Trouble in The East

Former monarch Sihanouk and his family on their private visit to Hanoi (Photo: Vietnam News)

"This, there will be one day and we will turn into Champa No. 2!
Cambodia will be Champa No. 2!
All your children, yes you all, [will live under] Champa No. 2!
... But now, I am freeing myself up!" - Ponhea Krek villager who lost his lands to Vietnamese encroachment

Friday, June 25, 2010
Op-Ed by MP

SO much for fraternity and territorial integrity, heh?

If one could tame tigers and turn them into pillows to rest on, warned Khmer forefathers, then one could consider having the Vietnamese as one’s friends!

Where is Cambodia now, after all the recent turmoil and grief?

The violation of Cambodian sovereignty by way of the Ho Chi Minh Trail across the eastern provinces with Sihanouk's connivance was a crucial factor in the coup against him. Lon Nol and his associates have been universally blamed for plunging the nation into the abyss, but the most tragic error surely must rest with those individuals who thought (and evidently still believe) they had the tiger tamed enough to gamble the nation and its survival on their conviction.

So Hanoi won the war against US imperialism and 'liberated' the Khmer people from the clutches of Pol Pot and his radicalism. But where was this radicalism fermented in the first instance if not through the collective psyche of a people who have for centuries been at the receiving end of humiliation and oppression at the hands of foreign yoke and traitors in their midst?

Are the Khmer people easily given to paranoia or do they have legitimate causes for their anxiety and concerns as regards their dominant, scheming neighbours to the East? What has Hanoi done to remove the causes of those negative emotions that the Khmer people have towards its empirical repression of their nation and its persistent disregard for their dignity, beside removing one murderous regime and replacing it with a not so murderous one?

At present, Khmer people everywhere may not share the same universal experience of a people completely submerged as the ancient nation of Champa had once done, but for those Khmer folk living along the border whose lands and livelihoods have been robbed by the Vietnamese and their compliant Cambodian authorities, there is only utter pain and anguish of not being able to live and die on their ancestral soil.

Some of us accustomed to urban environments may find it difficult to imagine the emotional attachment rural people have towards their farms or villages - every tree, lake, stream, wat and prasat is embedded in their very soul and consciousness constituting in their inextricable total a self-contained universe from which separation does but refutes their existence as a community and denies them as living humans.

One elderly villager's warning about his country facing the grave risk of following Champa's example comes as an echo of an imprisoned heart that clearly discerns truth and danger through its bitter experience of realities. Clearly, this gentleman is not a politician, an actor, an orator of great speeches, and appears oblivious of the potential punishment that his outspoken protestations may bring upon himself vis-à-vis the local authority. Such is the courage of someone who has lost all that was dear to him and his community; for this gentleman and his immediate world Champa is no projectable scenario or realisable nightmare, but a fait accompli.

Other villages, towns and districts will come to terms with his message when their turn arrives. For now though the King and his entourage on their private visit to the land of our fraternal neighbours on public expense offer the nation far better diversion on state controlled TV channels than does any visit to dreary border markers in the country’s rural backwaters.

Enjoy the weekend!