The relational archive of the Khmer Republic (1970-1975): re-visiting the 'coup' and the 'civil war' in Cambodia through written sources (original) (raw)
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Fragments in the Archive: the Khmer Rouge Years
Cambodia’s cinema history is strange and surprising. Popular films from France and the United States circulated through the Kingdom during the French colonial period. The 1950s and 60s saw extensive local production with the enthusiastic support of King Norodom Sihanouk, himself a passionate film- maker, but the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979) destroyed most of the existing material, including hundreds of feature films, raw footage and countless other ephemeral documents. In 2006, after representations by film-maker Rithy Panh and others, the Bophana Audio-Visual Research Centre was established in Phnom Penh to comb the world for every fragment of film and audio material relating to Cambodia’s history in order to reproduce it in an accessible digitized form. The archival preservation and duplication has continued apace. However the ethical use of these materials presents challenges. Contemporary documentary makers and digital enthusiasts frequently use fragmentary footage to support their political or historical interpretations without attribution or context. This paper discusses a propaganda film featuring the former King Norodom Sihanouk and his wife Monique shot in1973 in collaboration with the Communist Chinese, the North Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge. Short scenes and extracts from this film circulate online and appear in many documentaries.The“archive effect”of this footage raises questions about the source and circulation of archival images with significant historical and political consequences.
An institutional palimpsest? The case of Cambodia’s political order, 1970 and beyond
Journal of Political Power, 2015
How do continuity and change coexist and co-evolve? How does continuity enable change and changes reinforce continuity? These are central questions in organizational and political research, as organizational and institutional systems benefit from the presence of both reproduction and transformation. However, the relation between the processes of change and continuity still raises significant questions. To contribute to this discussion, we analyse the coexistence of deep institutional continuity and radical political change in the second half of 20 th century Cambodia. Over a two decade period, Cambodia was ruled by radically different political systems of organization: a traditional monarchy with feudal characteristics, a failing republic, a totalitarian communist regime, and a Vietnamese protectorate, before being governed by the UN, and finally becoming a constitutional monarchy. We use an historical approach to study how a succession of radical changes may in reality signal deep lines of continuity.
The Political Construction of Narrative and Collective Memory in Cambodia by Rebecca Gidley
The Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia from 17 April 1975 to 6 January 1979 in what is known locally as the " Pol Pot era. " This personification of blame was carefully cultivated by the group that overthrew the Khmer Rouge, who were themselves former Khmer Rouge members, and who continue to rule the country in 2017 as the Cambodian People's Party (CPP). The two main elements of the preferred narrative of the CPP are: the horrors of the Khmer Rouge are solely attributable to a handful of evil leaders, and members of the CPP are saviours who liberated the country. This message has been built through a 1979 People's Revolutionary Tribunal, children's textbooks, museums, annual Days of Anger, and the currently operating UN hybrid court, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. More than three decades of government influence over the political narrative of the Khmer Rouge regime has shaped the country's collective memory of that time.
Despite macro-level advances in ASEAN regional cooperation, on the ground anti-Vietnamese xenophobia remains an unsavory reality in contemporary Cambodia. During the 2013 national elections the newly constituted Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP), a merger of the Sam Rainsy Party (SRP) and the Human Rights Party (HRP), has capitalized strongly on anti-Vietnamese sentiments, leading to some minor violent incidents and a prolonged discussion on a renewal of racialism in contemporary Cambodia. Against widely hold views that the strong anti-Vietnamese animus constitutes a century-old historical continuity, this paper argues that popular Khmer anti-Vietnamism is predominantly based on folklorist representations of the lower Mekong delta’s early and mid 19th century social history and that it has undergone two significant – and closely interrelated – transformations in the course of Cambodia’s political history throughout the 20th century. The first transformative framework concerns times of crisis in the constitutive periods of Cambodian independence in the 1940s as well as the reconstitution of Cambodian statehood and nationalism in the early 1970s and again in the early 1990s. Building on René Girard’s mimetic theory, this paper argues that the Vietnamese minority in Cambodia has been ‘scapegoated’ as a ‘dispensable other’ which could be sacrificed in order to re-establish social cohesion in times of intra-societal conflict. As a result, the colloquial Khmer term “yuon”, formerly used as a neutral ethnic denomination, has assumed an increasingly derogatory meaning. Intrinsically related to the issue of ‘scapegoating’ is a second transformative moment which concerns the politicization of anti-Vietnamese sentiments in late 20th century Cambodia. It is argued here that this latter transformation has been fostered by ultra-nationalist tenants of Khmer Rouge ideology in the wake of the Third Indochina War. Ever since, divergent political camps have been prone to the use of anti-Vietnamese racialism in order to mobilize support from the Cambodian electorate. By de-cyphering the historical repertoires of Khmer xenophobia against their Vietnamese neighbors, this paper suggests that contemporary Cambodian society continues to fail in its attempts to overcome the social legacy of decades of civil war and factionalist infighting.
Silpakorn University Journal of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts 14(2): 133-154, 2014
Unsurprisingly, the scholarly literature on Democratic Kampuchea focuses on the Khmer Rouge’s internal policies, notably aspects of their ideology and regime of terror. By and large, Democratic Kampuchea is seen as a hermetically sealed hermit state with little engagement in foreign relations. If indeed foreign policy is scrutinized, most accounts are limited to a discussion of the Khmer Rouge’s relations to China and the Cambodian-Vietnamese war of the late 1970s. The similarly troublesome, if non-escalating relationship between Democratic Kampuchea and Thailand during the Khmer Rouge’s time in power is rarely touched upon in the scholarly literature on Cambodia. Based on an analysis of primary sources from the East German diplomatic archives, this paper aims to help filling this historiographical gap by providing an account on Thai-Cambodian relations during the period of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979), framed by a discussion of some basic principles of Khmer Rouge foreign policy.
An Enigma to Washington: The Political Ideology of Cambodia’s Norodom Sihanouk (1945-1970)
2019
Between 1945 and 1970 the United States Department of State consistently misjudged the ideology of Cambodia’s Prince Norodom Sihanouk. This same confusion permeates academic literature as well. David Chandler identifies Sihanouk as a leftist, Chinese puppet, while Michael Vickery, stresses his right-wing tendencies and dependence on the United States. Neither conception represents an accurate characterization of Norodom Sihanouk. Consistent with traditional Cambodian understandings of kingship, Sihanouk’s ideology can best be described as conservative Buddhist nationalism. In an attempt to maintain true national sovereignty, he remained consistently committed to a policy of non-alignment. The prince viewed domestic policy through a similar framework, attempting to hold a middle course between pro-American Khmer Blues against the communist Khmer Rouge. This delicate balance became increasingly untenable as the Vietnam War escalated. Ultimately, the State Department’s miscalculation o...