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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Letters From |
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Cambodia |
Contested Heritage
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| How a UNESCO World Heritage site became the flashpoint in a Cambodian-Thai border war |
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LEI BOSONG / XINHUA / XINHUA PRESS / CORBIS |
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| Foreign military attachés visit the Preah Vihear temple on 3 March 2011.
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N 4 FEBRUARY 2011, the ancient Hindu temple
at Preah Vihear in Cambodia, virtually
on its border with Thailand, was once again
transformed into hell’s own World Heritage
Site. At least 10 people have died in the following
weeks, after Thai and Cambodian
troops stationed around the temple began exchanging 105 mm
artillery fire and BM-21
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multiple rocket launchers, respectively,
in three areas adjacent to the temple, and Cambodia claims
that a wing of the temple has collapsed as a result of Thai artillery
bombardment.
Although they have never been model neighbours, Thailand
and Cambodia have been at each other’s throats since UNESCO
inscribed Preah Vihear temple on the list of World Heritage
Sites in 2008, prompting protest in Thailand and triggering the
current build-up of troops along the border. Thailand says the
land surrounding the temple is Thai soil (the temple’s main entrance
is in Thailand and land adjacent to the temple is claimed
by both countries). Cambodia can claim that UNESCO, the International
Court of Justice at The Hague (in a 1962 ruling),
and a French colonial map dated 1907 say it isn’t.
The February attacks were the fiercest since 2008. After each
clash, both countries have accused the other of firing first into
populated areas. Despite intense regional diplomatic pressure
to lay down arms, the ceasefire at Preah Vihear will remain
fragile as long as Thai and Cambodian nationalists keep fingering
the dispute to further their own political agendas.
Perhaps all borders are strange. But Preah Vihear is the only
borderland in the world in which a 1,000-year-old temple
stands at, and as, the nexus of an armed conflict between two
of the world’s last remaining Buddhist kingdoms. In the 10th
century, the same Khmer Empire that would, in the following
200 years, give the world Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom began
building Prasat Preah Vihear—the one true mountain temple
among the many manmade Mount Merus of the ancient Angkorian
period.
When I visited Preah Vihear in September 2009—slightly
more than a year after the UNESCO designation set off a round
of fresh fighting on the border—a relaxed, summer-camp atmosphere
prevailed in spite of the tension. Soldiers strolled
through the market area at the Hindu temple’s base licking ice
cream cones or playing cards next to their anti-aircraft guns.
I say the border was “relaxed” because, at the time, three
women—an American artist named Farrah Karapetian, myself
and our Cambodian tomboy guide, Soluy Loeurt—were able to
camp for three days with a group of Cambodian soldiers: General
Long Beach and the men of the Royal Cambodian Armed
Forces Battalion 169. I laughed when I heard the name “Long
Beach”, thinking it had something to do with the city of Long
Beach, California—home to the world’s largest population of
diasporic Cambodians. The general was quick to correct me,
however, stating that his name suggested his men’s memory of
him will be illustrious and long, like a seemingly endless stretch
of beach.
The next morning, as we passed a guardhouse, four Cambodian
soldiers in uniforms demanded cigarettes and money.
Soluy and Farrah shook their heads to show “don’t have” and
we sailed past the guard station unmolested, three women in
a boundary zone shot through with testosterone, cashing in on
the feminine element of surprise.
There was a picnic table in the distance. When we reached
the table, Soluy climbed atop, cupped her hands around her
mouth, and shouted the Thai greeting “SAWADEE” at the neat
rows of black sandbags situated about 50 metres in front of
us and stacked in both directions as far as my eyes could see.
In front of the sandbags was a trench; behind the bags a Thai soldiers’ camp. Soluy shouted again and we heard someone stir.
A soldier dressed entirely in black peered out at us and then
slowly clambered over the sandbags, trying his best to appear
nonchalant as he strolled toward the picnic bench. Only a few
feet away, the Thai soldier crossed a thick line drawn in the dirt
between the bench and the blockade. He has crossed the line—literally, I thought.
The line demarcated the border between Cambodia and
Thailand. If we crossed this same line, our guide told us, we
would quickly reach our ultimate destination.
“How’s that?” I asked.
Soluy grinned: “Because the Thais will shoot you dead.”
The temple rises 525 metres above sea level. To reach its
entrance, we ascended for over an hour through the malarial
jungle, up a crumbling rubble-pour that at times looked more
like a dry streambed than what remained of the ancient stairs.
Our heavenly reward? A boulevard of smooth stone, extending
upwards through five levels of massive ceremonial gates
called gopuras, entering into the temple sanctuary before finally giving way to a promenade of sky.
The cliff at Preah Vihear was its own society, with a lady
selling sweet green tea and Cambodian soldiers waving at Farrah’s
large-format camera, which many soldiers before them
had—unfamiliar with any camera except a 35 mm—mistaken
for a bomb.
Soluy, the 28-year-old daughter of a Khmer historian, was
not only our guide but also our apparatus for understanding.
She was well aware of her status, and full of aphorisms—what
she liked to call “Soluy proverbs”.
“Kim,” she said to me near the temple entrance, after karatekicking
a Cambodian soldier sporting a traditional red-and-white
checquered scarf called a krama, a beer gut and a huge
rifle, “it is the Indian, not the arrow.”
The soldier, playing along with this once-in-a-lifetime attack
from a Cambodian woman, blocked her gamely a split-second
before her foot seemed destined to reach his face.
Soluy pulled back, jogged a little in place, and then flew toward
the soldier again, full throttle; he attempted to stop her
kick midair by grabbing her leg and they both tumbled to the
ground. At this point, I couldn’t say who was instructing who
in the tactics of warfare.
“Kim,” she said to me again, grinning mischievously as she
dusted herself off, “it is the arrow, not the Indian—Soluy proverb!”
The backdrop to their mock fight was a chain-link gate,
looped in razor wire and shrouded by overgrown vegetation. This is the gate that, until 2008, admitted tourists to the temple
from the Thai side, where the Thai government had recently
completed a superhighway through the mountains to ferry
tourists to Preah Vihear. Before renewed conflict over the temple
closed the only Thai tourist portal, visitors to the temple
from the Cambodian side had the tragicomic experience of ascending
for hours on treacherous motorbikes and then clambering
the last few kilometres on foot, through a jungle still
peppered with unexploded landmines, only to be joined at the
top by hordes of Thai tourists, immaculately free of sweat, having
disembarked from airconditioned buses a stone’s throw
away on the Thai side.
What happened in 2008 to warrant the gate’s closure became
apparent when we paused for our fifth iced coffee of the day
at a small restaurant at the temple’s base. To reach the restaurant,
we had to pick our way through a rubble field strewn with
trash—the remains of Preah Vihear’s former market, which was
obliterated by a Thai missile a little over two years ago, not long
after the World Heritage Committee added Prasat Preah Vihear
to the list of World Heritage Sites.
Now the Cambodian flag flies high atop the fifth gate to the
temple, flanked by two powder-blue UNESCO flags. From the
vantage of this fifth gate (its image now a national icon; a kind
of Cambodian Statue of Liberty, if you will) you can see a modern
outpost across the border on the Thai side, Thailand’s flag
held aloft in the wind, and the new bitumen highway cleanly
snaking by.
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