prime minister hun sen has been in power for three decades. most of his rivals are in prison or in exile. i sat down with the cambodian minister of culture and fine arts. this week, she wrote to the uk government to demand their assistance. minister, some people will say your country has problems with corruption. it has a worsening human rights record. why should the uk authorities cooperate with cambodia? i think that every country has a problem about corruption, even in europe, in us, in asia. it s not. tell me one country don t have any corruption. i don t defend that. but don t confuse the corruption with something else. this statue belongs to us, belong to cambodian people. we are driving to a village
cambodia is one of the poorest countries in asia, but many will spend what little they have to come here. everyone, it s believed, has to make the journey to this complex at least once. but even though angkor wat is central to this population s identity, many of its greatest treasures are gone. so, this is a contrast you will see repeated over and over again in cambodia s most famous temple. here s a carving dating back to the 12th century in perfect condition, but, just one pillar over, this carving s been completely removed by looters and we simply don t know where it s gone. i mean, look at these bits. the head s been taken off, a hands been taken off, the fingers are gone. on this one, i mean, it s just been lopped off right at the top.
i mean, you canjust imagine a looter would cut that, take it, smuggle it across a border, probably into thailand, and then on into some auction house. we simply don t know where this has gone. the same thing has happened in thousands of temples, including this one, 100km to the east of angkor wat. for many cambodians, the missing statues are thought to have souls. they re notjust stone, are they, or bronze? they are definitely not just the stone for us. we never think this is only the statue, but the spirit of ancestor. sopheap meas is an archaeologist with the cambodian ministry of culture. when you saw the statue that s broken into pieces, how did you feel physically when you see something like that? ifeel pain, ifeel sad.
now cambodia is fighting back, demanding that some of the biggest museums in the world return their antiquities. these museums and these individuals are in receipt of stolen property, and the stolen property needs to come back. angkor wat is the beating heart of cambodia. this temple has been in continuous use for over 900 years.
most likely a perfect match. you know, like a foot matches a piece that s in a major museum. that s exactly what happened with these huge warrior statues, the team s biggest success to date. the tops of the statues were once on display in the us, but it was the perfect match of their feet left behind in cambodia that proved they d been stolen. they re now reunited, the pride of cambodia s national museum. the cambodian authorities are now on the hunt for more treasure. they re tracing the looters who originally dug up the antiquities. we have a whole network of informants who we re working with, and we are going site to site, where we understand they came from, and interviewing people in that