The Trouble With Neighbours

Monday, 14 February 2011
Op-Ed by MP

Not all modern day Thais are unaware, or dismissive, of the cultural debt that their nation owes to Cambodia. Not long ago a member of visiting Thai delegation to Cambodia was reported to have admitted that Thailand owes most of its culture (about 70 per cent) to Cambodia.

Culture defines a whole lot more than certain social codes and conventions that give meaning and sustenance to human existence. It is not inconceivable to envisage the earliest subject populations or tribal groups who for want or lack of basic physical safety and security decided to head south ward and away from their home settlements on the rugged fringes of the Middle Kingdom into the benign bosom of the Khmer Empire - aptly coined with the Brahminite appellation of 'Sovanna-Phum', a term by which Cambodians today call their villages (phum) and Thais, their phumi, meaning 'paradise' or bountiful, Golden Land (Suvarnabhumi (Sanskrit) or Suvannabhumi (Pali). It is also the name of Bangkok's international airport.

From artefacts that had in recent years been unearthed throughout the mainland of SE Asia, including present-day Thailand, the Khmers (or Khmer-Mons along with the Chams, who had been the earliest peoples to have established themselves within the vast confines of this temperate climate) are thought to have enjoyed or achieved a highly evolved civilisation, some considerable time prior to the arrival of Indian cultural influence there. It is thought that earliest Indian travellers and traders who first traversed these parts in the first century CE when SE Asia was at the centre of a vast trade network that stretched from the Mediterranean to China, used the term ‘Sovannabhumi’ to describe this prevailing civilisation, sustained on its mastery of rice-cultivation (flood-retreat agriculture), as well as a range of professional skills that encompassed the ingenuity in sculpturing, pottering and delicate handicraft that might have later been merged and complemented with Indian religious-cosmological influences to culminate or reach their fullest expressions and summits in now famed stone monuments like Angkor Wat, Bayon, Banteay Srei, Preah Vihear etc. What is significant, in contrast to the hitherto widely held perception among scholars that Khmer civilisation had, in the main, been fed or seeded by cultural and religious influences from India, is the now more than plausible premise for postulating – through evidence and clues provided by subsequent archaeological discoveries - that an advanced indigenous civilisation of this pre-Angkorean ‘Golden Age’ would have already independently emerged and evolved long before Cambodia exposed herself to those external influences; a possibility or detail that has not (in my humble opinion) been warranted due historical weight or recognition by scholars.

When a recent Thai academic advanced the notion that Cambodians are having ‘identity crisis’ as a result of the turbulence inflicted upon them in their nation's recent tragic past, he may have subconsciously regurgitated many a Thai supremacist's inability or refusal to acknowledge Thailand's actual roots as recorded in history for all to know and embrace as fact, making the Cambodians, unjustly, scapegoats for the Thais’ own chronic historical myopia. This inability, as it were, has developed and endured with a people who, having grown accustomed of dictating the course of history to their prejudices and avarice, have made it their overweening prerogative and pride, born of half dream and half self-induced hallucination, to erase from collective memory a less than noble and, a rather more than, undistinguished past, which continues, nevertheless, to prick their conscience and gnaw at their inflated self-esteem like an albatross around the neck; a past that sits ill at ease with a present they have carved up for themselves through sordid deeds and in their warped, clouded minds - a deluded mental state, furthermore, that is being enacted over the Preah Vihear conflict for all the world to see.

In the popular sentiment still being held by the Khmers, the pejorative term 'Stealing or Looting Siamese' has continued to retain historical emotion and resonance in light of both what had been committed down the centuries as well as, undeniably, what is still being perpetuated against the Khmer people and nation today. The Siamese sacking of Angkor in the 14th century that (combined with the Annamese pressure in the East) had contributed to the decline of the Khmer Empire and resulted in what amounted to a major cultural genocide, systematically conducted against the Khmers by the Siamese invaders; an unhappy experience from which, it can be argued, Cambodia has yet to fully recover. The invaders made sure they took as their scalps, and transported back to where they came, whatever they deemed of value and relevance to their young, emerging Kingdom, prominent among which were Khmer court scribes or scholars who were highly prized by the Siamese court for they were held by the latter to be the intellectual driving forces behind the flourishing Angkorean Empire and all its radiating magnificence, in addition to priceless stone works, manuscripts, religious texts, royal Apsara troupe, musicians, craftsmen, cooks and possibly, some royal concubines too!

This accounts for just one instance of looting that had been recorded by historians. The Siamese made a habit of not leaving the Khmers alone in the latter’s hours of vulnerability and helplessness by launching a series of invasions from time to time in search of booty needed to finance their war with Burma, the other nation that has its proper roots in the Khmer-Mon linguistic entity, and who, along with the Kingdom of Champa, can be said to rival Angkor in artistic genius and expression. Of more recent time, the Thais having lost the Preah Vihear case to Cambodia in 1962 at the ICJ are known to have emptied the site of many known removable artefacts and carvings that are sacred and integral to the temple itself as well as to the Khmer people who built it through their ancestors. These objects form part of the demand that the ICJ had ordered Thailand to return to the temple’s rightful owner i.e. Cambodia. Regrettably, as of now, the Thais have not been willing to comply with this seemingly reasonable injunction; a fact which Cambodia, through her successive governments, has been powerless to influence one way or another in her favour. And now, to rub more salt into the wounds, the temple’s standing ruins, had been of late, further subjected to the enthusiastic artwork of trained vandals in uniforms, armed with machine guns, artillery and rocket propelled grenades!

Where the Khmer artisans and masons would have laboured and strained their every sinew in the tropical heat for hours on end each day, and spent years of sweat and sacrifice so as to leave a lasting legacy that would stand as fitting memorial and tribute to man’s (not just Khmer people’s) highest, noblest spirit through such selflessly dedicated endeavour demanded of him by his higher spiritual consciousness; a religious assignment which he strove lovingly, if, indeed, however, inadequately to express and capture in stone, it took, by way of contrast, a matter of a few bursts of senseless machine-gun firing to deface and desecrate the structure with irreparable bullet-riddled damages.

This rather sad episode reminds one of a passage in the Hebrew Bible about two mothers’ conflicting claim over a child; a case which was brought before King Solomon’s judgement. The King in his wisdom had summoned the two women to appear before him to witness the expected killing of the child by his executioner so as to remove the cause of the dispute! However, before the blade of the executioner had fallen upon the child, the biological mother, overcome with terror and compassion for her own flesh and blood, begged the King to spare the child’s life by agreeing to let the other woman have sole possession over the child. The King, now having divined the truth through a woman’s protective gesture and readiness to make the ultimate self-sacrifice born of maternal love, ordered the child to be handed over to the biological mother instead.

When the envoy from UNESCO arrives in town, he/she will do well to heed the moral of this story, asking of the Thais what exactly they wish to hold on to; or what precisely they wish to ‘jointly develop’ with Cambodia over the temple or the surrounding area given the fact that from record they, as a nation, have only been capable (not of creating, something uniquely their own, resembling in parity or splendour, any of the stone temples scattered across the heart of SE Asia that came into existence long before anyone had heard of Thailand or Siam) of plundering what had not – and does not - belonged to them and, of destroying what they could not plunder?