Anthony Alderson writes for the Guardian Weekly
February 24, 2009
Born in the time of the Khmer Rouge and later badly maimed when he stepped on a landmine, Bouth Rithy has come to symbolise the resilience of Cambodians who are moving forward and rebuilding their lives. Based at the remote temples of Koh Ker in northern Cambodia, the project manager for Heritage Watch is managing the impact of tourism on the local community, many of whom are still waking from the nightmare of the Khmer Rouge.
My father was in the Cambodian army; then one day when I was very young the Khmer Rouge came and took him away. He said he was only going to study, but he never returned. I don't know what happened, I only know that if he was alive he would have come back for us.
I remember a little of that time under the Khmer Rouge. Us children had to bring water to the workers and at one point I was chosen to be a guard at the watermelon farm – but I just sat there. I don't remember the Khmer Rouge itself very clearly. My younger brother fell ill and died during that time and my mother was sent to a farm near the Thai border.
When I was eight I went to school in Phnom Penh. A few years later I enrolled in a police training programme. I was underage, but in Cambodia it's easy to get around that. A year and a half later, as a police officer, I was moved to a patrol near the Thai border. That's where I stood on a landmine.
The mine took my leg off and destroyed my life. I had to start again from zero. It seemed that my family and friends didn't want to communicate with me. In those days it was very hard for disabled people; charities and the government have since done a lot to improve awareness. I moved back to Phnom Penh and received treatment in the police hospital. I was given a prosthetic limb and gradually I began to find a new life.
Before long I got a job as a security guard with a Catholic organisation called Maryknoll. I was bought a bicycle and sent to English classes. That's when my life started again. Now I can ride a motorbike, too, and even drive a car.
That was more than 10 years ago. Now I work for a preservation organisation called Heritage Watch. I'm based in northern Cambodia, among the temple ruins of Koh Ker. My job is to help raise money from tourism to help the local people.
The villagers here in Koh Ker are very poor – they suffer from a lack of education and bad living conditions. They were once firmly under the control of the Khmer Rouge, so they don’t talk very much. They're closed up and it's as if they don't understand communication very well; if you ask them a question they answer with only one or two words. If you don't ask, they don't talk.
However, in the time that I've been here the people seem to have become friendlier and more open. I try to work with them to give them emotional support and to make them less scared of talking to people.
Not long ago Heritage Watch decided to provide them with some training. We taught them about Khmer culture and literature, how to read and write and how to run a business. People here don't know about business. If they sell a chicken, for example, they don’t care how big the chicken is, it will be the same price. We also gave them English lessons to help them communicate with the tourists. We did well, but ran out of funding.
When visitors come to Koh Ker they tend to be on organised tours, and they don't have enough time to see all of the temple complex. We would like to see tourism agencies scheduling in visits to the village so that tourists can see the daily activities of the community. That way the locals might gain some benefit from the visits – even if it's only one dollar.
When I first arrived here the villagers didn't seem interested in the temples, and they certainly didn't understand that they could make money from them like in Angkor Wat. We explained to them why they should be more active in protecting their local heritage, and that when they went into the fields and saw looting or illegal logging they should tell the police or the relevant protection authorities.
We bought them bicycles and set up a "community heritage patrol", encouraging them to go out every day and report any illegal activities. We don't ask them to interfere with the looters or loggers, however, as they might have guns and it would be too dangerous.
My biggest success so far has been getting the local people to understand and work together with the protection and management authority for Angkor and Siem Reap, known as Apsara. Before, if the locals witnessed looting, they wouldn't know who to tell. Now, between 50 and 70 villagers are employed by the authority. The money helps to buy clothes for the children or pay for hospital visits.
There are still some landmines around, but not as many as before. The Cambodian Mine Action Centre, or CMAC, has been busy removing unexploded ordinance from the war. It's a dangerous job for them and their children, who live with them all the time as they move from place to place. Mines are the main cause of disability in Cambodia, although traffic accidents are becoming another big cause.
I got married seven years ago and have two children – one daughter, six, and one boy, four. They have the same birthday. They don't live here with me, but I call my wife every day on the mobile phone and see them when I visit Phnom Penh. Three months ago they came to visit me. They thought the temple was impressive, but couldn't understand how I live here. It's very quiet, there is no market and no healthcare; I have to do everything for myself. Before I came here I couldn't cook or prepare food, but now I can. I've learned a lot.
Original story:
http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/?page=editorial&id=959&catID=7
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The Associated Press
February 17, 2009
Cambodia's great ancient city of Angkor Wat may have been brought to an end some 600 years ago by sudden weather changes that caused massive drought — not just by rival Siamese forces and widespread deforestation as previously suspected, a researcher said Tuesday.
Brendan M. Buckley said bands from tree rings that he and his colleagues examined show that Southeast Asia was hit by a severe and prolonged drought from 1415 until 1439, coinciding with the period during which many archeologists believe Angkor collapsed.
From the city of famed temples, Angkorian kings ruled over most of Southeast Asia between the 9th and 14th centuries. They oversaw construction of architectural stone marvels, including Angkor Wat, regarded as a wonder of religious architecture and designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
While the 1431 invasion from Siam — what is now Thailand — has long been regarded as a main cause of Angkor's fall, archaeologists working at the sprawling temple site have suspected that ecological factors played a major part in its collapse.
"Given all the stress the Khmer civilization was under due to political reasons and so forth, a drought of the magnitude we see in our records should have played a significant role in causing its demise," said Buckley, a research scientist at Columbia University's Tree-Ring Laboratory in New York.
The thickness of a tree's rings provides scientists with a historical record of a region's climate. Wet periods encourage tree growth, making rings thicker, while dry periods create thinner rings.
Buckley, one of the world's top tree ring experts, has spent the past 16 years taking core samples from trees across Southeast Asia to build a record of the region's climate dating back hundreds of years.
Buckley — who spoke on the sidelines of a three-day climate conference in Vietnam_ said his data helped identify at least four mega-droughts in Southeast Asia dating back 722 years.
The Greater Angkor Project — run by the University of Sydney in collaboration with the French archaeological group Ecole Francaise d'Extreme Orient and APSARA, the body responsible for management of the Angkor World Heritage Park — concluded in 2007 that ancient Angkor had become unwieldy. Efforts to expand rice production to support a population of 1 million led to vast deforestation, top soil degradation and erosion.
Dan Penny, a University of Sydney researcher who is a director at the Greater Angkor Project, said the new findings on drought will help researchers gain a greater understanding of why the kingdom collapsed.
"Angkor was a civilization obsessed with managing water. It was an agrarian society," said Penny, who also spoke at the conference. "It's hard to imagine that a society like that could have shrugged off 20 or 30 years of drought."
Penny said the drought was likely the final blow to a kingdom already suffering the effects of deforestation and attacks from the Siamese and the Cham of southern Vietnam. Sediment samples show no evidence that Angkor was overwhelmed by a "dust bowl" like drought, he said.
"We have these droughts occurring on top of preexisting pressures," Penny said. "Climate change was an accelerant. It's like pouring petrol on a fire. It makes a social and economic pressures that may have been endurable disastrous."
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Written by Jessie Beard (Phnom Penh Post Feb. 12, 2009)
A TEAM of researchers, led by US educational program and marketing executive Kent Davis, is analysing 7,000 digital photos taken in November 2008 for a database that will attempt to unveil a mystery that's been bugging Davis since he first visited Angkor Wat in November 2005.
He wants to determine why there are so many images of women in the temples, and he's postulating a theory that Angkor wasn't built to honour kings or gods, but to glorify women.
When Davis first came to Angkor, he immediately became fascinated by the carvings of women and instinctively felt they had been historically trivialised as decorations.
"I wasn't prepared for the temple's human side as realistic carvings of women greeted me. Quite clearly, the images of these women were a major part of the monument's design and purpose," he said.
"These women who are so extraordinary and so filled with significance have remained unstudied and unappreciated in modern times. The fact that they have been hidden in plain sight during 150 years of intense Khmer scholarship is truly amazing.
"But a quantitative analysis could unlock the secrets these complex women have guarded for so long."
Using a computer database, the project involves recording the diverse features of the women, enabling detailed analysis of them for the first time since they were carved.
Davis also departs from convention by referring to the women shown in temple carvings as devatas, not Apsaras.
"No one knows what the ancient Khmers called the women at Angkor Wat. I generally choose to use devata for historical and semantic reasons. About a hundred years ago, some scholars began using the Hindu term apsara, and that became more common over time."
Davis's use of the term devata and his quest to comprehensively analyse the collection of female carvings was also inspired by the work of a young French woman, Sappho Marchal, who began classifying the women by their attributes in her own personal drawings.
Marchal lived at Angkor Wat and was the daughter of the second curator of the Angkor Wat conservation program. She published a book, Costumes et parures Khmers d'apres les davata d'Angkor-Wat, in 1927, and when Davis discovered her writings, he became even more determined to finish what Marchal had started all those years ago.
Davis has already evaluated 1,780 carvings of women and expects to include over 1,800 carvings in his study. He said that once he amassed about 25,000 digital photos of the carvings he was studying, the sheer complexity required that a computer database be used.
But on April 17 last year, Davis's project received a major setback - fire gutted his house and studio, destroying a collection of more than 2,000 books on the history of Southeast Asia and material he had prepared to republish the book Angkor the Magnificent, originally written in 1924 by American socialite and Titanic survivor Helen Churchill Candee.
The book is credited with introducing the concept of Cambodian tourism to Americans, and Davis's revised version was scheduled to go to the publisher the day after the fire.
But the biggest setback was the destruction of Davis's original notes and manuscripts on female statues at Angkor Wat, including a hard drive containing about 25,000 photos of the female carvings.
Not to be deterred, Davis returned to Angkor Wat last November to redo some photography.
"I had logistical help from three Cambodians and three European scientists in Cambodia. But due to the independent nature of the study, their contributions are unofficial.
"Now, the only limitations to progress are time and money. I have most of the photo data again and have built the database program. The process of preparing the images and inputting the data will be quite time-consuming.
"The first paper published will be a technical study I just completed with Michigan State University researchers using computer technology to analyse the faces of the 259 devata on the West Gopura.
"Beyond the database, I have an enormous amount of research data about the images in relation to Cambodian, Southeast Asian and South Asian culture. The introduction to this body of work will be published in the anthology to be called Daughters of Angkor Wat, through my publishing company DatAsia.
"Ultimately, my goal is to work with Cambodian researchers and the Apsara Authority.
"But the onus is on me to prepare substantial evidence before approaching them with my paradigm, which is that the primary reason Angkor Wat was built was to protect, honour and glorify these women, as well as the feminine principles that they represent.
"My view is that Angkor Wat is there because of the women."
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2009021224179/Siem-Reap-Insider/The-mysterious-women-of-Angkor.html
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Written by Cheang Sokha (Phnom Penh Post Feb. 12, 2009)
CAMBODIAN officials say they are expecting the return of only seven of the 43 smuggled Khmer antiquities intercepted by Thai authorities that have been the subject of a series of recent high-level talks between the two countries.
Khim Sarith, a secretary of state at Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts who has been involved in meetings with Thai authorities over the return of the artefacts, said that, pending approval by the Thai Cabinet, Cambodia would send a delegation to retrieve the pieces.
But the acquisition would be bittersweet.
In 1999, Thai customs agents seized 43 antique Khmer sculptures weighting more than eight tonnes at a port owned by a Thai shipping company.
Thailand has recognised 18 of the 43 artefacts as belonging to Cambodia. But following a meeting between Cambodian Foreign Minister Hor Namhong and his Thai counterpart Kasit Piromya at the end of last month in which the visiting top diplomat pledged to push the Thai Cabinet to approve the repatriation of the artifacts, without specifying how many, local officials were hopeful they would see the return of all 43 pieces.
Now, they have had to lower their sights to acquiring just seven artefacts, all of which are the decapitated heads of statues, officials said.
"The artefacts are in their hands so they have the right to decide on how many pieces they will return to us," Khim Sarith said.
Still hope for complete return
The antiquities were being smuggled from Cambodia to Singapore via Thailand and were destined for markets in Europe and the United States. The sculptures are believed to have been stripped from ancient Khmer temples and monuments inside Cambodia.
Negotiations with Thailand on the return of the artefacts began a few years ago, but political instablility in Thailand has delayed the approval of any agreement. The most recent agreement is still awaiting approval from the Thai government, Khim Sarith said.
Koy Kuong, an undersecretary of state at Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said his office welcomed the artefacts' return but said he hoped that eventually all of the confiscated items would be back in Cambodia.
Hab Touch, director of the National Museum in Phnom Penh, said the seven heads would be a significant contribution to the museum's collection, but lamented that the majority of the intercepted cargo would remain in the hands of Thai authorities.
"The delay of this return is because of Thai internal political problems, but Cambodia will continue to negotiate to acquire the remaining pieces," he said.
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2009021224165/National-news/Officials-lower-their-hopes-for-return-of-artefacts-from-Thais.html
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