Cult of beauty - Minerva

Understandably, tourism at Preah
Vihear has been slow to develop on
the Cambodian side, where the country’s
recent history has been one of
civil war and genocide. Post-Khmer
Rouge Cambodia is still building necessary
infrastructure, including construction
of good roads and creation
of tourist facilities close to the site.
But even in the best of physical circumstances
it may be very difficult
to make Preah Vihear a frequented
attraction in Cambodia. For after visiting
Angkor – the greatest of all Southeast
Asian sites – would many tourists
travel 140km to see a provincial site,
notwithstanding its stunning view?
Nevertheless, Cambodia is gearing up
to develop Preah Vihear with the help
of the Chinese government, which is
donating US $290 million for the construction
of the road from Angkor to
Preah Vihear. However, Angkor will
remain the centre of tourism within
the country.
For Thailand, however, Preah Vihear
would be the proverbial jewel in the
crown for tourism in the north-east
of that country, providing a dramatic
climax to a four-day excursion from
Bangkok through Isan’s extensive
ancient Khmer landscape. (This would
Fig 10. Preah Vihear
temple. Photo:
courtesy of
William Brehm.
Fig 11. Ta Muan Thom,
on the Thai side of the
border from Preah
Vihear. Photo: H.
Silverman.
10
11
be analogous to Peru, where Machu
Picchu is the culmination of a typical
four-day visit to Cuzco and its outlying
landscape of glorious Inca ruins.)
When the border dispute is brought
to a definitive end, commercial investment
in tourism on the Thai side can
be expected to increase. It could be
accomplished in such a way that the
fact Preah Vihear is technically inside
Cambodia will be obscured by easy
access to the site from the Thai side –
if Cambodia will permit a trouble-free
border crossing (right now the Thai
side of the site has been sealed off by
Cambodia with impenetrable gates and
massively coiled barbed wire). Indeed,
crossing the border from Thailand for
a few hours and getting a Cambodian
stamp in one’s passport could impart
an aspect of adventure tourism to this
worthwhile cultural outing.
The recent bloodshed and political
turmoil unleashed by Cambodia’s
successful nomination of Preah
Vihear to the World Heritage List
is the most recent manifestation of
Thai-Cambodian tension. UNESCO’s
World Heritage Centre appears alarmingly
naïve or disingenuous in its professed
stance of political neutrality. It
has exhibited a significant failure to
recognise that countries differ in their
motives for seeking the inclusion of
sites onto the World Heritage List, and
UNESCO’s goal of site preservation
may not be foremost in the strategy of
nominating countries. It seems obvious
that it ought to be difficult to gain
inscription on the World Heritage List
for a site being claimed by two countries,
even without a larger boundary
conflict.
In the case of Preah Vihear, given the
history of conflict between Thailand
and Cambodia over the site, UNESCO
should have anticipated that the listing
of the temple as a Cambodian
World Heritage Site would have led
immediately to more violence and
make bilateral resolution of the surrounding
border dispute more difficult,
which time has proven to be the
case. The recent violence that damaged
the site was a direct result of the
UNESCO decision to list Preah Vihear,
in contravention of the explicit goal
of the World Heritage List and World
Heritage Convention to promote site
protection. A better solution in July
2008 would have been for UNESCO
to have worked with Cambodia and
Thailand to create a transborder World
Heritage Site. Rather than awarding
the World Heritage designation to a
single country UNESCO could have
conferred a borderless status on Preah
Vihear, assisting the two countries to
Heritage issues
prepare dual access routes to the site
with appropriate passport control. The
site could have been jointly managed
and tourist income equally shared by
both states.
The World Heritage List decision
to inscribe a site cannot be divorced
from political and other realities. A
recent article in The Economist criticised
the secrecy of the World Heritage
Committee’s decision-making ‘as well
as [that] inscribing sites in the first
place [is] getting infected by politics’
(28 August 2010, p. 50). The Economist’s
call for public openness and de-politisation
of the World Heritage List process
is merited. The World Heritage
Committee is susceptible to pressure
and has its own agenda. If the World
Heritage Committee meetings were
open to the public, then important factual
opinions could also be brought
into the deliberations, presented by
NGOs, professionals and scholars from
relevant academic fields with broader
contextual knowledge than the World
Heritage Committee. UNESCO must
consider more seriously the many and
sometimes unanticipated or unintended
consequences of its actions.
Although the Isan region lags behind
the rest of Thailand in economic development,
the situation is remediable
and the Khmer tourist route through
Isan is one means of generating financial
income and employment in an
area that has seen residents resorting
to massive protests to call attention to
their grievances. As for Cambodia, for
obvious reasons the country is grindingly
poor and underdeveloped save
at the tourist enclave of Siem Reap,
which, since Angkor was listed as a
UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992,
has witnessed extraordinary economic
growth based around tourism. Preah
Vihear offers Cambodia the opportunity
to extend that bubble to another
region of the country. The potentially
big money involved in opening up
Preah Vihear to mass tourism contributes
to Cambodia’s ardent defence of
its temple territory.
Notwithstanding the ‘ruined’
appearance of Preah Vihear (Figs 8, 9)
and the other various Khmer temples
in Thailand, they are not ‘dead’ sites.
The Thai-Cambodian border dispute
over a single beautiful Khmer temple is
an important and fascinating window
into the complex issues surrounding
sites of cultural heritage and how they
can have a huge impact on issues such
as domestic and international politics;
nationalism and national identity; and
the inexorable linkage between cultural
heritage, tourism, politics and
globalisation. n
Minerva May/June 2011 37