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Preah Vihear
 

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Preah Vihear nationalists could use a history lesson By The Nation Published on July 26, 2008 The ongoing fury on the listing of the Preah Vihear Temple as a world heritage site results from domestic politics as much as nationalism. Neither has anything to do with history and, in this case, architecture, something for which none of the vociferous parties involved in this matter has shown any appreciation. I can't help but fret over our shortcomings in history and culture as listed below. 1) My father, who spent years in the archives in France back in the 1960s, has the French map, or a microfilm of it, showing the "kink" from the watershed line to exclude Prasat Khao Preah Vihear from Siam. The said map was appendiced to the border agreement between France and Siam. This is something that nobody in Siam knew about when MR Seni Pramoj took the case to the World Court, and he (my father) told me that it was obvious that Siam had to lose the case because of this map. 2) After the World Court's deliberation, Field Marshal Sarit Dhanarajata refused to cede the temple to Cambodia. A higher authority called him in to say that the country was bound by the said verdict and there the matter rested. 3) Thais have never been good at keeping historical records, and we have to go to the archives in Paris, London, The Hague, Cornell, etc, in order to do our doctorates in Thai history! 4) Without the sense of real history, Thais are vehemently nationalistic, which is dangerous. For example, school textbooks still teach Thais that we came from the Altai Mountains and founded the Nanchao Kingdom, which Chinese scholars dismiss as pure nonsense. 5) Few Thais realise that the Khmer Empire used to cover much of present-day Thailand and Laos, as evidenced by Prasat Muang Sing to the West on the Burmese border, and Khmer ruins in Sukhothai in central Siam, and Laos. The Thais, having wrested from the Khmers their outpost town of Sukhothai in the 13th century, took over the Khmer language - the Thai script being a simplified form of Khmer - and in the early Ayutthaya period adopted, with variations or aesthetic licence, Khmer architecture, classical dance and other facets of Khmer civilisation, which were then unwittingly exported back to Kampuchea by the French in the 19th century. (Witness the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh, which is a mediocre copy of our Grand Palace). 6) Kampuchea to Siam is like ancient Greece and Rome to the rest of Europe, or third century BC China and T'ang Dynasty to Japan. That much do we owe to the Khmers! 7) In the end, a great monument like Preah Vihear doesn't belong to any particular country. It belongs to the world. Only this or that country has the obligation to look after it on behalf of mankind.  8) History is the future. When people refuse to understand this, with a tinge of humour, they have to start from the beginning again and again. Sumet Jumsai Bangkok

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