The Trouble with Secrecy

Border specialist Va Kim Hong: Read my lips: Cambodia still retains everything on the map!

by Ecole de Vice

Nothing changes here: a third party making allegations embarrassing to the CPP regime who noisily throws everything at its critic[s] or the source of the allegations, including the kitchen sink, only, perhaps soon after, to quickly retreat into a state of self-enforced silence when neutral and independent route to settling the disagreement is proposed. See the Global Witness incident, the initial reaction over the Hun To scandal involving the Australian anti-drug smuggling agency etc.

Why make a lot of noise about something you cannot ultimately hope to repudiate in your favour? Well, it seems secrecy, lies, denials, repetitions of constant lies, and above all the fear of being called to account and or being exposed over all these things before the public bear all the hallmarks of a well organised criminal society. Silence for the regime in the face of such allegations is not an option as it opens itself to being construed as confessing to the crime[s] alleged, hence the ‘rapidity’ of the response and heated denials, and counter allegations without concrete proofs  or anything of substance to back those counter allegations up. After all, like any well organised criminal underworld, the public, civic face i.e. the underworld's user-friendly front mimics almost to perfection the idioms, vocabularies, grammar rules, emotions [including collective sentiments like nationalism and even patriotic fervour!] and all the dignity of leadership of a given human community aspiring to a higher plane of existence. 

Yet, this public front - important as it is as a diverting propaganda tool - gives away only a superficial veneer or a hint of the regime's criminal underworld and its otherwise unconscionable but nevertheless authentic pursuits; ones mechanically and organically undertaken with all its focus and energy. Like the tip of an iceberg it is the vast body less obvious or virtually off-limits to public scrutiny or detection that has the greatest relevance and material gravitational pull. And it is this weighty body mass and all it represents that makes any closed, authoritarian regime constantly nervous and paranoid. Not that Google's latest discovery comes as a shock to many who have been suspecting or witnessing all along that Cambodia,  not yet a sovereign state in any sense of the word, has been ceding land and sea territories to her dominating and land hungry predator-neighbour to the east. The only surprise is that only 35km2 of an already "tiny" country is missing?! 

Anyone who picks up a map of Vietnam and Cambodia at a street stall in Vietnam can confirm that the map published and printed in that country does not even show a sizable region along the border between the two nations known as the "Parrot's Beak"; perhaps, the Vietnamese government is already acquainting and conditioning young generations of Vietnamese with tacitly newly acquired properties that have always belonged to someone else legally and historically. Just as it has invented 'history' and historical events to ensure that these successive generations of Vietnamese foot soldiers will learn only of the Chinese and Vietnamese frontier men and pioneers who cleared the forests and jungles of the Mekong Delta and Koh Tral for agricultural use and farming settlements, and nothing of the indigenous Khmers who had been the first to have claimed these parts. 

So you see it is none of Google's business or anyone else's to stick its nose into this forbidden terrain. Far better if this state of affair is allowed to proceed unobstructed and, of course, unnoticed. For why else would the regime insist on concluding all border settlements behind closed doors? Even far better if you and me - as concerned bystanders - stop talking about the whole damn thing lest some officials get 'irritated'?  Irritation is after all believed to be one of the symptoms of secrecy.