Depending on where you look in Phnom Penh, it is easy to forget the war torn history of Cambodia. The streets are run down and trash filled, but if you look up there is beautiful architecture and a huge expansive sky. The people here are so friendly… people on passing motos will crack a huge smile and giggle as they shout “hello” to you. It is hard to remember that many of them have experienced war in their lifetime. People as young as 30 have memories of genocide. They are all living in the wake of 30 years of war. There are certainly reminders. For instance, in one of the markets I was talking to a middle aged woman selling movies. She was trying to sell me a documentary about the Khmer Rouge… and it hit me, this wasn’t a history movie, this was part of her history. She knew people who died… she could have been one of them. It’s overwhelming.
For those of you like me who are not Cambodian History majors, let me share just a little with you. 1999 marked the first year of peace here in 30 years. Power changed hands many times from the King to the Khmer Rouge (communist party Khmer- name of Cambodian people Rouge-red (the color typically associated with Communism)) to Vietnamese rule to prime ministers back to a King… it’s been all over the place. 30 years of fighting sounds awful, but little compares to Khmer Rouge years.
In 1975 after a chain of events including: 600,000 Cambodians dead from American bombings during the Vietnam War and 5 years of civil war after the king was overthrown, the Khmer Rouge (a communist party from the North) gained power. The goal was to create a communist country as fast as possible. The result was the mass genocide of nearly 2 million Cambodians (1/3 of the population). Anyone associated with the old government or of little use to the Khmer Rouge was considered the enemy. They were sent to sites to be tortured for their confessions of treason and to name other enemies. Then they were taken to fields, killed, and put into mass graves.
We visited two such sites during our prayer tour of Phnom Penh. Tuol Sleng was a high school converted into a torture prison called S-21 where over 10,000 people were imprisoned and tortured. 7 survived. And we visited Cheung Eik, a killing field where the people from S-21 were murdered and thrown in mass graves when the Khmer Rouge was done with them.
I think visiting these places is a lot like driving through 9th Ward in New Orleans the summer after Hurricane Katrina. We drove through one evening to pray over the area. As we drove we saw houses completely flipped over and huge piles of rubble where houses once were. I was trying to pray but I couldn’t grasp what I was seeing. Watching it through the car window still kept it at a safe distance that it still wasn’t reality. It was like watching a Katrina Update on CNN.
Our culture has numbed us. We see news the minute it is happening. We see death. We kill people on video games every day. We see graphic violence and it makes a movie good.
It wasn’t until I was out of the car actually praying at one of the skeletons of a house that my emotions finally caught up with me. I had that moment when I finally understood “this is real.” These were people’s homes bulldozed to the curbs . People had died here, trapped in their homes as the flood waters came crashing in . For just a few minutes it was my reality as well.
This was reality in Cambodia: Men, women and children were held captive and tortured in classrooms of a high school. They were given 2 spoonfuls of soup a day to eat. People were tortured until they wrote their confession of “treason” against the Khmer Rouge and named other innocent people to the list of enemies. When they had served their purpose they were driven in trucks to one the killing fields. Guards would cheer as a truck drove up. Generators were started to drown out the noise. Handcuffed people were forced to kneel and killed one by one then tossed into a mass grave.
The thoughts going through my head were all over the chart that day. Here are a few of them:
2 million souls. Men, Women, Mothers and Children, Monks, teachers , Christians… all killed. For what? How could this have happened? I will never understand how killing people becomes the accepted solution to a divided country. Why didn’t God stop this? Why doesn’t he stop natural disasters? Where is his justice when humans are the ones causing the disasters? I was angry that we can look at Hitler, or the Khmer Rouge and say “what a horrendous tragedy” but there is genocide going on right this very minute in the Sudan and we haven’t stopped it.
So many unanswerable questions…
Trying to help us struggle through some of these unanswerable questions…one of the pastors in New Orleans shared this verse with us:
“It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, But the glory of kings is to search out a matter.” – Proverbs 25:2
The reality of the world is that bad things happen. There are a lot of things the bible explains to us about God… and there a lot of things it doesn’t. God is love, He is just, and He is sovereign. This verse also tells us that there are things that God is not going to reveal to us. We don’t get all the answers… sometimes we get no answers. And truthfully, we probably wouldn’t want them anyway. Wanting the answers hasn’t worked out so well for humans… just ask Adam and Eve. This verse also tells me that when bad things happen to seek God in it. He is always there… sometimes he is just concealing himself more than others.
Two of the things I have come to know as I seek God when bad things happen are:
There is always hope: our God lives. He takes bad situations and redeems them every day. I believe that He was there with each person who died under the Khmer Rouge weeping as his Children were murdered and he is still here today. In 1989 it was estimated that 90% of the Christian in Cambodia had been killed by the Khmer Rouge. Only 300 remained. Today there are over 200,000.
There is light: Our church partner this month, New Life Church is shinning in this city. They are fired up about their faith. Every time I go to a service there I am floored by the passion with which people worship. They are involved in their community and want everyone to know about Jesus. We meet people every day who want to know more about God… whether it’s a student in an English class asking to hear a testimony or a random guy after an aerobics class asking if we are on a “God Mission.” God is on the verge of something huge here in Cambodia.
Will you join us in praying for this country? Pray for justice. Pray for the healing of this land. Pray for the restoration of broken families. Pray for New Life Church, that they would continue to reach their community. Pray for this new generation finally getting to live peace. Pray that Cambodians would be released from their past and free to move on.
This is a powerful video with images from our visits to these two sites. I think it beautifully captures what we saw, some of the history and the prayer needs of Cambodia:
The Reign of the Khmer Rouge from Traci on Vimeo.
