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Cambodia
a country study
Federal Research Division
Edited by Russell R. Ross
Research Completed December 1987
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Foreword
This volume is one in a continuing series of books prepared by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress under the Country Studies/Area Handbook Program sponsored by the Department of the Army. The last two pages of this book list the other published studies.
Most books in the series deal with a particular foreign country, describing and analyzing its political, economic, social, and national security systems and institutions, and examining the interrelationships of those systems and the ways they are shaped by cultural factors. The authors seek to provide a basic understanding of the observed society, striving for a dynamic rather than a static portrayal. Particular attention is devoted to the people who make up the society, their origins, dominant beliefs and values, their common interests and the issues on which they are divided, the nature and extent of their involvement with national institutions, and their attitudes toward each other and toward their social system and political order.
The books represent the analysis of the authors and should not be construed as an expression of an official United States government position, policy, or decision. The authors have sought to adhere to accepted standards of scholarly objectivity. Corrections, additions, and suggestions for changes from readers will be welcomed for use in future editions.
Louis R. Mortimer
Chief
Federal Research Division
Library of Congress
Washington, D.C. 20540-5220
Data as of December 1987
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors are indebted to a number of individuals in government agencies and at private institutions who shared their time and specialized knowledge to provide research data and perspective to the production of this book. Among them were Bill Herod and Patricia D. Norland of the Indochina Project, Ok Soeum of the Cambodian Buddhist Association, and Rath Chhim of the MRM Language Research Center. Bill Herod, Frank Tatu, and Mr. and Mrs. Robert E. Hammerquist generously shared their personal and, in many cases, unique photographs of Cambodia for use in this book.
The authors also wish to express their appreciation to members of the Library of Congress staff who contributed to the preparation of this volume. These included Richard F. Nyrop who reviewed and coordinated all chapters; Robert L. Worden who reviewed all draft chapters; and Martha E. Hopkins, who, in addition to editing a chapter, managed editing and production of the entire book. Andrea Matles Savada was responsible for seeing the book through to its completion after the departure of the editor of the book. Other Library of Congress staff members who contributed substantial efforts were David P. Cabitto, Sandra K. Cotugno, and Kimberly A. Lord, who prepared and arranged all graphic material; Teresa E. Kamp, who drew the cover and chapter heading illustrations; Harriett R. Blood, who drew the topography map; Susan M. Lender, who reviewed the maps; Tracy Henry Coleman and Meridel Jackson, who performed word processing for all chapters; editorial assistants Barbara Edgerton, Izella Watson, and Monica Shimmin, who helped prepared the manuscript in final form; and Malinda B. Neale of the Library of Congress Composing Unit, who prepared the camera-ready copy under the supervision of Peggy F. Pixley.
Others who contributed to the book were Richard Kollodge, Marilyn L. Majeska, Michael Pleasants, and Catherine Schwartzstein, who edited chapters, and Shirley Kessel, of Communicators Connections, who prepared the index.
Data as of December 1987
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Table of Contents
* CAMBODIA
* Foreword
* ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
* PREFACE
* COUNTRY PROFILE
o COUNTRY
o GEOGRAPHY
o SOCIETY
o ECONOMY
o TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATIONS
o GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS
o NATIONAL SECURITY
* INTRODUCTION
* Chapter 1. Historical Setting
o PREHISTORY AND EARLY KINGDOMS
* Early Indianized Kingdom of Funan
* The Successor State of Chenla
o THE ANGKORIAN PERIOD
o CAMBODIA'S STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL, 1432-1887
* Domination by Thailand and by Vietnam
* The French Protectorate
o THE FRENCH COLONIAL PERIOD, 1887-1953
* The Colonial Economy
* The Emergence of Nationalism
* The Struggle for Independence
o CAMBODIA UNDER SIHANOUK, 1954-70
* The Geneva Conference
* Domestic Developments
* Nonaligned Foreign Policy
* The Cambodian Left: The Early Phases
* The Paris Student Group
* The KPRP Second Congress
o INTO THE MAELSTROM: INSURRECTION AND WAR, 1967-75
* The March 1970 Coup d'Etat
* The Widening War
* Early Khmer Rouge Atrocities
* The Fall of Phnom Penh
o DEMOCRATIC KAMPUCHEA, 1975-78
* Revolutionary Terror
* Society under the Angkar
* Religious and Minority Communities
* Education and Health
* The Economy
* Politics under the Khmer Rouge
* Establishing Democratic Kampuchea
* An Elusive Party
* Intraparty Conflict
* The Purge
* The Fall of Democratic Kampuchea
* Chapter 2. The Society and Its Environment
o ENVIRONMENT
* Topography
* Climate
* Drainage
* Regional Divisions
o POPULATION
* Dynamics
* Distribution
* Migration and Refugees
o SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND ORGANIZATION
* The Khmer
* Household and Family Structure
* Housing
* Diet
* Dress
* Families
* Social Stratification and Social Mobility
* Other Ethnic Groups
* The Cham
* The Khmer Loeu
* The Chinese
* The Vietnamese
* Other Groups
o LANGUAGES
* Austroasiatic-Mon-Khmer
* Austronesian
o RELIGION
* Buddhism
* Origins of Buddhism on the Indian Subcontinent
* Cambodian Adaptations
* Role of Buddhism in Cambodian Life
* Chinese Religion
* Islam
* Other Religions
o EDUCATION
* Public School System
* Buddhist Education
* Private Education
o HEALTH AND WELFARE
* Public Health
* Welfare Programs
* Chapter 3. The Economy
o ECONOMIC SETTING
* Natural Resources
* Metals and Minerals
* Hydroelectric Power
* Petroleum
* Forestry
* Labor Force
o ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENTS AFTER INDEPENDENCE
* Sihanouk's Peacetime Economy, 1953-70
* The Wartime Economy, 1970-75
* The Economy under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79
o ECONOMIC ROLE OF THE KAMPUCHEAN PEOPLE'S REVOLUTIONARY PARTY
* New Economic Policy and System
* First Plan, 1986-90
o AGRICULTURE
* Collectivization and Solidarity Groups
* Rice Production and Cultivation
* Other Food and Commercial Crops
* Livestock
* Fisheries
o INDUSTRY
* Major Manufacturing Industries
* Handicrafts
o DOMESTIC COMMERCE
o FOREIGN TRADE AND AID
* Composition of Trade
* Major Trading Partners
* Vietnam
* Soviet Union
* East Germany
* Czechoslovakia
* Poland
* Illicit Trade with Thailand and with Singapore
* Foreign Economic and Technical Assistance
* Soviet Aid
* Vietnamese Aid
* International and Western Aid
o FINANCE
* Banking
* Currency
* Taxes
o TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATIONS
* Roads and Highways
* Railroads
* Water Transportation
* Ports
* Airports
* Telecommunications
* Chapter 4. Government and Politics
o MAJOR POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS, 1977-81
* Background
* Cambodia in Turmoil
o COALITION GOVERNMENT OF DEMOCRATIC KAMPUCHEA
* Origins of the Coalition
* Coalition Structure
* Democratic Kampuchea
* The Khmer People's National Liberation Front
* National United Front for an Independent, Peaceful, Neutral, and Cooperative Cambodia
o THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF KAMPUCHEA
* The Constitution
* Government Structure
* The National Assembly
* The Council of State
* The Council of Ministers
* The Judiciary
* Local People's Revolutionary Committees
o THE MEDIA
o THE KAMPUCHEAN, (OR KHMER) PEOPLE'S REVOLUTIONARY PARTY
o THE KAMPUCHEAN (OR KHMER) UNITED FRONT FOR NATIONAL CONSTRUCTION AND DEFENSE
o FOREIGN AFFAIRS
* The Coalition's Strategy
* Phnom Penh and Its Allies
* The Search for Peace
* From "Proximity Talks" to a "Cocktail Party"
* The Sihanouk-Hun Sen Meeting
* Chapter 5. National Security
o HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
* The Time of Greatness, A.D. 802-1431
* Period of Decline, 1431-1863
* The French Protectorate, 1863-1954
* The Japanese Occupation, 1941-45
* The First Indochina War, 1945-54
* The Second Indochina War, 1954-75
o MILITARY DEVELOPMENTS UNDER THE KHMER ROUGE
* Khmer Rouge Armed Forces
* Khmer-Vietnamese Border Tensions
* Vietnamese Invasion of Cambodia
o MILITARY DEVELOPMENTS IN POSTWAR CAMBODIA
* Tenuous Security
* Coalition Government Resistance Forces
* National Army of Democratic Kampuchea
* Khmer People's National Liberation Armed Forces
* Armée Nationale Sihanoukiste
* Kampuchean, or Khmer, People's Revolutionary Armed Forces
* Threats and Capabilities
* Organization and Control
* Mission and Doctrine
* Composition and Deployment
* Conditions of Service
* Foreign Troops and Advisers
o LAW ENFORCEMENT AND COUNTERSUBVERSION
* People's Security Service
* Protection under the Law
* Penal System
* Appendices
o Appendix A. Tables
o Appendix B. Major Political and Military Organizations
* Bibliography
* Glossary
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PREFACE
The previous edition of Cambodia: A Country Study was compiled in 1972 when the ill-fated Khmer Republic (see Appendix B) was fighting for its life against the Khmer Rouge (see Appendix B). In the one and one-half decades since that time, profound upheavals have wrought substantial political changes in the country. These changes, and the regimes that sought to impose them, are only now beginning to be studied with objectivity. In addition, the quickening pace of negotiations concerning the future of the country suggests that a watershed period in its modern history may be approaching. It is, accordingly, time for a new country study, not only to catch up with the momentous developments of the past fifteen years, but also to establish some point of departure, some bench mark by which to interpret future events.
This is a completely new book, and, unlike the previous edition, it follows the standard, revised format of the entire country study series. It presents its narrative under five major concomitants of the Cambodian experience: historical setting, society and environment, economy, government and politics, and national security. Sources of information for this study included both monographs and serials, especially material published since 1975. Chapter bibliographies appear at the end of the book, and a brief, annotated bibliographic note on sources recommended for further reading is included at the end of each chapter. Measurements are given in the metric system; a conversion table is provided to assist readers who are unfamiliar with metric measurements (see table 1, Appendix A). A glossary is included.
It should be noted that, as a result of the Khmer Rouge policy of eradicating the traces of its predecessor and of establishing a ruthlessly self-sufficient, anti-modernistic regime, after mid1975 , statistical and quantitative data for Democratic Kampuchea are contradictory and virtually nonexistent. As for its successor, the People's Republic of Kampuchea, such data are only now becoming available, and they remain fragmentary and contradictory. Cambodia continues to be a desperately poor country, its infrastructure ravaged by war, and its thin stratum of educated citizens either in exile or nearly wiped out during the Khmer Rouge years; it is thus scarcely able to compile data that one has come to expect of other nations. Nevertheless, the country is making an effort to bind its wounds and to reestablish sovereignty over its territory, without enduring either a suffocating Vietnamese presence or a chilling reimposition of Khmer Rouge authority. More and better data should become available as Cambodia slowly rehabilitates itself and resumes its place in the Asian family of nations.
A word of explanation is needed concerning the use of "Cambodia" instead of "Kampuchea" to designate the country. According to historian David P. Chandler, both terms are derived from "Kambuja," a Sanskrit word thought to have been applied originally to a north Indian tribe. The selection of "Cambodia," therefore, was without ideological connotation. It is more recognizable to the English-speaking reader, and it adheres to the standard practice of the United States Board on Geographic Names (BGN), which also has been followed in the spelling of all place names. In April 1989, after the cut-off date of research for this book, Prime Minister Hun Sen of the People's Republic of Kampuchea announced that the name of the country had been changed to the State of Cambodia. In recent years some provinces have been combined, renamed, and then divided again several times. The most recent case is that of Bantay Meanchey, the formation of which-- from parts of Batdambang, Siemreab-Otdar Meanchey, and Pouthisat-- was announced in late 1987 to take effect in 1988. For the geographic terms occurring most frequently, such as names of provinces, the BGN designations together with the more common, journalistic equivalents are as follows:
BGN Name Common Name
Batdambang Battambang
Kampong Cham Kompong Cham
Kampong Chhnang Kompong Chnang
Kampong Saom Kompong Som
Kampong Spoe Kompong Speu
Kampong Thum Kompong Thom
Kaoh Kong Koh Kong
Kracheh Kratie
Mondol Kiri Mondolkiri
Otdar Meanchey Oddar Meanchey
Pouthisat Pursat
Rotanokiri Ratanakiri
Stoeng Treng Stung Treng
Takev Takeo
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COUNTRY PROFILE
COUNTRY
Formal Name: Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK) (Insurgent Coalition) People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) (government in Phnom Penh)
Short Form: Cambodia
Term for Citizens: Cambodians
Capital: Phnom Penh
Date of Independence: November 9, 1953
GEOGRAPHY
Size: Total area 181,040 square kilometers, about size of Missouri; country shares 800-kilometer border with Thailand on north and west, 541-kilometer border with Laos on northeast, 1,228- kilometer border with Vietnam on east and southeast; coastline along Gulf of Thailand about 443 kilometers.
Topography: Most salient topographical feature lacustrine plain formed by inundations of Tonle Sap (Great Lake), measuring about 2,590 square kilometers during dry season to about 24,605 square kilometers during rainy season. This densely populated plain devoted to wet rice cultivation constitutes heartland of Cambodia. Most (about 75 percent) of country lies at elevations of less than 100 meters above sea level, except for Cardamon Mountains (highest elevation 1,771 meters), their north-south extension to the east, Elephant Range (elevation range 500-1,000 meters) and steep escarpment of Dangrek Mountains (average elevation 500 meters) along northern border with Thailand.
Climate: Temperatures range from 10°C to 38°C. Tropical monsoons: southwest monsoon blowing inland in northeasterly direction brings moisture-laden winds from Gulf of Thailand/Indian Ocean from May to October with period of heaviest precipitation September-October; northeast monsoon blowing in southwesterly direction toward coast ushers in dry season, November to March, with period of least rainfall January-February.
SOCIETY
Population: In 1987 estimates vary from 6.3 to 7.3 million with possibly more than 500,000 Cambodians scattered in Thailand and abroad as refugees; average annual growth targeted at 2.3 percent; estimated urban population of more than 10 percent; estimated population density averages about 36 per square kilometer.
Ethnic Groups: Ethnically homogeneous, more than 90 percent Khmer; national minorities comprise about 3 percent of total population; Cham (see Glossary), of Islamic faith, most significant minority group, other scattered tribal minorities in upland and forested areas. Reportedly some Vietnamese immigration since 1981-82. Some Chinese in urban areas, numbers unknown.
Languages: National language Khmer, a member of Mon-Khmer subfamily of Austroasiatic language group. Russian and Vietnamese taught in Phnom Penh and other urban areas.
Religion: Theravada Buddhism, suppressed by Khmer Rouge (see Appendix B), revived but controlled under successor regime; wats (temples) and monks privately supported; wats administered by lay committees; Buddhist clergy or sangha (see Glossary); chairman (prathean) heads ecclesiastical hierarchy.
Education: Rate of literacy about 48 percent. In late-1980s total estimated school enrollment 1.3 million (primary), 369,500 (secondary). Schooling follows Vietnamese model with three levels: primary grades 1-4; lower secondary education, grades 5-7; upper secondary education, grades 8-10; education at all levels hampered by lack of facilities, teachers and instructional materials. Post-secondary education consists of twenty teachertraining schools, plus institutions offering professional or technical instruction. Soviet and Vietnamese instructors heavily represented in educational institutions. Admission to higher education based on political reliability.
Health: Average life expectancy 48.5 years (male 47 years, female 49.9 years) for the period 1985-90; some prevalent diseases are tuberculosis, malaria, infectious and parasitical illnesses; infant mortality 160 per thousand live births (1986); nonspecific gastro-enteritis accounts for disproportionate number of infant deaths; localized malnutrition and poor hygienic conditions exacerbate debility of population and susceptibility to illness. Total of 34 hospitals and 1,349 rural dispensaries nationwide; in countryside, network of primary care facilities being established with international help; hospitals planned or already established in provincial capitals, dispensaries at district (srok) level, first aid stations at village (khum) level; extension of health care greatly impeded by lack of trained personnel and inadequately developed infrastructure (especially clean water, and distribution or availability of medical supplies/equipment.)
SOCIETY
Population: In 1987 estimates vary from 6.3 to 7.3 million with possibly more than 500,000 Cambodians scattered in Thailand and abroad as refugees; average annual growth targeted at 2.3 percent; estimated urban population of more than 10 percent; estimated population density averages about 36 per square kilometer.
Ethnic Groups: Ethnically homogeneous, more than 90 percent Khmer; national minorities comprise about 3 percent of total population; Cham (see Glossary), of Islamic faith, most significant minority group, other scattered tribal minorities in upland and forested areas. Reportedly some Vietnamese immigration since 1981-82. Some Chinese in urban areas, numbers unknown.
Languages: National language Khmer, a member of Mon-Khmer subfamily of Austroasiatic language group. Russian and Vietnamese taught in Phnom Penh and other urban areas.
Religion: Theravada Buddhism, suppressed by Khmer Rouge (see Appendix B), revived but controlled under successor regime; wats (temples) and monks privately supported; wats administered by lay committees; Buddhist clergy or sangha (see Glossary); chairman (prathean) heads ecclesiastical hierarchy.
Education: Rate of literacy about 48 percent. In late-1980s total estimated school enrollment 1.3 million (primary), 369,500 (secondary). Schooling follows Vietnamese model with three levels: primary grades 1-4; lower secondary education, grades 5-7; upper secondary education, grades 8-10; education at all levels hampered by lack of facilities, teachers and instructional materials. Post-secondary education consists of twenty teachertraining schools, plus institutions offering professional or technical instruction. Soviet and Vietnamese instructors heavily represented in educational institutions. Admission to higher education based on political reliability.
Health: Average life expectancy 48.5 years (male 47 years, female 49.9 years) for the period 1985-90; some prevalent diseases are tuberculosis, malaria, infectious and parasitical illnesses; infant mortality 160 per thousand live births (1986); nonspecific gastro-enteritis accounts for disproportionate number of infant deaths; localized malnutrition and poor hygienic conditions exacerbate debility of population and susceptibility to illness. Total of 34 hospitals and 1,349 rural dispensaries nationwide; in countryside, network of primary care facilities being established with international help; hospitals planned or already established in provincial capitals, dispensaries at district (srok) level, first aid stations at village (khum) level; extension of health care greatly impeded by lack of trained personnel and inadequately developed infrastructure (especially clean water, and distribution or availability of medical supplies/equipment.)
TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATIONS
Railroads: Two routes of one-meter-gauge-track: Phnom Penh-Kampong Saom route, 260 kilometers long; Phnom PenhBatdambang -Sisophon route, 352 kilometers long; railroads disrupted during regime of Democratic Kampuchea but restored to service early 1980s. Both routes remain insecure and subject to sporadic guerrilla attacks.
Roads: Total 13,350 kilometers; about 2,600 kilometers paved (bituminous), 7,150 kilometers improved (crushed stone, gravel, earth), 3,600 kilometers unimproved; main roads paved but in varying states of disrepair.
Ports: Main seaport Kampong Saom, (Gulf of Thailand). Main riverine port Phnom Penh, at junction of Tonle Sab, Mekong, and Basak rivers; minor ports (Gulf of Thailand) Ream and Kampot. National merchant marine consists of three vessels with total displacement of 3,800 (deadweight) tons.
Inland Waterways: Total length about 3,982 kilometers; principal arteries are middle Mekong River (runs from Laos through Cambodia and Vietnam to South China Sea), and Tonle Sab and Basak rivers from Tonle Sap (Great Lake) to Cambodian-Vietnamese border; both wide (up to two kilometers) and navigable, with ferries at Kampong Cham, Tonle Bet, Sre Ambel, Stoeng Treng, and Phumi Prek Khsay (Neak Luong); precipitous falls and rapids occur near Laotian border and in vicinity of Kracheh city.
Civil Airports: Thirteen usable airfields, including 8 with permanent surface runways, 2 with runways 2,400 to 3,600 meters, 5 with runways 1,200 to 2,400 meters; main international airport Pochentong near Phnom Penh; secondary airports at Kang Keng at Ream, at Siemreab and Batdambang. National airline Air Kampuchea, inventory three Antonov-24s; scheduled air service to Batdambang and Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam).
Telecommunications: In late 1980s, one earth satellite station, part of Intersputnik communications network; radio telephone link (via Intersputnik) between Phnom Penh and Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam); about 7,300 telephones countrywide. One radio broadcasting station ("Voice of the Kampuchean People") with medium and short wave capability; about 171,000 radio receivers countrywide, television service inaugurated with broadcasts twice a week in late 1980s.
GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS
Two governments compete for internal legitimacy and for international recognition: Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK--see Appendix B) and People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK--see Appendix B.).
CGDK: Tripartite coalition consisting of Party of Democratic Kampuchea (PDK--see Appendix B, or Khmer Rouge--see Appendix B), and two noncommunist movements, Khmer People's National Liberation Front (KPNLF--see Appendix B) and National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful, and Cooperative Cambodia (Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Indépendant, Neutre, Pacifique, et Coopératif--FUNCINPEC--see Appendix B). CGDK recognized internationally by the United Nations and a few noncommunist states; controls little territory except inaccessible guerrilla areas in northeastern and southwestern Cambodia; administers some camps along Thai border.
Government: A president and a prime minister; vicepresident in charge of foreign affairs, and at next subordinate echelon, six coordinating committees established: culture and education, national defense, national economy and finance, public health and social affairs, military affairs, and press and information affairs.
Politics: Coalition partners exist in uneasy alliance, united only by opposition to Vietnamese occupation forces and government in Phnom Penh; coordinating committees staffed by one member from each movement comprising CGDK.
Major International Memberships: United Nations and many of its specialized agencies; Asian Development Bank, Group of 77, General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, World Bank (see Glossary), International Monetary Fund (see Glossary), Interpol, International Red Cross, International Telecommunications Union, and Nonaligned Movement.
PRK:Constitutes the government in Phnom Penh which exercises de facto control over most of Cambodian territory; recognized internationally by about three dozen Marxist and nonaligned states and revolutionary movements.
Government: Marxist government evolving toward socialism, sustained by large Vietnamese military presence. National Assembly, 117 members defined constitutionally as "supreme organ of state power," and body in which legislative authority vested; assembly selects members of Council of State that promulgates and interprets laws, the chairman of which serves as head of state; Council of State acts as secretariat for National Assembly and performs some assembly functions between parliamentary sessions. Council of Ministers, also responsible to National Assembly, exercises direct executive authority for administering government of the PRK down to local levels.
Politics: Kampuchean (or Khmer) People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP--see Appendix B) only political party permitted in late 1987 in areas under Phnomh Penh's control; functions at national level through Political Bureau (nine full and two candidate members) and Central Committee (thirty-one full and fourteen candidate members); mass auxiliary organizations foster patriotism and nurture party activism among population; most prominent of organization Kampuchean (or Khmer) United Front for National Construction and Defense (KUFNCD--see Appendix B); both KPRP and KUFNCD active down to local level and maintain nationwide network of committees at all provincial and district echelons. Other mass organizations include Kampuchean Federation of Trade Unions, Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Youth Union, Kampuchean Revolutionary Women's Association, and Kampuchean Revolutionary Youth Association.
Administrative Divisions: Two municipalities (Phnom Penh and Kampong Saom); eighteen provinces, subdivided into about 122 districts.
Legal System: Ministry of Justice, Office of Public Prosecutor, and People's Supreme Court exist at national level; at subordinate echelons, people's revolutionary courts established at provincial and municipal levels; court officials include president, vice-president and people's councillors. Separate system of military tribunals exist for armed forces, but in 1987 functions remained unknown.
Major International Memberships: None; nevertheless, government in Phnom Penh receives assistance from a number of communist and nonaligned states and from private international humanitarian organizations. Close bilateral relationship exists with Vietnam as result of Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation signed in February 1979.
NATIONAL SECURITY
Armed Forces of CGDK: In 1987 coalition forces remained unintegrated, with total numbers unknown. National Army of Democratic Kampuchea (NADK--see Appendix B, also known as Khmer Rouge)--roughly 40,000 to 50,000 combatants in three to six divisions, distributed in four autonomous military regions. Khmer People's National Liberation Armed Forces (KPNLAF-- see Appendix B)--strength waning; but conjecturally had 8,000 to 14,000 combatants organized into battalions and regiments, grouped administratively into 9 military regions. Sihanouk National Army (Armée Nationale Sihanoukiste--ANS--see Appendix B), strength increasing; has 7,000 to 11,000 combatants organized into a command structure and maneuver battalions grouped under 6 brigade headquarters.
Armed Forces of PRK: In 1987 military establishment comprised regular/main forces, provincial/regional forces, and village militia/local forces; embryonic coastal/riverine navy and air force existed; total military strength for all components unknown, but estimated to surpass 40,000 personnel; armed forces organized administratively into four military regions under Ministry of National Defense and General Staff in Phnom Penh.
Major Tactical Units of CGDK: Tactical units deployed usually comprise platoons or companies, occasionally single battalions. (People's Republic of Kampuchea): Seven understrength regular/main force divisions, with at least three deployed in border provinces of western Cambodia; several independent brigades and regiments; as many as four tank battalions, and combat support formations; naval forces one battalion; air force possibly two to four understrength squadrons; provincial/regional forces organized into battalions, generally deployed one per province, with greater number in border provinces; village militia/local forces organized into platoons and squads, generally deployed at subdistrict and village level; women heavily represented in militia/local forces.
Major Weapons/Equipment of CGDK: Small arms, light crewserved weapons, and equipment originating from China and possibly from Singapore.
Major Weapons/Equipment of PRK: Obsolescent tanks of Soviet or Chinese origin; armored personnel carriers of Soviet or United States origin; light to medium artillery pieces; small arms of Soviet origin; naval forces, small patrol and amphibious craft; air force, possibly MiG-21/FISHBED fighter aircraft, and Mi-8 (HIP) transport helicopters.
Security Expenditures of CGDK: Unknown; all military materiel assumed to be grant aid from China and from members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Security Expenditures of PRK: Unknown; all military materiel assumed to be grant aid from Soviet Union and Vietnam; estimated value of imported armaments US$150 million in 1986.
Foreign Troops and Advisers: (People's Republic of Kampuchea): Vietnamese expeditionary force numbering possibly 100,000 to 200,00 troops organized into 10 to 12 divisions under 4 Military Fronts; Vietnamese force to be withdrawn by 1990. Vietnamese military advisers with Cambodian units at least to battalion level; Warsaw Pact advisers at armed forces training institutions and possibly at upper defense echelons.
Internal Security: In 1987 insurgents of the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, backed by China and ASEAN nations, engaged in guerrilla warfare against People's Republic of Kampuchea government in Phnom Penh, and Vietnamese forces in Cambodia; some of country insecure because of sporadic guerrilla raids and ambushes, but guerrillas possessed insufficient strength or armaments to take and hold any urban area or to topple government.
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INTRODUCTION
ALTHOUGH THE LAND occupied by Cambodia has been populated for millennia, the area's history was unrecorded until the Chinese chronicles of the early Christian era. In the fewer than 2,000 years of its imperfectly documented existence, the Cambodian state has evolved along the lines of ascension, dominance, and retrogression inherent in all civilizations.
Historians surmise that by the first century A.D. a small number of Khmer (or Cambodian) states already existed on the fringes of the earliest recorded state in the region, the empire of Funan. Centered in the Mekong Delta of present-day Vietnam, Funan derived its power from commerce. With its port of Oc Eo on the Gulf of Thailand, Funan was well-placed to control maritime traffic between India and China. According to Chinese annals, Funan was a highly developed and prosperous state with an extensive canal system for transportation and irrigation, a fleet of naval vessels, a capital city with brick buildings, and a writing system based on Sanskrit. The inhabitants, whose adherence to Indian cultural institutions apparently coexisted with Mahayana Buddhism, were organized into a highly stratified society.
When the small Khmer states to the northwest of the Mekong Delta emerged into recorded history, it was to make war upon the declining empire of Funan. Between A.D. 550-650, these Khmer states overran their adversary, which fell apart, losing its tributary states on the Kra Isthmus and along the Gulf of Thailand.
Chaos and economic decline followed the fall of Funan, but the sequence of events over the next 500 years led to the ascension of the Cambodian state and its evolution into an increasingly powerful and dynamic entity. The first unified and distinctly Khmer polity to emerge after Funan was Chenla. It absorbed the Indianized cultural legacy of its predecessor and established its capital near the Tonle Sap (Great Lake), the heartland of Cambodia, then as now. Under expansionist rulers, its authority was pushed into the territories of present-day Thailand and Laos. The development of Chenla was not marked by an unrelieved accretion of power, however. Divisive forces quickly resulted in a split into Land (or Upper) Chenla and Water (or Lower) Chenla. Land Chenla demonstrated the greater vitality, controlled some thirty provincial cities, and sent emissaries to China under the Tang dynasty. Water Chenla slipped into vassalage to Java.
The historical ascension of the Khmer polity began during the early 800s. The initiator of the period was the first empire builder, Jayavarman II (A.D. 802-50), who carved out a feudal state generally encompassing modern Cambodia. Jayavarman revived the cult of Devaraja, an Indianized cultural institution that was intended to confer, through elaborate rituals and symbols, heavenly approbation or even divine status upon the ruler. Following the reign of Jayavarman II, the two Chenlas were reunited peacefully, and the Khmer polity continued to develop, establishing over time a priestly hierarchy, an armed force and police, a provincial administration of subordinate officials, a system of courts, corvée labor by the peasants, and a capital on the site of Angkor near the Tonle Sap.
The Khmer state reached its apogee in the Angkorian period-- also called the empire of Angkor--during the period from the eleventh century to the thirteenth century, when it was ruled by a succession of able monarchs. The last great monarch of the Angkorian period was Jayavarman VII (1181-ca. 1218). He reversed the Cham encroachments that had taken place after the death of Suryavarman II (1113-50) and carried the war to the enemy, conquering Champa itself and briefly reducing it to a Khmer vassal state. At its greatest extent, the Angkorian empire of Jayavarman VII encompassed not only Champa on the coast of southern Vietnam but also extended north to the vicinity of Vientiane in present-day Laos and south to include the small trading city-states of the Malay Peninsula. Jayavarman continued the public works program of his predecessors, uniting his realm by elevated military causeways with resthouses at intervals. He also built hospitals for the aged and the infirm and sponsored the construction of Angkor Thom and the Bayon, the last major temples of Angkorian times and splendid edifices in their own right, but presaging the decadence that shortly set in (see The Angkorian Period , ch. 1).
Jayavarman VII's wars and public works exacted a heavy toll on the finances and the human labor force of the Angkorian empire. The drain of resources coincided with the gradual intrusion of Theravada Buddhism, with its egalitarian focus, at the expense of the Indianized cults that stressed a hierarchical, stratified society (see Buddhism , ch. 2). Whether it was this development or the inability of the Khmer monarchs to command the fealty of their subjects that led to a societal breakdown remains open to conjecture. Also coupled with these internal developments was the accelerated southward migration of the Thai, who, dislodged from their state in southwestern China by the Mongols in the mid-1200s, flooded into the Menam Chao Phraya Valley. Subject to internal and external pressures, the Khmer state became unable to defend itself at the very time its enemies were growing stronger. Thai attacks were stepped up around 1350, and they continued until Angkor itself was captured and sacked in 1430-31. The fall of Angkor ended the dominant period of the Khmer state. Thereafter, its borders shrank, and it controlled little more than the area around the Tonle Sap, the alluvial plain to the southeast, and some territory west of the Mekong River. To the east, the collapse of the kingdom of Champa in 1471 opened the Khmer lands of the Mekong Delta to the steady Vietnamese expansion southward.
The long waning of the Cambodian empire after the fall of Angkor is not well documented. The transfer of the capital from the Angkorian region around the Tonle Sap to the vicinity of Phnom Penh may have heralded the shift of emphasis from an agricultural to a trading society. Even with this change, the Khmer state retained some of its vitality into the seventeenth century, alternately trading and warring with its neighbors. By the eighteenth century, however, it had become a backwater buffer state, existing solely on the sufferance of its increasingly powerful neighbors, Thailand and Vietnam. The imposition of the French protectorate upon Cambodia prevented its neighbors from swallowing it completely.
Cambodia's status declined further under the French, however, when the last vestiges of its sovereignty were lost, especially after 1884, when Paris imposed another unequal treaty that went beyond the original protectorate of 1863. The newer pact limited the authority of the king, abolished slavery, stationed colonial officials in the countryside, and codified land ownership. Reaction to the 1884 treaty produced the only sustained rebellion during colonial times. Unrest persisted until 1886 and was put down with troops from Vietnam (see The French Protectorate , ch. 1). Thereafter, the French consolidated their grasp on the country, and Cambodia became merely a heavily taxed, efficient rice-producing colony, the inhabitants of which were known for their passivity.
As the Southeast Asian colonies of the European powers stood on the brink of World War II in 1940 and 1941, the utter powerlessness of Cambodia was illustrated by the fact that it was compelled to surrender its provinces of Siemreab and Batdambang (Battambang), which included some of the country's most fertile agricultural area, to Thailand, as a result of the brief Franco-Siamese War. In addition, some months later it was the French, not the Cambodians, who selected the candidate who would sit on the throne in Phnom Penh. Their choice was the young Prince Norodom Sihanouk, because French officials considered him more manipulable than the heir apparent. (Sihanouk was then a shy youth, well-disposed toward his role as figurehead monarch, and totally inexperienced in governing. His formidable international reputation lay far in the future.)
In March 1945, the Japanese swept aside the Vichy French administration in Cambodia (as elsewhere in Indochina), and they induced the young king to proclaim independence. The event offered little occasion for euphoria, however. The Japanese remained in control, and then, after the Japanese surrender, the French returned to reimpose their authority, granting the Cambodians, as consolation prizes in early 1946, the right to have a constitution and the right to form political parties.
In the late 1940s and the early 1950s, the struggle for independence in Cambodia took place on several levels. Two political parties were formed under princes of the royal house. The Liberal Party, the more conservative of the two, advocated an evolutionary approach to independence. The Democratic Party, the more radical one, favored the rapid attainment of independence and the formation of whatever political alliances might be necessary. Underground, Cambodian guerrillas took to the jungles to fight the returning French. The Khmer Issarak (see Appendix B), as these guerrillas were called, encompassed disaffected Cambodians from across the entire political spectrum. Meanwhile, the French managed to secure the return of Cambodia's two provinces lost to Thailand in 1941. In 1949, under increasing military pressure from the Viet Minh (see Appendix B) in neighboring Vietnam, the French granted Cambodia qualified self-government in certain areas and an autonomous zone in Batdambang and Siemreab.
Sihanouk continued the political struggle above ground, embarking upon a campaign for independence. Using a combination of private and public initiatives and grandiose gestures, he exacted grudging concessions from a French government increasingly hard- pressed in Indochina by its war against the Viet Minh. In November 1953, Sihanouk announced dramatically that independence had been gained, and he returned triumphantly from Paris to Phnom Penh.
Sihanouk quickly emerged as a leader of stature in his newly independent country. In an effort to gain a freer hand in the politics of his nation, a role he was not permitted to play as the ruler in a constitutional monarchy, he abdicated the throne in 1955 and formed a political movement, the People's Socialist Community (Sangkum Riastre Niyum, or Sangkum). With control of the Sangkum, Sihanouk succeeded in having himself named both chief of state and head of government. For nearly sixteen years, from 1954 to 1970, he dominated Cambodian politics and ruled at the head of a highly authoritarian and centralized government.
In the countryside, Sihanouk kept the support of the people through his charismatic personality, his highly visible personal forays among the rural peasantry, and his adherence to the traditional symbols and institutions of the Khmer monarchy, such as public audiences and participation in time-honored ceremonies. Among the politicized urban elite, Sihanouk maintained power and kept his opponents off-balance through a range of manipulative stratagems, pitting them against one another when he could and co- opting them with government positions when he could not.
In spite of Sihanouk's efforts, the situation in Cambodia began to go awry in the mid- to late 1960s. Internally, the country had been savaged by economic reverses. The budget was chronically in deficit; United States aid had been terminated; and state socialism had stifled development (see Sihanouk's Peacetime Economy 1953-70, ch. 3). Prices for Cambodia's export commodities--rice and rubber-- were declining. Numerous members of the youthful, educated elite were underemployed and dissatisfied. Among the politicized middle class, the military leadership, the intellectuals, and the students, opposition was developing to Sihanouk's authoritarianism. In the countryside, heavy taxation had ignited the shortlived Samlot Rebellion in Batdambang Province. Although suppressed ruthlessly, it refused to die out, and smoldered on in remote corners of Cambodia. Disaffected elements still were at large, and some of the country remained insecure. The radical wing of the Kampuchean (or Khmer) Communist Party, (KCP--see Appendix B), led by Saloth Sar (later to be known as Pol Pot), had gone underground and had taken up arms, unleashing its own insurgency against the Sihanouk regime. In the northeast, minority ethnic groups were alienated from the government in Phnom Penh because of its corvée labor, forced resettlement, and assimilationist policies (see Cambodia under Sihanouk, 1954-70, ch. 1).
Internationally, the picture was not much better. Sihanouk tried to maintain a nonaligned course in the country's foreign policy. During its first decade of independence, Cambodia had received aid from East and from West, and it was respected internationally. In the mid- to late 1960s, however, this neutrality was fast eroding, and Cambodia was about to be engulfed by the war in neighboring Vietnam. The country rapidly was becoming a logistical rear area and a safe haven for North Vietnamese and Viet Cong (see Appendix B) forces fighting the Saigon government. Cambodia was exposed to cross-border forays and airstrikes from South Vietnam to neutralize these enemy installations. The Cambodian port of Kampong Saom also was becoming the terminus for Chinese weapons and supplies that were then trucked, sometimes in Cambodian army vehicles, overland to North Vietnamese and Viet Cong supply depots.
Sihanouk sought to adjust to the prevailing trends in Indochina. He sought to distance Cambodia from South Vietnam and accepted accommodation with North Vietnam and with the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NFLSVN--see Appendix B), the political arm of the Viet Cong. He broke relations with Washington, looked for support to Beijing--which was then distracted by its Cultural Revolution, and then resumed ties with Washington.
Events in Cambodia were moving out of control, however. When Sihanouk went abroad for a lengthy sojourn in January 1970 to solicit Soviet and Chinese assistance in curbing the presence of North Vietnamese sanctuaries on Cambodian territory, domestic opposition to his regime became more outspoken and soon acquired a momentum of its own. The entire Cambodian National Assembly, led by a rightist cabinet under Premier Lon Nol, voted on March 22 to bar the return of Sihanouk to the country. Cambodia's first post- independence era thus ended, and the country soon was plunged into a period of war, chaos, and human suffering perhaps unparalleled in its history.
The Lon Nol government that succeeded the fall of Sihanouk quickly abolished the monarchy and proclaimed itself the Khmer Republic (see Appendix B). It initially enjoyed wide support among the urban population, but it soon proved itself unequal to the tasks of governing and defending the country and capturing the allegiance of the Cambodian masses. The new government in Phnom Penh began by fanning anti-Vietnamese sentiment among the Khmer population, as a result of which countless numbers of civilian Vietnamese migrants in Cambodia were massacred. The government then turned against the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong by calling publicly for their ouster from Cambodia and by initiating ineffectual military operations against them. Shortly thereafter, an offensive military thrust of the United States and South Vietnam into Cambodia dislodged North Vietnamese and Viet Cong units from their border sanctuaries; instead of driving them away from Cambodian territory, however, it pushed them deeper into the country, where they soon swept before them the ill-trained, ill- armed, and totally inexperienced Cambodian republican forces.
At the same time, two concurrent developments conspired to erode further the shaky position of the Khmer Republic. The first was that Sihanouk established a government-in-exile in Beijing, where he had fled following his ouster. There, he raised the standard of revolt against the republican regime in Phnom Penh, and he united in a common front with the armed Khmer communist rebels. Both sides saw the advantages to such an alliance of convenience. The Cambodian communists, dubbed the Khmer Rouge (see Appendix B) by Sihanouk, had ignited a small-scale insurgency in early 1968, but they had not been able to move beyond their redoubts in remote corners of Cambodia or to gain mass support in their first two years. Their alliance with Sihanouk, in a broad resistance front called the National United Front of Kampuchea (Front Uni National du Kampuchéa--FUNK--see Appendix B), transformed their forlorn rebellion, which was aided by Washington, into a war of national liberation against a puppet regime in Phnom Penh. At the same time, Sihanouk's name attracted to the FUNK cause Cambodians of every political persuasion, including many people without communist antecedents.
The second development, one with equally serious consequences for the Khmer Republic, was that the North Vietnamese quickly undertook the training of the Khmer Rouge guerrillas to transform them into a conventional fighting force. While this training program was underway, North Vietnamese units temporarily assumed the burden of keeping the Khmer republican forces at bay, an effort that did not tax them unduly. By 1973 the Khmer Rouge were conducting most combat operations against the Phnom Penh government by themselves.
The ill-fated Khmer Republic was unable to defend itself. By 1971 it was on the defensive, and it was losing ground steadily. Fleeing the fighting in the countryside, peasant refugees crowded into the government's shrinking strongholds around Phnom Penh and the provincial centers. Lon Nol's inept and corrupt regime went from one military defeat to another. By early 1975, the situation of the Khmer Republic was so precarious that Phnom Penh itself was invaded, and government control was limited to the provincial centers and to a patch of territory in western Cambodia around the Tonle Sap. In the following months, the Khmer Rouge steadily tightened the noose around the capital until all escape routes were cut off, and resistance collapsed. The fall of Phnom Penh in April 1975 marked the end of the Khmer Republic (see The Fall of Phnom Penh , ch. 1).
For the Cambodian people, the entry of the Khmer Rouge into the capital began the grimmest period in Cambodia's long history. The Khmer Rouge rulers of Democratic Kampuchea, as the regime that supplanted the Khmer Republic was called, envisioned a totally self-sufficient Cambodia. This self-sufficiency was to be achieved by accelerated agricultural production, which in turn would provide the wherewithal to develop the other sectors of the economy.
Self-sufficiency, however, was pursued with such single-minded ruthlessness that between 1 million and 3 million persons died because of purges, beatings, malnourishment, and overwork. To head off opposition to economic and social restructuring, the new regime hunted down and executed virtually anyone who had served the former government. The regime emptied the cities of inhabitants and forced the entire population into rudimentary, badly organized collectives in the countryside; untold numbers died, worked to death under slave labor conditions or executed for minor infractions of camp discipline. At the same time, the regime nurtured an acute paranoia that brooked no potential opposition but that prompted it to eradicate the educated middle class of Cambodia. When this eradication was accomplished, it turned on its own cadres at every echelon, torturing and executing thousands (see Revolutionary Terror , ch. 1). The regime's ruthless extermination of opponents, however, could not ensure its security; ultimately its own paranoia brought it down.
Regionally, the Khmer Rouge paranoia manifested itself in the exacerbation of tensions with Vietnam. During the war against the United States and its allies, commonalities of enemy and of ideology had enabled the Vietnamese and the Cambodians to bridge their mutual distrust. After April 1975, however, with the xenophobic Pol Pot factions of the KCP in control in Phnom Penh, the traditional Cambodian antipathy for the Vietnamese reemerged. The source of the friction was the recurrent cross-border forays by combatants from both sides into the Mekong Delta and the Parrot's Beak area. The Khmer Rouge regime viewed itself as threatened, its territory violated by Vietnam. Hanoi in turn felt compelled to deploy substantial military assets along the border, as fighting continued to erupt on both sides of the frontier. By mid-1978 Hanoi's patience was rapidly running out, as it became obliged to commit division-sized units to pacification missions along the Cambodian border.
Sometime in the fall of 1978, the leadership in Hanoi decided to mount a multi-division punitive expedition into Cambodia. To lend a veneer of political legitimacy to this military undertaking, Hanoi sponsored the establishment of an anti-Pol Pot movement called the Kampuchean (or Khmer) National United Front for National Salvation (KNUFNS--see Appendix B), made up of fugitive Cambodians who had fled the Khmer Rouge. Accompanied by token KNUFNS units, the Vietnamese launched their military campaign into Cambodia in late December 1978 (see Vietnamese Invasion of Cambodia, ch. 5). The Khmer Rouge proved surprisingly vulnerable to the onslaught, and Phnom Penh fell to Hanoi's forces in early January 1979. The Khmer Rouge, defeated militarily for the time being, but not destroyed, ignited a persistent insurgency in the remote regions of Cambodia. The country then embarked upon a decade-long period of fitful rehabilitation, made more precarious by the lack of resources, the enduring guerilla war, and the military occupation by Vietnam.
It was evident that the institutions of the new Cambodian regime, which called itself the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK--see Appendix B), were virtually identical to those of Vietnam. In the PRK, only a single, pro-Vietnamese political party was permitted. This party, the Kampuchean (or Khmer) People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP--see Appendix B), was headed by a political bureau with a secretariat and a general secretary in charge. It also had a central committee with a control commission to handle day-by-day affairs (see The Kampuchean, or Khmer, People's Revolutionary Party, ch. 4). The party was backed by a mass movement--the successor to KNUFNS, the Kampuchean (or Khmer) United Front for National Construction and Defense (KUFNCD--see Appendix B) and by a number of front organizations such as labor, women's, and youth groups. As in Vietnam, party and government were intertwined: the same individuals held concurrent leadership positions in both sectors. The Council of State was the highest government body; it reserved to itself the major decision-making authority. A Council of Ministers exercised cabinet functions and was responsible to a National Assembly elected from KPRP members. The National Assembly heard reports from ministers and from the rest of national leadership, but appeared to exercise little legislative authority (see Government Structure , ch. 4).
Cambodian rehabilitation and development were hampered by the civil war that plagued the country after the ouster of the Khmer Rouge. When the Vietnamese drove Pol Pot from power in their December 1978 invasion, they failed to administer the coup de grace to their adversaries, who regrouped their forces and initiated a guerrilla war against Hanoi's occupation forces. Despite their odious reputation and their abominable human rights record, the Khmer Rouge were able to attract guerrilla recruits to their ranks. The Khmer Rouge applied the same coercive measures in the remote areas of Cambodia under their control as those they had used when they ruled all of Cambodia, and they cast themselves as the sole nationalistic force opposing the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. In terms of the number of combatants they could muster, the Khmer Rouge, throughout the decade-long civil war, continued to be the largest single guerrilla force in the field.
For many Cambodians, however, the option of joining either the Khmer Rouge or the Vietnamese-installed regime was a Hobson's choice. Consequently, soon after Hanoi's invasion, two additional insurgent movements arose among the Khmer refugees who had fled both Hanoi's and Pol Pot's forces. One of these movements coalesced around the elderly nationalistic figure of Son Sann, a cabinet minister under Sihanouk. Son Sann's movement took the name Khmer People's National Liberation Front (KPNLF--see Appendix B), and its armed wing was called the Khmer People's National Liberation Armed Forces (KPNLAF--see Appendix B). In the meantime, a third insurgent force rallied under Sihanouk and his son Prince Norodom Ranariddh. Sihanouk's political movement was called for the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful, and Cooperative Cambodia (Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Indépendent, Neutre, Pacifique, et Coopératif--FUNCINPEC--see Appendix B), and his armed wing, the Sihanouk National Army (Armée Nationale Sihanoukiste-- ANS--see Appendix B).
The three insurgent forces maintained their own separate structures; they initiated their own guerrilla campaigns against the PRK regime in Phnom Penh and its Vietnamese mentors. After several years of sustained pressure from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to form a unified front against the Vietnamese occupiers, the Khmer insurgent movements came together in an uneasy union, the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK--see Appendix B), in mid-1982. Sihanouk was chosen president of the CGDK; during the succeeding years, he launched an unending series of attempts to bring reconciliation to his divided country and to achieve some power-sharing arrangement agreeable to all four warring Khmer factions. Although the methods for achieving peace in Cambodia remained in dispute, there was agreement that the Vietnamese occupation forces must depart and that the Khmer Rouge must never again reimpose its brutal rule over Cambodia.
Cambodia's civil war had an international dimension as well. Arrayed on one side were the PRK, its Vietnamese allies who did much of the fighting, and, by proxy, the Soviet Union. Arrayed on the other side were the CGDK, its ASEAN supporters, and China. Vietnam was involved because it had placed the PRK in power and because it feared being caught between a hostile China and a pro- Chinese Khmer Rouge regime. The Soviet Union was involved because of its treaty relationship with Hanoi and because it provided much of the military hardware used by the PRK and by the Vietnamese. ASEAN was involved because it feared a heavily armed, expansionist Vietnamese state, which might not stop at conquest of the Indochinese Peninsula. China was involved and became the chief supporter of the Khmer Rouge faction in the CGDK because it saw the PRK and Vietnam as two more links in the chain of Soviet client states being forged around it.
As the 1980s closed, there were hopeful signs that the situation in Cambodia might not be as intractable as it had seemed in previous years. For example, the international environment had changed considerably. Soviet withdrawals from Afghanistan and Mongolia, as well as the renewed dialogue between Moscow and Beijing, culminating in a Sino-Soviet summit in May 1989, allowed to some extent Beijing's fears of encirclement by client states of Moscow. China itself stepped back from its support of the Khmer Rouge regime of Democratic Kampuchea s the sole legitimate government of Cambodia, and seemingly accepted the Vietnamese- installed Phnom Penh regime as a partner in any postwar government. The United States continued to oppose the return of the Khmer Rouge to a position of dominance in a future government, but appeared to acquiesce in a power-sharing arrangement between the Phnom Penh regime and the non-communist resistance. Vietnam stepped up the pace of its troop withdrawal from Cambodia, ending its decade of occupation in September 1989--a year ahead of time.
Among the four competing Khmer factions who remained at an impasse over power--sharing in a post-occupation Cambodia, informal meetings in Jakarta in February and May 1989 produced a useful dialogue, but little agreement on matters of substance. The PRK, in an effort to attract the support of Prince Sihanouk and the non- communist resistance and to isolate the Khmer Rouge, amended the Constitution and changed the name of the country, the flag, and the national anthem in April 1989. The amended Constitution, however, upheld the dominant position of the incumbent Kampuchean, or Khmer, People's Revolutionary Party, and made no provision for the establishment of a multi-party system in the newly named State of Cambodia. As a result of these cosmetic gestures, plus a series of meetings between Prince Sihanouk and Prime Minister Hun Sen, as well as conciliatory utterances by Khmer Rouge leaders, the differences among all sides seem to have narrowed, and the hopes for a successful resolution of the Cambodian situation seemed to have progressed sufficiently for the French government to convene the Paris International Conference on Cambodia from July 30 to August 30, 1989.
The optimism on the eve of the conference--attended by nineteen countries including the United States, as well as the UN Secretary General and the four rival Cambodian factions, proved to be ill- founded. The forum expired amid the intransigence of the Khmer factions on five basic issues: verification of the Vietnamese troop withdrawal; establishment of provisions for a ceasefire in the fighting; determination of the status of Vietnamese residents in Cambodia; official characterization of the Khmer Rouge period as a genocide; and the establishment of a power-sharing arrangement among the four factions. The latter issue proved to be the major stumbling block. The non-communist resistance headed by Prince Sihanouk lobbied for the inclusion of the Khmer Rouge on the grounds that they already exercised a decisive presence in Cambodian affairs and that their exclusion from a future government would lead inevitably to a civil war between them and the coalition that opposed them. The Phnom Penh regime countered that to include the Khmer Rouge in a postwar government would lead to a repetition of the cruelty and repression they wrought during the Democratic Kampuchea period. Thus, the impasse continued, and the failure of the Paris conference brought negotiations to an end for the time being. The State of Cambodia, in a preliminary fashion, however, cast about for a renewal of the dialogue by reconvening informal talks in Jakarta.
In the meantime, pessimistic forecasts of a civil war in Cambodia following the Paris conference, the Vietnamese troop withdrawal, and the end of the dry season, seemed to be borne out. On the western frontier with Thailand, Khmer resistance forces took to the field with renewed aggressiveness, capturing in succession a number of border towns. The single-minded purposefulness of the Khmer Rouge in the rebel offensive came as no surprise. What astonished foreign observers, however, was the unexpected combativeness of the Khmer People's National Liberation Armed Forces, which in previous years had been reduced to ineffectuality by the bickering of its leaders. As this book goes to press, the Thai-Cambodian border remains in turmoil, with the Phnom Penh regime in a defensive posture--increasingly hard-pressed to contain rebel actions and confronting increased speculation from foreign observers as to whether it can hold its own or indeed survive without outside help.
December 28, 1989
Russell R. Ross
Andrea Matles Savada
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Chapter 1. Historical Setting
THE KHMER PEOPLE were among the first in Southeast Asia to adopt religious ideas and political institutions from India and to establish centralized kingdoms encompassing large territories. The earliest known kingdom in the area, Funan, flourished from around the first to the sixth century A.D. It was succeeded by Chenla, which controlled large areas of modern Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand (known as Siam until 1939). The golden age of Khmer civilization, however, was the period from the ninth to the thirteenth century, when the kingdom of Kambuja, which gave Kampuchea, or Cambodia, its name, ruled large territories from its capital in the region of Angkor in western Cambodia.
Under Jayavarman VII (1181-ca. 1218), Kambuja reached its zenith of political power and cultural creativity. Following Jayavarman VII's death, Kambuja experienced gradual decline. Important factors were the aggressiveness of neighboring peoples (especially the Thai, or Siamese), chronic interdynastic strife, and the gradual deterioration of the complex irrigation system that had ensured rice surpluses. The Angkorian monarchy survived until 1431, when the Thai captured Angkor Thom and the Cambodian king fled to the southern part of his country.
The fifteenth to the nineteenth century was a period of continued decline and territorial loss. Cambodia enjoyed a brief period of prosperity during the sixteenth century because its kings, who built their capitals in the region southeast of the Tonle Sap (Great Lake) along the Mekong River, promoted trade with other parts of Asia. This was the period when Spanish and Portuguese adventurers and missionaries first visited the country. But the Thai conquest of the new capital at Lovek in 1594 marked a downturn in the country's fortunes and Cambodia became a pawn in power struggles between its two increasingly powerful neighbors, Siam and Vietnam. Vietnam's settlement of the Mekong Delta led to its annexation of that area at the end of the seventeenth century. Cambodia thereby lost some of its richest territory and was cut off from the sea. Such foreign encroachments continued through the first half of the nineteenth century because Vietnam was determined to absorb Khmer land and to force the inhabitants to accept Vietnamese culture. Such imperialistic policies created in the Khmer an abiding suspicion of their eastern neighbors that flared into violent confrontation after the Khmer Rouge (see Appendix B) established its regime in 1975.
In 1863 King Norodom signed an agreement with the French to establish a protectorate over his kingdom. The country gradually came under French colonial domination. During World War II, the Japanese allowed the French government (based at Vichy) that collaborated with the Nazis the Vichy French to continue administering Cambodia and the other Indochinese territories, but they also fostered Khmer nationalism. Cambodia enjoyed a brief period of independence in 1945 before Allied troops restored French control. King Norodom Sihanouk, who had been chosen by France to succeed King Monivong in 1941, rapidly assumed a central political role as he sought to neutralize leftist and republican opponents and attempted to negotiate acceptable terms for independence from the French. Sihanouk's "royal crusade for independence" resulted in grudging French acquiescence to his demands for a transfer of sovereignty. A partial agreement was struck in October 1953. Sihanouk then declared that independence had been achieved and returned in triumph to Phnom Penh. The following year, as a result of the Geneva Conference on Indochina, Cambodia was able to bring about the withdrawal of the Viet Minh (see Appendix B) troops from its territory and to withstand any residual impingement upon its sovereignty by external powers.
In order to play a more active role in national politics, Sihanouk abdicated in 1955 and placed his father, Norodom Suramarit, on the throne. Now only a prince, Sihanouk organized his own political movement, the Popular Socialist Community, (Sangkum Reastr Niyum, or Sangkum), which won all the seats in the National Assembly in the 1955 election. The Sangkum dominated the political scene until the late 1960s. Sihanouk's highly personal ruling style made him immensely popular with the people, especially in rural villages. Although the Sangkum was backed by conservative interests, Sihanouk included leftists in his government, three of whom--Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon, and Hu Nim--later became leaders of the Khmer Rouge. In 1963 he announced the nationalization of banking, foreign trade, and insurance in a socialist experiment that dried up foreign investment and alienated the right wing. In foreign relations, Sihanouk pursued a policy of neutrality and nonalignment. He accepted United States economic and military aid, but he also promoted close relations with China and attempted to keep on good terms with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). The principal objectives of his foreign policy were to preserve Cambodia's independence and to keep the country out of the widening conflict in neighboring Vietnam. Relations with Washington grew stormy in the early 1960s. In 1963 the prince rejected further United States aid, and, two years later, he severed diplomatic relations.
Both the domestic and the international situations had deteriorated by the late 1960s. The increasingly powerful right wing challenged Sihanouk's control of the political system. Peasant resentment over harsh tax collection measures and the expropriation of land to build a sugar refinery led to a violent revolt in 1967 in the northwestern province of Batdambang (Battambang). The armed forces, commanded by General Lon Nol (who was also prime minister), quelled the revolt, but a communist-led insurgency spread throughout the country. The spillover of the Second Indochina War (or Vietnam War) into the Cambodian border areas also was becoming a serious problem. Apparently one factor in Sihanouk's decision to reestablish relations with Washington in 1969 was his fear of further incursions by the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong (see Appendix B). In March 1970, however, he was overthrown by General Lon Nol and other right-wing leaders, who seven months later abolished the monarchy and established the Khmer Republic (see Appendix B).
The Khmer Republic faced not only North Vietnamese and Viet Cong combat units but also an effective, homegrown communist movement that grew more lethal as time went on. The Cambodian communists, whom Sihanouk had labeled Khmer Rouge, traced their movement back to the struggle for independence and the creation in 1951, under Vietnamese auspices, of the Kampuchean (or Khmer) People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP--see Appendix B). During the early 1960s, however, a group of Paris-trained communist intellectuals, of whom the most important were Saloth Sar (known as Pol Pot after 1976), Khieu Samphan, and Ieng Sary, seized control of the party. They gradually purged or neutralized rivals whom they considered too subservient to Vietnam. After the March 1970 coup d'état that toppled Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge formed a united front with the ousted leader, a move that won them the goodwill of peasants who were still loyal to the prince.
Despite massive United States aid to the newly proclaimed Khmer Republic and the bombing of North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge installations and troop concentrations in the countryside, the Phnom Penh regime rapidly lost most of the country's territory to the communists. In January 1975 communist forces laid siege to Phnom Penh, and in succeeding months they tightened the noose around the capital. On April 1, 1975, President Lon Nol left the country. Sixteen days later Khmer Rouge troops entered the city.
The forty-four months the Khmer Rouge were in power was a period of unmitigated suffering for the Khmer people. Although the severity of revolutionary policies varied from region to region because of ideological differences and the personal inclinations of local leaders, hundreds of thousands of people starved, died from disease, or were executed. "New people" (the intelligentsia and those from the cities--those new to the rural areas), being considered politically unreliable, were special targets of terror and of a harsh, unremitting regime of forced labor. In 1977 Pol Pot launched a bloody purge within the communist ranks that accounted for many deaths. The slaughter of the Vietnamese minority living in Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge's aggressive incursions into Vietnam led to fighting with Vietnam in 1977 and 1978. In December 1978, Vietnamese forces invaded the country. On January 7, 1979, they captured Phnom Penh and began to establish the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK--see Appendix B; fig. 1). The Khmer Rouge fled to isolated corners of the country and resumed their guerrilla struggle, which continued in the late 1980s.
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PREHISTORY AND EARLY KINGDOMS
Archaeological evidence indicates that parts of the region now called Cambodia were inhabited during the first and second millennia B.C. by peoples having a Neolithic culture. By the first century A.D., the inhabitants had developed relatively stable, organized societies, which had far surpassed the primitive stage in culture and technical skills. The most advanced groups lived along the coast and in the lower Mekong River valley and delta regions, where they cultivated irrigated rice and kept domesticated animals.
Scholars believe that these people may have been Austroasiatic in origin and related to the ancestors of the groups who now inhabit insular Southeast Asia and many of the islands of the Pacific Ocean. They worked metals, including both iron and bronze, and possessed navigational skills. Mon-Khmer people, who arrived at a later date, probably intermarried with them. The Khmer who now populate Cambodia may have migrated from southeastern China to the Indochinese Peninsula before the first century A.D. They are believed to have arrived before their present Vietnamese, Thai, and Lao neighbors (see fig. 2).
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Early Indianized Kingdom of Funan
At about the time that the ancient peoples of Western Europe were absorbing the classical culture and institutions of the Mediterranean, the peoples of mainland and insular Southeast Asia were responding to the stimulus of a civilization that had arisen in northern India during the previous millennium. The Britons, Gauls, and Iberians experienced Mediterranean influences directly, through conquest by and incorporation into the Roman Empire. In contrast, the Indianization of Southeast Asia was a slower process than the Romanization of Europe because there was no period of direct Indian rule and because land and sea barriers that separated the region from the Indian subcontinent are considerable. Nevertheless, Indian religion, political thought, literature, mythology, and artistic motifs gradually became integral elements in local Southeast Asian cultures. The caste system never was adopted, but Indianization stimulated the rise of highly-organized, centralized states.
Funan, the earliest of the Indianized states, generally is considered by Cambodians to have been the first Khmer kingdom in the area. Founded in the first century A.D., Funan was located on the lower reaches of the Mekong River in the delta area. Its capital, Vyadhapura, probably was located near the present-day town of Phumi Banam in Prey Veng Province. The earliest historical reference to Funan is a Chinese description of a mission that visited the country in the third century A.D. The name Funan derives from the Chinese rendition of the old Khmer word bnam (meaning mountain). What the Funanese called themselves, however, is not known.
During this early period in Funan's history, the population was probably concentrated in villages along the Mekong River and along the Tonle Sab River below the Tonle Sap. Traffic and communications were mostly waterborne on the rivers and their delta tributaries. The area was a natural region for the development of an economy based on fishing and rice cultivation. There is considerable evidence that the Funanese economy depended on rice surpluses produced by an extensive inland irrigation system. Maritime trade also played an extremely important role in the development of Funan. The remains of what is believed to have been the kingdom's main port, Oc Eo (now part of Vietnam), contain Roman as well as Persian, Indian, and Greek artifacts.
By the fifth century A.D., the state exercised control over the lower Mekong River area and the lands around the Tonle Sap. It also commanded tribute from smaller states in the area now comprising northern Cambodia, southern Laos, southern Thailand, and the northern portion of the Malay Peninsula.
Indianization was fostered by increasing contact with the subcontinent through the travels of merchants, diplomats, and learned Brahmans (Hindus of the highest caste traditionally assigned to the priesthood). Indian immigrants, believed to have arrived in the fourth and the fifth centuries, accelerated the process. By the fifth century, the elite culture was thoroughly Indianized. Court ceremony and the structure of political institutions were based on Indian models. The Sanskrit language was widely used; the laws of Manu, the Indian legal code, were adopted; and an alphabet based on Indian writing systems was introduced.
Funan reached its zenith in the fifth century A.D.. Beginning in the early sixth century, civil wars and dynastic strife undermined Funan's stability, making it relatively easy prey to incursions by hostile neighbors. By the end of the seventh century, a northern neighbor, the kingdom of Chenla, had reduced Funan to a vassal state.
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The Successor State of Chenla
The people of Chenla also were Khmer. Once they established control over Funan, they embarked on a course of conquest that continued for three centuries. They subjugated central and upper Laos, annexed portions of the Mekong Delta, and brought what are now western Cambodia and southern Thailand under their direct control.
The royal families of Chenla intermarried with their Funanese counterparts and generally preserved the earlier political, social, and religious institutions of Funan. In the eighth century A.D., however, factional disputes at the Chenla court resulted in the splitting of the kingdom into rival northern and southern halves. According to Chinese chronicles, the two parts were known as Land (or Upper) Chenla and Water (or Lower) Chenla. Land Chenla maintained a relatively stable existence, but Water Chenla underwent a period of constant turbulence.
Late in the eighth century A.D., Water Chenla was subjected to attacks by pirates from Java, Sumatra, and the Malay Peninsula. By the beginning of the ninth century, it had apparently become a vassal of the Sailendra dynasty of Java. The last of the Water Chenla kings allegedly was killed around A.D. 790 by a Javanese monarch whom he had offended. The ultimate victor in the strife that followed was the ruler of a small Khmer state located north of the Mekong Delta. His assumption of the throne as Jayavarman II (ca. A.D. 802-50) marked the liberation of the Khmer people from Javanese suzerainty and the beginning of a unified Khmer nation.
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THE ANGKORIAN PERIOD
The Angkorian period lasted from the early ninth century to the early fifteenth century A.D. In terms of cultural accomplishments and political power, this was the golden age of Khmer civilization. The great temple cities of the Angkorian region, located near the modern town of Siemreab, are a lasting monument to the greatness of Jayavarman II's successors. (Even the Khmer Rouge, who looked on most of their country's past history and traditions with hostility, adopted a stylized Angkorian temple for the flag of Democratic Kampuchea. A similar motif is found in the flag of the PRK). The kingdom founded by Jayavarman II also gave modern-day Cambodia, or Kampuchea, its name. During the early ninth to the mid-fifteenth centuries, it was known as Kambuja, originally the name of an early north Indian state, from which the current forms of the name have been derived.
Possibly to put distance between himself and the seaborne Javanese, Jayavarman II settled north of the Tonle Sap. He built several capitals before establishing one, Hariharalaya, near the site where the Angkorian complexes were built. Indravarman I (A.D. 877-89) extended Khmer control as far west as the Korat Plateau in Thailand, and he ordered the construction of a huge reservoir north of the capital to provide irrigation for wet rice cultivation. His son, Yasovarman I (A.D. 889-900), built the Eastern Baray (reservoir or tank), evidence of which remains to the present time. Its dikes, which may be seen today, are more than 6 kilometers long and 1.6 kilometers wide. The elaborate system of canals and reservoirs built under Indravarman I and his successors were the key to Kambuja's prosperity for half a millennium. By freeing cultivators from dependence on unreliable seasonal monsoons, they made possible an early "green revolution" that provided the country with large surpluses of rice. Kambuja's decline during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries probably was hastened by the deterioration of the irrigation system. Attacks by Thai and other foreign peoples and the internal discord caused by dynastic rivalries diverted human resources from the system's upkeep, and it gradually fell into disrepair.
Suryavarman II (1113-50), one of the greatest Angkorian monarchs, expanded his kingdom's territory in a series of successful wars against the kingdom of Champa in central Vietnam, the kingdom of Nam Viet in northern Vietnam, and the small Mon polities as far west as the Irrawaddy River of Burma. He reduced to vassalage the Thai peoples who had migrated into Southeast Asia from the Yunnan region of southern China and established his suzerainty over the northern part of the Malay Peninsula. His greatest achievement was the construction of the temple city complex of Angkor Wat. The largest religious edifice in the world, Angkor Wat is considered the greatest single architectural work in Southeast Asia. Suryavarman II's reign was followed, however, by thirty years of dynastic upheaval and an invasion by the neighboring Cham (see Glossary), who destroyed the city of Angkor in 1177.
The Cham ultimately were driven out and conquered by Jayavarman VII, whose reign (1181-ca. 1218) marked the apogee of Kambuja's power. Unlike his predecessors, who had adopted the cult of the Hindu god-king, Jayavarman VII was a fervent patron of Mahayana Buddhism. Casting himself as a bodhisattva (see Glossary), he embarked on a frenzy of building activity that included the Angkor Thom complex and the Bayon, a remarkable temple whose stone towers depict 216 faces of buddhas, gods, and kings. He also built over 200 rest houses and hospitals throughout his kingdom. Like the Roman emperors, he maintained a system of roads between his capital and provincial towns. According to historian George Coedès, "No other Cambodian king can claim to have moved so much stone." Often, quality suffered for the sake of size and rapid construction, as is revealed in the intriguing but poorly constructed Bayon.
Carvings show that everyday Angkorian buildings were wooden structures not much different from those found in Cambodia today. The impressive stone buildings were not used as residences by members of the royal family. Rather, they were the focus of Hindu or Buddhist cults that celebrated the divinity, or buddhahood, of the monarch and his family. Coedès suggests that they had the dual function of both temple and tomb. Typically, their dimensions reflected the structure of the Hindu mythological universe. For example, five towers at the center of the Angkor Wat complex represent the peaks of Mount Meru, the center of the universe; an outer wall represents the mountains that ring the world's edge; and a moat depicts the cosmic ocean. Like many other ancient edifices, the monuments of the Angkorian region absorbed vast reserves of resources and human labor and their purpose remains shrouded in mystery.
Angkorian society was strictly hierarchical. The king, regarded as divine, owned both the land and his subjects. Immediately below the monarch and the royal family were the Brahman priesthood and a small class of officials, who numbered about 4,000 in the tenth century. Next were the commoners, who were burdened with heavy corvée (forced labor) duties. There was also a large slave class that, like the nameless multitudes of ancient Egypt, built the enduring monuments.
After Jayavarman VII's death, Kambuja entered a long period of decline that led to its eventual disintegration. The Thai were a growing menace on the empire's western borders. The spread of Theravada Buddhism, which came to Kambuja from Sri Lanka by way of the Mon kingdoms, challenged the royal Hindu and Mahayana Buddhist cults. Preaching austerity and the salvation of the individual through his or own her efforts, Theravada Buddhism did not lend doctrinal support to a society ruled by an opulent royal establishment maintained through the virtual slavery of the masses.
In 1353 a Thai army captured Angkor. It was recaptured by the Khmer, but wars continued and the capital was looted several times. During the same period, Khmer territory north of the present Laotian border was lost to the Lao kingdom of Lan Xang. In 1431 the Thai captured Angkor Thom. Thereafter, the Angkorian region did not again encompass a royal capital, except for a brief period in the third quarter of the sixteenth century.
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CAMBODIA'S STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL, 1432-1887
The more than four centuries that passed from the abandonment of Angkor around the mid-fifteenth century to the establishment of a protectorate under the French in 1863 are considered by historians to be Cambodia's "dark ages," a period of economic, social, and cultural stagnation when the kingdom's internal affairs came increasingly under the control of its aggressive neighbors, the Thai and the Vietnamese. By the mid-nineteenth century, Cambodia had become an almost helpless pawn in the power struggles between Thailand and Vietnam and probably would have been completely absorbed by one or the other if France had not intervened, giving Cambodia a colonially dominated "lease on life." Fear of racial and cultural extinction has persisted as a major theme in modern Cambodian thought and helps to explain the intense nationalism and xenophobia of the Khmer Rouge during the 1970s. Establishment in 1979 of the People's Republic of Kampuchea, a Vietnamese-dominated satellite state, can be seen as the culmination of a process of Vietnamese encroachment that was already well under way by the seventeenth century.
The process of internal decay and foreign encroachment was gradual rather than precipitous and was hardly evident in the fifteenth century when the Khmer were still powerful. Following the fall of Angkor Thom, the Cambodian court abandoned the region north of the Tonle Sap, never to return except for a brief interlude in the late sixteenth century. By this time however, the Khmer penchant for monument building had ceased. Older faiths such as Mahayana Buddhism and the Hindu cult of the god-king had been supplanted by Theravada Buddhism, and the Cambodians had become part of the same religious and cultural cosmos as the Thai. This similarity did not prevent intermittent warfare between the two kingdoms, however. During the sixteenth century Cambodian armies, taking advantage of Thai troubles with the Burmese, invaded the Thai kingdom several times.
In the meantime, following the abandonment of the Angkorian sites, the Khmer established a new capital several hundred kilometers to the southeast on the site of what is now Phnom Penh. This new center of power was located at the confluence of the Mekong and the Tonle Sab rivers. Thus, it controlled the river commerce of the Khmer heartland and the Laotian kingdoms and had access, by way of the Mekong Delta, to the international trade routes that linked the China coast, the South China Sea, and the Indian Ocean. A new kind of state and society emerged, more open to the outside world and more dependent on commerce as a source of wealth than its inland predecessor. The growth of maritime trade with China during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) provided lucrative opportunities for members of the Cambodian elite who controlled royal trading monopolies. The appearance of Europeans in the region in the sixteenth century also stimulated commerce.
King Ang Chan (1516-66), one of the few great Khmer monarchs of the post-Angkorian period, moved the capital from Phnom Penh to Lovek. Portuguese and Spanish travelers who visited the city, located on the banks of the Tonle Sab, a river north of Phnom Penh, described it as a place of fabulous wealth. The products traded there included precious stones, metals, silk and cotton, incense, ivory, lacquer, livestock (including elephants), and rhinoceros horn (prized by the Chinese as a rare and potent medicine). By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Lovek contained flourishing foreign trading communities of Chinese, Indonesians, Malays, Japanese, Arabs, Spanish, and Portuguese. They were joined later in the century by the English and the Dutch.
Because the representatives of practically all these nationalities were pirates, adventurers, or traders, this was an era of stormy cosmopolitanism. Hard-pressed by the Thai, King Sattha (1576-94) surrounded himself with a personal guard of Spanish and Portuguese mercenaries, and in 1593 asked the Spanish governor of the Philippines for aid. Attracted by the prospects of establishing a Spanish protectorate in Cambodia and of converting the monarch to Christianity, the governor sent a force of 120 men, but Lovek had already fallen to the Thai when they arrived the following year. The Spanish took advantage of the extremely confused situation to place one of Sattha's sons on the throne in 1597. Hopes of making the country a Spanish dependency were dashed, however, when the Spaniards were massacred two years later by an equally belligerent contingent of Malay mercenaries.
The Thai, however, had dealt a fatal blow to Cambodian independence by capturing Lovek in 1594. With the posting of a Thai military governor in the city, a degree of foreign political control was established over the kingdom for the first time. Cambodian chronicles describe the fall of Lovek as a catastrophe from which the nation never fully recovered.
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Domination by Thailand and by Vietnam
More than their conquest of Angkor a century and a half earlier, the Thai capture of Lovek marked the beginning of a decline in Cambodia's fortunes. One possible reason for the decline was the labor drain imposed by the Thai conquerors as they marched thousands of Khmer peasants, skilled artisans, scholars, and members of the Buddhist clergy back to their capital of Ayutthaya. This practice, common in the history of Southeast Asia, crippled Cambodia's ability to recover a semblance of its former greatness. A new Khmer capital was established at Odongk (Udong), south of Lovek, but its monarchs could survive only by entering into what amounted to vassal relationships with the Thai and with the Vietnamese. In common parlance, Thailand became Cambodia's "father" and Vietnam its "mother."
By the late fifteenth century, the Vietnamese--who, unlike other Southeast Asian peoples, had patterned their culture and their civilization on those of China--had defeated the oncepowerful kingdom of Champa in central Vietnam. Thousands of Chams fled into Khmer territory. By the early seventeenth century, the Vietnamese had reached the Mekong Delta, which was inhabited by Khmer people. In 1620 the Khmer king Chey Chettha II (1618-28) married a daughter of Sai Vuong, one of the Nguyen lords (1558- 1778), who ruled southern Vietnam for most of the period of the restored Le dynasty (1428-1788). Three years later, Chey Chettha allowed the Vietnamese to establish a custom-house at Prey Nokor, near what is now Ho Chi Minh City (until 1975, Saigon). By the end of the seventeenth century, the region was under Vietnamese administrative control, and Cambodia was cut off from access to the sea. Trade with the outside world was possible only with Vietnamese permission.
There were periods in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, when Cambodia's neighbors were preoccupied with internal or external strife, that afforded the beleaguered country a breathing spell. The Vietnamese were involved in a lengthy civil war until 1674, but upon its conclusion they promptly annexed sizable areas of contiguous Cambodian territory in the region of the Mekong Delta. For the next one hundred years they used the alleged mistreatment of Vietnamese colonists in the delta as a pretext for their continued expansion. By the end of the eighteenth century, they had extended their control to include the area encompassed in the late 1980s by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (Vietnam).
Thailand, which might otherwise have been courted as an ally against Vietnamese incursions in the eighteenth century, was itself involved in a new conflict with Burma. In 1767 the Thai capital of Ayutthaya was besieged and destroyed. The Thai quickly recovered, however, and soon reasserted their dominion over Cambodia. The youthful Khmer king, Ang Eng (1779-96), a refugee at the Thai court, was installed as monarch at Odongk by Thai troops. At the same time, Thailand quietly annexed Cambodia's three northernmost provinces. In addition, the local rulers of the northwestern provinces of Batdambang and Siemreab (Siemreap) became vassals of the Thai king, and these areas came under the Thai sphere of influence.
A renewed struggle between Thailand and Vietnam for control of Cambodia in the nineteenth century resulted in a period when Vietnamese officials, working through a puppet Cambodian king, ruled the central part of the country and attempted to force Cambodians to adopt Vietnamese customs. Several rebellions against Vietnamese rule ensued. The most important of these occurred in 1840 to 1841 and spread through much of the country. After two years of fighting, Cambodia and its two neighbors reached an accord that placed the country under the joint suzerainty of Thailand and Vietnam. At the behest of both countries, a new monarch, Ang Duong (1848-59), ascended the throne and brought a decade of peace and relative independence to Cambodia.
In their arbitrary treatment of the Khmer population, the Thai and the Vietnamese were virtually indistinguishable. The suffering and the dislocation caused by war were comparable in many ways to similar Cambodian experiences in the 1970s. But the Thai and the Vietnamese had fundamentally different attitudes concerning their relationships with Cambodia. The Thai shared with the Khmer a common religion, mythology, literature, and culture. The Chakri kings at Bangkok wanted Cambodia's loyalty and tribute, but they had no intention of challenging or changing its people's values or way of life. The Vietnamese viewed the Khmer people as barbarians to be civilized through exposure to Vietnamese culture, and they regarded the fertile Khmer lands as legitimate sites for colonization by settlers from Vietnam.
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The French Protectorate
France's interest in Indochina in the nineteenth century grew out of its rivalry with Britain, which had excluded it from India and had effectively shut it out of other parts of mainland Southeast Asia. The French also desired to establish commerce in a region that promised so much untapped wealth and to redress the Vietnamese state's persecution of Catholic converts, whose welfare was a stated aim of French overseas policy. The Nguyen dynasty's repeated refusal to establish diplomatic relations and the violently anti-Christian policies of the emperors Minh Mang (1820- 41), Thieu Tri (1841-47), and Tu Duc (1848-83) impelled the French to engage in gunboat diplomacy that resulted, in 1862, in the establishment of French dominion over Saigon and over the three eastern provinces of the Cochinchina (Mekong Delta) region.
In the view of the government in Paris, Cambodia was a promising backwater. Persuaded by a missionary envoy to seek French protection against both the Thai and the Vietnamese, King Ang Duong invited a French diplomatic mission to visit his court. The Thai, however, pressured him to refuse to meet with the French when they finally arrived at Odongk in 1856. The much-publicized travels of the naturalist Henri Mouhot, who visited the Cambodian court, rediscovered the ruins at Angkor, and journeyed up the Mekong River to the Laotian kingdom of Luang Prabang from 1859 to 1861, piqued French interest in the kingdom's alleged vast riches and in the value of the Mekong as a gateway to China's southwestern provinces. In August 1863, the French concluded a treaty with Ang Duong's successor, Norodom (1859-1904). This agreement afforded the Cambodian monarch French protection (in the form of a French official called a résident--in French resident) in exchange for giving the French rights to explore and to exploit the kingdom's mineral and forest resources. Norodom's coronation, in 1864, was an awkward affair at which both French and Thai representatives officiated. Although the Thai attempted to thwart the expansion of French influence, their own influence over the monarch steadily dwindled. In 1867 the French concluded a treaty with the Thai that gave the latter control of Batdambang Province and of Siemreab Province in exchange for their renunciation of all claims of suzerainty over other parts of Cambodia. Loss of the northwestern provinces deeply upset Norodom, but he was beholden to the French for sending military aid to suppress a rebellion by a royal pretender.
In June 1884, the French governor of Cochinchina went to Phnom Penh, Norodom's capital, and demanded approval of a treaty with Paris that promised far-reaching changes such as the abolition of slavery, the institution of private land ownership, and the establishment of French résidents in provincial cities. Mindful of a French gunboat anchored in the river, the king reluctantly signed the agreement. Local elites opposed its provisions, however, especially the one dealing with slavery, and they fomented rebellions throughout the country during the following year. Though the rebellions were suppressed, and the treaty was ratified, passive resistance on the part of the Cambodians postponed implementation of the reforms it embodied until after Norodom's death.
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THE FRENCH COLONIAL PERIOD, 1887-1953
In October 1887, the French proclaimed the Union Indochinoise, or Indochina Union, comprising Cambodia and the three constituent regions of Vietnam: Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina. (Laos was added to the Indochina Union after being separated from Thai suzerainty in 1893.) Cambodia's chief colonial official, responsible to the Union's governor general and appointed by the Ministry of Marine and Colonies in Paris, was a resident general (résident supérieur). Residents, or local governors, were posted in all the principal provincial centers. In 1897 the incumbent resident general complained to Paris that Norodom was no longer capable of ruling and received permission to assume the king's authority to issue decrees, collect taxes, and appoint royal officials. Norodom and his successors were left with hollow, figurehead roles as head of state and as patron of the Buddhist religion. The colonial bureaucracy expanded rapidly. French nationals naturally held the highest positions, but even on the lower rungs of the bureaucracy Cambodians found few opportunities because the colonial government preferred to hire Vietnamese.
When Norodom died in 1904, the French passed over his sons and set his brother Sisowath (1904-27) on the throne. Sisowath's branch of the royal family was considered more cooperative than that of Norodom because the latter was viewed as partly responsible for the revolts of the 1880s and because Norodom's favorite son, Prince Yukanthor, had stirred up publicity abroad about French colonial injustices. During their generally peaceful reigns, Sisowath and his son Monivong (1927-41) were pliant instruments of French rule. A measure of the monarchs' status was the willingness of the French to provide them annually with complimentary rations of opium. One of the few highlights of Sisowath's reign was French success in getting Thailand's King Chulalongkorn to sign a new treaty in 1907 returning the northwestern provinces of Batdambang and Siemreab to Cambodia.
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The Colonial Economy
Soon after establishing their protectorate in 1863, the French realized that Cambodia's hidden wealth was an illusion and that Phnom Penh would never become the Singapore of Indochina. Aside from collecting taxes more efficiently, the French did little to transform Cambodia's village-based economy. Cambodians paid the highest taxes per capita in Indochina, and in 1916 a nonviolent tax revolt brought tens of thousands of peasants into Phnom Penh to petition the king for a reduction. The incident shocked the French, who had lulled themselves into believing that the Cambodians were too indolent and individualistic to organize a mass protest. Taxes continued to be sorely resented by the Cambodians. In 1925 villagers killed a French resident after he threatened to arrest tax delinquents (see French Protectorate, 1863-1954, ch. 5). For poor peasants, the corvée service--a tax substitute--of as many as ninety days a year on public works projects, was an onerous duty.
According to Hou Yuon (a veteran of the communist movement who was murdered by the Khmer Rouge after they seized power in 1975), usury vied with taxes as the chief burden upon the peasantry. Hou's 1955 doctoral thesis at the University of Paris was one of the earliest and most thorough studies of conditions in the rural areas during the French colonial era. He argued that although most landholdings were small (one to five hectares), poor and middleclass peasants were victims of flagrantly usurious practices that included effective interest rates of 100 to 200 percent. Foreclosure reduced them to the status of sharecroppers or landless laborers. Although debt slavery and feudal landholding patterns had been abolished by the French, the old elites still controlled the countryside. According to Hou, "the great feudal farms, because of their precapitalist character, are disguised as small and mediumsized farms, in the form of tenancies and share-farms, and materially are indistinguishable from other small and medium-seized farms." Whether or not the countryside was as polarized in terms of class (or property) as Hou argues is open to debate, but it is clear that great tension and conflict existed despite the smiles and the easygoing manner of Khmer villagers.
To develop the economic infrastructure, the French built a limited number of roads and a railroad that extended from Phnom Penh through Batdambang to the Thai border. The cultivation of rubber and of corn were economically important, and the fertile provinces of Batdambang and Siemreab became the rice baskets of Indochina. The prosperous 1920s, when rubber, rice, and corn were in demand overseas, were years of considerable economic growth, but the world depression after 1929 caused great suffering, especially among rice cultivators whose falling incomes made them more than ever the victims of moneylenders.
Industry was rudimentary and was designed primarily to process raw materials such as rubber for local use or export. There was considerable immigration, which created a plural society similar to those of other Southeast Asian countries. As in British Burma and Malaya, foreigners dominated the developed sectors of the economy. Vietnamese came to serve as laborers on rubber plantations and as clerical workers in the government. As their numbers increased, Vietnamese immigrants also began to play important roles in the economy as fishermen and as operators of small businesses. The Chinese had been in Cambodia for several centuries before the imposition of French rule, and they had dominated precolonial commerce. This arrangement continued under the French, because the colonial government placed no restrictions on the occupations in which they could engage. Chinese merchants and bankers in Cambodia developed commercial networks that extended throughout Indochina as well as overseas to other parts of Southeast Asia and to mainland China.
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The Emergence of Nationalism
In stark contrast to neighboring Cochinchina and to the other Vietnamese-populated territories of Indochina, Cambodia was relatively quiescent politically during the first four decades of the twentieth century. The carefully maintained fiction of royal rule was probably the major factor. Khmer villagers, long inured to abuses of power, believed that as long as a monarch occupied the throne "all was right with the world." Low literacy rates, which the French were extremely reluctant to improve, also insulated the great majority of the population from the nationalist currents that were sweeping other parts of Southeast Asia.
Nevertheless, national consciousness was emerging among the handful of educated Khmer who composed the urban-based elite. Restoration of the monuments at Angkor, which the historian David P. Chandler suggests was France's most valuable legacy to the colony, awakened Cambodians' pride in their culture and in their past achievements. Many of the new elite were graduates of the Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh, where resentment of the favored treatment given Vietnamese students resulted in a petition to King Monivong during the 1930s. Significantly, the most articulate of the early nationalists, were Khmer Krom (see Appendix B)--members of the Cambodian minority who lived in Cochinchina. In 1936 Son Ngoc Thanh and another Khmer Krom named Pach Chhoeun, began publishing Nagaravatta (Angkor Wat), the first Khmerlanguage newspaper. In its editorials, Nagaravatta mildly condemned French colonial policies, the prevalence of usury in the rural areas, foreign domination of the economy, and the lack of opportunities for educated Khmer. Much of the paper's journalistic wrath was directed toward the Vietnamese for their past exploitation of Cambodia and for their contemporary monopolization of civil service and of professional positions.
The Khmer were fortunate in escaping the suffering endured by most other Southeast Asian peoples during World War II. After the establishment of the Vichy regime in France in 1940, Japanese forces moved into Vietnam and displaced French authority. In mid1941 , they entered Cambodia but allowed Vichy French colonial officials to remain at their administrative posts. The pro-Japanese regime in Thailand, headed by Prime Minister Field Marshal Luang Plaek Phibunsonggram, requested assurances from the Vicky regime that, in the event of an interruption of French sovereignty, Cambodian and Laotian territories formerly belong to Thailand would be returned to Bangkoh's authority. The request was rejected. In January 1941, a Thai force invaded Cambodia. The land fighting was indecisive, but the Vichy French defeated the Thai navy in an engagement in the Gulf of Thailand (see Japanese Occupation, 1941-45, ch. 5). At this point, Tokyo intervened and compelled the French authorities to agree to a treaty ceding the province of Batdambang and part of the province of Siemreab to Thailand in exchange for a small compensation. The Cambodians were allowed to retain Angkor. Thai aggression, however, had minimal impact on the lives of most Cambodians outside the northwestern region.
King Monivong died in April 1941. Although his son, Prince Monireth, had been considered the heir apparent, the French chose instead Norodom Sihanouk, the great grandson of King Norodom. Sihanouk was an ideal candidate from their point of view because of his youth (he was nineteen years old), his lack of experience, and his pliability.
Japanese calls of "Asia for the Asiatics" found a receptive audience among Cambodian nationalists, although Tokyo's policy in Indochina was to leave the colonial government nominally in charge. When a prominent, politically active Buddhist monk, Hem Chieu, was arrested and unceremoniously defrocked by the French authorities in July 1942, the editors of Nagaravatta led a demonstration demanding his release. They as well as other nationalists apparently overestimated the Japanese willingness to back them, for the Vichy authorities quickly arrested the demonstrators and gave Pach Chhoeun, one of the Nagaravatta editors, a life sentence (see Japanese Occupation, 1941-45, ch. 5). The other editor, Son Ngoc Thanh, escaped from Phnom Penh and turned up the following year in Tokyo.
In a desperate effort to enlist local support in the final months of the war, the Japanese dissolved the French colonial administration on March 9, 1945, and urged Cambodia to declare its independence within the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Four days later, King Sihanouk decreed an independent Kampuchea (the original Khmer pronunciation of Cambodia). Son Ngoc Thanh returned from Tokyo in May, and he was appointed foreign minister. On August 15, 1945, the day Japan surrendered, a new government was established with Son Ngoc Thanh acting as prime minister. When an Allied force occupied Phnom Penh in October, Thanh was arrested for collaboration with the Japanese and was sent into exile in France to remain under house arrest. Some of his supporters went to northwestern Cambodia, then still under Thai control, where they banded together as one faction in the Khmer Issarak (see Appendix B) movement, originally formed with Thai encouragement in the 1940s.
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The Struggle for Independence
Cambodia's situation at the end of the war was chaotic. The Free French, under General Charles de Gaulle, were determined to recover Indochina, though they offered Cambodia and the other Inchochinese protectorates a carefully circumscribed measure of self-government. Convinced that they had a "civilizing mission," they envisioned Indochina's participation in a French Union of former colonies that shared the common experience of French culture. Neither the urban professional elites nor the common people, however, were attracted by this arrangement. For Cambodians of practically all walks of life, the brief period of independence, from March to October of 1945, was an invigorating breath of fresh air. The lassitude of the Khmer was a thing of the past.
In Phnom Penh, Sihanouk, acting as head of state, was placed in the extremely delicate position of negotiating with the French for full independence while trying to neutralize party politicians and supporters of the Khmer Issarak and Viet Minh who considered him a French collaborator. During the tumultuous period between 1946 and 1953, Sihanouk displayed the remarkable aptitude for political survival that sustained him before and after his fall from power in March 1970. The Khmer Issarak was an extremely heterogeneous guerrilla movement, operating in the border areas. The group included indigenous leftists, Vietnamese leftists, antimonarchical nationalists (Khmer Serei--see Appendix B) loyal to Son Ngoc Thanh, and plain bandits taking advantage of the chaos to terrorize villagers. Though their fortunes rose and fell during the immediate postwar period (a major blow was the overthrow of a friendly leftist government in Bangkok in 1947), by 1954 the Khmer Issarak operating with the Viet Minh by some estimates controlled as much as 50 percent of Cambodia's territory.
In 1946 the French allowed the Cambodians to form political parties and to hold elections for a Consultative Assembly that would advise the monarch on drafting the country's constitution. The two major parties were both headed by royal princes. The Democratic Party, led by Prince Sisowath Yuthevong, espoused immediate independence, democratic reforms, and parliamentary government. Its supporters were teachers, civil servants, politically active members of the Buddhist priesthood, and others whose opinions had been greatly influenced by the nationalistic appeals of Nagaravatta before it was closed down by the French in 1942. Many Democrats sympathized with the violent methods of the Khmer Issarak. The Liberal Party, led by Prince Norodom Norindeth, represented the interests of the old rural elites, including large landowners. They preferred continuing some form of the colonial relationship with France, and advocated gradual democratic reform. In the Consultative Assembly election held in September 1946, the Democrats won fifty out of sixty-seven seats.
With a solid majority in the assembly, the Democrats drafted a constitution modeled on that of the French Fourth Republic. Power was concentrated in the hands of a popularly elected National Assembly. The king reluctantly proclaimed the new constitution on May 6, 1947. While it recognized him as the "spiritual head of the state," it reduced him to the status of a constitutional monarch, and it left unclear the extent to which he could play an active role in the politics of the nation. Sihanouk would turn this ambiguity to his advantage in later years, however.
In the December 1947 elections for the National Assembly, the Democrats again won a large majority. Despite this, dissension within the party was rampant. Its founder, Prince Yuthevong, had died and no clear leader had emerged to succeed him. During the period 1948 to 1949, the Democrats appeared united only in their opposition to legislation sponsored by the king or his appointees. A major issue was the king's receptivity to independence within the French Union, proposed in a draft treaty offered by the French in late 1948. Following dissolution of the National Assembly in September 1949, agreement on the pact was reached through an exchange of letters between King Sihanouk and the French government. It went into effect two months later, though National Assembly ratification of the treaty was never secured.
The treaty granted Cambodia what Sihanouk called "fifty percent independence": by it, the colonial relationship was formally ended, and the Cambodians were given control of most administrative functions. Cambodian armed forces were granted freedom of action within a self-governing autonomous zone comprising Batdambang and Siemreab provinces, which had been recovered from Thailand after World War II, but which the French, hard-pressed elsewhere, did not have the resources to control. Cambodia was still required to coordinate foreign policy matters with the High Council of the French Union, however, and France retained a significant measure of control over the judicial system, finances, and customs. Control of wartime military operations outside the autonomous zone remained in French hands. France was also permitted to maintain military bases on Cambodian territory. In 1950 Cambodia was accorded diplomatic recognition by the United States and by most noncommunist powers, but in Asia only Thailand and the Republic of Korea (South Korea) extended recognition.
The Democrats won a majority in the second National Assembly election in September 1951, and they continued their policy of opposing the king on practically all fronts. In an effort to win greater popular approval, Sihanouk asked the French to release nationalist Son Ngoc Thanh from exile and to allow him to return to his country. He made a triumphant entry into Phnom Penh on October 29, 1951. It was not long, however, before he began demanding withdrawal of French troops from Cambodia. He reiterated this demand in early 1952 in Khmer Krok (Khmer Awake!) a weekly newspaper that he had founded. The newspaper was forced to cease publication in March, and Son Ngoc Thanh fled the capital with a few armed followers to join the Khmer Issarak. Branded alternately a communist and an agent of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) by Sihanouk, he remained in exile until Lon Nol established the Khmer Republic in 1970.
In June 1952, Sihanouk announced the dismissal of his cabinet, suspended the constitution, and assumed control of the government as prime minister. Then, without clear constitutional sanction, he dissolved the National Assembly and proclaimed martial law in January 1953. Sihanouk exercised direct rule for almost three years, from June 1952 until February 1955. After dissolution of the assembly, he created an Advisory Council to supplant the legislature and appointed his father, Norodom Suramarit, as regent.
In March 1953, Sihanouk went to France. Ostensibly, he was traveling for his health; actually, he was mounting an intensive campaign to persuade the French to grant complete independence. The climate of opinion in Cambodia at the time was such that if he did not achieve full independence quickly, the people were likely to turn to Son Ngoc Thanh and the Khmer Issarak, who were fully committed to attaining that goal. At meetings with the French president and with other high officials, the French suggested that Sihanouk was unduly "alarmist" about internal political conditions. The French also made the thinly veiled threat that, if he continued to be uncooperative, they might replace him. The trip appeared to be a failure, but on his way home by way of the United States, Canada, and Japan, Sihanouk publicized Cambodia's plight in the media.
To further dramatize his "royal crusade for independence," Sihanouk, declaring that he would not return until the French gave assurances that full independence would be granted, left Phnom Penh in June to go into self-imposed exile in Thailand. Unwelcome in Bangkok, he moved to his royal villa near the ruins of Angkor in Siemreab Province. Siemreab, part of the autonomous military zone established in 1949, was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Lon Nol, formerly a right-wing politician who was becoming a prominent, and in time would be an indispensable, Sihanouk ally within the military. From his Siemreab base, the king and Lon Nol contemplated plans for resistance if the French did not meet their terms.
Sihanouk was making a high-stakes gamble, for the French could easily have replaced him with a more pliable monarch; however, the military situation was deteriorating throughout Indochina, and the French government, on July 3, 1953, declared itself ready to grant full independence to the three states of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos. Sihanouk insisted on his own terms, which included full control of national defense, the police, the courts, and financial matters. The French yielded: the police and the judiciary were transferred to Cambodian control at the end of August, and in October the country assumed full command of its military forces. King Sihanouk, now a hero in the eyes of his people, returned to Phnom Penh in triumph, and independence day was celebrated on November 9, 1953. Control of residual matters affecting sovereignty, such as financial and budgetary affairs, passed to the new Cambodian state in 1954.
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CAMBODIA UNDER SIHANOUK, 1954-70
Sihanouk continues to be one of the most controversial figures in Southeast Asia's turbulent, and often tragic, postwar history. Admirers view him as one of the country's great patriots, whose insistence on strict neutrality kept Cambodia out of the maelstrom of war and out of the revolution in neighboring Vietnam for more than fifteen years before he was betrayed by his close associate, Lon Nol. Critics attack him for his vanity, eccentricities, and intolerance of any political views different from his own. One such critic, Michael Vickery, asserts that beneath the neutralist rhetoric Sihanouk presided over a regime that was oppressively reactionary and, in some instances, as violent in its suppression of political opposition as the Khmer Rouge. According to Vickery, the royal armed forces under Lon Nol slaughtered women and children in pro-Khmer Issarak regions of Batdambang in 1954 using methods that were later to become routine under Pol Pot. Another critical observer, Milton E. Osborne, writing as an Australian expatriate in Phnom Penh during the late 1960s, describes the Sihanouk years in terms of unbridled greed and corruption, of a foreign policy inspired more by opportunism than by the desire to preserve national independence, of an economy and a political system that were rapidly coming apart, and of the prince's obsession with making outrageously mediocre films--one of which starred himself and his wife, Princess Monique.
Sihanouk was all of these things--patriot, neutralist, embodiment of the nation's destiny, eccentric, rigid defender of the status quo, and promoter of the worst sort of patron-client politics. He believed that he single-handedly had won Cambodia's independence from the French. The contributions of other nationalists, such as Son Ngoc Thanh and the Viet Minh, were conveniently forgotten. Sihanouk also believed he had the right to run the state in a manner not very different from that of the ancient Khmer kings--that is, as an extension of his household. Unlike the ancient "god-kings," however, he established genuine rapport with ordinary Cambodians. He made frequent, often impromptu, trips throughout the country, visiting isolated villages, chatting with peasants, receiving petitions, passing out gifts, and scolding officials for mismanagement.
According to British author and journalist William Shawcross, Sihanouk was able to create a "unique brand of personal populism." To ordinary Cambodians, his eccentricities, volatility, short temper, sexual escapades, and artistic flights of fancy were an expression of royal charisma rather than an occasion for scandal. Sihanouk's delight in making life difficult for foreign diplomats and journalists, moreover, amused his subjects. Ultimately, the eccentric humanity of Sihanouk was to contrast poignantly with the random brutality of his Khmer Rouge successors.
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The Geneva Conference
Although Cambodia had achieved independence by late 1953, its military situation remained unsettled. Noncommunist factions of the Khmer Issarak had joined the government, but communist Viet Minh activities increased at the very time French Union force were stretched thin elsewhere |
