Opinion

Cambodians are not just for McCain

The Phnom Penh Post, Wednesday, November 5, 2008

t’s interesting to read about the different schools of thought regarding the future president of the United State of America in Kay Kimsong’s story, “McCain comes out on top in Cambodia,” Monday, 3 November 2008.

For Cambodians, we would support any US president who can help us build our democracy and free economy.

However, like many other Cambodians, I would prefer Senator Barack Obama to Senator John McCain for his own history and the history of Cambodia.

As a nation ravaged by decades of civil war and is on the brink of another cross-border war, we would support Senator Barack Obama for his less war-oriented policies. With his anti-war stance in Iraq and elsewhere, we hope Senator Obama will help Cambodia avoid the possible war with Thailand.

In addition, Senator Obama will be the first black US president if he is elected. As a black man whose fellow black Americans had experienced suffering and injustice under discriminatory US policies in the past, Senator Obama would know well the suffering of other peoples in the world who are deprived of justice and dignity.

Senator Obama would cherish in mind the words of the late black US civil rights leader Martin Luther King, who said: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Therefore, we believe that Senator Obama would not want injustice to happen to other peoples in other nations.

Last but not least, we would support younger Senator Obama as the next president of the United States as he will set the precedent for other nations to give opportunities to young people to become leaders and lead the nations with fresh talent and innovation.

- Moeun Chhean Nariddh

  Phnom Penh

Comment

 Neither Side Has Advantage In Border Conflict

by Moeun Chhean Nariddh

The Cambodia Daily, Tuesday, October 21, 2008

t’s interesting to read about observers’ comments on the border conflict between Thailand and Cambodia in article “Defense Analysts: Thais in Advantage at Temple,” October 17, page 29.

Regardless of advantage or disadvantage for Cambodia or Thailand, we can say that both sides will be the great losers unless this conflict ends soon.

During the past several decades, Cambodia has experienced an immense tragedy: from a harsh civil war to genocide and to another civil war. Almost two million people have lost their lives as a result.

After it finally reached peace, Cambodia is now trying to rebuild its economy and infrastructure, while the people are trying to restore their shattered lives.

If the armed conflict with Thailand becomes a full-scale war, Cambodia will lose more lives and its economy will be in great recession as investors will move out of the country.

Meanwhile, Thailand will be in the same boat. Though Thailand was lucky enough not to have experienced Cambodia’s nightmare, in recent years Thailand has also been struck by horrible turmoil, especially the battle with the Muslim separatists in the South. Many lives have already been lost to this conflict.

If border clashes with Cambodia turn into a big war, it will also cause bad consequences for Thailand. Thailand’s economy relies heavily on tourism. Together with the trouble in the South, a war with Cambodia will scare away tourists and their dollars.

So, there will be no winners in this armed conflict between Cambodia and Thailand.

The real winners are those who benefit economically from the fighting between both sides, especially those who produce weapons for soldiers from the two nations to shoot and kill each other.

The only win-win solution for Cambodia and Thailand is to seek a peaceful means to end the conflict through negotiations and mutual understanding.

Opinion

Buddhism is the basis of the rule of law

by Moeun Chhean Nariddh

The Phnom Penh Post, Tuesday, 07 October, 2008

s Cambodian people are returning from P’Chum Ben, they might have fulfilled their traditional obligation to appease the ghosts of their ancestors who have been roaming different pagodas in search of food offered by their living relatives during the two-week-long festival.

However, probably very few people apart from the Buddhist monks and lay people have been able to please the gods by fully following the panca-sila, or the Five Precepts, they have repeatedly chanted during the ceremonies.

Comment

Cambodia’s Magic War With Thailand

by Moeun Chhean Nariddh

Phnom Penh Post, Tuesday, 12 August, 2008

arly this month, The Nation newspaper in Bangkok reported that many Thai residents in Si Sa Ket province which borders Cambodia wore yellow to help protect Thailand from black-magic spells cast by Khmer “wizards” who met at Preah Vihear Temple during the solar eclipse early this month.

On August 1, Bun Rany, the wife of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, led Buddhist monks and soldiers to the ancient Hindu temple to call upon their ancestors to protect the temple.

The Nation wrote that Thai media reports said that the mysterious black-magic spells by Khmer wizards would not only protect the temple but also weaken Thailand. Meanwhile, some Thai astrologers were reported to have urged local people to wear yellow to deflect the spells.

Whether the Thai astrologers considered the solemnly organized prayer at the temple Cambodia’s cast of magic spells on Thailand, the use of magic by Cambodians has prevailed for centuries.

According to the Khmer-language book “The Tale of Ancient History,” in 1502 under the reign of King Chan Raja there was a Khmer warrior named Moeung who fearlessly fought against Siam, as Thailand was known in the past.

Unable to bear Siamese colonial dominance, the Khmer king ordered his men to kill the Siamese king’s son who was controlling Cambodia. The Siamese king found out and sent troops to arrest King Chan Raja and his court. But Chan Raja’s lady-in-waiting, Pen, escaped with army chief Moeung, his wife and four children.

The Siamese prepared a massive attack. But Chan Raja’s son, Prince Chey Ahcha, had neither enough troops nor weapons to fight them.

When asked if he could think of any tactics to win, Meoung told Prince Chey Ahcha an odd plan: to recruit a ghost army.

He ordered his men to dig a deep rectangular hole and to plant spears and swords at the bottom.

“Please use every effort in this battle to liberate Cambodia from the enemy,” he told his troops. “If within seven days after I die you hear a thunder-like cheering, we will win.”

Upon that Moeung jumped into the grave and impaled himself. His wife and two sons followed, killing themselves too.

Exactly seven days later, the cheering of the ghost army came from every direction as Chey Ahcha’s army advanced to stop the invading Siamese troops near Battambang.

“The ghost army went to the front to display their might and made the Siamese troops dizzy, gave them stomach aches and made them vomit,” the book says. “Chey Ahcha’s army killed all the Siamese soldiers.”

After victory Chey Ahcha was crowned King Preah Chey Chehsda of Cambodia. He ordered a ceremony to commemorate the spirit of his army chief, who earned the title “Neak Ta Khlaing Moeung”.

In 1866, Po Kambo, one of the first Khmer protesters against French colonial rule, led a struggle in Rong Damrey province in Kampuchea Krom, which was later annexed by Vietnam.

“Po Kambo knew the magic words with admirable effectiveness to turn away bullets,” wrote Sou Chamreon in 1971 in a book “History of the Struggle of the Khmer Heroes in the 19th Century.”

“The bullets from the French army… hit Po Kambo the most, but they could not make him fall down. Even other fighters survived thanks to the power of his magic,” the book reads.

Also in the late 19th century, two other anti-French protesters, Achar Svar and Kralahom Kong, used magic during the battle.

Kralahom Kong was said to be both fire and bullet-proof. Kralahom Kong could not be killed when the French tied him to a ship’s smokestack in front of the Royal Palace.

During Cambodia’s civil war between the 1970s and early 1990s, many Khmer soldiers would also seek supernatural protection in the forms of tattoos, magic kerchiefs “yons” and magic words written in Pali or Sanskrit, the currently dead languages used during the Angkorean period.

Nevertheless, the use of magic could probably give only spiritual strength for believers and might not provide any real solutions.

While the prayer at the temple was a good religious, non-violent approach, Cambodia may need to negotiate more with Thailand to solve the border disputes. It probably needs intervention by the United Nations Security Council if the bilateral talks stall.

Comment

Cambodian altruism in the face of poverty

By Kurt A. MacLeod

The Cambodia Daily, July 10, 2008

n the streets of the capital of Phnom Penh, I recently passed a shiny new black Rolls Royce Phantom with a sparkling silver grill. The US$400,000 vehicle was absolutely beautiful as it coasted down the streets cluttered with small entrepreneurs eking out a living on a per capita GDP of just over US$550 per year.

The previous week I had seen a 2007 Bentley with leather interior, and which sells for a quarter of a million, plying the chaotic streets of the city. As the Rolls Royce rumbled by, I thought not only about the value of the car but also about the wealth of the family that bought the car as a show of opulence in face of poverty.

I was on my way to a meeting called by a Cambodian youth organization (YRDP) that had been collecting donations for the survivors of Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar. Soon after the cyclone hit the southern Delta of Myanmar and left more than 135,000 dead or missing, 15 members of the youth group wanted to show their solidarity with the people of Myanmar. When the devastating earthquake hit China, they added the plight of those families affected.

Their campaign reached out to many of the students attending the mushrooming of universities in the city, went shop to shop in the city’s major markets and door to door in their neighborhoods. The students were stopped by police who said they needed permission from the municipal government to collect donations and halted by market security men who prohibited them from soliciting funds from local sellers. The students reached deep into their pockets for limited cash to cover the ever increasing cost of petrol for their motorcycles.

The students spoke of working from a deep place in their hearts to collect the donations.  They spoke of a desire to reach out to their community, in this case the global community, to do something positive for the world. They spoke of ethics and a dedication to give back to the world.

These were students from poor families, some plagued by HIV/AIDS, living in slums and trying to find ways and means to feed themselves.  I spoke to them about how they are Cambodian heroes, the importance of their leadership in the country’s future and their demonstrated role as global citizens.

In the end, when they had counted up all the small notes, they had collected over US$400. I thought how the value of US$400 of altruism in the world far outweighs the value of US$400,000 of pure selfishness.

On my way to the meeting, I had passed the Rolls Royce and my hopes for Cambodia had sunk. I remembered how history books had stated that one of the precursors to the tyranny of the Khmer Rouge era was a gulf that had grown between the rich and the poor, rampant corruption in the government of that time and students who were disillusioned about abut their future in a war torn region.

Some of these precursors still thrive in Cambodia. Yet, I had a glimmer of hope for Cambodia’s future when sitting on the floor with these youth. They had gone beyond the barriers of satisfying their own needs and reached high for altruism. They not only saw themselves as Cambodian citizens but citizens of the world.

I wished them to be rich and instead of spending their wealth on demonstrations of opulent wealth like buying a Rolls Royce or Bentley, they would continue their quest as global citizens and give back to the world what the world has given to them. We all need heroes in our lives, people who we look up to and show us a more positive vision of the future. On that day, these students were my heroes in one of the poorest countries in the world.

- Kurt A.  MacLeod is Vice President for Pact, Asia Eurasia. This article is courtesy of the writer

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Comment

Gods go hungry

The Phnom Penh Post, Friday, 27 June 2008

couple of nights ago, I had a nightmare that my house was on fire and everything was burned to ashes. I woke up in the middle of the night and told my wife my strange dream.

Deemed a bad omen for the family, my wife spontaneously warned me not to forget to light three incense sticks and throw away a handful of rice in the morning. As believed by many Cambodians, people think that this practice will get rid of bad luck after a nightmare.

With a lackadaisical belief in superstitions, I told my wife that I was not going to throw away more rice just because of a nightmare anymore.

“What if we all have nightmares everyday, how much expensive rice will be wasted?” I asked.

In fact, other Cambodians have also experienced a similar dilemma as to how much food they should offer to appease the ghosts or do merit making to please the gods.

In Cambodia, people observe several festivals and ceremonies such as the Khmer New Year, Bon Phchum Ben for spirits of the dead, merit-making Kathin processions, fundraising Bon Phkar, and numerous other traditional and religious activities throughout the year.

During these occasions, the people would offer money and meals to the monks and offer food to the spirits so that the dead can be born in a happy world and the living can be blessed with happiness and prosperity in return.

However, the rising food price has greatly affected these traditional and religious practices. Monks at various monasteries throughout the country have also received less food offered by followers who can not afford to buy as much good food they used to do before.

During the recent grave raising ceremony, many Cambodians of Chinese ancestry also reduced the size of roast pigs and the number of boiled chickens they offered to the spirits due to the rising food price.

Because of the high food costs, many people have cut short their old practices or abandoned some of them altogether.

In the case of my nightmare, I decided to revise old people’s advice to young children in dealing with an unpleasant dream.

They told us to make a plea when we were dropping the calling card by saying: “Oh s**t, please take away my nightmare and bad luck with you!”

Of course, there was no answer. But I would take it as a yes with a nod in response.

Moeun Chhean Nariddh
Phnom Penh

Comment

The Phnom Penh Post

30 May 2008

Cycle your way to cheaper living

by Moeun Chhean Nariddh

s the price of gasoline is skyrocketing, many Cambodians have thought about ways to cut the cost of travel by using other alternative means of transport.

I have personally decided to cycle to work a few times a week. In so doing, I am able to save some money I would spend on gasoline to cover the rising price of food.

Walking or riding a bicycle is also good for health. 

Nowadays, we frequently hear news of friends suddenly falling sick or dying from obesity-related illnesses like high blood pressure and heart attacks.

By riding a bicycle to work, I feel better and I don’t need the painful traditional coining Kos Kchol for occasional indispositions like before.

Riding a bicycle is also good for the environment in this increasingly polluted capital of Phnom Penh as it does not produce toxic emission like cars and motorcycles. Meanwhile, using bicycles also helps reduce traffic congestion.

However, cycling in Phnom Penh these days can also have bad consequences. Back in the 1980s, possessing a bicycle was like owning a luxury car for most Cambodians, so the cyclists also received a lot of respect from others. Because of this mutual respect, I was able to ride my bicycle to school without a single accident for nearly ten years.

Now things have changed. Except for foreigners, riding a bicycle in Cambodia today is considered a sign of low social status by many Cambodians.

Some car or motorcycle drivers would wildly honk their horns along a busy street to disperse cyclists and pedestrians as if they were cows blocking their way.

Worse still, pedestrians and cyclists can hardly find a safe road to travel on.

More than 15 years ago, Phnom Penh streets were clearly divided into appropriate lanes for cars, motorcycles and bicycles, while pedestrians traveled on the sidewalks.

Now, cyclists have to be squashed between cars and motorcycles or even pushed onto the sidewalk with pedestrians who also find it harder to walk. Except for a few boulevards, most sidewalks in Phnom Penh are now used as a parking place or to display goods for sale.

Nevertheless, walking or cycling is still a good way to move around the city.

To help reduce expenditure on gasoline and save the environment, the government should encourage people to walk or ride a bicycle in the city instead of driving their cars or motorcycles.

They also need to reserve part of the sidewalks for pedestrians and secure a safe lane for cyclists.

Government officials and civil servants can also take the lead by walking or cycling to work, while strictly strengthening the traffic rules.

Dith Pran, survivor of Cambodian horror, faces cancer with serenity

BY JUDY PEET Star-Ledger Staff (New Jersey, USA), Wednesday, March 19, 2008

The world knows him as a powerful voice for the ghosts of the Cambodian Killing Fields, but Dith Pran speaks barely above a whisper now.

The man who survived starvation, torture and Pol Pot’s murderous children’s brigade is now fighting a new war from a hospital bed in New Jersey. This time the enemy is even more relentless: pancreatic cancer.

Friends and family say that if anyone can win this battle, it is Pran, 65, once described as a survivor “in the Darwinian sense,” whose story was the basis for the Academy Award-winning 1984 movie, “The Killing Fields.”

Pran, who lives in Woodbridge, says he intends to beat the odds, but ultimately, “this is my path and I must go where it takes me.”

“We have already forced the enemy into the suburbs,” Pran joked of his cancer last week as he rallied after finishing a round of radiation therapy. “Food, medicine and meditation are good soldiers, and I am ready to fight.”

The healthy, round-faced man who danced at his son’s wedding just last fall is now a gaunt 118 pounds. The only time in his adult life that he weighed less was when he staggered out of the jungle on the Thai border in 1979, malnourished, covered in scars and suffering from malaria.

But with typical Pran grace, he refuses to despair about his medical odds — “I know how to recover from adversity.” He plans to use his condition as a platform to campaign for early cancer screening. It is also a time to reflect on an extraordinary life well lived.

“You or I could never have survived what Pran has. And he is still one of the nicest people I ever met,” said former New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg, 74, who insisted on sharing his 1976 Pulitzer Prize for covering the war in Cambodia with his translator, assistant and friend, Dith Pran.

“Pran saved my life, nearly at the cost of his,” Schanberg added, as he bustled around Pran’s hospital room, talking to staff, taking notes, reading messages from the legion of friends Pran has acquired in his 30-year photojournalism career. “There are no words to say what Pran means to me.”

It is a poignant reversal from a time Pran took care of Schanberg. It was April 1975, in Cambodia, five years into civil war.

The capital, Phnom Penh, was surrounded by the Khmer Rouge, the Chinese-supported Communist insurgents. Most of the Americans had already left, but Schanberg, the Times correspondent, decided to stay and witness the city’s fall.

Schanberg offered safe passage out to Pran, his wife and four children. Pran sent his family out on an American helicopter, but stayed behind to help his friend. According to Schanberg’s 1980 account, “The Death and Life of Dith Pran,” he and a handful of other journalists were arrested almost immediately and would have been killed if Pran had not intervened on their behalf.

He saved their lives, but was targeted by the Khmer Rouge, about to launch “the agrarian reform,” which became a holocaust.

Schanberg and the other journalists were eventually granted safe passage to Thailand. Pran was forced into the Cambodian countryside, where he spent more than four years in conditions that destroyed more than 1.5 million people — nearly a third of his country’s inhabitants.

They were killed because they were connected to the former government, because they were intellectuals, or doctors or lawyers or teachers. People were killed by the Khmer Rouge because they wore glasses, held hands, gave rice to their dying children, or just because.

Those who didn’t die were worked in labor camps 16 hours a day, planting rice that was given to China or hand-building dams and roads.

Those who didn’t die from overwork and malnutrition were plagued by disease, poisonous insects and infection.

It was in this environment that Pran lived by hiding his intelligence, education and his strength. He withstood beatings and torture, disease and malnutrition. Fifty other members of his family, including, his father, three brothers, sister, nieces and nephews, did not survive.

But survival came at a huge cost, one that Pran thinks may now have come due.

“I ate bugs and even more disgusting things. I drank dirty water; who knows what kind of poisons were in it from all the (American) bombs? Maybe that is why the cancer comes, 30 years later,” he says with a small, philosophical shrug.

Pran says he is not a religious man, but he has a Buddhist sense of destiny. “It was right for me to stay behind for Sydney, even if it means I am on this path now,” he says with quiet dignity. “I want to save lives, including my own, but Cambodians believe we just rent this body.

“It is just a house for the spirit, and if the house is full of termites, it is time to leave.”

Before locking the door, however, there is still cleanup to be done, Pran says. There are understandings to be reached with his first wife, Meoun, who brings him rice noodles every day, and his close friend of many years, Bette Parslow, who brings his little white dog, Gabby, to sit on his bed.

The women respect each other’s place in Pran’s life. Meoun, whose marriage to Pran was arranged when she was 16 years old, has been divorced from him for several years, “but a husband is like a kite. You let the string loose, but you never let go,” she says.

She puts out pictures of their children, one of which is the family Red Cross passport photo when they escaped Phnom Penh in 1975. “I can still remember him standing there as we went to the helicopter. I didn’t see him for four years, and when he came back, the nightmares were so bad.”

She gently touches Pran’s face, then tidies up the room. She pulls out get-well wishes from journalists around the world, acknowledging the contribution of this legendary humanitarian and photographer who has worked for the New York Times since 1980.

More visitors arrive with cameras. They are planning a documentary to be shot in his hospital room. It could be blended with footage of his exhaustive campaigning on behalf of Cambodian genocide victims and refugees, his 1989 Ellis Island Medal of Honor and his 1985 appointment as goodwill ambassador to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

There are visits with his children, grandchildren and dozens of colleagues who ignore hospital rules and wander in constantly. They are, after all, media.

There is the determination to use his late-life celebrity to help raise awareness about the “sneaky” ravages of pancreatic cancer, the same disease faced by actor Patrick Swayze and which claimed the lives of Michael Landon and Luciano Pavarotti.

“I thought because I didn’t drink, smoke or do drugs that I was safe. But I ignored signs (weight loss, abdominal pains) until it was too late,” Pran says. “I hope people learn from me and insist that your doctor test for cancer. Do it every six months.

“I am not afraid to die, but I hate to see a life wasted.”

Ironically, Pran’s illness was diagnosed on the eve of war crimes trials for the top surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge — Pol Pot died of a heart attack in 1998 — but he says it no longer matters. “It was all political, the same way America dropping bombs on Cambodia was political.

“It doesn’t matter if death came from bombs or torture,” Pran said. “What matters is that we remember and we keep talking and maybe some day we will mean it when we say about a holocaust: ‘never again.’”

In 1989, Pran returned to Cambodia with a human rights commission. While there, he went back to his birthplace near Angkor Wat to finally inter the ashes of his parents, the only members of his family whose remains he could find after the war.

At the end of the Buddhist ceremony, the monks released a small turtle.

Recounting the ceremony in a Times article, Pran said: “By giving freedom to another living creature we gain merit and release from suffering, for ourselves or for the people we love, in the life to come.”

- Reprinted with permission from the author

Judy Peet may be reached at jpeet@starledger.com or (973) 392-5983 .

Comment

A Bassac Theater tale

It was 25 years ago in 1982 when I and my schoolmates were lucky enough to come to the Bassac Theater at the river front south of the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh and see the early traditional arts performances after the Khmer Rouge regime collapsed.

Though we had little knowledge or feeling of a national pride as teenagers, we were proud enough to see the impressive theatre and its marvelous beauty. Surrounded by a spacious garden of blooming frangipani and other flowers, the theater was really a good place to relax and enjoy oneself. Below the staircase leading to the upper floor, we watched golden and silver fish swimming in a pool and dancing to the music inside the auditorium.

The Bassac Theater’s auditorium gutted by fire and excavators knocking down down the theater. (Photos: M.C.Nariddh)

As we looked at the Bassac River through the eastern windows, we felt like we were riding on a cruise ship across the sea when the Naga Casino, the new National Assembly and other buildings were nowhere to be seen.

Before the drama began, we mischievously flipped the chairs back and forth and felt the smoothness of their dark red velvet covers. We shouted to the tall roof and waited to hear the echo bouncing back.

No sooner had we played than the lights were turned off and many of us were startled by the beating of drums as the curtains were opened and revealed a group of gracious dancers in front of us.

After about two hours, the arts performances came to an end. While we were returning home, my feeling was still attached to the majestic theater. Over the years, I had returned to see more dramas and performances until the theater was gutted by a fire in 1994 during its unfinished renovation.

Following unsuccessful efforts by its renowned designer, architect Vann Molyvann, and other art lovers to save the theater, this national cultural symbol was swapped with a new substandard building by a private company under a shady deal with the government.

After it fell into the hands of a Chinese-Cambodian business tycoon, the Bassac Theater, which was originally named Preah Suramarit National Theater, didn’t stand long.

On December 27, the destruction started. A group of workers were hired to do the dirty work of knocking down the theater. When the sound of the first excavator started striking the front part of the theater, a security guard from the National Assembly rushed to the corner to show his sympathy to the theater while our lawmakers were busy finishing their unfinished jobs before the year-end.

On the fifth day, the lonely excavator was backed up by another yellow dinosaur of the same size to help pull down the theater. Three days later, the third excavator moved in to reinforce the existing machinery and the workers in the battle with the old but strong theater.

Under the siege of the three powerful excavators and about a dozen workers armed with hammers and welding devices, the theater was forced to surrender. The battle was over.

The theater that cost multi million dollars and took years to build was reduced to rubble in a few days, joining the fate of the shanty houses of squatters at neighboring Dey Krahorm and Sombok Chab to the south.

Now that the Bassac Theater was demolished and many other old state properties sold or swapped, many people were left wondering: Which buildings or national landmarks will become the next victims of the war of land grabs and fearsome development in Cambodia?

Moeun Chhean Nariddh
Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh Post, Issue 17 / 01, January 11 – 23, 2008
© Michael Hayes, 2008. All rights revert to authors and artists on publication.
For permission to publish any part of this publication, contact Michael Hayes, Editor-in-Chief
http://www.PhnomPenhPost.com – Any comments on the website to Webmaster

Mud houses give shelter
to Svay Rieng’s poor

By Moeun Chhean Nariddh

            Banteay Kraing, Svay Rieng: In 1936, Pailin’s heart of love was revealed when Cambodian writer Nhok Them published his novel The Rose of Pailin that tells the story of two lovers: Chao Cheth and Khun Neary.

In the then gem-rich town on the Thai border, an impoverished young man, Chao Cheth, was lucky enough to marry Khun Neary, the daughter of a millionaire, despite the fact that they were from different social classes.

Five hundred kilometers away on the Vietnamese border, the residents of Banteay Kraing village say Chao Cheth would not have been so lucky had he been born here. His advances might well have been rejected had he lived in a mud house and wanted to marry a girl from a large wooden house with a tiled roof.
Chao Cheth would not be the only person living in a mud house in the area. The villagers say more than half of the 600 families in Banteay Kraing commune have built their houses from that material. Not that mud is their first choice when it comes to building materials, explains 26-year-old villager Pov Theary.

Theary says the reason people build their houses from mud is because they cannot afford to buy wood, which has become increasingly expensive. Theary and her 24-year-old husband, Pov Kong, have just completed their house, a structure of five-by-four meters that stands on nine wooden columns, a meter off the ground.

Although they collected the mud from behind their house, Theary spent around one million riel (about 250 dollars) six years ago just to buy the columns, bamboo floor and wall frame, and the iron-sheet roof. Today, she says, she would have to pay twice that.

Construction materials aside, the villagers usually build their houses by themselves with help from local carpenters who ask for not much more than their daily meals. Pov Kong says the four people he hired, who worked as both carpenters and masons, took only two weeks to build their house using simple, traditional methods.

The first stage involves putting up the structure of the house, preparing the bamboo floor and nailing up bamboo bars for wall supports. After that, the messy work of building the mud walls begins.

The villagers simply dig up the sticky mud around the house, sprinkle it with hay in a shallow pit, then trample the materials together until the mud and the hay mix. A buffalo helps to speed up that process.

“You can also mix the mud with cow or buffalo dung to turn the color gray,” explains Kong, his feet bogged down in the mud. “The dung works like cement to prevent cracks.”

If the job is done properly, the walls should last ten years. Kong advises would be mud house builders to wait five days for the walls to dry completely before moving in. By then, the smell of the cow dung is gone, “[otherwise] you have to cover your nose when you sleep”.

From a distance, the gray mud walls convey a different impression to strangers. The villagers tell the story of some UNTAC personnel who came here in 1993 and thought the mud houses were built with cement.

“They said Khmer people are poor, but they all live in concrete houses,” Kong jokes of those foreigners on their first viewing.

And while people in other provinces tend to live in huts of thatch or straw, the needy folks in Svay Rieng say the benefits of mud are numerous.

“Straw houses can catch fire easily,” says Kong, “and if there is a strong wind, they can be blown away.”

Not that mud houses are entirely safe: locals tell of a poorly built hut that collapsed, injuring a 12-year-old boy who was trapped inside. To avoid such dangers and improve their social standing with the wealthier villagers, Theary and her husband plan to improve their home one day.

“If I have money in the future, I will remove the mud walls and replace them with wooden planks,” says Theary.

But that could take years – across the country, wood is getting scarcer and costing more. Theary says it would cost 600 dollars to replace the mud walls with wood, an astronomical amount after two successive years of floods and drought which destroyed their crops and interrupted their farming.

The villagers say the government is partly to blame for the floods, drought, and the wood shortage – it cut and exported much of the area’s timber, which made it too expensive. They want the government to lower the price to allow those who live in mud houses to build wooden structures instead.

But a forestry official in the province cites a different reason for both the wood shortage and the decision to use mud. Chan Tak, who heads Svay Rieng’s forestry office, says 40 percent of the province’s population of 500,000 live in mud houses. Tak attributes the scarceness of forests in the province as one of the main factors behind the inability to find local, cheap wood.

Among Svay Rieng’s seven districts, he said, only Romeas Hek still has 200,000 hectares of forests. That is around half the size in the 1970s.

“For 100 years people [in other districts] have been born without seeing forest,” he explains.

Tak says the forests in Romeas Hek were cut during the Khmer Rouge period to build collective dining halls. After 1979, local farmers used slash-and-burn methods to clear land for farming.

And people in some districts, particularly Svay Chrom, cannot even find wood for cooking, let alone for building. Instead they burn dried cow dung to prepare their food.

The forestry chief says another reason for the prevalence of mud houses stems from the 1960s and 1970s. American bombing during the Vietnam War spilled over into Cambodia, and in the subsequent civil war most wooden houses in border villages were burned down. That was a mistake, he says, the villagers don’t want to repeat.

“If they build mud houses, they won’t feel [much] regret if they have to run away again,” he says, pointing to Chantrea district on the border where almost 90 percent of the houses are built from mud.

What is clear is that mud houses are not something new in Svay Rieng. Seventy-seven-year-old Chin Suon from Banteay Kraing village recalls mud houses as being among his earliest memories.

Suon says the first mud houses were built on the ground and called ‘Ptaeh Tiem’. After that people used mud to build ‘Ptaeh Rong Daol’, a house with pillars to raise it off the ground. Then, he says, came ‘Ptaeh Pet’ with a longer roof-end, before they built another similar type of house called ‘Ptaeh Kantaing’.

The village elder says that although people built their houses from mud, they would still organize religious ceremonies and invite the monks to bless them, much like those living in wooden and brick houses. But there is a social difference.

“It’s a division between the rich and the poor,” said Suon’s 72-year-old neighbor, Neth Heang.

And while many Phnom Penh residents still distinguish between city and country folks, the villagers in Svay Rieng say discrimination exists here between those who live in mud houses and those who stay in tiled-roof, wooden houses, especially when it comes to love affairs.

“If the son and daughter of a rich and a poor family love each other, their parents won’t let them marry,” says 56-year-old Kim Uon as she gazes at a tall, wooden house across the street in Kampong Ro’s Russei Leap commune. The young lovers of Svay Rieng clearly have some way to go before they can emulate the literary bliss of Chao Cheth and Khun Neary.
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Phnom Penh Post, Issue 12/10, May 9 – 22, 2003
© Michael Hayes, 2003. All rights revert to authors and artists on publication.
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