Neither Cambodian nor Chinese: Vietnamizing the History of Saigon
Maureen Feeney, University of Michigan

http://www.lib.washington.edu/Southeastasia/vsg/org/aas%20abstract_00.html

In 1998, Vietnamese state officials organized a year-long celebration of the 300-year anniversary of Saigon with the cooperation of local historians. As Vietnamese historians acknowledge, however, the region was already populated by a number of ethnic groups, in particular the Khmer and Chinese. Why, then, did the authorities declare that Saigon was exactly 300 years old? This paper argues that by selecting 1698 as the originary year of Saigon, the authorities were able to downplay the foundational roles of non-Vietnamese settlers.

How the War Goes On (And On) in Cambodia

By BARBARA CROSSETTE

The New York Times; Published: June 22, 1997

(Comments: This article provides a unique view on how Cambodia is in such a deadly mess due mostly to its own doing. The Paris Agreements had given Cambodia the last best chance to survive and that chance was totally destroyed by Sihanouk's betrayal as he allied himself with Hun Sen. On the other hand, the Khmer Rouge provided Vietnam and Hun Sen the most valuable excuse to invade Cambodia, by setting the moral standard by which Cambodia is to be judged. By demonizing the demons (Khmer Rouge), Vietnam and Hun Sen made themselves more acceptable to the international community.  Then Vietnam sealed the deal by imposing its will on Cambodia by using Hun Sen and Sihanouk, and by imposing an unequal treaty, whereby any protest however benign it may be, is considered as a threat to Vietnam's security, as is proven in the case of the kidnapping by Hun Sen and sent to be tried by Vietnam of the reverend Tim Sakhorn. Cambodia, will probably never another chance anytime soon to leberate itself from Vietnam's colonialism and imperialism, as the international community is so tired of Cambodia's endless fighting against each other. Naranhkiri Tith, Ph.D. Washington DC. Decem ber 28, 2007)

AS Cambodia wobbles yet again on the edge of a violent implosion, barely five years (and billions of dollars) after the United Nations mounted the largest national recovery mission in its history, the rest of the world might justifiably wonder, as an anonymous diplomat asked last week, whether Cambodians are simply bent on killing each other. ''Let them be,'' seems to be the common sentiment. ''We have done all we can for them.''

That's the problem.

There has always been foreign meddling in the affairs of this extraordinary country of Buddhist piety, royalist loyalty, artistic brilliance, exquisite natural beauty and inexplicably deep strains of human cruelty and venality.

Thailand, France, Japan, Vietnam, China, the United States have had a hand in writing and rewriting Cambodia's history and, more broadly, the history of Indochina. A short but not small part of the story is known to Americans as the Vietnam War.

The effects of that war are still being felt throughout Southeast Asia. Perhaps it was fateful coincidence last week that while rumors were flying in Cambodia that Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader responsible for at least a million deaths from 1975 to 1979, had been captured, Robert McNamara, the American Defense Secretary who played a major role in raising United States stakes in the war, was in Vietnam discussing how that war could have been avoided.

Perhaps, too, he had learned enough to know that history did not begin with the Americans.

The Indochinese conflicts of this century have roots in old animosities that were easily exploited by new players. The ancient Siamese were such a perennial threat to the Khmer people of what is now Cambodia that the home of the stupendous temples and palaces at Angkor was joyously and proudly named Siem Reap, for victory over Siam. Modern Thailand, which inherited that Siamese legacy, has never given up the game. The Thai military until very recently enjoyed a lucrative business partnership with the Khmer Rouge that allowed generals to exploit impoverished Cambodia's timber and gemstones.

Vietnam was Cambodia's other traditional foe. Some scholars on how Pol Pot came to power believe that the Khmer Rouge's vicious hate propaganda against Vietnam earned it genuine support -- and still does, because Cambodians believe their two larger neighbors will always fight over them.

But Siam and Vietnam were outdone by France, which consolidated its hold over Indochina -- Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos -- by the late 19th century. Decades of relative peace followed, until World War II when Japan occupied much of Southeast Asia. When the Japanese were driven out in 1945, it was only a matter of time before French Indochina became independent countries in 1953-54 -- and again vulnerable.

It is fitting that Mr. McNamara and veterans of the leftist-nationalist movement in Vietnam should be talking about how the war got out of control, because the critical decisions made in Hanoi and Washington in the 1950's and 1960's still send out ripples.

After the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and the division of Vietnam, the communist leadership under Ho Chi Minh decided that the conquest of South Vietnam, not national development, was the top priority. America's entry did not deter Hanoi, only raised the real and human costs of its policy.

''Vietnam was prepared to make extreme sacrifices, but the Americans didn't understand this,'' Deputy Foreign Minister Dao Huy Ngoc told the gathering on Friday.

The war set Vietnam back at least a generation, but Hanoi thought the price worth the prize. While other Southeast Asian nations were spawning tiger-cub economies, the country was re-educating its people. The economic damage was compounded when an embittered United States, which had dropped bombs all over Indochina, denied Hanoi recognition and investment dollars for nearly 20 years after the fall of Saigon.

American capital and development -- including roads that the Vietnamese can only dream of -- rained on Thailand during the war. United States troops and planes found a home and a lot of good times. Thais, until they belatedly concluded that an American military presence would not serve their regional interests, prospered by the arrangement.

Missed Opportunity

The Thai economy, however troubled, now dominates Laos, which America bombed to box in the Vietnamese, and where it armed anti-communist hill people. Many Hmong were abandoned by their American paymasters and left in refugee camps in Thailand. Laos, always fragile, has yet to recover from its role as ideological battleground.

But it is in Cambodia that the Vietnam War itself seems never to have ended. Cambodia was everybody's opportunity. The Vietnamese used it as a sanctuary for North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong while talking of a federation of Indochinese states (dragging in the hapless Lao) that sounded very similar to what the French had planned half a century earlier. The communists in Beijing and Hanoi courted Cambodia's radical leftist movement, which Prince Norodom Sihanouk had first called, disdainfully, the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge had, paradoxically, picked up their communist education in France. The Prince, who found himself in opposition in the 1970's, flirted with them enough to give Pol Pot credence with many Cambodians and served briefly and disastrously as their figurehead when they took power in 1975.

By then the United States had waded clumsily into Cambodia to support the anti-communist Lon Nol Government that had overthrown Prince Sihanouk's original regime in March 1970. Secret American bombing raids into Cambodian territory in violation of Congressional restrictions, compounded by an American-South Vietnamese invasion, helped the Khmer Rouge recruit new followers, although many Cambodians say now that the raids were probably not the most critical factor in Pol Pot's rise to power, given the support he got from the Vietnamese and China -- and from Norodom Sihanouk.

The fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, days ahead of the fall of Saigon, did not end American, Chinese or Vietnamese involvement in Cambodia. The war soon went on by proxy, with a part of the Khmer Rouge movement drawing closer to Vietnam as another faction threatened Hanoi's interests. In December 1978, Vietnam invaded, setting up a cooperative government the next month under Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge -- who is today the country's Second Prime Minister. China was furious and marched over the border into Vietnam to teach the Vietnamese a lesson. The Vietnamese taught them instead.

When the defeated Khmer Rouge fled toward the Thai frontier, they were drawn into an unholy alliance with the Cambodian royalists and a small, more democratic and moderate faction under Son Sann. China and the United States were among those who gave the alliance diplomatic and material support. Eager to rid Cambodia of the Vietnamese, Beijing and Washington, strongly supported by other Southeast Asian nations ready to seize economic opportunities in Indochina, forced Hanoi's withdrawal and engineered a peace treaty that put all factions back in play in Phnom Penh in 1992.

Until recently, it appeared that the Vietnam War had finally ended in Cambodia. Last week, the Cambodians struck up the music, and a new game of musical chairs began. 

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Dancing in Shadows
The Phnom Penh Post, December 2007

(Comments: This article is unique as, for the first time, it reveals some of the most important historical facts about Sihanouk behind the scene's maneuvers to torpedo UNTAC-sponsored general elections in the summer of 1993, and to help Hun Sen regain his full power after his defeat by Ranariddh, in those elections. In so doing, Sihanouk has again showed that he is not at all interested in democratic process in Cambodia. His main concern was to regain the full power to rule that he once had, in Cambodia

First, Sihanouk, tried to hijack the costly UN-sponsored elections process by trying to take over the power and by forming a so-called government of Coalition with Hun Sen and Ranariddh as vice presidents and himself as President of the Coaltion government.

Then, after strong objection from the international community, especially from(UNTAC), he then orchestrated a secession movement in the Eastern Zone, using one of his many sons, Chakrapong along with a CPP member and minister, Sin Song, as leaders of that movement. Confronting by his own father machialellian plot, Ranariddh had no choice but to accept his father manipulations and accept a typical Sihanouk creation in the form of a unique government in the world with two prime ministers.

As you can see, Sihanouk, when not in power, never stops his evil intention to destroy Cambodia, by associating himself with Cambodia's worst enemies, such as; the Vietnamese, the khmer Rouge, and now Hun Sen and his murderous CPP. Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Wahington DC. December 7, 2007)

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The anxious exhilarating UNTAC days: Successes and failures. Reviewed by David Chandler.

Vietnam Genocide Against Khmer Kampuchea Krom

Link to Khmer Krom wholesale persecution by Vietnam entitled

‘Eliminated without Bleeding’ 

(Comments: a word of caution before watching this series of film clips on how Vietnam is committing an ongoing genocide to eradicate our brothers and sisters from Kampuchea Krom from the surface of the earth, while Sihanouk and Hun Sen claim that it is not a Cambodian problem but an internal problem of Vietnam. This sequence of film clips is an extemely detailed depiction of how much suffering our brothers and sisters are enduring daily from the murderous hands of the Vietnamese government. If the Khmer Krom are allowed to perish without anything done to help them from all of us, we certainly are going to disappear soon as well. So, wake up Cambodians, wherever you may be living now. The end is very near. Naranhkiri Tith Ph. D. Washington DC, November 27, 2007)

ELIMINATED WITHOUT BLEEDING is a one-hour documentary on the Khmer Krom indigenous peoples from the Mekong Delta in Southern Vietnam. The Khmer Krom explain how they are oppressed and eliminated as a peoples. There is no freedom of speech, religion or culture. Aggressively Vietnamized, the Khmer Krom struggle to maintain their way of life and identity.

Please, to see this set of film clips, either click on the link pasted below, or to paste it on 'http' browser.

http://rebeccasommer.org/documentaries/Khmer-Krom/index.php

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Khmer Krom Association deceived by Cambodian Parliament leaders

By Sok Serei

Radio Free Asia

Translated from Khmer by Socheata

26 April 2007

(Comments: During a recent his visit to Cambodia, the president of the Vietnamese parliament raised the issue of Vietnamese residents in Cambodia, and praised their countrymen of being brave to have endured a difficult situation in Cambodia. The Hun Sen government has recognized the Vietnamese asssociations in Cambodia as legal entities. In Vietnam, The Vietnamese government not nly did not recognized the Khmer Krom associations as legal entities, but has persecuted them by not allowing them to have their own religion, culture, and social asssociation. The persecution of the Khmer Kroms is by defintion a genocide. Yet, Heng Samrin had declared that the mistrreatment of the Khmer Krom by Vietnam is an internal problem of Vietnam alone, while allowing Veitnamese to have their own associations and freedom to be a full citizen of Cambodia, without even a period of wating. In addition, no figure from the last population census was allowed to be publicly known. If Hun Sen and his CPP is not working for the Vietnamese, by their despiclable behavior towards the Khmer Krom people, what else do we need to prove that they are traitors to Cambodia by just looking at how Hun Sen and his CPP are treating our fellow countrymen the  Khmer Krom case.as discussed earlier. Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. November 27, 2007)

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On Thursday, a group of associations for Khmer Kampuchea-Krom Human Rights Defense have issued one after another their deception on the standing adopted by the Cambodian National Assembly president who rejected the request for him to negotiate the Khmer Krom issue with

Nguyen Phu Trong, Vietnam Assembly chairman, during the latter's visit in Cambodia.

Thach Setha, President of the Khmer Kampuchea-Krom Association in Cambodia, reacted by saying: "I am very deceived by the attitude of Heng Samrin, the president of National Assembly, who considers the Khmer Kampuchea Krom issue as not being a Cambodian issue, but rather a

Vietnamese internal affair. I believe that this a serious mistake because according to the Constitution [of Cambodia] and the Nationality law, Khmer Krom people are truly Cambodian citizens."

Monk Yoeung Sin, President of the Khmer Kampuchea-Krom Monks Association based in Phnom Penh, reacted by saying that all his hopes have evaporated. "Talking about Khmer people, wherever they are born, they are supported, and legally recognized by the [Cambodian] Constitution."

A source indicated that during the meeting held between Heng Samrin and Nguyen Phu Trong on Thursday, the Khmer Krom issue and the border affair were not discussed, and that only bilateral signing for the strengthening of the cooperation between the Vietnamese and Cambodian

parliaments took place.

Prior to this meeting, Heng Samrin told reporters that the Khmer Kampuchea-Krom issue is a Vietnamese internal affair. "The Kampuchea Krom monks is an internal affair of their country, it's not a Cambodian issue, we are not interfering in the internal affair of another country..."

One source also indicated that 5 Khmer Krom monks fled Kampuchea Krom (South Vietnam) and they have reached Cambodia on Thursday. The 5 monks have been in hiding from the Vietnamese authority which wants to defrock them.

There is no indication of protest by Khmer Krom monks in Phnom Penh during the 3-day official visit of Nguyen Phu Trong in Cambodia. The associations for the Khmer Krom Human Rights Defense have recently sent a joint statement demanding that Cambodian Parliament leaders discuss with their Vietnamese counterpart, the Khmer Krom issue.

Recently also, peaceful demonstrations have been held in several countries, the USA, Australia, France and Cambodia, by Khmer Krom people and Khmer Krom monks, to protest against the defrocking of 16 Khmer Krom monks by the Vietnamese authority, and the jailing of 5 other monks who have been demanding for their freedom of Buddhist religious belief according to Cambodian custom.

The Vietnamese Assembly chairman who is currently visiting Cambodia, also plans to meet with Chea Sim, the Senate president, Prime Minister Hun Sen, and King Norodom Sihamoni.

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