Post-Conflict Heritage, Postcolonial Tourism

Tourism, Politics and Development at Angkor

Tim Winter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415430951
• eBook ISBN: 9781134084944
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Angkor, Cambodia's only World Heritage Site, is enduring one of the most crucial, turbulent periods in its twelve hundred year history. Given Cambodia's need to restore its shattered social and physical infrastructures after decades of violent conflict, and with tourism to Angkor increasing by a staggering 10,000 per cent in just over a decade, the site has become an intense focal point of competing agendas. Angkor's immense historical importance, along with its global prestige, has led to an unprecedented influx of aid, with over twenty countries together donating millions of dollars for conservation and research. For the Royal Government however, Angkor has become a 'cash-cow' of development.

Post-conflict Heritage, Postcolonial Tourism critically examines this situation and locates Angkor within the broader contexts of post-conflict reconstruction, nation building, and socio-economic rehabilitation. Based on two years of fieldwork, the book explores culture, development, the politics of space, and the relationship between consumption, memory and identity to reveal the aspirations and tensions, anxieties and paradoxical agendas, which form around a heritage tourism landscape in a post-conflict, postcolonial society.

With the situation in Cambodia examined as a stark example of a phenomenon common to many countries attempting to recover after periods of war or political turmoil, Post-conflict Heritage, Postcolonial Tourism will be of particular interest to students and scholars working in the fields of Asian studies, tourism, heritage, development, and cultural and postcolonial studies.

1
From a time of conflict to conflicting times

Today, all around the country you see mass graves and ruined structures; the latter are the result not of neglect but of a conscious, coordinated campaign by the Khmer Rouge to smash the country’s pre-revolutionary culture. And you see underpopulated towns and cities whose inhabitants are only slowly emerging from a nightmare that claimed the lives of their parents, spouses, siblings and children.¹

Taken from the opening page of the Introduction to the 1992 Cambodia Lonely Planet, this excerpt provides some indication of what a visitor to Cambodia might find. These few lines also reveal why the publisher of what has become the bible of contemporary travel waited until then to publish a guide dedicated to the country. Indeed, in many respects, the publication of this first edition marked the beginning of Cambodia’s return as a major destination of international tourism; a turbulent journey which would bring numerous contradictions, paradoxes and dilemmas. By the late 1960s Cambodia had become increasingly familiar with the challenges and opportunities presented by tourism. Two and a half decades of war and intense social turmoil virtually erased that familiarity. In the early 1990s the country would be starting again, and, as such, totally unprepared for the frenzy of international attention – and millions of visitors – which would arrive over the coming years.

Despite having so much of its physical infrastructure destroyed by decades of armed conflict, as well as its social institutions shattered by devastating periods of genocide and foreign occupation, Cambodia was about to witness an explosion in tourism unparalleled in any other country in recent times. Far from national in scope, this infant industry would focus overwhelmingly on the spectacular temple complex of Angkor. After decades of trauma, and with the country heavily dependent on international aid, reconciliation, cultural rejuvenation and economic rehabilitation were urgent and simultaneous demands. Located at the heart of this matrix, Angkor would witness an intense and fractious convergence between agendas of cultural preservation and socio-economic development. The situation was especially severe due to the country’s need to restore a national identity severely damaged by prolonged conflict, the immense scale of the past to which that identity adheres and the dependence of the state on the revenue of tourism.

As a result, Angkor is enduring one of the most crucial, turbulent periods in its 1200-year history. Its immense historical importance, along with its global prestige, has led to an influx of international assistance, with more than twenty countries – including France, Japan, China, India, America, Germany, Italy, and Australia – donating millions of dollars to help restore and safeguard the temples. While such efforts have prioritized architectural restoration and archaeological research, the number of international tourists visiting the site has risen by a staggering 10,000 percent in just over a decade. Not surprisingly, the Royal Government has paid far greater attention to this growth in tourism, with Angkor now regarded as a ‘cash cow’ of much needed socio-economic development and wealth generation for a country plagued by shattered physical and social infrastructures. In such a context, culture, history, and local communities have become entwined in an elaborate set of political, economic, and social relations.

This book takes a critical look at this evolving situation. It explores conceptions of culture and development, the politics of space, and the relationship between consumption, memory and identity to illustrate the intense battleground which has formed around Angkor since it became a World Heritage Site in 1992. I locate heritage and tourism within their broader political and socio-economic contexts, both historical and contemporary, to reveal the aspirations and tensions, anxieties and paradoxical agendas, which have emerged due to the lure of the tourist dollar and the need to prevent the rampant destruction that the dollar and its bearers might bring. The situation in Cambodia today is a stark example of a phenomenon common to many countries attempting to recover after periods of conflict or political turmoil. Heritage and cultural tourism are widely regarded by host governments and international bodies like the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) or the World Tourism Organization (WTO) as effective tools for protecting past histories, whilst simultaneously providing the economic fuel for societal modernization (Meethan 2001). In essence, tourism looks in both directions: it restores and promotes the past while promising future prosperity.

By addressing such issues at Angkor the book sets out to place cultural heritage and tourism in the foreground of debates concerning post-conflict nation building, postcolonial cultural politics, and the socio-spatial changes brought about by contemporary globalization. The immense scale and complexity of the Angkor region also brings into sharp focus the challenges facing countless heritage landscapes around the world today as they attempt to marry a series of interconnected agendas: development with conservation; national sovereignty with global patrimony; modernization with tradition; responsible governance with democratic ownership; and cultural values with economic value. A recurrent theme of academic studies on tourism and heritage has been the analytically elusive relationship between the discursive nature of the tourism industry, the ways in which tourists actually encounter landscapes, and how such processes come to shape the development of destinations. Recent years have seen increasingly sophisticated accounts in this area, and by exploring consumption in terms of various symbolic economies and the materialities of touristic performances, this book seeks to add clarity to these debates.

I argue that scholars of tourism and heritage need to pay greater attention to the cultural politics of development and postcolonial theory than they have done previously. An analysis of Cambodia, I believe, provides valuable insights for countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan or Rwanda which face similar challenges of marrying agendas of cultural restitution and modernization in their quest to recover from eras of war and social instability. Finally, this text joins the literature on contemporary Southeast Asia, a field which includes a limited number of works on Cambodia. Since the late 1970s two antithetical histories have received much attention: the ancient glories of Angkorean splendor and the horrors of the modern Khmer Rouge regime. By focusing on issues such as cultural politics and regional re-integration, it is hoped this book can offer a perspective that challenges some of the misconceptions, even clichés, about the country which continue to linger.

Years of turmoil

Situated at the heart of mainland Southeast Asia, Cambodia covers an area of just over 180,000 square kilometers. It is bordered by Thailand to the west and northwest, by Vietnam to the east and southeast, by Lao People’s Democratic Republic to the north, and by the Gulf of Thailand to the south. Largely made up of plains, the country’s topography also includes low mountain ranges in the southwest and north, and Southeast Asia’s largest freshwater lake, the Tonle Sap. At the beginning of the 1990s Cambodia was a ‘transitional society’ in every sense, to use Curtis’s terms (1998). The country would move ‘from a centrally planned economic system to a market oriented one … from a war economy to a peace economy, and from a poor and underdeveloped economy to a more prosperous and developed one’ (Tith 1998:102).

Cambodia’s turmoil began in the late 1960s through its involvement in the Vietnam–America war, in what Shawcross (1993) famously dubbed as the conflict’s ‘Sideshow’. As North Vietnamese communist forces moved southwest into Cambodia the US responded by launching a series of devastating bombing campaigns that penetrated further and further into the country. Frustrated by Norodom Sihanouk’s alliances with Beijing and Moscow, Washington supported the overthrow of Cambodia’s Prime Minister by military coup in 1970. As eastern provinces increasingly fell under communist control the country became further embroiled in the conflict (Kiernan 2004). The death toll grew to the hundreds of thousands, with a similar number of internally displaced refugees fleeing to escape the conflict. For those Cambodians with the political and/or financial means to leave, many sought refuge in France, and to a lesser extent the US. Global media coverage produced both expressions of sympathy for the Cambodian people, as well as visions of the country as the political ‘other’ of western democracy and capitalism – an image which would be subsequently reinforced by the isolationalist policies of the Khmer Rouge regime.

On 17 April 1975, paralyzed by years of US bombing and domestic turmoil, Cambodia experienced the start of one of the most radical and brutal social experiments ever inflicted upon a nation. Saloth Sar, latterly known as Pol Pot, promised to ‘liberate’ the country from the tyranny of both Vietnamese and American intervention. Through his revolutionist ideology Pol Pot would set about replacing previous post-independence modernization programs – seen as corrupt, elitist and urban-centric – with an agrarian-based economy. Within a matter of weeks all major cities and towns were evacuated, with their residents forced to become agricultural workers in the countryside. Although bearing a number of similarities with Maoist and Marxist-Leninist doctrines, Pol Pot’s utopian vision recognized no precedents. As Chandler (1996a) asserts, it was revolutionary in every sense. According to Kiernan (1996) the issue of race would be central to the regime. In the quest for Khmer purity, the removal of ‘those of foreign origin, education, or employment’ resulted in the execution of tens of thousands of non-Khmers (ibid: 27).

Anonymous at first, it was not until September 1976 that the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) declared themselves as leaders of a new Democratic Kampuchea (DK). By then however, a fresh constitution had already been promulgated abolishing all religious practices, private property and even the most basic human rights (Chandler 1996a). The imposed ideology of collectivist production and consumption rapidly began to unravel, and with failing harvests and increasing foreign hostilities came ever greater levels of brutality. By 1977 killings across the country were vast and largely indiscriminate. Fears of potential ‘pollution’ from contact with the neighboring Vietnamese meant the country’s eastern provinces suffered the highest numbers of murders (Etchison 2005).² In Phnom Penh, an infamous facility with the code name S-21, now known as Tuol Sleng, incarcerated, tortured and sentenced to death over 14,000 victims accused of threatening the security of the party centre (Chandler 2000).

Lasting until early 1979, this horrific episode in Cambodia’s history finally ended with the arrival of over 100,000 Vietnamese troops. On January 7, 1979 Phnom Penh was once again liberated as Pol Pot fled westwards by helicopter. While the Khmer Rouge regrouped as a jungle guerrilla army in Thailand, a new government formed in Phnom Penh calling itself the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK). This experiment lasting just under four years in which it is now estimated over one and a half million people died, or one in seven of the population, had finally come to an end.

In addition to new hope, 1980 brought an improved harvest and the reintroduction of money. In a complex political landscape however, various power struggles were being waged across the country, with Hanoi pulling the strings of the PRK government in Phnom Penh (Chandler 1996b). Factions fiercely dedicated to communist ideals were embattled with parties led by former Khmer Rouge defectors, as well as an anti-Vietnamese coalition which somewhat farcically realigned Sihanouk with an unrepentant Pol Pot.

As the 1980s progressed a political and military stalemate would set in with Hanoi and Moscow locked against the Chinese and Western supporters of the Cambodian resistance (Gottesman 2003). With virtually no humanitarian aid reaching an impoverished population, Cambodia was essentially locked into a struggle which had ‘become simultaneously a civil war, a regional war, and a great-power proxy war’ (Brown and Timberman 1998:16). In such circumstances, a gratitude for liberation initially held by many Cambodians was gradually replaced by a resentment towards the Vietnamese as an occupying power.

In 1989, starved of funds by the collapse of the Soviet Union, Vietnamese troops were forced to withdraw from the country. Despite the ongoing presence of numerous factions, the State of Cambodia (SOC) party administered about 90 percent of the territory, enabling it to restore Buddhism as the state religion, as well as introduce a new national anthem, flag, and constitution for the country. The ongoing re-population of Phnom Penh after the enforced evacuations of 1975 was largely driven by the desperate situation in the countryside, with physical and mental illnesses, black markets, smuggling and widespread poverty all remaining prevalent (Chandler 1996a). Headquartered along the Thai border in the mountainous southwest of the country, and funded by cross-border gem and timber trading, the Khmer Rouge – now known as the Party of Democratic Kampuchea (PDK) – continued to be the most powerful group fighting the SOC.³

Nonetheless, the end of the cold war provided the opportunity for unlocking Cambodia’s political stalemate. In 1991, the Paris Peace Accords (PPA) attempted to broker a resolution to decades of civil conflict through the creation of a temporary coalition prior to forthcoming elections. To oversee this transition the United Nations implemented its largest and most expensive peacekeeping operation to date, involving around 40,000 personnel, at a cost of over $2 billion. The United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, or UNTAC as it became known, was charged with the task of creating an environment of conciliation and compromise, essential for open and fair elections. UNTAC’s meticulous planning ensured 95 percent of those deemed eligible to vote were registered for the 1993 elections (Brown and Timberman 1998:19).

Although passing off peacefully, the election could only produce a compromise dual government, made up of the royalist Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Indépendant, Neutre, Pacifique, et Coopératif (FUNCINPEC) party, led by Norodom Ranariddh, and the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), led by the former Khmer Rouge defector Hun Sen. In the ensuing power struggle, FUNCINPEC had little control over the military forces, police or civil administration. Somewhat predictably, this fragile democracy would unravel some years later with the ousting of Ranariddh by a violent CPP coup in 1997.

Rebuilding Cambodia

Together with $880 million of aid pledged during the inaugural meeting of the International Committee on the Reconstruction of Cambodia (ICORC), the UNTAC-sponsored elections represented an attempt to kick-start major reforms and a process of transition. In 1993, with 85 percent of the population living in rural communities, agriculture accounted for more than 50 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) (Quintyn & Zamaróczy 1998). Export manufacturing industries were virtually nonexistent and the limited economic growth at that time was principally fuelled by UNTAC’s effects on the service and construction industries, the vast majority of which centered on Phnom Penh (Shawcross 1994, Ledgerwood 1998). Nonetheless, the prospect of macro-economic stability – something Cambodia had been denied for over two and a half decades – provided the country with the opportunity to make far reaching, and desperately needed, reforms in ‘the context of one of the lowest levels of per capita income in the world’. (Ministry of Planning 2003:5).

Writing in 1994, Shawcross described Cambodia at that time as ‘still a semi-feudal country, a place of bargaining, survival, and lawlessness … [with] … no independent legal system, no central authority, no tolerance, no concept of human rights or of loyal opposition’ (1994:2). He also argued that the military and a disproportionately high civi...

Table of contents

• Asia’s Transformations
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1 From a time of conflict to conflicting times
• 2 ‘Lost civilization’ to free-market commerce
• 3 World heritage Angkor
• 4 Remapping Angkor
• 5 Angkor in the frame
• 6 Collapsing policies and ruined dreams
• 7 Conclusion – in (the) place of modernity appears the illusion of history
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index