the citizen-viewer

Nine years ago today, as I was eating breakfast in my house in Phnom Penh, several explosions sounded from the north. It was hard to tell if there were three or four, and they were some distance away. I didn't take too much notice at that moment -- I wasn't working for The Cambodia Daily any more, and I figured I would find out soon enough what it was.

Within the hour I found out. Grenades had been thrown into a rally in a park near the the National Assembly. I didn't go up there to see the carnage in person. I should have, but I didn't know.

Sixteen or more people were killed, and well over 100 were wounded. I didn't know that the police would prevent people from helping others get to the hospital, but that some foreigners who arrived soon after were able to transport some of the wounded by taxi, by motorbike and by cyclo.

I didn't know that it would take 35 minutes for ambulances to arrive, that bloody footprints would lead from the park to the locked gate of the nearby children's hospital, that nine years later the man whose bodyguard units were watching, and toward whose compound the assailants fled, would still be in charge, and that his government would still be receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid.

I didn't know that those four -- it was four -- exploding fragmentation grenades would help seal his grip on power, that I would play a role in the park's transformation into "Democracy Square" a year later, after the elections, or that two years after that the opposition party would erect a monument to the dead, or that this monument would be torn out and dumped in a sewage ditch by the police just a few hours later. I didn't know that nine years later, investigations by both the Cambodian police and the FBI would be long since abandoned, the files gathering dust, the dead purposely forgotten and their deaths shrouded in a web of diplomatic conveniences.

I didn't know that I would spend a large part of the next several years researching this event, and eventually publishing a lengthy article on it, or that this effort would yield no observable effect. I didn't know a lot of things then that I know now.

I did know that it was another sunny day. That's about all.