No Wrath of the Phantom Army for Foreign Collectors

Cambodian artefact hunters have made a mockery of every institution that has tried to stop them so far. The government’s Heritage Department has proved powerless, the police and local authorities failed and UNESCO has made little impact. While the main historical sites such as Angkor Wat and its surrounding temples are now relatively well protected, but Cambodia’s less-celebrated monuments are regularly plundered.

Many of the artefacts are stolen to order for clients overseas, but some end up on sale at international auction houses or on the internet. Ancient necklaces, beads and even statues can easily be found at markets in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. Many rural villages are built on or near ancient burial grounds without the inhabitants even realising. When antiquities dealers find out about the grave sites and offer the impoverished villagers cash for anything they find, they spark a frenzy of digging and inadvertent destruction.

Heritage Watch was set up in 2003 to attempt to combat the problem. Dougald O’Reilly, its director of Heritage Watch, said: “It’s our responsibility to at least give people an informed opinion about what they’re doing.” Five years ago to further these aims, the organization produced a comic book Wrath of the Phantom Army to fight against the looters. (Story by Heritage Watch, illustrated by Y Lida. 24 full-colour pages on glossy paper.) This action-packed story tried to get over an important message, that looting is destroying Cambodia’s great past and risking its future and plays on popular superstitions to ward off potential raiders. (Guy De Launey Tomb raiders and the phantom army, The Times October 1, 2005). Dougald O’Reilly stressed “We needed a medium to effectively communicate the harm looting does, but in an entertaining way, that can be appreciated by the literate and illiterate alike.” Illiteracy is common in Cambodia’s villages, and a picture- heavy, text-light publication stands at least a chance of making an impact. Its use of ghosts is also likely to strike a chord in a highly superstitious country.The story is set in provincial Cambodia, where villagers earn extra money through looting a prehistoric site. They are encouraged to do so by an unscrupulous middleman who enriches himself through selling antiquities. When the protagonists dig up and desecrate ancient graves in search of treasure, angry spirits cause the village animals to fall sick. As the young men continue to loot, the unearthing of a chiefly grave causes a 'phantom army' of skeletons to rise from a burial mound to confront them. A wise old monk educates the looters in the error of their ways, and they soon conclude that grave robbing is a profession with no future.
HeritageWatch intended this comic to be an important part of their campaign to educate Cambodians and foreigners alike about the dangers facing Cambodia’s heritage. The Khmer version of the comic is being given away in rural, impoverished communities where looting is most likely to occur. To cover the costs of this distribution, editions in foreign languages are available for sale throughout Cambodia and online, and generate revenue to help pay for free distribution of Khmer Language version in rural Cambodia. Nonetheless, some observers were highly sceptical about the degree to which it would achieve success given the curent manner in which the looting is funded by indiscriminate dealers, buyers and collectors:

At the old market in Siem Reap, only a few miles from Angkor Wat, Srey Raksmey, read the comic surrounded by the prehistoric gold beads and ancient temple bells in her souvenir shop. “People in the villages have money problems,” she said. “As long as they’re poor and the dealers have cash, they’ll continue to dig.”

It would be interesting to hear five years on how successful this campaign was felt to have been. Surely the real answer to this is to prevent the middlemen financing this destruction by educating not the ignorant peasants in rural Cambodia but the ignorant and undiscriminating peasants who buy this stuff no questions asked in foreign countries.