A. Gaffar Peang-Meth
By A. Gaffar Peang-Meth • January 13, 2010
via CAAI News Media
Last week I wrote about Vietnam's military invasion of Cambodia and characterized Jan. 7, 1979, as a day of infamy, the precipitant of a dark era in the country.
More than 100,000 Vietnamese troops, backed by tanks and aircraft, crossed the border into Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1978 in a swift military invasion that sent Pol Pot and his gang running for their lives. The Vietnamese captured Phnom Penh 14 days later, installed a puppet regime and stayed in control for the next 10 years.
Also last week, Cambodian Premier Hun Sen blasted as "beasts" those who do not regard Jan. 7 as the anniversary of Vietnam's "liberation" of Cambodia.
Hanoi, like the rest of the world, knew that Pol Pot's agents had perpetrated brutalities against the Khmer people since April 17, 1975, when the Khmer Rouge forced the evacuation of the entire Cambodian population from homes, villages, towns and cities, to perform forced labor. Suffering, death and destruction were the order of the day.
The widely reported burning of homes and massacres of civilians in Vietnam's An Giang and Chau Doc provinces in 1977 by Pol Pot's guerrilla units offered an incitement to Vietnam, which was then busy strategizing and plotting Ho Chi Minh's grand design of a greater Vietnam, to put in play a takeover plan that would advance its goal of a federation of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
It was no coincidence that the Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia on the same day Brezhnev's Soviet 40th Army entered Afghanistan, Dec. 24, 1979. The Soviet Union was Vietnam's chief ally and financial supporter at the time.
Following the regime change in Moscow, in May 1988, one month after Gorbachev announced the Soviets would leave Afghanistan, the Soviets began to exit that country.
Vietnam observed the rapid changes under way in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where communism was in retreat; the rise of rival China; the warming of U.S.-China relations and their support for the anti-Vietnamese Khmer Resistance. While it began to hint at its eventual withdrawal from Cambodia -- which was accomplished in December 1989, 11 years after the initial invasion -- Vietnam took offensive action against the Cambodian resistance, maneuvered to weaken the anti-Vietnam U.S.-China alliance by encouraging talks between the Vietnam-created regime in Cambodia and the resistance factions in order to improve the puppet government's legitimacy, and presented itself as a reliable and attractive future partner of the U.S. in the region.
At the same time, Vietnam ensured that members of the Khmer Viet Minh were positioned in Cambodia's administrative and governmental organizations. The KMC was largely made up of those several thousand Cambodians, mostly children, who had been taken to Vietnam in 1954 after the signing of the Geneva Accords, and raised and acculturated there. They were later trained at the Son Tay Military Academy and the Nguyen Ai Quoc school.
As history reveals, Vietnam's labors yielded great results.
The Paris Peace Accords on Cambodia were signed in October 1991 and Vietnam's Cambodian proxies, now legitimized by the world community, sat in positions of power. Important stipulations in the accords were not implemented, allowing Vietnam's surrogate, Hun Sen, who lost the 1993 general elections, to elbow himself to become a co-prime minister. In 1997, Sen unleashed a coup d'etat, in which hundreds were killed, and seized power.
The journey toward a greater Vietnam has not ended. It began in 939, when Nam Viet freed itself from a thousand-year bondage to China, and moved southward, taking over and integrating what stood in the way. In 2010, that journey has put the Vietnamese in a position to have an impact on Thailand's political stability.
The current Cambodian-Thai conflict has been inflamed by Sen's continuing provocations, intended to destabilize Thailand and provide opportunities for Vietnam to influence events there. Hun Sen's success at diverting his countrymen's attention from their own meager lots to the possibility of a conflict with their historical adversary has had the side benefit of increasing support for his regime.
As has been the case many times in history, Cambodians have connived with the Vietnamese to accomplish Vietnam's goals: Khmer King Chey Chettha II in 1620, King Ang Chan II in the 1800s, Prince Sihanouk in the Vietnam War, Pol Pot and Paris-trained Khmer Marxists, Hun Sen and his ruling Cambodian People's Party, supported by the King Father and his son, the current king.
The institution of the Khmer monarchy has tumbled to its lowest ebb as it now has acquiesced to become a political instrument of the Sen regime. Sen has extracted a royal decree from the king to appoint a fugitive former premier of Thailand as Sen's personal and economic adviser and another royal decree to pardon a Thai engineer who was imprisoned as a "spy" for a foreign power.
Cambodians are being manipulated by Sen to respond to Thailand based on historical animosities not relevant to today's political realities. It would be preferable if lessons could be taken from history so that it is not repeated.
Hurling racial slurs and insults only makes one angrier. It's time to unlearn and relearn, adopt what's useful, discard what's not. As fear is conditioned and learned, so it can be unconditioned and unlearned. The general inclination to conform, and not to ask questions, needs to change. Progress requires it.
A. Gaffar Peang-Meth, Ph.D., is retired from the University of Guam, where he taught political science for 13 years. Write him at peangmeth@yahoo.com.
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