'Race' and radicalism under a totalitarian state

 

 

Ref. At the center of a web of corruption amongst Khmer elites is Choeung Sopheap

 

 

by Khmer Circle


King Rama of Thailand once described the Chinese as 'The Jews of the East'. The money-making DNA that's in their blood stream and consciousness makes them the most economically successful ethnic minorities the world over. 

Over the centuries past their migrating ancestors would have left their native China with barely any personal possessions - as many still do even today and not all are endowed with wealth or financial assets for settling into their new countries. Perhaps, apart from the Jews these exceptional genes; their ability to adapt, thrive and make the most of opportunities even in the direst of circumstances is what sets them off from other peoples and ethnic groups. 

Reforming Chinese leaders such as Deng Xiaoping in the eighties and after would also not have failed to recognise such a crucial quality in the Chinese people and have been eager to exploit it as a basis for propelling China into modernity and - ultimately - a global power rather than the collectivisation and the state-imposed Five Years Plans that characterised Mao's and Stalin's eras under their respective reigns.

King Rama and others were not wrong in their assessment of the Chinese as a whole, although, of course, it would be misleading to ignore many other ethnic Chinese all-over South-East Asia who have culturally assimilated themselves into main stream indigenous societies through intermarriage or religion. In Cambodia of the 1950s and 1960s, some Khmer 'nationalists' and 'intellectuals' had converged on the belief that this type of ethnic-racial fusion had led to the dilution and corruption of the 'Khmer soul' and that only a radical 'overhaul' or corrective surgery would undo the harm. Their prognosis as such was not entirely without validity given many of the social vices - such as gambling. prostitution. bribery, usury etc. had been - in the main - imported features of this ethnic group; a cancer or malaise that arguably can still be seen to grip the country and society today. 

What was wrong - and fatally so - was the lack of progressive foresight and or humane visions on the part of successive Cambodian ruling elites, starting with Sihanouk's post-colonial rule - a long era of  national 'peace' and 'contentment' under its autocratic umbrella while the country's enemies in the East were scheming its downfall and would subsequently turn the blade of ultra-Khmer nationalism [as propounded by the likes of Keng Vansak and like-minded radical 'intellectuals' in Phnom Penh who had such a profound formative influence upon Salot Sar - Pol Pot - the "Original Khmer'] against its own kind. The ethnic cleansing campaign that had been witnessed during the Pol Pot era had not been exclusively limited to the ethnic Chinese, Sino-Khmers or Vietnamese alone. The Muslim minority - known as the Chams - had also been targeted. This latter minority group had been slaughtered almost to extinction and suffered disproportionately as an ethnic makeup in the country. 

That remains the enduring legacy of those soul-searching discussion sessions between young impressionable activists and 'revolutionaries' like Salot Sar, Ing Sary, their wives et al and their ideological gurus like Keng Vannsak, in particular. Unlike the assimilating Chinese, the ethnic Chams are thought to pose a threat to the country of a different kind: secessionist rebellion and, even after the overthrow of the KR regime in 1979 the idea fermented by this radical group had lived on in many a misguided Khmer nationalist's mind. 

Even the very notion of 'racial purity' itself is an idea that is almost impossible to define in the modern world; certainly not in a country or region as culturally and ethnically diverse as Cambodia. Assuming the lighter-skinned Sino-Khmer or Vietnamese had been purged, what then would qualify as the next targets for liquidation? The ethnic hill tribes like Kuys and Phnongs? Pursued to its logical conclusion, the state-driven policy - if that can be considered a 'policy' - of racial-ethnic cleansing would result in the country ethnically cleansed to the last Khmer person. Indeed, so many innocents had been labelled and persecuted as CIA 'spies', 'Khmer bodies with Vietnamese heads', 'counter-revolutionaries' and so forth and, much of this practice often arose out of unsettled personal feuds, prejudice, paranoia or envy. Even the 'Original Khmer' himself along with his trusted associates within the small KR leadership circle were hardly 'original' in that sense. But, under totalitarian rule such petty human foibles and undercurrents could easily gain traction and translate into tragedies.   

 
That's - in brief - what can happen to a small nation kept in the grip of a closed, single-party leadership. More accurately, one-man dictatorship. 

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