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saturday 23 april, 2.30pm - phnom penh, cambodia i've lost my notebook. the one liz gave me before i left brisbane. sorry, liz. in the frenzy to film the landing, fill out the transfer documents and control the rush of being in a new place i'd left it in the plane. its a bitch! i'd had notes from meetings as well as thoughts and impressions on the trip thus far. not much, but enough to fret about. its the first time i've lost anything whilst travelling so i guess i could count myself lucky. theres so much to say thats already been said. we're all aware of the impacts of over-development, colonialism, western media and market based economies on the 3rd world. its all there to be seen and i've seen alot of it. traffic jams, foul air and desperatly poor people. its hard to not be scared when all around you seems to be spiralling down a sewer. so, rather than repeat whats been said far better than i could i'm just going to write what comes into my head whenever it happens, however it comes. i'd wanted to start writing from the moment i'd left but it was impossible. lisa got me to the airport in one sound, sane piece. i hit the plane and just phased out on a couple of movies. i'd been booked into business class. the headphones were superb and between prokiev and the LCD screen anchored to my most comfortable of seats, and the generous servings of gin i drifted in and out of sensory gluttony all the way to singapore. once off the plane i was met at the departure lounge by a hired driver. from the moment between hearing my name over the din of new arrivals information started in on me. i took to it like sarte to debauvour, like mickey mouse to mini, like ren to stimpy! phnom penh is anethema to singapore. singapore is an economic rationalists dream (and heres where i crave my notebook cause i'd had some interesting thoughts on this). its a text book success. its safe to walk through at night, streets are clean, the buildings are cleaned along with everyones brain. someone said, in singapore you can think, but you can't speak. people are encouraged to be "kind" to each other. at the airport one is greeted by attendants wearing badges declaring that (damn that notebook!)... well, i forgot. i wrote it down, but... anyway, it said something about caring being of an "encounter of the 1st kind". these and other slogans of the same nature are all over service areas in shops, taxis and malls. so, if theres so much niceness around to be had, why weren't people smiling? perhaps they were all shopped out. theres a lot of shopping going on in singapore. shopping centres the size of cities overwhelm consumer passion. i saw more people wandering around these vast marble and electric canyons, being dazzled by neon than by the opportunity to spend. there didn't seem to be a whole lot of buying going on. as i wandered the shopping malls i kept asking myself, wheres the passion, what turns these people on? in a public toilet a sign informed me that if i don't flush i'll be fined Sin$150. i didn't flush. the bangkok consumer is a different sort of person. when you arrive in the city a couple of dominant billboards greet you. as a local i'd get the idea that with AT&T i get access to the rest of the world. this sounds kind of neat, but then i'm told that life would be pretty funky if i'd have sexy company, sculptured western features and a bottle of chevis regal to mix it all around with. so, i'm getting the idea that life here is pretty smooth and that all i need do is connect to my comms device, cruise the world and water down the buzz with my fave bottle of scotch. wrong!!! bangkok is in serious trouble. consider the following: drought: water is being rationed in some of the rural areas. bangkok is sure to be hit soon. when it does the only solution, as the dams are the lowest they've ever been, is to bore for water. but the city planners (if there were any) never considered the shifting water table. if you were to bore for water in and around bangkok, and its there to be had, parts of the city would collapse into the earth. no kidding! the sinkings begun: parts of the city are already on their way down. the cbd water supply sees to it that many buildings sink 4-5cms a year. approaches to bridges are buckling, steps to larger buildings are hanging in mid-air and water-pipes are twisting and breaking in some areas. foundations for major constructions rest on bedrock. below that is the water-table thick with sand. as the water is drained the sandbed is unable to sustain the weight of the bedrock. but still the thai build. bangkok is only one foot above sea level. if global warming don't drown it, perhaps blind commerce will. intense commercial development: the outskirts of bangkok are ringed by massive construction of multi-story glass-tiled buildings (totally unsound for local climate) and expressways. the commercial centre is being drawn out of the city in a bid to eleviate the congestion there. good luck, bangkok! international trade agreements: in an already financially stressed community international business interests are being invited to plunder thailands market opportunities. no clear workers rights: when construction workers can only afford to wear thongs and rags whilst hauling up the countries economy their conditions can only be seen as being exploited. i saw several whole families, women and children, young and old, working on a building site one mid-evening: mixing cement, pouring it, shovelling sand and rubble and scrambling up and down scaffolding. it was scary. shit shit air: i almost fainted one afternoon from it. the intolerable traffic (the 1st decision to build a mass-transit system was 23 years ago), and the declining indigenous fish market: a japanese fish introduced into thai waters is eating up indigenous stock. "sustainable development", bereft of local knowledge doomed to fail from the beginning. the thai government has alot of money. why they don't invest in long-term planning and development is anyones guess. sunday april 24, 10:30am its 36 degrees c. i'm travelling with jagdish parikh. i met jagdish online about three years ago. we'd been exchanging information and comments on low-cost networking models for south east asia. i'd found a paper published by the hong kong based asia monitor resource centre on non-government networking in the region and i wanted to communicate with the authors. it didn't take long to be led to jagdish who'd been one of the two principle authors. when i sent my first email to him he was working with a uruguay based organisation, ngonet. we quickly discovered a common voice. i was doing research for an aidab (australian international development aid bureau) funded study on non-government (ngo) communications in the asia pacific region. jagdish had done extensive work there. in 1992 we finally met at the united nations conference on environment and development, rio de janeiro, brazil. from there we went on to collaborate on various initiatives, meeting again in manila and kuala lumpur. its now after breakfast and we're waiting for a driver to take us around the city. i read some of last months wired and got to thinking about singapore again. despite the sterility, its pretty neat place - i get off on neon (!) and buildings that reach so high they seem detached from their foundations. its a cubists dream somehow. but it takes the cabbies to keep ones feet to the ground. i met two cabbies that weren't afraid to speak their mind. not like in 88 when i was last there you couldn't find a single person willing to say anything against the government. one guy talked about the goods and services tax that was recently introduced and how a referendum demonstrated the populations protest against it. they were ignored. one driver suggested that the gst would work in singapore cause people will accept what ever conditions they are expected adhere to. they won't question, just submit to them. another driver, a malay born indian, used to be a policeman when the british had the colonialist edge. he was pleased to see them go, but had little good to say about the current government. he was particularly keen to tell me about the government working subversivly in their own interests by encouraging extensive trade and real estate opportunities with the chinese. end result -> huge increases in real estate and thus higher rates of inflation. millions of singapore dollars have gone off-shore into china to ensure chinese investments that will ultimatly provide some sense of security from the emerging thai markets. this same driver was dissapointed by the lack of bone in the international media to cover such issues. i suggested that occasionaly some journalists do cover asia issues well, but asian governments interpret them as critical which obviously influences what gets aired. he agreed, and added that in most cases the media just doesn't want to be seen disturbing potentional market opportunities for both itself and the 1st world. media is the 1st world. its 1st world culture, predominatly american, colonising the minds of all peoples. no one is to be spared. for instance, cnn IS everywhere. bangkok airport had cnn monitors all over the place. yesterdays screens were dominated by nixons death. so what! people are dying in the most horrendous conditions everyday. at least the bbc reports we receive here via satellite remind us of the legacy of watergate. whats suprising about the world news services is the paucity of information from asia. its as if nothing's happening here. and they have the courage to call it, world news. the strongest argument for public access to information is to enable individuals to choose the information thats important to them. if they've only cnn and other services like it, jagdish says that people will start believing that whats happening down the street doesn't matter. 11:30pm the driver never arrived. i didn't think he would as i was certain he was arranged to meet us 2morrow morning, but jagdish was certain it was 2day. oh well. we took breakfast with an idrc person at the california cafe. a bohemain style of venue amidst the clutter and rubble. mostly frequented by ex-pats they served up a menu of mixed american and cambodian cuisinne. i wanted to sit there a few hours. its been a few weeks now since i was last able to take in the world in with only my brain for company. its one of those many privelages we have. we can time out and not worry about where the next meals to come from. time out for cambodia is a series of attrocities wrenching apart refined moments in history. i was exposed to two 2day. at the museum for crime i came one step closer to my father, being directly immersed in cambodias recent bloody history. four long buildings in a "u" shape are open to the public as a reminder of times not so long gone. the museum was pol potts interegation and execution camp. what has been left behind is almost pretty much what had been found when the khmer rouge were forced out of phnom penh. tiny cells contained a single wire framed bed with shackles to hold down the doomed at their hands and feet. i walked through one room and then another and another...each room contained a large photo of someone found in a wretched state in them. it was shocking. one photo showed a fairly stocky man shackled to a bed with the skin on his face torn off. women and children met the same fate. doused with cold water, fingers clipped, whipped by chains and electrified wire and forced to remain quite during the ordeal. insane. the violence exhibited here screams at you from the walls and faces of those held here. several rooms were devoted to shots of hundreds of people taken prior to interegations or executions. i felt compelled to photgraph and film as much of what i saw. if these images can shock enough people to ensure this sort of insanity, and the violence against humans now stops then its worth the pain in me it took to document them. why did this experience bring me closer to pa? cause, he saw much of this shit for real. for at least the first 21 years of his life, living as a refugee in europe and surviving a world war and all that went along with it was no party. i think thats what caused him so much anguish. here was an expressive man, perhaps even an artist locked in a pain that he carried to his grave. we've got it so good. more than 50% of the population here owns a gun. ak-47s, hand-grenades, land mines and other foreign weapons can be bought at a store not far from the airport. jagdish asked this morning, what can become of a country when children are brought up with these things? right now the khmer rouge are striking border villages. enough just ain't enough. after leaving the museum of crime we took a couple of "cyclos" to the other side of town to check out the royal palace. cyclos are three wheeled cycles with shaded seating and a single guy peddling from behind. a bit like a surry. we wanted to see the palace cause the king of cambodia had returned after years abroad. we saw news footage of him and he looked like a pretty groovy sort of guy. definatly someone happy to be back amongst his people. he'd left cambodia for fear of his life, but returned just recently to work towards peace in his country. in fact he's been able to initiate talks with the khmer rouge which commence this week. the palace was closed so we headed to the national museum. here i wandered for about an hour amongst 1000 year old, mostly sandstone, carvings of buddhist and hindu deities. what struck me was that at one point i suddenly became aware of all these deities with their eyes closed. throughout the entire museum these figures appeared as if time had just stopped and they closed their eyes, not to the horror, but to something they could see that we couldn't. the khmer had created a very sophisticated culture that existed relatively peacefully from the 9th to 12 centuries. then things went awry and much was lost in the preceeding years to all manner of colonialism, both from within and out the country. perhaps one day the khmer deities will awaken from their reverie and bring into the world that which keeps them in such a state of peace. monday, april 25, 12.10pm we're sat at the foreign correspondants club after a hectic morning. we've had 6 meetings booked for today. so far we only managed one. the first had forgotten about us. the 2nd was quite interesting and ran over the following two meetings. prior to lunch i went into the australian embassy and had to muscle in a meeting for 2morrow morning. below the club the meekong river shifts gently in the heat. half a dozen local boats cruise by. i wonder what sort of information would these people need. nothing more than indigenous knowledge i suspect. i wonder just how our work would help these people. the NGO presence here is huge. they're working with the government to aid in building up the countries infrastructure. perhaps as NGOs get access to email the positive results of their use of it would cascade towards cambodian nationals. email is a means to an end. you participate in a process, much like warhol or melbourne's cyberdada crew. David Cox describes it as viewing (or purchasing) the process - not a unique, finite product. though the process itself is unique. the nets like that - defined by language and the will to communicate it offers a unique matrix of conduits, each a layer of given or taken information sucking and exhaling at each end of it. |
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