The rice farmer is ready with his seedlings. As the rains cease, the Mekong falls. Now lower than the Great Lake, it retracts its floodwaters; the Tonle Sap river starts to run back into the Mekong; and the Great Lake begins to recede. As it does so, the Cambodian heartland re-emerges as a sparkling Atlantis of vaguely concentric paddy fields. From the dry stubble of what was the lake’s outermost rim, the sun-ripe gold of harvest shades inwards to the lime green of a mature sowing and then the tender lemon-grass of wispy seedlings protruding from the water’s edge of the still-receding lake.
Thanks to this phenomenon, plus the potential for a second harvest in the winter months, Cambodia reaps all that it needs and conveniently does so over an unusually long period of the year, thus releasing a large section of the population for other activities. It has always been so. The wealth which made Angkor great and the surplus labour which made its monumental extravaganzas possible are commonly ascribed to this same freak of nature. Had Lagrée and Garnier paid closer attention to the behaviour of the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers, they might have anticipated the most likely answer to the conundrum of how an otherwise unfavoured jungle kingdom could have attained such magnificence. They might also have drawn a valuable lesson for future French empire. The Mekong’s importance lies in its role as a provider, not as a highway.
It has ever been so, but it may not remain so. In Phnom Penh and Saigon today’s hydrologists wax paranoid about the changes being wrought along the river’s middle reaches in Laos and Thailand, and especially along its upper reaches in China. The blasting of the riverbed to improve navigation, the construction of dams for hydro-power and irrigation, and the relentless deforestation of the whole basin could easily spell disaster to the hydraulic economies of Cambodia and the Delta. If the Mekong rises too high or too fast, people drown. If it rises too little or too late, they starve.
The situation is believed to be critical. Lights burn late, and long reports get written, in the Phnom Penh headquarters of today’s Mekong River Commission. A multinational watchdog concerned with the river’s ‘sustainable development’, this organisation publicly endorses many of the ambitious projects that its advisers privately decry. The contradiction between alleviating national poverty by large-scale development schemes and endangering individual livelihoods, usually those of subsistence farmers and ethnic minorities, by the fallout from these same schemes is proving difficult to reconcile. Dazzling projections and dire warnings emanate from the Mekong River Commission as erratically as they did from its near-namesake, the Mekong Exploration Commission of 1866.
Pacing the galleries of Angkor Wat, Francis Garnier made the length of its outer wall 3.5 kilometres, estimated that there were 1800 pillars in the temple itself, and scampering up its central tower, counted 504 steps for a measured height of sixty metres. The pillars were mostly single blocks of sandstone, each weighing up to four tons. ‘Perhaps nowhere else in the world’, he wrote, ‘has such an imposing mass of stone been arranged with more sense of art and science.’ To technical skills in the cutting and manoeuvring of megaliths that rivalled those of the Pyramids was added the spark of sheer genius. ‘What grandeur and at the same time what unity!’ he exclaimed. France, ‘to whom Angkor should belong’, had here a quite spectacular opportunity to proclaim its intentions in south-east Asia. He echoed le Commandant Lagrée’s sentiments in looking forward to the day when the site would be reclaimed for Cambodia, and he called on archaeologists, artists and historians to petition the French government to undertake a wholesale restoration.
These hopes would eventually be realised. The fretted towers of Angkor Wat – nine in total but five in angled profile and three per exterior façade – would be restored to Cambodia and become its national symbol. Looking like an unfolded paper cut-out, their silhouette is today everywhere – on postage stamps, official letter-heads, ministerial car plaques, TV news logos. Cambodians seem quite oblivious of the embarrassing fact that, but for the much-maligned French, the site itself might still be in Thailand. For it was thanks to the French authorities that Lagrée’s designs on the site would bear fruit. In 1907 Angkor and the ‘lost provinces’ would be wrested from Bangkok, studied, partly restored, and impressively landscaped as per Garnier’s plea.
By the 1980s the towers of Angkor Wat also featured on the national flag. The blood-red flag above the towers is raised, and will lead the nation to happiness and prosperity,’ ran the national anthem. This was doubly ironic; for at the time the Cambodian nation, still traumatised by the rule of the Khmer Rouge and ravaged by famine, knew neither happiness nor prosperity, and Angkor itself had again slipped beyond Phnom Penh’s control. Indeed Angkor and the ‘lost provinces’ had been re-lost, being now held by the outlawed Khmer Rouge who, with the connivance of Bangkok and the support of the Western powers, formed part of a national front at war with the Phnom Penh regime. Even as Angkor Wat’s profile fluttered on the blood-red flag, the towers themselves were reportedly being vandalised and their statuary sold off on the international art market.
Crises of national identity are to Cambodia much as floods are to the Delta. They well up with such depressing frequency that one is inclined to accept them as a condition of the country’s existence. Independence Day is celebrated on 17 April; there is also a National Day on 7 January. But what these dates memorialise is a vexed question; there are just too many liberationist contenders in Cambodia’s modern history. Independence could refer to Lagrée’s rejection of Thai suzerainty in 1863, to the French emancipation of the ‘lost provinces’ in 1907, to the demise of French rule in 1955, to the overthrow of the US-backed Lon Nol regime in 1975 (the right answer, incidentally), to the overthrow of the Chinese-backed Pol Pot (Khmer Rouge) regime in 1979, or to that of the Vietnamese-backed Heng Samrin regime in 1989. Other possible candidates, already discredited and now ripe for demonisation, are the UN-backed administration of the early 1990s and the elected coalition of the mid-1990s. Only the Hun Sen regime, which overthrew the last-named in a 1997 coup, has definitely to be excluded on the grounds that, although often vilified, it has yet to be overthrown.
With such a sustained record of liberating itself from tyranny, Cambodian nationalism ought to command widespread respect. Yet the suspicion lingers that Cambodians have been forever redeeming themselves not so much from foreign aggressors as from fellow Cambodians. Bangkok, Paris, Washington, Beijing and Hanoi have found collaborators rather easy to come by in Cambodia because there is no consensus about what being a Cambodian means. Even Pol Pot’s sui-genocidal Khmer Rouge could claim to represent an indigenous tradition. They traced the roots of their revolution not simply to someone else’s little red book but to supposed Angkorian traditions of mass mobilisation and draconian discipline in the pursuit of an ideologised utopia.
Of neighbouring Laos as late as the 1950s it was said that most people who lived there had no idea that they belonged to a state called Laos. Cambodians were no doubt better informed, but not therefore more involved. As Lagrée and his companions would be delighted to discover, the region was woefully lacking in those structural elements – centralised administrations, respected institutions, shared interests, recognised frontiers – which underpin statehood and steady other national mansions. Like inland Africa, inland south-east Asia had plenty of political building timber but, as the twentieth century dawned, it had yet to evolve a stable and convincing architecture. Cambodia was still waiting for the French to reclaim Angkor and the ‘lost provinces’, without which it was like a Scotland minus the Highlands. As for the anthropologists’ paradise which is Laos, it was not until the mid-twentieth century that most of its hundred-odd – and some of them very odd – ethnic groups would even be identified.
Yet international opinion as represented by organisations like the League of Nations and the UN made no allowance for such delinquency. Existing states were meant to correspond to coherent nations, and those that did not, supposedly soon would thanks to the process called ‘nation-building’. Hence the credit for the survival of a country like Cambodia – or the insinuation of one like Laos – belongs less to the strength of its nationalist sentiment and more to a benign, if alien, world order which decrees that all existing states are inviolable. Whether they are viable is another matter.
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