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A quick update on news items from Cambodia …
The Viet Nam News
Agency reports a joint campaign between Viet Nam and Cambodia to crack down on human trafficking operations is to begin in July.
Head of the Cambodian Interior Ministry delegation, Un Sokhunthea, expressed her determination to work closely with Viet Nam in order to tighten control over the trafficking of Vietnamese women and children across the border and inside Cambodian territory.
According to the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security, trafficking of women and children abroad had become increasingly complicated and more difficult to control.
Thousands of victims, mostly in the southern provinces of An Giang, Tay Ninh, Dong Thap, Kien Giang and Tien Giang, were sold to Cambodia, where they were delivered to third countries.
This has, by the way, nothing to do with international adoptions, but is addressing issues of trafficking for the sex trade and cheap labor, a market with even more ‘product’ when adoptions can’t happen.
With tragic history in Cambodia still very recent, an attempt at healing took place over the weekend near Phnom Penh.
The annual “Day of Anger” was was acknowledged at the Choeung Ek Killing Fields … a gruesome site that holds testament to the almost two million Cambodians who died during the years of the Khmer Rouge genocide … with about one thousand Cambodian survivors and their families attending. In addition to other activities of remembrance, thirty black-clad students staged a performance, reenacting the horrors as they mimed executions and torture.
Hopes are running high at this year’s commemoration that justice will finally be on its way.
Cambodia and the United Nations, after many years of bickering, agreed in 2003 to jointly establish a tribunal to try the remaining leaders.
The effort gained momentum after the appointment of 30 Cambodian and international jurists early this month to oversee the trials, which may start next year.
“It lifted my spirit when I heard the news that the trial process would begin soon,” Chea Yada, 48, said with tears in her eyes. She said she lost about 30 relatives, adding that she would like to see the tribunal “mete out the heaviest punishment possible to the Khmer Rouge leaders.”
And speaking of about time …
A wife of the Hindu god Shiva, decapitated in Cambodia in the 15th century, finally has her head back, after it was discovered 500 years later on the other side of the world.
A Paris museum dedicated to Asia, the Musée Guimet, is celebrating the implausible chain of events that reunited a divided masterpiece of ninth-century Cambodian art.
The headless body of a wife of the Hindu god of destruction and renewal was found by French archaeologists near the shattered temple of Bakong, amid the celebrated Angkor ruins, in 1935. The statue has been exhibited since 1938 at the Musée Guimet in the Place d’Iéna in Paris, which has the finest collection of ancient Khmer artefacts outside Cambodia.
Last autumn, the museum held an exhibition on Vietnamese art which paid tribute in its catalogue to a retired American diplomat, John Gunther Dean. The catalogue recounted Mr Dean’s efforts, as ambassador to Cambodia in the early 1970s, to rescue ancient Khmer art from the ravages of the Khmer Rouge, which was determined to expunge all record of Cambodia’s past.
To thank the museum, Mr Dean, now 80, offered a gift from his own collection of ancient Khmer artefacts. Last month, the gift arrived, the sculpted head of a woman found at the Bakong temple site in 1939.
“I asked him for a Khmer head because we only had headless statues but I didn’t think for a moment about a possible match,” said Pierre Baptiste, the museum’s curator for south-east Asian art.
“I brought the head into our [Cambodian] hall looking for a place that it could be exhibited,” said M. Baptiste. “I had a sudden notion the two pieces resembled each other but then thought, ‘no, things never happen that way’.
“I put the head on the statue’s shoulders. It shifted a few millimetres. I heard the little click that you get when two stones fit together and the head fell perfectly into place. It was as if it had put itself together. I still get goose-bumps thinking about it.”
The reformed statue, which is 4ft 10in high, was beheaded in the temple when it was destroyed in the 15th century.
Now, isn’t that nice?
