Amoeba-like, communist Vietnam began neo-colonizing Laos and Cambodia by the traditional Vietnamese expansionism termed "Don Dien", first by occupying territory with troops, then having their families come in to settle the new territory, then putting the troops into civilian clothes to become "ready reservists" and replacing them with new troops for further expansion. After their defeat in Cambodia, in order to quell a budding revolt within the Vietnamese army, Hanoi compelled their willing partner, Hun Sen, to grant land in Eastern Cambodia and citizenship to over 500,000 Vietnamese army personnel. Thus, the “Vietnamization” of Cambodia began, forcing the puppet regime in Phnom Penh to issue Circular No. 240 SR/MC/HH and successive decree-laws appealing to all Cambodians to consider the expansion of solidarity with the fraternal Vietnamese peoples their duty by helping Vietnamese nationals to settle in Cambodia. By 1989, the number of Vietnamese “settlers” in Vietnam had reached 1,250,000.
Former POW, Mike Benge, in "Tiger Cage" on the Mall, Veterans Day, Washington D.C., 1998 raising funds for POW/MIA FOIA Litigation Fund. (Photo: Northwest Veterans Newsletter)
Vietnam’s Tay Tién expansion into Laos and Cambodia
By Michael Benge
a
retired Foreign Service Officer who spent over 16 years in South East
Asia, 11 years in Viet Nam, and five years as a Prisoner of the North
Vietnamese -- ‘68-73 – in South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and North
Vietnam. Mr. Benge is a student of South East Asian politics, is very
active in advocating for human rights and religious freedom for the
people there, and has written extensively on these subjects.
Paper (with attached “Final Act of the Paris Conference on Cambodia”) presented at theNational Conference 2007 to commemorate and assess “The Paris Peace Agreement” of October 23rd, 1991
It is common belief that the Vietnam War was a civil war when in fact it wasn’t; it was a war of conquest of Southeast Asia, for Ho Chi Minh was not a Vietnamese nationalist rather he was an international communist. Ho Chi Minh, cofounder of the French communist party, held a position of leadership in the international communist movement – the Comintern. Ho was sent by the Comintern to Siam (Thailand), Malaya and Singapore to preside over the creation of communist parties in these countries. Moscow also put him in charge of creating communist parties in Cambodia and Laos. All were encouraged to contribute to the international proletarian revolution, and all of them reported to the Comintern’s Far Eastern Bureau headed by Ho.1
As part of the “Communist Internationale funded by the Soviet Union, Ho Chi Minh founded the "Indochinese Communist Party in 1930. Aping his mentor — the butcher Joseph Stalin – Ho’s ultimate plan was to establish a greater Vietnam by gobbling up his neighbors, Laos, Vietnam, and later other S.E. Asian countries as Stalin and Russia did to it's neighbors in establishing the Soviet Union.
After the Geneva Agreements in 1954, Ho Chi Minh saw to it that several hundred young Cambodians were taken north, indoctrinated in communism and given military training. They were later armed and sent back, where they became the basis of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia’s Eastern Zone. Knowing of Ho’s close ties to Moscow and his intent to emulate his hero, the butcher Joseph Stalin, by creating a Soviet-style Union of South East Asia, China began training and arming the Pol Pot faction of the Khmer Rouge as a counterbalance to Soviet influence. China believed that revolution should come from within. North Vietnam enabled the Khmer Rouge to take over Phnom Penh in 1975 by providing logistics, ammunition, artillery and backup by Vietnamese troops making them complicit in the genocide of at least one and one half million Cambodians.
Viewing the U.S. as a paper tiger after its abandonment of South Vietnam, the Vietnamese communist party sent its mighty military force into Cambodia, not to liberate it from Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, but to colonize that country to fulfill Ho Chi Minh’s dream of hegemony over Indochina. They never dreamed that the U.S. would ally with communist China to drive them out. Unfortunately, the Hanoi’s Khmer Rouge remained intact and now controls Cambodia.
From the onset of the Indochina communist party, Ho Chi Minh began neo-colonizing Laos. He, as the majority of the Vietnamese, considered the Laotians, and even more so the Hmong, who had not been cultured by China as being Nha que qua [very backward], therefore they were not to be trusted. That attitude persists among the Vietnamese communists leaders today.
Since the Vietnamese had better access to French education, the French colonial government used Vietnamese as lower-echelon civil servants throughout the region, thus playing right into the hands of Ho Chi Minh. Ho began implementing his plan to dominate Indochina by infiltrating educated communist Vietnamese agents into Lao villages with money to set themselves up as scribes, and moneylenders. Acting as liaisons with the French colonial government through the lower-echelon Vietnamese civil servants, they gained considerable influence throughout the countryside. To cement their stature and gain total trust of the villagers, the Vietnamese communist agents took Lao wives and raised families. Now the sons and a few daughters of these Vietnamese make up a fair portion of the Lao communist party leadership.
In Laos, the U.S. waged a "secret war" against Hanoi to interdict communist North Vietnamese troops infiltrating into South Vietnam. The backbone of this secret war was the Hmong ethnic minorities who lost over 40,000 killed while fighting for the United States. It has been over 30 years since the Vietnam War ended; yet a second "secret war" continues in Laos. However, this secrete war is being waged jointly by Vietnamese and Laotian communist forces, this time without American involvement. The war is against the Laotian people, especially the Hmong and other ethnic minorities, such as the Khmu, Mien and Chao Fa..
Hanoi maintains large numbers of troops in Laos to assist the communist Pathet Lao in hunting down and exterminating their joint enemy -- the Hmong. In 1988, the Lao Communist Party proclaimed it would hunt down the “American collaborators” and their families, “to the last root.” They will be “butchered like wild animals. Those they are hunting are mostly the children, grand children and great-grandchildren of the fighters who sided with the U.S.
Although Ho Chi Minh is dead, the repressive and genocidal regime in Hanoi continues to implement Ho’s 1930 Indochinese Communist Party’s strategy by neo-colonizing Laos and Cambodia; a strategy reaffirmed in successive Vietnamese communist party congresses.2 Today, the Vietnamese communists have extended their hegemony over Laos and Cambodia and have de facto annexed Laos, which in many ways is now a province of North Vietnam. The Lao party leaders are anointed by Hanoi and receive their marching orders in a Sub Rosa fashion through a Vietnamese shadow government.
In Cambodia, Hanoi maintains a contingent of 3,000 troops, a mixture of special-forces and intelligence agents, with tanks and helicopters, in a huge compound 2½ kilometers outside Phnom Penh right next to Hun Sen's Tuol Krassaing fortress near Takhmau. They are there to ensure that Hanoi's puppet, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, doesn't stray far from Hanoi's policy of neo-colonization of Cambodia. The Vietnamese compound bristles with electronic surveillance equipment that would make any group’s electronic ease-dropping outstation proud. When Vietnamese troops were forced to withdraw from Vietnam, as a compromise, Vietnam installed its Hanoi trained Khmer Rouge marionette Hun Sen as Prime Minister.
Amoeba-like, communist Vietnam began neo-colonizing Laos and Cambodia by the traditional Vietnamese expansionism termed "Don Dien", first by occupying territory with troops, then having their families come in to settle the new territory, then putting the troops into civilian clothes to become "ready reservists" and replacing them with new troops for further expansion. After their defeat in Cambodia, in order to quell a budding revolt within the Vietnamese army, Hanoi compelled their willing partner, Hun Sen, to grant land in Eastern Cambodia and citizenship to over 500,000 Vietnamese army personnel. Thus, the “Vietnamization” of Cambodia began, forcing the puppet regime in Phnom Penh to issue Circular No. 240 SR/MC/HH and successive decree-laws appealing to all Cambodians to consider the expansion of solidarity with the fraternal Vietnamese peoples their duty by helping Vietnamese nationals to settle in Cambodia. By 1989, the number of Vietnamese “settlers” in Vietnam had reached 1,250,000. Simultaneously, Vietnam developed new maps depicting their new borders expanding up to 40 kilometers inside Laos and Cambodia. Hun Sen formally conceded these borders to Hanoi in violation of international law through a series of treaties, the latest in October 10, 2005.
Today, the communist party of Vietnam is faced with a burgeoning population, a lack natural resources to fuel its economy and enough fertile land on which to grow food to adequately feed its people. In a desperate move to keep its grasp on power and in an attempt to pacify a restless young population, Hanoi is exporting “guest workers” and by further excursion into neighboring countries in order to expand its control over those territories. In 2005, the communist regime exported 500,000 Vietnamese workers overseas to countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, South Korea, and now they are being exported to Cambodia and Laos.
Vietnamese communists continue their policy of neocolonization, nibbling away at Cambodia by annexing sizable portions of its borders, coastlines and islands through illegitimate treaties with their puppet regime in Phnom Penh. Their latest sceme is involves flooding three northeastern provinces of Cambodia and the three southeastern provinces of Laos with Vietnamese settlers and exploiting the natural resources there.
In November 2004, Vietnam cajoled the puppet communist regimes of Laos and Cambodia into signing the “Development Triangle agreement.”3 This agreement allows the Vietnamese to now formalize their expansion through what is historically termed Tay Tién (Westward movement) into the three North Eastern provinces of Stung Trèng, Ratanakiri and Mondolkiri in Cambodia, and into the three South Eastern provinces of Attapeu, Sékong and Saravan in Laos.
The “Development Triangle” is a vast area of high plateaus and virgin forests covering approximately 120,400 square kilometers. With the exception of the provinces in Vietnam where the communist regime have already confiscated the ancestral lands of the Montagnards in the Central Highlands, deforested the area, and relocated several million people there; those provinces in Laos and Cambodia are sparsely populated, mainly with ethnic minorities, but were occupied by the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.
This “so called development” of these provinces starts with building a “security” road network with the intent of depriving Montagnards fleeing repression in the Central Highlands of Vietnam of sanctuary among their distant relatives in Laos and Cambodia and in the UNHCR camps in Phnom Penh. Although claiming that the roads would increase tourism and commerce in these areas, the real reason is to create easy access for the growing Vietnamese population to migrate to and neo-colonize these provinces in Laos and Cambodia. Already, Vietnamese settlers are flooding Mondulkiri and Ratanakkiri provinces in Cambodia occupying lands belonging to the local populations.
The Triangle occupies “an eminently strategic position on the political, economical, social, environmental and ecological levels” for the control of Laos, Cambodia by Hanoi. Japan and China are leading supporters of Vietnam’s expansionism.
Already in Laos, the Vietnamese army’s Military Corps No. 15 has completed an irrigation complex in Sekong for plantation crops , established a coffee plantation in Salavan, and developed plans for setting up coffee, rubber and cashew plantaions, and building a 10,000 tonne-per-year rubber proessing plant in Attopeu. Atopeu’s new rubber plantion covers and area of over 7,000 hectares (NHAN DAN, June 30, 2007). The Triangle area is only one of many places that the Vietnamese expansionists have moved into in order to the natural resources of Laos; e.g., there are six hydroelectric dams that were constructed and are owned and operated by the Vietnamese to power Vietnam’s booming economy.
In Cambodia, China is competing with Vietnam and constructing roads in Stung Treng, exploiting forests in Mondulkiri, and developing mining exploration units in Ratanakkiri. Vietnam views the Triangle area for its potential for growing cash crops and establishing vast plantations fast-growing trees, coffee, tea and rubber to earn export dollars. Both the Vietnamese and Laotian regimes have voiced policies of using ethnic minorities in these regions for cheap labor for plantations established on their ancestral lands.
Vietnam’s parastatal company EVN (Electricity of Viet Nam) is planning to build five hydroelectric dams on the Sesan River in Stung Treng Province. The dams will have a total production capacity of 818 megawatts. The estimated production capacities and costs of the five dams are: 1) 420 MW, costing $611 million; 2) 180 MW, costing $387 million; 3) 90 MW at $164 million; and 4&5) 64 MW each, costing $114 million each.
Construction on these dams is expected to begin in 2012 upon the completion of the Japanese-funded highway connecting the port of Da Nang in Vietnam with the northeastern provinces of Cambodia, and the southeastern provinces of Laos (AKP, Phnom Penh, 07/09/06).
Corruption and a lack of progress in combating it remain a major blight on Asia's restructuring efforts following the 1997 crisis. Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam also lost ground in 2007, according to Transparency International. The strong correlation between corruption and poverty means that the benefits of growth are concentrated among the politically connected and bypass many who most need it.4
Given the level of corruption among officials in Vietnam and Cambodia, it is expected that several Cambodian and Vietnamese officials will become very, very wealthy from these projects. The dams would be constructed, owned and operated by Vietnamese, and the electricity generated from these hydroelectric plants will be forwarded and sold to Vietnamese power plants. Purportedly, electricity would be resold to Cambodia at a “cheap price.” One has to be very naive to believe that Vietnam will sell any electricity to Cambodia at a cheaper price than in Vietnam, given that county’s level of corruption, rate of economic growth and the need for cheap energy to fuel its economy; its needs are increasing by 10-15% annually.
Another reason for its expansion in Laos and Cambodia is Vietnam’s conflict between food production, industrialization and building dams to power its economic growth. In the last five years, Vietnam has lost 300,000 hectares of irrigated rice due to industrial development, including a vast amount lost through the construction of dams. This is creating a looming shortage of rice needed to feed it burgeoning population.
The construction of dams results in the displacement of large numbers of indigenous populations that farm the fertile soils in the river basins. These people are then either relocated to marginally productive lands, or receive no land at all; thus they fall victim to abject poverty. Vietnam has a history of doing this as well as corrupt officials absconding with relocation funds, leaving the victims with little or nothing; e.g., the Muong Lay Dam in North Vietnam.5 Those who choose to remain behind to farm the basins below the dams find that two or three times a year,uncontrolled spillage from the dams will flood their fields, destroy their crops and drown their livestock.
Cambodia is presently ruled by Hanoi’s marionette Prime Minister Hun Sen and his Vietnamese communist-backed corrupt cabal. In terms of “real politick”, Hun Sen’s Premiership -- albeit obtained illegally, first by a coup d'etat in 1997 and then appointed by bought-and-paid-for National Assemblies in 1998 and 2003 -- continues to receive de facto international recognition as the “legitimate” representative government of Cambodia. Therefore, the Paris Peace Agreement of October 23rd, 1991, or any other accord/agreement, is at present moot. Thus, nothing can be done at this time about violations of Cambodia’s territorial integrity until a democratic or another form of government representing the true aspirations of the Cambodian people is elected. At that time, the new Cambodian government can take these matters to the international court for abrogation of these unfair and illegal treaties and agreements made by the illegitimate, corrupt and immoral regime of Hun Sen and the Cambodian People's Party (CPP).
As part of the “Communist Internationale funded by the Soviet Union, Ho Chi Minh founded the "Indochinese Communist Party in 1930. Aping his mentor — the butcher Joseph Stalin – Ho’s ultimate plan was to establish a greater Vietnam by gobbling up his neighbors, Laos, Vietnam, and later other S.E. Asian countries as Stalin and Russia did to it's neighbors in establishing the Soviet Union.
After the Geneva Agreements in 1954, Ho Chi Minh saw to it that several hundred young Cambodians were taken north, indoctrinated in communism and given military training. They were later armed and sent back, where they became the basis of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia’s Eastern Zone. Knowing of Ho’s close ties to Moscow and his intent to emulate his hero, the butcher Joseph Stalin, by creating a Soviet-style Union of South East Asia, China began training and arming the Pol Pot faction of the Khmer Rouge as a counterbalance to Soviet influence. China believed that revolution should come from within. North Vietnam enabled the Khmer Rouge to take over Phnom Penh in 1975 by providing logistics, ammunition, artillery and backup by Vietnamese troops making them complicit in the genocide of at least one and one half million Cambodians.
Viewing the U.S. as a paper tiger after its abandonment of South Vietnam, the Vietnamese communist party sent its mighty military force into Cambodia, not to liberate it from Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, but to colonize that country to fulfill Ho Chi Minh’s dream of hegemony over Indochina. They never dreamed that the U.S. would ally with communist China to drive them out. Unfortunately, the Hanoi’s Khmer Rouge remained intact and now controls Cambodia.
From the onset of the Indochina communist party, Ho Chi Minh began neo-colonizing Laos. He, as the majority of the Vietnamese, considered the Laotians, and even more so the Hmong, who had not been cultured by China as being Nha que qua [very backward], therefore they were not to be trusted. That attitude persists among the Vietnamese communists leaders today.
Since the Vietnamese had better access to French education, the French colonial government used Vietnamese as lower-echelon civil servants throughout the region, thus playing right into the hands of Ho Chi Minh. Ho began implementing his plan to dominate Indochina by infiltrating educated communist Vietnamese agents into Lao villages with money to set themselves up as scribes, and moneylenders. Acting as liaisons with the French colonial government through the lower-echelon Vietnamese civil servants, they gained considerable influence throughout the countryside. To cement their stature and gain total trust of the villagers, the Vietnamese communist agents took Lao wives and raised families. Now the sons and a few daughters of these Vietnamese make up a fair portion of the Lao communist party leadership.
In Laos, the U.S. waged a "secret war" against Hanoi to interdict communist North Vietnamese troops infiltrating into South Vietnam. The backbone of this secret war was the Hmong ethnic minorities who lost over 40,000 killed while fighting for the United States. It has been over 30 years since the Vietnam War ended; yet a second "secret war" continues in Laos. However, this secrete war is being waged jointly by Vietnamese and Laotian communist forces, this time without American involvement. The war is against the Laotian people, especially the Hmong and other ethnic minorities, such as the Khmu, Mien and Chao Fa..
Hanoi maintains large numbers of troops in Laos to assist the communist Pathet Lao in hunting down and exterminating their joint enemy -- the Hmong. In 1988, the Lao Communist Party proclaimed it would hunt down the “American collaborators” and their families, “to the last root.” They will be “butchered like wild animals. Those they are hunting are mostly the children, grand children and great-grandchildren of the fighters who sided with the U.S.
Although Ho Chi Minh is dead, the repressive and genocidal regime in Hanoi continues to implement Ho’s 1930 Indochinese Communist Party’s strategy by neo-colonizing Laos and Cambodia; a strategy reaffirmed in successive Vietnamese communist party congresses.2 Today, the Vietnamese communists have extended their hegemony over Laos and Cambodia and have de facto annexed Laos, which in many ways is now a province of North Vietnam. The Lao party leaders are anointed by Hanoi and receive their marching orders in a Sub Rosa fashion through a Vietnamese shadow government.
In Cambodia, Hanoi maintains a contingent of 3,000 troops, a mixture of special-forces and intelligence agents, with tanks and helicopters, in a huge compound 2½ kilometers outside Phnom Penh right next to Hun Sen's Tuol Krassaing fortress near Takhmau. They are there to ensure that Hanoi's puppet, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, doesn't stray far from Hanoi's policy of neo-colonization of Cambodia. The Vietnamese compound bristles with electronic surveillance equipment that would make any group’s electronic ease-dropping outstation proud. When Vietnamese troops were forced to withdraw from Vietnam, as a compromise, Vietnam installed its Hanoi trained Khmer Rouge marionette Hun Sen as Prime Minister.
Amoeba-like, communist Vietnam began neo-colonizing Laos and Cambodia by the traditional Vietnamese expansionism termed "Don Dien", first by occupying territory with troops, then having their families come in to settle the new territory, then putting the troops into civilian clothes to become "ready reservists" and replacing them with new troops for further expansion. After their defeat in Cambodia, in order to quell a budding revolt within the Vietnamese army, Hanoi compelled their willing partner, Hun Sen, to grant land in Eastern Cambodia and citizenship to over 500,000 Vietnamese army personnel. Thus, the “Vietnamization” of Cambodia began, forcing the puppet regime in Phnom Penh to issue Circular No. 240 SR/MC/HH and successive decree-laws appealing to all Cambodians to consider the expansion of solidarity with the fraternal Vietnamese peoples their duty by helping Vietnamese nationals to settle in Cambodia. By 1989, the number of Vietnamese “settlers” in Vietnam had reached 1,250,000. Simultaneously, Vietnam developed new maps depicting their new borders expanding up to 40 kilometers inside Laos and Cambodia. Hun Sen formally conceded these borders to Hanoi in violation of international law through a series of treaties, the latest in October 10, 2005.
Today, the communist party of Vietnam is faced with a burgeoning population, a lack natural resources to fuel its economy and enough fertile land on which to grow food to adequately feed its people. In a desperate move to keep its grasp on power and in an attempt to pacify a restless young population, Hanoi is exporting “guest workers” and by further excursion into neighboring countries in order to expand its control over those territories. In 2005, the communist regime exported 500,000 Vietnamese workers overseas to countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, South Korea, and now they are being exported to Cambodia and Laos.
Vietnamese communists continue their policy of neocolonization, nibbling away at Cambodia by annexing sizable portions of its borders, coastlines and islands through illegitimate treaties with their puppet regime in Phnom Penh. Their latest sceme is involves flooding three northeastern provinces of Cambodia and the three southeastern provinces of Laos with Vietnamese settlers and exploiting the natural resources there.
In November 2004, Vietnam cajoled the puppet communist regimes of Laos and Cambodia into signing the “Development Triangle agreement.”3 This agreement allows the Vietnamese to now formalize their expansion through what is historically termed Tay Tién (Westward movement) into the three North Eastern provinces of Stung Trèng, Ratanakiri and Mondolkiri in Cambodia, and into the three South Eastern provinces of Attapeu, Sékong and Saravan in Laos.
The “Development Triangle” is a vast area of high plateaus and virgin forests covering approximately 120,400 square kilometers. With the exception of the provinces in Vietnam where the communist regime have already confiscated the ancestral lands of the Montagnards in the Central Highlands, deforested the area, and relocated several million people there; those provinces in Laos and Cambodia are sparsely populated, mainly with ethnic minorities, but were occupied by the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.
This “so called development” of these provinces starts with building a “security” road network with the intent of depriving Montagnards fleeing repression in the Central Highlands of Vietnam of sanctuary among their distant relatives in Laos and Cambodia and in the UNHCR camps in Phnom Penh. Although claiming that the roads would increase tourism and commerce in these areas, the real reason is to create easy access for the growing Vietnamese population to migrate to and neo-colonize these provinces in Laos and Cambodia. Already, Vietnamese settlers are flooding Mondulkiri and Ratanakkiri provinces in Cambodia occupying lands belonging to the local populations.
The Triangle occupies “an eminently strategic position on the political, economical, social, environmental and ecological levels” for the control of Laos, Cambodia by Hanoi. Japan and China are leading supporters of Vietnam’s expansionism.
Already in Laos, the Vietnamese army’s Military Corps No. 15 has completed an irrigation complex in Sekong for plantation crops , established a coffee plantation in Salavan, and developed plans for setting up coffee, rubber and cashew plantaions, and building a 10,000 tonne-per-year rubber proessing plant in Attopeu. Atopeu’s new rubber plantion covers and area of over 7,000 hectares (NHAN DAN, June 30, 2007). The Triangle area is only one of many places that the Vietnamese expansionists have moved into in order to the natural resources of Laos; e.g., there are six hydroelectric dams that were constructed and are owned and operated by the Vietnamese to power Vietnam’s booming economy.
In Cambodia, China is competing with Vietnam and constructing roads in Stung Treng, exploiting forests in Mondulkiri, and developing mining exploration units in Ratanakkiri. Vietnam views the Triangle area for its potential for growing cash crops and establishing vast plantations fast-growing trees, coffee, tea and rubber to earn export dollars. Both the Vietnamese and Laotian regimes have voiced policies of using ethnic minorities in these regions for cheap labor for plantations established on their ancestral lands.
Vietnam’s parastatal company EVN (Electricity of Viet Nam) is planning to build five hydroelectric dams on the Sesan River in Stung Treng Province. The dams will have a total production capacity of 818 megawatts. The estimated production capacities and costs of the five dams are: 1) 420 MW, costing $611 million; 2) 180 MW, costing $387 million; 3) 90 MW at $164 million; and 4&5) 64 MW each, costing $114 million each.
Construction on these dams is expected to begin in 2012 upon the completion of the Japanese-funded highway connecting the port of Da Nang in Vietnam with the northeastern provinces of Cambodia, and the southeastern provinces of Laos (AKP, Phnom Penh, 07/09/06).
Corruption and a lack of progress in combating it remain a major blight on Asia's restructuring efforts following the 1997 crisis. Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam also lost ground in 2007, according to Transparency International. The strong correlation between corruption and poverty means that the benefits of growth are concentrated among the politically connected and bypass many who most need it.4
Given the level of corruption among officials in Vietnam and Cambodia, it is expected that several Cambodian and Vietnamese officials will become very, very wealthy from these projects. The dams would be constructed, owned and operated by Vietnamese, and the electricity generated from these hydroelectric plants will be forwarded and sold to Vietnamese power plants. Purportedly, electricity would be resold to Cambodia at a “cheap price.” One has to be very naive to believe that Vietnam will sell any electricity to Cambodia at a cheaper price than in Vietnam, given that county’s level of corruption, rate of economic growth and the need for cheap energy to fuel its economy; its needs are increasing by 10-15% annually.
Another reason for its expansion in Laos and Cambodia is Vietnam’s conflict between food production, industrialization and building dams to power its economic growth. In the last five years, Vietnam has lost 300,000 hectares of irrigated rice due to industrial development, including a vast amount lost through the construction of dams. This is creating a looming shortage of rice needed to feed it burgeoning population.
The construction of dams results in the displacement of large numbers of indigenous populations that farm the fertile soils in the river basins. These people are then either relocated to marginally productive lands, or receive no land at all; thus they fall victim to abject poverty. Vietnam has a history of doing this as well as corrupt officials absconding with relocation funds, leaving the victims with little or nothing; e.g., the Muong Lay Dam in North Vietnam.5 Those who choose to remain behind to farm the basins below the dams find that two or three times a year,uncontrolled spillage from the dams will flood their fields, destroy their crops and drown their livestock.
The Se San River originates in the Central Highlands of Vietnam and flows into Cambodia where it meets the Mekong River. In 1993, the Vietnamese government started construction on the first dam on the river -- Yali Falls Dam -- which was completed in 2000.Although he’s dead, Hanoi is well on its way in the implementation of Ho Chi Minh’s 1930 aspirations of creating a Soviet-style Indochina.
While the dam was under construction from 1996-2000, erratic releases of water resulted in flash flooding downstream, causing deaths to people and livestock and destruction of rice fields and vegetable gardens. Since 2000, operation of the dam has resulted in rapid and daily fluctuations in the river’s flow downstream in Cambodia’s Ratanakiri and Stung Treng provinces. It is estimated that at least 36 people have drowned due to erratic releases of water from the dam, and at least 55,000 people have been adversely affected (3,500 people relocated),6 suffering millions of dollars in damages due to lost rice production, drowned livestock, lost fishing income, and damages to rice reserves, boats, fishing gear and houses
In addition, more than 6,700 people were resettled to make way for Yali Falls Dam (in Vietnam, ed.). According to a 2001 study by Vietnam’s Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Studies, people displaced by the dam have suffered from severe shortages of food and other hardships since the dam flooded their homes and land in 1999.
Affected communities (in Vietnam, ed.) have not received compensation for their losses, and there are no plans to provide them with compensation for past or future impacts. In Cambodia, communities have formed the Se San Protection Network to press for compensation and changes to the dam’s operating regime to minimize downstream damages. Despite the unresolved issues, the government of Vietnam has embarked on an ambitious plan to build up to five more dams on the Sesan River. The International Rivers Network is working to support the Se San Protection Network in their request for reparations and a halt to future dam construction on the Se San River.7
Cambodia is presently ruled by Hanoi’s marionette Prime Minister Hun Sen and his Vietnamese communist-backed corrupt cabal. In terms of “real politick”, Hun Sen’s Premiership -- albeit obtained illegally, first by a coup d'etat in 1997 and then appointed by bought-and-paid-for National Assemblies in 1998 and 2003 -- continues to receive de facto international recognition as the “legitimate” representative government of Cambodia. Therefore, the Paris Peace Agreement of October 23rd, 1991, or any other accord/agreement, is at present moot. Thus, nothing can be done at this time about violations of Cambodia’s territorial integrity until a democratic or another form of government representing the true aspirations of the Cambodian people is elected. At that time, the new Cambodian government can take these matters to the international court for abrogation of these unfair and illegal treaties and agreements made by the illegitimate, corrupt and immoral regime of Hun Sen and the Cambodian People's Party (CPP).
Literature cited
1 Hoang Van Hoan. as cited by Moyar, Mark. “Triumph Forsaken”. Cambridge University Press. 2006.
2 RSAMH, Fund 89, list 54, document 10. About VWP policy in determination of Indochinese problems and our goals implying from the decisions of the ??IV Congress of the C.P.S.U. (political letter) May 21, 1971, p. 14. as cited in “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists.” http://www.wccpd.org/news/news69.html
3 Dy Kareth, “The expansionist ‘Development Triangle’”, Published by CFC-CBC, Paris, August 22, 2005.
4 http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Vietnam_Dam_Project_Dooms_Remote_Mountain_Town_999.html
5 William Pesek. “Corruption in Asia keeps poor from rising.” International Herald Tribune. 30/10/07.
6 http://www.ngoforum.org.kh/Environment/Docs/mekong/Abandoned%20Village%20Report%20August%202007.pdf
7 http://www.irn.org/programs/vietnam/index.php?id=yalifalls.html
2 RSAMH, Fund 89, list 54, document 10. About VWP policy in determination of Indochinese problems and our goals implying from the decisions of the ??IV Congress of the C.P.S.U. (political letter) May 21, 1971, p. 14. as cited in “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists.” http://www.wccpd.org/news/news69.html
3 Dy Kareth, “The expansionist ‘Development Triangle’”, Published by CFC-CBC, Paris, August 22, 2005.
4 http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Vietnam_Dam_Project_Dooms_Remote_Mountain_Town_999.html
5 William Pesek. “Corruption in Asia keeps poor from rising.” International Herald Tribune. 30/10/07.
6 http://www.ngoforum.org.kh/Environment/Docs/mekong/Abandoned%20Village%20Report%20August%202007.pdf
7 http://www.irn.org/programs/vietnam/index.php?id=yalifalls.html
________
Paper (with attached “Final Act of the Paris Conference on Cambodia”) presented at the National Conference 2007 to commemorate and assess “The Paris Peace Agreement” of October 23rd, 1991, by Michael Benge is a retired Foreign Service Officer who spent over 16 years in South East Asia, 11 years in Viet Nam, and five years as a Prisoner of the North Vietnamese -- ‘68-73 – in South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam. Mr. Benge is a student of South East Asian politics, is very active in advocating for human rights and religious freedom for the people there, and has written extensively on these subjects.
The Vietnamization of Cambodia is on its way to completion thanks to Ah Kwack Hun Sen who has done whatever it took to please his master Yuon to stay in power.
ReplyDeleteKI was founded by Mr. Heng Soy (Tan Phalkun) in the sole purpose of giving Khmer people a place to express their opinion freely regarding the situation in Cambodia.
Unfortunately, after his death, these new KI's administrators have turned this KI blog into a business, highly likely have accepted a huge sum of money from Ah Kwack Hun Sen and Yuon. They have successfully chased away the vast majority of Khmer people from that KI Blog when these crooks required their IDs to make comment.
Who dares to say the truth in that KI with their IDs?
A couple of persons still said something bad about Ah Kwack Hun Sen in KI, but how do we know that these critics are real Khmer people? They are maybe just Hun Sen's agents who came in KI to lure people into Hun Sen's trap ( with their IDs revealed ).
Therefore, those crooks at KI must stop abusing Heng Soy's principals and lift that stupid ID's requirement so that people can say something to help Cambodia.