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Cambodia Archive

On Cambodia

April 9, 2005

Logic would suggest I would have written many posts about Cambodia by now. I feel a strong personal connection to Cambodia as a result of years of friendships with Khmer immigrants and personal inquiry into the Cambodian Civil War. On the other hand, it's a very sensitive subject. Explaining how foreign participation in the Cambodian Civil War led to an autogenocide is really wrapped up in a debate over what happened, who is to blame for the excesses of the Khmer Roughe, and so forth. I'm well aware of Prof. Peter Dale Scott, who has written articles in which he insists the carnage of Indonesia's G30M (30 Sep 1965, in which at least 500,000 persons were slaughtered) was entirely the result of American intelligence operations. This, despite the uncontested fact that no US personnel were present at the killings. Both Scott's thesis, and the one implicating US bombing of northeastern Cambodia in the 1970-1978 violence, are problematic.¹

The Cambodian tragedy has been used a polemical football between the American left and political liberals, and between liberals and conservatives. I have not wished to be a party to this, partly because of my personal ties to Khmers and the magnitude of the allegations. In the past I have denounced the way many American institutions colluded with the State Department to oust and demonize Jean-Bertrand Aristide. However, I have also seen the transparently polemical way in which history has been used in battles between rival factions of college professors, and wish to remain aloof from that.

That said, I've observed an outstanding series of posts on the monstrosities of "Democratic Kampuchea" at the revived EastSouthWestNorth site. Part One is where the author collects scattered thoughts and impressions after returning to Hong Kong; it's quite short. Part Two is devoted to Tuol Sleng, largest of several centers where the Angkor tortured thousands of victims, scrupulously documenting the victims in photographs. Part Three describes ESWN's visit to Choeung Ek, where some 9,000 Cambodians are buried.

ESWN does not say much, relying mainly on photos. I found these intensely moving, although in response to the host's frequent compliants about the cost of maintaining such a high bandwidth site, I will assure you they consist of endless heaps of skulls. The Khmer Rouge were obsessed with parsimony in murder; they used extravagently cruel methods to torture tens of thousands of victims, for purposes that remain mysterious to me (what possible use could there have been extracting evidence from potential resistance when that entire demographic category was targeted for death?), the conditions and tools were so cheap and so crude they seem like the old "Why kill yourself?" cartoons in Mad Magazine. Prisoners were executed with plastic bags or banyan tree leaf branches (ESWN includes paintings from the two sites, by prisoners).

One reason I've felt the need to comment on this is the extreme murkiness of the Cambodian Civil War, but also recent developments in the Nepali Civil War. I would argue that the late King Birendra, who was killed in a massacre by his son and heir, Dipendra (source), was loosely analogous to Prince Sihanouk; Birendra, of course, died rather than go into exile, but while Sihanouk endorsed the insurgency after his ouster in 1970, Birendra is widely believed to have been murdered by hardliners opposed to his conciliatory measures. Gyanendra, his brother, succeeded Birendra in '01 and has since inflicted a full scale royal dictatorship; he could be likened to the fascist Sirik Matak. At the same time, the military situation of the Royal government in Nepal has deteriorated drastically, to the point that the Maoist rebels appear to have overrun most of the rural populated areas (HC, 1, 2; FPiF; BBC; NYT on death squads in Nepal). Could the Maoists of Nepal repeat many of the horrors of "Democratic" Kampuchea?

For now, I remain optimistic that the answer is no. The KR had numerous powerful external forces that molded them to savagery; these forces are far weaker in Nepal. No ally of the Nepali government has carpet bombed the country; the Maoist shows of force seem to be costly to their own support among Nepalis. Of course, the technology of counterinsurgency has also changed. The methods of COIN are less visible. Still, the poverty of Nepal is if anything more grinding than that of Cambodia in 1969, when the bombing began.

King Sihanouk abdicates in favor of son

October 17, 2004

Few careers in politics have been as picaresque as that of King Norodom Sihanouk (Wikipedia; essay/review on Sihanouk's memoirs). Cambodia was under a French protectorate from 1863 to 1953; because of its very low-key, rural life, the protectorate tended to avoid clashing with nationalist aspirations. Indeed, for centuries before the French arrived in Cambodia, the expanding Vietnamese empire of the Nguyens pushed into the older Khmer empire of Cambodia; hence, the Khmer tended to view the French favorably, as protectors from a historic enemy. After 1950, the young King Sihanouk (r.1941-1955; 1993-2004) became nationalistic and demanded the departure of the French; afterwards he abdicated in favor of his father, and governed the country in fact to the 1970 coup. From then until '91 he either lived in exile, or under effective house arrest of the Khmer Rouge (whom he initially expected to restore him to power).

Most of my impressions of Sihanouk and his influence on the world around him were formed reading a few books, such as Brother Enemy (Nayan Chanda, '86). By now, I would expect much of the material in that book to have been superseded (e.g., by The Pol Pot Regime and How Pol Pot Came to Power (Ben Kiernan, '02/'04), or the Tragedy of Cambodian History (David Chandler, '93). The philosophical outlook of the historian tends to reduce the relative importance of the individual in the history of a country.

Nonetheless, Sihanouk's multifarious political career doubtless had a strong influence on the events that shaped his country. Partly that's because Cambodia is such a small, impoverished country extremely vulnerable to foreign influence: its urban population is both small and likely to be resented as a competitive elite, from the point of view of the peasantry. Additionally, such a large share of the population has been displaced by war and famine, and made dependent upon the assistance of others. Usually refugees develop a curious attitude towards their helpers, which-in the case of Cambodia's post-1970 civil war-tended to favor the Khmer Rouge.¹ Over the course of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, many were eventually reassimilated into smaller towns, which were again abandoned in January '79 when the rump of the KR regime resolved to cease defense of territory and fight a guerrilla war.

Sihanouk's government had been the original objective of the Batdambang Uprising ('67) of Khmer insurgents; his object during the war had been to placate Ha Noi while fighting the KCP, and the USSR government had therefore extended assistance to his government. The March '70 coup of Lon Nol and Prince Sirik Matak left Sihanouk on the outside, and he therefore decided to make common cause with the group he had named the "Khmer Rouge." He would do so again in 1982, after the FUNK government of Pol Pot was overthrown by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Additionally, he travelled extensively to Beijing to seek support, and befriended Kim Il-sung, who had a palace erected for him.

Sihanouk's sons, Ranariddh and Sihamoni, both spent time in North Korea; Ranariddh has been PM of the country from his election ('93) to his ouster ('97) by the real power in Cambodia, Hun Sen. His half-brother Sihamoni studied film making in North Korea, and taught ballet in Paris between '81 and '93, then took up a post (also in Paris) as Cambodia's ambassador to UNESCO.

My conjecture is that Sihanouk has accrued a lot of reverence for having lived through so much; his tenure has also been marred by events not of his chosing, but he's done precious little to help matters. His fund of merit has been dissipated by decades of opportunism, and I foresee the monarchy fading into irrelevance .

The [once-again Prince] Sihanouk is retiring to Pyongyang, where he has been spending much of his time already. NOTES: 1 The 1967-1975 phase of Cambodia's civil war-described here-left a large cohort of internally displaced persons (IDPs). The constant movements of territory controlled by the Kampuchea Communist Party (KCP), efforts by the West to help repress the leftist guerrillas, and the concomitant efforts to supply aid, led to a general disregard for stable, ordered rights and obligations in Cambodian society. The accumulation of vast numbers of refugees in the country (mainly in the major cities), cut off from most forms of economic sustenance, led to a fatalism about welfare and survival: there was no situation whose outcome did not depend entirely upon aid workers and (occasionally) bureaucrats.

Refugees usually develop a great deal of resentment towards their host societies, especially is obstacles to assimilation are large. In the case of Phnom Penh, this was a city that simply could never achieve the economic expansion required to absorb such vast numbers of displaced people, even if conditions had been ideal; as it was, the city relied heavily on foreign supplies of basic necessities, and was prone to loss of electric power as the war neared its climax.

Few of these people had any prior experience with urban life; most had every reason to hate the squalor, boredom, confinement, and shame. Encounters with the prior urban residents were likely to be unpleasant; hence, many of the IDPs were likely to identify with the class that the KCP purported to be serving. In contrast, those who had fled the KR during the war, or who were regarded as class enemies, had been betrayed by officials unable to keep their promises. They would therefore be unable to act as a group.

After the KCP took control there was a trickle of emigration from Thailand; about 18,000 Khmer emigrated to '79; then, the numbers soared, and 165,000 left; most of these eventually immigrated to the USA (147,000; source). These were largely people with an intense fear of being left in Cambodia, perhaps because they had been marked for death by the now KCP-which was waging a bush war against the Vietnamese-backed Hun Sen. government.