Hatred of ‘the Other’: Cambodia, Racism and Ultra Nationalism by Jeff Mudrick
“All Cambodians remember the sad fate of Kampuchea Krom or Southern Cambodia, a former Cambodian territory made up of 21 Khmer provinces, which was annexed by Vietnam in the last century with the complicity of the French colonialists following decades of massive immigration. Eventually Vietnamese largely outnumbered Cambodians and the new demographical balance, as a fait accompli, was the justification for the annexation by Vietnam. Cambodians are now afraid of another fait accompli which could be under preparation and which would mean, this time, the death of their motherland.”
- Sam Rainsy, Cambodia Daily, Letter to the Editor October 2013
On November 9, Miss Truong Thi May (Reaksmey), will represent Vietnam in the Miss Universe pageant being held in Moscow. Cambodia, following the wishes of its long serving prime minister, will not be represented. What is significant about the Vietnamese entrant is that she was in fact born in Phnom Penh to a Khmer mother and a father of mixed Vietnamese-Khmer heritage, raised from infancy in An Giang province of Vietnam as a member of the minority Khmer Krom community in Bac Lieu.
She speaks unaccented Khmer and her culture and self-described ethnicity is Khmer. The Khmer Krom community in Vietnam, particularly in the spheres of education and religion has been according to numerous human rights organizations the subject of various kinds of discrimination and intolerance.
Nothwithstanding such issues, her nationality, according to numerous interviews, is proudly Vietnamese. It would be naive to suggest that Miss May’s elevation to the national stage represents a signal change in the treatment of Vietnam’s minority population, but it would be equally naïve to suggest that a non ethnic Kinh representing Vietnam is not of some substantial symbolic importance in understanding how the nation of Vietnam chooses to see itself.
Once cannot imagine, let alone hope, that in Cambodia something along the same lines might take place, even at the level of a beauty pageant. The Khmer have, to put it mildly, a problem with the large Vietnamese minority in Cambodia, a problem which is long standing, deep rooted, seemingly intractable, and, given the military capability of its neighbors to the east, extremely dangerous. It shows no signs of being resolved for reasons which I’ll suggest, but, for the sake of both Khmer and Vietnamese it surely must be, if not for the cause of human rights, then in the interest of continuing peace and economic stability.
Alongside coverage of Cambodian opposition leader Sam Rainsy’s anti-Vietnamese campaigning there appeared in the build-up to the most recent Cambodian national election a number of articles in local news outlets which focused on the human interest aspect of the difficulties faced by ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia, particularly in the context of this national election: one in which the CNRP accused the ruling government of jumping to the tune of Hanoi and allowing the slow takeover and ultimate destruction of the nation through massive Vietnamese immigration and empowerment.
There is nothing new in this accusation, nor in the receptivity of this message to a large percentage of the population. The only thing new it seems is the new prominence of the internet in spreading this message among the young, but therein, in my judgment lies the potential for far greater danger ahead. After reading these various articles one is left with the question, so what then?
Some background first.
For centuries the Vietnamese and Khmer, both ancient kingdoms – the royal city of Hanoi being founded one hundred years before the Khmer empire reached its peak – had very little contact with each other. They share few cultural antecedents and were long separated by geography. The Vietnamese march towards the Khmer occupied Mekong Delta from their Red River homeland began in earnest in the 17th century. The desire on the part of the weakened Khmer kingdom for peace with the Vietnamese, who by then had absorbed the Kingdom of Champa, resulted in the Vietnamese being allowed to settle in Prey Nokor, then a small trading center, now known as Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City.
By the end of the 18th century, Vietnamese had settled in, and were in control of, most of the sparsely settled Mekong Delta, a process of colonization which unerringly fratricidal and short-term thinking Cambodian royals where unable to resist.
Indeed they were often complicit in trading off territories in return for protection, trapped as they were between the two vastly more powerful kingdoms of Vietnam and Siam. While there were occasional military confrontations during this process (and a handful of 19th century rebellions afterward), it was primarily an extended period of peaceful settlement, but one which is now called by some Khmer observers a “silent genocide”.
With a more powerful Vietnam united after 1802, Cambodia desperately weakened by war and infighting, and formerly cordial relations between the Vietnamese and Siamese broken down, the Vietnamese first asserted control over Cambodia through a loyal royal, before ultimately embarking upon an ill fated full-fledged and quite brutal military occupation of eastern Cambodia in the 1830s.
Initially the Vietnamese emperor had viewed this as a “civilizing mission”, one in which the Vietnamese expected and relied upon the cooperation of local Khmer oknya (appointed nobility, more or less), all of whom would benefit from such an arrangement. It was a miserable failure. The more the local leaders resisted, the more heavy handed the Vietnamese became in their pursuit of Vietnamization. Being told to dictate how Khmer were to eat and dress was bad enough for the oknya, taking direct charge of lucrative customs duties proved to be the last straw and open rebellion against the Vietnamese broke out in 1840.
In came the Thais, as was their wont, to battle the Vietnamese and war continued until soon after the death of the Vietnamese emperor a face saving peace was reached in 1848. The new Khmer sovereign was to pay tribute to both Thailand and Vietnam. The reality was that a frustrated Vietnam went back to its corner scratching its head about the bull-headed Khmer and the Thais again took on the role of overseer and protector until the French Protectorate was established fifteen years later.
The Khmer have through folk tales if not from any profound knowledge of history, passed on from generation to generation the sufferings and humiliations of this period, and the hatred for those who caused them (see “The Master’s Tea,” the tale of the forced labor construction of the Vinh Te Canal as the most famous example).
The Thais though certainly not opposed to sacking and pillaging but more culturally and religiously familiar to the Khmer, get off rather lightly in the realm of Khmer folk tales and residual animosity. The Thai’s destruction of Phnom Penh in 1772 is pretty much forgotten, the Viet reenactment a few decades later lives on in core mythology. The Thai’s absorption of the once Mon and Khmer dominated area of what is now central Thailand never happened, the loss of Koh Trahl (Phu Quoc) and Prey Nokor may as well have happened last week. Champa-Vietnam-Cambodia relations, usually summed up by Khmers as “the Vietnamese swallowed Champa” is rather more complex and the Khmer were not exactly innocent bystanders in the destruction of the Cham kingdom. Thus, Michael Vickery writes in his paper Champa Revisited:
“Struggles between north Champa and Vietnam began after the latter’s independence in the late tenth century, but it was not, as conventionally believed, a constant push southward by the Vietnamese. The first war, and others later, was provoked by the Cham. Real Champa weakness with respect to Đại Việt began only after the 30 years of involvement with Cambodia in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, which may have caused more political and economic damage to Champa than any previous intervention from Vietnam.”
The French protectorate, welcomed by Cambodia’s King Norodom both to keep himself in power and to stave away further loss of territories to the Thais and Vietnamese, put an administrative stamp on the existing reality of the Khmer loss of territory to their eastern and western neighbors.
To the east a formerly unified Vietnam was, under French rule, broken apart into three jurisdictions, with Cochin China, encompassing the former Khmer Krom, administered as a colony. The French later persuaded the Thais to return to Cambodia the territories of Battambang and Siem Reap, but, in contrast to the Vietnamese occupation of the the Mekong Delta, these provinces had never seen significant Thai settlement. Hundreds of years of earlier Khmer settlement notwithstanding, and with the ratio of Viets to Khmer in Cochin China already greater than 10-1 by the turn of the 20th century, the French had no interest in provoking conflict with their favored if troublesome Vietnamese colony to appease its weak and less valued Cambodian protectorate.
New Vietnamese settlers arrived in larger numbers with the coming of the French Protectorate of Cambodia in 1863. The Khmer workforce being largely unskilled and uneducated (and according to French bias irredeemably corrupt and untrainable), the French recruited Vietnamese as administrators and brought in thousands to work in the rubber plantations of the north and east.
As Phnom Penh boomed Vietnamese were brought in as construction workers (wooden and thatched Phnom Penh had burned in the 1870s) and skilled laborers, as household servants, and in myriad other roles in the new urban economy of French Cambodia’s new capital. Vietnamese convict labor was brought in to build the perilous Bokor Mountain road and resort near Kampot. In the countryside Vietnamese came sans shackles, up the Mekong and Bassac rivers to work as fisherman and rice farmers, often bringing different techniques by which they prospered.
By the time of the 1921 census, Vietnamese were found to constitute six percent of Cambodia’s population, concentrated then, as now, in Phnom Penh, along the Mekong (Kratie, Kompong Cham) in the floating fishing villages of the Tonle Sap and in the border areas such as Prey Veng and Svay Rieng. This six percent figure is believed to be about the same as in the period before 1970. Despite intervening wars, deportations and new waves of immigration it is also about what most scholars believe to be the the Vietnamese share of Cambodia’s population today
“All Khmer citizens shall be equal before the law, enjoying the same rights, freedom and fulfilling the same obligations regardless of race, colour, sex, language, religious belief, political tendency, birth origin, social status, wealth or other status.”
- Article 31 Cambodian Constitution
“No Annamite (Vietnamese) will sleep peacefully until he has succeeded in pushing Cambodia towards annihilation, having made it first go through the stage of slavery.”
- Prince Norodom Sihanouk
With independence in 1954 came the difficult task of deciding how to treat this substantial national minority. To some, the language in the Cambodian Constitution is ambiguous, being that in the Khmer language the word for Cambodian and Khmer is the same.
Be that as it may, any inkling that the framers intended to extend the rights of citizenship to Vietnamese was soon clarified by legislative actions in 1956, 1958 1959 and 1963 which restricted Vietnamese access to various occupations and narrowed their avenues to naturalization and citizenship. The 1963 legislative action made it clear that Vietnamese were to be explicitly excluded from naturalization as they were “immune to Khmerization”.
Whether this interpretation is constitutional has, of course, never been tested, and subsequent history and legislative action strongly suggests that no Khmer politician of any stripe would step forward to argue for a contrary interpretation.
Norodom Sihanouk made it clear in his pronouncements, as have many others, that this same discriminatory treatment ought not and does not in fact apply either to indigenous Cambodian tribal peoples “Khmer Loeu”, or to the Cham people, “Khmer Islam”, though both maintain their own cultural and religious values and live in their own communities.
Whether one wishes to characterize the Khmer view of the Vietnamese as racism or ethnic chauvinism, the Khmer are quite clear on the matter, as the Khmer language does in fact distinguish between ethnicity and race, and while the Khmer Loeu and Cham are viewed as ethnic minorities, the Vietnamese to the Khmer are indeed members of a different race.
By the early sixties most of the growth in the Viet population was in an around Phnom Penh, where the Vietnamese population was thought to be in the range of 150,000. Phnom Penh’s substantial Chinese population, while treated as foreign residents under the law, were never singled out for the same type of persecutions as the Vietnamese despite their far greater control of the economy and trade.
This situation it should be noted continues today when it comes to the issue of foreign concessions, far more of which are owned by Chinese than Vietnamese. Cambodia’s primary export industry and major employer, the booming but troubled garment industry is almost entirely Chinese/Taiwanese owned and subject to few controls. For Sam Rainsy, notwithstanding their ownership of land concessions which he lambasts (though only calling out the Vietnamese) the Chinese are “our dear friends”, while the “Yuons come to steal our land”.