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At Ankor, Wat, King Suryavarman
II stands forever in a sandstone panel overlooking a gallery. Halfway along that
has relief he's shown again, riding a war elephant with 15 parasols, surrounded
by armed columns. Weapons bristle against the flower-printed coats and stylised
coiffures of the soldiers. Pointing to the swords and halberds on the wall, the
guide draws your attention to the role of weapons in Cambodia's tragic history.
"remember, the anti - personnel mines and mortars that you saw at the War Museum
on the way to the temple in the morning ?," he asks. "They are all
blood-brothers of the swords and spears used by the Khmer in ancient times."
The crippled war veteran sporting
jungle green fatigues at the museum was more taciturn. He said he lost his arm
while fighting the murderous Khmer Rouge and his entire family perished in the
great wave of terror that Comrade Pol Pot unleashed on this gentle land. He said
all this without expression, as though he'd lost all feeling. Upon further
probing, he talked softly about his nightmares; about never being able to reach
his children in time; about finding them lying bloody and still in a lush green
paddy field. What about his fellow citizens who'd had a hand in murdering more
than a quarter of Cambodia's population ? Had he met any one of them ?
For a long time he did not
answer. As you waited for him to speak, you could feel the sunshine on your back
as grasshoppers leapt among the weeds growing around the rusting relics of war.
Then he started speaking about great bewilderment, about an even greater sorrow
for being born on this earth and the few questions that he had for the killers:
"Why ? What had his kids done to deserve such a fate ?" No answer could possibly
wipe out his anguish. But he would never stop searching.
The Cambodian veteran's endless
quest for explanations reminded you of something attributed to Freud: that there
could be no 'final solution' to the 'problem of evil'. Freud believed that human
life was such that evil impulses "may be temporarily held in check, suppressed
or repressed, but never permanently eliminated". He recognised that good maxims
would not make moral dilemmas go away. In such a scheme, the possibility of
perpetual peace was a utopian myth, for human life was marked by nothing so much
as the transience of beauty and good and evil as well. The mystery, as the Gita
says, lay in the passage. |
