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| Samlot rebellion revisited? |
“The French were clever in that they actually exalted the Cambodian monarchy in a way not seen since the days of Angkor, thus diffusing a lot of anti-French sentiment.”
“The Thai ballet is far more authentically Angkorian, since
they did not tamper with its borrowed moves”
“. . . an ambitious "god-king" Sihanouk has
endorsed tragedy and sanctioned horror; he sees himself as the deliverer of his
nation.”
Early Years -- The history of what is now Cambodia is
largely about the roller-coaster sweep of empire across the whole of the region
including Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. They are all related.
The earliest recognizable national entity in what is now Cambodia
was the Indianized kingdom of Funan. This trading nation flourished from the
1st to the 6th century A.D. and probably existed between Prey Veng Province in
Cambodia and Kien Giang Province in Vietnam. As most Khmers will tell you, they
still regard southern Vietnam, or "Kampuchea Krom," as rightfully
Cambodian and historically they have a pretty strong case. Although Cambodia
was at the time a patchwork of small fiefdoms sometimes at peace and sometimes
at war with one another, it was through its position as a major seaport that
Funan imported the Indian religion and culture that would be so important in
shaping the future of the region. At its height Funan and its related states
stretched across Vietnam, Laos, and as far as the Malay Peninsula. The kingdom
is said to have employed Indians in the administration of the state. Sanskrit
was the court language, and the Funanese advocated initially Hindu and, after
the 5th century, Buddhist religious practice. Hindu deities Shiva and Vishnu
were the focus of worship and the Lingam (or Indian phallic totem and temple
focus) seems to have played a central role in religious practice.
By the 6th century, Funan was weakening as trade diminished
due to historical shifts in faraway places. The population largely shifted from
the coastal areas inland to the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers, moving from
oceangoing trade to wet rice production. Power shifted from the Kingdom of
Funan to the more specifically Khmer rebel entity of Chenla. Chenla later
divided into separate north and south, referred to by contemporary Chinese
sources as "Chenla of the Land" and "Chenla of the Sea,"
respectively. What is now Champasak in Laos was the center of the north, while
the lands around the Mekong Delta and the coast belonged to the south. By the
8th century, Chenla too was weakening as various vassal states broke away.
The Rise of Angkor -- Jayavarman I was the first king
of what historians consider to have been the Khmer empire. It emerged from the
Kingdom of Kambuja, after which Cambodia is named. He ruled from approximately
657 to 681 but died without an heir. Over the course of his reign, he
consolidated power over the lands around him. However, Jayavarman left no male
heirs, which led to a return to the chaotic conditions that previously held
sway.
These events preceded the rise of the mightiest empire in
all of Southeast Asia. It was Jayavarman II, the "god-king" or
devaraja, who set off the train of events that would lead to Khmer rule
encompassing all of what is now Cambodia, most of what now makes up Thailand
and Laos, and large parts of present-day Vietnam. The physical remains of this
empire are dotted around the region as far west as Kanchanaburi and as far
north as Sukhothai in Thailand, and as far east as the South China Sea. Most
historians concur that Jayavarman II rose to power in about A.D. 802. Inscribed
on the sacred temple of Sdok Kak Thom on Phnom Kulen Mountain north of Angkor
is an account of how Jayavarman had himself made "chakravartin" or
universal monarch. It was this dawn of the age of god-kings that saw the
creation of Angkor.
Although Hinduism had arrived, original feudal and animist
practices survived. One such belief was the blurring of definition between God
and feudal lords. This feudal reverence is imbued in the Khmer psyche and in
mutated forms continues to this day. Through alliance and conquest, Jayavarman
first subjugated nearby Khmer local warlords. He then turned his attention
further afield. Not much is actually known about Jayavarman II except the fact
that he consolidated the lands that are now Cambodia and laid the groundwork
for the empire that was to follow.
Angkor is the surviving representation of hugely ambitious
construction. Indravarman I (A.D. 877 -- 89) initiated incredible irrigation projects
(an obsession with irrigation was revisited under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge
centuries later, inspired by Angkorian supremacy). These projects were vastly
complex and allowed the production of up to three rice harvests a year. Angkor
was a power built on water and rice. Indravarman also presided over a flowering
of the arts.
The Decline of Angkor & Battles with Siam -- By
the end of the 10th century, the empire was in trouble. A usurper, Suryavarman,
pushed the boundaries of empire further by annexing Lopburi in what is now
central Thailand. The town is still home to some impressive Khmer ruins
(largely inhabited by monkeys). The rise and fall of Angkor was not one unified
process. It ebbed and flowed with periods of near collapse followed by
triumphal renewal, with new additions as a symbol of triumph.
One of these periods of renewal was under the reign of
Suryavarman II (1112-77), ending a period of disunity marking military victory
against the Kingdom of Champa in what is now Vietnam. Above all, Suryavarman
will be remembered as the man who initially commissioned the building of Angkor
Wat itself as a devotion to the god Vishnu. He was killed in a retaliatory
strike by the maritime forces of Champa, who fought their way up the Mekong and
the Tonle Sap Lake and took the Khmers by surprise.
Their triumph was not to last long. Suryavarman's cousin
Jayavarman VII was crowned in 1181 and defeated the Chams decisively. This king
was a Buddhist and it was under his rule that much of what one now sees at
Angkor was constructed. It is likely his face that you see serenely staring out
of the walls of the Bayon on such an amazingly impressive scale. The
bas-reliefs around Angkor show a Buddhist king immersed in Buddhist practices.
Other sculptures display an image of warlike ferocity and relentless and brutal
killing. This undertaking probably involved a huge amount of suffering for the
laborers. His motivation was partly political in an insecure world of war and
dispute. It was also partly evangelical. His was the desire to spread the word
of Buddhism in a predominantly Hindu world (although he was Mahayana, not part
of the Theravada line that dominates in Cambodia today).
Jayavarman VII died around 1215 and by this time, even
though the Khmer empire was at its zenith, cracks were beginning to appear and
signs of a permanent decline were beginning to show. The massive construction
projects were taking a heavy toll on resources. The god-kings destroyed
themselves by the effort of maintaining their own physical glory in water and
in stone. The Thai empire of Ayutthaya was growing in strength as the Angkorian
empire wore itself out. Their raids on the Khmers became ever more successful
and ever more aggressive. In 1431, Siam attacked the city of Angkor itself,
sacking it wholesale. It was around this period that the Khmer empire started
to shrink and the area of what is now Phnom Penh grew in importance, as Angkor
came under repeated attack from the warlike Siamese. For the next 150 years,
conflict with the Thais largely dictated the agenda. It didn't all go the
Thais' way. At one point, Khmer soldiers got very nearly to the walls of
Ayutthaya only to discover the Burmese had beat them to it, vanquishing the
Thais and occupying their capital. Ayutthaya recovered, however, and the Khmers
were crushed by their armies in 1594.
Years of Chaos & Arrival of the French -- From
this time on, Cambodia was largely a power vacuum. Weak kings looked to both
Vietnam and Siam for protection. The whole of southern Vietnam including the
Mekong Delta was ceded to the Vietnamese, including the village of Prey Nokor
-- a place now called either Ho Chi Minh City or Saigon. The Thais took the
northwestern provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap, a bitter historical irony
since the name Siem Reap means "Defeat of Siam." By the late 18th
century, Siam was in total control. The only reason that Cambodia survived at
all was because the Thais became preoccupied with fending off the
ever-aggressive Burmese and the Vietnamese created their own problems of
internal strife.
Then there was a colonial intervention. France had initially
established and consolidated its rule in Vietnam as part of a move to protect
its valuable trade interests. In 1867, French gunboats made their way up the
Mekong and King Norodom I was forced to sign a treaty making Cambodia a
protectorate of France. For the king at the time, the choice was one of
dominance by either the French or the Thais, and the French were the preferred
choice. This move actually reinforced the territorial integrity of Cambodia,
since it halted Thai and Vietnamese appropriation of territory. In 1887,
Cambodia became a part of the newly formed Federation of French Indochina with
the Vietnamese provinces of Annam in the north and Cochin in the south. Laos was
ceded to France after the Thai-Franco War of 1893. In Cambodia, Norodom
remained on the throne, but it was the French who called the shots as they
remained aggressively predatory, making a further series of land grabs against
the Thais over the following years.
Cambodia remained very much a backwater and a buffer. The
French made their money in Vietnam. The Khmers were also heavily taxed, but all
the money was used to develop the neighboring provinces of what is now Vietnam.
Cambodia remained undeveloped, even in Phnom Penh where most positions of
authority in the colonial administration were held by Vietnamese. The French
were clever in that they actually exalted the Cambodian monarchy in a way not
seen since the days of Angkor, thus diffusing a lot of anti-French sentiment.
Norodom died in 1904 and was succeeded by King Sisowath, who
reigned until 1927. He was followed by King Monivong. On Monivong's death, a
19-year-old named Sihanouk was placed on the throne by the French governor,
Admiral Decoux. His life remains intimately intertwined with every step of the
following decades of drama.
During World War II, Japanese forces rampaged through all of
Southeast Asia. Vichy French cooperation with the Axis powers ensured that the
actual physical presence of the Japanese was not that great in Cambodia,
although the Cambodians did have to hand over much of Battambang and Siem Reap
to Thailand, which was an Axis ally. When Paris fell to Allied forces, the
Japanese took more direct control of Cambodian affairs. Once the Japanese were
defeated, De Gaulle was very insistent on re-claiming French Indochina,
bulldozing aside any claims for independence tacitly agreed to by the U.S.
Pacific command in return for active resistance to Japanese occupation on the
part of Ho Ch Minh and his allies. The British also acquiesced for fear of
setting a precedent with regard to India. Sihanouk sneakily welcomed back the
French for fear of being engulfed by the old enemies, Thailand and Vietnam. By
this time, however, the independence genie had been let out of the bottle and
no European colonial power was in a position to reverse that in the long term.
Guerrilla movements demanding independence, such as the Khmer Issarak and the
Khmer Serei, grew up in the countryside and battled French control. The French
fought back with immense brutality.
The Rebirth of Nationhood -- Curiously, it was the
French who re-created a lost sense of Khmer nationhood -- something that had
been eroded in the previous centuries by the disintegration of the Khmer empire
and centuries of domination by neighboring powers. The French "discovered"
Angkor, a place abandoned by the Khmers to slumbering and powerful spirits for
600 years. They resurrected and encouraged the arts, including the Royal
Ballet, but adapted it to their own tastes (the Thai ballet is far more
authentically Angkorian, since they did not tamper with its borrowed moves).
The virulent Khmer nationalism you see today was largely contrived by the
French to create a psychological buffer between themselves and the Thais, who
were seen as being in the British sphere of influence. It was Theravada
Buddhism, the backbone of Khmer culture and society that often inspired protest
against the French, and the monkhood was seen as vulnerable to Thai influence.
Independence -- At this point, King Sihanouk
confounded the French who put him on the throne. In 1953, he dissolved
parliament and declared martial law in aid of what became known as the
"Royal Crusade" for an independent Cambodia. Independence arrived in
Indochina in 1954, though this was just the beginning of brand-new conflicts as
the whole region became tragically sucked into the vortex of the Cold War.
In 1955, Sihanouk abdicated the throne in order to pursue
his aims as a bona fide politician. For better or worse, he was to directly
dominate Cambodian politics until his overthrow in 1970 and continues to be a
major player until this day -- an ambitious "god-king" who has
endorsed tragedy and sanctioned horror, he sees himself as the deliverer of his
nation.
During the 1960s, Sihanouk walked a diplomatic tightrope as
he maneuvered to keep Cambodia neutral in the conflict raging in Vietnam. He
feared the North Vietnamese Communists who had always taken a fairly
patronizing and threatening view of Cambodia. He also deeply distrusted the
Americans, breaking diplomatic ties in 1965 in the belief that Washington was
plotting his removal. He might well have had cause.
He was, however, shortly to fall off the tightrope. In
tilting toward Ho Chi Minh, Sihanouk allowed North Vietnamese forces to use
Cambodia as a base and for transit. He didn't really have much choice. The
Hanoi-based Communists had enough military power to do what they wanted.
Sihanouk's rule became increasingly brutal as dissent grew. Opponents
"disappeared." The right-wing forces gained more and more power. The
army grew resentful and rebellious. The nascent left wing felt pushed to ever
greater extremes as the ravages of a corrupt regime seemed to become ever more
totalitarian. Cambodia was sliding toward an abyss.
Rebellion broke out in Samlot in the remote western
jungles near the Thai border in 1967, and it was brutally suppressed.
Photographs still exist of Royalist soldiers brandishing the severed heads of
vanquished rebels. At this point, Sihanouk went for the left wingers and even
moderate leftists, and fled to the jungle to organize resistance.
The Spiral of War -- Things came to a head in 1970.
While Sihanouk was at a conference in France, an American-sponsored coup
deposed him. Defense minister Lon Nol took power, a move that had terrible
reverberations. An occultist right-wing "Buddhist," he was in many
ways a mirror of his nemesis, Pol Pot. Like Pol Pot, he was a plodder
professionally. He had reached his exalted position through being Sihanouk's
enforcer and hatchet man as head of the army, yet as a soldier and tactician he
was to prove disastrous, breaking his own army with bizarre campaign strategies
that went against all the rules of good generalship. Like Pol Pot, he was also
a deranged xenophobe, particularly against the Vietnamese. He had Vietnamese
living in Cambodia massacred on a fairly industrial scale, even though his
sponsor at this time was largely the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government.
Sihanouk went to Beijing. Up to this time there had been a
tacit agreement with Hanoi that in return for Cambodia not supporting America,
North Vietnam would not actively sponsor the increasingly radical Cambodian
left. That agreement was now in shreds and the group that Sihanouk had derided
as the "Khmer Rouge" (Red Khmers) became the recipients of massive
infusions of military aid and support from Hanoi and China, Sihanouk's previous
allies. Effectively, a beast was let off the leash. No one could have guessed
the intentions of Pol Pot and his accomplices. The horror to come was
unprecedented in the wars of Indochina.
In April 1970, South Vietnamese and American forces invaded
Cambodia to root out North Vietnamese forces. Yet the North Vietnamese just
retreated farther inside Cambodia. The North Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge
acolytes soon controlled vast areas of the countryside. In these
"liberated zones," there was a total disregard for human life as the
Khmer Rouge started to implement their horrific ideology. These were dark
portents for the future.
Just before Sihanouk's overthrow, the U.S. had begun a secret
campaign of bombing Cambodia and Laos to try and interdict the NVA and Viet
Cong on the Ho Chi Minh trail and destroy their Cambodian bases. It failed to
do either. What it did do was kill thousands upon thousands of innocent
villagers and send their relatives rushing to join the fight against the
American aggressor or scramble for refuge in Phnom Penh -- a city that was
increasingly bloated with suffering. Nixon and Kissinger were Pol Pot's
greatest friends in terms of recruitment. After 1970 Sihanouk, following the
dictum that "my enemy's enemy is my friend," disastrously and naively
threw in his lot with the Khmer Rouge, visiting the liberated zones and being
photographed with the Khmer Rouge leadership. He was under pressure from China (as
was Pol Pot) and his bitterness knew no boundaries. This was a disaster. Even
with all the wriggling and squirming that Sihanouk had done to remain in power,
he was still revered by Khmers in the countryside and now the Khmer Rouge had
his blessing. In his arrogance, Sihanouk thought he could control the Khmer
Rouge. It was to prove to be very much the other way around. By 1973, the whole
of Cambodia was engulfed in savage fighting, and Phnom Penh was bloated with
refugees and was effectively under siege. Pressure continued to build, and the
bombs continued to fall. Meanwhile, the Lon Nol government didn't aid its own
survival as the practices of brutality and corruption became amplified to
operatic proportions.
UN Intervention -- With the Cold War imperative gone,
diplomatic efforts to put a stop to the fighting started to become effective in
1990 with the Paris peace accords, implemented by the five permanent members of
the UN Security Council. A deal was hammered out that suited both Hun Sen's
government and the forces of the Sihanouk "alliance." The United
Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) would create and oversee the
conditions under which elections could be held. Sihanouk was rewarded for all
his years of politicking and plotting by being put back on the throne.
There was a merciful break in the fighting, but the period
saw an influx of foreign troops and money into the country. Phnom Penh became a
Wild West -- like boomtown awash with money, four-wheel-drives, and rampant
prostitution. As Hun Sen darkly quipped years later, UNTAC should really stand
for "United Nations Takes AIDS to Cambodia." Originally the Khmer
Rouge were included in the peace process following the delusional and criminal
logic that caused the international community to support them through the '80s.
They soon realized that this would not suit their ends (largely because no one
would vote for them) and they returned to their jungle bases and went back to
what they knew best -- killing and war.
The election took place in 1993 and Sihanouk's FUNCINPEC
party very narrowly won the vote. This didn't suit Hun Sen, who remains to this
day a Machiavellian strongman. The UN, in its wisdom, caved in to Hun Sen,
appointing him and FUNCINPEC's Prince Norodom Ranariddh as joint prime
ministers. They both had armies, they both wanted exclusive power, and they
both hated each other with a vengeance.
Meanwhile, the UN left town thinking Cambodia was now a job
well done. All that effort and money left Cambodia in continued chaos, and once
again the wider world had failed ordinary Cambodians. The inevitable happened
-- conflict between the two prime ministers worsened and the Khmer Rouge went
on the offensive yet again.
The End of the Khmer Rouge -- The key to the
beginning of the end came from the Khmer Rouge itself. In 1996, Ieng Sary,
former head of the Cambodian Cercle Marxiste and Pol Pot's foreign minister,
broke with Pol Pot's center. Ieng's forces were in the Western town of Pailin
where they were becoming very rich as a result of logging and gem mining. Pol
Pot's center was based in the northern area of Anlong Veng, and they felt that not
enough of the money was making it their way. In the end, what broke this
murderous Marxist movement was a squabble about cash. The issue of Khmer
Rouge defections exacerbated the already fragile peace between the two prime
ministers as both attempted to attract enough former Khmer Rouge forces to
their own cause and wipe out their rival.
This came to a head in 1997 when Hun Sen seized absolute
power in what was wrongly called a "coup," but was actually simply a
stand-up fight and settling of scores. FUNCINPEC forces were defeated and
Prince Ranariddh fled.
Meanwhile things started to look bleak for Pol Pot. He
murdered his old and close friend, Son Sen (and his wife and children) by
having them run over by a tank. Pol Pot was in turn ousted by his own brutal
one-eyed lieutenant, Ta Mok, dubbed "The Butcher." Ta Mok, quite
rightly, probably thought he was next and decided to get in his retaliation
first. Pol Pot was convicted in a Khmer Rouge show trial and put under house
arrest. He died in a malarial jungle hovel in 1998 and his body was burned on
tires with no autopsy being done. A long and painful era of Cambodian history
died with him.
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