(Photo: A monk at the Preah Vihear temple. 7 November 2008. By Isabelle Roughol)

By Isabelle Roughol and Rann Reuy

The Supreme Sangha Council will request of the government that the rock opera “Where Elephants Weep” never again be allowed to be seen in any form in Cambodia, or anywhere else in the world, Supreme Patriarch Non Nget said.

The musical is disrespectful to Buddhism and therefore it should not again be played on stage or broadcast on television, Non Nget said.

“They cannot use monks’ robes to wear and play like that,” he said in an interview Sunday.

“Monks throughout Cambodia completely oppose any attempt to replay or broadcast this story in Cambodia or in the world,” he said, who saw the musical in its first television broadcast Dec 25 on CTN.

In the musical, monks are seen singing and dancing. A young man who had entered the monkhood for three months disrobes early against his abbot’s advice to be with the woman he loves. He eventually separates from the woman and returns to the monkhood.

A complaint from the council already led to the cancellation of a second CTN broadcast Thursday. The complaint requested an apology to Buddhist monks from the show’s director, writer and performers.

Venerable Sao Chanthol, high adviser of the council, said the council would also write to the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications asking that the show’s Web site be blocked.

Though the site is hosted in the US, Minister of Post and Telecommunications So Khun said he would write to Cambodian Internet providers upon receiving the monks’ complaint for them to block the site locally.

Great Supreme Patriarch Tep Vong, however, said he did not take part in the complaint, as he had not seen the show and did not know what in it might offend Buddhist values.

The Buddhist council’s complaint comes at a time when monks themselves have been heavily criticized for a series of scandals involving pornography and alcohol, and even arrests for rape and murder. At an annual Buddhist congress mid-December, Ministry of Cults and Religion Min Khin demanded that monks behave.

“In my opinion, it is monks that first must be worthy of respect,” said Constitutional Council member Son Soubert.

“It is not the opera that doesn’t respect religion, it is those monks, those bad monks.”

Son Soubert said he saw the opera and thought it was spreading a positive message about Buddhism. He added the artists were allowed freedom of expression under the constitution and that the monks had no authority to stop their performances.

Show composer Him Sophy said he had received praises about the show, including from high officials, and was waiting for the government to set up a meeting between him and the Buddhist leaders to settle the issue.

(Photo: Placebo leader Brian Molko sings before the iconic towers of Angkor Wat. 7 December 2008. By Isabelle Roughol)

By Isabelle Roughol

Angkor, Siem Reap province — One thousand had tickets but many more showed up Sunday night in Siem Reap, hoping to get a glimpse and an earful of the first ever rock concert to be held at the ancient temples of Angkor.

The event, organized by MTV and USAID to raise awareness about human trafficking, featured Cambodian and international artists, ending on a 40-minute set by British alternative trio Placebo, arguably the biggest rock band to have ever played in Cambodia.

Before the concert, packed tuk-tuks filed into Angkor National Park while ticket-less music fans were seen begging bouncers to let them in.

“I have lived here three years. I have never seen this…. It’s a major event, you can’t miss it,” said Sabien Lesecq, an expatriate concertgoer who was, like many others, excited to see Placebo perform.

But Cambodian youths seemed more enthusiastic about seeing the American band The Click Five.

“I’m so excited, it’s a big concert in Cambodia,” said Borin You, 20, who was attending his first rock concert.

Messages from the artists, speeches and videos were to be presented between performances and volunteers canvassing the crowd educated the audience on human trafficking issues.

“The fact that you have so many people in one spot at one time is fairly unique in Cambodia. I think that shows the message is getting across,” said Steve Morrish, executive director of SISHA, an anti-trafficking NGO associated with the event.

The goal of the concert is to educate people on how not to get into situations where they could be trafficked, for instance by thoroughly researching offers to work abroad, and to remove the stigma put on victims of trafficking, Morrish said. The Cambodian government has grown more aware and more proactive in fighting human trafficking, but the country’s growing openness to the world also brings in more traffickers and more sex tourists, he added.

The Angkor Wat concert, the third of four in the MTV Exit tour, stands out as the most intimate because the setting of the fragile temples forced organizers to limit the size of the audience.

Around 1,000 free tickets were distributed for the Angkor Wat show to populations vulnerable to human trafficking selected by NGOS and universities, and also via lottery, MTV Exit campaign director Simon Goff said. By contrast, there were in previous concerts 30,000 listeners in Kompong Cham and 10,000 in Sihanoukville. For those who couldn’t make it to the concerts, excerpts will be shown in a 90-minute program to be shown on Bayon TV later this month.

The smaller scale of the show and sacred surroundings inspired the artists to rethink their music.

“I’ve chosen songs that are more appropriate for a temple, so there’s no swearing or anything like that,” said Australian singer Kate Miller-Heidke. She rearranged her usual pop to an acoustic sound, including a surprising cover of Britney Spears’ “Toxic.”

Cambodian artist Pou Khlaing chose not to adapt the volume, but the message to the audience, choosing to emphasize Khmer culture and the empowerment of the Cambodian people. In “Save The Khmer Music,” he pleads for Cambodian musicians to write original music rather than translate foreign hits.

“We have everything. We have our own language, we have our own culture, beautiful Angkor and everything. We don’t use it,” Pou Khlaing said.

But Placebo perhaps put in the most work in picking their setlist, spending hours in the studio to strip their classic songs to the bare bones of melody and reinventing the instrumentation.

“We’ve kind of created a new sound for us specifically for this performance. It may not be repeated. We love noise; we love massive, massive walls of sound, three guitars going crazy. We didn’t think this was going to be appropriate for this,” said Placebo lead singer Brian Molko.

Though Placebo will not be playing, massive walls of sounds will most likely be heard Friday when the tour culminates in front of an expected 50,000-strong crowd at Olympic Stadium in Phnom Penh.

“The Phnom Penh show is a completely different set, completely different show,” said The Click Five drummer Joey Zehr. “I think it’s nice to give two different experiences in Cambodia.”

(Photo: The collapsed inner sanctuary of the Preah Vihear temple at dusk. 7 November 2009. By Isabelle Roughol)

By Isabelle Roughol

Thailand has “categorically” denied responsibility for the damage inflicted to Preah Vihear temple during the Oct 15 military clash with Cambodian troops, saying in a statement that Thai troops did not fire the grenades that chipped a naga statue and a staircase.

Cambodia lodged a complaint last week with Unesco accusing Thai forces of firing M-79 rifle-launched grenades during the fighting, at least two of which landed just a few meters from the temple causing very minor superficial damage to stonework.

Shrapnel recovered from the impact sites showed that the munitions were M-79 shells and the angle of trajectory, Cambodian officials said, proved that they could only have been fired from the Thai frontlines.

“In accordance with strict orders, Thai troops have not used heavy firearms or rocket launchers near the Temple of Pra Viharn and never fired at the Temple,” the Thai Foreign Ministry said in a statement dated Sunday. Phra Viharn is the name Thais use to refer to the Preah Vihear temple.

“Thai soldiers being fired upon by Cambodian troops…used only rifles in self-defense,” the statement added.

Cambodian troops, however, fired rockets that landed within Thailand’s Phra Viharn National Park, injuring two Thai soldiers, the ministry statement claimed, adding Thailand has kept two unexploded Cambodian rockets as evidence.

Thai Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Tharit Charungvat added by telephone Monday that it was Cambodian troops, and not Thai soldiers, who were responsible for endangering the temple.

“I would rather say that it has been the Cambodian side who militarized the Phra Viharn temple, whereby they put hundreds of forces-if not thousands-and heavy artillery around the area, which is against Unesco criteria,” he said.

“[Cambodians] held the Preah Vihear temple as an hostage so to speak,” he added.

Cambodian Council of Ministers spokesman Phay Siphan said Monday that he had grown accustomed to hearing Thailand’s excuses and claims of innocence.

“You see that the Thais [are] on the side to deny everything: they deny deployment of military on Cambodian territory; they deny everything but look at the facts,” Phay Siphan said by telephone.

Cambodian forces had used B-40, B-41 and B-42 rocket-propelled grenades, which are not powerful enough to cause the damage that was inflicted on the temple’s stonework, which, he added, was caused by a Thai M-79 grenade.

“[It's] scratch damage, it’s not heavier damage, but as the Cambodian side, we have to pay attention much because the temple is World Heritage, it belongs to everybody,” Phay Siphan said.

“We have to protect it…. [Thailand] is a signatory, too. They should not fire on [the temple]. They should not try to force armed provocation in that area,” he added.

The chairman of Thailand’s World Heritage Committee, Pongpol Adireksarn, told The Nation newspaper in Bangkok on Monday that he was concerned Cambodia had made a request to UNESCO to name Preah Vihear temple as “a risky area.”

World Heritages Sites listed as endangered can receive additional funding from Unesco, as well as a possible surge in global media attention, according to the World Heritage Center’s Web site.

Sites on the List of World Heritage in Danger include Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Valley, where the Taliban dynamited two giant Buddha statues, and national parks in Congo, where war threatens natural riches.

Giovanni Boccardi, chief of the East Asia and Pacific unit at the World Heritage Center, said earlier in the month that Preah Vihear could be placed on the danger list without a request from the Cambodian government.

“The possible danger listing of Preah Vihear would have to be decided by the World Heritage Committee, based on information provided by the Secretariat and having consulted the State party of Cambodia,” Boccardi said.

“The latter could indeed request such inscription to the Committee, but this is not a precondition,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Tharit Charungvat said that Thailand was ready to prove its innocence in the damage done to the temple.

“It’s up to the Cambodian side, but we are ready to show evidence and give solid explanation to any party” he said.

(Photo: The White Building in Phnom Penh. Designed as a model of modern, middle-income housing by Vann Molyvann in the 1960s, the decrepit building is now the symbol of the country’s urban ruin. 22 August 2008. By Isabelle Roughol.)

By Isabelle Roughol

It’s been two years since Vann Molyvann last stood here. He doesn’t like to see his masterpiece “because of all this,” he says, pointing with an air of disdain to a non-descript concrete box building standing on what should have been the 40-hectare, green grounds around the Olympic stadium. Now that much of the land has been sold off and built on, Vann Molyvann feels his vision for the sports complex, which he built in 1963 and 1964, has been compromised. So he stays away.

Narrating a tour of Phnom Penh organized by the French Cultural Center on Sunday, Vann Molyvann—the figurehead of the New Khmer Architecture movement of the 1960s—expressed deep concern for the state of urban development and the future of the capital.

“I am very worried. Look at the catastrophe that is happening here,” he says looking around the stadium grounds. “It is in danger of disappearing—this stadium,” adding the land there could go for $1000 per square meter.

Asked if he thinks the stadium could be razed to make way for development, he adds, “They are capable of destroying everything.”

Yet , while in the stands overlooking the football field, he points—with the knowing smile of a man who has seen what is now history—to the spot where General Charles de Gaulle made his 1966 Phnom Penh speech. He reminisces about the buffalo carts that carried the earth to build the stadium mount and the shaky introduction of motor vehicles. (A man flipped a construction truck into a pond and had to leap out “like a frog.”)

At every one of his works on the circuit—the Foreign Language Institute, the Olympic stadium, the Chaktomuk Theater and the Senate—he speaks with pride of his creations.

“He is someone who is fascinated and fascinating,” said Alain Arnaudet, director of the French Cultural Center, by telephone Friday. “It is rare to have the chance to bring together in the same place an architect and his work.“

The rarity of the occasion wasn’t lost on many: When the two planned busses quickly filled, Vann Molyvann enthusiasts took to motos and tuk-tuks, forming a motorcade of sorts for the 81-year-old architect.

“Vann Molyvann is my superstar,” said Yam Sok Ly, a 24-year-old architecture student at the Royal University of Fine Arts who found a seat on a bus. “It’s not because he is famous; it’s because of his ideas,” he said, adding he was inspired by Vann Molyvann’s use of natural ventilation and hoped to create “a building that’s really suitable for Cambodia, not a building that’s suitable for air con.”

But in most of the buildings shown, natural ventilations had been cut off with glass windows and open spaces filled up with more construction. At the Foreign Language Institute, for instance, Vann Molyvann had designed science labs with openings in the ceiling to shine natural light on each lab bench. With the room transformed into a language classroom, the architect’s choice now makes little sense.

With humor, Vann Molyvann apologizes for such modifications. He laughs off the destruction of his building for the Presidency of the Council of Ministers—“Here is the New Khmer Architecture,” he said jokingly, pointing to the glass structure of the new, Chinese-made building.

But his smile fades when the conversation invariably returns to the current evolution of the capital.

“Everywhere [in the world] you have parks that are not sacrificed to build Chinese blocks. That doesn’t exist in civilized countries,” he says of the filling of Boeng Kak lake.  “Internationally, there is absolutely no government that expropriates land to serve private interests.”

Things could be different, Vann Molyvann argues. In the doctoral thesis he recently defended at a Paris university and that he is making into a book, Vann Molyvann presents a development plan for Phnom Penh, Siem Reap-Angkor and Sihanoukville that centers on water: irrigation, potable water distribution, flood control and the development of coherent cities around their water points. (Vann Molyvann will present this thesis at a lecture in French and Khmer at 6.30 pm Thursday at the French Cultural Center.)

“We tried, for the city of Phnom Penh in particular, to develop normally with an urban plan…. We thought we were going toward a strong democratization of Cambodia,” he says of the early 1990s, when he returned from exile and helped draft building and zoning codes that could improve and preserve capital. But, “there’s no political will to enforce them.” 

28 June 2006: A British artist unveils his dark vision of Asia in a Phnom Penh exhibit.

The Mystique of the Orient by Nicholas Grey

By Isabelle Roughol

Drawing was always part of Nicolas Grey’s life. When he was just 3 or 4, he said, he would copy his father, an artist too. As he grew up in his native England, he kept drawing in the same comic-like style that is now his mark. His fascination for Asia was a constant, too. Now 39, Grey united his two passions in his show “The Mystique of the Orient and other drawings” this month at Java Gallery, where his intricate images explore the darker sides of life in Asia.

The Asia of young Grey’s imagination didn’t quite match what he saw when, four years ago, he first moved to India.

“It used to be kind of a mysterious kind of place. It still has elements of mystery, but they say everywhere is the same once you go there,” Grey said. “How I see Asia now is the modern world grafted onto something very old. It’s sitting kind of uncomfortably sometimes, side by side.”

In his mind, Asia was a world of mystics, desirable women, luxurious forests and strange creatures. But in his travels, he also saw poverty, trafficking and AIDS. The magic of imagination and the slight disillusionment of reality collide in his show of 28 ink-on-paper drawings where cohabit farmers and colonialists, prostitutes and deities.

“He’s managed to convey Asia broadly. People in his images look like a mix of Indian, Cambodian, Vietnamese,” said Ali Sanderson, artist and co-curator of the show. These “hybrid Asian” figures, she said, allow Grey to explore all the darker aspects of the continent, especially appropriate in Cambodia because NGO workers encounter these issues here every day.

One drawing, for instance, tells in several vignettes like a comic book the plight of a young woman who was sold into prostitution and contracted HIV/AIDS. Another shows a Western woman surrounded by Asian slaves. Yet another shows a Tuol Sleng chamber.

“It’s not something I consciously thought of,” Grey said of the social issues and power relationships depicted in the show. “It’s just another one of those things that’s more overt in poor countries.”

The people in Grey’s drawings, some in fantastic surroundings, others in the most commonplace urban settings, usually stand in a full-frontal pose like out of an old daguerreotype. Their insistent stares demand the viewer’s attention.

A closer look reveals Grey’s crosshatching technique—a criss-crossing of thin diagonal lines used to mark shadows—and it’s easy to imagine the long hours Grey must have spent, hunched over his work, tracing with a thousand strokes of his pen the folds of a dress or the lines on an old man’s face.

“It’s really accessible to everyone, this kind of art, because aesthetically it’s beautiful, and technically, people like to see he spent a lot of time on his art,” Sanderson said.

He starts by forming the image in his mind and draws it roughly in pencil. “That’s when the image changes from what I had in my mind,” he said. The rest is a series of compromise to arrive to the final drawing.

While most of the work is black ink on paper, Grey has allowed color to creep in a handful of drawings to better match the accompanying collages.

Grey started out as an underground comic artist in London. He temporarily moved away from comic books because, he said, he was frustrated with having to fit his drawings into a story. But the style remained.

“I can’t do any other style. Even if I try drawing a realistic picture, it ends up like a cartoon,” he said. “I think I see everything kind of cartoon-like.”

Grey moved to Phnom Penh eight months ago, after having lived in India two years and explored other parts of Asia. The show at Java Gallery was his first in Cambodia.

Grey is now working on a comic book biography of U G Krishnamurti, a philosopher to whom he already devoted a portrait in the show. He is also drawing more images for the Mystique of the Orient series; he hopes to show the exhibit elsewhere and must replace the images that have been sold.

The show, which runs until Sunday, was successful beyond expectations.

“We’ve sold more than half the show, which is unusual for a foreign artist,” Sanderson said. “That’s what’s most interesting about this show: People want it in their lives.”

A Sad Story by Nicholas Grey