Between Two Enemies

Sunday, January 02, 2011
Op-Ed by MP

(NB: to the reader(s) who helpfully suggested I should include a Khmer language version of my comments, it is also an idea that has crossed my mind. Unfortunately, my overall mastery of the Khmer language may not be ideal for this purpose. However, hopefully, someone somewhere could be kind enough to take up the challenge one day! My sincere thanks for reading and commenting).

To those who hold the view that Phnom Penh is doing the right thing by allying with either Hanoi or Bangkok in order to minimise their combined pressure and counter their respective threat, it is worthwhile to appraise this ill-fated stance and try to find a more reasoned approach. To seasoned observers and critical minds, Vietnamese hegemony over Cambodia and Laos is beyond debate. However, there are still doubters among many Khmers even though their concerns and intentions for their country are not, perhaps, in question.

The opinion that Cambodia needs to turn a blind eye to what takes place in the East in return for Vietnam’s assistance in response to the threat posed by Thailand in the West would not be disturbing if it comes from a non-Khmer person. If it does comes from a Khmer - and for what a Khmer nationalist is worth - it is both naive and dangerously misguided. That said, it would not be surprising that so many Cambodians have been easily manipulated into taking this self-defeating view. Both Hanoi and Bangkok have identified this weak spot in the Cambodian elite's mindset for several centuries and have taken turns or exploited this mindset to their own advantage simultaneously, taking both territories and populations as additions to their expanding spheres at Cambodia's expense.

Possibly, it would be harsh to blame Khmer kings for their tendency to run into the arms of either of the two neighbouring states whenever either of them put military or political pressure upon their kingdom. Apart from those Kings' restricted, feudalistic world views and their antiquated understanding of the nature of the threat posed by their ancestral enemies (Sihanouk would be in the category of the kings mentioned here) there were no international mediating institutions or forums of any substance from the end of the Khmer Empire around the 14thth century up to the end of the European colonial era in the first part of the 20th century, to which countries like Cambodia could refer their grievances and demand just resolutions or arbitration. That means of support had become available much later even if international relations has still been hampered by the competing interests of the super powers, as the small but politically effective anti-Vietnamese resistance movement backed predominantly by Western powers and China would seem to indicate.

This kind of scenario - whereby Cambodia is over run completely by foreign power(s) and yet her elite refusing to buckle under the pressure and accept foreign suzerainty or yoke, instead clearly knowing and recognising that such a domination would eventually see Cambodia reduced to another Champa or Kampuchea Krom - however grim this might be, still offers the best possible alternative to solving the country's geo-political dilemma without chopping parts of its legs or arms off in appeasement and/or in return for external military intervention. A sound and strong defence, even for a relatively small country backed by international support of the world community might just be what is needed to neutralise the threat posed by either Hanoi or Bangkok in the longer run.

Moreover, if the CPP leadership are concerned with preserving national identity or protecting national sovereignty, they are doing and going about it in the most destructive, suicidal manner possible. Knowing that the Paris Peace Accords provide their country the legal basis upon which to defend Cambodia's interests, they have chosen instead to ride roughshod over these mechanisms by sweeping them under the carpet. Even their generally repressive tendency in relations to domestic and civil issues such as freedom of expression and information as well as political pluralism clearly illustrates their perception that patriotic nationalism - the single most vital force required to overturn the nation's decline - is a liability rather than an asset to their immediate personal political survival; something quite distinct from that of their compatriots or nation.

No matter how many schools or universities are built to educate youngsters and prepare them for future roles, as long as Cambodia is not in control of her own affairs and not be enabled to determine her own destiny by way of surrendering that responsibility to external powers, she would always be trapped half way between complete national oblivion and de facto enslavement. Educational institutions could function as places of learning and discoveries, but deprived of civic independence and self-regulating discipline or discretion, they could also be fronts for internalising partisan values and ideologies deemed instrumental to the advancement of a repressive state and its prerogatives only. One of such prerogatives is the notion that ‘nationalism’ is disruptive of ‘progress’; that this progress equates or be synonymous with the well-being and stability of the State (i.e. the Empire or Vietnam-dominated Indochina) as a whole.

Therefore, beware of those who to questions raised about the losses of national sovereignty oppose these questions with seemingly progressive, neutral notions of social-economic imperatives (the need for schools, hospitals, roads, bridges and general increase in the standard of living or ‘poverty reduction’ and so forth) even whilst more and more of the country’s natural assets and economic resources are not within the influence or under the control of indigenous mastery or management (subject nations). In any case, the loss of even an inch of national territory is equal to the loss of the entire country. And no amount of payment received in compensation over the losses of Cambodian lands or villages, in financial or material terms, could ever justify or fully compensate for those losses, all of which in their inseparable totality form an inextricable dimension of the Khmer Soul.

No one could dominate a nation without its consent.