Angkor Wat Temple-largest religious monumnet in the world-Might Makes Right-
Asian Millennium- Might Makes Right
(For centuries, Southeast Asian rulers have seen power as a personal possession--something that can be acquired, hoarded and spent. The people are still paying the price.)
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By David Chandler
Issue cover-dated September 9, 1999
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In the 12th century, the Cambodian empire we now refer to as Angkor stretched from southern Vietnam to southern Laos and eastern Thailand. At its heart lay the city of Yasodharapura, then one of the largest in the world, with over a million inhabitants.
Around 1150, shortly before his death, Suryavarman II, who had unified the empire after a period of foreign invasions and civil wars, surveyed the monument he had built at Yasodharapura to celebrate his rule and his intimate relationship with the Hindu god Vishnu, the preserver. The temple, Angkor Wat, had taken 40 years to build and is still the world's largest religious monument. It's also the world's largest personal tomb, for Suryavarman was buried inside it.
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(The temple of Angkor Wat is probably the finest monument in Cambodia. It covers an area of aobut 2.6 KM2 and it the largest religious temple in the world. It was bult in the 1100's to honor the Hindu god Vishnu. Angkor Wat later became the tomb of the Cambodian King who order its construction.)
Angkor Wat Hindu Temple-Cambodia : The largest religious monument in the world.
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Ariel View
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Close-up
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Distant View
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Sunset at over Angkor Wat
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Apsara Dancer
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Apsara Dancer
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Ancient Script
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The King & I
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With its miles of intricate bas-reliefs and complex, harmonious design, Angkor Wat is one of the wonders of the world. It's also a monument to the unchecked power of an individual ruler, who saw himself as the embodiment of cosmic forces and hoped, by harnessing them, to become immortal.
Roughly 800 years later, another Cambodian strongman, Pol Pot, set about rebuilding Cambodia from scratch. He evacuated cities, abolished money, closed schools and turned nearly everyone into a farmer. Believing that he held what he called "the wheel of history," he used Cambodia's past to justify his gigantic programme of forced labour and public works. "If our people can build Angkor," he declared, "they can do anything." Anything, that is, to achieve his own revolutionary vision.
At the close of the 20th century in Southeast Asia, some peculiar, deep-rooted notions of power, not unlike Suryavarman's or Pol Pot's, remain alive and well in many places. These ideas have pleased rulers in the region for hundreds of years. For the first time in history, however, they are under serious threat, largely from the young.
For millennia, most Southeast Asians have believed (or, more precisely, have been told) that political power is a possession of those who hold it, rather than an abstract force connected to institutions. Power seen in this way resembles the Buddhist concept of merit, or more prosaically, money in a bank account. It can be acquired, hoarded and spent. It can increase, fade and disappear. Constitutions, titles and elections have nothing to do with it. Instead, rulers see themselves as legitimate because they have power, rather than having power because they are legitimate. Thus in Cambodia in 1993, the ruling party, which lost elections sponsored by the United Nations at a cost of more than $3 billion, refused to step aside; so did the junta in Burma, faced with electoral defeat in 1988.
Power to these people is an all-or-nothing proposition. No one possessing it can allow anyone else to share it, or permit a loyal opposition. Loyalty must be directed towards the power holder rather than towards his position; opponents are intolerable. Succession poses serious problems, too, because most power holders are usually unwilling to pass their prized possession along to someone else. In Burma and Singapore, for example, Gen. Ne Win and Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew still exercise enormous influence behind the scenes, and former President Suharto's unwillingness to conceive of a successor or a different kind of government threatened stability in Indonesia.
In Western political thinking, the term that fits the classical Southeast Asian idea of power best is probably "charisma," an ephemeral quality related to charm that exists in the eye of the beholder. A positive aspect of a charismatic leader in classical Southeast Asia was that he was seen to balance a range of contradictory forces.
In Java and Cambodia rulers and sculptors favoured the Hindu god Harihara, a composite of Siva, the creator and destroyer of worlds, and Vishnu, the preserver. By blending these attributes in a single, calm-looking statue, Harihara, like an idealized king, was holding them in balance. By imitating the god's charisma and displaying a capacity to amass, control and channel contradictory forces, rulers displayed their special, god-like gifts. In the 1950s and 1960s, Sukarno, the first president of Indonesia, and then Cambodian Prince Norodom Sihanouk acted in this way when they held their countries together and kept a range of enemies at bay. Similarly, throughout his long reign, King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand has been seen as a unifying, balancing figure.
Still, despite protestations to the contrary such as a 12th-century Cambodian ruler's pious assertion that he "suffered from the illnesses of his subjects more than from his own," the welfare of the people in classical Southeast Asia was always secondary to the ruler's grip on power and his headlong race for cosmic approval. The word for "govern" in Cambodia also meant "to consume," and there were no checks and balances on a ruler's appetites. There were no alternatives to forced labour, forced delivery of crops and ruinous taxation, either, except rebellion or flight, which were usually fruitless. Whatever happened, the victors were merciless; a king's word, as a Thai chronicle put it, was "like an axe from heaven."
In modern Southeast Asia, this tradition of unchecked power also lives on in the widespread impunity of civil servants, the often unchallenged corruption of high-ranking figures, inoperative judicial systems and, at another level, in the reckless depletion of natural resources such as timber and fish.
Classical Southeast Asian kingship was fractured and weak when the colonial powers erupted into the region. Rulers were swiftly overthrown or became creatures of the European powers. Interestingly, in places where the rulers were cast out, such as Vietnam, Bali and Burma, rebellions to restore them broke out almost at once. On the other hand, where the rulers were co-opted by the colonial powers as they were in Cambodia, Laos and Malaysia, opposition to colonialism was rare. The tradition of absolute kingship persisted throughout the region, under wraps.
Ironically, even though absolute kings were removed from power and supposedly enlightened European administrators took their place, nothing really changed. One form of unquestioned rule replaced another. The people were still "consumed." Opposition remained a punishable offence. Judicial systems, as in the past, served the rulers rather than an ideal of justice, or the interests of ordinary people. Southeast Asians, outside of the Philippines, enjoyed few rights and were given almost no experience in participatory government. Acting like a new batch of classical rulers, the Dutch, British and French governors and "residents" based their legitimacy on the fact that they held power. Throughout what one writer has called "the monologue of colonialism," the Europeans treated power as something they had earned through force majeure.
For many years scholars of Southeast Asia, particularly in the United States, myself included, uncritically applauded the nationalist movements in the region. The movements, it seemed to us, had set admirable notions of liberation and local culture against an oppressive colonial rule. To our way of thinking, almost anything local was preferable to nearly everything imported by the West. After brief constitutional interludes in several countries, the resurgence of authoritarian politics of an "Asian" sort, endemic throughout the region, still seemed preferable to "imperialist" values and behaviour.
As regimes became increasingly tyrannical, however, it became hard to blame colonialism for the way that Southeast Asians were treating one another. There was very little that was British about the way Ne Win or Lee Kuan Yew, for example, treated their opponents, and almost nothing French about Pol Pot's grandiose, inept regime. Instead, it soon became more fruitful to suggest continuities that predated the colonial era.
As the millennium approaches, some regimes in Southeast Asia, notably the Philippines and Thailand, are slowly evolving into pluralistic states. Indonesia is opening up in ways that could not have been predicted three short years ago. But absolute rule in Brunei, one-party politics in Vietnam, Laos and Singapore, repression of dissent in Malaysia and Cambodia, and the cruel and unresponsive regime that flourishes in Burma form a sombre backdrop to these achievements.
A new form of pressure on rulers in Southeast Asia has been emerging for a decade or so from non-governmental organizations concerned with human rights, civil society and the rule of law. The governments they oppose have seldom welcomed these often courageous bodies. Instead, some people have suggested that the idea of human rights, being contrary to "Asian values," is a poisonous concoction aimed at destabilizing the region. Because the debate about Asian values has been dominated by those in power, these disgruntled critics may be right in arguing that the concept of human rights transcends racial and geographic boundaries. The notion of empowering the powerless, through the protection of their individual rights, is genuinely revolutionary. So is the notion that power can exist outside the grip of those at the top of a regime.
Ironically, the apparently abstract concept of human rights has become, like the ancient Southeast Asian idea of power, almost a palpable possession. What makes the idea revolutionary is that, unlike power in the past, it is freely available to everyone in the region.n
(David Chandler, a visiting professor at Georgetown University, is the author of A History of Cambodia and Brother Number One: a Political Biography of Pol Pot.)- Courtesy: Far Eastern Economic Review |
