Prasat Preah Vihear

This week brought the news that UNESCO has finally decided to list the country’s Preah Vihear temple as a world heritage site, implicitly recognising Cambodia’s sovereignty over the Angkor-era ruin. The announcement came amidst a wave of mewling and sabre-rattling from the anti-Thaksin People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) party in neighbouring Thailand, where zealots from the radical nationalist group Dharmayutra has issued calls for the ‘return’ of Cambodia’s Battambang, Siem Reap and Banteay Meanchey provinces to Thai control. The struggle over Preah Vihear, which has been milked for political capital for more than half a century, is a telling demonstration of how legal disputes can be blown out into the most colourful historical fantasies.

Preah Vihear temple, as seen from the Thai side

The temple dispute, like many of the region’s problems, has its roots in the pre-independence era. 11th-century Prasat Preah Vihear, one of the most stylistically diverse Angkorean temple sites in Cambodia, sits on the northern side of the 525 metre-high Dangrek escarpment, easily reachable by road from Thailand but only accessible via a long and tortuous drive from the south. When the French began delineating the Siam-Indochina border in 1904, it did so with the agreement from both governments that the precipitous Dangrek watershed be used as the ‘natural’ frontier between the two countries, a plan that would have put the temple on Thai soil. However, maps produced after the French border expedition showed Preah Vihear as being in Cambodia, sparking off an international row over the temple’s ownership. It may have been simple oversight; but it was more likely a product of French cultural paternalism — the Gallic self-perception as the ‘protector’ of a ‘lost’ Khmer culture — leavened with a pinch or two of anti-Siamese animus. (For an example of this cloying sentimentalism see The Gate, by French ethnologist François Bizot). What started out as a crude piece of imperial slight-of-hand turned into a source of simmering Thai resentment, simultaneously underscoring Cambodia’s own nascent national identity.

In fact, the tensions between Paris and Bangkok that led to Preah Vihear’s initial contestation can be traced back the establishment of French Indo-China in the late-nineteenth century. After bringing Vietnam and Cambodia under its sway, the French drove their gunboats up the Chao Phraya River to Bangkok in 1893, forcing the cession of Laos — then a fragmented, bandit-ridden vassal-state of the Siamese. Further unequal treaties in 1904 and 1907 forced Siam to give up additional Lao territories west of the Mekong, as well as the northwest Cambodian provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap, which had been under Thai control since 1769.

The coup d’état engineered in Bangkok in 1932 by Marshal Phibun Songkhram turned the tables a little, leading to the diminution of the Thai monarchy, the renaming of the country from Siam to Thailand (‘land of the Thai’), and a irredentist foreign policy geared towards to the unification of all ethnic Tai within a single state governed from Bangkok. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Songkhram — backed now by Japanese military muscle — reclaimed the disputed Indochinese territories in a short border war against the French in 1940-41, also gaining Muslim-majority states from British Malaya and the ethnically-Tai Shan States from Burma. As much as it inflated Thai prestige, however, piggy-backing on the successes of Japanese imperialism turned out to be a bad choice for Songkhram: after the Japanese surrender, Thailand was forced to cede the territories back to French Indochina, which soon solidified into the borders of the newly independent states of Laos and Cambodia as they are known today.

After the French withdrawal from Indochina in 1954, the Thais immediately took the opportunity to extract symbolic revenge, sending troops to occupy Preah Vihear from the north, a move which set off a game of military cat-and-mouse, culminating in a 1962 ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague that the temple belonged to Cambodia.

Despite what some in Cambodia might think, however, Cambodian ownership of the temple is no foregone conclusion. The Thai government could make a good argument that the French border delineation of 1904 ceded the temple to Thailand, but for the ‘variation’ in the subsequent maps, which was not taken into account by the 1962 ICJ ruling. The temple also sits on the Thai side of a significant natural frontier (the Dangrek escarpment), which forms the border between the two countries for the rest of its 320km length. The question of the temple’s history is also irrelevant. Claims that Preah Vihear should belong to Cambodia purely because it was ‘built by Khmers’ are meaningless, since they would also give Cambodians the right to seize large swathes of Thailand’s Surin, Sisaket and Burirom provinces, which contain other Angkorean ruins. This reasoning resonates emotionally, but is a recipe for dangerous irredentism: the Italian government, by this logic, would have the right to claim the Roman ruins in Bath or Alexandria or Volubilis.

The best argument that Cambodia can make is a purely legal one: that the 1962 ruling settled the question in their favour, and, pending a legal challenge by Thailand, represents the final word on the matter. Any appeals to ‘culture’ or ‘history’ seen through the distorting lens of Cambodian nationalism misrepresent the issue and threaten to trigger off more events like the 2003 anti-Thai riots, in which the Thai embassy and Thai-owned businesses were looted and burned after an air-headed Bangkok actress stated that Angkor Wat ‘belonged to Thailand.’

However, the Thai appeals to history are more vague and insubstantial. Calling for the return of Khmer-majority Cambodian provinces on the basis that they were once under the loose suzerainty of Bangkok is sheer fantasy: borders change, and Cambodia has an equal moral claim to the majority of mainland Southeast Asia on the grounds that the Angkorean empire once ruled it. As for protesting UNESCO’s listing of Preah Vihear, as some 100 Thais did at the temple site last month, this betrays the standard exceptionalist tendency to assert that international legal rulings are fine for everybody else, but inapplicable in the case of one’s own country. As a legal issue, Preah Vihear is done and dusted. Thai nationalists better get used to the idea.