The (correct) frame from which to view the tense relationship btw Cambodia and Vietnam

(Photo: Roland Neveu)

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This chapter 9 HABITS OF WAR (When the War Was Over, a must-read history book by Elizabeth Becker by anyone who is interested in Cambodia and BY ALL CAMBODIANS -- if you only have one choice of a book on Cambodia, THIS IS IT) provides a (correct) frame from which to view and understand the tense, sensitive relationship between Cambodia and Vietnam. 

Here's an excerpt:

Nearly every country has a rival, usually a neighboring state that is a convenient focus of national fears and prejudices. One week in a foreign country and the most desultory tourist knows who that rival, or enemy, is by the jokes told and the epithets screamed in anger...

That is the character of the problem between Cambodians and Vietnamese. They do not hate each other, nor have they always been at each other's throats. But they had been defined as national rivals for some two centuries and there is national resentment and competition between the two states in the best of times. Their peoples have well-developed respect and fear of each other and well-honed stereotypes...

It was the peculiar nature of Khmer-Vietnamese relations, and especially between the two modern communist states, that led to the Third Indochina War. And in 1977 communist Vietnam was anxious to step forward and force a resolution of the question "What will be the special relationship between Vietnam and Cambodia now that they are both communist states?"

Vietnam was accustomed to being the pivotal actor in modern Indochina. Its fortunes jolted Cambodia like whiplash. In 1977 the fears of the Khmer Rouge were not entirely misplaced. The communists in Hanoi did see Cambodia as a lesser state, one that should accept Vietnam's benevolent influence if not indirect rule...

In January 1976, after the communist victories in Phnom Penh and Saigon in April 1975 and in Vientiane, Laos, in December 1975, all of former French Indochina was under communist rule. There was a real possibility that Vietnam would head a strong Indochinese communist bloc that would serve to improve reconstruction possibilities in Vietnam and assure Hanoi a leading position in Asian politics as head of an important regional group. But the Khmer Rouge were suspicious of all Vietnamese suggestions to form such a grouping...

While it is clear Cambodia started the border war with Vietnam, it is less obvious why Vietnam interpreted that challenge as an invitation to invade and occupy Cambodia.

It was not the atrocious policies of the Khmer Rouge that turned Vietnam against Cambodia, not the slaughter or the slavery. It was a question of domination, control, and territory, of ridding Vietnam of the "problem" of Cambodia once and forever--questions that cannot be arbitrarily relegated to the communist era, the colonial period, or even the Angkor era. But they are questions that can be resolved without full-scale war and occupation. It was Vietnam's resort to total warfare that prompted the inevitable comparisons with their Red River ancestors. The communists in Hanoi had turned a near-disaster into a historic opportunity to realize what their predecessors had attempted centuries earlier: control of the Mekong River...

The Vietnamese expansion had begun in the eleventh century when they won three northern provinces from the Chams in what is now central Vietnam... Their dynasties grew stronger and more effective in raising taxes and enforcing a common, militaristic goal for the society. They looked to China as a model, or yardstick to measure their own accomplishments, while they looked south to the Mekong River for land. That attitude survived to modern times...

... First the Nguyen Vietnamese used divisions within the Khmer court to win favors and territory from Cambodian rivals to the crown. Then they openly interfered with Khmer politics, enforcing their policies on Khmer rulers. The decadent and weak Cambodian rulers encouraged this interference. [Sounds familiar with Hun Sen's CPP?]

The Nguyen Vietnamese settled their newly acquired Khmer territory in a manner that, again, has echoes in modern affairs. First they allowed their least desirable elements to open the territory--vagabonds, deserters, and those banished from their villages... The state then selected formal settlers to farm the land and build new villages [reason why the Hun Sen CPP blatantly criminalized Sam Rainsy for shedding light on the problems in Svay Rieng]... Finally, demobilized soldiers were given land grants in the territory in return for their military service [p. 333]...

...The Vietnamese emperor dispatched a force of 15,000 soldiers, defeated the Siamese, and in 1834 appointed a Khmer princess [for modern equivalent, insert "Hun Sen"] to act as puppet while the Vietnamese tried to absorb what was left of Cambodia into the new Vietnamese Empire.

...The country was divided into new provinces attached to Cochin China's administration. Vietnamese subjects settled in Cambodia and looked to Vietnam as the source of law and authority, not the puppet Cambodian queen...

... Then France intervened and upset the balance achieved by the 1845 compromise. In the name of protecting Cambodia from the Thais, the French created the implausible union of "Indochina" and made Cambodia even weaker and more susceptible to Vietnamese ambitions [p. 334]...

The French rewarded the Vietnamese in several instances. They gave the Vietnamese territorial rights to Cambodia and bureaucratic positions in Cambodia and Laos that enhanced the Vietnamese sense of manifest destiny. Nearly every aspect of the Indochinese union favored the Vietnamese...

Vietnam, however, was the pivotal member of the triangle. And it was Vietnam that stretched the fears to the limit... Moreover, and without a shred of proof, the Vietnamese said the Cambodians were conniving with the Chinese to destroy the Vietnamese race and had agreed to allow China to use Cambodia to invade Vietnam. Given this "life-or-death" scenario, the Vietnamese could justify invading and occupying Cambodia. And that is what they did [p. 347].

... Hanoi created an elaborate blueprint for moving ten million people from the more densely populated north to the south by the year 2000. The mentality of the Red River Vietnamese had not changed. They wanted to push farther south and west--which they did, finally, not through the New Economic Zones but by invading and occupying Cambodia two years later... [p. 355]

... A culprit had to be blamed for this overwhelming disappointment, preferably a foreign enemy. Like Cambodia, the Vietnamese had a preferred candidate--China...

... And Beijing could be blamed for Vietnam's inability to bring communist Cambodia into an Indochinese bloc...

With a new foreign threat Vietnam could return to the more comfortable habits of war... The Vietnamese were supreme experts at mobilizing the people around the issue of survival of the Vietnamese people and nation, as Cambodia was not. And Hanoi was better at manipulating all of the unspoken racial connotations of such an appeal.

Unlike the Cambodians, who when faced with the threat of foreign war ended up fighting among themselves and seeking foreign protectors, the Vietnamese sought unity through war, at least in modern times.