Learning from Cambodia's bloody experience

November 9, 2010
By Geoff Gallop
(Geoff Gallop is the former premier of Western Australia)
WAtoday.com.au (Australia)

Through their own expansion, and their own self-destruction, we can learn a lot from our Asian neighbours.

Finding out about human nature by exploring its manifestations in different places and at different times was one of the features of the great Enlightenment project that saw science and reason take the scalpel to religion and tradition in the eighteenth century. Learning from history mattered as it should today. Indeed no matter how small a country is there will always be aspects of its history and experience that provide lessons for us all.

Take Cambodia for example. A small nation of just over 15 million people, it occupies 181,000 square kilometres of land and water (WA, by comparison has an area of 2,252,500 square kilometres). Since retiring from politics in 2006, my work as an academic has taken me there on four occasions. Last week I was there lecturing to public servants at the Royal School of Administration in Phnom Penh. Like many Australians I have also taken the opportunity to visit Angkor Wat and other temples located around Siam Reap.

What then can we learn from the experience of the Khmer people?

Lesson One – great cities can decay and collapse.

From the ninth to the 14th centuries the Angkor Empire stretched across much of South-East Asia. At its centre was a great city covering an area similar to the size of greater London today. It possessed a sophisticated network of roads, canals and irrigation ponds. Intensive agriculture supported a city of one million people, arguably the largest in the pre-industrial world.

Visit Angkor today and all that is left of this city is a handful of the estimated 1000 temples constructed in the era of Empire.

What happened? We know that the Empire was already in decline in the 13th and 14th centuries and that the city was sacked by Thai invaders in 1431, causing its population to move south.

Certainly the strains associated with war and conflict played their role but recent research, including that by scholars from the University of Sydney, has been focused on the impacts of climate change, population pressure and the over-use of natural resources. Damien Evans from the Greater Angkor Project put it this way: "You can see the city pushing into forested areas, stripping vegetation and re-engineering the landscape into something that was completely artificial." In a sense the city built itself out of existence.

Add to this evidence of decades of drought interspersed with intense monsoon rains which destroyed much of the infrastructure. Overstretched, over-engineered and vulnerable to external shocks like climate change – does it sound familiar?

Lesson Two – fanaticism and the evil associated with it is never far below the surface of human society.

In more recent times, we know about Cambodia because of the Pol Pot era (1975-79) and his government's campaign of systematic genocide, known as the Killing Fields. Caught up in the Cold War in South-East Asia and preceded by five years of foreign meddling, bombardment and civil war, Cambodia was ripe for revolution in 1975 a situation the disciplined and well-organised Khmer Rouge exploited.

Little did many know, however, about what was to follow. Writing in A HISTORY OF DEMOCRATIC KAMPUCHEA (2007) Khamboly Dy summarised the four years of Khmer Rouge government in this way:

"They wanted to transform Cambodia into a rural, classless society in which there were no rich people, no poor people and no exploitation. To accomplish this, they abolished money, free markets, normal schooling, private property, foreign clothing styles, religious practices, and traditional Khmer culture. Public schools, pagodas, mosques, churches, universities, shops and government buildings were shut or turned into prisons, stables, re-education camps and granaries. There was no public or private transportation, no private property, and no non-revolutionary entertainment. Leisure activities were severely restricted. People throughout the country, including the leaders of the CPK (Communist Party of Kampuchea), had to wear black costumes, which were their traditional revolutionary clothes."

Just as the great city of Angkor was deserted in 1431, so too was Phnom Penh in 1975. In this case it was forced removal of the residents to the countryside in order to fulfil the dream of starting history again in the year zero, free of foreign influence and capitalist temptation.

It is estimated that nearly two million Cambodians died either from disease, starvation, exhaustion from overwork or execution. Torture was commonplace as the country was transformed into what Dy described as "a huge detention centre". It is very difficult to fully comprehend or describe the level and intensity of the suffering that was involved.

Cambodia wasn't the first and probably won't be the last to experience a politically driven attempt to remake human nature at the point of a gun. It reminds us of the dangers of fanaticism and nationalism, just as Angkor reminds us of the dangers of human arrogance in the face of a fragile and interconnected environment.