by Marsha Dubrow, DC Arts & Travel Examiner
"The Treasures of Angkor" by Marilia Albanese
Angkor Wat, the world’s largest religious structure, and one of the most spectacular architectural wonders, was used as a “killing field” by Cambodia’s genocidal dictator Pol Pot.
On January 7, monks chant at Angkor Wat and other “killing fields” throughout Cambodia to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of Pol Pot’s horrific regime – one of history’s worst.Pol Pot's infamous Khmer Rouge regime killed an estimated 1.7 million people – more than one-fifth of Cambodia’s population -- in the late 1970’s. They were either murdered outright, or died from forced labor and starvation.
Recently, I finally realized a life-long dream to visit Angkor Wat. I asked my extraordinarily knowledgeable guide, Phalla Chan, how he had managed to survive those years. “I guess I’m strong,” he replied. “Today is for today, not for thinking about yesterday.”
Fortunately, the only violence we saw was in the bas-reliefs of epic Hindu tales covering Angkor Wat, the spectacular temple spread across more than four square miles. Truly a world wonder, Angkor Wat is a UNESCO World Heritage site.Not until 2004 was Angkor removed from UNESCO's endangered World Heritage sites. UNESCO called Cambodia's efforts a "success story" in clearing landmines, reducing pilfering and other crimes.
Angkor Wat and the four nearby temples I toured were the most spectacular I've ever seen. Yes, even more than the temples I've toured like those of the Kama Sutra at Khajuraho in northern India, Mahabalipuram and Kancheepuram in southern India, the Taj Mahal; pagodas along Burma's "Road to Mandalay" -- I refuse to use the dictator's terms like Myanmar; Mayan ruins in Mexico and Guatemala; Machu Piccu in the Peruvian Andes, etc., etc. Full disclosure: Okay, so I haven't -- yet -- seen the Pyramids and many other world wonders. But back to Angkor Wat...
The French explorer Henri Mouhot, who re-discovered Angkor Wat in the 1850’s described it as: “…a rival to the temple of Solomon, and erected by some ancient Michaelangelo...It is grander than anything left to us by Greece and Rome.” W. Somerset Maugham put it like this, “No one, no one should die before they see Angkor,” during his second visit to Cambodia in 1959.
I certainly agreed with "Of Human Bondage" author, but the Angkor area had been extremely dangerous thanks to remaining Khmer Rouge guerrillas, other armed bandits and kidnappers, and landmines. Two of my neighbors were shot there. My guide Phalla Chan said temple-goers used to hire armed guards.
Angkor Wat had been the center of the enormous Khmer empire that thrived from the 9th to the 15th century. About 40 other temples are in the Angkor area near Siem Reap. One of the most astounding is Banteay Srei “Fortress of Women” with numerous sculptures of celestial dancers called apsaras.
French author André Malraux (“Man’s Fate”) and his wife Clara found the sculptures so beguiling that the couple was convicted of stealing several Banteay Srei statues in 1923. However, the jail sentences were never enforced in what was then French Indochina.
Malraux described it like this in his novel “The Royal Way”, “…the two dancing girls were some of the purest work he had ever seen. Well, the next thing was to load them onto the carts.” Despite his art pilfering, Malraux’s fate was to serve as France’s Minister of Cultural Affairs in the 1960s. Mon dieux, Malraux.
These days, at several temple sites, musicians injured by landmines play hauntingly eerie Cambodian tunes on traditional instruments.
Country & western Musak was playing in the lobby of my hotel in Siem Reap, the jumping off place about 10 miles from Angkor. I couldn’t escape country & western alleged music even in Siem Reap? Hotels there have “sprung up like mushrooms after the rains”, Phalla Chan commented. There was no room at the inn I’d wanted, the elegant Amansara, formerly a guest villa of Cambodian Prince, later King Norodom Sihanouk.
Stay anywhere you need to in order to see Angkor Wat, as Maugham said. And experience the rest of this exquisite country decimated by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge before their regime ended 30 years ago.
Sadly, but understandably, yesteryear's tragedies are today's tourist attractions in Cambodia. "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it," as the philosopher George Santayana warned so memorably.
At the most notorious of hundreds of killing fields, Choeung Ek, 8,000 skulls are stacked up in the former orchard just a few miles from Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh.
Cambodia’s deadliest prison, then called S-21, is now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The 290 skulls on display there used to be arranged in the shape of Cambodia. The walls of the former high school are papered with head shots of the 14,000 prisoners tortured there daily by the Khmer Rouge. These photos can be ordered, if you really want, as wallpaper for your computer.
Although one of history’s worst mass killers, Pol Pot never faced trial and died peacefully in his sleep at age 73. “Pol Pot” and "Brother Number One" were two of 10 aliases for Saloth Sar, a former schoolteacher . “The more often you change your name the better. It confuses the enemy,” he once said, according to “Pol Pot: Anatomy of A Nightmare” by Philip Short ((Henry Holt and Company).
Five former Khmer Rouge leaders are languishing in a Cambodian-United Nations detention center -- whose food they’ve complained about. Their long-planned trial is still not in sight, and the detainees, in their 70s and 80s, may well die peacefully before facing justice.
For more info:
“The Treasures of Angkor” by Marilia Albanese (a White Star Publishers Cultural Travel Guide)
“A History of Cambodia” by David Chandler (Westview Press)
“Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare” by Philip Short (Henry Holt and Company). Short has been a foreign correspondent for "The Times" of London, "The Economist", and the BBC
“The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79” by Ben Kiernan (Yale University Press). Kiernan is the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History, and the founding director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University
"How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930-1975" also by Ben Kiernan
Trails of Indochina tour operators, who organized my independent travel in Cambodia and Vietnam
Cambodian Embassy in Washington, DC
U.S. State Department travel information about Cambodia
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