Michael Batson

Cambodia is a country which has experienced more than its fair share of tragedy, some on a scale barely comprehensible to most foreign observers. This year, what was supposed to be a celebration of the Water Festival, turned into disaster on Diamond Island near the capital, leaving many questions unanswered as to why, in a country not noted for neither transparency in government nor the accountability of its institutions.

Though largely landlocked, water pays a critical part in Cambodian life, in an area where the monsoon is both too heavy and too short. Near the end of each calendar year is the season of holidays and anniversaries in Cambodia, in a country not short of either.  The end of the rainy season is marked by the Water Festival, Bon Om Touk, and it’s the biggest party of the year in Phnom Penh.

If you ever go to Cambodia, the Water Festival is well worth a look.

The festival in Cambodia takes place each year in late October or November, at the time of the full moon.  It is the most exuberant festival in the Khmer calendar outdoing even the New Year celebrations, for which Cambodia observes three; the Khmer, the Chinese and the international.

On 22 November 2010, at the close of the festival, thousands of festival-goers jammed the two-lanesuspension bridge over the Bassac River from Diamond Island. They panicked when the bridge began to sway, setting off a deadly stampede. The island was the site where tens of thousands had flocked for a free concert at the end of a three-day holiday marking the close of the monsoon season.

The capital, Phnom Penh, is situated at the junction of three rivers; the Bassac, Tonle Sap and the Mekong.  Previously the city was known as Krong Chaktomuk or the City of Four Faces.  The name refers to the junction where the city’s three rivers cross to form an “X”.

Predictably, the country’s prime minister Hun Sen, dismissed calls for senior figures in the government and the military to resign over the country's worst tragedy in three decades, saying the calls were politically motivated to serve opposition parties, a well-used and self-serving retort from the region’s longest serving head of state. However, he admitted that mistakes had been made and the situation was badly handled.

Diamond Island, the site of the tragedy has a history of horrors. During the Cambodian civil war, the prelude to Khmer Rouge rule, the island was the scene of the massacre of Phnom Penh’s Vietnamese population. An atrocity perpetrated based on historic anti-Vietnamese sentiment in Cambodia, fuelled by the war in Vietnam by America spilling uncontrollably in Cambodia and facilitated by the complicity of Cambodian authorities at that time.

The cause of panic on the bridge was not immediately apparent. Witnesses claimed that the bridge was overcrowded but what triggered the stampede is not clear. Electric shocks from the lights, fights among young people and fears that the structure was about to collapse have all been put forward.

Most of those who died were from the country. They would not jump from the bridge because they could not swim. They did not know the water was only waist-deep.

The narrow footbridge, the Rainbow Bridge, was supposed to be one way only, from the island to the city. People trying to get to the island were supposed to take a second bridge. But the Rainbow Bridge was closer to the action.

The dead, dying and injured were transported to Calmette Hospital, the capital’s largest medical facility in a convoy of ambulances, or what passes for them in Cambodia, Southeast Asia’s second poorest country.

Most of the deaths were as a result of suffocation and internal injuries. Though one doctor who declined to be named, said many also died from electrocution.

It’s hard to see how Calmette Hospital would cope with a tragedy of this magnitude. Calmette was built in 1950 with the support of several French organisations. Though it has some 250 beds, as well as facilities for minor and major surgery and for obstetrics, and a 10-bed intensive care unit, other facilities are limited. On a typical day doctors work short shifts as all physicians have private clinics; because the hospital salary is only about $50 per month, so they depend on their clinic earnings of about $400 per month.

The capital is inundated every year for the Water Festival with hundreds of dragon boats and up to 24,000 crew members from all of the 24 provinces, including others from Thailand and Vietnam, here for the racing on the Tonle Sap River.  Logistics can be a nightmare in a country with little infrastructure.

The capital receives up to 1.5 million visitors during the event, virtually doubling the population and a potential logistics nightmare for city officials.

Many Phnom Penhois, the people from the capital, use the opportunity to leave town, while those from the provinces move in for the week.  The Water Festival marks the time when the Mekong stops reversing the flow of the Tonle Sap River, where it forces the water of the smaller river upstream to fill the Tonle Sap Lake, the largest body of fresh water in Southeast Asia, leaving behind vast quantities of fish.

The tragedy was preceded by the racing. Cambodian dragon boats are long and narrow, built for speed.  Like every other mode of transport in Cambodia they are packed with people.  Fifty or 60 paddlers occupy space that would accommodate less than half that number in New Zealand.  As a result stroke reach is limited and to generate speed paddlers are compelled to almost stand in the boat. 

The force of so many people driving with a downward motion forces the boats lower in the water.  Coupled with a low draft the boats easily take on water.

Racing is done in pairs and begins near the Japanese Bridge finishing at the Royal Palace, a course of over one kilometre, at which point some crew wind up in the water.  All the boats are numbered stretching into the high 330s. Some boats race with the paddlers pushing the boats through the water, in a frantic, reverse rowing motion.

The last time the festival was marred by tragedy was in 2007 when five Singaporeans were killed after their dragon boat, carrying 22 men, capsized at the end of their race.

Accidents are common during the races, which involve long, thin boats crewed by as many as 70 rowers, which compete against each other in the sometimes choppy waters in front of Phnom Penh's royal palace.

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he Water Festival has a unique history.  The ceremony was traditionally used to train the army for battle.  Historically the Khmer king always battled with enemies using maritime power, so he prepared the water festival ceremony every year to choose a champion of sailing battle.  At the Bayon Temple at Angkor there are many statues recognizing sailing battles under the leadership of Jayvarman VII (1181 – c.1218), the Khmer king who expelled the Chams from Cambodia.  The Khmer naval victory over the Chams, from what is now Vietnam, is also celebrated.

The finale of the festival is a massive fireworks display over the rivers of the capital.  Many of the expats and tourists flock to the balcony of the Foreign Correspondents Club for a view of the Tonle Sap and the procession on the water of a large number of illuminated floats.

Thanks to its three decades of civil war and the horrors of the Khmer Rouge era, Cambodia has a reputation as a place where awful things happen. But many of its mostly young population have grown up with peace and relative prosperity, and have never experienced a disaster before.

Preliminary findings by an official investigation committee found that the natural swaying of the bridge ignited fears it would collapse among an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 people on the structure. In frantic efforts to escape, the crowd pressed and heaved, crushing hundreds of people and leading some to dive off the span into the water.

The official casualty toll is 353 dead and 395 injured.

Hun Sen announced that families of the dead would each be given at least US$12,000, an enormous sum in a country where the annual per capita income is barely US$700, one of the world’s poorest. So poor in fact, that a recent study by economists at the University of Warwick in England found that per capita income in the middle ages was about £634 a year compared with 1990 currency values, more than many of the world’s poorest countries, including Cambodia.

Phnom Penh’s governor, Kep Chuktema, announced on 8 December at a sombre event to reopen the bridge for use, “This accident is a big lesson for us in controlling such a mass of people,” the governor said. “In the future ... we will have a master plan and not allow a tragedy like this to happen again.”

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he governor said two more bridges will be built alongside the 100-metre long bridge to help reduce traffic between the mainland and the small island. The bridge reopened just over two weeks following the tragedy.

It will be interesting to see what officials learn from these events and what, if anything, the government does to avert such tragedies in future.