The Six Wooden Poles and the Khmer Buffaloes

Illustration by KI-Media.
(Warning: Any resemblance to real persons or situations, living or dead or fictional is purely coincidental. Void where prohibited by the CPP. Some uprooting disassembly required. Contents may unsettle Mr. Hun Xen who may send in coffin with free shipping. All models over 18 years of age except for the babes in the background. Subject to change without notice from the Vietnamese authority. Contains a substantial amount of anti-Hanoi and anti-CPP ingredients. Reproduction strictly encouraged. This supersedes all previous warnings unless Hanoi says otherwise. Laughing is strictly prohibited per royal sub-decree signed by Samdach Akkok Moha Sena Bat Dey Dek Cho Hun Xen. For further question, please do not ask)

Friday, 26 March 2010
Op-Ed by MP

KI-Media Note to Mr./Mrs. MP: Sir/Madam, in the future, we would appreciate it if you would send us your Op-Ed to the following email: kiletters@gmail.com. Thank you!

In years to come historians will write about the significance of and implications for those seemingly harmless, rustic six wooden poles planted on citizens’ rice field in a Svay Rieng commune along the shifting borderline with Vietnam. They will point out, with historians’ penchant for irony and coded meaning in small details that the posts, though “temporary” and contrived/ makeshift in appearance, were purposefully deployed as tentative, advance outposts for a more deadly wave of invasion to come; that for what was to follow in terms of deciding a small nation’s fate, consolidation and entrenchment of foreign power and foothold over this subjugated land, they exceeded in deed and significance the far better known and violently fought over 9th century temple of Preah Vihear along the western frontier with another troublesome neighbour.

The poles’ utility can be likened to an army’s reconnaissance unit of between 2 or 3 foot soldiers sent into enemy’s abandoned territory with the aim of gauging indigenous reaction to foreign presence in their midst. When no resistance is encountered, the rest of the division could then advance into the said territory and prepare for the next phase of troops movement until the end point is reached. This tactic was indeed exactly what the Vietnamese army deployed in 1979 shortly following the retreat of Pol Pot’s forces from the Eastern Zone and elsewhere in Cambodia.

Those searching for hints as to the limits of Hanoi’s territorial and political ambition should not look further than the current tragedy of the 2 unjustly imprisoned villagers and the amount of finance and hardware poured towards the defence of the western frontier. In previous centuries, Siamese and Vietnamese annexations might have converged conveniently along the Mekong, but today the river might be less of a factor in granting their wishes over the country in the middle, with Khmers being allowed to do the honour of defending their ancestral land in the west while in the east the Phnom Penh regime is throwing the white towel with its insistence that “Cambodia does not have precise borders.”

This admission about the absence of clearly delineated border lines would have been acceptable in context of a time in history when the Khmer Empire consisted of identifiable regions marked by differences in dialect and ethnicity. But even then the ordinary inhabitants of the Empire would still have been aware of the extent and limit of the Kingdom’s expanse. In any case, history should have taught the Khmers enough lesions about giving the Vietnamese state the benefit of such a doubt.

As for the shifting border in Svay Rieng, locals often relate that the Khmer buffaloes seem to know precisely where the international border lies by grazing just inside the Khmer part of the border and never stray onto the other side! This they manage even without concrete legal documents and the benefits of science and technology like maps deposited at the UN and Global Positioning System, not to mention Google ...

By denying that the country possesses precise borders, the Cambodian authority is either deliberately or unwittingly issuing a blank cheque to Vietnam to shift the border line infinitely forward at Cambodia’s expense while depriving her the right to legal defence or concrete reference points in the process of protecting national integrity and sovereignty.

Clearly those six wooden posts are only ‘temporary’ devices in the manner of an invading army’s forward unit or outpost – what they embody first and foremost is an iron will, an irreversible advance into the conquered territory, and the imprisoned farmers themselves have been unfortunate enough to be in the way of this relentless march. Yet, all this could not have been accomplished without the subservient, blind eagerness and narrow self-interest with which the villagers’ own rulers have made a sacrifice of their lives (farmers’) at the mighty alter of the six wooden sticks, against which from here on end, not even the Khmer buffaloes will have the incentive to scratch their itchy backsides. Or will they?

MP