phuketrichard wrote: ↑Wed Dec 05, 2018 9:05 am

rozzieoz wrote: ↑Wed Dec 05, 2018 8:55 am We need passports??
Do Khmer need passports?

Yes,they put ur passport # in the book at the bottom
Khmers need id card

Indeed, security in a contested area and all that.

I went to Preah Vihear temple yesterday, my first visit.
On the practical side, I can say that passports and IDs are no longer needed. Reasonable guest houses seem to be available in the nearby town of Sra'aem, and a smart looking big hotel on the road 62 just south of that town.
Adjacent to the ticket office, there is a window where you can buy a ticket to hire a 4X4 Toyota pick-up to take a total of 6 people up and down for $25. The driver waits for you at the top.
Once you disembark, you are bothered a lot by sellers but it is a short walk to the checkpoint. From there you walk up an incline to the temple area. You swing round to the right and continue up the wide stone path to the main temples which culminate in the famous clifftop views.
It was only on my way back that I realised that I had entered by a side door, so to speak. Continuing down the wide stone path, you reach the top of 126 stone steps which form the grand entrance to the temple. This is the way that all tourists approached the site until the Cambodian access road was built in 2003. It's sad that it is no longer open. You can; however, at least approach the temple from the top of the stone steps. To do this, you need to go sharp left at the checkpoint and follow a path that serves some small buildings, you have a sharp drop to your left as you walk along this path. Once you get to the top of the stone steps, AFAIK you can in fact walk down the 126 steps and come back up, doing the thing properly (but nobody does so).

The magic of Preah Vihear is IMHO the setting, which is magnificent. The structures are in very poor condition and there is little by way of intricate carvings. It is of course an old temple, even by Khmer standards.

I became interested in the land dispute between Thailand and Cambodia that has disrupted public access to the site. I came across a piece written by a German in 2010. http://www.expat-advisory.com/articles/ ... at-and-why

He quotes from a Frenchman writing in the early C20 about the Thais as follows:
“the superiority of their self-esteem was the primary cause of their troubles and misfortune…"

And a Khmer wrote thus in 2010:

"In 1853 King Ang Duong of Cambodia wrote a letter to the French Emperor Napoleon III to express his friendship and solicit his support. The immediate consequence of which had been to stop the armies of Siam from marching at will into Cambodia to conquest and ravage the many provinces of Cambodia to the West and North, and to relieve Cambodia from paying tributes to Bangkok. Siam, now Thailand always acts like a hungry mad dog that missed a good piece of meat and had never stopped dreaming about it, since…

The arrogance, the condescension, and the obstinacy which cause the failure of King Mong Kut and his ministers from executing the annexation policy by annihilating Cambodia and her people create an endless nostalgia that Thailand had never allowed itself to wake up and liberate itself from the bad dream of the hungry mad dog. Therefore, Thailand’s territorial ambition on Cambodian territories has become its grand design to be executed by the government of Thailand if any of such a government wishes to have a reasonable life span. From then on, Thailand has learnt, acquired, and mastered the art of distortion of the facts, dissemination of misinformation and disinformation, the art of accusation, of denial with arrogance, condescension and obstinacy… In 1954, not even a mere one year after Cambodia acquired full independence from France, Thai armed forces occupied the Temple of Preah Vihear, to be ordered out by the international will, the LaHaye ICJ Judgments of 15 June 1962. Finally, Thailand has made official, its territorial ambition on Cambodian territories in 2007 in Christchurch, New Zealand during the 31st session of the World Heritage Committee by presenting for the first time to such an important international gathering a map dressed up unilaterally and secretly by Thailand and thus laying claim on an area of 4.6 km sq. inside the Cambodian territory near the Temple of Preah Vihear, as an objection of various uncoordinated, confusing, illegitimate, and nonsense motives to the inscription of the Temple of Preah Vihear to the World Heritage List. Again, Thailand’s arrogance, condescension, and obstinacy were its primary troubles and misfortune. In 2008, the Temple of Preah Vihear was inscribed unanimously on the World Heritage List by the World Heritage Committee…"

Both governments, however, seem to have contributed to the dispute.

Finally from wikipedia on the Thai government rounding up of Cambodian refugees and bussing them to PV and pushing them down the cliff:
On June 12, 1979, the government of General Kriangsak Chomanan, who had come to power in Thailand by a military coup, informed foreign embassies in Bangkok that it was going to expel a large number of Cambodian refugees. He would allow the governments of the United States, France, and Australia to select 1,200 of the refugees to resettle in their countries. Lionel Rosenblatt, Refugee Coordinator of the American Embassy, Yvette Pierpaoli, a French businesswoman in Bangkok, and representatives of the Australian and French governments rushed to the border to select the refugees that night. In three frantic hours the foreigners picked out 1,200 refugees for resettlement from among the thousands being held by Thai soldiers behind barbed wire in a Buddhist temple at Wat Ko Refugee Camp and loaded them on buses to go to Bangkok. The remaining refugees were then loaded on buses and sent away, their destination unknown.

It later became known that Cambodian refugees had been collected from many locations and sent to Preah Vihear. An American Embassy official stood beneath a tree along a dirt road leading to the temple, counted the buses, and estimated that about 42,000 Cambodians were taken to Preah Vihear.[13]

Preah Vihear is situated at the top of a 2,000 foot high escarpment overlooking the Cambodian plains far below. The refugees were unloaded from the buses and pushed down the steep escarpment. “There was no path to follow,” one said. “The way that we had to go down was only a cliff. Some people hid on top of the mountain and survived. Others were shot or pushed over the cliff. Most of the people began to climb down using vines as ropes. They tied their children on their backs and strapped them across their chests. As the people climbed down, the soldiers threw big rocks over the cliff.”[14]

At the foot of the cliffs were minefields, placed by the Khmer Rouge during their rule in Cambodia. The refugees followed a narrow path, the safe route indicated by the bodies of those who had set off land mines. They used the bodies as stepping stones to cross the three miles of mined land to reach the Vietnamese soldiers, occupiers of Cambodia, on the other side. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees later estimated that as many as 3,000 Cambodians had died in the push-back and another 7,000 were unaccounted for. General Kriangsak's objective in this brutal operation apparently was to demonstrate to the international community that his government would not bear alone the burden of hundreds of thousands of Cambodian refugees. If so, it worked. For the next dozen years the UN and Western countries would pay for the upkeep of Cambodian refugees in Thailand, resettling thousands in other countries, and devising means by which Cambodians could return safely to their own country.

armchairlawyer wrote: ↑Sun Dec 16, 2018 8:25 amOn June 12, 1979, the government of General Kriangsak Chomanan, who had come to power in Thailand by a military coup, informed foreign embassies in Bangkok that it was going to expel a large number of Cambodian refugees. He would allow the governments of the United States, France, and Australia to select 1,200 of the refugees to resettle in their countries. Lionel Rosenblatt, Refugee Coordinator of the American Embassy, Yvette Pierpaoli, a French businesswoman in Bangkok, and representatives of the Australian and French governments rushed to the border to select the refugees that night. In three frantic hours the foreigners picked out 1,200 refugees for resettlement from among the thousands being held by Thai soldiers behind barbed wire in a Buddhist temple at Wat Ko Refugee Camp and loaded them on buses to go to Bangkok. The remaining refugees were then loaded on buses and sent away, their destination unknown.

That's interesting, the story is well known and caused a bit of an international outcry but I didn't know about the 1,200 being chosen for resettlement first.