The trouble with Vietnam's 'Nam Tien'

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Editorial by School of Vice

After centuries-long nam tien [southward] invasions and piece-meal annexations of territories once belonging to neighbouring kingdoms, including the ancient state of Champa [Central Vietnam today] and the Mekong Delta region referred to as 'Cochin China' by the French or 'Kampuchea Krom' by the Khmers, Vietnam still does not possess enough land space wherein to settle its own population!  

This historical Vietnamese trend of populating and seeding human presence in foreign territorial domains has been a key component of that nay tien process, and principally the reason behind the colonial French favouring Vietnam in many a territorial dispute with Cambodia, as such overwhelming ethno-demographic presence in relations to indigenous populations and the political-economic de facto 'fait accompli' this situation created had invariably tended to force the outcome in the dispute in the invaders' favour.

Yet, the nam tien movement itself has not altogether been a free-sailing process, and there are living symptoms and pointers to it being at work even as we speak; from the hundreds of thousands of documented and undocumented ethnic Vietnamese living in Cambodia [including but not limiting to those floating on the water of Tonle Sap lake], the provinces bordering Vietnam where ethnic Vietnamese have come to settle in unaccounted numbers and call these places their homes, the control over large swathes of Cambodian territory by Vietnamese firms and even Vietnamese military under the guise of "Economic Land Concessions" and commercial investments whilst hundreds of indigenous Khmers living on their ancestral lands along the eastern 'border' have been unceremoniously evicted since the two countries had agreed to "redraw" the contentious border line in the 1980s. Unfortunately, for some curious reasons these victims of land evictions at the hands of Vietnamese authorities have not received much international media attention - if any at all - especially, when compared to the "landless Vietnamese" often reported sympathetically in the world's press.

The nam tien and the real fear it engendered among the Khmers of being outnumbered and enslaved by the Vietnamese as well as the threat it posed to their identity as a nation  had also led to a series of widespread violent native uprisings against occupying Vietnamese troops [and civilians] in the 19th century, forcing the remainder of the army to retreat from the country and their commanding general to commit suicide in apology to his emperor for "failing to keep Cambodia under your Majesty's rule"!   

There had also been similair outbreaks of violence against ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia, especially those commissioned by the Khmer Rouge and the Lon Nol regime in the 1970s. Yet, while it is wholly unacceptable to condone such incidents, it would also be equally callous and cynical in the extreme to overlook the real provocations and causes of these violent reactions as these adhere to the nam tien process, which is arguably still in motion and even gaining momentum. While we the so-called 'civilised world' decry the brutalities committed and the expected plights of innocents - be they ethnic Khmers or Vietnamese - it is highly questionable those who advocate and advance nam tien and want it above all to succeed, actually care about human suffering.