The Eyes of the Pineapple

One of us must kill thirty Vietnamese … So far, we have succeeded in implementing this slogan of one against thirty … We need only two million troops to crush the fifty million Vietnamese, and we would still have six million people left.

Radio Phnom Penh broadcast, 10 May 1978

Well, the DK government’s confidence was severely shaken in December of that year. Thirty thousand of the best RAK troops weren’t much use against the meticulously planned Vietnamese invasion, with its inside information, Russian tank spearhead which sped down the country’s highways, and the swift application of the Blooming Lotus tactic. A move that either destroyed or sent the DK forces scurrying about the countryside like confused insects without a nest. A strategic withdrawl to the western border areas ensured survival for these ultra-nationalists. With a shared hatred of the Yuon, but unlike their old enemy Marshall Lon Nol, they didn’t bother drawing a circle of coloured and supposedly magical sand around the perimeter of Phnom Penh, but instead decided to leg it. During the Cambodian Civil War, Lon Nol, with his mumbo-jumbo Neo-Khmerisme, believed it would somehow protect the capital city from attacks by Khmer Rouge units, like the animal tooth and claw necklaces worn by his oft-stoned soldiers. He needed all the help he could get. The roaring jets of B-52s were no longer causing those in rural areas to lose control of their bodily functions in the nether regions. Obviously keeping that letter from Richard Nixon in his pocket, as if it was some kind of talisman, didn’t help because by August 1973 the bomb supply had dried up. Forward again to December 1978, and early January 1979, final victory for the Vietnamese was only delayed when the tank units only stopped short of their target for want of fuel. Also in that year 1978, the soon to be toppled group of self-regarding but incredibly sensitive Khmer intellectuals were trying to get to the bottom of the problems that had befallen their attempt at state building. Without, of course, blaming themselves. They produced an unintentionally amusing but interesting document which, while being crammed with facts, is an ample demonstration of how facts can be bent to suit the needs of ressentiment. This document is called the Black Paper or Livre Noir. Now, chauvinist attitudes bordering on racism have long been a clichéd aspect of Khmer-Vietnamese relations, but the Black Paper at least tried to paint a serious picture of grievance, some of its content genuine, some of it fanciful, and about which the Vietnamese, when apart from producing their weaker Dossiers, remained quiet on the history of hostilities between Communists in the region.

In 1980 an English-translation of a paper produced by French sociologist Serge Thion, was published in the journal Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (Issue 4 in the 12th volume), named The Ingratitude of the Crocodiles. In his usual wry style, he offered a critical assessment of the Black Paper’s content. The DK document is rich in information, Thion’s paper is rich in its informed and detailed piss-taking of it, but this is a blog post by an amateur, and not a school essay, so there are only going to be a few choice snippets for you to perhaps chuckle at — on Khmer-Vietnamese relations during the war, quoted below. By no means the most interesting of items which can be picked out of course. Pages and pages could be written in discussion on other matters regrading the bad feeling felt between the Khmer and Vietnamese Communists and what is found in the Black Paper. That’s what the comment function is for I suppose. Its okay to laugh you know. It’s good for you. But firstly, here is Thion on the actual word Kampuchea and its origins.

A lot of smart pedants straightaway renounced the dirty colonialist word Cambodia for a rejuvenated Kampuchea, free of its past, for better or worse. Can such a grotesque rush to this cheap symbol be attributed to ignorance? Who can not see that Cambodia and Kampuchea are one and the same word, that they simply come from different phonetic contexts? When what used to be French Sudan rebaptized itself Mali, albeit a historical mistake (the Mali Empire was in another part of West Africa), this was at least a real change, the recovery of a political past which had been abolished by a colonial presence. But the Cambodia case is nothing like this. The term Kampuchea is found in Sanskrit writings around the seventh and eighth centuries, when the ruling dynasty settled in Angkor. Previously, the country had been known only by the name given it in Chinese annals, Chen La.

The Portuguese navigators again tried to find a written form that corresponded to what they had heard, and came up with Cambogia. The first French missionary in the country tried to do the same thing: in 1783 he wrote “Kamphoxa.” It was the French version of the Portuguese transcription that was adopted by the first travellers and Orientalists. But also, how can one render the true sound of the Khmer word? The transcription is an approximation which, moreover, has been in use for a very long time. Prince Sihanouk, who often mixes French and Khmer in his speeches, had used it quite a lot. Similarly, he named a monthly magazine that he ran Kambuja, which is the Sanskrit transcription later modified to suit Cambodian phonetics. Should we end this squabble over transcriptions by proposing a new one just a bit closer to the original, and henceforth write “Kampoutchi”?

As to the origins and meaning of the word itself, we are rather in the dark. Khmer myths claim a certain Kambu as an eponymous ancestor who is said to have united with a serpent goddess. There are many reasons to think that this is a case of the Khmers remoulding mythical material which, like much of the local culture, originates in India. Although, we do not know anything about the local origins of the name, in the geography of classical India it is quite well known that there was a region of the northwest periphery, perhaps roughly what is Afghanistan, named Kamboja. It seems highly probable the Indianization, reinforced by the subsequent diffusion of Buddhism, transferred to Southeast Asia a geographic representation based on India and its Gangetic center. (The name Mekong is probably a doublet of Ganges.) In his remarkable work on Cambodian chronicles, Michael Vickery demonstrates the existence of this transfer by the fact that other regions of Burma and Thailand were called Kambojoa during certain periods: “What is certain is that in medieval Burmese and Thai traditions “Kamboja” does not refer to Cambodia, and that the confusion is not due to the fact that Khmers once ruled over central and southern Siam, as Coedes believed, but rather from the displacement of classical geography.

One could give a thousand examples of this kind of phenomenon. Greeks and Romans easily transposed their own toponyms to the peoples they subjugated. The Crusades brought us a good number of Biblical place-names which became scattered over the map of Europe. Europe’s colonial expansion littered the world map with New Scotlands, New Hebrides, New Caledonias, New Yorks, New Amsterdams, etc., not to mention the bewildering toponymy of the United States. That the Northwest part of classical India should thus be transferred at an early time to the Northwest of what was undoubtedly the first center of Hinduization in the Indochina peninsula, in the lower Mekong Delta, seems highly probable. This is how history mocks fledgling nationalisms. After all, what does France owe a few handfuls of Germanic warriors who crossed the Rhine in 454? Nothing, just its name.

Into the twentieth century and the escalation of the Second Indochina War. With a silly rewriting of developments there was, it seems, a dastardly long-devised plan by the Vietnamese to take control of Cambodian territory for the purposes of settling their own people there. But here is where ugly chauvinist tendencies of the Khmer left and right meet one another and say hello:

According to the Black Paper the “manoeuvers used by the Vietnamese” to annex Cambodian territory were of several types, including the sordid use of young girls and drawing maps, as we have seen. But there were others as well. In 1966-67 the Hanoi and Viet Cong authorities are said to have been planning to bring hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese nationals into the country and settle them along the rivers and in the border zones. It seems the Black Paper is alluding here to the refugees who fled the escalation of the war in South Vietnam that followed the introduction of American combat units. This paragraph, which describes the setling of the Vietnamese, contains a phrase which I find interesting: “If measures had not been taken, they would have totally annexed the districts of Saang and Koh Tom.”

Naturally, the Black Paper never states what everyone knows, which is that Vietnamese nationals were almost all expelled from Cambodia immediately after the Communist Party took power. They are estimated to have totalled 300,000, of whom some were evacuated by special river convoys which came from Vietnam for this purpose. But the reference to Saang, which is not far from Phnom Penh, recalls another evacuation, the one Lon Nol troops provoked in 1970 when they launched their anti-Vietnamese pogroms. Saang had been taken by the guerilla forces and, to get it back, General Sosthene Fernandez’ troops advanced behind rows of Vietnamese hotsages from the local Catholic community. The others were shoved into camps. Does the Black Paper, in recalling “the measures taken” to avoid “the total annexation” of Saang, wish to congratulate the Lon Nol regime?

That shared chauvinism rears its head, even when bitter enemies are trying to annihilate one another and history with the ‘truth’ it contains is all tangled up. The Khmer Rouge must have missed those scores of Vietnamese corpses, their hands and feet tied, heads with bullet holes, bobbing up and down the Mekong when they were waiting along the riverbanks for Phnom Penh-bound supply boats to blow up. Fernandez was a FANK General and war criminal of Khmer-Filipino descent, who in an attempt to retake Saang from the enemy, thought it would be a good idea to have his troops follow behind a procession of poor Vietnamese civilian prisoners, this shield of flesh forced to approach the town in the hope that their Communist compatriots wouldn’t shoot. The Vietnamese forces present at Saang, in the words of Philip Short, weren’t impressed and opened fire. You can guess the rather unpleasant result. Those Vietnamese nationals who were interned didn’t escape massacre either. It was a poor mistake for Lon Nol to instigate these ugly pogroms, for when Operation Junction City wound down its failed mission to destroy the Communists’ Central Office for South Vietnam, and American soldiers withdrew, undisciplined South Vietnamese troops stayed behind, marauding around the countryside with vengeance on their minds. Looting villages, stealing livestock and raping girls and women didn’t exactly endear these allies of the Khmer Republic to the local populations they terrorised. The Khmer Rouge can’t have been referring to their Khmer wartime enemies when “measures were taken” to avoid annexation, surely? But in reality at the time, they themselves couldn’t have “taken measures” against the Vietnamese, not when they were beneficiaries (with some grudging thanks) of further North Vietnamese and NLF military penetration into Cambodia, when the Sangkum became defunct in 1970 and their complexes of border camps crucial to the war effort, and which the United States Air Force had been hammering for years, were now exposed at the rear. It is also worthwhile to note that the earlier 1960s maquis in the Northeast was where the Ho Chi Minh Trail reached the country, and the Khmer wannabe guerillas must have found it quite comforting to have a shield of Vietnamese forces protecting them, even if indirectly. The Sihanouk regime by the 1960s, with its ‘independence,’ and as conservative and corrupt as it was, had proven to be an effective bulwark against US imperialism and kept the US military out of the country, much to the pleasure of the Vietnamese. And so, below is an illustration of the arrogance faced by the maquisard skulkers who after being refused help in earlier times, now got it in small doses with a condescending pat on the head:

We all know that relations between communist powers are generally characterized by flippant cynicism. The revelation of Sino-Soviet relations and the Yugoslav stories about the 1948 confrontations taught us a lot. The way the Chinese dumped the Albanians, like brushing an insect off their sleeve, set off some interesting revelations in Tirana. Around 1965 and later, the Vietnamese would have needed an almost inconceivable supply of urbanity to treat their Khmer comrades without a hint of condescension, given their own prestigious past, long experience of struggle and political-military resources that bear no comparison with the several hundred ragged guerillas, who had experienced more hardship than success. In an April 1970 internal document, an officer from a Viet Cong-North Vietnamese security unit in Cambodia notes that

Forces are available but the ideology and sense of organization of our [Cambodian] friends are poor. Therefore, we must be patient in providing help for their movement. (Because their capability of learning is slow we must use explanations that suit their level of understanding when we request their help, they request us to provide them with weapons, medicine, food, provisions, etc.)

Harumph! Cleaning out other people’s latrines and doing the washing up is not not what Paris-educated intellectuals expected. They had a sense of entitlement. They were leaders. Some among them had developed a political line in direct opposition to the one pushed by the Vietnamese and older Hanoi-oriented comrades of the KPRP, then turned that organisation into a pseudo-Communist Party. The poor buggers just lacked experience and guns. And although grumbling about the Vietnamese, they reaped the positive results of political and military collaboration because, well, the Khmers really needed the Vietnamese, particularly in military matters for the first two years of the war. For example, it wasn’t the Khmers who in a daring night-time raid on the Pochentong airfield in January 1971, destroyed nearly all the planes and helicopters of the Khmer Republic’s Air Force, but 97 soldiers of an elite North Vietnamese Dac Cong brigade.

Lastly, one of my favourite bits, where the unqualified Khmers, like stroppy teenagers, come out with a rather sexist comment in an attempt to assert that “Yeah yeah, fuck off fancy pants, we’re better than you, so ner.” The CPK leadership visited Peking and Hanoi for meetings on cooperation and aid, through March and April 1970, following the Lon Nol coup, and when the changed political situation in Cambodia called for more Vietnamese involvement in assisting the armed struggle of the Cambodian Communist movement.

On the way back [from Peking], when they stopped off in Hanoi after the March 18 coup d’ etat, the Khmer delegation found a completely changed atmosphere. Hugs and kisses instead of grimaces, “but in the middle of the embraces, Vo Nguyen Giap, ever boorish and undiplomatic, let this remark escape: ‘This is a historic occasion that allows our three parties to unite once again.’” (p. 50.) The proud Cambodians must have shuddered. They saw right away that even though the Vietnamese were grappling with serious difficulties, they “did not for a moment give up their ambition to annex and devour Kampuchea” (p. 51). Try negotiating with such sensitive people ….

However, there were urgent affairs to discuss. The Vietnamese made a number of proposals, the most important of which was the establishment of joint military commands — “which would be joint in name only,” adds the ever perfidious Black Paper (p. 52). The Khmers obviously refused. There then follows a murky story of a telegram from the guerilla zone which was given to Pol Pot in truncated form, which it is hard to know quite what to think about. Further negotiations took place in Cambodia upon return of the leaders. We learn incidentally that the Vietnamese offered a hospital with 200 beds and a full staff, including cooks. “The Vietnamese even wanted to teach Kampuchea how to cook rice,” adds the Black Paper hysterically (p. 54). On the same delirious tone, among the types of cooperation proposed by the Vietnamese the text mentions aid in organizing women, which elicits this vengeful barb:

“Even with regard to work among women, the Vietnamese Nguyen Thi Dinh offered to come and educate the women of Kampuchea, to teach them how to work. In fact, this Nguyen Thi Dinh did not know how to do anything, either housework or mass political work, nor military work. What the Vietnamese really wanted was to control the people of Kampuchea like they did at the time of the fight against the French colonialists” (p. 55).

I will not pass judgement on Nguyen Thi Dinh’s competence at housework, but I recall that she was Deputy Chief of Staff of the Liberation Armed Forces in the South and that she was anything but ignorant of “military work.”

This is just a bit of filler until new and hopefully better posts appear in this New Year. Being the nerd that I am, I own several old copies of publications which some might say border on the kitsch, although unintentionally. Below are snippets taken from the second of three September 1976 editions of the usually once a week Peking Review, all on the death of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. Clunky, hyphenated (Marxist-Leninist) clichés with capital letters also abound when right-clicking the link at the bottom of this page. I mourn the loss of people being able to express themselves as human beings. The file contains messages of condolence sent by the leaders of North Korea, Albania, Romania and Indochina, including the DK leadership, expressing their grief to the Chinese Communist Party and Government (then the Chinese people), followed by their paper ministerial positions. Pol Pot is just the prime minister, instead of Comrade Secretary General of a Communist Party undergoing a troubled period of ‘restructuring.’

This kind of thing is only interesting for demonstrating the two-sided attitude of the Democratic Kampuchean government when it came to revealing bits and pieces about themselves, or more specifically their political outlook — whether for an accurate reflection of their ideological adherence to certain kinds of ‘thought,’ passed down to them in an apostolic line from one thinker to another; or otherwise going through the motions of ritual and merely paying lip service. As a ‘non-aligned’ Communist-ruled state in the making, outward relations with friends in the Communist world bloc stressed the importance of this or that influence of orthodox Marxist-Leninist theory and/or political positions. It was indeed a 1976 radio broadcast in China, and not the speech made at the 1977 Khmer Party’s Congress, which mentioned for the first time the supposed Marxism-Leninism of the Khmer Communists (read that as being the Pol Pot group in power); although this kind of utterance was largely absent internally, inside DK, except for the consumption of cadres. But the ugly chauvinism and absurd confidence of the Khmer Communists was expressed plentifully, with the fanciful idea that given the uniqueness of the Kampuchean Revolution, a social upheaval without any known precedent, it was something which had made the whole world lift up their heads, and take notice of a ruined bombed-out country undergoing a doomed transformation with an ‘awesome’ and ‘clear-sighted’ Angkar at the helm. But for all their viewing of foreignness as an affront to Kampuchean pride, along with their domestic self-regard reeking of impudence, China and North Korea weren’t slagged off by the CPK.

For those of a sensitive disposition, please be aware there is an image of saddened children below. After wiping away their tears, the industrious little mites no doubt carried on the fight against Teng Tsiao Ping and right-wing deviationism, until they finally arrived at correct revolutionary verdicts. Or something. With barely-formed consciousnesses, under the influence of cynical high politics or courageously acting like some collective superstructural sweeping brush (take your pick). Unfortunately, when I pop my clogs, I won’t continue to live (forever, I might add) in the hearts of the world’s largest human population.

Perhaps of slightly more serious interest to some of you, Peking Review also published for English-language readers FUNK and GRUNK statements during the Cambodian Civil War (messages from Norodom Sihanouk, Khieu Samphan et al), some of which will be reproduced here on this blog at some point.

Good grief! Download messages of condolence, by right-clicking here.

One of the distinctive features of Khmer Communism from the 1960s (rural insurgency and the preparation for all-out war) is that it was largely unexpressed to most people its proponents had control and influence over, except for those rank and file poor peasant cadres deemed reliable enough to enter some form of political education. Changes under them occurred very noticably, but people not versed in foreign ideologies didn’t really know why. A sensitive and shy bunch those Pol Potists. During the Democratic Kampuchea period, the tattered maquisards turned wielders of state power still insisted on this hush-hush approach to dealing with those outside the Organisation. Their Chinese friends eventually managed to persuade them to open up a little and reveal themselves at least partially to an outside world (I’ve said that somewhere before). A Chinese delegation was present at that famous 1977 Communist Party Congress in which Pol made that long speech, broadcast by Radio Phnom Penh, in which he largely talked a load of bollocks, and showed the influence of the French Communist Party by using embarrassingly stilted language. He also produced a simplified analysis of Cambodia’s history, usefully superimposing upon the Cambodian situation a schema containing various stages of class conflict as if he was trying to nail diarrhoea to a wall. Here is Serge Thion from his article on the DK Black Paper, called The Ingratitude of the Crocodiles:

How should we understand Cambodian society? Is it composed of classes? Which ones? This is a vast subject on which to reflect. What we know of the Cambodian communists’ class analysis, most of which comes from Pol Pot’s major speech of September 30, 1977, which made public the existence of the CPK, is appallingly weak. It uses the Soviet schema of the 1930s, which was mechanically adopted by other Asian communists before and after World War II, but which is even more simplified and rigidified in its Cambodian version. Eighty-five percent of the country is made up of poor and medium-poor peasants. The exploiting classes constitute the rest, but they include a lot of patriots who joined the revolution. This is the 1975-78 version; we do not know what the 1960 version was like. But, when one knows how this kind of sociological analysis can be used to justify the party line, especially when it is in power, we can imagine that the discussion must have been charming — and a long way from Marx.

Cutting the feet to fit the shoes, trying to apply a poor outdated class analysis to a Cambodian reality, of which they weren’t really sure of themselves.

You see, all was not well in Democratic Kampuchea, among those in the know, and correspondingly felt by those who weren’t. Shit rolls downhill as the old saying goes. Pressurised DK regional administrations covered up their failures to the central government, which was expecting rapid achievement of the impossible. An angry and impatient central government was training and then sending out much more purer peasant cadres to the underperforming zones, obedient teenage boys and girls, to supervise the smooth operation of the Party meat grinder. I guess the choice to provide a surplus of rice for development needs or starvation was a bit of a toughie, when your mates would be summoned to long indefinite meetings with a displeased Angkar. Imposing strict uniformity in order to (in theory) equalise distribution doesn’t mean much when you have little to distribute. I suppose in relation to the title of this post is controversy over the ‘real’ or correct year of the Party’s founding, hinted at in the above Thion quote. If you were a studious cadre aware of your movement’s history, then which one? If not the clandestine Phnom Penh ‘meeting at the railway station’ in 1960, then perhaps you’d have thought the anniversary would really be the 26th, from the founding, in 1951, of the proto-Bolshevist Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party with Vietnamese guidance (ugh, you can hear those hammers and sickles clanging in the background). But instead of putting up the birthday balloons and sprinkling confetti around the cooperative, you probably would’ve kept your trap shut about it. Until put to the rack, and then you’d have said anything, even if you didn’t believe it, and they didn’t really believe it either. Still, interesting footage though.

I have a copy of an unofficial translation of the said speech, delivered at the Congress, published by a small radical American press (Liberator Press) in the 1970s, and translated by the ‘Group of Kampuchean Residents in America.’ It’s rubbish, the translation, but overall it’s an interesting piece nevertheless. A curio. The same Chicago-based and I think now defunct press also produced a booklet documenting a solidarity visit made by American David Kline, who came back impressed by what he saw of DK, similar to the now-repentant Swede and drippy middle class fool Gunnar Bergstrom. I’ll post up both to this blog, when time allows.