DEVELOPMENT & DEATH: THE STORY OF DIAMOND ISLAND

Diamond Island's Ferris Wheel

Diamond Island (or Koh Pich in Khmer) is a spit of land located a few kilometres south of the confluence of the Mekong and Tonlé Sap rivers. It is separated from Phnom Penh by a narrow channel and two small bridges. On weekends, Phnom Penh’s youth descend on Diamond Island to sip coffee and beer, stroll amidst gaudy art deco gardens, ride Ferris wheels, play carnival games, and, most importantly, cruise on their motorbikes.

On November 22, 2010, Diamond Island made international headlines when over three hundred people were trampled to death and nearly eight hundred more were injured in a stampede on the island’s northernmost bridge. People from surrounding provinces had flocked to the island for the annual three-day water festival—Cambodia’s most important public holiday that marks both the end of the monsoon season and the reversal of the Tonlé Sap River’s flow. After a day of boat races and an evening of concerts, mass panic ensued. Several investigations were launched to determine what sparked the tragedy, but no conclusions were ever made. Similarly, news media outlets all cited different causes for the stampede (see below). In order to avert future tragedies, the government has begun constructing several new bridges to be opened in time for this year’s festival.

Stampede aftermath: November 23, 2010

The development of Diamond Island epitomizes the changing face of Phnom Penh. A decade ago, the island was home to three hundred poor families who made their meagre livings growing rice and catching fish. Today, after several land reclamation projects, it is a concrete sprawl of western-style fast food restaurants, banquet halls, carnival rides, and games. A gated community of cookie-cutter townhouses is currently in construction on the island’s southern tip, and there are plans to build several condominiums, a shopping mall, and even a hospital. Developers envision Diamond Island becoming a city within a city; a place for the affluent to live and play without having to rub noses with the capital’s impoverished masses.

But what happened to the people who used to live here? And what happened last November?

I found Chon (27) lounging on a bench with a pretty Japanese backpacker. Born in Kampot province, Chon moved to Phnom Penh to pursue a legal education. “I come here every day,” he said. “In Cambodia, there are no places to travel; no places to relax. I come here whenever I can.” Chon’s favourite activity? Cruising on his moto. When I asked him about what Diamond Island was like before its recent development, Chon said, “Before, there were no buildings, no roads. Nothing. There was only land.” My final question: what can Cambodians learn from last year’s tragedy? Chon said, “It was terrible, but there is nothing we can learn. There was no reason for it.”

Nuomcham engaged in Cambodia's favourite pastime

When I met Nuomcham (22), she was engaged in Cambodia’s most popular pastime: sitting on the back of a parked motorbike and chatting with friends. An unemployed hairdresser, Nuomcham visits Diamond Island weekly with her boyfriend and family to people watch. When I asked her what Diamond Island looked like before its recent makeover, she said, “I have no idea.”

Whereas most western amusement parks have multiple carnival games, Diamond Island only has one: balloons and darts. There must be nearly a hundred stalls operating the same game, and wherever you walk, proprietors rush at you with handfuls of darts, begging you to play. The prizes? Stuffed animals, cheap plastic toys, wood sculptures, house wares, and dusty bottles of soda, dish soap, and bleach.  5000 riel ($1.25 USD) buys me eight darts. I only hit three balloons. My prize: a glass mug.

Praoun working his balloon and dart game

Praoun (23) moved to Phnom Penh a year and a half ago from Takeo province to work at the carnival. “I love my job,” he said, “but business has been bad since the stampede. Less people come.” On the night of November 20, 2010, Praoun was working his booth when tragedy struck. “I felt very scared when I heard the commotion,” he said, “but I did not see it.” When I asked him why it happened, he said, “I do not know.”

I saw Srey (52) lounging in a faux-Greco gazebo supported by columns of bare-breasted women in togas. Five years ago, Srey moved to Phnom Penh with her family from Svay Rieng province to find work. Now, she sells beverages near the bridge that leads to the island.

Of all the people I talked to on Diamond Island, Srey was the only one who seemed to know about the area’s past. She told me about the poor farmers who used to scrape their living off this small strip of land, farmers who periodically return to the island to watch its transformation. It was from their mouths that Srey learned of their fate. In the early 2000s, the government, having already reached deals with investors to develop the island, offered its residents a buyout package: $100,000 USD for each family plot. While many people took the offer and left, others decided to stay. This was their home: they had nowhere else to go. When government agents returned the following year, they offered the remaining inhabitants $50,000 for their family plots. With no documentation proving the ownership of their land, many families buckled to their inevitably declining fortunes and accepted the offer. However, armed with legally binding property deeds, twenty three families decided to stay. Police arrived and forcefully evicted these remaining farmers. This last group received no compensation.

Srey enjoying the Diamond Island air

On the night of November 22, 2010, Srey was at Diamond Island, busy selling drinks to the crowds that had come for the water festival. She witnessed the stampede firsthand: “There were two groups of men fighting. When one fled, the other followed. The fight continued on the bridge, and people started coming to watch. So many people came onto the bridge, they began to be crushed. People jumped off the bridge and into the water. Some hit boats under the bridge and died. People got free, begged me for water. I gave it to them. The police showed up and starting beating back the crowds that had assembled.”

Despite its troubling history, Diamond Island remains Srey’s favourite place in Phnom Penh: “There is nowhere else we can go to enjoy fresh air in the evenings, nowhere else to walk.” It should be noted that with the exception of a few strips of grass and benches between busy downtown boulevards, Phnom Penh completely lacks public parkland.

Dizzying Diamond Island distractions

The city’s youth, it seems, does not want to be bothered with the past: they come to Diamond Island to have fun; they live for the pleasures of the present. The city is rapidly changing, and to Phnom Penh’s young majority, all changes are good. “These things are not so important,” Chon said towards the end of our interview—I had asked him about his feelings regarding last year’s stampede. “Why do you ask these questions? Things like this happen everywhere and all the time.”

 

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For harrowing firsthand accounts of last November’s tragedy, see the following articles:
Global Voices: “Cambodia: Stampede Tragedy During Water Festival”
France 24: “Hundreds Dead as Popular Water Festival Ends in Tragedy”
Sky News: “Cambodia: 456 Dead in Festival Stampede”
The New York Times: “Stampede in Cambodia Leaves Hundreds Dead”

SALAK: INDONESIA’S FRIGHTENING FRUIT

When I first saw these clustered together in a marketplace basket, I thought they belonged to the nether regions of some hapless and endangered male armadillo. Remember: this is Cambodia… anything is possible edible.

The young woman working the stall smiled and peeled the spiny brown snakeskin from one, revealing two off-white globes.

Ugh, I thought. Suspicion confirmed.

The woman thrust one of the globes at me and I waved my hands, “No meat. No balls,” I said. “I’m a vegetarian.”

She cocked her head, popped the globe in her mouth, chewed, then spat out a shiny blackish-brown seed. She rubbed her belly, then handed me the second one. Resigned, I put the fleshy ball in my mouth and… Yum! Oh goodness! Sweet something delicious! The texture of a cherry; a taste like a sugar-sprinkled sour pineapple. I was hooked. I bought a bushel and ate them until I felt sick.

Salak (Salacca zalacca), also known as snake fruit, grows in clusters on cactus-like palms that are native to Indonesia. Today, the thumb-sized fruits are cultivated throughout Southeast Asia, particularly in peninsular Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, and the Indonesian islands of Bali and Java. Considered a delicacy, my local market sells salak for the exorbitant price of 4000 to 6000 riel per kilogram (approximately $1 to 1.50 USD).

To eat salak, break off the hollow tip and peel the scaly skin until the white inner flesh is revealed. Pop the fruit in your mouth and spit out the seed. Pods usually contain two fruits, although single and triple pods are also common. In my experience, the single pods are the tastiest: the fruit in double and triple pods tend to be drier and less flavourful.

Because of its hard protective skin, salak has a long shelf life and can easily be thrown into a backpack for a snack. Word of warning: the little hair-like spines on the skin can stick in your fingers!

To my Canadian friends: you’ll be hard-pressed finding salak, even in the multitudinous fruit cornucopia that is Toronto’s Chinatown. However, it is rumoured that an Indonesian snack vendor at the CNE’s international pavilion sells it. Go out and be delicious!

PHOTO ESSAY: Khmer Free Fighting

Pradal Serey, aka Khmer Free Fighting, is Cambodia’s national sport. It is a dazzling and violent aerial ballet where fighters use their feet, knees, elbows and fists to pummel their opponent into submission.

The kickboxing-like martial art traces its origins to the dawn of the mighty Khmer Empire that dominated Southeast Asia from the 9^th until the 15^th century. The following photographs were taken at the Cambodian Television Network’s Phnom Penh studio on August 14, 2011.

(click photos to enlarge)

POLICE BRIBES AND NEAR-DEATH DRIVING

I’ve stood on street corners, trying to discern the logic that governs Phnom Penh’s traffic. My conclusion: there is none.

The old travelogues I’ve read call Phnom Penh “La Perle de l’Asie,” a beautiful and quiet city of broad leafy boulevards where rickshaws and bicycles pedal to the languid pace of the wide muddy Mekong.

Now:
Those once serene French-built boulevards are jam-packed with exhaust-spitting, engine-growling, horn-honking motorbikes, tuk tuks, and SUVs. The few remaining rickshaws and bicycles hug the sewer-water curbs, their drivers’ eyes wide with fear while their motorized brethren whip past at terrifying speeds. In recent years, the government has re-paved the city’s notoriously pothole-riddled streets and installed traffic lights at every major intersection. Their attempts to impose order on this madness, however, have proven to be entirely in vain. The locals have absolutely no interest in basic driving concepts that westerners take for granted, simple concepts based on collective safety (and sanity), such as our rules of right of way—“you go first,” the Canadian driver waves while at an unmarked intersection. “No, you go first,” the driver to his left insists… Marked or not, Cambodian drivers rush all intersections en masse. Total gridlock.

Even more rudimentary concepts go unheeded. Example: motorbike drivers race and swerve (forget indicating lane changes), then, while talking on cell phones, make one-handed left turns on red lights into the opposing traffic of one way streets. Even on median-divided roads, drivers pay no mind to the flow. Keep right or keep left: it’s up to you. Perhaps some of them were educated in Europe?

The law requires drivers of open-air vehicles to wear helmets. Drivers keep their helmets strapped to their handlebars, then slip them on when they spot the police. This law, however, does not apply to passengers, nor are there any laws prohibiting the balancing of five people or four-hundred pounds of unsecured banana bushels on the back of the little bikes. You see motorbike drivers with their two-year-old child STANDING on the seat in front of them, their eight-year-old wedged behind them, and their wife clinging to the back with a newborn baby in a harness dangling over the rear wheel. My guidebook warns: while on a motorbike, always keep your backpack in front of you. Bag snatching is common… Perhaps this woman is looking to lose another hungry mouth?

Watching it is dizzying. The anxiety of navigating it will turn your hair prematurely grey and take years of off your life, that is if your life doesn’t prematurely end when you’re ploughed over by a racing mammoth of an imported SUV—most of which, interestingly, sport large aftermarket decals on their sides advertising their manufacturer: Lexus, Nissan, Toyota, Land Rover… Status status status. With locked doors, windows up, A/C blasting, and stereos blaring nasal synth pop, SUV drivers, completely oblivious to the world outside, go fast and straight, hand on the horn (if they’re courteous), demanding that everyone conforms to their racing will. Watch out!

In an attempt to harmonize my disorientated soul to this chaos (and, because it’s been costing about $2 a tuk tuk ride to get to faraway downtown Phnom Penh), I have decided to rent a motorbike. Drive slowly, I tell myself, and follow the rules: you’ll be fine.

My little red 125cc Honda is no beauty: one of its mirrors is missing and the front light is cracked. Worst of all, when stopped, the engine stalls. My real estate agent friend who rented it to me for $40 a month said, “Oh, it no problem. You just always keep gas like this: vroom vroom,” he mimed, “and you have no problem.” No problem when it stalled crossing the busy Mao Tse Toung Boulevard. No problem.

Day one:
I am rear-ended at a red light. Damage assessment: none. Although the man who hit me sped away before we could swap insurance. Insurance? What insurance? Most people don’t even have licenses.

Day two:
Uneventful. Pounding rain. Thank god. I witness an accident. Oh god.

Day three:
Following the man in front of me, I make a left turn on a green light onto large Street 63. Within two minutes, I hear a shrill whistle. Looking to the right, a baby-blue clad police officer gesticulates wildly. He leaps into the road, directly in the path of my motorbike, and I slam the brakes: brakes that didn’t work before yesterday’s tune-up.

“One way! One way!” the cop screams, pointing to a sign further down the road, a red circle with a white horizontal line placed on a suspiciously temporary-looking stand.

I look at the sign, then at the cop. I say, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” A half-dozen other cops watch me from the corner, lounging on the seats of parked motorbikes. One of them spits. A few other drivers go past, travelling in the same direction as me. Fucking shakedown, I think. Coming from the university with my clean-shaven western face, dress shirt and slacks, I’m a prime target, a secure meal ticket.

“You big trouble now,” the cop in front of me says. “You talk with boss.” He points to a heavy-set white-helmeted man with bars on the epaulettes of his uniform. “You leave bike here and talk to boss.”

“But I didn’t know,” I say. “I didn’t see any sign.”

“You talk boss now,” he says. “Now!”

I sigh. No need to turn off the engine: it had already stalled. I take out the key, unstrap my backpack from between my legs, and rest the bike on its kickstand. The boss waves me over.

With his minions watching, the fat, hard-looking sergeant says, “New law in Cambodia. You drive wrong way, we take moto to station. You want me take moto to station?” His badge glitters in the blinding afternoon sun. He toys the baton strapped to his hip.

“I’m very sorry, officer,” I say. “It’s my first time driving in Phnom Penh. I don’t know the rules yet. It’s so crazy driving here. You know? I’m very sorry.”

“Maybe we take your moto. You like that? You want me to take your moto?”

“No officer,” I say, halfheartedly. “I don’t want that.” Do me the favour, I think. Prolong my life. Take the goddamn thing.

“New law,” he says. “Too bad. We take.”

“Listen,” I say, “let’s not go to the station. We go to the station, it’s big trouble for me and big trouble for you.” Trouble for you to get off your lazy ass, I think. Trouble for me: the more cops around, the bigger the payoff.

“Yes,” the fat sergeant says, grinning. “Much trouble. So, how much you pay?”

“Excuse me?”

He flips open a ledger packed tightly with incomprehensible Khmer curves. “See this?” he says, pointing to a number, “this person pay twenty dollar. How much you pay?”

“Oh Jesus,” I say. “I don’t know. I don’t want to pay anything.”

The sergeant’s round brown face darkens. He flips the ledger to another page. “This person pay forty-five dollar. How much you have? How much you pay?”

“Um,” I say stalling. “Well, I guess I can pay five dollars.”

The sergeant looks me up and down, then smiles. “Five dollar okay.”

I should have said two.

I fish out my wallet and hand him a crisp new bill. The sergeant places it inside an unmarked cash-brimming envelope and says, “You go now.”

“Okay,” I say. “I go now.”

The cops lounging on the parked motorbikes smile and laugh.

Back to my Honda. The first cop is standing in the road. The cop blows his whistle, jumps in front of a speeding Super Cub. The driver swerves, accelerates, and makes a left hand turn, disappearing down the busy bisecting road.

“Hey,” I say. “Aren’t you going to chase him?”

The cop shrugs.

I straddle my bike, reattach my backpack, and start the engine. Two helmetless boys on a scooter zip by. The cops don’t even budge.

“Now,” I say, “if I turn right, will you stop me again?”

“You go. You go.”

“All right.”

I change gears, turn right, and follow a black Mercedes sedan. In the middle of the road, the Mercedes slams its brakes. I stop inches behind it and am rear-ended by a small Suzuki.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” a young girls says. “I’m so sorry. So sorry.”

I look at her pretty worry-lined face, then inspect the back of my bike: no visible damage.

“Don’t worry,” I say, “don’t worry.”

I restart the engine—the damn thing had stalled again—and take off into the mad Phnom Penh bustle.

FIRST TRANSMISSION: My New Neighbourhood

I live on Rue 420. You can get your sewing machine repaired next door. Two doors the other way: a police station. Across from the police station: a massage brothel. The miniskirt girls come out at night and ask the cops to knock mangoes off their tree. The cops use long basket-tipped bamboos. The girls bow and go back to their rubbings… Walk a little further: the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Between them all stand houses old and new, a few small and made of wood, a few shaded colonial villas, but most two or three floors of concrete. My landlord says, “My building very safe.” It takes six goddamn keys to get in. “If someone steal something, police come very fast. No problem. They look around, they write paper. Then they say, ‘Paper cost twenty dollar.’ You pay, they go. You lose two times.”

I watch it all from my little rooftop terrace. Looking across the city, cranes outnumber gold-spired temples. Very few of the new apartment and office towers are finished.

My block is bordered to the north by the wide shop-adorned Mao Tse Toung Boulevard. To the east is a cement-channelled river, putrefyingly black. Walk a little west, and from the back of their motorbike-rigged trailers, lounging figures whisper, “Tuk tuk? Tuk tuk?” Quick left, then a right. A few beer holes and noodle shops—watch out for cockroaches—and Maitreya’s dollar-a-dish vegetarian restaurant. Next, the sprawling tin-roofed hustle of Phsar Toul Tom Poung, or, the Russian Market. In the Vietnam-occupied 1980s, this is where Phnom Penh’s solely Soviet expat population did all of its shopping.

The rickety sheet metal and wood market is a jammed full of everything you could ever want to buy: fruit, house wares, jewellery, engine parts, silks, cosmetics, Buddhas, burnt CDs, and designer clothes leaked from Cambodia’s many sweat shops. There are benches to eat noodles, rice, soups, fried insects (intentionally and not), and stews of mysterious meats. Just watch your feet: shallow trenches of grey reeking water rush from the fly-infested quarter where they sell slabs of animal flesh. Splintered wood tables. No refrigeration.

During the day, foreigners flock to the market: it’s the best place for souvenirs. You hear them bargaining, mostly with European accents. “No. I pay 5000 riel. 5000!” The shop girl who speaks better English says, “I’m sorry. Six thousand is final price.” This goes on for some time. Eventually, the tourist storms off, empty-handed, unwilling to part with an extra twenty five cents.

At night, the shops close and the foreigners flee, but in the streets around the market, locals pack sidewalk stalls and beer gardens, laughing and drinking on their plastic stools. Every night, this one stall roasts an entire pig! If you see a rare white face, it’s probably an NGO world-saver or a soul-saving missionary. Or, it could be me, hunched over my notebook and noodles in the candlelight. Another blackout.

Back to my terrace, watching the night. Across the street: an open window where a thin dying man receives injections under a doctor’s flashlight.