BOOK REVIEW
How history shaped the Pearl of Asia Phnom Penh - A Cultural and Literary History by Milton Osborne
Reviewed by Andrew Symon
With Cambodia's national elections on July 27, a new history of the crucible of
the country's politics, the capital Phnom Penh, is a valuable guide to what is
at stake.
No firm grip on Cambodia's murky modern politics can be attained without an
extensive knowledge of the country's often traumatic past. And as Australian
academic Milton Osborne recounts in his new volume, the country's past
transformations and tragedies have most frequently played out in riparian Phnom
Penh.
There is now an uncertain brew combining the new energies and
hopes of young Cambodians with a government under the authoritarian Prime
Minister Hun Sen, under whom official corruption runs rampant and culprits act
with impunity. While the economy is more buoyant than at any time since the
1960s, propelling vigorous commerce and construction in the city, there are as
always inequalities of opportunity and reward.
Set against this is the resilience of ordinary Cambodians, the renewal of
traditions and arts that Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge tried to stamp out, and the
belief that Osborne finds among younger Cambodians in the future and their
courage to call for change to the present political system. "Some subjects have
an obvious ending. Phnom Penh is not one of these," the author writes.
Few Western authors can boast Osborne's experience and knowledge of Cambodia
and the wider Mekong region. For nearly half a century he has witnessed and
analyzed the region's often-turbulent change and written extensively about its
history and politics, including, among other books, a biography of Prince
Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia's flamboyant and indefatigable royal leader for
almost all of the last 50 years of the 20th century, Sihanouk: Prince of Light,
Prince of Darkness.
His Southeast Asia: An Introductory History, now in its ninth edition,
is the definitive short history of the region and commonly used in university
classes around the world. Most recently, Osborne has concentrated his energies
on the environmental challenges the region now faces from hydropower and other
modern developments on the Mekong River and its tributaries.
He returns to Cambodia in this latest book, Phnom Penh: a Cultural and Literary
History. The title is a tad misleading, as the book is much more than a
cultural guide. The book's central theme is how the course of Cambodian history
has created, shaped, buffeted - and during the Khmer Rouge period from 1975-79
- devastated the city. Osborne weaves into the political story a description of
the city's architectural development, a colonial creation under the French who
in 1865 convinced then-king Norodom, retired king Sihanouk's grandfather and
great-grandfather to current King Norodom Sihamoni, to move his palace to Phnom
Penh from Udong, located 35 kilometers north of Phnom Penh.
Today the urban focal point remains the royal palace and national museum, which
both look out majestically over the junction of the Mekong and Tonle Sap
rivers. Osborne's book is enriched with line drawings of Phnom Penh's palaces,
temples, colonial buildings and street life. Yet Phnom Penh is not stuck in a
time warp. With Cambodia's economic growth - and seemingly poor town planning -
jarring change is on the way, with planned skyscrapers and growing traffic
congestion.
True to the book's title, Osborne breaks his journey at several literary way
stations. Here he looks at descriptions by visiting writers in the 1920s and
1930s - among others the famous French author and Gaullist minister Andre
Malraux, who was convicted of trying to steal ancient statues from a temple
complex near Angkor Wat. Another is British writer Somerset Maugham, who
Osborne later encountered as a young Australian diplomat in Phnom Penh in 1959
during the grand old man of literature's return visit to the country at age 85.
"I heard him deliver the observation that no one should die before they see
Angkor," writes Osborne.
Phnom Penh was a very different world when Osborne first arrived in 1959 as a
22-year-old diplomat with the Australian Embassy. Preparing to attend
ceremonies at the Royal Palace, Osborne writes that, "I found I should equip
myself with a white sharkskin suit, the prescribed dress for the diplomatic
corps at daytime ceremonies. When I later came to wear it with my colleagues in
the corps, I cold never rid myself of the feeling that we looked like a rather
seedy collection of Italian ice cream vendors."
He returned in the mid-1960s for research towards a doctorate in history at
Cornell University in the United States. "As I returned to Cambodia each year.
... I found Phnom Penh's mood increasingly morose as its citizens recognized
that the good times had passed and puzzled over whether they might ever return.
... In 1971, I made my last visit before the terrible triumph of Pol Pot's
force four years later. Yet with war growing in intensity in the countryside,
Phnom Penh was already a city under partial siege."
An earlier book by Osborne - Before Kampuchea - recalls these tumultuous
times in detail. He sketched the lives and thoughts of Cambodians from various
walks of life he met and became acquainted with in his student days in Phnom
Penh - many of whom were to disappear in the Pol Pot years. He returned in
1981, while working for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, to an
utterly shattered city, with still fresh Khmer Rouge-run extermination centers
and exhumed mass graves of the killing fields.
"The smell of human decomposition hung heavy in the air over the lines upon
lines of battered skulls lying on the grounds beside the graves," he wrote.
While the city was made a virtual ghost town under the Khmer Rouge, whose
radical Maoist regime forced its inhabitants into rural areas to achieve a
never-realized agrarian utopia, important buildings and structures generally
escaped destruction. The royal palace still stands and the national museum's
priceless Angkor sculptures and other collections were mostly left untouched,
curiously by a regime that aimed to erase vestiges of the bourgeoisie past and
reset the national clock to year zero.
"Much has changed in Phnom Penh since that 1981 visit, and both Cambodia and
its capital have attainted an apparent degree of normality," Osborne writes.
"Visitors encounter smiling people who appear to have triumphed over a recent
past and to have achieved a phoenix-like rebirth from the figurative ashes of
the period when Pol Pot ruled," writes Osborne.
Osborne has continued to take stock of post-conflict Cambodia and the wider
region variously as a university historian, head of the Southeast Asian branch
of the Australian Government's Office of National Assessments, an intelligence
analysis group reporting to the Prime Minister, and over the past decade as an
independent author.
But as he underlines, the promise inherent in the UN-sponsored 1993 elections
and the recent economic surge will not be fully realized as long as the
corruption and impunity associated with the long rule of Prime Minister Hun Sen
and his Cambodian People's Party (CPP) remains entrenched. Sadly, there is
little chance that the July election, the fourth since 1993, will lead to a
healing of what Osborne describes as these "running sores".
With his government's dominance over the national media and well-funded
political machine, few expect Hun Sen and his CPP to lose their stranglehold on
political power. But with the new hopes and expectations aloft in Phnom Penh, a
new chapter is opening on the country which Osborne's new book puts into
erudite historical context.
Phnom Penh - A Cultural and Literary History by Milton Osborne, Signal
Books, Oxford, May, 2008. ISBN 978 1 904955 40 5. Price US$28.
Andrew Symon is a Singapore based analyst and writer and frequent visitor
to Cambodia.
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Set against this is the resilience of ordinary Cambodians, the renewal of
traditions and arts that Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge tried to stamp out, and the
belief that Osborne finds among younger Cambodians in the future and their
courage to call for change to the present political system. "Some subjects have
an obvious ending. Phnom Penh is not one of these," the author writes.
