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Archeologists have
located Cambodia brick temples, walls, pottery, and precious metal artifacts in
several locations in southeastern Cambodia and in
southern Vietnam.
These
discoveries, along with a large canal network that is
believed to have linked the ancient settlement of Angkor Borei with more coastal settlement sites, indicate a
high degree of political organization.
The archeological
evidence of Funan's scope is supported by Chinese texts
that describe Funan as a maritime empire with
settlements containing
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houses raised on stilts.
According to these texts, the people of Funan cultivated
rice and sent missions to China with tribute of gold,
silver, ivory, and exotic animals. |
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Cambodia brick temple at Phnom Chisor |
Buddhist artifacts
such as Buddhist statues
and Buddha images were also exchanged
between Funan and the Liang dynasty of southern China. The
Chinese texts also recount the
mythological origins of Funan as the land of the Khmer
people. The earliest known account of this myth was
recorded by the Chinese official Rang Tai, who traveled
to Funan in the middle of the third century A.D. A
tenth-century history of Kang Tai's journey states that
he learned that the original sovereign of Funan was a
woman named Liu-ye. A man named Hun-tian - a Chinese
transcription of the name Kaundinya - from the land of
Mo-fu dreamt that a god gave him a bow and asked him to
take to the sea. The next day, Hun-tian discovered a bow
in a temple devoted to the god, and he boarded a ship
that sailed to Funan. Liu-ye attempted to attack and
plunder Hun-tian's ship, but "Hun-tian raised his bow
and shot an arrow which pierced through the queen's boat
from one side to the other. The queen was overtaken by
fear and submitted to him." Hun-tian then ruled over the
country of Funan.
A similar account is contained in the
History of the Chin, compiled in the first half of the
seventh century A.D.7.
The Chinese texts that refer to the Khmer
foundation myth are generally regarded as
chronologically accurate, but they concentrate on
China's diplomatic and commercial relations, making them
a discontinuous and biased historical record;8 however,
Chinese accounts of the myth do contain references to
names found on stone inscriptions dated prior to 1000
A.D. An inscription dated 657 A.D at the Champa site of
Mi Son in Vietnam describes a warrior named Kaundinya
starting a dynasty with Soma, the daughter of the king
of the naga serpent gods.9 The Baksei Chamkrong
inscription outside of Angkor Thom, dated 947 A.D.,
describes a dynastic line originating from "from Sri-Kaundinya
and the daughter of Soma."Similar versions of
the same myth also appear in modern Cambodian folklore. One
version states that a man named Preah Thaong arrived by ship at
an island marked by a giant thlok, a tree that is native to
Cambodia. On the island Preah Thaong discovered the subterranean
home of the nagas, where he met the king's daughter, NeangNeak,
whom he married with her father's blessing. The couple returned
to the land of men, and the naga king drained waters surrounding
the island, bestowing the name of Kampuca Thipdei upon the new
realm, a title that in Sanskrit means "king of Kambuja"
(kambujadhipati). ' ' Preah Thaong's wife was impregnated by the
god Indra, and she gave birth to a son named Ket Mala who
assumed the throne and established a dynasty. In some variants
of the story, Preah Thaong encountered the naga princess on the
shore of the ocean.
Another version of the myth from Cambodian
folklore states that Preah Thaong arrived at the land of the
thlok tree only to find it under the rule of a Cham king.
Through trickery and war Preah Thaong overthrew the Cham king
and gained the throne. In some variations of this story, the
Cham king retreated to Champassak in modern-day Laos, where he
gathered a Laotian army and forced Preah Thaong to retreat.
Preah Thaong then counter-attacked at and besieged the Cham
king. Through the intercession of Cham mandarins, the Cham king
agreed to divide his kingdom, and Preah Thaong was granted "the
place of the thlok tree."
Royal Cambodian annals that date at least to the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contain similar explanations
for the origin of the Khmer. One story in the annals identifies Preah Thaong as an exiled son of a foreign king and credits him with
defeating the native king who had ruled the land of the thlok.
Upon his victory, Preah Thaong married a naga princess, and the
king of the nagas created a kingdom called Kambuja for Preah
Thaong by swallowing the sea1·* A variation on this account,
also found in the annals, describes Kambu Svayambhuva, the king
of a land called Aryadesa, who wandered in sorrow through a land
of sand and rock after the death of his wife. Kambu stumbled
upon a cave, entered it, and discovered the naga underworld.
Kambu married the daughter of the naga king, who turned the
desert into a beautiful land that became known as Kambuja.
The Khmer origin myth is
remarkably consistent over many sources and time
periods,
and it reflects significant geographic
influences on the early Khmer polity of Funan. In the
myth, a man traveling by sea indicates a coastal area,
and his arrival at a place inundated by water where
serpent gods control floods and fertility suggests that
agriculture in this location depended on the floodwaters
brought by the annual monsoon.
A complex society like
Funan, with its high population densities,
ceramic and
metallurgical technology, and a hierarchical social
structure, would have required food-surplus rice agriculture. Van Liere believes that surplus
food production first arose in the region approximately two
thousand years ago in the flood-prone alluvial plains of the
lower Mekong river, near the coast of the South China Sea, with
the use of broadcast rice. Rice production further inland to the
north and west was avoided until the eighth century A.D. because
of the effort required to clear densely vegetated interior
lowland forests.
Even today Cambodia's zones of
productive agriculture are restricted to lowland areas, where
flooding maintains soil fertility but makes careful control of
water for bunded-field irrigation difficult.
The ability of the Khmer between
two thousand and fifteen hundred years ago to produce a surplus
of food in the alluvial plain of the Mekong made it the most
important location of early Khmer settlement and permitted the
development of a complex society like Funan. Inscriptions dated
prior to 1,000 A.D. indeed indicate a concentration of Khmer in
this area - "the modern provinces of Takeo, Prei Veng, Kompong
Speu, and Kampot, with an extension northward along the Mekong
through Kompong Cham as far as Kratie." Making the Cambodia Khmer nation
capable of repelling threats from without required a
restructuring of Cambodian society from within.
Cambodians thus had to accept without question the
state's absolute authority to ensure that the revolution
proceeded. Influences that were deemed alien by the DK
leadership were purged from the body politic, and forced
labor became a tool to produce "the rectification of the
self and subordination of the individual into a
collective unit." The revolution would by necessity also
"defend, strengthen, and enlarge" the DK regime itself.
In the minds of the DK
leadership, the DK's "capacity to defend the country"
against aggression could only be assured by "economic independenence." As detailed in the DK's Four Year
Plan for 1977-1980 that was drafted in the summer of 1976, the DK chose a strategy of rapidly transforming peasant agriculture
in order to overcome the country's weak industrial and
technological base. To create "plentiful agricultural capital"
over the period covered by the Plan, the Standing Committee of
the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) expected the Cambodia's
average rice yield to increase to 3 metric tons per hectare by
the beginning of 1977 and the country's rice production to
double between 1977 and 1980. This represented an immediate
doubling of the country's average rice yield. DK leaders
believed that "gaining mastery" over the "water problem" was
critical to increasing agricultural production, and huncuds of
thousands of Cambodians spent the DK period digging ditches and
building dikes in water control construction projects. Foreign
economic assistance was not needed to improve agricultural
yields, DK leaders believed, because of the special
characteristics of the Cambodian revolution, nor was it wanted
because of its political dangers.
As noted by Chandler et
al., the Northwest Zone, composed of portions of Battambang and Pursat provinces north and west of the
Tonle Sap, was singled out in the Four Year Plan as the
area slated for the greatest expansion of agricultural
production. The DK leadership expected 140,000 hectares
of previously uncultivated land in the Northwest Zone to
produce 3 tons of rice per hectare by 1980, a target
that would enable the Northwest to provide 60 percent of
Cambodia's rice exports. While other areas of Cambodia
were expected to supply 20 percent of the export value
of their harvests to the central authorities, the
Northwest was ordered to turn over 50 percent of its
harvests by value.
The province
of Battambang in the Northwest Zone had in fact been the
most agriculturally productive region of Cambodia since
colonization by the French in the nineteenth century. In
terms of population, when the DK came to power in 1975,
the Northwest also enjoyed higher land per capita and
rice production per capita ratios than the more densely
populated East Zone (composed of parts of the provinces
of Prey Veng, Svay Rieng, Kompong Cham, and Kratie) and
Southwest Zone (portions of Kampot, Kompong Speu, Takeo,
and Kandal provinces). The East and the Southwest Zones
contained the provinces located on the alluvial plain of
the Mekong watershed. The problem facing DK leaders was to increase rice
production and yields in the Northwest Zone without a
ready supply chemical fertilizers, agricultural
machinery, or other capital-intensive inputs. DK leaders
implemented an ingenious if brutal solution to the
problem: sending additional labor to the Northwest Zone
by relocating not only many of Cambodia's million-plus
urban residents but also people from rural southeastern
Cambodia.
The forced relocation of large numbers of
people from southeastern Cambodia not only increased the
amount of labor available in the Northwest Zone, but it
also served the DK's wider ideological agenda. Pre-1975
Cambodian society had to be overturned, class enemies
had to be destroyed, and the DK's hold on power had to
be solidified. Ordinary Cambodians had to "build and
defend Cambodia'1 while "standing guard against
widespread but poorly defined enemies who threatened the
Organization [the CPK] and its revolution." Southeastern
Cambodia, especially the provinces located in the East
Zone, was the area of Cambodia believed by DK leaders to
be most in danger of foreign aggression. DK leaders
believed that the area contained the greatest numbers of
civilians and CPK members whose commitment to the DK -
and thus to the Khmer nation - were suspect. These
individuals had to be removed from southeastern Cambodia
- in one way or another - for security reasons. Notably
the first DK district administration in the East Zone
brought under greater control by the central DK
leadership was Chantrea in 1975-76. Chantrea is the only
area of Svay Rieng province and the East Zone surrounded
on three sides by the territory of Vietnam.
According to
Kiernan, 800,000 people were relocated under the orders of the
DK leadership to the Northwest Zone between April 1975 and the
middle of mid-1976.38 The majority of those moved to the
Northwest seem to be civilians from the Southwest and East Zones
- Cambodia's southeasternmost provinces. Included in these
evacuees was a large group of Chams from the East Zone. Chams,
being non-Khmer, were, by the DK's definition, enemies and as
Kiernan has argued convincingly, the victims of genocide under
the DK.
Vickery, in contrast, argues against the view that "the Chams
were as a group a special object of extermination policy" and
that evidence indicates that "there was never a central policy
to destroy them . . . they were not the object of any special
attention by the authorities and that they survived in the same
proportion as other people." The death rate of Chams under the
DK does not alter the fact that Chams were deliberately
relocated away from the East early in the regime on the orders
of the central DK leadership - against the wishes of DK cadres
in the North and Northwest Zone. An official telegram to Pol Pot
on 30 November 1975 states:
According to
the final decision of the meeting [between regional and
district authorities in the Eastern Zone], we must not
send the Islamic People [the Chams] to Kracheh [Kratie]
Province [in Cambodia's southeast]. The Northwest and
the North [Zones] have to accept them, so that we can
keep them away from the Mekong River to help ease the
atmosphere ... In principle, the Zone withdrew fifty
thousand people to the North. More than one hundred
thousand additional Islamic people remain in the Eastern
Zone . . . But we will not have enough people to reach
the one hundred fifty thousa id [slated for relocation
out of the Eastern Zone], if the Northern Zone will not
accept the Islamic people.
Although executions on a mass scale did not begin in the
East until 1978, East Zone cadres apparently began to be
arrested as early as 1975, and by 1976
cadres from the Southwest Zone had begun a implement a
centrally-directed plan "to sweep all E istern cadres out of the
system." The decision to "purify" the East was thus a decision
reached before the beginning of execution campaign of 1978.
Heightening fears among DK leaders that southeastern Cambodia
might fall victim to foreign invasion were increasingly frequent
military clashes with Vietnam. Vietnamese forces had penetrated
more than 20 miles into Cambodian territory in 1977, and
residents of the East Zone retreated into Vietnam as its army
pulled back. For this event to occur, the DK leadership
believed, the area had to be rife with traitors, and these
traitors had to be eliminated if the border was to be secured.
If traitors were not exposed and defeated by the DK, they would
eventually "rot society, rot the Party, and rot the army," leading to the destruction of the Khmer.
The killing
campaign instituted by the DK in the East Zone in 1978
targeted all remaining East Zone cadres, urban evacuees,
and in particular anyone in the Zone believed to be
ethnic Vietnamese or a supporter of Vietnam - anyone
labeled as having a "Khmer body but a Vietnamese mind."
During the 1978 purge between 100,000 and 250,000 men,
women, and children from the East Zone were killed. The
importance placed by DK leaders on "purifying"
southeastern Cambodia near Vietnam rather than
Cambodia's northwestern interior is further demonstrated
by the pattern of mass graves
that have been mapped by researchers participating in the
Cambodian Genocide Program (CGP) at Yale University. In
Cambodia's southeastern provinces (Kompong Cham, Kompong Speu,
Kampot, Kandal, Prey Veng, Svay Rieng, Takeo, and the city of
Phnom Penh) - the provinces that occupy the flat alluvial plain
of the Mekong - approximately 12,000 mass gravesites were
identified, composing almost two-thirds of all mass grave sites
that had been located in Cambodia by July of 2001. Although the
precise number of people killed at these locations is unknown,
evidence indicates that these are in fact "mass" graves filled
with the bodies of people executed by the Khmer Rouge.
At most of
the sites containing mass graves,
CGP researchers also
identified Khmer Rouge-era prison facilities at or near
the mass grave site. This fact, along with witness
testimony and records of the Khmer Rouge security
services obtained by the CGP, leads us to conclude that
most mass graves hold the remains of victims of
centrally-organized violence, rather than of other
causes of death such as disease or starvation.
For example, documents record that 94,000 people were
killed at a single site in Svay Rieng province.
Northwest Cambodia presents a different picture. In the
six provinces surrounding the Tonle Sap (Siem Riep,
Battambang, Pursat, Kompong Chhnang, and Kompong Thorn)
- a region that includes the heartland of the former
Angkorian empire and the productive rice fields of
Battambang, nearly 5,200 mass grave sites were located
by July of 2001 - less than half the number found during
the same period in southeastern Cambodia. The geographic
distribution of death under the DK regime is heavily
skewed toward Cambodia's southeastern provinces, as
shown in Fieure.
While Khmers
inside
Cambodia who were perceived as traitors were
being eliminated, ethnic Khmers who lived on the other
side of Cambodia's southeastern border were brought
under DK rule to bolster national defenses. Officials
from the Southwest Zone were told by their superiors in
1977 that "the Khmer Krom [ethnic Khmer living in
southern Vietnam] were to be brought to live in Cambodia
while [Cambodian] Khmer were to be sent to live in
Kampuchea Krom," in part to gain "many forces" to fight
Vietnam.47 In 1978, Southwest military units oegan
launching raids across the border into Vietnam to
forcibly drive ethnic Khmers into southeastern Cambodia;
however, once inside Cambodia the Khmer Krom had to
endure the same "tempering" - forced labor, political
indoctrination, and in some cases torture and execution
- as native Cambodians to prove their loyalty as "true"
Khmers.The construction of a national identity is usually
assumed to have three prerequisites. The first
prerequisite is a belief shared by a large group of
individuals that each member of the group belongs to a community that
is distinct from and bordered by other communities. According to
Anderson, the nation is an "imagined community" in the minds
of its members whose boundaries, while superseding the
individual's immediate environment, are finite. While individual
members of the community need not be identical in terms of
class, religion, or even language, they feel a bond with other
members of the community and therefore want "to act in unison on
all matters of national importance."The
second prerequisite is the belief by members of the
community that the community should be governed by a
sovereign state, and that the defense of this
sovereignty legitimizes the use of power by the leaders
of that state. Sovereignty links the shared belief in
the community to the community's most important
political institution - the state - and prescribes some
of the necessary duties of that state and those who
manage it. The belief in sovereignty grants the state's
leaders the authority to act upon the nation as a whole
in the name of national interests.
Nationality is thus a product not just of
culture and history, but also of geography. Geography is
central to national identity, and while geography is not
destiny, "it comes awfully close to being so...
tradition can be invented [but] it cannot be invented
out of nothing."51 In the case of the Khmer, the
geography of the lower Mekong river watershed - an unforested alluvial plain that is flooded annually by
monsoon rains - made possible the development of
food-surplus rice agriculture.
Surplus agricultural production in turn
permitted the Khmer
to form their first highly-organized
polity, the empire of Funan.
The importance of the region once occupied by
Funan to Khmer concepts of nationhood is demonstrated by the
mythical account of the origin of the Khmer people. Though the
historical accuracy of the myth of a foreign man marrying a
native princess and establishing a dynasty over the land now
known to Khmer as Kampuchea is impossible to verify, the Khmer
have believed in it for over fifteen hundred years. When people
believe in myths, the myths themselves become reality to the
people who believe in them, and "people act, or even base their
lives upon them, especially in times of crisis."
The
crisis that put the Khmer nation most recently at risk
was the regime of Democratic Kampuchea. It has been
estimated that within only forty-four months the leaders
of Democratic Kampuchea caused the deaths of between 9
and 20 percent of the Cambodian population.53 Cambodia
has still not recovered socially, economically, or
politically from the trauma inflicted by Democratic
Kampuchea. The area of Cambodia subjected to the most
brutality during the DK regime was its southeastern
provinces, especially those bordering Vietnam, an
historical enemy of the Khmer. In the minds of DK
leaders, the past use of the plains of southeastern
Cambodia as an invasion route by foreign aggressors
required that the region be purified of anyone disloyal
to the Khmer nation or unsupportive of the DK's
authority over it. The DK leadership's preoccupation
with defending southeastern Cambodia from supposed
enemies led to precisely what it feared most - an
invasion by the Vietnamese on December 25, 1978. The
government of Democratic Kampuchea fell within days and
Vietnam occupied Cambodia for over a decade.
In the years after Democratic Kampuchea
had fallen to Vietnam, Cambodia's southeastern lowlands
remained important in definitions of the Khmer national
interest. For example, following elections sponsored by
the United Nations in 1993, Prince Norodom Chakrapong, a
son of Cambodia's king Norodom Sihanouk, declared that
an "autonomous region" would be formed out of provinces
adjacent to the Mekong River, such as Svay Rieng,
Kompong Cham, Prey Veng, Kratie, Stung Treng.
Chakrapong's statement was intended to force the winning
party in the election, led by a rival son of the king,
to accept a coalition government with the political
party that had ruled Cambodia before the election. The
ploy worked - faced with the potential secession of much
of southeastern Cambodia and not wanting to be regarded
as responsible for a division of the Khmer people into
two states, the winning party agreed to share power. In
the era of global ization when national territories and
borders are supposedly becoming increasingly irrelevant,
the geography of Cambodia remains important in Khmer
politics
By Chad Raymond, assistant Professor, Political Science, Gardner-Webb
University, Boiling Springs, NC 20817. Professor Raymond's main
research interests are: Economic Development. non-Western
politics, and Southeast Asia. |
