Southeast Asia (Page 137)

Additional reporting and photography by Anton L. Delgado.

On an unbearably hot day in April, Kong Mok pantomimed wrapping a material around his neck with one hand.

Mok, 67, was on duty as a guard at the ancient Koh Ker temple complex in northern Cambodia, which was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List earlier this month. As a small group watched, Mok mimicked how he believed looters used some form of explosive to break off the valuable heads from stone statues before transporting them out of the country.

He slowly moved his other hand around his neck before shooting his arms out to both sides. Bang – no more head. 

Throughout this year, far from the heat of Koh Ker, the U.S. federal government coordinated the return of illegally looted Cambodian relics from the Denver Art Museum and the private collections of billionaires as a wider reckoning in the art world has pressured collectors across the globe to give back pieces of dubious provenance.

Cambodia received 13 antiquities from the U.S. in March. Some of these had been looted from the Koh Ker complex in the grinding decades of strife that followed the Khmer Rouge regime, which collapsed in 1979 but waged insurgency until the late 1990s. These works included Hindu-era relics such as a warrior from a set of nine statues depicting a battle from the Mahabharata epic, a sandstone figure of the war god Skanda riding on a peacock and an enormous embodiment of the god Ganesha.

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As foreign governments and law enforcement agencies track pilfered artefacts in their own jurisdictions, Cambodian researchers are investigating for themselves. Their work is part of a broader, often behind-the-scenes effort in the country to restore a historical legacy sold off to international dealers such as the late antiquities collector and accused smuggler Douglas Latchford.

The inquisitive group who spoke with Mok had come on behalf of the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts with a twofold purpose – to patch together Koh Ker’s history with local narratives, however incomplete, and to track down missing pieces of ancient sculptures. 

At Koh Ker, researcher Tek Soklida filmed the interview with Mok on her phone as another member of the team sat nearby, jotting details in a notebook. Senior researcher Chhoun Kunthea led the interview and interpreted for Bradley J. Gordon, a U.S. attorney representing the Ministry of Culture and working on the project. 

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For Soklida, the work wasn’t just a way for her to help others understand the country’s history. She felt the sculpted figures were a way her ancestors intended to communicate with the future – in other words, with her.

“A statue is not just a stone; it’s an achievement from my ancestors, who made it,” she said. The icons show her “how hard they worked at that time, even bringing the stones to the temple and carving it into a human or animal statue to show their descendants.”

A first-time visitor to Koh Ker might see only toppled stone carvings and collapsed chamber walls, lying nearby a massive pyramid erected in the 10th century. But the research team, which has been studying the temples for years, envision the outlines of what these places looked like when they were first built. 

Assisted by other historians and archeologists, the team has created original drawings and maps of the area, scrutinised photos found on Latchford’s laptop, and gathered historical details through interviews with neighbouring communities.

In their on-site interviews, the team often uses photographs to help jog residents’ memories. Now, with the recent returns, the women have a new set of photos. Before moving on to another area of Koh Ker, Kunthea pulled up a picture of the Ganesha statue, which had been presented earlier at a celebration in Phnom Penh. 

Mok laughed, surprised to see the statue he remembered from childhood. He hadn’t yet heard about its return. 

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Later, the team hiked to the back of the central structure in the complex, a seven-tiered pyramid standing more than 35 metres tall. There, Kunthea found another guard with whom she had previously spoken. Often, the team gradually gets to know people before meeting again with more explicit questions about looting. 

“The information, it is not easy to get it … We try step by step to get more and more,” she said. “The questions [have to] be careful. Sometimes it’s not direct, a little bit around, and then you get to the main point of what you want to know.”

The guard, 68-year old Run Ran, suspected he was one of the oldest living villagers from Koh Ker. 

Around 1980 he worked to clear the temple grounds for a time under the direction of Ta Mok, a senior leader of the Khmer Rouge nicknamed “the Butcher” for overseeing mass killings. After living near and working at the site for many years, Ran was sure he had a connection with the temple in his past lives. 

The guard told the researchers he remembered seeing the complex’s 10th-century dancing Shiva statue when it still had three intact faces of its original five. Shattered into more than 10,000 pieces, the seven-tonne piece is now undergoing restoration in Siem Reap. French archeologists had moved two of the heads and some other fragments to Phnom Penh before the 1970s. And while a third face was shattered before looters got it, the remaining two heads were likely looted during the early 1990s and are still missing.

After Kunthea tried to pin down when exactly Ran had seen the statue with three heads, which would help in understanding the timeline of the looting, the women were ready to move on to Koh Ker village, where they hoped to talk with more elders. 

The temple guard lamented before they left that those most knowledgeable about the statues had already died. 

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Even when foreign museums have returned pieces to Cambodia, such institutions don’t always offer up all of the information or documentation that could shed light on the journey the piece took, according to U.S. attorney Gordon. Without more official information, he said details from fragmented interviews, such as the ones gathered by the team at Koh Ker, are key to tracing the supply chains of looted relics. 

“There’s a very small number of experts out there on Cambodia,” he explained. “They have their theories and they are doing their research, but we’re still at a point that we haven’t been able to connect the dots yet. We’re getting lots of individual pieces of the past. The question is: what does it all add up to? Why was this here?”

Despite the rounds of returns, many pieces are still missing or outside the country. A standing female deity on display at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is thought to be originally from the Koh Ker. 

Back in the village far from the galleries of Manhattan, the team of Cambodian researchers spoke to some older women sitting under a wooden home raised on stilts. 

Yeam Koun and her niece Deb Sem, both 63, remembered seeing the set of nine warrior statues before several were looted. Sem said she remembered the area because a family member was bitten by a tiger there. At least one of these statues has still yet to be identified and brought back to Cambodia. The women suggested the team meet up with another older man in the village who might know more.

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The research team stopped at a few more places in search of the village elder. They found his son-in-law, who told them to try looking for the man at a nearby pagoda. The team wasn’t able to track him down, and decided to end their research for the day. 

But spirits were not low. The team made new connections and dug up new details. Plus, they had already received a tip with names of Thai families who may have received the missing looted dancing Shiva heads. 

The team plans to travel to Thailand this year to follow the trail of the heads. Though plenty of investigation remains ahead, efforts such as theirs are slowly, finally bringing home the lost relics of Cambodia.

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Additional reporting and photography by Anton L. Delgado.

Hundreds of headless deities sit in rows in a warehouse in Siem Reap, lit by buzzing fluorescent lights and a rim of small windows. 

The largest statue, nearly five metres tall, looks down at the rest. Or, rather, it would look down if it still had its head. Five heads, in this case. 

Stone restorers and archeologists have spent more than a decade piecing back together the monumental statue of the Hindu god Shiva from the Koh Ker temple complex in northern Cambodia, which was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List earlier this month. The seven-tonne, 10th century work depicts a 10-armed Shiva in a dancing pose – but over long years of turmoil during the country’s civil conflict in the 1980s and 90s, looters gradually smashed the stone deity into more than 10,000 pieces.

Some larger fragments, including two of the heads, had been preserved in Phnom Penh before the 1970s. A third head was shattered before looters got to it, and the final two looted faces have yet to be found.

This year, the world has shone a spotlight on the return of looted relics to Cambodia, with federal indictments in the U.S. preceding returns from the Denver Art Museum and wealthy private collectors such as Netscape founder Jim Clark. The arrivals in the country met a joyous response, though much of the fanfare stopped at the point of repatriation. 

But now, even intact objects require deep historical research to fully understand their place in Khmer history. And the quiet restoration of the dancing Shiva by a team of French and Cambodian experts demonstrates the often-tedious, highly difficult process of piecing the country’s looted history back together.

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The shattered statue now stands behind the gates of Angkor Conservation, an office of the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts in the temple tourism hub of Siem Reap. The facility houses thousands of ancient statues in various stages of repair. Its compound is closed to the public and flanked by “No Photography” signs. 

Hang Chansophea, head of the collection at Angkor Conservation, works on inventory and documentation on the project. She labels and maintains digital records of the various fragments, creating what she likens to a person’s ID card for each piece. 

On a hot day in April, she sifted through a styrofoam tray of pieces, some mere millimetres wide, trying to find connections. Eye drops, she said, helped her get through eight-hour days of staring at minuscule fragments.

“Sometimes I’m angry with looters,” she said. “Why do they try to break [the statues]? Because this is the heritage of the nation, the heritage for all.”

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By the end of the Angkorian period in the 14th century, the statue had also fallen, breaking into a few large fragments. 

The toppled statue was in relatively good condition until the 20th century, said Éric Bourdonneau, an archeologist and historian from the French School of the Far East. He’s leading the restoration project in collaboration with Cambodian authorities. 

“Ninety percent of the fragments were still inside the [Kraham Temple] tower,” Bourdonneau said. “Still, you have some hands, some fragments that were moved at different periods of history outside the tower because of some villager or some child playing with it. It’s not surprising that you have some fragments moving.”

Between the 1920s and 1960s, French archeologists moved some large pieces of the dancing Shiva, such as hands and heads, to the National Museum in Phnom Penh. Bourdonneau described the movement of many pieces during the colonial period as problematic, with historians and archeologists from France and elsewhere believing they were “the best people to tell the history of other people.” 

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It’s unlikely that statues from Koh Ker were taken during the Khmer Rouge’s reign from 1975-79. But in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, and then again in the ‘80s and ‘90s, looters descended on the temples of Koh Ker. Their forays were fueled by the demands of wealthy Western art dealers and curators, capitalising on the chaos in Cambodia at the time. 

In a shift from earlier times, looters of the late 20th century sought to evade the law by cutting the link between the objects and their origins.

Antiquities dealers such as the late Douglas Latchford – a prolific collector of Cambodian relics who was criminally charged before his death with smuggling looted artefacts – made use of this tactic of misdirection. Latchford had claimed a massive, three-tonne Ganesha statue he sold was not the original but merely a replica.

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The dancing Shiva was one of the last statues in Koh Ker to be looted. While vandals absconded with other nearby pieces, the Shiva remained, possibly because of its large size and because its remaining two faces were worn and in bad condition. But in the early 1990s, looters finally lopped off those faces. In order to break off the heads intact, researchers believe the looters drove chisels lower down on the statue’s body, shattering the torso in the process.

Finally, some years after this mortal blow, there were throngs of local and foreign tourists weaving through the archeological site, likely stepping on stone fragments and broken pieces of history. 

The steady crumbling of the dancing Shiva dragged on until restoration work began in 2012. 

The project is more complex than almost any other restoration project in the world, Bourdonneau said.

“It’s extremely unusual,” he said. “Of course it’s not rare that you have many examples where you have to work with some dozens of fragments or even hundreds. But here, we have collected … more than 10,000 fragments.”

The restoration is made even more challenging because about 80% of the surface of the figure is smooth, with no designs to help the team.

After the excavation and a study of the found pieces were complete, the team spent  2019 connecting the largest pieces of the torso.

“At the beginning, when we put all the pieces on the table and looked around, it was hard for us to start. From what way? From what point?” said Chhan Chamroeun, deputy director of safeguarding and conservation of ancient monuments with the Ministry of Culture.

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In their first phase, the team used digital scanning of the project to create a 3D model. A centre at Heidelberg University in Germany even used this to develop an interactive puzzle.

But the monumental task of connecting the pieces has been done almost entirely by hand. Bourdonneau said technology, including artificial intelligence, is not advanced enough to assist in putting the pieces back together as there aren’t enough regularities in how the fragments were broken off. 

“I won’t say that maybe in the future it won’t be possible, but for now, there’s nothing better than the human brain,” he said.

Some pieces remain missing but a basic shape has taken form along an internal scaffolding. This skeleton for the dancing Shiva may help put it back on its feet as it was in the 10th century

“As it is broken in so many parts and as it is so huge and so heavy, one real challenge of this kind of restoration is to design the metallic structure to make it possible to have the statue standing up,” Bourdonneau said.

The group plans to complete the majority of the restoration by the beginning of 2025 and hopes to eventually display the statue in Koh Ker in a new pavilion north of its original site. Bourdonneau hopes to keep the local community connected to the statue and has invited residents throughout the restoration to see its progress. 

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Despite the enormity of their task, the stone restorers and archeologists working on the project seem somewhat unfazed by what can appear to an outsider as a gruelling process. They see their work, largely unseen by the public, as part of a larger mission for Cambodia.

Asked about his reaction to recently finding the right location of an important missing piece, Chamroeun said he felt happier than if he had been gifted “a box of beer.”

But amidst his muted responses was an earnest commitment to the job at hand.  

“If we just have the experience or we have the knowledge we learn from different fields to restore this object – it’s not enough if we don’t have our heart,” he said. “It’s not just for us in this generation, this is for our country and for our next generation.”

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David Eubank will accept your call, but there might be missiles disrupting the connection. 

Eubank, 61, is the founder and leader of the Free Burma Rangers, an eclectic band of former U.S. Marines seeking new purpose, Myanmar ethnic minorities and rebels with a cause. Since 1996, the nonprofit group has gradually built a following throughout Myanmar with backing from local leaders, documenting war crimes carried out by the national military while distributing humanitarian aid. 

Eubank spoke with the Globe from a car driving outside Lutsk, Ukraine, a country that his organisation has recently entered. As the road rumbled and the connection cracked, Eubank spoke about the intense fighting in Ukraine, then switched to talk of Texas and the Alamo, a symbol of independence now nearly two centuries old. 

“I believe in the whole thing of freedom to this day,” he said.

Eubank is a devout Christian raised in Thailand by missionary parents. He and his wife, Karen Eubank, made faith and family central to their organisation, which also draws from David’s own experience as a former member of the elite U.S. Army Rangers and Special Forces.

The couple has raised three children across various conflict zones – now in young adulthood, the trio help their parents run family programmes in the field while on university breaks. With Eubank’s dual role as a combat-trained philanthropist and a spiritual leader who performs baptisms and other rites, he eludes any easy description. 

“You don’t surrender to fear or comfort or pride or the threats of the enemy,” Eubank said, adding that he only surrenders to love and God.

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In Myanmar, decades of civil war and international isolation have created severe barriers to humanitarian aid. That already challenging landscape was further exacerbated after the 2021 coup that ousted the elected government of state counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi and unleashed a brutal chapter of widespread violence and lawlessness under yet another junta.

Amidst the scorched-earth campaign waged by the national military in its struggle to maintain control of the country, Eubank’s Rangers may be distinctly well-suited to fill a vacuum of service provision and information-gathering around Myanmar. 

Eubank said the quasi-clerical yet diverse humanitarian group operates with “no safety rules”. The organisation’s website states a total of 59 rangers have been killed since the group’s beginning. Though some died from disease, most were documented as perishing from gunshots, mortar attacks, air strikes or other actions by the Myanmar armed forces.

You don’t have to have any religion. As long as you do this for love, you don’t run, and you can read and write in some language to get the news out, you can be a Ranger.”

David Eubank

The Rangers focus on three key areas, according to Eubank. These are providing humanitarian aid such as food, shelter, clothing and medical assistance; documenting atrocities through interviews, photos and videos for media dissemination; and offering a range of trainings, from emergency medical care and logistics to what might be tactical instruction on landmine clearance and battlefield communication.

“Now there are about 150 teams deployed in every part of Burma, representing 16 ethnic groups,” Eubank said. “You don’t have to have any religion. As long as you do this for love, you don’t run, and you can read and write in some language to get the news out, you can be a Ranger.”

Though Myanmar is central to the group’s purpose, its website and prolific social media channels document missions abroad.

With an address in the U.S. city of Colorado Springs and a post office box in Chiang Mai, Thailand, the Rangers describe themselves as “a multi-ethnic humanitarian service movement working to bring help, hope and love to people in the conflict zones of Burma, Iraq and Sudan”.

Financial records on the Rangers’ website declare about 2,800 donors, mostly private individuals, churches and organisations donating to the group’s tax-exempt public charity, Free the Oppressed. For the last fiscal year, the organisation received more than $7 million for everything from medical supplies and cameras, to Bibles and Ranger-branded t-shirts. 

The group’s nonprofit revenue nearly tripled from 2020 to 2021 following the military coup in Myanmar.

Aside from records, the Rangers’ website is full of regular updates on the intense civil warfare following the coup – including graphic images from the scenes of massacres reportedly committed by the national armed forces. The military has in turn claimed the volunteer organisation “was formed by Vietnam War veterans [and] are in fact militants” who train ethnic armed groups to attack its bases.

Eubank denies these accusations and has long maintained his focus is on protecting the public, not confronting the military.

“Of course, I’m angry. Of course, I’m going to support the people against [the military]. But I also pray for them, their hearts to change,” he said.

Although Thai was Eubank’s first language as a child, he was born in the U.S. and later returned there for university in Texas. He joined the U.S. Army after that, serving as an Army Ranger reconnaissance platoon leader for counter-narcotics missions in Central and South America before joining the Special Forces.

Eubank left the military service in 1992 and entered seminary school. As he tells it, about a year after that, representatives of the Wa people – who hold a powerful, two-region enclave in Myanmar along the Thai and Chinese borders – reached out to Eubank’s missionary father to request his help. 

That would be the start of the family’s work in Myanmar.

We’re not a militia or an army, but we’re not pacifist. … If you have your own weapon, then you can take it. But you can’t use it except for defending [internally displaced persons] or yourself.” 

David Eubank

From their founding in 1996, the Free Burma Rangers have worked closely with ethnic armed organisations, including the Karen National Liberation Army and the Kachin Independence Army. These groups safeguard the Rangers, many of whom share the same ethnic backgrounds. 

In return, the Rangers typically provide expertise and training in field medicine. The organisation has trained more than 7,000 people to date. Eubank said the group does not provide arms or military training to its members or to ethnic armies – but also doesn’t forbid anyone from carrying guns.

“We’re not a militia or an army, but we’re not pacifist,” Eubank said. “If you have your own weapon, then you can take it. But you can’t use it except for defending [internally displaced persons] or yourself.”

Eubank himself was filmed taking up arms against ISIS fighters during the liberation of Mosul in 2017 in a documentary about the Rangers from a Christian production studio.

One wounded ranger from the battle claimed Eubank killed three fighters, even after he was shot in the arm. 

In Myanmar, Eubank’s policy is to get close to but avoid the military.

Still, the diplomatic concern of Rangers potentially acting as gunrunners for ethnic rebels in Myanmar has been documented in leaked cables transmitted to the Bangkok and Yangon embassies from the U.S. State Department. 

In one mishap, Eubank was caught on camera wearing a partial U.S. military uniform at a Shan National Day Rally, an annual festival where political and military leaders of the Shan people recognise and celebrate self-determination. According to the cable, this allegedly generated the perception the Rangers were providing weapons to the Shan State Army. 

The cable also suggested this incident – along with some disagreements between Eubank and the State Department over Thai refugee policy – prompted the department to limit contact with the Rangers and instruct Eubank to resign from the U.S. Army Reserve. Later, the Myanmar government claimed the photo of Eubank in uniform was evidence that the U.S. military was working with Shan militants and summoned the Defense Attache in Yangon over the issue.

While there is no evidence that the Rangers funnel weapons to rebels, State Department investigators stated in the cable they “believe there are other individuals who do help armed ethnic groups in Burma procure weapons, some of whom are former U.S. military. Due to the nature of his work, Eubank is probably aware of who they are and precisely what activities they are engaged in.” 

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Generally around the world, small communities of ex-U.S. military personnel volunteering to enter foreign conflicts have caused some – such as former Human Rights Watch researcher David Scott Mathieson – to suggest “war zones (like in Myanmar) attract a rogue’s gallery of adventurers, fantasists and psychopaths. Eubank and his Free Burma Rangers (FBR) have been called all those and more.”

But Mathieson acknowledged that those who find the group’s faith-fueled humanitarian work off-putting cannot go so far as to claim that the Rangers have been ineffective.

Flitting between frontlines, Eubank doesn’t shy from the martial realities of his calling. When asked about balancing love against vengeance, he spoke about a form of justice that requires punishment motivated by the former.

“Justice has to have love in it so that when someone has done something wrong, the punishment must be one of love,” Eubank said. “That might be imprisonment or any number of other punishments to help them see the error of their ways. You might even have to shoot them, they might even die, but you’re just going to kill their body, not their soul and that’s better than letting them continue – body and soul – to wreak havoc on others and themselves.”

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