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.
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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.”
{ 24 } Comments
One more source that brought hard feelings was that Vietnam who used international aid to buy
rice in the Cambodian market. Before the coup d’etat Vietnamese bought goods not only in the
Phnom Penh markets but also in many other provincial places situated close to the war theater. After the coup d’etat when the war entered Cambodia areas close to Tonle Sap took over the old markets. Chinese merchants and some Khmers entered the markets and served as a middle link. Vietnamese communists had to pay high prices because Lon Nol and South Vietnam also had to pay high prices.
One day in 1971 Pol Pot and Nuon Chea went to work and I was allowed to go with them. I saw with my own eyes two rows of bicycles, in a single file, until the eye can see. One row was carrying rice, fish and supplies from the Siem Reap to Stung Treng and the other, coming back from Stung Treng had no load. Each file of bicycles adhered to the right side and we drove on the motorbike in the middle, paying the great caution not to hit neither left or right row. This picture made me think of Dien Bien Phu with the exception that those carriers were Khmers and they were driving bicycles instead of pushing them up to the mountain. Two leaders spoke to me- “Comrade can see, they are the masters. Our troops lacking everything while theirs got no reason to worry”.
My own poor translation of a Khieu Samphan account from his book.
Yes, the Lon Nol military tried to impose a ‘ramassage du paddy’ in the countryside before the coup, in 1967 or so, as Cambodian peasants were selling rice to the Vietnamese, who offered higher prices than the government. Stocks of rice for the Phnom Penh government to export were low, so soldiers went to villages to confiscate hidden rice or force the peasants to sell it at lower prices. But the Khmer Rouge also sold rice to Vietnamese traders during the war years, engaging in other forms of trade too for things not produced by one of their forced cooperative set-ups in the Southeast of the country.
Vietnamese commandos contributed greatly into the victory. Blowing up the gasoline resources and damaging aircraft was a huge damage for Khmer Republic. Lon Nol should had foreseen this act of sabotage. DK also lost all of its aviation after Vietnamese invasion. They never learnt Lon Nol’s fuck ups. Anti-Vietnamese sentiments are a lot in Cambodia, but why there’s no anti-Chinese sentiments? Or anti-American let’s say. They blame Vietnamese for everything, even if Thais shoot Khmer loggers it’s still Vietnamese to blame to some point. After all isn’t Hun Sen a Yuon puppet? Ha-ha!
After all Vietnam is more Oriental while Cambodia is more Indianized one. There’s very little common ground Khmers have with Vietnamese than let’s say with Thais or Laotians. But, do they have that much common ground with Chinese? Chinese are always beyond critic. If you visit International Book Store (IBC) in PP you can see that they carry more Chinese language titles than Khmer ones! And it’s the biggest bookstore in Cambodia. Nearly all books are quite rubbish novels, especially of that Tonsay (Rabbit) writer, who is one of the most known writers. Not a single book in Vietnamese language, and if you still insist on looking for a omnipresent Yuons there’s a Vietnamese Association of Cambodia located in the cozy building on the one backstreets of Monivong. They have a small shop too selling books. Maybe a few shelves and some newspapers. Yuon no doubts occupy the best areas in Phnom Penh. The slums of Chhbar Ampeou, 11th kilometer (Svay Pak) which was at one point of time a famous brothel, immortalized in Off the Rails in PP, and other small areas, like backstreet of Kampuchea Krom street. There’s at least two Vietnamese karaoke located in centre of Phnom Penh, one size of a rowhouse, another yard of a small villa, maybe a few Pho shops, catering to tourists and there’s too coffee houses which are here and there, but mainly in the Vietnamese ghettos. An average PP Vietnamese is a poor, deprived of all rights subject, forgotten by his historical motherland and his country of residence (i.e. Cambodia). And there’s never ending talk of Yuon eating Khmer territory. Get a fucking life! Their businesses and premises are the most under-represented in PP. Life a prostitute for a girl and a small vendor for a boy, always oppressed and despised.
I turned my TV in Saigon just to find a program about ethnic Khmers Krom in delta. What a coincidence to watch a program like that in a short visit. There’s a museum of Khmer Krom culture and I bet lots of free shit that Vietnam throws out for free for national minorities in the same order as Soviet Union did to its notional minorities. Yes, Vietnam occupied Champa and Kampuchea Krom, Mekong delta but after all, wasn’t there a Khmer empire which also enslaved other nations? Khmers warred on Champa too, so what’s the point to bitch on Yuons who swallowed Champa?
Yes, a grim reality for poor Vietnamese girls, sexually exploited in Cambodia. You’ve said you visited the Red Soil area of Phnom Penh, the slum neighbourhood which has recently been subject to clearance for property development. Did you speak with the residents when there?
Vietnamese commandos attacked the Kompong Som oil refinery, yes. During 1975, the US attacked it with air strikes too, but elsewhere I’ve read that soldiers belonging to the FANK 13th Brigade attacked it in 1977, possibly under the command of General Chantaraingsey. Several officers of Lon Nol’s army didn’t surrender after the Communists took power in 1975, instead fleeing with their men to the border areas, from where they continued to fight the Khmer Rouge. Some interesting groups with colourful names, some of which would later help to form the KPNLF and enter a coalition with Pol Pot’s overthrown DK government.
There are two areas from which residents were evicted, the area around old buildings which housed public employees in 60s, not too large of a slum, and kind of opposite of it a large field filled with huts and makeshift houses. I visited a few times. To say that place was a horrid, wretched containment is not to say anything. There were few Vietnamese though. Vietnamese slums of Chhbar Ampeou and 11th kilometer are of the same kind. I’ve spoken with some inhabitants but only to the matter of bussiness concerned. I thought that it was better to live in Pol Pot’s regime then to live in such miserable slums. I never spoke much of the politics anyways, only to my immediate relatives, and the relatives of my wife. Poor people, who hardly can read, or don’t read at all are very hard to approach politically. This is why all those Maoisms Third Worldism won’t work in the societies like Cambodia. They have never translated a single classic into Khmer, not even Mao red book! How one wants to grasp attention of the poor slum dweller, illiterate person with a very limited abilities to think beyond everyday’s life? This is why an approach of a vegan, because meat was always considered a luxury, of a sober type, of a simple lifer will appeal more to the masses. It’s hard to be influenced by bon vivants like Mao himself and Lenin and Marx. That’s why simplicity, oh well, relative simplicity compare to communist grands, of Pol Pot and Khieu Samphan and Ho Chi Minh deserve that much attention of mine. They weren’t orthodox and they were always looked down by marxists. Marxists like Che Guevarra, Trotsky or some Sartre but not above mentioned.
I didn’t know that refineries were attacked by Lon Nol soldiers. There’s a recent post on KI media about news clips from French archives, you probably know of those anyways.
http://ki-media.blogspot.com/2010/01/khmer-republic-1970-1975.html
There are some brilliant films held in the French archives.
The popularity of the Khmer Communists among the poor peasantry was due to a lot of the ‘door step’ work they did. Providing elementary social welfare, giving free medicines, helping out with harvesting, taking care of the elderly, putting on activities for poor youth and so on: puppet plays, dances, sing-a-longs, catering for the fact that many had not been fortunate enough to receive schooling. Of course if they’ve been working hard in someone else’s fields all day, a young Khmer peasant will enjoy visiting a dance in the evening, where they can forget their hardships and have fun, and without the gaze of their parents, meet members of the opposite sex. Just a mistake Leninists make in power is in a top-down type of political education; instead of allowing the means in which people can express and articulate their views, they impose their own model of how things should be. There is a difference between education and inculcation. Yes, of course help people to learn how to read, and even in this day and age, what a liberatory tool this ability is! But don’t beat people over their heads with books only you have chosen. A mistake the Pol Potists made was imposing what they thought was poor peasant culture on the entire population. The revolution didn’t become an expression of the people, but in the name of the people, or an image of it conjured in the minds of the privileged. It’s the people’s will. You will do this, you will do that, or else.
Here’s my small contribution to the topic, the scan of Le Livre Noir, an original Kampuchean edition. I zip filed it, ’cause of the color map included at the back of the book and so cool looking yellow front:)
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=5N7F7QIW
Pol Pot plans the future-
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=9NR59EL6
Thanks for the scans!
Sheffield beckons, once again.
“Yes, Vietnam occupied Champa and Kampuchea Krom, Mekong delta but after all, wasn’t there a Khmer empire which also enslaved other nations? Khmers warred on Champa too…”
I’ve always been interested in the little-researched contribution of the Sihanouk regime to the nationalist aspirations of the Khmer Krom and the Cham, particularly his sponsorship of various semi-guerrilla separatist movements, no doubt as a thorn in Vietnam’s side. These unfortunate people were successively co-opted by Sihanouk and Lon Nol, the US, and latterly the Khmer Rouge, gaining little from the exchange other than thousands of deaths in a low-level nationalist conflict that’s almost forgotten these days.
FANK military operations against the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge were named Chenla.
Very interesting read, full of enlightning points for me.
It should be said, though, that Serge Thion is a noted French ultra-leftist who turned Holocaust-denialist by… ahem… anti-”zionism”, close to La Vieille Taupe and Faurisson, that sort of people. It may not invalidate all his writings on South-East Asia, but it’s useful to remember that when reading what he chose to say.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serge_Thion
Mention earlier of the KPNLF, and of Sutsakhan in the most recent post, reminds me that I found a few interesting images taken by Patrick Chauvel during the time the KPNLF were the West’s ‘official’ proxy of choice in that particular theatre of the Cold War. These pictures if nothing else underline what a relatively shambolic outfit they were compared to the, um, more ‘unofficial’ proxy of choice, led by Khieu Samphan and the other one who wasn’t mentioned so much.
I’m sure Sutsakhan and Son Sann were probably well-intentioned enough, but they couldn’t even agree amongst themselves on whether to cooperate with Sihanouk or not, let alone be a coherent ‘third force’. The chaotic, incestuous factionalism of the Khmer Republic had effects long after its demise.
“It should be said, though, that Serge Thion is a noted French ultra-leftist who turned Holocaust-denialist by… ahem… anti-”zionism”, close to La Vieille Taupe and Faurisson, that sort of people.”
I’m glad you’ve found this post interesting, and yes manur, I’m aware of his disgrace. With this post I’m not validating historical revisionism regarding the attempt to exterminate a people from the face of a continent. Thanks for bringing this up, and I’ve had this pointed out here previously. His writings on Southeast Asia, and particularly Khmer Communism, are deeply knowledgeable, not to mention witty. If it’s felt that there is moral concern over even mentioning his name or his work here, then I’ll take it on the chin. I wouldn’t say Thion, at least when he grew older, was an ultra-leftist though. The way he has poured scorn on Maoism, for example, calling it a “pseudo-theory” etc. Unless what you mean by that is something outside the left end of the liberal democratic spectrum. And old Marxist-Leninists, say, have their own uses for the term ultra-leftism.
I’ll get back to your comments Ib. I need to get some rest soon, was working last night.
LB,
I don’t know much about local nationalism sponsored by Sihanouk, in fact it made me wonder, was it that Cham nationalism was sponsored? I knew that Khmer Leur were subject to khmerification programs, there the Prince wanted to send Khmer youth to help bring “savages” close to Khmer society. I guess Vietnamese were always some subject to discrimination, unlike Chinese who always enjoyed privileged status. Actually even in Angkorian Cambodia there were community of Chinese merchants living in the capital, and the Khmer farytails, there always Chinese or Malaysian merchant, almost never Khmer. I see foreigners also like nations like Cambodia or Thailand, they seem to have a mysterious aura attached to them, unlike Vietnam or Malaysia which do not carry much attraction for tourists and expats. Is this because of Angkor Wat or there some other points too? I asked my wife and she didn’t know what to answer, I could not explain it good enough too.
Khmers look down on those people, they are called “monus prey” people of the forest, but “barang” or Chinese of Korean- they are too happy with them. Even Vietnamese, I saw many Khmer tourists coming to Vietnam, for treatment, for pleasure, so globalism even if I can’t stand it, makes me to accept some part of it, at least people become friendlier to Vietnamese, and more and more people do not use “youn” when speaking about Vietnamese, as the word “youn” makes it feel like an object or an animal towards them.
I feel attracted to sheer poverty of Vietnamese, they are always so poor, even in Canada! And they never can master English too, always an accent.
PINEAPPLE
I read Tchevengur of Andrei Platonov, have you read it? Do you think in that novel are hell of too many parallels with Khmer communism? I have to practically mark every page for a further reference point. Platonov’s language great too, when I’m done with Russian original I’ll try to get an English translation just to see whether it as good as the source.
Sihanouk did sponsor Cham nationalism to a certain degree, mainly via the rather shadowy figure of Les Kosem (or Kasem), a Cham officer in the Royal army. Kosem was not only part of the army clique responsible for helping supply the Viet Cong with weapons, but was one of the leaders of a Cham ‘liberation front’ which seems to have been fostered by Sihanouk with the purpose of needling South Vietnam, and indeed everyone else. He was also associated with another ‘liberation’ movement in the Mekong Delta, headed by an even more obscure figure, Chao (or Chau) Dara.
I’ve seen it stated that Chau Dara was, in fact, Lon Nol under a pseudonym….
Another almost-forgotten aspect of the Khmer Republic was that the Cham were given quite a prominent role, again via the visible presence of Kosem, El Brahim, and their associates; Nol had himself photographed with Cham community leaders quite often. I assume this was another extension of Lon Nol’s pan-Khmerist fantasies.
I wonder if foreginers, as you say, like Cambodia or Thailand perhaps because of the greater Indic influence on their culture, as opposed to the Chinese influence on Vietnamese society. Westerners seem to have little understanding of Chinese culture in general, and particularly of the Confucian structure underlying it.
On the subject of the Khmer Krom, Kiernan has noted that many supported the Vietnamese Communists, either in the North or the NLF. Sieu Heng was one of them, and several of the ICP-oriented Issaraks who went to Hanoi following Geneva were Khmer Krom. He points to the migration of Khmer Krom into Cambodia, starting from the early twentieth century but importantly in the 1960s, and the Samlaut outbreak of violence, as being a possible source of radicalism from which the rural rebels drew strength. Aside from the the flow of leftist town-dwellers into the maquis. I guess their reputation for robustness comes from southern Vietnamese attempts to make them assimilate into the wider dominant society, protecting their strong sense of cultural identity. Similarly the hill tribes in Cambodia’s Northeast, militarily resisted an attempt by a state plantation to take their land in 1967. I believe Sihanouk blamed the Vietnamese for this, threatening to cut off supplies to the border camp complexes, coming from the port at Sihanoukville, unless they halted the rebellion by what he termed “Khmer-Vietminh.” Of course, with his government’s ruthless smashing of the town-based Communist movement, pushing it underground and into the countryside, he wasn’t fully cognisant by then of the political divide that had been created within the said movement and the struggle among the Communists themselves. For although some of the weapons used by the rebels will have come from them, it wasn’t the Vietnamese who had stirred the minority peoples of Ratanakiri, and who then resisted the government, but that small group of maquisards who had been there since 1963, lead by Salot Sar.
Unfortunately Tong, being the uncultured fellow that I am, I’ve not read a word of Platonov. The only Russian literature I’ve read, are a few books from the nineteenth century, including the badly written What is To Be Done? by Chernyshevsky; and some twentieth century revolutionary-era literature such as Aleksei Tolstoy’s Aelita, or The Decline of Mars, made into a fantastic Soviet-era silent film directed by Yakov Protazanov (witness the creation of a Martian Union of Soviet Socialist Republics!), and proletarian writer Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement.
Here’s some footage of General Sosthene Fernandez:
This reminds me (tangentially) of another interesting document I came across recently, a memoir by William Harben – a political officer in the US Embassy who features briefly in Shawcross’s book ‘Sideshow’. Apart from a story about Lon Nol issuing a presidential decree arresting anyone who was seen in the markets buying rabbits (as the KR had, according to the government, adopted the tactic of creating ‘rabbit bombs’ which could hop across FANK lines and explode), it also gives away what the other side really thought about Lon Nol:
“A rumor circulated about a possible assassination attempt against the Marshal. I halfheartedly checked it with one of his ministers, who laughed and said, “The enemy would burn alive anybody who touched a hair of the Marshal’s head. He’s the greatest asset they have. Any of the servants in the palace would kill him for 2000 riels. You can wander in there and run into him sunning himself in the garden. The guards won’t stop you.”
I dropped this bit of news in the staff meeting and met with icy stares. The fact was that both we and the enemy were protecting Marshal Lon Nol, and one of us was wrong”
The full document (which covers Harben’s whole career) can be accessed here – in SGML format for some reason. Another brief portrait of the doomed regime the Khmer Rouge were fighting against.
Interesting quote. I can’t open the file right now, though.
I’m reminded that it was Harben who did the ‘box’ test on a map of Cambodia, and realised that a B-52 strike on any area of central Cambodia would inevitably hit populated areas. Made worse by the fact that outdated intelligence didn’t allow for the Khmer Rouge relocating and then concentrating significant chunks of the population within their liberated zones.
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