Member of the Constitutional Counsil of Cambodia
paper presented during
Identities versus Globalization,
Conference cum Art Exhibition organized by the Heinrich Böll Foundation,
Chiang Mai, Amari Rincome Hotel, February 6-8, 2004
History and, at the present time, the question of globalization are the works
of men and women who have lived through these events. There are those who are
observers and those who are the active advocates of such a “global village,”
with the ideal of a human family, such as Renaissance men and women in Europe
called for at the beginning of the sixteenth century when new worlds were being
discovered.
But there are also those who object to this trend, because they fear that too
much uniformity will be imposed on their lifestyle resulting in the loss of
their identity as a group of people who have been making together through
centuries of history woven in an extricate pattern, a fabric of shared hardship,
happiness, common language, taste, and thinking. How can you abolish these
centuries of genes accumulated in us? Is it not these differences in the human
families that make for the originalities and the beauty of the World Stage or
World Garden? These differences in the ways of thinking allow for the progress
of humanity. It is obvious that the revolutions brought in by the Buddha or
Jesus, in their respective societies, contributed to changes in the pattern of
thinking in Asia and in Europe. If there were not the revolutions of Copernicus,
Galileo, Isaac Newton, Einstein and others, science would not have evolved so
rapidly. The choice is ours. But at the same time, as history and culture are
made by us, they could become also a burden and a source of conflicts that
divide us. The ill feelings of the Korean or the Chinese people towards the
recent past history of Japanese occupation are a reality that no one can deny;
so too are the ill feelings of the Khmers vis-à-vis the Siamese, now Thai and
the Annamese, now Vietnamese.
I- THE KINGDOM OF CAMBODIA AND ITS NEIGHBOURS:
Sometimes history is made of misunderstandings. As history starts from me too, I
wish to share some of my own experiences in this regard about Cambodia’s
neighbors.
1- After severing diplomatic ties for over ten years, Cambodia and Thailand
resumed their relationship, in 1970. By that time, I had already visited Bangkok
with my youngest brother, who was in his 20s, with a fair complexion and rather
handsome. At the gate of the Grand Palace, where the visit was there not so well
organized and the flux of tourists was not so stressful, two young Thai ladies
asked my brother where he came from in their broken English. They would not
believe that he was Khmer or Khmen, because for them Khmers were dark skinned
and ugly: “mai suai, mai lor. ” This was the first bias, and was also from our
part, a misunderstanding: “How dare they call us Khmen. That sounds like
“Khmeng” in Khmer, which means “Young child”?
2- The second occasion occurred when I came to Thailand in the early 1980s. I
remember talking with my dearest friends, the Lady Acharn Titima Phitaksparaiwan,
who passed away many years ago and whom I consider as my Elder Sister, and
Acharn Valai na Pombejr or Acharn Kantika na Songkhla from Chulalongkorn
University. We discussed the biases of our history books that must be corrected,
because most of the time they hurt our relationship. This was truly illustrated
by the question of Preah Vihear, known in Thai as Khao Preah Viharn. At that
time, I used to take food items to Khmer refugees on the Cambodian side of the
Thai border, under the responsibilities of the Khmer People’s National
Liberation Front (KPNLF) and fighting for the liberation of Cambodia from the
Vietnamese occupation. Sometimes these shipments took place at nighttime, to the
remotest area of Trat or Ubon Ratchathani provinces. Somehow the Thai driver of
the truck knew that I was Cambodian/Khmer, and immediately he mentioned the Thai
recriminations about Preah Vihear or Khao Preah Viharn, claiming that it
belonged to Thailand. I was doing then what I am committed to nowadays as well,
replying as objectively as possible on a scientific basis, as a historian. I
told the driver that my educational background was archaeology and history. I
asked him to tell me where were the Siamese, presently Thai, in the 10th century
A.D. or even the 11th century, since a 12th century inscription at Angkor Vat
clearly mentioned them whereas the statesmanship of Sukhothai was known with
King Râmkamheng only in the 13th century. The driver was a clever guy: he saved
his face by replying to me that the Siamese had helped the Khmer to build that
temple. This is a good lesson for compromise.
The situation of the Khmer Refugees of the time was not enviable. They were
looked down on and mistreated. If there had been no international intervention,
they would have died not only from starvation and the Khmer Rouge criminal
regimes, but also from the Thai soldiers defending their territory and
sovereignty. We were subjected to harassment of all kinds, even myself.
3- At the end of 1993, just after the formation of a new government born from
the UN supervised elections, there was a delegation of Thai Members of
Parliament visiting Cambodia. As the Deputy Speaker of the Parliament, at the
time, I was invited by the then Thai Ambassador (H.E. Krairuek, I think) for a
dinner party. When my turn to speak came, I started to inform the Thai MPs about
the Khmer inscription, known as the oath of King Suryavarman I. This illustrated
the capacity of the Thai people to preserve, maybe better than ourselves, the
Khmers, the Khmer Angkor traditions. For example, that 11th century Khmer
inscription included the word “Damruc”, which the Thai continue to write in that
old way. However, the Thai pronounced that word as “Damruat,” and now we
pronounced it that way too, instead of as in the old form. Likewise, the sacred
ploughing field, known as Meru or Sumeru, is pronounced in Thai as “Men” or "Phra
Men." We then started to call it Veal Men. There are many other examples,
including the use of the consonant “v” by the Thai as a vowel “ur” or “sara ur”
in the same old way we found in the pre-Angkor and Angkor inscriptions. Visibly
the Thai MPs were not enthusiastic by my linguistic lessons. Either they felt
that it was not enough political, or they were not very interested in cultural
lessons. My purpose was to demonstrate that Thai and Cambodian have many things
in common to share. As a matter of fact, the current Thai word for greeting
“Savasdi” may have come from the Khmer word “sursdei” which was transcribed from
“svsdî”, then “savasdî.”
Around the same time, I remember the reactions from my colleagues of the
Government circle, especially from the Ministry of Culture (I will not quote the
name), who reacted strongly to anything Thai, including Thai TV serials or soap
operas, which flooded the Khmer channels as much as the Chinese ones. To his
complaints, I adjusted him to the reality of the market economy and competition:
why do we not improve our TV programs and make them more attractive, so as to
compete with the Thai programs which were more attractive? It would also be the
most intelligent way, which is to improve oneself. I wanted to avoid this narrow
chauvinistic and nationalistic approach, which does help us to be better, but
just keeps us ossified in our traditions. We don’t have problems with the
Vietnamese side, since our culture and traditions are so different. Furthermore,
the legacy of the communist regime experienced by some of our people during the
Vietnamese occupation, did not make the Vietnamese TV program attractive to us.
Maybe it is only those millions of Vietnamese expatriates legally or illegally
living in Cambodia who enjoy them.
4- More recently, while taking a taxi in Bangkok with some Khmer students we had
sent for higher education in a Thai university, I spoke to them in English in
order to give them practice in that language. The driver, who had a military
background, inquired about our nationality. After we told him, he started to
make some unkind reflections, such as he could not believe that the Khmer could
speak so well English and could attend ABAC University. Then came a show of Thai
superiority when he said that Thailand had never been colonized like we had
been. So I begged him permission to not agree and told him about the historical
fact of the Japanese occupation with their troops going to Burma, whether it was
agreed upon or not, Thailand could not oppose such a strength and had to agree.
And I remember reading the novel from M.R. Kukrit Pramoj, Si Phen Din, when the
Thai ladies were forced to wear Western skirts that they did not like and they
managed to keep their Thai skirt beneath it, during that period of the Japanese
presence. I asked the taxi driver whether he considers that a military
cooperation or an occupation?
5- Here, also I wish to talk about other more official personal experiences with
our Vietnamese neighbours. In 1994, I had the privilege, as Deputy Speaker of
the National Assembly, to accompany His Majesty the King of Cambodia for a State
visit in Hanoi. During the Official Dinner, I was seated on the right of Madame
Le Duc Anh, wife of the then President of Vietnam. The first question she put to
me was “What are your feelings vis-à-vis the Vietnamese?” Instead of answering
her question, directly, in French with a very pretty young Vietnamese
translator, who spoke very correct French, I started to tell her that when I was
a baby and a child, I was brought up by a Vietnamese nanny from Hué, with
lacquered teeth, and that she loved us, my younger sister and my younger brother
and myself like her own children, and that I got to know the Vietnamese only
through her eyes. I was about to explain more, that when I was a student in
Paris, I used to admire the North-Vietnamese attitude toward the Chinese
Cultural Revolution, by inviting its agents to kindly and firmly leave the
country, where they had nothing to do, although Vietnam depended a lot on China
for the transfer of weapons from the Soviet Union for its struggle in the
Vietnam War. But all of the sudden, His Majesty the King, the Vietnamese
President and the other Officials became silent, and we were the only ones to
talk, thus by respect I stopped talking. I wanted to tell the Vietnamese First
Lady that no country or people can bear to have another country or people to
occupy or rule them.
II- CAMBODIA IN THE CONTEXT OF ASEAN:
For the past three years, Cambodia as well as Burma/Myanmar and Laos, was made
part of ASEAN. Following the example of the European Union has tried to regroup
in order to attract investors from affluent countries with their 500 millions
inhabitants, to be competitive and to be a force to be reckoned with in other
fields. Since October 2003, the Bali Conference made new steps toward the
economic integration of the ten ASEAN countries.
This may contribute to regional peace and security, to a nuclear free zone.
However this peace process remains fragile, as a consequence of the contentious
historical, of cultural, religious, and political differences, and very recently
also of the bomb attacks by the Islamic extremist elements. The Kingdom of
Cambodia is a Buddhist country with at least 90 per cent of its population
culturally rooted in this religion. We are supposed to be tolerant, but the
Marxist-communist ideologies, a Molotov cocktail of the French Paris Latin
Quarter communist party, the Chinese cultural revolution and Pol Pot madness has
contributed to a criminally inhumane regime, as we could see during the Khmer
Rouge time. This shows that even though our culture is filled with Buddhism,
non-violence and tolerance, it could not prevent such a catastrophe to happen.
Was this due to inherent flaws in the practice of Buddhism, to false
apprehensions to bad interpretations of Buddhist teachings, or to the free
thinking of some individuals?
At the level of ASEAN, Cambodia, as well as Laos, started from a disadvantaged
position compared to our neighbours of Vietnamese to the east and Thais to the
west, because of over 20 years of warfare and catastrophic communist regimes,
doubled with the Vietnamese neo-colonialism from 1979 to 1991, when the Paris
Peace Agreement on Cambodia opened a new era of hope and new direction. But
since then, our leaders have not found the good direction, the path to
reconciliation, because corruption and the thirst for power has destroyed the
capacity of their to think, to conceive, and to contribute to agriculture
development, on which depends 85 per cent of the rural population. The
International Community, at the head of which is Japan, for the reconstruction
of Cambodia, with other world financial institutions, such as the World Bank,
IMF, ADB, is powerless in front of this free thinking to evil forces, like
mafias, drugs and the trafficking of children and antiques, the impunity of
criminals to commit assassinations, and the lack of political will to solve the
mortal problems faced by the country.
Facing such conditions, how can a down-and-out starving to death understand what
is democracy? How can children scavenging in city garbage dumps be interested in
their rights? How can children with parents to poor to feed them to weak to
resist the lure of gain to sell them for begging in Thailand or in South
Vietnam, can understand freedom born from the knowledge and education that they
never received?
As a conclusion, this social disparity can be imparted also to political and
economic areas. The European Union established criteria regarding the level of
democracy and development for all the European countries willing to join the
Union. But here in Southeast Asia, we have a real disparate range of political
regimes, from an obsolete rightist military junta, which robbed the people from
their political rights, in Burma, to a spectrum of Communist regimes, a mixture
of a past Royalist and mild communist Laos to the pure and hard-line communist
regime of Vietnam, from a full-fledged democratic system in the Kingdom of
Thailand and the Republic of Philippines, to a one-party regime of Republican
Singapore, an autocratic strong centralized democracy of Rotating Kings of
Malaysia, from the emerging democracy of a former communist regime in the
Kingdom of Cambodia which is in a political deadlock, and a recuperating
Republic of Indonesia to a quiet and absolute monarchy of Brunei Darussalam.
How are we going to build a harmonious Association of Southeast Asian Countries,
if we cannot come to agree to a basic guarantee for our citizens on the
protection of their rights and security, their welfare and their freedom, if we
cannot exert any influence or make recommendations to each other? Can we define
a common perception of justice, the rule of law, human rights and democracy?
Would ASEAN become a club of leaders who care only for the defense of their own
interests and to preserve the power they have acquired, as would be the rest the
regional groupings? If such a temptation cannot be checked, humanity will be in
danger.
SON Soubert,
Member of the Constitutional Council,
Professor, Faculty of Archaeology