By Sebastian Strangio

Published in the Christian Science Monitor, July 26, 2010

A crumbling Mughal-era mansion in Dhaka’s old city. (Photo: Sebastian Strangio)

ACROSS Old Dhaka, decaying and sprawling mansions are hulking reminders of the city’s 19th-century commercial boom. Majestic, wrought-iron gates slump inward. Gardens are overgrown. Squatters have taken up residence in some of these empty shells, but mostly these Mughal-era (17th-19th century) structures are now regarded as less important than the land on which they sit.

Taimur Islam, an architect who heads the Urban Study Group, a Dhaka-based organization campaigning to have the old city designated as a protected area, says the pace of development spells an uncertain fate for the city’s architectural heritage. Since 2004, the group has created an inventory of about 3,000 historically significant structures in Old Dhaka, where a handful of buildings are razed daily. Mr. Taimur says that if the government took a more integrated approach to planning, it could accommodate the preservation of old buildings and also the needs of a ballooning population. It could even help reshape perceptions of Dhaka, one of the world’s fastest-growing megacities. “If it’s possible to restore all those important monuments under certain guidelines and come up with an integrated plan, the rest of the areas could be revitalized too,” he says.

This week brought the news that UNESCO has finally decided to list the country’s Preah Vihear temple as a world heritage site, implicitly recognising Cambodia’s sovereignty over the Angkor-era ruin. The announcement came amidst a wave of mewling and sabre-rattling from the anti-Thaksin People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) party in neighbouring Thailand, where zealots from the radical nationalist group Dharmayutra has issued calls for the ‘return’ of Cambodia’s Battambang, Siem Reap and Banteay Meanchey provinces to Thai control. The struggle over Preah Vihear, which has been milked for political capital for more than half a century, is a telling demonstration of how legal disputes can be blown out into the most colourful historical fantasies.

Preah Vihear temple, as seen from the Thai side

The temple dispute, like many of the region’s problems, has its roots in the pre-independence era. 11th-century Prasat Preah Vihear, one of the most stylistically diverse Angkorean temple sites in Cambodia, sits on the northern side of the 525 metre-high Dangrek escarpment, easily reachable by road from Thailand but only accessible via a long and tortuous drive from the south. When the French began delineating the Siam-Indochina border in 1904, it did so with the agreement from both governments that the precipitous Dangrek watershed be used as the ‘natural’ frontier between the two countries, a plan that would have put the temple on Thai soil. However, maps produced after the French border expedition showed Preah Vihear as being in Cambodia, sparking off an international row over the temple’s ownership. It may have been simple oversight; but it was more likely a product of French cultural paternalism — the Gallic self-perception as the ‘protector’ of a ‘lost’ Khmer culture — leavened with a pinch or two of anti-Siamese animus. (For an example of this cloying sentimentalism see The Gate, by French ethnologist François Bizot). What started out as a crude piece of imperial slight-of-hand turned into a source of simmering Thai resentment, simultaneously underscoring Cambodia’s own nascent national identity.

In fact, the tensions between Paris and Bangkok that led to Preah Vihear’s initial contestation can be traced back the establishment of French Indo-China in the late-nineteenth century. After bringing Vietnam and Cambodia under its sway, the French drove their gunboats up the Chao Phraya River to Bangkok in 1893, forcing the cession of Laos — then a fragmented, bandit-ridden vassal-state of the Siamese. Further unequal treaties in 1904 and 1907 forced Siam to give up additional Lao territories west of the Mekong, as well as the northwest Cambodian provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap, which had been under Thai control since 1769.

The coup d’état engineered in Bangkok in 1932 by Marshal Phibun Songkhram turned the tables a little, leading to the diminution of the Thai monarchy, the renaming of the country from Siam to Thailand (‘land of the Thai’), and a irredentist foreign policy geared towards to the unification of all ethnic Tai within a single state governed from Bangkok. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Songkhram — backed now by Japanese military muscle — reclaimed the disputed Indochinese territories in a short border war against the French in 1940-41, also gaining Muslim-majority states from British Malaya and the ethnically-Tai Shan States from Burma. As much as it inflated Thai prestige, however, piggy-backing on the successes of Japanese imperialism turned out to be a bad choice for Songkhram: after the Japanese surrender, Thailand was forced to cede the territories back to French Indochina, which soon solidified into the borders of the newly independent states of Laos and Cambodia as they are known today.

After the French withdrawal from Indochina in 1954, the Thais immediately took the opportunity to extract symbolic revenge, sending troops to occupy Preah Vihear from the north, a move which set off a game of military cat-and-mouse, culminating in a 1962 ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague that the temple belonged to Cambodia.

Despite what some in Cambodia might think, however, Cambodian ownership of the temple is no foregone conclusion. The Thai government could make a good argument that the French border delineation of 1904 ceded the temple to Thailand, but for the ‘variation’ in the subsequent maps, which was not taken into account by the 1962 ICJ ruling. The temple also sits on the Thai side of a significant natural frontier (the Dangrek escarpment), which forms the border between the two countries for the rest of its 320km length. The question of the temple’s history is also irrelevant. Claims that Preah Vihear should belong to Cambodia purely because it was ‘built by Khmers’ are meaningless, since they would also give Cambodians the right to seize large swathes of Thailand’s Surin, Sisaket and Burirom provinces, which contain other Angkorean ruins. This reasoning resonates emotionally, but is a recipe for dangerous irredentism: the Italian government, by this logic, would have the right to claim the Roman ruins in Bath or Alexandria or Volubilis.

The best argument that Cambodia can make is a purely legal one: that the 1962 ruling settled the question in their favour, and, pending a legal challenge by Thailand, represents the final word on the matter. Any appeals to ‘culture’ or ‘history’ seen through the distorting lens of Cambodian nationalism misrepresent the issue and threaten to trigger off more events like the 2003 anti-Thai riots, in which the Thai embassy and Thai-owned businesses were looted and burned after an air-headed Bangkok actress stated that Angkor Wat ‘belonged to Thailand.’

However, the Thai appeals to history are more vague and insubstantial. Calling for the return of Khmer-majority Cambodian provinces on the basis that they were once under the loose suzerainty of Bangkok is sheer fantasy: borders change, and Cambodia has an equal moral claim to the majority of mainland Southeast Asia on the grounds that the Angkorean empire once ruled it. As for protesting UNESCO’s listing of Preah Vihear, as some 100 Thais did at the temple site last month, this betrays the standard exceptionalist tendency to assert that international legal rulings are fine for everybody else, but inapplicable in the case of one’s own country. As a legal issue, Preah Vihear is done and dusted. Thai nationalists better get used to the idea.

Phnom Penh is about two hours from the Vietnamese border, a trip broken only by a ubiquitous half-hour lunch stop and a short break at Neak Loung, where cars, buses, motos and pedestrians are borne across the Mekong on rusting ferries. Due to the abundance of foreign aid the highways here are well-sealed and, excepting a bumpy 40km coda of expansion works on the final approach into Phnom Penh, the hulking Sapaco tourist bus made good time. My arrival was smooth but otherwise inglorious. After a week-long spell in one of the city’s ubiquitous backpacker ghettos, I’ve finally found a permanent address, a second-floor apartment set in a quiet street close to the riverfront and the old National Assembly building:

No. 7Dz, Long Ngeth Street (St. 258)
Khan Chamcarmon
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
+855 (0) 17 606 885

The new edition of the Phnom Penh Post hit the streets on Friday, and we celebrated with tequila shots and beers at Cantina, a Mexican restaurant and dedicated Post watering-hole on the riverfront. For this first issue, I contributed stories about the release of a new court monitoring report — which paints a predictably dire picture of the country’s judiciary — and the arrival of a new 3G mobile network in Cambodia, for which I interviewed Christian pop-star Stacie Orrico (!) in the feathered expanses of Hotel Le Royal. I also received VIP tickets to the launch of the new network last Saturday, a free concert at the Olympic Stadium featuring Orrico and a line-up of local artists.

In the event, I spent more time taking photos of the stadium itself than I did of the performers. I’ve always been interested in the school of Khmer modernism that flourished briefly under Prince Sihanouk in the 1950s and 1960s before it was terminated by the civil war and the depredations of the Pol Pot era. Phnom Penh’s Olympic Stadium, built in 1964 and designed by Vann Molyvann, is one of the best remaining examples of this new style of Khmer modernism. Molyvann, a local architect who studied with Le Corbusier in France, was the leader of this architectural school whose close personal friendship with Sihanouk ensured him a series of major state commissions, including the Independence Monument, Preah Suramarit National Theatre (recently destroyed by fire) and several private villas for the Prince in Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville. (In the same style, though probably not designed by Molyvann, are the apartments — once white, now a sepulchral grey — that line the streets around O Russei Market in the centre of town).

Spectators at Phnom Penh’s Olympic Stadium, March 15.

Although Phnom Penh never hosted the Olympic Games — to Sihanouk’s consternation — the stadium was inaugurated when the city hosted its non-aligned equivalent, the Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO) in 1966. The village for the visiting athletes was built by Molyvann in the same angular style, a box-like line of apartments along the Tonle Bassac foreshore about 1km south of my apartment. ‘Le Front du Bassac’, as the housing development was then called, is today in a decrepit state, but a skeleton of high modernism can still be discerned beneath the peeling paintwork and twisted railings of the apartment blocks, now wreathed in electric cables and covered in the detritus of their inhabitants. My colleague Brendan is researching the heritage issues associated with these old buildings for the upcoming edition of the Post and I am keen to explore their history further. I’ll definitely write more on this during my stay, once I have a chance to visit some of the remaining buildings around the city.

With my mind occupied with Cambodian issues at work, I’ve been pursuing my other interests in my downtime. I already have a favourite book store nearby in Street 240 (a branch of Bangkok’s D’s Books) where I’ve procured vintage 1960s/1970s paperback copies of Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gore Vidal’s Duluth, Von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and The Spice-Box of Earth, a 1961 collection of poetry by Leonard Cohen. There are also a couple of articles up on Arts & Letters Daily that I recommend: one by David Mamet in The Village Voice, disavowing what he calls ‘brain-dead liberalism’ (although like most Americans he misuses the term*) and an excellent essay by Christina Hoff Sommers, one of my favourite American intellectuals, on why universities can’t, and shouldn’t, pursue gender equality in the physical sciences. I’ve also acquired a copy of The Anti-Industrial Revolution, an obscure Ayn Rand polemic against the New Left, which is ruthless in its denunciation of the student ‘revolution’ of the 1960s. Although it matches radical left-wing theories with its own brand of heaven-sent certainty, the book is worth the price of admission ($3.50) for the following quote alone. Here is Rand on hippies:

Observe the hippies’ choice of clothing. It is not intended to make them look attractive, but to make them look grotesque. It is not intended to evoke admiration, but to evoke mockery and pity. One does not make oneself look like a caricature unless one intends one’s appearance to plead: Please don’t take me seriously.

I’m not sure I agree with Rand on every, or even most, issues; but man, she sure knows how to skewer an innocent.

* I am always perplexed by the American use of the term ‘liberal’. Liberalism, in its nineteenth-century sense, stands for free markets and individual rights. Americans use the word to denote almost the exact opposite: namely, strong government intervention in the economy. American ‘liberals’ are only liberal in the social — civil rights, pro-choice — sense of the term. Economically, their philosophy comes closer to statism or social democracy. This confusion of the history of political ideas — this tendency to call a spade a lettuce — only muddies an already complicated debate.