A History of Cambodia

David Chandler

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429975141
• Edición: 4
• Categoría: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Categoría: Politica asiatica

In this clear and concise volume, author David Chandler provides a timely overview of Cambodia, a small but increasingly visible Southeast Asian nation. Praised by the Journal of Asian Studies as an ''original contribution, superior to any other existing work'', this acclaimed text has now been completely revised and updated to include material examining the early history of Cambodia, whose famous Angkorean ruins now attract more than one million tourists each year, the death of Pol Pot, and the revolution and final collapse of the Khmer Rouge. The fourth edition reflects recent research by major scholars as well as Chandler's long immersion in the subject and contains an entirely new section on the challenges facing Cambodia today, including an analysis of the current state of politics and sociology and the increasing pressures of globalization. This comprehensive overview of Cambodia will illuminate, for undergraduate students as well as general readers, the history and contemporary politics of a country long misunderstood.

1

Introduction

This book will examine roughly two thousand years of Cambodian history. Chapters 2 through 5 carry the story up to the end of the eighteenth century; the remaining chapters deal with the period between 1794 and 2007.

One reason for writing the book has been to close a gap in the historiography of Southeast Asia. No lengthy history of Cambodia has appeared since the publication of Adhémard Leclère’s Histoire du Cambodge in 1914.¹ Subsequent surveys, in French and English, have limited themselves to the study of particular eras or have relied primarily on secondary sources.² Over the last sixty years or so, moreover, many of Leclère’s hypotheses and much of his periodization—to say nothing of his style of approach—have been revised by other scholars, weakened by new documents, or altered by archaeological findings. The colonial era ended in 1953 and needs examination in terms of preceding history; moreover, the so-called middle period discussed in Chapters 5 through 7 has often been ignored even though it clearly forms a bridge between Angkor and the present.

The time has come, in other words, to reexamine primary sources, to synthesize other people’s scholarly work, and to place my own research, concerned mainly with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, into the framework of a general history, with a nonspecialist audience, as well as undergraduates, in mind.

As it stands the book examines several themes. One of these has to do with the effects on Cambodian politics and society of the country’s location between Thailand and Vietnam. This theme, which is discussed in detail in Chapters 6 and 7, has been crucial since the second half of the eighteenth century and has recently faded in importance. For over two hundred years, beginning in the 1780s, the presence of two powerful, antagonistic neighbors forced the contentious Cambodian elite either to prefer one or the other or to attempt to neutralize them by appealing to an outside power. Cambodian kings tried both alternatives in the nineteenth century. Later on, Norodom Sihanouk, Lon Nol, and Pol Pot all attempted the second; the regime of the State of Cambodia (SOC), formerly the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, which lasted from 1979 until 1991, committed itself to the patronage of Vietnam. A UN protectorate (1991–93) neutralized the contending foreign patrons of Cambodia by removing it from Cold War rivalries. In the late 1990s Cambodia and Vietnam joined the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the Kingdom of Cambodia, established under that name in 1993, has so far avoided seeking a dominant foreign patron, although in recent years China has emerged as an increasingly important ally and benefactor of the regime.

Another theme, really a present-day one, has to do with the relationship of contemporary Cambodians to their past. The history of Angkor, after all, was deciphered, restored, and bequeathed to them by their French colonial masters. Why had so many Cambodians forgotten it, or remembered it primarily as myth? What did it mean to have the memories and the grandeur brought back to life, in times of dependence? What happened to the “times between” Angkor and the modern era? And in what ways are the post-Angkorean years, the colonial era, and what has happened since 1954 connected to these earlier periods? How are the revolutionary events of the 1970s to be remembered, taught, and internalized? There has even been pressure from the government to play down the teaching of Cambodian history as too controversial.

A third theme arises from the pervasiveness of patronage and hierarchies in Cambodian thinking, politics, and social relations. For most of Cambodian history, it seems, people in power were thought (by themselves and nearly everyone else) to be more meritorious than others. Older people were also ideologically privileged. Despite some alterations these arrangements remained unchanged between Cambodia’s socalled Indianized phase in the early years if the present era and the onset of Theravada Buddhism in the fourteenth century, when some egalitarianism, but not much, seeped into Cambodian social relations.³ The widespread acceptance of an often demeaning status quo meant that in Marxist terms Cambodians went through centuries of mystification. If this is so, and one’s identity was so frequently related to subordination, what did political independence mean?

A final theme, related to the third, springs from the inertia that seems to be characteristic of many rural societies like Cambodia. Until very recently, alternatives to subsistence agriculture and incremental social improvements of any kind were rarely available to most Cambodians and were in any case rarely sought, as the outcome could be starvation or punishment at the hands of those in power. In the meantime, crops had to be harvested and families raised, as they had been harvested and raised before. The way things had always been done in the village, the family, and the palace was seen as the way things should be done. Clearly, this attitude suited elite interests and kept the rest of society in line, but the process may well have been less cynical than we might wish to think. After all, how else was stability to be maintained? Throughout Cambodian history, in any case, governance (or rajakar, literally “royal work”) was the privilege enjoyed by people freed in some way from the obligation of growing their own food. The governed grew food for those above them in exchange for their protection.

This conservative cast of mind has led some writers to suggest that, at least until the 1970s, Cambodia and its people were unchanging and asleep. The notion of changelessness suited the French colonial administration, as it implied docility. For later observers there has been something “un-Cambodian” about revolutionary efforts, however misguided and inept, to break into a new kind of life and something un-Cambodian about the country becoming a player on the global scene.

The notion of changelessness, of course, is an oversimplification of events, but it has persisted for a long time among students of Cambodian history and among Cambodians with a conservative point of view. The notion will be undermined in this book, for each of the chapters that follow records a major transformation in Cambodian life. The first perceptible one came with the mobilization of population and resources to form a somewhat Indianized polity at the start of the Christian era, discussed in Chapter 2. Another followed the concentration of power at Angkor in the ninth and tenth centuries, which is described in Chapter 3. A state emerged at Angkor that some scholars have seen as a classic example of Karl Wittfogel’s notion of oriental despotism or of Marx’s concept of an Asiatic mode of production and which has bequeathed an extraordinary legacy of religious monuments and sculpture.⁴ Still another transformation, discussed in Chapter 4, overtook the Khmer when their capital was damaged by Cham invaders in 1177 and was rebuilt into a Buddhist city by the Khmer monarch Jayavarman VII, who was a Mahayana Buddhist. In the century following his death in 1220, still another transformation occurred: the conversion of most Cambodians from a loose-fitting form of Shaivistic Hinduism, with perhaps some Mahayana overtones, to Theravada Buddhism, the religion of the new kingdoms that were coming into being in what is now central Thailand. These changes are discussed in Chapter 5. The abandonment of Angkor in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the southward drift of Cambodia’s demographic center of gravity in this period probably had even more profound effects.

Because the sources are so thin and unreliable, the middle period of Cambodian history, extending from the abandonment of Angkor to the imposition of French control, is difficult to study, but it is clear that it was very different from its Angkorean forebear. For one thing, the spread of Theravada Buddhism (and its corollary, Thai cultural influence) diminished the importance of priestly families close to the king who had crowded around the throne looking for preferment. In Angkorean times, these families had controlled much of the land and manpower around Angkor through their connections with royally sponsored religious foundations. As these foundations were replaced by wats (Theravada Buddhist temples), the forms of social mobilization that had been in effect at Angkor broke down, and so did the massive and complicated irrigation system that had allowed Angkorean populations to harvest two or sometimes three crops of rice per year. The elite grew less numerous as a result of these changes and out-migration, while its interests became more commercial.

Unfortunately for us, these transformations occurred in a very poorly documented era. Through documents, we can examine Cambodian society before and after the transformations, but not while they were taking place. We have no clear idea, for example, why so many people changed religions when they did or how the process played out. Although there were clearly some economic incentives involved, it is hard to say why (and when) a landholding Angkorean elite transformed itself into, or was replaced by, an elite more interested in trade.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Cambodia became a victim of its location. Its capital region (Phnom Penh/Udong/Lovek) lay at the eastern edge of the Theravada cultural zone that included Burma and Siam, and it was very close to the expanding southern frontier of Sinicized Vietnam. The region, in other words, lay along a cultural fault line. This fact affected the thinking and behavior of Cambodia’s leaders, drawn into games of realpolitik that they could never expect to win. By the end of the eighteenth century, Cambodia had been devastated by civil wars and invasions from both sides; it was even without a monarch for several years. The early 1800s, discussed in Chapters 6 and 7, formed perhaps the darkest portion of the post-Angkorean era. By the mid-nineteenth century, Cambodia was almost a failed state. After a brief taste of independence under King Duang (r. 1848–60), the kingdom succumbed to French protection. Its rulers probably preferred this state of affairs to continuing Thai hegemony, but French rule soon came to resemble the “civilizing mission” imposed upon Cambodia earlier by the Vietnamese when the monarch’s autonomy had also been sharply reduced.

The economic, social, and cultural changes of the colonial period in Cambodia resembled those that occurred elsewhere in Southeast Asia, but they were less intense than those that affected Java, Burma, and the Philippines under systematic colonial rule. As in these other colonies, however, the changes that swept through Cambodia helped to put together the framework for the Cambodian nation-state that emerged very briefly in 1945 and again in 1953.⁵

The three most obvious transformations in the colonial era discussed in Chapters 8 and 9, were in foreign trade, communications, and demography. Rice and corn, grown for the first time in large quantities for export, and rubber, grown for the first time altogether, now linked Cambodia with the world outside Southeast Asia. Its economy, never especially strong, became partially dependent on this outside world. Nothing altered with political independence; most of Cambodia’s foreign exchange throughout the 1950s and 1960s came from earnings on the export of rice, rubber, and corn.

Perhaps the most visible difference between colonial and precolonial Cambodia, however, had to do with communications. By the 1920s, one could travel across Cambodia by car in a couple of days—a journey that had taken months just fifty years before. Cambodians began moving around the country by road and rail and found markets for their products opening up. The social changes that accompanied this new freedom of movement were obviously important, but they are hard to document precisely.

Finally, for every Cambodian who had greeted the French (if the image is appropriate) in 1863, there were four to say good-bye. Cambodia’s population, estimated at slightly less than a million when the protectorate was declared, had risen to more than four million by the early 1950s. By keeping the kingdom at peace and by introducing some improvements in hygiene, the French presided over a demographic revolution that, when it intensified in the 1960s, soon put serious pressures on Cambodian resources. Since the 1980s these pressures have become even more severe, and Cambodia now has thirteen million people.⁶

It is difficult to say how decisive the Japanese occupation of Cambodia in World War II was, particularly as the French remained in nominal control until March 1945. With hindsight, however, it is clear that the summer of 1945, when Japan granted Cambodia its independence, had a profound effect on many Cambodian young people. In the late 1940s after the French returned, a new political ideology based on resistance rather than cooperation and on independence rather than subordination also took hold among many rural Cambodians, as well as in sectors of the Buddhist clergy and the educated elite. Some of these people opted for a revolutionary alternative to the status quo, occasionally with disastrous effects. These developments in the 1940s and early 1950s, discussed in Chapter 10, continued as an undertone to Cambodian political ideology ever since.

Cambodia gained its independence in 1953, but its economy remained much as it had been under the French. Under the relatively benign dictatorship of the former king, now titled Prince Norodom Sihanouk, which lasted from 1955 to 1970, education expanded, the economy flourished, and the country enjoyed a period now regarded by most Cambodians over fifty as a kind of golden age. By the mid-1960s, however, as the Vietnam War intensified and as Sihanouk’s ability to control Cambodia’s politics diminished, new forces came into play, including a revolutionary movement dominated from the shadows by the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) led by a former schoolteacher, Saloth Sar, who later took the name Pol Pot.

In March 1970 Cambodia’s National Assembly voted to remove the prince from power. Soon afterward the new, pro-American government declared that Cambodia had become a republic. This move, which ended over a thousand years of Cambodian kingship, which was restored in 1993, occurred in the context of a Vietnamese Communist invasion, U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and a burgeoning civil war inside Cambodia between the government and forces allegedly loyal to Sihanouk. The latter were soon controlled by the CPK, and a brutal civil war lasted until April 1975, when the Communists, known popularly in the West as the Khmer Rouge, were victorious.

Over the next three years, many of Cambodia’s institutions were destroyed or overturned, and the urban population, forcibly exiled from towns and cities, was put to work alongside everybody else (except for soldiers and CPK cadres) as agricultural laborers. The new regime abolished money, markets, formal schooling, Buddhist practices, and private property. In a headlong rush toward a socialist Utopia, nearly two million Cambodians, or one in four, died of overwork, malnutrition, and misdiagnosed diseases or were executed.

The regime of Democratic Kampuchea (DK) effectively destroyed itself when its leaders decided in 1977, with Chinese encouragement, to wage war on the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. By that time, economic disaster in the countryside and uncertainty about the loyalty of high-ranking CPK members had led Pol Pot and his colleagues to set purges of the CPK in motion, during which at least fifteen thousand people were executed at the regime’s secret prison after interrogation and after providing detailed, but often spurious, confessions.⁷ Tens of thousands of others, especially in the eastern part of the country, were later killed for allegedly supporting the Vietnamese incursions of 1977 and 1978. These men and women were said to have Cambodian bodies and Vietnamese minds. Such actions hastened the collapse of DK and paved the way for a Vietnamese invasion. After 1979, Cambodia, known as the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) and later as the State of Cambodia (SOC), struggled to its feet under Vietnamese protection. For several years, the regime submitted to Vietnamese guidance and control, particularly in the realms of defense, internal security, and foreign relations.

Throughout the 1980s, repeated votes in the United Nations condemned Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia and allowed DK representatives to occupy Cambodia’s UN seat. Lacking diplomatic recognition (aside from allies of Vietnam), the PRK was unable to obtain development assistance, so the country’s economic recovery was slow. Resistance forces, claiming loyalty to Sihanouk, the CPK, and an amorphous middle-class grouping, found sanctuary in Thailand and received political support from the United Nations that was spearheaded by the United States and China. Throughout the 1980s, Pol Pot’s forces, estimated at between twenty thousand and forty thousand armed men and women, also benefited from extensive Chinese military aid.

The process of rediscovering and reshaping Cambodia’s identity, which is not the same as reconstructing its prerevolutionary appearance, continued through the 1990s and beyond, as did yet another transformation whereby Cambodia today has become part of the wider community of Southeast Asian nations and moved into the global marketplace....