[T2P Media comments in blue ink]
When the War Was Over
by Elizabeth Becker
also available in Khmer
Excerpts from Chapter 9: Habits of War
While
it is clear Cambodia started the border war with Vietnam, it is less
obvious why Vietnam interpreted that challenge as an invitation to
invade and occupy Cambodia.
It was not the atrocious policies of the Khmer Rouge that turned Vietnam against Cambodia, not the slaughter or the slavery. It was a question of domination, control, and territory, of ridding Vietnam of the "problem" of Cambodia once and forever--questions that cannot be arbitrarily relegated to the communist era, the colonial period, or even the Angkor era. But they are questions that can be resolved without full-scale war and occupation. It was Vietnam's resort to total warfare that prompted the inevitable comparisons with their Red River ancestors. The communists in Hanoi had turned a near-disaster into a historic opportunity to realize what their predecessors had attempted centuries earlier: control of the Mekong River...
The Vietnamese expansion had begun in the eleventh century when they won three northern provinces from the Chams in what is now central Vietnam... Their dynasties grew stronger and more effective in raising taxes and enforcing a common, militaristic goal for the society. They looked to China as a model, or yardstick to measure their own accomplishments, while they looked south to the Mekong River for land. That attitude survived to modern times...
... First the Nguyen Vietnamese used divisions within the Khmer court to win favors and territory from Cambodian rivals to the crown. Then they openly interfered with Khmer politics, enforcing their policies on Khmer rulers. The decadent and weak Cambodian rulers encouraged this interference. [Sounds familiar with Hun Sen's CPP?]
The Nguyen Vietnamese settled their newly acquired Khmer territory in a manner that, again, has echoes in modern affairs. First they allowed their least desirable elements to open the territory--vagabonds, deserters, and those banished from their villages... [Now, also sex-traffickers... watch CNN's report "Every Day Cambodia] The state then selected formal settlers to farm the land and build new villages [reason why the Hun Sen CPP blatantly criminalized Sam Rainsy for shedding light on the problems in Svay Rieng]... Finally, demobilized soldiers were given land grants in the territory in return for their military service [p. 333]...
It was not the atrocious policies of the Khmer Rouge that turned Vietnam against Cambodia, not the slaughter or the slavery. It was a question of domination, control, and territory, of ridding Vietnam of the "problem" of Cambodia once and forever--questions that cannot be arbitrarily relegated to the communist era, the colonial period, or even the Angkor era. But they are questions that can be resolved without full-scale war and occupation. It was Vietnam's resort to total warfare that prompted the inevitable comparisons with their Red River ancestors. The communists in Hanoi had turned a near-disaster into a historic opportunity to realize what their predecessors had attempted centuries earlier: control of the Mekong River...
The Vietnamese expansion had begun in the eleventh century when they won three northern provinces from the Chams in what is now central Vietnam... Their dynasties grew stronger and more effective in raising taxes and enforcing a common, militaristic goal for the society. They looked to China as a model, or yardstick to measure their own accomplishments, while they looked south to the Mekong River for land. That attitude survived to modern times...
... First the Nguyen Vietnamese used divisions within the Khmer court to win favors and territory from Cambodian rivals to the crown. Then they openly interfered with Khmer politics, enforcing their policies on Khmer rulers. The decadent and weak Cambodian rulers encouraged this interference. [Sounds familiar with Hun Sen's CPP?]
The Nguyen Vietnamese settled their newly acquired Khmer territory in a manner that, again, has echoes in modern affairs. First they allowed their least desirable elements to open the territory--vagabonds, deserters, and those banished from their villages... [Now, also sex-traffickers... watch CNN's report "Every Day Cambodia] The state then selected formal settlers to farm the land and build new villages [reason why the Hun Sen CPP blatantly criminalized Sam Rainsy for shedding light on the problems in Svay Rieng]... Finally, demobilized soldiers were given land grants in the territory in return for their military service [p. 333]...
[Now, more recently, they also annex under the cover of RELIGION, case in point unfolding now in Kampot and Mount Bokor facilitated and protected by Vietnamese tycoon who owns the Sokha Hotel chain. The VIETNAMIZATION of Cambodia layered onto history of annexation took a more frenzied free rein beginning in January 1979
with the plundering of Phnom Penh, the "civializing" of its military
commanders into Cambodian tycoons and embedding into leadership
positions of the key ministries, e.g. Interior, to the genocide of K-5
Plan, to the decades of ongoing deforestation (see Global Witness report),
to dominant control of Cambodia's telecommunication in the form of
Metfone whose parent company is Vietnam-military-owned Viettel, to
ownership of "Cambodia's national airlines", to the political interference at key juncture in Cambodian recent history (July 1997 coup, 2-3 Jan. 2004 violence, etc.)]
... Hanoi
created an elaborate blueprint for moving ten million people from the
more densely populated north to the south by the year 2000. The
mentality of the Red River Vietnamese had not changed. They wanted to
push farther south and west--which they did, finally, not through the
New Economic Zones but by invading and occupying Cambodia two years
later... [p. 355]
See Vietnamization
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