Counter demonstration in Phnom Penh

We agreed on 1,500 riel for the journey. That's about US 40 cents. I could have walked; the Wat Preah Keo was only about 1.5 km away, but the sun was already burning hot, so I decided to take the easy way out and get a motorbike taxi.

He was as surprised as I was when we approached the centre of the Phnom Penh, to see it barricaded by police. It wasn't cordoned off yesterday, or any day before. He avoided the first roadblock, then the second, then the third. I didn't think he'd ever find an unguarded lane into the palace precinct, and by passing one roadblock after another, he was simply going further and further away from the destination. So I said to the driver, "just ask the police whether he will let us in, don't turn away, just ask."

We stopped at the fourth barricade. The driver spoke to the two policemen in Khmer -- probably telling them that I was only an innocent tourist wanting to see the temple -- while I gave them a big broad smile, then reinforced it by pointing in the direction of the temple, "I want to go to the Wat Preah Keo. Looking and take picture," hoping that by speaking in English, I would convince them that I was a tourist. Then again I could be foreign reporter, in which case, I could be arrested. Hmmm, didn't think of that.

It wasn't too difficult convincing them, and they waved us through. Whereupon I asked myself: What exactly have I got myself into now? What's going on inside here that is blocked off to all locals? Am I all that smart to worm myself into this zone?

The sanitised zone encompassed about 6-8 blocks of the city comprising the Royal Palace, government buildings, the National Museum, the National Assembly building, the Wat Preah Keo, and some shops and townhouses tucked among them. The Wat is a Buddhist temple, housing an emerald Buddha, the symbol of the nation's sovereignty. Like Wat Pra Keo's in Thailand and Laos, I expected this one to be richly decorated, being the supreme political temple of the country. My guidebook said its floor tiles were made of pure silver.

50 metres into the barricaded zone, one could feel the difference. The bustle of the city was muted. Shops were closed. The streets were free of vehicles. There were no pedestrians about. Instead, there were riot police in twos and threes lounging under the shade of trees. They seemed bored.

We turned the corner into Samdech Sothearos Boulevard, expecting a smooth ride to the entrance to Wat Preah Keo, just 100 metres away. But whoa, there was a large convoy of grey and green trucks all lined up on the Boulevard. Each truck had 30-40 men in them, holding placards. They trucks were stationary; they were probably just getting organised.

My driver turned to ask me, "You want to go?" meaning "You still want to go?"

I looked at the trucks and the men in them and came to the conclusion it would be perfectly safe to carry on. "Yes, of course," I told my driver, so he squeezed me through the convoy and dropped me off at the entrance to the Wat, under the overbearing side of a truck. The men in the truck looked at me, half-curious what I was up to. I looked up and smiled at them, knowing full well what they were up to.

They were all weatherbeaten men mostly in their thirties or forties. Nearly everyone had the pink-chequered scarf, so typical of farmers in Cambodia, a scarf that doubles up as towel to wipe off sweat and as a headcover to keep out the sun. They stood docilely in their assigned trucks holding placards that looked too mass-manufactured to have been their handiwork. These were not city sophisticates, these were country folk from outside Phnom Penh. Maybe they weren't even literate -- did they know what their placards said? I doubted if they had any political views at all. Most people who spontaneously participate in demonstrations tend to be in their twenties. These guys had clearly been brought in to participate in today's pro-government demonstration. I wondered how much they were being paid for a day's work.

It was going to be a thoroughly orchestrated affair. I mean, they even cordoned off a district for them! But it was going to be a big affair. I counted over 40 trucks in a long line, before the tail of the convoy disappeared around a bend in the road. With 30-40 persons per truck, they've paid well over a thousand farmers to come enjoy a day in the capital..

The outer gate of the Wat Preah Keo was closed and the six people huddling behind it, the curator, ticket attendants and courtyard sweepers, were amazed to see that they were really going to have a visitor today. They unlocked the gate to let me through, then had to look for the ticket book in order to sell me one miserable ticket. They had obviously assumed that no one would be visiting the Wat today, so they hadn't bothered to get things ready.

Five steps into the complex and you're enveloped by serenity. Buddhist temples are designed to do that. They have thick concentric walls to keep the world out, and in the inner compound, with its pavilions, stupa, statues and bas-relief carvings, you're in a different world. Or rather, you're supposed to be in a different world. Most places are now so overrun by tourists, there is little chance of getting that feeling, but not here, not today.

I was the only person in the entire inner complex. Can you imagine that? The gardens with their chirping birds, the courtyards slowly getting baked by the 9 a.m. sun, the pavilions softer with their cool shade, the galleries with endless murals depicting the life of the Buddha, the central temple with the silver tiles, they were for me to wander about at will. I had free rein over its jade, gold, silver, rubies and emeralds. There was not even a sweeper at work. He was at the front gate watching the proceedings nervously. I walked, sat, listened and thought: few people would have this experience. The whole Wat Preah Keo of Cambodia was my private domain today.

Not for long.

From outside, the loudspeakers started up. The truck engines sputtered to life. It sounded as if every truck had at least 2 loudhailers, and no effort was made to co-ordinate their shouting. It screamed over the walls and echoed around the galleries. I cursed a little, and then tried to look on the bright side: here was a once-in-a-lifetime surreal experience to be savoured. I sat down on a parapet and tried to take it in. You couldn't see the demonstration from inside, but you could hear them all too well. So here I was, sitting quietly in a courtyard of visual peace, enjoying the repose, amidst a torrent of amplified vulgarities.

The convoy was moving now. You could hear the cacophony pass, but they didn't really move away. The sound would fade a bit and then come back to full volume. They seemed to be circling the area. They were blasting their pro-government rhetoric into the Royal Palace (the king wasn't even in residence), the Royal temples, and government buildings. Who they were trying to convince, in a precinct cleared of passers-by by the police barricades, was a strangely unanswered question.

After an hour of that, I had enough. My memory of the Wat Preah Keo would always be one of sublime solitude accompanied by deafening demands. I made my way out, and saw the moving convoy go past the gate. The scene was exactly as I had earlier pictured it in my mind's eye. Two or three energetic characters in each truck were shouting into their loudhailers. All the other farmers were standing expressionless on the flatbed of the truck, bored to hell. The trucks drove slowly in single file round and round the block, guided by road marshalls. They didn't seem needed, really. There was no one else on the streets they could possibly run over.

I left the "zone" to get some lunch. Then at about 2 p.m., I decided to visit the National Museum, which I knew was back within the zone. I walked there this time, using the same entry point as this morning. The policemen at the roadblock recognised me -- ah, our crazy tourist come back again -- and just waved me through. I never felt safer.

The museum faced 13th Street. But 13th Street was chock-a-block with parked trucks. They had obviously broken off for lunch and a siesta. The midday heat was beating down, and the trucks were not so much parked, but dead where the heat felled them, facing this way and that.The farmers were lying around in whatever little shade they could find, under a dwarf tree, under a truck, under cardboard, dozing off in the afternoon heat. It looked like a battleground with knocked-out vehicles and dead men sprawled about. They had lost the battle not against the enemy, who never appeared, but against dreary monotony, relentless heat and a heavy lunch. The ground was littered with identical syrofoam boxes and half-finished food. Lunch had obviously been provided as part of the deal. The rats were going to have a feast tonight with so much food thrown onto the ground.

I picked my way through the bodies to the front gate of the museum. It was padlocked. I clanged the gate. A face appeared in a window 20 metres beyond. It was too hot for her to come out into the garden. "Can you open the museum for me?" the crazy tourist asked. She lifted her hand to indicate, wait, wait, I'm coming. She disappeared for a while. I waited, but she didn't come. I clanged the gate again. The farmers began to stir and watch me, wondering if this tourist might just prove more interesting than the riding around in trucks. She appeared again. Wait, wait, her hand said. "You're supposed to be open," I hollered to her across the grass. Hand repeated wait, wait.

A little while later, she came out of a huge timber door onto the porch and with some hand signals -- I couldn't hear her -- tried to indicate that she couldn't find the guy with the keys to the front gate. But I could go around the back and come in through the rear gate. So, followed my many farmers' eyes, I walked along the fence to the back. I pushed open the rear gate, so rusted and collapsing, it would keep no one out, and walked through the large back garden, passing a man taking a shower from a garden hose under a tree, his loincloth so thin and wet, you could see everything underneath. Was he the museum director?

She met me on the porch, and led me in through the heavy timber door. "This is the side door, the restoration area," she explained. "We have no key to the front gate and front door."

"That's fine with me," I said, quite glad to see a side of the museum few others would get to see. And boy was it an eye-opener. The restoration workshop was a jumble of sculpture fragments, broken chairs, work tables thick with dust, and a few well-worn tools, all thrown together in no particular order. Above, the ceiling beams were powdery grey from decades of dust and cobwebs. You could make a vampire movie in here. I didn't believe any restoration work took place in here at all. The place itself needed restoration.

I was led through some passageways and then to the front hall of the museum. I paid my US$2 admission (the only sale they had that afternoon), and for the next two hours, had the whole museum to myself. Four or five members of the staff sat rooted before a TV soap opera in the corner of the front hall, while a young man sort of followed me around, fortunately not too closely. It was probably his job to make sure I didn't steal any pieces.

It was quite a remarkable museum, despite the unswept floor, peeling paint and steamy humidity. It had hundreds of wonderful statues, thousand years old or more, of Shiva, Krishna, Lokesvara, the Buddha, King Jayavarman VII, and so on. It was fascinating to see the evolving styles and subject matter. And I thought I was very fortunate to have the whole place to myself; I could go back and forth to compare various pieces.

Then three o-clock sharp, and the noise started up again. The same loudhailers, the same slogans, the same driving round and round the block. The noise came into the museum courtyard and reverberated through its side galleries. The bats in the attic above were woken up, and got all flustered by the upset to their biological clock. As for me, I was getting used to it all, and was able to ignore it while looking at the sculptures. I didn't even notice when it finally died down for the day. By the time I came out of the museum -- the soap opera was over and the staff were so glad they could finally close up and go home -- the convoy had gone. The hundreds and hundreds of syrofoam boxes silently oozing curry onto the grass were all that was left to show for it: that big farce of a pro-government demonstration, shouting at empty buildings, driving in circles within a carefully cordoned-off area. What a waste of time and resources.

After the museum, I went off somewhere else. It wasn't until sundown, about 6 p.m, before I made my way back to Preah Sihanouk Boulevard and my hotel. And then I saw a different reality. There were roadblocks on the side streets leading into the Boulevard, not perfunctory somnolent things this time, but serious, alert checkpoints, and police were questioning everyone who walked past. Shopkeepers and residents were milling around waiting to see who would be arrested. At one intersection, there was an ambulance, which meant that there had been casualties.

"What happened?" I asked the young man next to me, who looked like he could understand English.

"The opposition suddenly came out on their motorcycles, and threw rocks at the government people."

The protesters were very mobile compared to the government's farmers. They were usually motorbike-mounted, and indistinguishable from ordinary folks going to work or going home. But they had organisers among them, who could call a few hundred of them out at short notice. They would appear suddenly out of the maze of side streets like guerrillas, and this time, according to this young man beside me, they reportedly targetted the farmers just as they were disassembling. The riot police had to be called in to save the poor farmers, and the whole thing disintegrated into running battles. Having said that, the clerk at my hotel had a different version. He said the farmers were not involved. The protesters targetted the riot police directly. I don't know which version was accurate.

Still, my point is this: it had been a day of farce, but farce can end in fury.

It is hard to find a rational answer to the question: what purpose was served by the government's counter-demonstration? It certainly wasn't constructive. I guess it was meant as a form of intimidation, a flex-the-muscles reply to a week of spontaneous opposition rallies, one of which had an estimated 10,000 protesters marching down Monivong Boulevard. I was in Phnom Penh that day, but not around the area, so I didn't see it.

Why does a government need to prove that it too can call out its supporters? What would that achieve? It already has the police, the troops, the media, the laws, and any number of extra-legal powers it cared to invent, to deal with dissent. This kind of response -- orchestrating a counter-demonstration -- only betrays an emotional and inexperienced government, not thinking through its actions. It's a stone-age response to a challenge. "Look here, my club is bigger than your club", which simply risks spiralling downwards into uncontrolled clobbering. No attempt is made to engage with the opposite side on the issues.

It is even more ridiculous when the counter-demonstration is as obviously purchased or induced as this one, trucking in country-folk, providing transport, loudhailers, placards and lunch. And a cordoned-off area. Who was going to be convinced by this show of "strength"?

Then again, maybe that's not the point. Perhaps people were never expected to believe it was spontaneous. People were simply expected to see that the government was prepared to be brutally thuggish, that it would trade blow for blow, it would do anything to get its way.

This kind of orchestrated pro-government demonstration happens all the time in Southeast Asia. I was in Rangoon some time back, when the government held a rally to demonstrate the people's support for it, against the claims of Aung San Suu Kyi's popularity. Tens of thousands were reported to have attended. By coincidence, the government ministries were down to skeleton staff that afternoon.

Now Mahathir's UMNO party is planning to call a rally of 150,000 supporters in Kuala Lumpur, to demonstrate popular support for his government, in the face of the Anwar affair. How do they know in advance there would be 150,000 turning up?

Are such pro-government demonstrations a solution to anything? Only goons may think so. There are too many goons in government.

© Yawning Bread 

Footnotes

None

Addenda

None