The Vietnamese minority in Cambodia

I use the term 'genocide' in a somewhat imprecise manner, because it has yet to be determined - perhaps it never will be - that Democratic Kampuchea sought intentionally to destroy all Vietnamese living in Cambodia. Most certainly, it sought to destroy any opposition, real or imaginary, to its dictatorial practices and other ethnic minorities, particularly the Cham Islam, were deliberately persecuted. Many of my relatives, who were neither Vietnamese nor Cham Islam but rather Chinese-Cambodians, including my parents (both poor, my mother being a tailor and my father a mechanic), died during this time. But so did many Khmer - Cambodia's ethnic majority - during the 1970s. What Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea could not tolerate was any form of ethnic diversity, hence ethnic minorities, especially the Cham Muslims, suffered disproportionately from the excesses of the late 1970s. See Kimmo Kiljunen , Kampuchea: decade of genocide (London, 1984); Ben Kiernan , 'Orphans of genocide: the Cham Muslims of Kampuchea under Democratic Kampuchea' , Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (Vol. 20, no. 1, 1988); David Hawk , 'The photographic record', in Karl Jackson (ed.), Cambodia 1975-1978: rendezvous with death (New Jersey, 1989).

See Ben Kiernan , How Pol Pot Came to Power (London, 1985 ) and M. Vickery , Kampuchea: politics, economics and society (Sydney, 1987).

I do not offer a precise definition of what it is to be a racist because I want to avoid abstract and ahistorical theorising in favour of understanding the historical changes in the nature and formation of racism. In the context of Cambodia, I argue that it has to do with the negative beliefs that people were encouraged to hold in the past towards Vietnamese, who were characterised as tricky, dishonest and uncultured, and their negatively evaluated attitudes, particularly in relation to the former control and administration of Cambodian territory, which was deemed 'barbaric'. Hence, the Vietnamese could be denied full citizenship rights, and, during periods of civil unrest, be detained, expelled or killed.

See W. Willmott , The Chinese in Cambodia (Vancouver, 1967); A. Forest , Histoire d'une colonisation sans heurts: Le Cambodge et la colonisationfrançaise (1897-1920) (Paris , 1980); D. Chandler , A History of Cambodia ( Boulder, Co., 1983).

See Norodom Sihanouk , War and Hope (New York, 1980) and F. Ponchaud , 'Social change in the vortex of revolution' , in K. Jackson (ed.), op. cit.

For those able to use Khmer language sources, see the 'orthodox' historical account of this period in Cambodian history by Trung Ngear , Provathsastr Khmere (Khmer History) (Phnom Penh, 1974).

See Serge Thion , 'Remodelling broken images: manipulation of identities towards and beyond the nation, an Asian perspective' in R. Guidiere , F. Pellizzi and S. Tambiah (eds), Ethnicities and Nations (Houston, 1988), and David Chandler , A History of Cambodia (Boulder, 1983 ).

The Ho Chi Minh trail was used in the 1960s by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) to send military supplies down to its armed forces and the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) in South Vietnam, which were fighting a war of national liberation against the South Vietnamese army, the US and its allies. The trail passed through parts of Ratanikiri and Mondolkiri, two of Cambodia's north-eastern provinces, adjacent to the strategically important central highlands of Vietnam. By the late 1960s, Sihanouk was 'permitting' the port of Kompong Som (Sihanoukville) to be used to trans-ship supplies to the DRV's armed forces and the NLF. The military under the organisation of Lon Nol - who was to seize power from Sihanouk in a March 1970 military coup and realign Cambodia with the US- 'unofficially' sold rice, medicines and other supplies to these same forces. See Norodom Sihanouk , My War with the CIA (Harmondsworth, 1973); Craig Etcheson , The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea (Boulder , 1984), and Grant Evans and Kelvin Rowley , Red Brotherhood at War ( London, 1990).

Based on interviews with Cambodian refugees in Australia from Takeo, Prey Veng and Sway Rieng provinces, who, while not directly affected by movements along the Ho Chi Minh trail during the 1960s and 1970s, nevertheless had experience of both communist and non-communist Vietnamese troops. These interviews were conducted in 1989, but I also interviewed people in Takeo province in 1991 who had had similar experiences. However, this does not mean that relations were always conflict-free. There were reports that DRV/NLF troops looked down upon Cambodians and, for example, sometimes shot at low-flying enemy aircraft from within poorly defended villages. Nonetheless, even the US Defense Intelligence Agency suggested at the time that these troops were generally well behaved. See Ben Kiernan and Chanthou Boua (eds), Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea, 1942-1981 (London, 1982).

C. Etcheson , op. cit.

Some copies of this Communist Party of Kampuchea publication have been translated into English. See David Chandler , Ben Kiernan and Boua Chanthou (eds), Pol Pot Plans the Future: confidential leadership documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976-1977 (New Haven , 1988). Norodom Sihanouk, writing in 1980, claims that Democratic Kampuchea's leadership told him about the denial of residence rights to Vietnamese in Cambodia, about plans to make Cambodians work much harder than Vietnamese (thereby making it more difficult for Vietnam to invade Cambodia), and about drawing the land and sea borders between Cambodia and Vietnam more 'justly'. War and Hope, op. cit.

Some of the Cambodian refugees I have interviewed in Australia, and who were living inside Cambodia, rather than in the border camps, during the early 1980s make this point.

Arguments concerning the politics of food aid and other forms of humanitarian assistance to Cambodia in the early 1980s have appeared in William Shawcross , The Quality of Mercy (London, 1984). Evans and Rowley, op. cit., are much less negative towards both Vietnam and the post-Pol Pot state in Cambodia than Shawcross.

Some members of my own family were apprehensive about the intentions of the government (People's Republic of Kampuchea) at the time, because they listened to the Voice of America -which is more widely heard and listened to in Cambodia than state radio due to its 'oppositional' politics and the weak transmission power of local radio - and believed that life might get worse for them. However, one of my brothers decided to take up an offer to study in Vietnam. He believes that he benefited from this experience, not least because the Vietnamese education system is superior to Cambodia's. See also M. Martin , 'Vietnamised Cambodia: a silent ethnocide' in Indochina Report (No. 7, 1986), pp. 1-31, and Vickery, op. cit.

My next door neighbours who fled Phnom Penh in the wake of Lon Nol's 1970 pogrom returned to Cambodia in the early 1980s. They consider Cambodia to be their home, having no strong kinship links in Vietnam, and were only too happy to return to Cambodia.

At an after-dinner address, on 27 October 1991, to more than 400 Cambodians in Fairfield, a suburb of Sydney where many refugees from Indochina settled in the 1980s.

I have met economics students in Phnom Penh who complained that they had to learn Vietnamese because most of their lecturers were Vietnamese. They wanted to be 'instructed' in the dynamics of capitalist economics by lecturers who could speak some English, Khmer, or both languages. Such students are mostly opposed to any form of socialist economics.

The Blainey debate in Australia was quite complex. Elements of the New Right, including some of Australia's largest and most successful capitalists, supported the continuing immigration of Vietnamese (Cambodians were not mentioned) because it was felt that their experiences with 'communism' would enable them to oppose 'leftist' immigrants and local workers who brought politics into the workplace. See the discussion in Stephen Castles et al, Mistaken Identity ( Sydney, 1990).

The current recession in Australia has seen the revival of the anti-immigration 'debate', especially because most recently-arrived immigrant groups, notably the Lebanese and Vietnamese, have unemployment rates double the national average. Unemployment among the less skilled Cambodians is even higher, and only Australia's most oppressed underclass, the Aborigines, are worse off than the Cambodians.