Cambodia - The Final Word

A summary of the themes

It’s time to say goodbye to Cambodia.  It’s been a great learning experience and I hope I get to visit Cambodia again sometime in the future. During the past couple of months, I’ve learned about Norodom Sihamoni, Cambodia’s Czech-speaking King and an unusual role-model for the country, as it moves through the 21^st century.  I learnt about Chaul Chnam Thmey, the Cambodian New Year, which took place in April.  I learned about the Cambodian script and its influence on other writing systems in South East Asia.  I learned about the Cham people of Cambodia and Vietnam and I learned how to make Somla Machou, or Sour Fish soup, one of Cambodia’s national dishes.

Tools for research

I read three books as part of my research into Cambodia. 

Research for this blog

Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction by Andrew Robinson

First they killed my Father by Loung Ung

River of Time by Jon Swain

I used the Insight Guide to Cambodia and Laos for some of my background research

I watched two films about Cambodia:

The Killing Fields

Voices of the Killing Fields (a documentary about the work of the Cambodian reporter Thet Sambath.

To provide some background for my research and studies, I’ve been listening to lots of Cambodian music.  I’ve become a bit obsessed by Dengue Fever, the US group who sing in Cambodian and English.  I’ve also been listening to traditional Cambodian music, which is an acquired taste, but I find it really beautiful and, strangely, some of the songs remind me a bit on Bob Dylan!  I’m sharing a video from YouTube below which shows Dengue Fever's track Seeing Hands.

Other themes

And of course, there were plenty of other themes I would like to have explored, if I’d had more time to do so.  Some of these were:

UNESCO

The French in Asia

Ghosts

Ieng Sary, Brother Number Two

Exodus

Children and war

Mt Meru, the holy mountain of Hinduism

Landmines

Laughter

War photography

Landmines

The Irrawaddy dolphins

Casinos in Cambodia

Cambodian classical ballet

The Reamker – Cambodia’s version of the Ramayana

Artists who disappeared under the Khmer Rouge, eg. Ros Sereysothea and Sinn Sisamouth

Dinner Party trivia

And for those of you who are regular readers – here are some lesser-known facts about Cambodia that you can use to impress people at your next dinner party!

Tourist taking photo of Angkor Wat

Cambodia became independent in 1953.

There has been a long-running dispute between Cambodia and Thailand in relation to a temple complex, Preah Vihear, which sits directly on the border of the two countries.

‘New people’ was the term the Khmer Rouge used to describe Cambodians from the towns and cities, ie. Those who weren’t from a peasant background.  The famous Khmer Rouge slogan about the New People was ‘To keep you is no benefit.  To destroy you is no loss.’

The leaders of the Khmer Rouge were very well-educated, eg. Pol Pot studied in Paris. 

The US, Britain and Thailand continued to fund the Khmer Rouge, even after the Vietnamese had ousted them from power. 

Cambodia’s main ecological threats are from logging and shrimp farming.

The Sap river, which fills central Cambodia to form the lake Tonle Sap, reverses its flow every half-year, a very unusual phenomenon.

Cambodians count in blocks of 5.

The main entrance to Angkor Wat faces west, towards the setting sun, rather than east, which has led to speculation that the temple was somehow associated with death. 

The French use an expression called Le Mal Jaune (the yellow sickness) to describe nostalgia. 

Kaj Bjork, Sweden’s ambassador to the Beijing, was the only foreigner allowed to visit Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.

The Final Word

Of course, the ‘Elephant in the Room’ when it comes to Cambodia, is the period between 1975 and 1979, when Cambodia was controlled by the Khmer Rouge.  The Khmer Rouge regime was brutal in its attempts to turn Cambodia into an Agrarian Socialist state and it’s distressing to read the stories of those who lived through that time.  As a ‘national trauma’, the Khmer Rouge regime has left scars that are barely healed today.  Loung Ung’s story, as told in her book, ‘First they killed my Father’ is the second first-hand account I’ve read about life under the Khmer Rouge.  Loung Ung was a young girl when, in April 1975, the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh.  Shortly after the arrival of the Khmer Rouge, the entire city was evacuated and sent to work in the countryside.  Ung’s father had been an official in the old regime and they were particularly vulnerable, living in fear of discovery.  What really touched me about the book was the sense of anger Ung had as a young girl.  That a child would have to suffer so much and become so angry is saddening, in her own words, ‘My hate empowers and scares me, for with hate in my heart, I have no room for sadness’. 

Like many other Cambodians, Ung managed to escape Cambodia, first to Vietnam, then Thailand and the United States.  I was unaware of the suffering that many refugees experienced at the hands of (mostly Thai) pirates, as they crossed the Gulf of Thailand in small boats from Vietnam. 

Sunlight catches dancing Apsara at Angkor Wat

Jon Swain’s book, The River of Time, was also really interesting – although from a completely different perspective, ie. Through the eyes of a Western journalist living in Cambodia and Vietnam.  By all accounts, Swain was the last foreigner to be granted a visa under the Lol Non regime (ie before the Khmer Rouge gained power).  He was also one of the first Westerners to return to Cambodia, after the Vietnamese invaded in 1979.  He took great personal risks to report what was going on, both in Cambodia and Vietnam and his passion for ‘French Indochina’ is infectious.

I watched The Killing Fields again, which is a great movie and I also came across a fascinating documentary called, Voices of the Killing Fields – by the Cambodian journalist, Thet Sambaht.  Sambath lost most of his family under the Khmer Rouge regime and spent ten years as an adult, making contact with surviving Khmer Rouge members, most notably with Nuon Chea (Brother number 2), but also with minor Khmer Rouge officials who he records, quite shockingly, talking about the people they killed ‘under orders’ from above.  There has been a real desire from the survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime, to get some kind of justice for those who were murdered by the regime.  Sambaht’s documentary is an attempt to establish the power structures involved and prove that the order to kill came from the top of the Khmer Rouge leadership. 

The Khmer Rouge officials he interviewed seemed distressed and regretful of their role in the killings.  It also seems as though there was a lot of ‘peer pressure’ to kill and that, somehow, once a person had broken the taboo of taking another human being’s life, the only way they could feel better about it was by forcing others to do the same. 

I just can’t imagine what it would be like to be in a situation like that.  Cambodia is slowly recovering from the intense revolution of those four years, but it could take another generation before the violence of that period is finally put to rest.  Here’s hoping the future for this small nation is much happier than it’s more recent past. 

Image credits:

All photos on this blog post were taken by me.  Please feel free to reuse them under the Creative Commons License:

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- Non-commercial
- Attribute (especially to this blog)

Cambodia - The Lost Kingdom of the Chams

Flag of the Cham Liberation Front

I've always been fascinated by 'lost kingdoms' or 'countries that might have been'.  The map of the world today is a product of History and it's interesting to think how it could all look so different.  I touched on this when I was blogging about the Veneto - Venice was a republic and a nation for so long, it seems a bit unfortunate that the Venetian nation no longer exists, although it's for the greater good of the Italian state.  Similarly, it would be interesting to see Champa on the map of South East Asia in the 21st century, as it was for many centuries in the past.  I guess the Cham people have been unlucky in the end and now their culture and 'nationhood' remains somewhat obscure and unheard of by most people. 

So where was Champa?

Cham ruins in Vietnam by GlobalCitizen01

I first heard about the Chams when I was travelling through Vietnam.  Although most Chams now live in Cambodia, the Kingdom of Champa was in southern Vietnam and this is where the architectural legacy of the Cham people still remains.  I remember travelling on one of those horrid tourist buses from the old French hill station at Da Lat to the seaside resort of Nha Trang and we stopped along the way to look, rather bleary-eyed, at the ruins of a Cham palace. 

Ancient Champa had its capital at Indrapura, which is near modern-day Da Nang in Vietnam.  Champa flourished until the late 17th century when the northern Viets started to push the Chams out of the Vietnam, a situation that continued until well into the 19th century. 

The Chams in Cambodia

The Chams were eventually defeated by the Viets and many of them moved to Cambodia, settling around the area now called Kampong Cham (Port of the Chams), as well as along the shores of the Tonle Sap lake.  They retain their own culture, language, stories etc and they've become well-known in Cambodia for their weaving and dying skills.  There are more than 300,000 Chams in Cambodia, but they are very much a minority group within Cambodian society.

Conversion to Islam

Cham performer by GlobalCitizen01

One thing that makes the Chams stand out from other Cambodian citizens is the fact that most Cambodian Chams are (Sunni) Muslims.  Islam had made some headway in South East Asia before the Chams moved to Cambodia but, perhaps in an effort to maintain a separate cultural identity, most Cambodian Chams have adopted Islam.  It has also served a practical purpose, allowing Chams to fish and kill animals, in a country where most people are Buddhist and don't wish to take the life of another creature.  There are small Cham communities in Thailand and Laos as well.  Interestingly, the majority of the 130,000 or so Chams who remain in Vietnam have retained their Hindu faith, as much as faith continues to exist in a Communist country like Vietnam!

Suffering under the Khmer Rouge

By all accounts, the Chams suffered horribly under the Khmer Rouge, being treated in much the same way as the ethnic Viets living in Cambodia.  It's hard to measure the extent to which the Cham population suffered, but some estimates suggest that as many as half a million Chams could have been murdered by the Khmer Rouge in an attempt to 'ethnically cleanse' Cambodia.  I have written about ethnic cleansing before in my blog about Barbados.

Connections with Aceh and Malaysia

It surprised me to learn that the Acehnese people have their origins in the Cham Kingdom of Vietnam, having fled to Aceh after a defeat by the Vietnamese in the 15th century.  The Cham language is closely related to Acehnese, so that they are 'in the same part' of the language family tree.  Both Cham and Acehnese are part of the Malayo-Polenesian branch of the Austronesian language family.  There were long-standing cultural and trade connections between Champa and the Malay peninsula and, by all accounts, the Malaysian constitution recognises the right of Cham people to claim Malaysian citizenship.

Other Chams, Khmers and Viets

Cham ruins by GlobalCitizen01

I guess our 19th-century obsession with creating nations has left a simplified map of the world today.  We tend to think of Viets in Vietnam, Cambodians in Cambodia etc., but the nature of human and cultural migration has left more complicated patterns.  As well as the main Cham population of South East Asia, there are also people like the Jarai of central Vietnam (called montagnards by the French colonisers), numerous hill tribes of northern Vietnam, the Chamic Tsat people of Hainan in southern China etc. 

There are more than a million ethnic Cambodians who have always lived in the Isan region of (what is now) Thailand, known as the Northern Khmer, as well as another million or so Khmer Krom living in Vietnam in the Mekong Delta.  Likewise, there are more than half a million ethnic Vietnamese living in Cambodia, so the ethnic make-up of South East Asia is much more complicated than a map of the region would have you believe! 

Image credits:

For this blog post, I've chosen to highlight the work of flickr member GlobalCitizen01 who has taken lots of photos of East Asia and Australia.  All of the images above were taken in My Son in Vietnam.  You can see more of GlobalCitizen01's photos on his photo stream and he also has a really interesting blog, which is worth checking out!

His most recent blog post is about Kuril islands in the Russian Far East (north of Japan) - the photos are very well mounted and explained. 

Cambodia - Sok sobai tay?

It's more than 10,000 miles (or just less than 17,000 km) from Bridgetown, Barbados to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia - the next place I've chosen to blog about.

My own experience of Cambodia
My choice of Cambodia is an unusual one, in the sense that it's a place I've actually been to a couple of times. With the exception of the Netherlands and Veneto, most of the places I've blogged about thus far, are places I have never visited and, in many cases, places I may never get the opportunity to visit. A couple of them, eg. Hong Kong and Iceland, are places that I've visited subsequent to my blogging about them, as I felt so inspired by everything I'd read and seen.

I found Cambodia to be incredibly beautiful and welcoming and it's a country I feel strongly about.  I would love to see Cambodia prosper and move on from the troubles of its recent past.

The legacy of the Killing Fields

Khmer Gris at Angkor

It's impossible to do any research into Cambodia without coming across texts, movies and references to the terrible period of suffering under the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979. In previous blogs, I've talked a little bit about 'national traumas', like the famine in Ireland, the loss of religious identity in Mongolia or the AIDS epidemic in Lesotho. Attempts by the Khmer Rouge to turn Cambodia (or Kampuchea) into an agrarian socialist society is very much part of Cambodia's national trauma.

After travelling to Cambodia, I became a bit obsessed about this period in the country's history and I've already read quite a few books and eye-witness accounts of life under the Khmer Regime. One of my favourite's was Pin Yathay's Stay Alive, My Son - a very moving account of displacement and survival. I've also watched Roland Joffe's 1984 movie The Killing Fields, but I would like to watch it again, as I've actually visited Cambodia since I saw the movie.

I bought a copy of Loung Eng's First they Killed my Father when I was last in Phnom Penh in 2007. I wasn't ready to read it then, so it's sat on my bookshelf for 5 years and I'm ready to read it now. I've also bought a copy of River of Time by Jon Swain, the journalist portrayed in The Killing Fields.. I've tried, in vain, to find modern Cambodian literature available in an English-language translation. So if anyone knows of anything, I'd be interested in hearing about this.

The Splendor of Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat, taken in 2004

I guess the flip side to Cambodia's 'dark history' under the Khmer Rouge is the resurgence of interest in the remains of the Cambodian (Khmer) temples at Angkor, just outside the modern-day town of Siem Reap. My first trip to Cambodia was in 2004, crossing the border from Thailand, I spent three days being driven around Angkor, exploring the various temples that are scattered around the Cambodian jungle.

It really is a wonderful place and I returned in 2007 with my Kalmyk/Russian partner. It's being overrun by tourists though, so I don't think I'll return, as I've had my chance to visit Angkor and the temples now have more visitors than they can handle.

Again, it's going to be challenge to get beyond the legacies of the Angkor and the Khmer Rouge, so I can find out even more about Cambodia. As usual, I want to read, watch movies, cook a Khmer dish and listen to Khmer music.

Spotify and Khmer play lists

Heaven and Earth

Although I registered on Spotify several years ago, I've never been able to make it work properly until now. I've got a 30-day trial of their Premium account, which allows me to listen to music on my iPhone and I want to see how this works for my blog research, amongst other things. So far, so good - as I've been writing this blog, I've been listening to an album called Khmer Passages: Songs for Cycles of Cambodian Life as well as Dengue Fever's album Venus on Earth. Interestingly there are Cambodian music playlists on Spotify as well, so I intend to absorb as much Khmer music as I can over the next month or so!

A fleeting obsession with Photoshop

Also, because I've been in Cambodia, I have my own photos, which I'm using to illustrate this current blog post. I'm a big fan of the Flickr community and I like to highlight some of the wonderful images that Flickr members have shared with the world. But I'm also quite a keen (amateur) photographer. I have relatively few photos from Cambodia, as I was there in my pre-digital camera days. My Cambodian photos, as you may have already guessed, reflect a period when I was obsessed with Photoshop!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy these images and my future blog posts about Cambodia.

Image credits:

All images in the current blog post were taken by me. Please feel free to reuse them with the Creative Commons license:

- Attribution (especially to this blog)

- Share Alike

- Non-commercial