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Whither Cambodia?
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20126 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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2 / 1992 |
4,020 Words |
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George A. Carver, Jr.
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Is it possible that peace will finally return to the once-tranquil Southeast Asian kingdom of Cambodia? It has been racked for nearly three decades by war, a genocidal Marxist regime that deliberately killed some 16 percent of the population, an invasion imposing a decade of foreign-dominated rule, and civil strife involving four sets of combatants.
To understand what happened in Cambodia during the 1980s, it is important to realize what the Vietnamese accomplished by their 1979 invasion. They did not oust the Khmer Rouge, as most non-Cambodians, particularly in the West, seem to believe. Instead, by using the Vietnamese army, the Lao Dong (Vietnamese Workers Party) ousted Pol Pot's Maoist, Beijing-oriented faction of the Khmer Rouge, along with Pol Pot himself, replaced it with a faction of the Khmer Rouge led by Heng Samrin, and kept in power the new regime in Phnom Penh. In the process, largely for propaganda purposes, the Vietnamese dropped the Khmer Rouge label from their newly installed puppet government, which they called the People's Republic of Kampuchea. Henceforth, the term Khmer Rouge, with the opprobrium now attached to it, was applied exclusively to Pol Pot and his followers.
Heng Samrin and his Khmer Rouge lieutenants were not Jeffersonian democrats by any stretch of the imagination. Though not Beijing-oriented Maoist zealots, they were dedicated communists who were oriented in doctrine and loyalty to the Vietnamese Lao Dong and its leader, Le Duan.
Under Heng Samrin's Vietnamese-dominated government, physical genocide was halted, but many Cambodians feel that it was soon replaced by a form of cultural genocide. Large numbers of Vietnamese were brought in to run the farms and businesses whose previous owners had been driven away, or executed, by the Khmer Rouge. Cambodian women were strongly encouraged to marry Vietnamese soldiers or immigrants. Vietnamese became the language of instruction in Cambodian schools. Though French was taught, the Khmer language was not--nor was it used. During the decade of Vietnamese military occupation, in short, a systematic effort to "Vietnamize" Cambodia was clearly in process. Like Vikdun Quisling's government, which failed to oppose German policies in Norway during Nazi occupation, Heng Samrin's government did not oppose the Vietnamese effort to colonize and absorb Cambodia.
During the 1980s, a Cambodian opposition did evolve, but it was not particularly effective because it consisted of three factions, each of which mistrusted and despised the
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