Top Quotes: “A Short History of Cambodia: From Empire to Survival” — John Tully

Introduction

“This book traces the history of Cambodia from the Indian-influenced state of Funan, which predated Angkor (founded in 802), to the present: a grand sweep of over 2000 years. Also included is a brief discussion of the pre-history of what is today Cambodia. The Cambodian monarchy is over 1200 years old; King Sihamoni, who sits on the throne today, is the latest incumbent in a line dating from the reign of King Jayavarman Il, the shadowy founder of Angkor, the first unified polity of Cambodia. It is not an unbroken bloodline of kings, but was disrupted by usurpers on many occasions. The institution, however, has remained constant for almost all of this time. If we count Jayavarman Il’s predecessors, the monarchy is even older, and epigraphic evidence indicates that Khmer culture predates him by around 200 years. Whether those that lived here before were Khmers, we cannot say, although it is probable that they were.

If the monarchy has been remarkably resilient, so too have been the Khmer people and their culture, which sustained the kingdom. Although there have been some sharp discontinuities in Cambodian history, the Khmers today, particularly the rural dwellers who still make up the majority of the population, live much as their ancestors did.”

“When the first European visitors arrived in the 16th century, the empire was in decline and the centre of gravity of the Cambodian state had shifted downstream to the Quatre Bras region at the head of the Mekong delta, where it remains today.”

“The Vietnamese directly administered the country for 30 years during the first half of the 19th century, placing puppets on the throne and striving to assimilate the Khmers, whom they regarded as ‘barbarians’, into Vietnamese culture. Cambodia almost became a Vietnamese province: the earlier fate of the Khmer lower Mekong delta lands. King Ang Duang restored order and a measure of sovereignty, but after his death in 1860 the country was once again plunged into chaos.

Most historians conclude that Cambodia would have disappeared if Duang’s successor and eldest son, King Norodom, had not negotiated a treaty with France to keep his neighbours at bay. Under the terms of the treaty, his kingdom became a protectorate in 1863. The Siamese seethed, but could do little against superior force. The French gradually tightened control over the Kingdom to create a de facto colony, administered by a powerful official known as the Résident Supérieur. In 1887, Cambodia became part of the newly created Indo-chinese Federation under a governor-general with his capital at Hanoi.”

“The Mekong, the world’s 12th longest river, rises thousands of kilometres away on the Tibetan plateau and every year, after the spring thaw in the mountains, the snow-fed waters surge downstream in a mighty flood. In fact, so great is the volume of water that it is unable to drain through the delta and backs up into the Tonlé Sap past the capital, reversing the flow so that the water flows upstream, past the old capital at Udong and into the lake of the same name as the river. When this happens, the surface area of the lake expands enormously, forming an immense inland sea of over 13,000 square kilometres and attaining a depth of up to 10 metres. In October or November, the direction of flow changes and the waters are carried away to the sea. The enormous volumes of water, silt and nutrients give rise to a teeming population of over 200 varieties of fish, and these form the major source of protein for the people of Cambodia. Over one million people earn their living directly from fishing and some three million live around the lake, some by flood retreat farming.”

“The Chams, who speak their own language and practise the Sunni variant of Islam, are the descendents of the once mighty empire of Champa, sacked by the Vietnamese in 1471, mixed with more recent Muslim Malay immigrants. They have been renowned as cartwrights and woodworkers. Although their number fell by around 36 per cent under Pol Pot, there are today about half a million Chams in Cambodia. They live in their own villages, replete with mosques, to which they are summoned to prayer not by the cries of a muezzin as elsewhere in Darul Islam, but by drums and gongs.”

“They live in their own villages, replete with mosques, to which they are summoned to prayer not by the cries of a muezzin as elsewhere in Darul Islam, but by drums and gongs.”

“The temples of Ancient Angkor are the largest ruins in the world and the only archaeological site visible from outer space.”

“The ancestors of today’s Khmers built Angkor and the temple complex of the Heritage Area as the centre of a powerful empire and of a dispersed city with between 700,000 and one million inhabitants; it was the most populous city of antiquity, sprawling over an area of 1000 square kilometres or more.”

“Jayavarman VIl’s reign, between the late 12th and early 13th centuries, is regarded as the climax of the empire. Angkor stood at the centre of a vast realm that extended from the Andaman Sea in modern Myanmar to the South China Sea in today’s Vietnam, and far northwards into what is now Laos. Although it might have been ultimately constrained by what modern historians call ‘imperial overstretch’, Angkor’s expansion was checked by natural, rather than human barriers — seas; mountain ranges and impassable jungles. However, as George Co-edès has written, the huge effort needed to carry out Jayavarman VIl’s building program was an ultimately unsustainable drain on the resources of the empire.”

“Interestingly, given that hell in the western tradition is a place of perpetual fire, the Khmer version is one of eternal, bone-chilling cold.”

“Khmer mores allowed a wife or husband to have another sexual partner if a partner was absent for more than ten nights, although this could be dangerous as a husband could have a man who cuckolded him put in the stocks. Khmers married in their teenage years and once a couple were betrothed, premarital intercourse was accepted. A major rite of passage for girls was the custom Zhou Daguan has recorded as the chen-t’en, which tends to shock modern readers. Following lavish celebrations, a priest would deflower the girl with his hand, for which he would be rewarded with gifts of alcohol, rice, cloth, silver, betel and silk. In wealthier families, the ceremony happened when the girl was aged between seven and nine years old, in poorer, when she was 11.”

“In the end the arrogance, greed and general bad behaviour of the conquistadors led to their deaths in a massacre at Phnom Penh in 1599 at the hands of an outraged mob stiffened by Tagals, the Cham and Malay palace guards, who would have been equipped with firearms. Ruiz and Veloso died with their dubious cohort and with them perished Spanish hopes of carving out God’s Empire in Indochina. Afterwards, French missionaries took over the work the Iberian Church Militant had initiated, albeit with no greater success, at least in Cambodia.”

“By 1780, the Vietnamese controlled almost the whole of the lower delta region and the Camau Peninsula. In the delta, the Vietnamese had carried out a process similar to that of the Israelis in the present-day Occupied Territories of Palestine, of ‘creating political facts on the ground’ by populating the region with settlers. It was a slow-motion annexation in which the hapless Khmers were pushed over the de facto border, or onto marginal lands. The 19th century French historian Adhémard Leclère claimed that the Vietnamese settlers provoked border incidents so as to be able to demand indemnities in land from the Khmers.

Although almost half a million Khmer Krom still live in the Vietnamese lower delta today, it is probable, as the distinguished archaeologist and writer Louis Malleret has argued, that only the coming of the French saved them from assimilation or extinction. The Khmers’ religion taught them resignation in the face of seemingly inevitable misfortune and they would need every ounce of faith in a ‘historical amphitheatre’ that, as Albert Camus reminds us, has always contained ‘the martyr and the lion’ and where the ‘former relied on eternal consolation and the latter on raw historical meat. For their part, metaphorically speaking, the Siamese tiger and the Vietnamese crocodile had voracious appetites for Cambodian flesh. However, the designs of Cambodia’s external enemies were assisted by periodic bouts of dynastic feuding within the country itself and by the late 1770s, during which decade the Siamese burned Phnom Penh, the country’s fortunes were at their lowest ebb.

From the 18th century onwards, Cambodia became a tributary state of its neighbours, a common form of foreign relations in Southeast Asia and one originally developed by the Chinese. The Cambodian kings were expected to pay annual tribute in ritual ceremonies in Hué or Bangkok. Gifts and letters would be exchanged, underlining the dependent status of the vassal monarch at Phnom Penh. In its turn, Vietnam was expected to acknowledge its own tributary status with regard to China.”

“For the Vietnamese, the Khmers were by definition barbarians to be punished, patronised or civilised, depending on the situation. The Siamese, who shared much of the culture of Cambodia, were often more tolerant and tended to view the Khmers as children, albeit unruly and disobedient ones. This would explain the frequent resort to stern measures, as for instance when they burned down Phnom Penh in 1772, and invaded the country in 1811, 1833 and again in the 1840s. However, it is clear they also felt some sense of responsibility for the fate of their Theravadist neighbour, whose capital lay much closer to Vietnam than to Siam.

Until the 19th century the actions of Siam and Vietnam in Cambodia were usually constrained by the desire on both sides to avoid an all-out military collision with each other. Although they continually intrigued and jockeyed for power and influence in the kingdom, they both understood that it was in their interests to allow Cambodia to exist as a semi-independent buffer state. This did not stop them from pushing home the advantage when the other was preoccupied with other problems, as when the Nguyen dynasty was confronted with the Tay Son rebellion in Vietnam, or when the Siamese were distracted by wars with Burma. The situation changed in the early 19th century when the Vietnamese decided on a policy of territorial and cultural assimilation. The resulting chaos and instability almost destroyed Cambodia.”

“The Phnom Penh region was given a Vietnamese administrative name and the aspect of the city became increasingly Sinitic, just as Prey Nokor had become Sai-gon. The region looked set for absorption into Vietnam, just as the lower delta or Kampuchea Krom had been during the previous century.

However, in 1840–41 the Khmers once again rose up in rebellion against the foreigners, this time with more effect. The revolt lasted for six months and although it was suppressed it did ensure the continued existence of the Khmer state.”

“Siam and Vietnam were pretty evenly matched and the situation bogged down into a military stalemate that lasted until 1845. For the Khmers, there was no respite from the horrors of war. Both sides inflicted mass deportations and public executions on the populace. Farmland was laid waste and towns and villages razed as the rival armies attacked and counterattacked, looting, raping and burning their way across the countryside. The population fell dramatically to somewhere around half a million, according to the accounts of foreign visitors such as Sir John Bowring. Phnom Penh’s population was no more than 25,000 and that of Udong perhaps half as large. Famine and epidemics of disease stalked the land. Trade had almost completely dried up and literacy rates had fallen. The towns and villages were depopulated and much of the agricultural land had reverted to nature.

The suffering ended only when the Vietnamese withdrew from Phnom Penh and sued for negotiations with Siam. Both sides were weary after years of war and the Vietnamese were increasingly worried — not without foundation — about the designs of France on their kingdom. They agreed to allow Duang to stay in the capital and eventually they returned the royal regalia, without which the Khmers would not consider him a legitimate ruler. In effect, both sides agreed that Cambodia would become a neutral state, albeit a client of its neighbours. Both sides withdrew their troops (with the exception of the Siamese in the northwest provinces) after more than three decades of occupation.”

“The degree of independence Duang enjoyed during his reign should not be overstated. He reigned by courtesy of his powerful neighbours and he was crowned by both Khmer and Siamese Brahmans. The northwest provinces — which contained the great national symbol of the ruins of Angkor — had been severed from Cambodia, seemingly forever.”

Colonialism

“His death was followed by another depressing interregnum of court intrigues, dynastic squabbling, revolts and foreign meddling. Duang’s oldest son, Prince Norodom, turned to the French for support, and this time the French were quick to accept. During the monsoon of 1863, a bluff middle-aged French admiral sailed up the Mekong to Udong by gunboat to sign a treaty with this prince. A new era in Cambodian history was about to begin.”

“French colonialism arrived in Indochina in 1858, four centuries after the Iberian conquistadors set sail from Manila on a doomed mission to carve out an empire on the Southeast Asian mainland. This time, the Europeans would succeed. French marines landed from warships anchored off Saigon after a pogrom had broken out against Catholic missionaries and their Vietnamese converts. What was ostensibly a ‘protective mission’ became a permanent occupation force. The Vietnamese troops were no match for French marines armed with breech-loading rifles and naval guns. Blocked from expansion in India and kept out of the rest of Southeast Asia by the Dutch, the Spanish and the British, the French were eager to plant the tricolour in Indochina.”

“Cambodia had no private landed property in the normally accepted sense of the word. All land was crown land, the property of the king, who was indistinguishable from the state. The French saw this as a barrier to material progress. They believed it encouraged sloth and passivity on the part of the peasants, who made up the overwhelming majority of the Cambodian population. There was no doubt that it prevented the establishment of a stable taxation base for state revenues. Under the Cambodian system, which was a form of usufruct, anyone could work the land with the king’s blessing. However, should the occupants leave the land fallow for three years, anyone else was free to take it over. In return for the right to use the land, the peasants had to hand over one-tenth of their income, in kind, to the state. They were also expected to perform corvée labour, in theory for a stipulated number of days per year but in practice often at the whim of local officials, who often put the peasants to work on private projects. The system entrenched subsistence agriculture and discouraged private enterprise. The tax-in-kind system also fostered corruption because tax collectors could understate the amount of taxable farm produce in any particular year.”

“The second aim was to abolish slavery, on both moral and pragmatic grounds. France had itself only finally abolished slavery a few decades before, but the custom flew in the face of the (in theory) cherished Rights of Man and it was also economically inefficient (as Marx had noted in Volume I of Capital, for instance). According to one estimate, 150,000 people out of a total Cambodian population of 900,000 in the 1880s were slaves. Those in bondage fell into two broad categories, hereditary slaves and debt slaves, but there were also slaves at the royal court and even in the Buddhist temples. However repugnant to modern eyes, slavery had been part of life in Cambodia since pre-Angkorean times, and Khmers — including the slaves themselves — saw it as a natural part of life, and there was no indigenous emancipation movement. Its eradication therefore proved extremely difficult.”

“The country was largely at peace, but it was the peace of an exhausted and devastated land. The French estimated that 10,000 people had died during the revolt, but other statistics show that the Cambodian population fell from 945,000 in 1879 to 750,000 in 1888: a net loss off 195,000 people. Many of these must have died, but tens of thousands of peasants had also fled to Battambang and Siam proper, or else sought refuge in the jungle. Once again, famine and disease broke out as farmland was abandoned or devastated. It was yet another immense tragedy for a land that had never recovered from the wars, famines, deportations and insurrections earlier in the century.”

“While it would be drawing a long bow to claim that the French deliberately imported the Vietnamese in order to play a game of divide and rule, the presence of so large a minority led to ethnic friction, and the French made opportunistic use of it when it suited them (just as they played off the Khmer Krom minority against the Vietnamese in Cochin-China). Upon the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, Khmer nationalism was weak and unfocused, with most Khmers either indifferent to the French or well disposed towards them. Even today there are some very old Khmers who look back with nostalgia to the colonial era. However, war and French humiliation at Asian hands during the Japanese occupation were to change the political situation forever, and trigger a qualitative leap in consciousness that was to lead to independence within less than a decade after 1945.”

“The French government readily agreed to their request to station troops throughout Indochina, and also to provide them with rubber, coal and other products. They were scarcely in any position to refuse. For their part, the Japanese were content to leave the day-to-day administration of Indochina to the despised whites, so that they could concentrate on their war aims. It was a marriage of convenience that was to last until the dying days of the war.

The French capitulation was a devastating blow to French morale in the colony, and it must have given the Francophile Khmer elite cause for grave concern. Worse was to come in early 1941, when the Japanese brokered a humiliating agreement between France and Siam — by now renamed Thailand — following a short-lived war. The war had broken out in late 1940, with the Thais taking advantage of France’s weakness to demand the handover of Cambodia’s western provinces, which they had ceded in 1908. While the land war was inconclusive, the French had inflicted a stinging defeat on the Thai navy at the Battle of Koh Chang in the Gulf of Siam, and might have expected a more favourable outcome than that imposed by Japan. However, despite its nominal alliance with Vichy, Japan’s underlying aim was to undermine western colonial power in Asia, regardless of its political complexion. They awarded Thailand almost all of the territories she had asked for, with the exception of the area around the Angkor ruins, which France argued bitterly to retain.

The Cambodians had tolerated the French and many, especially in the elite, had welcomed them, so long as they acted as protectors of srok khmer. Now, their protector’s sword and shield were broken, and the ancient predators were at the gates of the kingdom. Perception of France’s weakness led on one hand to profound disillusionment and depression, but on the other to the growth of nationalist sentiment and to a new confidence that Asians could defeat the almighty Europeans.”

“Despite their promotion of Khmerité the French were inconsistent. In 1941, the French authorities decided to replace the ancient Khmer script (based on Sanskrit) with a new romanised script known as quoc ngu khmer after the reformed Vietnamese script. The move caused widespread indignation, particularly in the Buddhist sangha and in the proto-nationalist circles around Son Ngoc Thanh and Nagaravatta. Son Ngoc Thanh secretly negotiated with the Japanese who, while they counselled prudence, did not discourage his nationalist ambitions. The quoc ngu khmer issue provided the Cambodian dissidents with a focus for popular discontent; on the one hand, the French encouraged Khmerité, yet on the other they threatened the age-old Khmer customs.

In July 1942, a nationalist monk called Hem Chieu delivered a vitriolic anti-French sermon to a group of Cambodian tirailleurs in a Phnom Penh wat. An informer tipped off the French police, who arrested Hem Chieu and a number of other monks and lay nationalists. In response, several thousand angry Khmers, including monks with their distinctive orange robes and parasols, marched on the Résidence Supérieure demanding the prisoners release. A riot ensued, in which a number of police and demonstrators were injured and more arrests made. Further bloodshed was probably deterred by the presence of Japanese military police, the Kempetei, who stood by but did not intervene. The event entered Khmer political folklore as the Revolt of the Parasols, after the monks’ sunshades. In another country, the incident might have been relatively unremarkable, but in hitherto docile Cambodia it was a significant milestone on the road to national independence. Afterwards, the colonial authorities launched a general crackdown, banned Nagaravatta and sentenced several of the perceived ringleaders to death. The French government commuted these terms to life imprisonment on the prison island of Poulo Condore in the South China Sea. There, tutored by Vietnamese nationalist prisoners, the Khmers gained an advanced anti-colonial political education.”

“On 9 March 1945, the Japanese staged an Indochina-wide coup de force against the French, crushing feeble efforts at resistance with ease. The brutal military police of the Kempetei threw the French soldiers and civilians into concentration camps, treating them with neglect and great cruelty, and murdered some in the streets of Phnom Penh. The Japanese government also decided that the time had come for King Sihanouk to declare independence, as had already happened in Burma. They took this step both from political conviction and from the desire to focus their efforts on the military struggle, free of administrative distractions. Sihanouk recalls that he was greatly amazed when Kubota, the Japanese special advisor to Cambodia, directed him to declare his country’s independence from France. This he did, in an unusually restrained broadcast; he must have been under no illusions about the coming Allied victory and couched his statement in guarded terms rather than a ringing declaration.

Sihanouk’s new government trod warily, doing little beyond reversing the quoc ngu khmer decree and changing street names. He pointedly ignored the newly liberated Khmer prisoners when they arrived back from Poulo Condore, and offered them no posts in his government. Perhaps he saw them as a potential threat to his position, but it is also probable that he wished to distance himself from people whom the Allies would call traitors upon their inevitable return to Indochina. Later, seeking to cast himself as the sole architect of Cambodian independence, he attempted to write them out of history.”

Independence

“The political right were clearly in the mood for a coup.

The coup came in June 1952. Although Sihanouk denied it, it is most likely that he plotted with the French high commissioner to remove Huy Kanthoul’s government. It is not credible that heavily armed French troops equipped with tanks just happened to be in Phnom Penh on the day of the coup, all the more so since they surrounded the National Assembly building while its sacking took place. This time, Sihanouk did not govern via an intermediary such as Yem Sambaur. He assumed power directly and dissolved parliament. Huy Kanthoul, the leader of the democratically elected government, went into exile in France and his political career was effectively over. Sihanouk’s unelected cabinet largely consisted of the old cronies, placemen and rightist intriguers who had destabilised the elected government in the first place. A wave of strikes and protests erupted, but Sihanouk was intransigent. Many of the protest ‘ringleaders’ were detained without trial and others arraigned on trumped up charges, a great irony given the claim that Huy Kanthoul was a dictator for locking up Lon Nol and his cronies overnight.

The brave democratic experiment was over. Sihanouk would govern either directly or through proxies for the next 18 years, until he was himself removed in a pro-US coup led by the perennial schemer Lon Nol.”

“Shortly after his visit to Paris, Sihanouk spoke frankly to the press in New York. He called for immediate independence, warning astutely that if it were not granted his country could turn communist.”

“On 17 August, the French agreed to grant Cambodia full sovereignty and Sihanouk returned to a rapturous welcome in Phnom Penh. Finally, on 9 November 1953, the last French troops left Cambodia, marking the end of 90 years of colonial rule. Sihanouk, in a brilliant display of political theatre, had achieved independence months before the French capitulation at Dien Bien Phu and almost one year before the final declaration of the Geneva Peace Conference on 21 July 1954 brought independence to the whole of French Indochina.”

“Sihanouk was only 30 years old when he led his country to independence. Yet his quick intelligence and driving ambition compensated for his comparative youth, and he was able to shape a political system in which he held almost absolute power.”

“The 1951 coup against Huy Kanthoul’s government had thrown his Democratic rivals into disarray, and he had neutralised the Issarak guerrilla chieftains by force or guile. He tolerated no rivals, recognised no equals and branded political opponents as traitors. Democracy and pluralism had no place in his script and although some who lived through ‘Sihanoukism’ look back upon it wistfully as a time of comparative prosperity and peace, others remember it as a time of dark shadows presaging future disaster. In truth, it was both.

Sihanouk’s greatest achievement was his commitment to neutrality, which kept his country out of the Second Indochina War until 1970. In the end, however, this achievement was undermined by his domestic policies and the country plunged into the abyss of the Second Indochina War and Pol Pot’s bloody revolution.”

“In its more honest moments, the Sangkum media justified structural inequality as the workings of karma: the poor were poor because of the bad things they had done in previous lives, while the rich and powerful enjoyed the fruits of their virtue. As David Chandler has observed, independence meant that for the overwhelming majority of Khmers life went on as before with a new set of rulers and they ‘continued to pay taxes to finance an indifferent government in Phnom Penh (or Udong or Angkor) . .’

Cambodia had undergone a political revolution, but Sihanouk suppressed any chance of social change while cultivating the people with demagogic verbal assaults on the rich. This royal populist also made a great show of going to the people, sometimes stripping to the waist to make one or two desultory blows with shovel or mattock on a new public works project. It was cheap theatre, but it worked.”

“In April 1967, a peasant revolt flared when angry villagers killed police and soldiers and burned down government offices at Samlaut, in the northwest province of Battambang. The soldiers had been sent to requisition rice at low prices set by the government, depriving the peasants of the higher prices paid on the black market, which was controlled by private entrepreneurs who sold the rice to the Vietnamese communists. It is also likely that regionalist feeling was another factor in an area with a history of armed opposition to central governments in Phnom Penh. Sihanouk ordered a cruel repression that dwarfed anything carried out during the French colonial period. General Lon Nol crushed the rebels with bloody zeal, eager to prove his loyalty, as Sihanouk had recently humiliated him for allegedly allowing the Cambodian communists to get out of control. According to Sihanouk’s own offhand estimate, as many as 10,000 peasants were killed and he has never apologised for the overkill. Disaffection spread, with scattered revolts elsewhere in the countryside and students staging demonstrations against the regime’s brutality.”

“Sirik Matak, however was resolute and more than an intellectual and moral match for the equivocating Prime Minister. He had lost all respect for Sihanouk sometime earlier, and he was determined that the time had come to remove Sihanouk from power. During the night of 17 March, Sirik Matak and several supporters burst into Lon Nol’s house, pulled him from his bed and demanded his support for a parliamentary coup against Sihanouk — at gunpoint, according to some reports. Reluctantly, Lon Nol agreed, signing a paper that called upon the National Assembly to depose Sihanouk as head of state. He is said to have wept when he signed the document, and later, when the country descended into chaos, to have expressed remorse at turning against his master.

The session of the National Assembly that followed was electric, as speakers stood to denounce Sihanouk for corruption and abuse of power, giving vent to howls of pent-up rage against the man who had often personally humiliated them. It was a revolt of men exasperated to the limit with a master who had forfeited their loyalty and respect. The assemblymen were not revolutionaries by conviction or nature. They were, by and large, the same conservatives who had supported Sihanouk since his overthrow of the Huy Kanthoul government in 1951, or men very much like them. They agreed with the plotters, voting by a margin of 86 to 3 to remove Sihanouk as head of state (later altered to be unanimous). It was the symbolic parricide of the father of the nation. Sihanoukism was dead, and some months later the mutineers voted to transform Cambodia into a republic.”

“A carnival mood prevailed in Phnom Penh and the American journalist T.D. Allman compared the atmosphere at the time to a psychedelic trip. Free of the prince who had long unmanned them, the National Assembly celebrated Sihanouk’s political demise. Students paraded joyfully in the streets, the chief bonze of the Buddhist Mohanikay order praised the actions of the National Assembly, and the government granted an amnesty to a few hundred political prisoners and paid their bus fares home. The government denounced Sihanouk as a madman and vowed to put him on trial for corruption and abuse of power.

Given the dangers facing the country, it should have been a time for sobriety, but reason was washed away in the flood of jubilation. Bolstered by the empty promises of the Saigon regime, by faith in the United States, and steeped in an ineffable belief in the racial superiority of the Khmers, the Republican government prepared for all-out war.”

“Although the new head of state, Cheng Heng, announced that his country would remain neutral, the new regime developed a de facto alliance with the United States and South Vietnam and embarked on a bloody anti-communist war that would end five years later with the fall of Phnom Penh to the black-clad Khmers Rouges guerrillas. Full of surreal optimism, Cheng Heng rejected any suggestion of a negotiated solution with the Vietnamese communists and promised to throw them out of the country. Officials scoffed at the threat posed by up to 40,000 battle-hardened Vietnamese communist regulars and NLF guerrillas and their tiny 400-strong Khmers Rouges allies. ‘They amuse us,” one bureaucrat yawned. ‘We are strong. In the end we will be victorious.”

“On 23 March 1970, Sihanouk announced the formation of the National United Front of Kampuchea (FUNK after its French acronym), in which his royalist supporters would join hands with his old Khmers Rouges enemies in a war to remove the ‘usurpers’ at Phnom Penh. It was a declaration of war by a man who had staked his career on avoiding war.

Years later, Sihanouk claimed to have suffered mis givings over the Chinese leaders’ motives. He was suspicious, he asserts, that they saw the alliance as a way of using him to install the Khmers Rouges in power. Even if this occurred to him at the time, he was boiling with rage and his lust for revenge soon overrode any doubts. Pol Pot claimed later that the alliance was his idea, but it is likely that he was encouraged by the Chinese to accept a pact of convenience with his old enemy. As it turned out, Sihanouk was supping with the devil with a very short spoon, although he could not foresee the tragic consequences of the alliance at that time.”

“Less than a fortnight after the coup, the New York Times reported that thousands of Vietnamese refugees were streaming across the border into the lower Mekong delta. Cambodian government leaflets whipped up race hatred and the police rounded up tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians as suspected communists. Lon Nol labelled the entire Vietnamese community as communist as a pretext for the mass detention, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and slaughter of civilians.”

“The final death toll was probably in the tens of thousands and although the government blamed the massacres on angry civilians, most were the handiwork of the Cambodian military and police. Lon Nol never apologised for the slaughter and, given his mystical racism, probably justified it as a crusade against the ancient enemy.”

“From 1970, when the bombing was stepped up following the Lon Nol coup, the US dropped almost 540,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia. After the Paris Peace Accords came into force in February 1973, and ended the bombing of Vietnam, the US commanders turned their entire aerial firepower on Cambodia, with B-52s flying thousands of sorties from carriers in the Gulf and bases in Thailand and Guam. The bombing reached a crescendo in the first half of 1973, when 260,000 tons of bombs fell on Cambodia.By way of comparison, the Allies dropped a total of 160,000 tons of bombs on Japan in all of World War II. Admittedly, Japan was a more urbanised society, but the extent of the destruction inflicted on Cambodia should not be downplayed. Estimates of the total death toll from bombing vary from 150,000 to the US historian Chalmers Johnson’s perhaps inflated estimate of 750,000. A Finnish Commission of Inquiry estimated 600,000 directly war-related deaths between 1970 and April 1975, although in truth the exact numbers will probably never be known. To this day, hundreds of Khmer peasants are killed and mutilated every year by the cluster bombs and other unexploded ordnance littering the countryside, although some of this is caused by landmines sown by Cambodian troops of one ideological complexion or another.

US Congressmen had on a number of occasions tried to stop or limit the bombing, but Nixon and his chief advisor, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, ignored their directions. The bombing only ceased after Donald Dawson, a B-52 co-pilot on leave in the United States, saw television footage of the carnage inflicted on a Cambodian wedding party at Neak Luong by a US raid. B-52s fly at a tremendous altitude, so high that their engines cannot be heard on the ground and the first inkling of their presence is when the bombs begin to punch huge craters in the ground. The air crews are shielded from the horror below and think only in terms of dropping their bombs according to pre-arranged map coordinates in long, narrow areas known as boxes. When he realised the horror of what he had done, Dawson refused to fly any more sorties. He was threatened with a court martial, the public outrage halted legal proceedings and the US Congress ordered the complete cessation of bombing.”

The Khmer Rouges

“There were two interrelated immediate reasons for the expulsions. The first was the relative weakness of the Khmers Rouges forces, which had been only just strong enough to defeat Lon Nol’s army. The second was the fear that the cities would act as reservoirs of counter-revolution. It did not matter that over half the urban population were civilian refugees from the countryside, or that most city-dwellers welcomed the end of hostilities and favoured national reconciliation. For the high command of the secretive angkar, it was a case of ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’ — logic that they shared with both Sihanouk and Lon Nol, for whom dissent meant treason. Underlying the immediate practical necessity of evacuation (as the Khmers Rouges saw it) was an ideological imperative. The Khmers Rouges leadership was determined to begin the total transformation of Cambodian society on the day that Phnom Penh and Battambang fell and this was predicated on the dispersal of the old urban populations.”

“Pol Pot’s antipathy towards Vietnam also impelled him into an alliance with China, which for its part was delighted to gain an ally against Hanoi, which it saw as an upstart agent of ‘Soviet social imperialism’ on its southern border. The communist world, it should be recalled, had been riven in two by the Sino-Soviet split of 1960, when Mao denounced the leaders of the USSR as revisionists seeking to impose their domination over the rest of the bloc. Pol Pot suspected that the Vietnamese wanted to revive the old federation of Indochina under their hegemony and his suspicions deepened when they signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation with the Lao communist regime in 1977, a move he interpreted as encirclement. After delivering the September 1977 speech in which he announced the existence of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, Pol Pot flew to Beijing for discussions with Hua Guofeng, the successor to Mao and the ‘Gang of Four’. The hostile alignment of the Indochinese states within the communist world was completed in 1978, when Vietnam, suspicious of Chinas ambitions in Southeast Asia, signed a 25-year treaty with the USSR.

The move accelerated the deterioration of relations between DK and Vietnam. DK broke off diplomatic relations with Hanoi in early 1978. There had been sporadic fighting along the border and in December 1977, the Vietnamese decided to teach Pol Pot a lesson by dispatching an invasion force that penetrated deep into eastern Cambodia and routed Khmers Rouges forces. They soon withdrew but took a number of Cambodian villagers with them and, more importantly, there was an increasing stream of Khmers Rouges over the border as Pol Pot’s purges began to spiral out of control and local Khmers Rouges commanders attempted to defend themselves or escape.”

“Increasingly belligerent and buoyed by an unrealistic sense of power, Pol Pot rejected a Vietnamese offer to submit the border dispute to international arbitration and both sides massed troops at the frontier. Khmers Rouges guerrillas increasingly slipped over the border and raided villages on the Vietnamese side, committing horrible atrocities that were recorded by the journalist Nayan Chanda for Far Eastern Economic Review at the time. It was necessary, claimed the Khmers Rouges, to ‘annihilate’ the Vietnamese on their own territory. What this meant was that in house after house bloated, rotting bodies of men, women and children lay strewn about. Some were beheaded, some had their bellies ripped open, some were missing limbs, others eyes! General Tran Van Tra, the commander of the Vietnamese army in the Mekong delta, seethed with rage and another officer who witnessed the massacres was ‘overcome with nausea’ when he recalled them 12 months later, Chanda has written. The raids displaced almost half a million people on the Vietnamese side of the border, and caused around 100,000 hectares of farmland to be temporarily abandoned. While the local Vietnamese army commanders chafed, the Hanoi government continued its fruitless efforts at a negotiated solution. In one memorable speech, Pol Pot boasted that the disparity in size and population between Cambodia and Vietnam was of no consequence, for if every Khmers Rouges soldier killed 30 Vietnamese, they would win the war. He was also banking on Chinese support, but the Chinese were no more inclined to dispatch troops to help him than the Americans had been to protect Lon Nol.

The end came swiftly for the Pol Pot regime. On Christmas Day 1978, an invasion force over 100,000 strong, backed by tanks, artillery and aviation, poured over the border from Vietnam, driving the Khmers Rouges forces before them.”

“The old despot died while under house arrest in a Cambodian frontier village in April 1998, a sad, sick old man of 70 years, despised even by the rump of the Khmers Rouges, who cremated his corpse in a makeshift pyre of old rubber sandals and other rubbish. He never expressed remorse for his disastrous policies. The American journalist Nate Thayer, who interviewed Pol Pot shortly before his death, said, ‘The one regret I had in my several encounters with Pol Pot was that he didn’t feel sorry. He felt what he did was justified. To the end, this old schoolmaster-turned-guerrilla epitomised what a wiser revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, had meant when he wrote that the ultra-left sectarian saw life as a great school and himself as the teacher. The Cambodian people had failed him, not the other way round.”

Post-Rouge

“Cambodia has lived through two regimes since Pol Pot. Immediately after the Vietnamese invasion, the leaders of the Hanoi-backed National Salvation Front declared the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) on a broad platform put forward at Snoul on the eastern border in December 1978. This regime (renamed the State of Cambodia in 1989) lasted until the Paris Peace Agreement of 1991, when the warring factions in Cambodian politics, helped by international diplomatic initiatives and the end of the Cold War, decided on a course of national reconciliation and democratisation that resulted two years later in the reconstitution of the Kingdom of Cambodia.

The PRK failed in its avowed socialist objectives and its noncommunist successor has yet to live up to the democratic hopes of its domestic and international sponsors. Although the Kingdom of Cambodia holds regular elections, like the old Sihanouk and Lon Nol regimes it is an authoritarian state ruled by a strongman — the ex-Khmer Rouge guerrilla Hun Sen, who first rose to prominence under the PRK, abandoning its socialist principles along the way.”

“Today, around 50 per cent of Cambodia’s budget comes from overseas aid, corruption is rife even at the highest levels of government and the civil service, poverty and landlessness are increasing.”

“He swore to rebuild Cambodia as ‘a truly peaceful, independent, democratic, neutral, and non-aligned country… Once the Khmers Rouges had been defeated there would be national elections and a new constitution. The people would have the right to vote and to live, work and travel where they wished within the country.’

The new regime would be avowedly socialist but there would be a mixed economy, with rural cooperatives established only with the full consent of the peasants, and there would be an eight-hour working day. Banks, currency and trade would be re-established. Family life and religion would be respected and the state would provide its citizens with proper health care, and education at all levels. There would be support for war victims, the elderly and the numerous orphans. Finally, Heng Samrin held out the hope of national reconciliation, promising that the new state would be lenient with former Pol Pot supporters who had genuinely reformed.

Given the state of the country at the time, it was as ambitious and lofty a declaration as any in human history and it was sincerely meant. It would also prove far more difficult to implement than its authors imagined.”

“Even at the end of Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea, there had been a final round of slaughter in some districts, with the Khmers Rouges forcing families to volunteer their strongest members, ostensibly for labour but in reality for execution. As historian Margaret Slocomb explains, ‘Like roads and bridges, and a ripe harvest, human assets had to be destroyed to spite the conquerors! One suspects it was also to prevent them from joining the invaders, arms in hand, to wreak vengeance on their tormentors’.”

“The retreating Khmers Rouges soldiers took a quarter of the rice crop with them and burned down granaries and even destroyed the crops in the fields. Still more rice rotted on the ground as people deserted the DK’s prison-villages, some for the nearest frontier, others for their old homes. In the midst of the chaos, much of the next rice crop was not planted. There was also a shortage of basic agricultural implements, seed, draught animals and means of transportation. Fish teemed in the rivers and in the Great Lake, but there were virtually no nets or boats to catch them. Although some food aid came from Vietnam and Eastern bloc countries, augmented by smaller amounts from some Western charities, it was not enough to stave off disaster. After living to see the end of DK, between 325,000 and 625,000 people died within the first year of liberation, many from starvation. By way of comparison, this alone is a disaster almost on the scale of the Irish famine of the mid-19th century.”

“Pragmatic policies of the new government, the Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Council, was established in Phnom Penh on 8 January 1979, under the presidency of Heng Samrin. It was basically a coalition, with Heng Samrin and Hun Sen representing the former Khmers Rouges who had broken with Pol Pot, and another group of former ‘Khmer Viet Minh,’ such as Pen Sovann and Keo Chendra.”

“The non-communist countries making up the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) — Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia in particular — were also frightened of what they saw as Vietnam’s hegemonic intentions in the region; this was still the era of the domino theory. As a result, Thailand gave sanctuary to Pol Pot’s guerrillas, allowing them to operate with impunity from bases in refugee camps inside its border. This was done with the full support of China and the United States.

In June 1982, the Khmers Rouges were joined by Sihanouk’s royalist FUNCINPEC party (after its French initials) and Son Sann’s republican Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (KPNLF) in an unlikely Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK), which was immediately recognised by China, the United States and the ASEAN countries (with Lee Kwan Yew’s Singapore particularly zealous in its support). Militarily, Pol Pot’s forces, estimated to number 200,000 in 1979 and stabilising thereafter at around 35,000, dominated this coalition. FUNCINPEC and the KPNLF never managed to muster effective fighting forces. According to the United Nations, the total number of people under CGDK control in the refugee camps was slightly more than 260,000 in 1987. There is evidence that many people under Khmers Rouges control in particular would have left if they could. Because the PRK was widely regarded as Vietnam’s puppet, the CGDK gained widespread diplomatic recognition, with the Khmer Rouge Khieu Samphan occupying Cambodia’s ambassadorial seat at the United Nations General Assembly. In contrast, only 11 countries recognised the Heng Samrin government, and only one of them, India, was outside of the Soviet bloc.

Early attempts to end or at least scale down the conflict proved fruitless. In 1980, Thailand flatly rejected a Vietnamese proposal for a demilitarised zone along the Cambodian border and the following year the Soviet bloc boycotted a UN-sponsored international conference on Kampuchea, along with an ASEAN proposal for the UN to disarm all of the Cambodian factions, in combination with withdrawal of all Vietnamese troops and free elections. In 1983, China blocked a proposal by the NonAligned Summit for a roundtable conference of all the parties to the dispute. Three years later, Austria offered to chair direct talks between the parties, but the proposal failed due to Chinese opposition. International events, however, allowed in the end for the relatively speedy resolution of the conflict, but for the best part of a decade it was intractable.

For the vast majority of Cambodians, who lived under PRK control, the results of these international intrigues were painful in the extreme. During the 1979 famine, for instance, the country was denied the economic and humanitarian aid it so desperately needed and although conditions improved in subsequent years with better harvests, Cambodia remained one of the world’s poorest countries. Oxfam’s Eva Myslwiec was forthright in her criticism: ‘Seven million Kampucheans are being denied the Right to development and many are suffering directly because of the decisions taken by China, ASEAN and Western nations. The PRK was ineligible for any of the assistance normally available for other Third World countries, many of which were ruled by governments much more corrupt and brutal than the PRK or Vietnam. The PRK was cut off from assistance from the UN Development Programme, the Asian Development Bank, the IMF and the World Bank, with only a trickle of humanitarian aid from UNICE and the International Red Cross, whose rules did not preclude them from operating in disputed territories. ‘Kampuchea,’ pointed out the Oxfam patron Sir Robert Jackson, ‘remains in the unique position of being the only developing country in the world — and it is almost certainly the country most in need — that is prevented from receiving any of the normal development and other assistance provided by the UN system.”

“Perhaps the PRK’s greatest abuse of human rights began in 1982–83, when the regime launched the ambitious K5 Plan in the preparation for the huge 1984–85 dry season offensive against the Khmers Rouges. Under the K5 blueprint, the regime moved to seal off the border with Thailand with a great line of forts, ditches and dikes, walls, fences and minefields. Although Khmer People’s Revolutionary Armed Forces (KRAF) personnel and Vietnamese soldiers worked on the fortifications, the regime also conscripted some 50,000 civilian labourers. Indifferent food and poor sanitation, combined with heavy manual work, cost the lives of thousands of these civilians.”

“K5 and the following offensive could be rated a military success, but it was deeply unpopular and cost the PRK a great deal of support among those it claimed to serve. However, we should not forget that it was the continuing support for Pol Pot by China, the West and ASEAN (and in particular Thailand) that necessitated the fortifications in the first place.”

“The regime introduced a kind of perestroika from 1988 (mirroring the Vietnamese party’s doi moi free market reforms) and the collectivisation project in the countryside was abandoned. In September 1989, just prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall and coincident with the final withdrawal of Vietnamese troops, the PRK changed its name to the more neutral-sounding State of Cambodia (SOC). The KPRP renamed itself as the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) and dropped its socialist aims and ideology. It had simply given up on the socialist project in the face of overwhelming domestic and international pressures and the seductions of power. However, by this stage the regime had also demonstrated that it was no longer the mere Vietnamese puppet that its detractors had claimed.”

“For all their manipulation of Cambodian affairs, the Vietnamese government did its best to provide economic and humanitarian aid that it could scarcely afford. The war in Cambodia cost Hanoi dearly and was deeply unpopular with the Vietnamese people. Up to 50 per cent of Vietnam’s budget was spent on the military during the occupation and this colossal drain turned their own war-damaged country into an economic basketcase. Vietnam and the PRK were shunned as international pariahs while Pol Pot’s sinister entourage basked in the sun of international recognition. The tragedy is that it took 13 weary years before the ‘international community’ could agree on a solution to a problem they were largely responsible for creating in the first place.”

“In many former Soviet bloc countries, the old ruling communist parties were either eclipsed or reinvented themselves politically and made a genuine commitment to play by the rules of democracy and pluralism. This did not happen in Cambodia. The Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party, rebadged as the Cambodian People’s Party, was determined to maintain its monopoly of power. Evan Gottesman has expressed this succinctly:

No Berlin Wall fell in Cambodia. No Vaclav Havel or Lech Walesa came to power. The regime did not collapse; it negotiated the terms of its survival. Impoverished and isolated, the SOC understood that it needed legitimacy and assistance from the United Nations and the West. This meant complying with the expectations of the international community, when necessary, and protecting power in undemocratic and frequently violent ways, when possible.

Part of the price was the abandonment of the party’s socialist ideology, and therefore its apparent raison d’être. Nor did the party reinvent itself as a social democratic party, with a residual commitment to social justice. From now on its imperatives would be those of power and wealth, devoid of egalitarian concerns, and backed up by its control of the country’s ‘prisons and bodies of armed men’ inherited from the PRK.”

“Cambodia was now ruled effectively by a dictator, a ‘strongman’ whom the US scholar Stephen Heder had once described as both a competent political administrator and a ‘ruthless political criminal’.

The astute Hun Sen was aware that force alone does not legitimise a regime. Despite its corruption and abuse of human rights (the latter documented in Amnesty International’s annual reports and the publications of Human Rights Watch and Citizens for Public Justice etc.), the regime maintained a populist façade, claiming to care for the poor who made up the overwhelming bulk of the population. In fact, a study by the UN Development Programme published in March 2003 indicates that poverty has become much worse under Hun Sen, and the rate of infant mortality rose from 79 deaths per 1000 in 1987 (under the PRK) to 95 per 1000 in 2000. Trade unionists — including women textile workers who attempt to organise to improve their standards of living and conditions of work — have been brutally repressed and/or subjected to officially condoned private violence.

In 1998, however, Hun Sen surprised his critics by announcing that the country would hold fresh elections for the National Assembly. The elections, which were held on 26 July, were supervised by a team of international observers from the European Union, ASEAN and NGOs, all of whom, to FUNCINPEC’s chagrin, proclaimed them to have been free and fair in the main. The result was a clear victory for the CPP, although it fell short of the two-thirds majority necessary under the constitution for it to govern in its own right. As a result, the CPP formed a new coalition with FUNCINPEC, which accepted some junior portfolios.

The following year saw Hun Sen win another important political victory when his country was accepted as a member of ASEAN. The CPP’s preeminence was reconfirmed in July 2003, when the party again won a majority of votes, and is unlikely to be challenged in the near future.”

“Nor has the government displayed much interest in coming to terms with the horrors of the DK years, either through trials or via a ‘truth and reconciliation’ process as in post-apartheid South Africa. The PRK, it is true, made the S21 torture centre at Tuol Sleng into a ‘museum of the genocide,’ but there has been little progress in bringing the top Khmers Rouges leaders to trial. Indeed, at the time of writing, only two of the worst leaders have been indicted: Ta Mok, the one-legged former commander of the DK’s Southwest Zone, and Duch, the schoolmaster-turned-torturer who ran Tuol Sleng. Pol Pot and Son Sen are dead and although the Cambodian government came to an agreement with the United Nations in May 2005 to set up a tribunal to try the other former leaders, it remains to be seen whether this will happen.”

“Today, Cambodia remains one of the poorest nations on earth. Between one third and one half of its 13 million people live in abject poverty on less than US$1 per day, and the numbers rise every year. Fifty per cent of the country’s children under five are underweight. Corruption scares off foreign investment and the country’s rate of economic growth has slumped, with the World Bank predicting that it could fall to less than 2.5 per cent in 2005. The estimated per capita GNP was US$280 in 2002. The country relies heavily on foreign aid donations, which make up some 50 per cent of its budget, yet the US Agency for International Development estimates that corrupt officials siphon off up to US$500 million per year.”