Analysis: By 10 p.m. the night of the stampede, there were too many people. Far too many people.
November 23, 2010
By Terry McCoy
Special to GlobalPost
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Cambodia is a country of ghosts and superstition. Don’t go out at night, they say in the countryside — ghosts. Always live with other people, others say — ghosts. Did you hear the crying last night in the quiet? Ghosts.
Every year in my high school classes in provincial Cambodia I ask my students to rank their greatest fears, and ghosts, despite nagging concerns for HIV, cancer and leeches, always creeps to the top of the list. At first I found this amusing. Now, I get it.
Every single person in this country has been touched by the egalitarian-driven genocide that killed 2 million people between 1975 and 1979. Every single person you see here lost someone during the Khmer Rouge and the apparitions linger and linger. Ghosts.
Now, more wraiths have come for one of Cambodia’s last remaining havens safe from the past: celebration. On Monday night, during the country’s raucous Water Festival in Phnom Penh, which swelled the city’s population from 2 million people to 5 million, nearly 400 people were crushed to death while trying to cross a narrow bridge connecting a small island in the Bassac River.
Please click here to read more...
Every year in my high school classes in provincial Cambodia I ask my students to rank their greatest fears, and ghosts, despite nagging concerns for HIV, cancer and leeches, always creeps to the top of the list. At first I found this amusing. Now, I get it.
Every single person in this country has been touched by the egalitarian-driven genocide that killed 2 million people between 1975 and 1979. Every single person you see here lost someone during the Khmer Rouge and the apparitions linger and linger. Ghosts.
Now, more wraiths have come for one of Cambodia’s last remaining havens safe from the past: celebration. On Monday night, during the country’s raucous Water Festival in Phnom Penh, which swelled the city’s population from 2 million people to 5 million, nearly 400 people were crushed to death while trying to cross a narrow bridge connecting a small island in the Bassac River.
Please click here to read more...
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