The slow death of a shrinking republic.
From the 15th of August 1973 forward, both foreign and Khmer observers witnessed the growing war between the Khmer themselves, that is between the FANK of the Khmer Republic and the forces of the Khmer Communists. The land, the high seas, the rivers and lakes, the skies clear and cloudy were all criss-crossed by ships, vehicles, and aircraft flying the emblem of the Republic as they went in search of the enemy prey. It was also the date when the FANK began to operate independently of all assistance from foreign forces and it was for that reason that the date 15 August was chosen as Armed Forces Day for the FANK, an occasion which the Khmer Republic celebrated for the first and last time on 15 August 1974 before the esplanade of the sacred Stoupa of the Great Teacher Buddha Sakhyamoui.
-
Lt. Gen. Sak Sutsakhan
{ 19 } Comments
Film from the Khmer Republic period always has the air of catastrophe about it, though this may just be hindsight of course.
I think the problem was that after 1971, very little of what Sutsakhan refers to as the country’s “land, the high seas, the rivers and lakes, the skies clear and cloudy” was in the control of the Republic at all. The roads perhaps, and the towns – making it even simpler for the opposing side to depict the urban centres as beyond redemption.
Very strange compare life before and after. I’m fascinated with this too. Nobody knew who KR were, except the account of Ith Sarin, I guess. Very few accounts describe the life in Khmer Republic too, or politics of the last. Relatives of Pol Pot and Khieu Samphan took part in the social life, without realizing, like in Pol Pot’s case, what was coming. Unusual for Khmer communists that there are no surviving memoirs of maquis, when I read everything I just craved for the description of everyday’s life. Except that of Ith Sarin nothing, Khieu Samphan writes only two or three pages, filling the rest with justification of Vietnam-Kampuchea rivalries. Same true for Khmer Republic and People’s Republic 79-89, really nothing… People prefer on writing memoirs on KR and ending it on 79, without going on further. What a pity!
The reason I chose the Sutsakhan quote is because he states that from August 1973, the FANK received no outside assistance from foreign forces. I guess he refers to the ending of assistance from the US Air Force, but from then on, supplies were still sent in by the Americans from Thailand. Military and food aid. Just the FANK were to fight it out without B-52 support. Of course the intense aerial bombardment of Khmer Rouge-held territory, halted the KR’ wet season offensive in that year, but afterwards, there remained a region of Cambodia so utterly disrupted by bombing, with infrastructure and farming land destroyed or abandoned, that yet more hungry refugees entered the capital for safety. The capital and other towns became islands in a hostile sea, totally reliant on airlifted supplies. It’s true that both sides at one point saw control of population rather than land as being important for success, with the Khmer Rouge at first raiding Khmer Republic territory specifically for people, relocating entire villages into their liberated zones, while the Khmer Republic welcomed as many refugees from the rural war zone as possible without much thought as to how to feed them independent of outside help. However, the Khmer Rouge had the advantage after the bombing ended, for they held more territory, albeit ruined and moon-cratered, and their wartime transformation of peasant villages into a cooperative system not only provided manpower for their army, but also for food production. The Khmer Republic elite in Phnom Penh had manpower for the FANK, drawn from the bulging refugee population, but had to wait for food and other things to be dropped from the air. But that support wasn’t indefinite, and the Khmer Rouge forces by then had heavy weapons with which to attack the airport.
The Khmer Republic as a state is almost forgotten; it never knew peace, so it remains defined purely by the war it was involved in, identified strongly with its chaotic army and with many of its politicians either being full-time or occasional military commanders. However, it had a political life, of sorts, and quite an interesting one too, as all sorts of people kept in the political wilderness by Sihanouk – moderate leftists, for example – began to re-emerge. In the first year, before Lon Nol consolidated his grip on power and the first real military disasters, there was (by all accounts) a lot of optimism about. Which reminds me, I must get started getting hold of / scanning Khmers Stand Up!
Please do!
I would love to read this one too, I found an interesting title that I’ve never heard it’s called Ros Chantrabot La Republique Khmere, I don’t see it in any libraries nearby and the copy on amazon costs 55 bucks. I don’t think it’s too rare though, I’ll keep myself keen on getting that copy too.
OK, that one looks very interesting indeed – my French is rusty but just about serviceable so I have ordered a copy (slightly easier to obtain in the UK perhaps) and should hopefully have it in a couple of weeks. When I do, I’ll arrange you both copies as you have made such good information available here.
Has anyone got hold of a copy of Ith Sarin’s Nine Months in the Maquis, or Regrets of a Khmer Soul? A cheeky bookseller sent me an incomplete photocopied version of Communist Party Power in Kampuchea.
I’ve found Nine Months with the Maquis floating around online…
Ah, silly me. Thanks.
If either you or Tong fancy the idea of becoming contributors to this blog, then send me a desired username and password to (removed), and I’ll manually add you. Then you can access the site and publish your own posts.
If you go up to the directory that document is held in, there’s actually a lot of interesting material (semi-demented filenames aside). Here, for example, are two translated notebooks containing Khmer Rouge political lessons “captured on 16 August 1971 by FANK”: they are particularly interesting for dating from a period when the public line was still heavily Sihanoukist. “Peace can settle everything”, writes the notebook’s nameless owner, who no doubt had a rather less peaceful time of it at the hands of FANK.
By the way, thanks for the offer – I’d be very interested, perhaps I could put together a few things on the background of the Sangkum period etc. I’ll send you a sample first, though, to see what you think.
It’s okay, you need not bother about sending me a sample, for I’d be unqualified to pass judgement anyway! I only started this blog as an amateur interest, and as you can see most of the content here consists of a few bits and pieces of commentary on material produced by other people. It’s up to you, the offer is open. I trust that you’re not a new-generation spambot using artificial intelligence …
“Semi-demented.”
I think the guy who has uploaded this material is the same who posts interesting videos on YouTube, but appears to be an utterly bonkers chauvinist. Hates the Vietnamese. Brilliant stuff by the way. I believe this is what is lacking from what was sent to me by a bookseller stroke con merchant.
Well, I’ll get something together over the next few days, then…
Yeah, I wondered if it was the same guy. The Ith Sarin text has some very interesting elements – I note an early appearance by Comrade Deuch in there, as well as the phrase “the events at Samlaut were prepared in advance”, which as Kiernan pointed out in his book, is directly contradicted by the later KR line – they no longer wanted to be associated with a failed rebellion.
As for the Samlaut Rebellion, the fledgling Khmer Rouge armed movement did cash in on it; so for the purposes of their own historiography, it would have been useful (and untruthful) for them to portray this at-first spontaneous rebellion as being a milestone of the revolutionary movement, and proof of peasant desire for radical change. So at some point they were wanting to be associated with it. After all, it was the most serious outbreak of home-grown popular violence since the anti-French rebellion in the 1880s. Thousands of peasants left their villages for the forest. A sizeable chunk of them returned, but several stayed on, becoming guerillas. As an expression of frustration and discontent, then it did fail yes, as it was incoherent, and the crack-down against it was brutal (you know about the beheadings). But it was successful in giving some momentum to the inadequate Khmer Rouge movement, and the Communists brought a sympathetic ideology to the peasants, structure, and sophisticated organisational skills for propaganda and to coordinate attacks by those willing to fight the government after the first flare up. Khieu Samphan and Hou Youn had fled to the countryside in 1967, following the outbreak of violence, and were involved in organising rebels.
Unless, what you mean is that they wanted to cynically distance themselves from it temporarily, when part of that ‘united front’ with an exiled Sihanouk.
Also, Kiernan notes that at the time Lon Nol had ordered aircraft to bomb and strafe the rebel areas, without the knowledge and authorisation of Sihanouk, indicating that the Prince was losing his grip on the Cambodian right.
Thank you for your offer, I will gladly accept it and will start to translate some stuff from my Russian blog into English and I will definitely send you an email with the sample too. So it will not be that shocking.. let’s say so. You can always edit or delete, we have to be opened to criticism anyways, not the bullshit one like Tuol Sleng guards breaking the pencils! So, don’t be shy to say what you will not like or not accept. I will omit it then or will re-arrange it.
LB
Thank you for purchasing the book, too. I’m ready from my side to keep scanning more and more, just when I get home and when I get to the library since I work away from home.
Ith Sarin – The suffering for a Khmer soul is not a full version, it’s a relatively short book. I wish I could translate it, maybe one day. Is there exist an English translation? Otherwise, I guess I can commit myself to translate it, in future. Without setting any specific date.
Those note books are a quite surprise to me, I’ve read many contents of that website but it’s so unorganized I’ve never seen them. Amekkhmer is a Youn hater same as KI media, maybe he is one of those who runs that blog too. I like the calligraphy of the 13th page, by the way Nechaev had calligraphic handwriting so his letters to the Tsar did not have to be copied by professional copiers such easy to read they were. I’ve never seen even a single line written by Pol Pot not even his signature, unfortunately, maybe we could read a lot from it..
I’ve managed to find this image of what are presumably members of the Monatio, taken on April 17 1975. You can see the distinctive flag. Might place it into my old post on them.
Post a Comment