Cambodia and the Politics of Aesthetics

Alvin Lim

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135132590
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Illuminating developments in contemporary Cambodia with political and aesthetic theory, this book analyses the country's violent transition from socialism to capitalism through an innovative method that combines the aesthetic approach and critical theory.

To understand the particularities of the country's transition and Cambodia's unfolding encounter with neoliberal capitalism, the book pursues the circuits of desire connecting the constellation of objects and relations, which is identified as Cambodia. Chapters focus on the pre-colonial empire of Angkor, the invasions of Siam and Vietnam in the nineteenth century, the devastation of the Khmer Rouge genocide and the subsequent Vietnamese occupation, and the present rapacity of Hun Sen's neoliberal government.

A creative combination of auto-ethnography, critical theory, and area studies and the analysis of a historical moment, the book is of interest to academics working on comparative politics, Asian studies, holocaust studies, critical theory, and in the politics of aesthetics.

1 The Third-Worlding of Cambodia

In April 1967 there occurred a moment of historical irony. Singapore's prime minister Lee Kwan Yew was on a state visit to Cambodia, hosted by the kingdom's Prince Norodom Sihanouk. As Robert Turnbull (2004) recounts,

Cruising along the capital's elegant boulevards in his Mercedes convertible, the Singaporean premier turned to his host and mused, ‘I hope, one day, my city will look like this.’

(38)

In the years that followed this encounter, Singapore would proceed on its neoliberal path of development, finally leaving the Third World to achieve developed country status in 1996, and by 2001 to overtake the United Kingdom, its former colonial master, in per capita income (Easterly 2006: 349; Wilson 2000: 105–7). Cambodia, however, would experience a very different political and economic transformation, leaving it firmly in the Third World. As Turnbull (2004) notes, referring to the Khmer Rouge revolution, ‘eight years after Lee's visit, Phnom Penh lay charred and abandoned’ (38). I shall examine in this chapter how Cambodia came to have such distinct and disparate fate from Singapore.

Before we investigate how the newly-independent states of Cambodia and Singapore achieved such disparate fates, it would be instructive to consider their colonial legacies. Davis (2002) reminds us of the colonial roots of the Third World:

Forcibly imposed trade deficits, export drives that diminished food security, over-taxation and predatory merchant capital, foreign control of key revenues and developmental resources, chronic imperial and civil warfare, a Gold Standard that picked the pockets of Asian peasants: these were the key modalities through which the burden of ‘structural adjustment’ in the late Victorian world economy was shifted from Europe and North America to agriculturalists in newly minted ‘peripheries’.

(306)

Cambodia did not escape this colonial ‘structural adjustment’, and the roots of its Third Worlding can be found in the French protectorate period. Under French rule, Cambodia suffered ‘the highest per capita taxes in Indo-China’, and its natural bounty was diverted to Vietnam to develop the export economy of French Cochin-China (Chandler 1979: 411). Gottesman (2003) notes that the ‘confiscation of large percentages of rice harvests also created a level of rural indebtedness not previously known in Cambodia, which, in turn, forced Khmer peasants into a state of increased dependence on Chinese moneylenders’. Viewing their Cambodian subjects as lazy and simple', the French ‘brought in Vietnamese bureaucrats to staff the civil service in Phnom Penh’, hence depriving Cambodians of the opportunities and experience necessary to develop their administrative knowledge and skills. This colonial Vietnamization extended to the countryside, where the French imported ‘Vietnamese workers to tap the rubber plantations’ and ‘allowed large numbers of Vietnamese farmers and fishermen to settle’ (15). Anti-Vietnamese resentment from these colonial policies would later periodically explode in pogroms, especially during the nadir of the Democratic Kampuchea period. Singapore's ‘much happier colonial legacy’ can be placed in juxtaposition with Cambodia's. As Easterly (2006) points out, Singapore and her sister crown colony of Hong Kong were ‘unoccupied territories that the British colonized with the permission (or coercion) of the nearby local rulers’:

Even if the British were disposed to boss around or mistreat the indigenous population, they couldn't, because there was none. The people of the two trading stations depended on voluntary migration, mainly from China. Since these colonies depended on trade, the British induced Chinese merchants to settle there. The Brits would hardly have scared the merchants away with exploitation, or any restrictions on trade, so Hong Kong and Singapore were born free traders.

(348)

Unlike Cambodia, Singapore's colonial legacy provided the foundation for its post-colonial economic success.

Following Cambodia's independence in 1953, Norodom Sihanouk had a firm hand in guiding his kingdom's development. After abdicating the throne in favor of his father Norodom Suramarit in 1955, Prince Sihanouk centralized political power through his political machine, the Sangkum Reastr Niyum (Popular Socialist Community), which Ayres (2000) glosses as ‘avast assemblage or organization, embracing players from both the left and the right of the ideological spectrum’, and which served as ‘nothing more than a rubber stamp for the prince and his policies’ (34). Up until 1966, when he lost control of the National Assembly, Sihanouk controlled the National Assembly through the Sangkum, allowing him to shape Cambodia's development based on his ideology of Buddhist socialism, which, being founded on ‘the religious traditions of Cambodian life’, contested the ideological appeal of the leftist opposition (34–35).

Buddhist socialism asserted that the ruler should treat the people equally, with empathy and with goodness… Marxist socialism advocated the abolition of private property ownership and encouraged state or collective ownership of all capital. Sihanouk opposed this belief, arguing that citizens should not be dispossessed of the fruits of their labor. Drawing on Buddhist belief, the rich, the prince argued, should be encouraged to give to the poor to gain merit.

(35)

By the 1960s the Sangkum had established agricultural cooperatives and state-owned enterprises, and launched ‘numerous construction projects within the context of a market economy’ (Ear 2007: 73). However by 1963, the third year of a five-year plan, ‘anticipated returns on investment in infrastructure and education had been considerably less than anticipated’, forcing Sihanouk to slow down the rate of infrastructure investment (Ayres 2000: 46). In addition, the industrialization program was showing less than optimal results, and the government faced a growing budget deficit. In the midst of these economic problems, Sihanouk's growing distrust with the United States prompted him to ‘erase the Americans’ from the kingdom, cancelling much-needed American military and economic assistance, thereby decreasing the government's annual revenues (46–47).

Public frustration over Sihanouk's mismanagement of the economy soon converged with anger over his failure to protect Cambodia from Vietnamese incursions as well as the massive American bombardment of the country's border with Vietnam, leading to General Lon Nol's coup d'état of March 18, 1970 (Ayres 2000: 70–72). Sihanouk retaliated by forming a coalition with the hitherto enemy communist movement to fight the Lon Nol regime, thereby aligning the traditional royalist sentiments of the rural population with the communists and strengthening the rural base of the Khmer Rouge (81). As Gottesman (2003) notes, the civil war brought in a flood of American military assistance to the Lon Nol regime, which ‘found its way to corrupt generals and to officials in control of fuel, medicine, and other elements of the economy connected with the war effort’ (22). The withdrawal of Vietnamese forces following the American and North Vietnamese peace accords of January 1973 allowed the Khmer Rouge to conduct its revolution without Vietnamese interference. In a grim precursor of Democratic Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge ‘evacuated towns, murdered educated Cambodians, and enforced a policy of radical collectivization’ in their ‘liberated zones’. By 1975 the communist insurgency had reached Phnom Penh, and on April 17 the Khmer Rouge finally seized control of the capital city (24). Hinton (2004) suggests that the subsequent 3 years, 8 months and 20 days of revolutionary hyperviolence can be interpreted as a vigorous response to the socioeconomic violence of the prerevolutionary period:

The Khmer Rouge came to power after a period of extreme socioeconomic upheaval: the economy broke down in the wake of the Vietnam War; the United States intensively bombed parts of the Cambodian countryside, killing thousands, destroying homes, and inciting youths to join the antigovernment movement; foreign troops moved at will through strategic areas; Prince Sihanouk was overthrown in a coup headed by pro-U.S. elements; and the country was rocked by a civil war in which up to six hundred thousand people died. As their lives were torn apart, tens of thousands of Cambodian peasants — particularly the extremely poor and the young — joined the Khmer Rouge in order to restore their king to power, to seek vengeance against the corrupt ‘oppressors’ who were responsible for their impoverishment and for the bombing of their homes, and to find meaning in a chaotic and violent world.

(282)

Given these warning signs of impending genocide, it follows that such acts of mass violence may be detected in advance and, in theory, prevented. Indeed, Kiernan (2007) notes that genocide ‘frequently happens when only a small part of the group conspires and acts’, and that ‘such plots usually lack participation from most of the conspirators' race’ (22–23). This opens the intriguing possibility of intervention to prevent acts of massacre or genocide. However in practice successful intervention is contingent on political will. As Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire (2004) recounts from his first-hand experience as the Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda, the UN peacekeepers had multiple opportunities to intervene in the organization of the planned genocide, but these recommended interventions were stymied by the lack of political will from the international community. The failure of the United Nations Mission in East Timor to prevent the 1999 massacres and forced deportations, despite clear warning signs, follows the same pattern mapped out by Dallaire (Robinson 2002), as does the massacre of the Vietnamese of the Chong Kneas floating village in Siem Reap, which, as Widyono (2008) notes, the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia lacked the political will to prevent (96–98).

Ear (2007) notes that ‘the period 1975–89 took Cambodia to its nadir’. This period of revolution, foreign invasion and occupation, and civil war witnessed a ‘massive loss of human resources from death, disease and displacement’, with ‘most of the highly-qualified Cambodians… living outside the country, among them Cambodia's best and brightest, systematically targeted by the Khmer Rouge as a threat to the regime’ (73). Under Pol Pot's guidance, Democratic Kampuchea was transformed into ‘an agrarian Maoist economy’, within which ‘currency and private property were banned’ (73). Genocide survivor Pin Yathay (2000) describes the destabilizing effect of the Khmer Rouge's demonetarization policy on a hapless Chinese refugee from Phnom Penh:

I saw from his face that he was a broken man. He had lost family, business, possessions, and now even his money was useless. That night, as we set up camp, we saw a small crowd of people down by the river. The Chinaman had thrown himself in and drowned, leaving his bag full of useless riels on the river-bank.

(35)

Later, Pin's father and other refugees are shaken when they encounter a Khmer Rouge soldier who finds and angrily throws ten thousand American dollars into the river, denouncing it as ‘imperialist money’:

Stupefied, the passengers looked at each other. Why not keep the dollars? The young man could easily have confiscated them. Apparently, he had no idea of the meaning of foreign currency and how the Khmer Rouge regime could benefit from it.

(53)

As they would soon discover, the Khmer Rouge was working with a radical economic plan that had no place for capitalist instruments such as money, markets or private property. Gottesman (2003) describes the Khmer Rouge's Great Leap Forward, in which Cambodia's urban populations were forcibly evacuated to rural cooperatives where ‘every object, including wild edible plants and fruit, was considered communal property’. In this agrarian utopia, malnutrition and disease reigned, with the rice produced by the nominally self-sufficient collectives ‘trucked away to meet unrealistic production goals and to feed the leadership or the army’. Medical care deteriorated with the Khmer Rouge's murder of ‘class enemies’, including educated medical professionals, leaving ‘those with supposedly pure ideological stances, including children, to serve as doctors and nurses’ (24–29). De Walque (2005) observes that demographic data confirms that ‘violent deaths represented a large share of the excess mortality’ from 1974 to 1980:

Individuals with an urban or educated background were more likely to die, establishing that they were especially targeted. Muslims were less likely to survive than members of other religious groups. Infant and under-five mortality reached very high levels during the Khmer Rouge period and, unlike the pattern in subsequent periods, was as high among urban and educated households as in rural and less educated families.

(351)

After the fall of Phnom Penh to the Vietnamese army on January 7, 1979, Cambodia plunged into civil war, with the Vietnamese-backed People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) regime facing off against the remnant Khmer Rouge and a non-communist resistance. The PRK government faced an economy left devastated by Khmer Rouge misrule: infrastructure and equipment had been destroyed, damaged or left in a state of disrepair; educated citizens had either been murdered or fled the country; and the surviving population was weakened by malnutrition and disease, and ‘unable to resume normal economic activity’ (Gottesman 2003: 79–80). While humanitarian aid from the Red Cross, UNICEF and various Vietnamese provinces and municipalities helped alleviate the immediate crisis, the West's economic embargo of the PRK, and the PRK's suspicion of Western aid, postponed by over a decade the arrival of the flood of Western aid into the Cambodian economy (84–86).

While Western aid was largely absent, aid from the Soviet bloc ‘helped to stabilize and legitimize’ the PRK: the regime's distribution of rice and other necessities helped instill ‘the minimum of goodwill necessary to govern and to fight off a civil insurgency’. In the absence of a national currency, the regime disbursed the donated rice to ‘pay its officials, soldiers, cadres, and state workers’, allowing for the reestablishment of a working administration. This also saw the reemergence of corruption, with officials and soldiers ‘distributing, selling, or seizing rice according to local conditions and their own impulses’ (Gottesman 2003: 87). This cereal currency facilitated the emergence of a black market, where ‘everything was for sale: vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, noodles, and old clothes’. The PRK, lacking a bureaucracy at this early stage to properly organize a socialist economy, saw the necessity of allowing this spontaneous free market. The reemergence of capitalism was also facilitated by the establishment of markets at the refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border, allowing Thai goods to enter Cambodia. The PRK's pragmatic decision to permit and tax this border trade would ‘enrich local and national leaders’, and strengthen ‘patronage systems that connected local authorities with a hand in the trade to some of the most powerful people in Phnom Penh’ (88–90). The existence of these markets would influence the regime's reintroduction of the riel as the national currency: peasants ‘were refusing to sell their rice to the state below black market prices’. In response the regime bought rice ‘at close to market prices while issuing only maximum and minimum prices’. While pragmatic, this policy offered ‘enormous opportunities for graft and corruption to the bureaucracy’ (100). As we shall see, this socialist-era corruption would persist and expand through the country's transition to neoliberal capitalism.

In the countryside, the PRK reintroduced agricultural collectivization in the form of Production Solidarity Groups, which the regime took care to distinguish from the ‘monstrous caricature’ of Democratic Kampuchea's killing fields. Following the Vietnamese model, collectivization was ‘expected to form the backbone of a socialized economy, channeling food to a state commercial network that would, in turn, distribute goods throughout the country’. Within these Solidarity Groups there would be an ‘equal distribution of rice, regardless of individual contribution’, but as the regime was to discover, this system removed the incentive to work. Following similar changes of socialist thinking in Hanoi, the PRK attempted to encourage economic growth by distributing land (albeit still under the ownership of the state) to individual families and tolerating their small-scale private-sector economic activity (Gottesman 2003: 91–95). However, these reforms were insufficient to make collectivization a success, as the policy was being subverted from within by corruption. Local officials were distributing land of low quality to the Solidarity Groups under their control, and keeping the prime land for their families for the profitable purposes of rent or sale (272–73). By 1989, despite the legal codification of the distinction between land use and land ownership, local officials continued to trade in land they legally did not own. This pattern of state officials ignoring the law for private gain would persist in the corruption of the post-socialist neoliberal era.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, and in particular the end of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in 1991, had a dire impact on Cambodia (Ear 2007: 74), with the loss of aid from the former Soviet bloc contributing to triple-digit inflation, exchange rate instability, and an ‘unsustainable budget deficit’ in the early 1990s (Ear 2009: 151). The loss of Soviet bloc aid was, however, soon followed by the arrival of a flood of Western aid. After the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in October 1991, United Nations secretary-general Perez de Cuellar ‘appealed to the international community to support Cambodia's rehabilitation efforts’, leading to ‘pledges and other commitments totaling $880 million at the first International Conference on the Rehabilitation of Cambodia (ICORC) in Tokyo in June 1992’, with an additional $119 million pledged the following year (Ear 2007: 74). Following its UN-organized elections in 1993, Cambodia ‘received five billion dollars in Official Development Assistance (ODA), turning it into one of the most aid-dependent countries in the world, with half of its national budget funded from ODA’ (69). With this acceptance of Western aid, Cambodia accepted the structural adjustment conditionalities imposed by donor agencies such as United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. These policy prescriptions, known as the ‘Washington Consensus’, aimed at transitioning Cambodia from a socialist planned to a neoliberal market economy (Ear 1997: 73–74). The structural adjustment program, which included measures such as ‘the privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), the creation of a body of regulatory statutes, and the downsizing of the military and civil service sectors’, helped reduce inflation ‘from a high of 112% in 1992 to under 10% in 1995–96’, stabilized the exchange rate, and reduced the budget deficit from 4.6 percent of GDP in 1992 to 0.6 percent of GDP in 1995 (Ear 1997: 91–92; Ear 2007: 74). As Ear (1997) notes, Cambodia's structural adjustment occurred in its unique context of the ‘absence of effective regulation due to decades of war, revolution and foreign occupation’ (92). As it turned out, Cambodia's neoliberal transformation would be quickly reshaped by its elites who enriched themselves on the aid delivered by generous foreign donors:

Indeed, what makes ‘actually existing’ neoliberalism in Cambodia distinctly Cambodian is how local elites co-opted, transformed, and rearticulated neoliberal reforms. This has been done in such a way that it reinforces existing patron-client relations through a framework which ‘asset stripped’ foreign resources brought in to support the building of the liberal peace, thus inc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Third-Worlding of Cambodia
• 2 Jacotot in Cambodia
• 3 The gaze and the tain
• 4 A Cambodian hauntology
• 5 Cambodian literature as heterotopia
• 6 Breakfast with the dictator
• 7 Reassembling memory
• 8 Precarious lives
• Bibliography
• Index