Days Two and Three
It’s impossible to look at the remnants of the Angkorian past without wondering what would cause such imposing empire to collapse so completely. It’s similarly difficult to consider the prospects for rural Cambodia without s sense of sadness and wonder.
It would be wrong to view Cambodian history as having reached it’s pinnacle with the creation of Bayon, Angkor Wat and the other temples we now associate with the height of Angkorian rule.* But it’s equally true that the scope and grandeur of these temples hasn’t yet been surpassed. And viewing the mine-strewn countryside in Cambodia today, it’s evident that the country has quite a distance yet to run to achieve such grand feats again.
Having visited the major Angkorian temples in January, Kelly and I set out to see Beng Mealea, roughly 70 kilometers northeast of Siem Reap. It’s a mysterious temple whose origins and purpose have been studied far less than the other major sites. It’s also in a state of collapse, making it an effective symbol for the empire altogether.
Our driver, Vichet, was a young man from Battambang. He drove us through customarily beautiful countryside for two hours until we reached the temple. A few police officers lazily lollygagged about and a handful of visitors took photos, but it lacked the tumultuous crowds of Angkor Wat. We scaled the outer wall and two kids, about 10 years old, attached themselves to us. We made them peanut butter sandwiches and snacked in an intensely atmospheric setting.
Beng Mealea’s appeal is mystery and it’s aesthetic of collapse. It’s been largely taken over by foliage: roots and vines reduced walls to rubble and grew over them. What makes this aesthetic so appealing? Why are similar temples like Ta Prohm so popular? Part of the answer lies in our imagination: in seeing fully the extent to which these grand structures have fallen we are forced to imagine what they once were, only to contemplate what obliterated them so profoundly and completely. Here, where mountains of rubble sit next to the remaining artifices, the aesthetic is clear and pronounced.
Collapse, Jared Diamond argues, doesn’t always follow a slow decline: it often happens to great societies at the apex of their powers. Walking through the flotsam of rubble, I considered the urban centers I knew intimately and what they would look like in a state of collapse, overgrown and abandoned. This fascination lies deep western culture, as evidences by mountains of novels, poems, songs and films dealing with collapse and apocalypse. As I write this, the apocalypse-porn film 2012 is leading American box offices.
Our small tour guides took us about, pointed at things that may or may not have been what they claimed them to be—“look, a library!”—“a coffin!”—and ran away from the lazy police at intervals. We snuck off the marked path and climbed through crevasses, and snacked. After three hours of slow exploring we tipped our charming guides and left.
Vichet drove us down a long, bumpy dirt road to our other objective for the day: the land mind museum. It’s a justifiable famous project by a man named Aki Ra. Ra was taken by Khmer Rouge soldiers when he was ten years old and forced to fight in their guerilla army. This was in 1980, one year after the KR lost Phnom Penh to the Vietnamese. Ra spent his youth laying landmines along the Cambodia / Thai / Laos border, first for the KR and then, upon defecting, for the Vietnamese army. After a change of consciousness and the end of immediate hostilities he began actively demining. Using sticks, rocks and his own specialized skills he set about returning the Cambodian countryside to a place of safety.
This is a massive challenge. Cambodia is one of the most heavily mined countries in the entire world: between anti-personnel mines, anti-vehicle mines and unexploded ordinances (UXO), the number of active bombs in Cambodian soil remains in the millions.
Ra claims to have diffused 50,000 mines himself—a fraction of the total amount in Cambodia. With his wife, Hourt, he established a school and living quarters for child amputees who were wounded by UXOs of all sorts. The school is on the same grounds as the museum but tourists are not allowed on its grounds. The museum itself was somewhat informative but not interactive: there was no one to talk to about mines and their effects on Cambodia’s populace. It didn’t fail to leave an impression, however: merely the massive collection of diffused mines, claymores, shells and so on it enough to cause fright and despair.
The next day we took off for Anlong Veng, about 120 kilometers north of Siam Reap. Two old Germans and a Cambodian soldier joined us on the bus. The soldier kept making obnoxious sucking noises through his teeth and stared at Kelly, so we changed seats.
The three-hour bus ride came with a complementary three hours of Cambodian music videos. They follow the same theme as Vietnamese music videos: an ear-twisting guitar solo introducing a young, hip singer in a state of depression. He raises his head from his hands and the video transitions to scenes of him and his girlfriend in better times: in restaurants, taxis, whatever. This sequence takes the bulk of the time: usually three minutes. Then she breaks up with him. Or she cheats on him. Or she does something irreparably wrong to him. This sequence lasts two minutes or so. The remainder of the video is he, looking sad. Sad at malls, sad outside her house, always sad looking off in the direction of some sad sunset or sad emblem of their past love.
I digress.
Anlong Veng is a series of buildings along a T-intersection: south to Siem Reap, north to the Thai border, east to Prasat Preah Vihear. It’s poor, dusty and sketchy, filled with soldiers and way too many men with nothing to do (never a good sign). We didn’t plan on sticking around. It’s a town that wouldn’t be located on a map if it wasn’t for one critical factor: it was the final stronghold of the Khmer Rouge, staying in the clutches until 1998, twenty years after the Vietnamese takeover Phnom Penh in early 1979.
In failing to capture the top KR cadres, Cambodia was doomed to another two decades of civil strife as the KR recruited children and Vietnam’s economic policies prevented the moribund Cambodia economy from recovering from the civil war of the early 1970s and the Khmer Rouge revolution of 1975-1978. When the top cadres—Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Ta Mok etc.—fled the capital they took refuge in the jungles and mountains near the Thai border, where they could escape when things got hairy. From this backwater, isolated scrap of land they “contested” Cambodia with a monumental degree of arrogance and delusion.
We came to see their remnants. There isn’t much. The area along Anlong Veng is flat and sparsely populated; twenty kilometers to the north is a massive ridge, and just a couple of kilometers past that is the border of Thailand. Our drivers took us up the ridge, past a smuggler’s market and two Pol Pot’s cremation site, where people continue to pay homage with incense sticks, food offerings, and piece of a dead crab. The jury is still out on the symbolism of the crab.
From there it was dusty, off-road ride through a poor village to Ta Mok’s house on a ridge with stupendous views. Ta Mok was known as “The Butcher”—quite a distinction for a leading member of the Khmer Rouge. His savagery makes comparisons to Vlad the Impaler appropriate. Not much is left of his house now, though people have written some strange graffiti: their names and phone numbers, for example.
It was too late by this point to go the further distance to Pol Pot’s abandoned house, so we went back to Anlong Veng. Along the way we passed a few vehicles marked for demining. The Halo Trust, a non-profit demining organization, was clearing some land.
We spoke to Kim, site coordinator from the Halo Trust, a gracious and well-spoken man who answered our amateur questions about the demining process. Five workers were working on this particular site, which was not particularly large: maybe four acres at the most. There was interest in building a parking lot in the area so it needed to be cleared. An undetermined number of mines and UXO were scattered about. Demining by hand would take over a year, so they moved in the heavy machinery. Essentially they were going to clear away an entire level of topsoil (“soil” used loosely), scoop it all into a machine and grind everything to pieces. What they didn’t clear through grinding they would sift, letting the soil fall below and the mines suspend above. It was an amazing effort to clear a relatively small patch of land.
On the return to Anlong Veng we briefly stopped at another of Ta Mok’s houses, though it was too dark to see anything much. A misspelled sign read,
“Ta Mok’s House Historical Attractive Site”
Back at Lucky Star guesthouse we reflected on the poverty of the northern Cambodian countryside and the legacy of landmines in the area. Why would huge tracts of land remain entirely uncultivated when there’s so much poverty? Even sustenance farming would be preferable, it would seem. But the land is almost entirely unusable: the threat of mines remains too great. Who would start a farm when the very land they would use could be a potential death trap?
The terror of landmines are their future legacy. They are, as it often said, less a weapon of war and more a weapon against peace: after the soldiers return home, the mines stay, a threat to any who would actually use that land. Poverty is rooted in homelessness and the inability to make use of available resources. Cambodia’s mines ensure not only that hundreds are killed and injured every year, but that the rural countryside remains rooted in poverty—a process which propagates the now familiar dislocation of traditional farming families to cities, further depleting the countryside and adding hectare after hectare of slum to the metropole.
So who is to blame for this situation? In Cambodia’s case: nearly everyone involved. America dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of ordinance on Cambodia’s eastern countryside, much of which remains undetonated. Along the Thai-Laos-Cambodia border—one of the highest concentrations of mines in the world—the Khmer Rouge laid thousands of mines, a practice which was utilized by the Cambodian national army, no matter who was in charge. The Vietnamese army outdid all of them after it failed to capture the KR leadership, which hid out along that border. To pin them in that narrow strip of land and prevent them from spreading their insurgency into central Cambodia, the Vietnamese army laid hundreds of thousands of landmines. Of course, none of these entities express the slightest bit of accountability for their actions. All of the world’s most powerful countries—the US, China, Russia and India included—refuse to sign the UN ban on landmines (the US won’t do so without a “Korean exception,” which would not prohibit the laying of mines between the north and south, already one of the most mined belts anywhere).
Cambodia, today, is more economically and politically stable and independent then it has been in two hundred years. After a recent Transparency International study ranked Cambodia 158th of 190 countries, a Cambodian official commented (this is a paraphrase): “We don’t care about the ranking. We aim to bring safety, stability and harmony to the Cambodian people.” It’s certainly true that over the past two centuries safety, stability and harmony have been in short supply. With the legacy of Angkor’s enduring triumphs and collapse perpetually on their backs, Cambodian people have the right to not merely survive, but to prosper. With the legacy of its recent tribulations buried in it’s soil, safety, stability, harmony and prosperity will remain elusive.
*The so called “dark ages” of Cambodian history—the time between the fall of Angkor and the beginnings of the French protectorate—are a relatively unknown period which is marked by a number of critical trends: first, the geographic transition of Cambodian power from north of the Tonle Sap to east at Phnom Penh; secondly, the vacillation of Cambodian patronage between it’s powers to the east and west: Siam and Vietnam. Even if Cambodia remained politically subservient to these alternating powers, the lives of ordinary, rural Cambodians would have been little affected by the power struggles and machinations, and Cambodian rural traditions have lasted with remarkable consistency for hundreds of years.
