TEMPLES LOST IN TANGLED WOODS

William Shawcrass argues that one of the

world's most precious monuments is in danger of being destroyed by merciless tourism

Phnom Penh THE EXQUISITE, fearsome and decay- ing temples of Angkor aptly symbolise the problems of Cambodia today, caught still in the turmoil of civil war and foreign depredation.

The power of Angkor derives both from the grandeur of the site and from the fact that, almost alone amongst the world's monuments, it has not been destroyed by tourism or commercialism. Not yet.

The temples lie a short drive out of the pretty little town of Siem Reap, across the great lake, north west of Phnom Penh. They stand in woods dotted with little vil- lages. They are about as far from a 'theme park' or 'leisure park' as it is possible to get. There are few places more glorious and thrilling than dawn at the Bayon, where scores of huge smiling faces emerge in the light from the cataracts of stone, and the singing of the crickets reaches a crescendo as of silver bells ringing in the tall nave of the trees.

Osbert Sitwell wrote of the Bayon: 'This Cyclopean bulk of stones, standing like a rock from which the ocean has receded, depends entirely for its effect on the repet- itive occurrence, the rhythm of the colossal gently smiling faces.' The main temple, Angkor Wat, was built by the Khmer King Suryavarmnan II as an earthly replica of the Hindu cosmos, at about the same time as Frenchmen were creating Chartres. The moat around the temple was designed to represent the great oceans, while the tiered walls repre- sent mountain ranges separating conti- nents.

In the last 20 years much of Cambodia has been destroyed by civil war, revolution and invasion. The temples of Angkor, by contrast, have just slowly decayed in their unsullied woods, rather as they did in the hundreds of years between their building and their 'rediscovery' by a French natu- ralist, Henri Mouhot, in 1860.

When Mouhot stepped through those trees and saw Angkor Wat for the first time, he described it as a rival to the tem- ple of Solomon, erected by some ancient Michelangelo, grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome. He was right.

For the first 70 years of this century the Ecole Frangaise d'Extreme-Orient under- took the conservation and reconstruction of the monuments. As the French histori- an Claude Jacob says, each of the school's members working there 'had a real story with Angkor, different for each one'. The last of them was Bernard-Philippe Gros- lier, who was finally driven out by the war between the Khmer Rouge and the Lon Not regime which swept over Angkor in 1971. For a while the Khmer Rouge allowed Groslier to cycle to the temples, twice a week to inspect the work, and to pay the labourers for such little work as continued. The best sculptures in the con- servancy were hidden in a concrete bunker.

On the road to Angkor from Siem Reap stands the shell of an old school destroyed during the 1970-75 war. Victims of the Khmer Rouge were thrown into trenches around the school. Now their skulls are dis- played there.

None the less, all factions avoided full- scale fighting in and around the temples which did not suffer serious war damage. Angkor was left once more to the luxuriant and devouring woods. But the temples were (and are still) regularly attacked by robbers, who chop off heads and entire tor- sos to sell in the increasingly lucrative and odious art market which stretches west- wards from Bangkok to Los Angeles, and eastwards to Hong Kong.

The regime the Vietnamese installed when they overthrew the Khmer Rouge in 1979 remained unrecognised throughout the Eighties, except by the communist world and India. In 1986 the Archaeologi- cal Survey of India started on a project to restore Angkor Wat itself.

The work the Indians did is constantly abused by those who were not there at the time — especially the French. They are blamed for having hundreds of untrained Khmer workers scrub the soft sandstone with harsh chemicals which have rubbed away the stone as well as the dirt.

At the end of the Eighties, as political compromises began to appear, the Poles, the Japanese, a British-led team from the World Monuments Fund and various French groups all sought to become involved, and in 1990 and 1991 Unesco began to try to devise a common interna- tional plan for restoration. It obtained the blessing of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia's former and future ruler. At the end of 1992 Angkor was finally inscribed on the World Heritage List and noted to be a Site in Danger.

All the equipment that was here before 1968 has disappeared or disintegrated; so has most of the accumulated knowledge. Only three of the trained Khmer who used to work on conservation appear to have survived. At the conservation office, which was occupied by troops during the Khmer Rouge years, I saw Sou Tho, the softly spoken deputy head. He had worked under Groslier in the late Sixties and had come back after the Vietnamese invasion. `We have nothing,' he said. `No machines. No stones. No plans. No one gives us any- thing.'

In Siem Reap today there are several different groups seeking to conserve Angkor with different methods and differ- ent priorities. The Ecole Francaise is rep- resented by a young man who is building himself a house and waiting for a budget from the French government. The World Monuments Fund team is in the majestic tumbled temple of Preah Khan, where stones and pillars lie scattered through the courtyards and the huge roots of trees grasp those walls that still stand.

Last year, the Phnom Penh authorities — the rump of the communist government installed by the Vietnamese — exploited Angkor as best they could. Through much of the year almost every tourist was forced to pay a $100 tax to visit the site. This money did not, as claimed, go to conserva- tion, but rather into the coffers of the rul- ing People's Party, the renamed communist party. The local UN adminis- trators — who are supposed, under the Paris Peace Agreement, to be able to con- trol provincial officials — protested. For months they were ignored, but eventually the extortion was eased. UN officials reck- on that at least $3 million levied by provin- cial officials is unaccounted for.

In January, a preparatory session for a full-scale intergovernmental meeting on Angkor took place in Paris; it was an unhappy occasion. According to Unesco officials, the Japanese, who are now trying to present a cultural front in Asia, at first tried to exclude the French on the grounds that they have little money. (Like Thai- land's, Japan's commercial interests in Cambodia are vast and rapacious.) Japan has already given $1.37 million to Unesco for Angkor, while the French government has merely pledged $600,000 to the Ecole Frangaise d'Extreme-Orient. Unesco is attempting to get other countries involved so that its development should be contin- ued within an agreed international plan. The Japanese appear to be trying to con- trol it all themselves; having failed to exclude the French at the January meet- ing, they then attempted to co-opt them. `There was uproar over Japan's attempt to downgrade the role of smaller, poorer countries,' said one Unesco official.

As a result, Unesco was determined to reassert itself a few days later at a meeting in Peking of the Supreme National Coun- cil, which is supposed to govern Cambodia until elections, and over which Prince Sihanouk presides.

The SNC has failed to function as planned, and at this meeting little or noth- ing was decided. But Sihanouk (who will almost certainly be elected President of Cambodia in the next few months) stressed that he wanted Unesco to be in charge of Angkor. He said Cambodia had nothing to fear from Unesco, unlike the `colonial ambitions of bilateral actors'. He said repeatedly that Cambodia is Unesco and Unesco is Cambodia. The assembled ambassadors and officials of the Cambodi- an factions in attendance could hardly miss the point.

One problem is that the whole area of Angkor ought to be conserved — and that is beyond Unesco's remit. At the moment there are no commercial buildings any- where near Angkor itself. The temples are lost in tangled woods. The only commerce is done by women and children selling soft drinks or snippets of information. It must be the most under-exploited treasure in the world.

That will have to change. The average income in Cambodia today is about $150 a year and the resources of Angkor will have to be tapped. But the dangers are that Cambodia itself will not benefit much and that tourism and rampant commercialism will destroy the fragile beauty of Angkor more completely than anything the cen- turies have done. The Thais are particular- ly rapacious. They used to control the Angkor region anyway, and many Thai businessmen think it should be an exten- sion of the Thai Tourist Authority. Already a Thai company has ripped down a beautiful old part of Siem Reap to build a hideous hotel. The old town, a place of considerable beauty in its own right, is being rapidly ripped apart. The develop- ment of Siem Reap ought to be controlled at the same time as that of Angkor itself.

All of Cambodia is being exploited mer- cilessly now. In areas they control along the Thai border, the Khmer Rouge, with Thai help, have levelled out huge areas of forest, and have ravaged the soil for gems. The erosion has been so bad that the local rivers have polluted the north-west corner of the Great Lake, whose fish are the coun- try's most important natural resource. In other parts of the country, the Phnom Penh regime has been equally destructive, tear- ing out timber for shipment (often through Vietnam) to Japan. There seems to be nothing to stop Cambodia's forests being felled at the same terrifying rate as all oth- ers in South-East Asia.

The pace at which the robbery continues depends in part on the progress of the United Nations effort to save Cambodia from itself and from the assaults of foreign powers. The peace plan is in a critical state. Elections are due to be held in May, but fighting between the Khmer Rouge, who have reneged on their agreement to co- operate, and the government in Phnom Penh has recently increased. Some have already written off the UN's $2 billion effort as a failure. That is absurd. But the depressing thing about Cambodia has always been its political leaders. Today, as before, there seems to be only one belief which all factions, Khmer Rouge commu- nist, post-communist, capitalist, share — that the country's resources, whether natu- ral or man-made, should be sold as quickly as possible. For ordinary Cambodians, as well as for the world's cultural heritage, Angkor needs to be saved from the depre- dations of tourism and commercialism. At the moment, Unesco's proposals to limit the free-for-all are the only decent game in these incomparable woods.