By A. Gaffar Peang-Meth
Pacific Daily News
I promised last week to discuss today the 25-year treaty of peace, friendship and cooperation concluded by Heng Samrin, a former Khmer Rouge commander who is now a leader in Cambodia's government, and Vietnam's prime minister Pham Van Dong on Feb. 18, 1979.This treaty binds Cambodia and Vietnam in what the treaty terms, "militant solidarity and fraternal friendship." In a stroke of the pen, the signatories extol a symbiosis of interests between Cambodia and Vietnam, opening the door to an even more thorough Vietnamization of Khmer land and culture than might have taken place in a federation of the states of the former French Indochina.
Retired Johns Hopkins professor Naranhkiri Tith observes on his Web site that the 1979 treaty between Hanoi and its puppet in Phnom Penh "became official in 2005" when Cambodia's King Sihamoni, "with the support of his father Sihanouk," put his royal signature on "supplements" to the treaty, thereby making Cambodians complicit in the Vietnamization of Cambodia.
Some readers have requested a review of Vietnam's historical expansionism and its contemporary revolutionary activities that ended with the 1979 treaty. I will provide that review today and then deal with the treaty.
No comments:
Post a Comment