Century-old fight for a Shiva shrine in Cambodia
Sandeep Unnithan | Mail Today | New Delhi, January 7, 2014 | UPDATED 17:37 IST
Sandeep Unnithan
And it is the spectacular 11th-century mountain temple of Preah Vihear (sacred city) built by the Khmer empire atop a 525-metre cliff on the Dangrek mountains.
The country's best shrine with a view is also one of Asia's most contentious. For over a century, this 900-year-old Shiva temple has been bitterly contested by Thailand and Cambodia. Think Siachen meets Machu Picchu. Thailand refused to recognise the maps drawn by Cambodia's erstwhile French colonial rulers and has frequently sent its army in to stake its claim to the shrine.
The country's best shrine with a view is also one of Asia's most contentious. For over a century, this 900-year-old Shiva temple has been bitterly contested by Thailand and Cambodia. Think Siachen meets Machu Picchu. Thailand refused to recognise the maps drawn by Cambodia's erstwhile French colonial rulers and has frequently sent its army in to stake its claim to the shrine.
Both nations last skirmished here in February 2011, exchanging gunfire and lobbing artillery shells. Last November, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) decisively awarded the site to Cambodia.
The road that leads up to the temple from Thailand is closed and entry of Thai nationals banned even from the Cambodian side where passports are scrupulously checked. Vehicles have to be left behind at the foot of the mountain. Hired four-wheel drive vehicles take you up the five-kilometre concrete highway up the mountain. It soon becomes clear why.
The drive up the concrete highway, built a decade ago, is extraordinarily steep. Just like a trek up the mythical Mount Meru, abode of the Gods, which its ancient builders had tried to recreate. Gradient of over 40 degrees can swiftly make believers out of atheists.
Cambodian soldiers gleefully hop on for free rides. They are going where you are. The top is a heavily militarised zone: sand-bagged bunkers, razor wire, barely disguised gun emplacements and ammunition dumps in mountain caves.
A modern-day echo of the stony jousts between the Deva and the Asuras carved on the temple's gateways. The 800-metre-long stone shrine is a long narrow rectangle. Its four sanctuaries are interlinked with pathways and five gopurams decorated with soaring serpents. Built by Suryavarman-I in the 11th century AD, the temple was put on UNESCO's list of World Heritage Sites in 2008.
A view of the gopurams at the Preah Vihar Shiva temple on the Cambodia-Thailand border.
This hitherto inaccessible mountain redoubt has been a witness to Cambodia's bloody recent history. The last government troops held out against the surge of the Khmer Rouge in 1975 before falling to cliff assaults and artillery bombardment.
The last Khmer Rouge guerillas finally surrendered here in 1998. The troops deployed around the temple are helpful, even indulgent. One of them sucks at his cigarette and offers you a peep through the gigantic bug eyes of his Russian-made PNB-1 surveillance scope.
It overlooks a Thai flag a kilometre away. When the ICJ first awarded the temple to Cambodia in 1962, the Thai army refused to lower the national flag. They uprooted the flagpole with the flag still flying and planted it on a cliff on their side.
The last has not been heard on this dispute yet.
Taste the world from East Asia
Phnom Penh is a paradise for lovers of world cuisine. One reason is because the city caters to thousands of French, American, Australian and British nationals who work in over 3,500 registered non-governmental organisations in the country.
Mercifully, it is also a city where you can eat without burning a hole in your pocket. Neera Shah, an Australian national who works in a Phnom Penh-based NGO, lists her five favourite must-visit places: Luigis for Italian pizzas where all pizzas are between $8 and $10; Taqueria Corona for Tacos in $6; Chinese Noodle House that sells 10 dumplings for $1.50; the Café Green Bowl for the best Udon; and the 'Pork and rice man' for the best street food.
The city's best watering hole is, of course, the Foreign Correspondent's Club located on two floors of a threestoreyed colonial building along the river.
Vacationing in the killing fields
The darkest paths of Cambodia's tourist trail are not in the jungles which overran the four-century old Khmer empire's temples. They are in its capital Phnom Penh. From here, the Khmer Rouge directed the 21st century's most horrific post-Second World War atrocities. The 'Red Khmers' under its crazed leader Pol Pot began a social engineering in 1975 to transform the country into a peasant society.
Cities were depopulated; the upper classes - intellectuals and poets, anyone with soft hands or spectacles - shipped to countryside camps.
The darkest paths of Cambodia's tourist trail are not in the jungles which overran the four-century old Khmer empire's temples. They are in its capital Phnom Penh. From here, the Khmer Rouge directed the 21st century's most horrific post-Second World War atrocities. The 'Red Khmers' under its crazed leader Pol Pot began a social engineering in 1975 to transform the country into a peasant society.
Cities were depopulated; the upper classes - intellectuals and poets, anyone with soft hands or spectacles - shipped to countryside camps.
Nearly 2 million perished before the Vietnamese army drove the regime out in 1979. Roland Joffe's haunting 1984 film The Killing Fields on the genocide is today a metaphor for the Capital's biggest tourist draws.
"Killing Fields? Tuol Sleng?" tuk-tuk drivers slow down and ask you. Tuol Sleng is a high school in the city centre where classrooms were converted into a torture facility called S-21. Over 10,000 citizens were murdered here. The Choeung Ek killing fields on the Capital's south-eastern fringes is the most notorious of the 30 death camps. The sonorous voice of a survivor on an audio guide directs visitors around the camp. Bullets were expensive, he informs. Camp guards often slit throats of inmates using the serrated edges of palm stems.
The writer is Deputy Editor, India Today
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