Hun Sen’s Cambodia - Hardcover

Strangio, Sebastian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300190727 ISBN 13: 9780300190724

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2014

Synopsis

A fascinating analysis of the recent history of the beautiful but troubled Southeast Asian nation of Cambodia

To many in the West, the name Cambodia still conjures up indelible images of destruction and death, the legacy of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime and the terror it inflicted in its attempt to create a communist utopia in the 1970s. Sebastian Strangio, a journalist based in the capital city of Phnom Penh, now offers an eye-opening appraisal of modern-day Cambodia in the years following its emergence from bitter conflict and bloody upheaval.
 
In the early 1990s, Cambodia became the focus of the UN’s first great post–Cold War nation-building project, with billions in international aid rolling in to support the fledgling democracy. But since the UN-supervised elections in 1993, the nation has slipped steadily backward into neo-authoritarian rule under Prime Minister Hun Sen. Behind a mirage of democracy, ordinary people have few rights and corruption infuses virtually every facet of everyday life. In this lively and compelling study, the first of its kind, Strangio explores the present state of Cambodian society under Hun Sen’s leadership, painting a vivid portrait of a nation struggling to reconcile the promise of peace and democracy with a violent and tumultuous past.

About this title

About the Author

Sebastian Strangio is a journalist and author focusing on Southeast Asia. Over the past decade he has roamed widely across the region and his writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, The New York Times, the New Republic, Foreign Affairs, and The Atlantic, among many other publications. From 2008 to 2011 he was reporter and editor at the Phnom Penh Post, Cambodia's oldest English-language newspaper. He currently splits his time between Phnom Penh and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

From the Back Cover

"Sebastian Strangio has filled a big void with this much needed history of modern Cambodia... This book will set the standard for years to come." - Elizabeth Becker, author of When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution

"A long overdue expose of Cambodian thugocracy and its Western enablers... 'Hun Sen's Cambodia' is must reading for anyone who wants to make sense of recent Cambodian history." - Peter Maguire, author of Facing Death in Cambodia

"An exceptionally insightful biography of the world's longest-serving prime minister... a first-class analysis of contemporary Cambodian political history." - Carlyle A. Thayer, author of War By Other Means: National Liberation and Revolution in Vietnam

"An absorbing, clear-eyed evaluation of Cambodia today... A persuasive reading of its turbulent recent history, as it explores the connections between Hun Sen's enduring dictatorship and Cambodia's painful emergence, willy-nilly, into a larger, freer, very demanding world." - David Chandler, author of Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Hun Sen's Cambodia

By Sebastian Strangio

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Sebastian Strangio
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-300-19072-4

Contents

Introduction: A Mirage on the Mekong, vii, 
Map of Cambodia, xvi, 
1 Against the Ages, 1, 
2 The Second Revolution, 21, 
3 The Wages of Peace, 42, 
4 A False Dawn, 62, 
5 Potemkin Democracy, 89, 
6 The Peasant King, 110, 
7 Hunsenomics and Its Discontents, 131, 
8 "A City With No Smoke and No Sound", 152, 
9 The Scramble for Cambodia, 171, 
10 A Hundred Lotuses Blooming?, 191, 
11 An Improbable State, 211, 
12 UNTAC Redux, 235, 
Epilogue: A Cambodian Spring?, 258, 
Notes, 267, 
Further Reading, 293, 
Illustration Acknowledgments, 298, 
Acknowledgments, 299, 
Index, 301, 

CHAPTER 1

Against the Ages

"That's where the killing fields begin." Mao Vei extended an arm eastward, past a low concrete fence and a wall of green bamboo, toward the groves and orchards of the dead. The tall green mango and papaya trees stretched over three hectares. They were planted here 30 years ago, and their roots still mingle with the remains of the thousands killed at Wat O Trakuon, a Buddhist pagoda and former Khmer Rouge prison in whose grounds the 67-year-old Vei now stood, his eyes narrowed against the afternoon sun, all the memories crowding back.

From 1974 until 1978, Wat O Trakuon served as a Khmer Rouge security center for the district of Kang Meas, a dusty town set on the broad brown sweep of the Mekong west of Kampong Cham. A tin-roofed school building within the temple grounds was converted into an office and interrogation center. The pale yellow pagoda hall, sweeping up from a base of sun-split concrete, was used as a prison. Inside the fragrant darkness, Vei crouched down and indicated where the thick wooden beams were fitted with iron bars, how the prisoners were shackled in rows by their ankles. He padded across a floor of cool brown tiles and opened a wooden door, pouring light onto a wall of Buddha images. "They couldn't clean the bloodstains," he explained, "so they put in a new floor."

In the Khmer Rouge years, Vei worked as a cook in a communal kitchen. One day in 1977, he climbed a sugar palm close to the prison walls to collect palm juice for the senior cadre. Peering down into the fields, he saw prisoners arranged in lines, their hands tied behind their backs. One by one, Khmer Rouge soldiers bludgeoned them in the back of the head with hoes and other farming implements and threw them into pits. The bodies were covered with a thin layer of earth; later, Vei told me, he could see the corpses swelling in the heat. In 1982 a few of the graves were exhumed and the bones enclosed in a white reliquary, where they still sit today, cobwebbed behind panes of dirty glass. According to a memorial inscription, 32,690 people were executed at Wat O Trakuon. Most were left undisturbed, lying beneath the fruit trees, planted to discourage people from scouring the graves for valuables.

Many of those killed at Wat O Trakuon were Muslim Chams, descendants of the kingdom of Champa that was once based in central Vietnam. The Chams' distinct language and religion immediately made them suspect in the eyes of the angkar loeu—the omniscient "High Organization" of the Khmer Rouge. On one evening in 1977, militia squads rounded up every Cham family in Sambor Meas village and took them to the wat. Others were brought by boat along the Mekong. Pim Phy, an 80-year-old achar, a white-robed Buddhist layman, said killing began straight away and carried on all night, to the blare of revolutionary anthems. "There were two big holes to bury the Cham people," he told me. "I saw it myself—all the Chams were brought in ox-carts. They were loaded and very heavy. There were even young children and small babies. They came at night and they were all killed."

On April 17, 1975, the armies of the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh and deposed the US-backed Khmer Republic. A spokesman declared 2,000 years of Cambodian history at an end. The city's population was forcibly evacuated. The operating mantra of Democratic Kampuchea (DK)—as the new regime termed itself—would take the form of a chilling aphorism: "To keep you is no gain; to kill you is no loss." Having returned Cambodia to a new zero-point, the DK leadership treated Cambodia's people as expendable raw material from which they intended to mold a rural society of unsurpassed purity.

All traces of the old "feudal" order were to be cut away and discarded. Money was banned, families were disbanded; Buddhist monks were forced to disrobe and were shot if they failed to comply. The population was put to work on vast communes in the countryside, farming rice and digging irrigation dikes. Work began in the dark of morning and ended in the dark of night. Rations were grossly insufficient, and hawk-eyed cadres enforced a regime of inhuman discipline. Husbands were separated from wives, children from their parents. Death from starvation, overwork, and summary execution became commonplace.

The most chilling thing about a place like Wat O Trakuon is that there was nothing particularly remarkable about it. During the three years, eight months, and 20 days of Khmer Rouge rule, the regime established an archipelago of oppression that stretched to some 200 security centers and prisons, many with a similar satellite field of mass graves. Today, 40 years after Pol Pot's regime took power, piles of skulls still dot the Cambodian countryside like ghastly totems, lying in the open or disintegrating in old memorial stupas. Every now and then new killing fields are uncovered and the families of victims hold ceremonies for anonymous bones, hoping to finally give their lost relatives a proper Buddhist funeral. In January 1979, the Khmer Rouge were overthrown by a Vietnamese invasion and the Cambodian nightmare came to an end. But today's Cambodia remains haunted by its past. History echoes in the bustle of the present. And as the Irish poet Ewart Milne wrote, history is always a cruel country.

Cambodia's history begins in the unique contours of its physical setting. Bisecting the country from north to south, the Mekong that bore the victims of Wat O Trakuon starts its journey far outside the country's borders, in the Himalayan mountain valleys that nurture Asia's great rivers: the Yangtze, the Irrawaddy, the Ganges. After a long journey through China, Burma, Thailand, and Laos, the Mekong arrives in Phnom Penh, where it mingles with the Tonlé Sap. While the Mekong is Cambodia's bridge to the world, the Tonlé Sap is unique to Cambodia—the only river in the world that completely changes direction, twice each year. In the dry season, the river flows southward from the Tonlé Sap Lake, a vast central expanse of water stretching over a thousand square miles. Then, when the monsoon rains come and the Mekong is swelled by Himalayan snowmelt, the pressure of its flow forces the Tonlé Sap to turn back northward, inundating the lake and flooding large parts of the country.

This annual flood-cycle provides Cambodians with an agricultural bounty, depositing rich alluvial silt across the floodplains and renewing the world's largest freshwater fishing ground. The importance of the seasons—the intertwining cycles of water, rice, and subsistence agriculture—is still marked each year by the Water Festival, when Cambodians gather in Phnom Penh for boat races on the Tonlé Sap and the Cambodian king stands at the confluence of the Tonlé Sap and Mekong Rivers to preside over the churning of the waters.

A millennium ago, these fertile soils and teeming waterways nourished the empire now known as Angkor, which arose along the northern shores of the Great Lake. At its zenith, Angkor was the predominant power in mainland Southeast Asia, its influence stretching from modern-day Vietnam and Burma to the Malay Peninsula. The God-Kings who ruled Angkor were masters of hydraulics, building dikes and reservoirs to harness the monsoon floodwaters and amassing huge stores of rice. At its height, Angkor was the largest premodern settlement in the world, a city of more than 700,000 spread over a larger area than modern Los Angeles. Its crowning achievement was Angkor Wat, built at the kingdom's height in the early twelfth century. Topped by five towers, arranged in an "X" pattern like the dots on a die, Angkor Wat was designed as a microcosmic representation of Mount Meru, the center of the universe in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology. This vast complex, still the largest religious building in the world, remains a powerful representation of Angkor's military, artistic, and economic might, as well as the absolute rule of the God-Kings, who were said to "eat their kingdom," ruling with an iron fist.

Angkor Wat has since become Cambodia's talisman, the shining meridian toward which successive generations of leaders have turned their sails. An image of the temple has appeared on the flag of every Cambodian regime since independence, including the Khmer Rouge, who placed its golden silhouette on a background of blood red. Where a doctrinaire Maoist might have seen a symbol of feudal oppression, Pol Pot saw the shimmer of future greatness. "If our people can build Angkor," he said in 1977, "we can do anything."1 But while Angkor was a source of great pride for Cambodians, it would also become a crushing burden—a symbol of the country's past achievements, and a reminder of its subsequent decline.

By the fifteenth century, Khmer power was on the wane. The Siamese (Thai) kingdom of Ayutthaya had arisen to the west, and sometime during the 1400s the royal court abandoned Angkor Wat and relocated its capital southward to Oudong, and then to Phnom Penh, both of which commanded better access to the Mekong and maritime trade routes. Post-Angkorian Cambodia appeared as a void on many early European maps—a featureless expanse hemmed in by the Vietnamese and Thai kingdoms rising to its east and west. Its diminished territory provided few natural barriers to invasion. During these dark years, the foundering Cambodian kingdom became a buffer state and object of rivalry between Thailand and Vietnam, serving at various points as a vassal state to one or both.

In the 1790s Thailand moved in from the west, annexing Cambodia's western provinces (including Angkor Wat) and installing a Thai governor to oversee them. From the east, Vietnam's nam tien—its "southward march" from the heavily populated Red River Delta—brought it into contact with the diminished Cambodian kingdom. Before long, Vietnamese settlers had occupied large parts of the Mekong Delta.

Cambodia's border with Vietnam, unlike its western frontier, lies along a deep cultural fault-line—the hyphen separating the two halves of what the French called "Indo-China." This gulf was geographical, political, religious, and linguistic. Vietnam's Confucian social and political system, inherited from China, contrasted sharply with the informal nature of Cambodia's political arrangements. On the Vietnamese side of the border, people aggressively shaped nature to serve their needs, clearing jungle and threading the landscape with a network of dikes and canals, while Khmer peasants adapted themselves to the natural rhythms of the land, living off the rice, fish, and fruit that they found everywhere around them. The situation along the two countries' border remains similar today. In the dry months the Vietnamese fields glow a deep green, while on the other side of the border much of the land remains parched and brown.

It wasn't long before Vietnam tried to extend more direct control. In the early 1800s the Vietnamese emperor Minh Mang started building fortresses and forced Cambodian officials to adopt Vietnamese clothes and hairstyles. Confucian forms of administration were imposed and more Vietnamese migrants settled in the Khmer territories. In 1817, Vietnam began conscripting Cambodian laborers to build a canal linking the river town of Chau Doc to the Gulf of Thailand. The Vietnamese overseers treated their Khmer workers cruelly. According to legend, one punishment consisted of burying Khmer workers up to their necks in groups of three and using their heads to support their boiling teapots. As the Cambodians struggled and flinched in pain from the flames, the Vietnamese laughed and warned them: "don't spill the master's tea."

Eventually this mini-Confucian "civilizing mission" prompted bloody revolts. By the early 1840s, imperial officials had decided that the cultural world of the "barbarian" Khmers was impervious to change. "The people do not know the proper way to grow food," Minh Mang complained. "They use mattocks and hoes, but no oxen. They grow enough rice to have two meals a day, but they do not know how to store rice for an emergency." For Cambodians the period of Vietnamese domination was formative. The "yuon," as the Vietnamese are often pejoratively termed, became the bogeymen of the Cambodian political imagination. Again and again they would resurface as a cruel and rapacious enemy, inexorably bent on "swallowing" the rest of Cambodia's land, just as they did Kampuchea Krom ("lower Cambodia"), the former Khmer territory in the Mekong Delta. The yuon became synonymous with death and disunity, a force that threatened the country's very existence.

If it wasn't for the French empire, Cambodia might well have ceased to exist in the mid-nineteenth century. The first French explorers had arrived in Cambodia in the early 1860s, seeking to expand French commercial interests in Southeast Asia, and believing that the Mekong might provide a backdoor to China and its riches. By the time the French established a protectorate over Cambodia in 1863, the kingdom had endured a half-century of civil wars, rebellions, and Siamese invasions, as well as the depredations of the Vietnamese protectorate.

The Cambodian kingdom became a part of French Indochina. King Norodom welcomed the French offer of protection, which kept him in nominal power and prevented the loss of further territory to the Thais and Vietnamese. In 1907 the French negotiated the return of the Angkor region and the western provinces from Thailand, and fixed Cambodia's national borders in roughly the place they remain today. But French protection soon evolved into a firmer form of control. The Cambodian monarchy became a ward of the colonial authorities, which kept it from performing any significant political activities and placed the next three Cambodian kings on the throne.

Many French officials saw their new colonial possession in romantic terms, viewing the Khmers as innocent savages—a pale vestige of the people who had produced the glories of Angkor. The French scholar George Groslier wrote, "the gods have disappeared, and ironic Death has left only slaves." But French scholars did much to reconstruct the country's early past. Proclaiming the greatness of Angkor, they set about translating inscriptions and restoring monuments, including Angkor Wat. At the same time the French shielded Cambodians from the perils of freedom, judging them unready for the challenges of the modern world. It was the Vietnamese, rather, who were the true dynamo of Indochina. As a derisive colonialist saying had it, "the Vietnamese grow the rice; the Khmers watch it grow; the Laotians listen to it grow."

The French attitude was largely self-fulfilling. French rule did little to prepare Cambodia for the modern world. Life for most of the population remained much the same as it had been since Angkorian times, revolving around the cycles of subsistence agriculture. Instead of employing Khmers, the French brought in Vietnamese to staff the civil service and work the colonial rubber plantations. Electricity and running water were rare outside Phnom Penh. Until the 1930s, practically nothing was spent on schooling. The country's first high school, the Lycée Sisowath, only opened its doors in 1936, and the number of Cambodian university graduates to that point was barely enough to fill a small seminar room.

Most education took place, as it had for centuries, in the country's Buddhist wats, where monks instructed boys in part through the use of religious treatises known as chbap—a series of moral aphorisms and tenets that provided students with a rigid code of worldly conduct. The chbap counseled passivity and acceptance and enforced strict social relationships between men and women, parents and children, rulers and ruled. In contrast with Confucian conceptions of social hierarchy, these were seen to flow from the moral worldview of Theravada Buddhism, by which a person's present fate depended on merit earned by good deeds in past lives. In the world of the chbap, deference and fatalism took precedence over the pursuit of social or economic justice.

Slowly the modern nation of Cambodia came into relief. By 1927 the French had laid down 9,000 kilometers of roads, and a rail line linking Phnom Penh and Battambang began operations in 1932. But these developments relied on a harsh system of taxes and forced labor that prompted a series of small-scale revolts in the early twentieth century. In 1925 villagers in Kampong Chhnang attacked and beat to death a French résident collecting unpaid taxes. The injustice of colonial rule raised hackles among Cambodia's tiny French-educated elite. In 1936, as resistance to French rule mounted in neighboring Vietnam, anticolonialists founded the country's first newspaper, Nagaravatta ("Angkor Wat"), which peddled a discreet anti-Vietnamese and anticolonial line. Cambodia was starting to awaken.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Hun Sen's Cambodia by Sebastian Strangio. Copyright © 2014 Sebastian Strangio. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300190727
• ISBN 13: 9780300190724
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 344