 Cartoon by Sacrava (on the web at www.sacrava.blogspot.com) |
May 11, 2011
A. Gaffar Peang-Meth
PACIFIC DAILY NEWS
Thirty-two years ago, more than 100,000 Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia, smashed Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge guerrillas, took over Phnom Penh, installed a puppet regime in January 1979, and staffed the Hanoi-instituted Cambodian administrations with Vietnamese to oversee the puppet government’s activities.
Several thousand Cambodian youths taken in 1954 by the Viet Minh for education, indoctrination and training in Vietnam — by 1979 in their forties and fifties and fully acculturated in Vietnam — were brought back to Cambodia.
The puppet government leaders and their Vietnamese masters allowed Vietnamese citizens unrestricted access to live in Cambodia in support of Hanoi’s long-term economic and expansionist goals. The immigrants, like the Hanoi-backed Cambodian regime, were illegally installed in Cambodia.
These illegals were integrated into different aspects of Khmer society. There are Vietnamese who speak Khmer and act Cambodian, and many Cambodians who speak and enjoy Vietnamese ways, as this helps get them closer to privileges. An officer of Premier Hun Sen’s army told me it’s no longer easy to tell who is Vietnamese and who is Cambodian.
Nationally conscious Cambodians hate what has happened in the country, acknowledging their fear that Cambodia and the Khmer race may be subsumed by the country’s eastern neighbor. As Cambodian anger mounts, Vietnamese who migrated and have lived in Cambodia since France ruled Indochina, who have families who have lived all their lives in Cambodia, also are threatened by the new arrivals. The “old ” Vietnamese know no other place but Cambodia; the “new ” Vietnamese are exploiters of Cambodia’s resources.
Cambodians called on the Vietnamese to leave Cambodia and for Premier Hun Sen to step down. But the Cambodian-ized Vietnamese are not going anywhere, nor is Hun Sen, elected again and again.
Some Cambodians call for the “reactivation ” of the 1991 Paris Peace Accord to restore individual rights, freedom and democracy in Cambodia, and protect her independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity.
The international community’s $3 billion U.N.-managed peace initiative never required the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese-propped Heng Samrin/Hun Sen factions to disarm, nor created a politically neutral environment essential for the accords to work. The naïve nationalist KPNLF/KPNLAF and royalist FUNCINPEC/ANS were happy to empty their pockets, in the name of “national reconciliation,” with hungry alligators to get closer to the seat of power.
Recall the wide-eyed international community, which thought it could make Cambodia a “success” story, leaving town after the first U.N.-organized elections in 1993.
Today, in the midst of economic crises and world political upheavals, which government would step in to implement the accords?
Hun Sen is now a recipient of so-called Chinese “aid without strings attached”
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