Reviewed by Andrew Symon
With Cambodia's national elections on July 27, a new history of the crucible of the country's politics, the capital Phnom Penh, is a valuable guide to what is at stake.
No firm grip on Cambodia's murky modern politics can be attained without an extensive knowledge of the country's often traumatic past. And as Australian academic Milton Osborne recounts in his new volume, the country's past transformations and tragedies have most frequently played out in riparian Phnom Penh.
There is now an uncertain brew combining the new energies and
hopes of young Cambodians with a government under the authoritarian Prime Minister Hun Sen, under whom official corruption runs rampant and culprits act with impunity. While the economy is more buoyant than at any time since the 1960s, propelling vigorous commerce and construction in the city, there are as always inequalities of opportunity and reward.
Set against this is the resilience of ordinary Cambodians, the renewal of traditions and arts that Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge tried to stamp out, and the belief that Osborne finds among younger Cambodians in the future and their courage to call for change to the present political system. "Some subjects have an obvious ending. Phnom Penh is not one of these," the author writes. Few Western authors can boast Osborne's experience and knowledge of Cambodia and the wider Mekong region. For nearly half a century he has witnessed and analyzed the region's often-turbulent change and written extensively about its history and politics, including, among other books, a biography of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia's flamboyant and indefatigable royal leader for almost all of the last 50 years of the 20th century, Sihanouk: Prince of Light, Prince of Darkness.
His Southeast Asia: An Introductory History, now in its ninth edition, is the definitive short history of the region and commonly used in university classes around the world. Most recently, Osborne has concentrated his energies on the environmental challenges the region now faces from hydropower and other modern developments on the Mekong River and its tributaries.
He returns to Cambodia in this latest book, Phnom Penh: a Cultural and Literary History. The title is a tad misleading, as the book is much more than a cultural guide. The book's central theme is how the course of Cambodian history has created, shaped, buffeted - and during the Khmer Rouge period from 1975-79 - devastated the city. Osborne weaves into the political story a description of the city's architectural development, a colonial creation under the French who in 1865 convinced then-king Norodom, retired king Sihanouk's grandfather and great-grandfather to current King Norodom Sihamoni, to move his palace to Phnom Penh from Udong, located 35 kilometers north of Phnom Penh.
Today the urban focal point remains the royal palace and national museum, which both look out majestically over the junction of the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers. Osborne's book is enriched with line drawings of Phnom Penh's palaces, temples, colonial buildings and street life. Yet Phnom Penh is not stuck in a time warp. With Cambodia's economic growth - and seemingly poor town planning - jarring change is on the way, with planned skyscrapers and growing traffic congestion.
True to the book's title, Osborne breaks his journey at several literary way stations. Here he looks at descriptions by visiting writers in the 1920s and 1930s - among others the famous French author and Gaullist minister Andre Malraux, who was convicted of trying to steal ancient statues from a temple complex near Angkor Wat. Another is British writer Somerset Maugham, who Osborne later encountered as a young Australian diplomat in Phnom Penh in 1959 during the grand old man of literature's return visit to the country at age 85.
"I heard him deliver the observation that no one should die before they see Angkor," writes Osborne.
Phnom Penh was a very different world when Osborne first arrived in 1959 as a 22-year-old diplomat with the Australian Embassy. Preparing to attend ceremonies at the Royal Palace, Osborne writes that, "I found I should equip myself with a white sharkskin suit, the prescribed dress for the diplomatic corps at daytime ceremonies. When I later came to wear it with my colleagues in the corps, I cold never rid myself of the feeling that we looked like a rather seedy collection of Italian ice cream vendors."
He returned in the mid-1960s for research towards a doctorate in history at Cornell University in the United States. "As I returned to Cambodia each year. ... I found Phnom Penh's mood increasingly morose as its citizens recognized that the good times had passed and puzzled over whether they might ever return. ... In 1971, I made my last visit before the terrible triumph of Pol Pot's force four years later. Yet with war growing in intensity in the countryside, Phnom Penh was already a city under partial siege."
An earlier book by Osborne - Before Kampuchea - recalls these tumultuous times in detail. He sketched the lives and thoughts of Cambodians from various walks of life he met and became acquainted with in his student days in Phnom Penh - many of whom were to disappear in the Pol Pot years. He returned in 1981, while working for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, to an utterly shattered city, with still fresh Khmer Rouge-run extermination centers and exhumed mass graves of the killing fields.
"The smell of human decomposition hung heavy in the air over the lines upon lines of battered skulls lying on the grounds beside the graves," he wrote.
While the city was made a virtual ghost town under the Khmer Rouge, whose radical Maoist regime forced its inhabitants into rural areas to achieve a never-realized agrarian utopia, important buildings and structures generally escaped destruction. The royal palace still stands and the national museum's priceless Angkor sculptures and other collections were mostly left untouched, curiously by a regime that aimed to erase vestiges of the bourgeoisie past and reset the national clock to year zero.
"Much has changed in Phnom Penh since that 1981 visit, and both Cambodia and its capital have attainted an apparent degree of normality," Osborne writes. "Visitors encounter smiling people who appear to have triumphed over a recent past and to have achieved a phoenix-like rebirth from the figurative ashes of the period when Pol Pot ruled," writes Osborne.
Osborne has continued to take stock of post-conflict Cambodia and the wider region variously as a university historian, head of the Southeast Asian branch of the Australian Government's Office of National Assessments, an intelligence analysis group reporting to the Prime Minister, and over the past decade as an independent author.
But as he underlines, the promise inherent in the UN-sponsored 1993 elections and the recent economic surge will not be fully realized as long as the corruption and impunity associated with the long rule of Prime Minister Hun Sen and his Cambodian People's Party (CPP) remains entrenched. Sadly, there is little chance that the July election, the fourth since 1993, will lead to a healing of what Osborne describes as these "running sores".
With his government's dominance over the national media and well-funded political machine, few expect Hun Sen and his CPP to lose their stranglehold on political power. But with the new hopes and expectations aloft in Phnom Penh, a new chapter is opening on the country which Osborne's new book puts into erudite historical context.
Phnom Penh - A Cultural and Literary History by Milton Osborne, Signal Books, Oxford, May, 2008. ISBN 978 1 904955 40 5. Price US$28.
Andrew Symon is a Singapore based analyst and writer and frequent visitor to Cambodia.
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