Humanity

SIEM REAP, CAMBODIA: Over a cup of coffee, Prince Sisowath Sirirath recounts to me yet another dimension to that horrible genocide committed by the Maoist Khmer Rouge in the late seventies.

In the shadow of the Angkor Wat, we’re talking about history, in the more expansive sense of that term: the empire of the Khmers, the influence of Hinduism in the written script, the almost abrupt shift to Buddhism a few centuries ago and persistence of indigenous cultures in the uplands. The prince was a most literate man, brimming with insights on the ebb and flow of great civilizations on the Asian land mass.

I was interested in small details: where the stones used for the Angkor Wat came from, how were they transported, how the population that built this magnificent edifice thrived. Angkor, at its height in the 11th century, had a population of a million people. It was the largest pre-industrial revolution urban center ever. The temple complex took over 300 years to build, indicating not only continuity in the political order but also an advanced logistical system.

The prince was a rich source of detail. He pointed out that of the thousands of images of women in bas relief, none had the same hairstyle and costume as the other. Each was a unique person.

I wondered why, after building such a magnificent city, the Khmers abandoned it at about the 13th century. The seat of the empire relocated to the south, to the vicinity of where Phnom Penh is. The power of that empire also rapidly dwindled.

It could not have been the entry of an external force. The Khmers had successfully repelled invasions from the Chams to the east and the Kingdom of Siam to the west. Siem Reap, in old Khmer, means “Siam vanquished.” It was the site of a pivotal battle that saw the Khmers repel an invasion from Siam.

The most compelling theory about why Angkor was abandoned involves climate change. At about the time this great city was abandoned, the world entered into a mini-ice age. The enlargement of the glaciers might have, according to this theory, greatly reduced water volumes into the rivers flowing from the lower Himalayas. A drought forced the evacuation of the city and the dwindling of an empire.

Still, I wondered, why did the Khmers forget they once had this city? The Angkor complex, we will recall, was eaten up by jungle growth and only recently rediscovered. That might be hard to imagine today, where the flat land on which the old city lies is surrounded by irrigated rice paddies on land stolen back from the forest. But that is what happened. A magnificent city built over centuries was lost to memory for centuries more.

If they did forget about the great city they built, the Khmers are not about to forget the great atrocity committed by the Khmer Rouge. In many places across Cambodia, there are temples made out of the skeletal remains of the victims of mass murder at the hands of Marxist fanatics. Nearly a fifth of the population was exterminated in the reign of terror that ended only when the Vietnamese, themselves exhausted from a long war with the Americans, decided to invade their neighbor and expel the ruthless Pol Pot regime.

It was not only a fifth of the population that was exterminated during Khmer Rouge rule. It was the best fifth of the population that was killed off: the intellectuals, the bureaucrats, the engineers, the literate were the first to go. It was a fifth of the population that was the hardest to recover. To this day, Cambodia struggles to build a modern society with literate citizens and the most reliable source of foreign currency are tourists visiting the ruins of a great ancient civilization.

As we discussed this, the prince casually drops yet another small detail that would startle me and disturb me for days.

Before the Khmer Rouge took power, the prince tells me, there were about 80 indigenous communities speaking languages other than Khmer. After the communists were done with their bloody business, only 30 such communities survived. About 50 cultural communities were rendered extinct, with no temples to mark their passing through this earth, no written records of their languages and lore, nothing to help us remember they were ever there.

With all the other problems the government of Cambodia has to deal with, recovering cultural artifacts from extinguished communities is obviously not high on the national agenda. No one speaks for the exterminated cultures.

If the Khmer Rouge was not stopped by a just invasion, they might as well have gone on to murder most of their people. Then, as Maoist organizations are wont to do, they would have broken up into warring factions and started murdering each other — much like the Maoists have done to each other in our own society.

But, if it is any consolation, the rest of humanity will remember the greatness of the Khmer empire because of Angkor Wat. Surely, at its height, it was a city without rival.

The prince, rather matter-of-factly, delved into this puzzle about our own humanity and how fragile our civility really is. All species in the animal kingdom, except for homo sapiens, kill only to eat. Homo sapiens kill for other reasons, sometimes for the perverse pleasure of it.

Immediately, those gory images from the Maguindanao massacre swelled up in my mind. How is it possible for men, in an instant, to so quickly lose every shred of humanity and indulge in such numbing inhumanity?

Homicidal insanity is a poor excuse. But if we try and look beyond what we conveniently call evil, we find ourselves with no easy answers to offer.

In a season like this one, when we celebrate the joy there is in having peace, we should as well contemplate the fragility of our own humanness, the ease with which it could sometimes be lost.