News: Cambodian students hope to reclaim nation's heritage

[Sitha Hem]

> Cambodian students hope to reclaim nation's
> heritage
>
>
> By Gregg Jones / The Dallas Morning News
>
> PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - During Cambodia's decades
> of death, the fabled ruins at Angkor and other
> ancient temples served as gun emplacements for
> warring guerrillas.
>
> Thousand-year-old statues of Shiva and other
> cultural treasures became the booty of
> unscrupulous rebel commanders, army generals and
> government officials willing to sell Cambodia's
> priceless patrimony to the highest foreign
> bidder.
>
> But the murderous Khmer Rouge movement is
> finally dead, the Vietnamese occupation army is
> gone and the civil war that has devastated
> Cambodian society for the last three decades has
> sputtered into a tense political stalemate.
>
> Now, a handful of Cambodian students are taking
> advantage of the first moment of relative peace
> they have known in their lives to begin
> reclaiming their broken country's rich cultural
> heritage.
>
> Under the tutelage of Bertrand Porte, a
> restoration expert from the French Ministry of
> Culture, five young Cambodians are learning the
> fine points of restoration work in a pilot
> program at the National Museum in Phnom Penh.
>
> "They want to save the patrimony of Cambodia,"
> said Mr. Porte.
>
> These students are the first generation of young
> Cambodians to emerge from the warfare and
> genocide that have torn this tiny Southeast
> Asian nation, and they are inspired by a sense
> of mission.
>
> "All our treasures have been stolen or broken by
> war or people," said Hun Tha, 32, as he
> carefully cleaned a 10th-century bust of the
> Hindu goddess Laksmi. "I want to help preserve
> Cambodia's culture, so it can be seen by young
> people in the future."
>
> Mr. Hun was born in 1968, at a time when
> Cambodia was already sinking into the throes of
> the vicious war that spilled over from
> neighboring Vietnam. He survived the 1975-79
> Khmer Rouge reign of terror but didn't begin
> school until he was 13, two years after the
> genocidal communist regime was overthrown by a
> Vietnamese invasion.
>
> The schools Mr. Hun and other young Cambodians
> attended during the Vietnamese occupation
> avoided any mention of Cambodia's rich history,
> symbolized to the outside world by the sprawling
> complex of temples at Angkor. Only in 1991,
> after the Vietnamese soldiers withdrew, did
> Cambodian students once again begin to learn
> about their country's glorious past.
>
> These days, Mr. Hun and his fellow students are
> racing against time to preserve that past.
> Cambodia's art treasures are not only
> deteriorating due to exposure to the harsh
> extremes of a tropical climate. Thieves are
> continuing to pilfer ancient artworks for sale
> on the international black market in stolen
> relics.
>
> Mr. Hun said the students can't do anything
> about the looters, but they can preserve the
> treasures that are already in safe hands.
>
> At a cluttered workshop in the National Museum,
> bats twitter behind a false ceiling as the
> students work lovingly with fragile sandstone
> busts and statues of Buddha and the pantheon of
> Hindu deities, some of them more than 1,400
> years old. (The bats took up residence here
> during the years when the Khmer Rouge drove
> Phnom Penh residents into the countryside and
> closed the museum, and they have never left.)
>
> Air conditioning is a luxury the cash-starved
> museum can't afford, so the students work in the
> stifling heat. They patiently scrape away cement
> previously used to repair cracks or hold broken
> parts together.
>
> "I hope to restore temples," said Man Chandevy,
> 24, an architecture student at Cambodia's Fine
> Arts University, as she carefully chips away at
> flecks of cement on the knee of a 12th-century
> statue of Prajnaparamita, a Buddhist goddess,
> recovered from the famous ruins of Angkor Wat.
>
> Next to her, Sok Soda, 24, cleans the severed
> head of an 11th century statue of Shiva, a Hindu
> god.
>
> Much of the students' work involves undoing past
> restoration efforts, which utilized cement and
> iron, often causing more long-term harm than
> good. Now, epoxy glue and copper rods allow for
> more aesthetically pleasing restoration without
> damaging the sandstone.
>
> The philosophy of restoration work has also
> changed in recent years.
>
> "Before, if an arm was missing from a piece, it
> was reattached with cement," said Mr. Porte.
> "Now, we respect the history of pieces that have
> been broken. It's part of the story of the
> piece."
>
> Last year, nearly 200 new pieces, including a
> stunningly well-preserved seventh-century statue
> of Vishnu, another Hindu god, arrived at the
> National Museum from all over Cambodia.
>
> The students speak with pride about the craft
> they are learning and the role they are playing
> in preserving a chapter of Cambodia's past that
> has been overshadowed in recent years by the
> Khmer Rouge killing fields. But they also fear
> that renewed civil war could finally destroy the
> surviving links to Cambodia's resplendent past.
>
> "If we want to preserve our culture, the statues
> and other works of art, we must stop the
> fighting," said Mr. Hun. "If the fighting
> continues, Cambodian culture will die."
>
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