Page 59 - ELITE PLUS MAGAZINE Vol 3

W hoever designed the road shooting from Siem Reap to Angkor Wat would not only have thought of making a smooth and convenient ride for motorists. This sort of straight, spacious, well paved road only exists in metropolises like New York, Paris, Berlin, to name a few. It is rare to see a road of such quality cutting through the rainforest in a rural area. The road is an attraction in itself. We weren’t able to keep up with the abrupt changes of scenery: the sudden switch from modern road to the looming presence of Angkor Wat, as we turned left at the end of the road and passed the moats of the temple complex. The vision of the majestic temple, the jewel of Southeast Asia, appearing in the late morning sunlight was such a contrast to the green of the rainforest over the past few kilometres. We parked at the west entrance. Angkor Wat is one of the few temples in Southeast Asia to face west. On that spot the beautiful sweeping sight of the complex – 850 metres wide and 1,000 metres long – is best revealed. Still we would walk another 200 metres on a stone path to reach thestairs of the outer enclosure.We almost had the whole complexto ourselves, as other groups of visitors followed the typical itinerary: Angkor Thom in the morning and Angkor Wat in the afternoon. Instead of checking off Angkor Thom that afternoon, we saved it for the following day.I separated from the group as soon as I stepped out of the car. Solitude gave me the freedom to wander at my own pace to take pictures. Over 5kg of gear – a Leica D-Lux 7, tripod and a few camera lenses – weighed me down. I was soaked in sweat by the time I had zigzagged my way around the complex.I ended up taking countless pictures. I couldn’t get enough of the lion and seven-headed nagasculptures, the low and high relief carvings of apsara, the stone plates on the inner cloister walls illustrating battles between the Khmers and Chams backed by armies of different ethnicities. Not to mention the porches, lintels and other wonderful architectural structures I captured through the lens.Angkor Wat is the Greek architec- tural civilization of Southeast Asia, I told myself. No doubt it is the paragon of architecture in the region.But how could it be...?How could it be that such amazing cultural heritage, with its stunning intricate stonework, shares space in the same kingdom as Tuol Sleng, another heritage complex located in Phnom Penh? Tuol Sleng is a former Khmer Rouge genocide site for political prisoners. The Khmer nation was buried here. The extermination wiped out millions of the nation’s citizens, leaving Cambodia with almost no chance to rebound.At Tuol Sleng are no illustrations of peaceful landscapes like mountains and rivers or heavens where gods reside. The complex features a gruesome building surrounded by barbed wire-topped walls. Starting off as a school, it was turned into a prison and now is a museum that keeps as its exhibition portraits of the executed.I was aware that many slaves had died, worked to death to complete the construction of Angkor Wat. But the deaths at Tuol Sleng were an abuse against the human race for a different reason. The deaths at Angkor Wat were the result of faith; lives were sacrificed for a religious end. At Tuol Sleng the loss of life was the decision of a handful of tyrants who placed themselves above the sovereign and enjoyed killing people.Millions of Cambodian citizens were killed under Khmer Rouge rule. Almost all of the survivors were lefttraumatized – if not also deprived of their families, their friends. While Tuol Sleng is a genocide museum, the country can be called a museum of death itself. It is filled with the horrific tales of those who managed to survive.Rasamee, our tour guide, wasn’t originally from Siem Reap. Her family was part of the bourgeoisie expelled from Phnom Penh under the Khmer Rouge policy of stripping the city’s middle class of their status and power and turning them into labourers. Her family was placed in the jungle 70km from any town. Her father, a farm boy turned physician, saved the family’s lives by showing the Khmer Rouge soldiers he could farm and plant.“Lots of our neighbours couldn’t work in the fields. So they were killed.” Words came out of Rasamee’s mouth easily, though in a monotone. But they left me unable to carry on interviewing other locals on the topic as I had meant to.It’s not easy to understand the mentality of a people who are aesthetically sensitive but at the same time can be cruel enough to conduct such massacres – just as it’s not easy to make sense of the thoughts of Hitler, who oversaw the deaths of over 6 million Jews yet was an emotional man, an art lover and a vegetarian.But these people existed. And their ideas have had the sort of impact that can move the world in a particular direction.A few years back...When I was head of the Faculty of Political Science at Thammasat University, I was assigned to go to Myanmar to meet some leading figures of the military government. As a member of the committee representing the Council of National Security, I was collecting some data on the junta, information the Thai government might find crucial inElite+ 57