The Tragedy of History and Its Revision

Then-Prince Norodom Sihanouk with Pham Van Dong
Hun Xen (R) and Nguyen Tan Dung (L)

Friday, April 23, 2010
Op-Ed by MP

All the telling signs indicate just how deep and decisive Hanoi's influence has been over just about every field of Khmer people's national life. We have seen how risky it is for Khmer nationalists and activists to speak out against this one-sided relationship, formed and enforced, first and above all, to advance Vietnamese interests and political agenda in Cambodia.

How has this unjust relationship been structured and maintained without drawing displeasure and opposition from the party in this relationship with the most to lose and sacrifice? That the Vietnamese state does not entertain sanguine aspirations towards the Khmer nation is self-evident, but even Vietnamese imperial excesses over Cambodia in centuries past and Khmer people's bitter taste of that experience have all been, not so much forgotten as details of history, but instead brewed and recast as each other's misunderstood intentions and as outcomes of outdated, feudalistic exercise in inter-state diplomacy against which the entire existence of the Indochinese Workers' Party and its raison d'être were ostensibly purported to rest. This was what Première Phan Van Dong alluded to when he expressed regret over his country's past mistreatments of the Khmer Kingdom in the course of his pep talk with Prince Sihanouk in those hey days of anti-American struggle.

Sihanouk, however, to be fair, might not have been completely naive as to have wholeheartedly accepted all of Hanoi's explanations, but his cards were limited and therefore in his view the forced marriage was necessary in view of enveloping crises and in pander to political expedience or convenience at the time. Moreover, as a royal, and despite having spent some part his youth in Saigon/Prey Nokor as a pupil of French colonial schooling, Sihanouk would have already learned from his immediate royal palace council and forebears not to trust Vietnam's designs towards Cambodia.

But those young revolutionary cadres recruited even before 1978/9 by the Communist Party of Kampuchea out of the salt and rugged stock of the peasantry as its vanguard and replacement of their country's old administrative order represented a radical proposition, a true generational antithesis to Cambodia's past in world view and consciousness, offering Hanoi a rich, pliable alternative and groundwork from which they gleefully set about cloning a new generation of leaders that bear to all intent and purposes their own inward Vietnamese desires and images. It was not for nothing that young Mr. Hun Sen had to turn up at the Vietnamese embassy in Phnom Penh every morning to sit at the feet of his Vietnamese mentor and guru learning the art of world diplomacy, international relations, administrative structure, how to deal with internal 'reactionaries' and dissent, how to mobilise the masses to endorse the new regime, and most crucially, discovering the undoubted benefit and protection provided by the Khmer-Vietnamese solidarity within a unified Indochinese setup.

Within the confines of this morally sordid, contrived arrangement a whole new colony is created out of the body of the Khmer nation itself which gives over the appearance of leading the Khmer people out and away from their dark, troubled past and towards the security of the Promised Land over flown with milk and honey.

It would be insulting to their intelligence to say that the Khmer people are unaware of all these machinations at the heart of this relationship, but they could hardly be blamed for allowing themselves to be led along by this crop of leadership that they know deep down does not possess a will and character of its own to lead them to a destination of their own choosing. For the older generation who have survived the genocide of the Pol Pot regime their ultimate preference would be to be left alone to gather the pieces in life. The generation who came after that regime, on the other hand, simply have nothing more than an epistemological awareness of their nation’s past, learning through selective school texts of Vietnam’s salvific role in rescuing their parents from that genocide.

What will and character this leadership, therefore, does possess denotes or conveys nothing more and nothing less than its artificially cloned self that has, in its own eye, overcome numerous odds and adversities over the decades and in the aftermath of ‘Year Zero’ which, further, is a national tragedy wholly attributed to unguided ultra-nationalism and xenophobia.

So skilfully has the tragedy of Khmer history been exploited and used as a pretext to expunge the will of the Khmer nation and replace it with something foreign to it that even those who just want justice for their ancestral land, who harbour no ill prejudice towards the Vietnamese people, who defend and advocate basic civil rights for all under the law, who decry the excesses of officialdom are all invariably readily awarded the distinction of being trouble-makers, national traitors, and just as absurdly, of being Hanoi’s agents out to make Khmers turn against Khmers even while Khmer interests and lives are being superseded in every field by those of Vietnam.

I concur with Martin Luther King’s refrain that we should learn to live together like brothers or perish like fools, but in my humble view, true fraternity has to reflect equality in human dignity and genuine mutual regard that should leave no scope for underhanded attempt at subjugating one another’s will to something beyond which the convention or meaning of mutuality itself does not permit nor recognises as being equally beneficial to both parties.

MP