From My TV

Many of you in America, it seems, have heard about what happened in Phnom Penh.

I was not in Phnom Penh this weekend for the Water Festival. Instead I watched the boat races, floating barges, and fireworks on TV with my family. Last night, I went to bed around 9 after watching the packed concert live from the capital city. Then today, we sat and watched on TV the aftermath of last night's stampede. All-day news coverage showed interviews with survivors and families of the deceased, government representatives visiting the bridge, and the hospitals. Everything at the hospitals. Cambodian television news, I learned today, is a fair bit more graphic than what we see in the states. They showed the many wounded lying packed into hospital hallways, placed close together on mats. They showed an interview with a survivor in the hospital ward who, between grimaces of pain, talked about what had happened to him. And they showed the dead, the bodies laid out in rows with narrow aisles between. At one location, they were outside, under an awning to protect from the midday heat as much as possible in Cambodia, and each was covered with a sheet. Another location where they have the bodies seemed to be inside, and the cameras panned over the faces in the rows, mostly young people still decked out in their party clothes. The camera crews rolled on as the families came through to identify and collect the bodies. In the background, I saw crowds of curious onlookers pressed against a fence, watching the bodies as they were wrapped and placed in caskets, then pushed three across onto waiting green trucks.

We watched through the afternoon and through dinner, too. The dishes from lunch went unwashed in the sink, an unprecedented event in my time here. I could understand little of what was said on the news all day. My host mother occasionally tried to explain in more basic words so I could get an idea. -This girl they are interviewing, her father and mother are both dead.- -They say the Prime Minister is going to give 5 million riel ($1200) to each family, money they can use to pay for the funerals.- As we saw the grieving families, she explained how they are identifying the bodies. She said that most of the people had cell phones with them. When family members call, the police, who have collected the phones, answer and inform the caller that the phone owner has died. Over and over, she just repeated ‘Ahnut nah,’ meaning roughly ‘Such a shame, such a shame.’

I couldn’t understand her explanation or the news stories about what had actually happened at the stampede. I’ve been able to read the English-language news online, but it’s clear that there are competing versions of the story being tossed around, particularly regarding the role of the police in what happened last night. To state a fact, on this year’s Corruption Perceptions Index, Transparency International scored Cambodia, tied with several other countries, 154th out of 178 countries. The countries ranking lower were Somalia, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Sudan, Chad, Burundi, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Venezuela, Kyrgystan, Guinea, and the Congo. While I’m not sure what the truth behind the stampede is, I can tell you that what was shown on the state-sponsored television station seemed to be different from what was shown on the other channels, and the initial government reports seemed to be different than what has been reported by most of the large news agencies. Yet another reminder that things are, well, different here.