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| Vietnamese in Cambodia - Joshua Project |
by School of Vice
It is an age old adage of liberationist thought around the
world, and one that resonates time and again in humankind’s struggles against
organised repression throughout history that oppression always breeds resistance
even if sometimes the crushing weight of such oppression in the end overwhelms
even the best of mobilised effort and sacrifice directed to reversing it. This
fact, indeed, proves to have been the case with the vanquished and ancient nation
of Champa, the various indigenous races [Les Montagnards] scattered all over
the highlands of central and northern Vietnam, and, of course, the Khmers of
Kampuchea Krom or the Mekong Delta. ‘Vanquished’ is the right term one may use
to describe the tragic fate and plight of these communities – victims or collaterals
of what Karl Marx might have termed ‘historical dialectics’.
In the natural or animal world researchers and naturalists
have identified certain characteristics inbred or inherent in some species which
render them particularly inimical to the stability, regeneration and physical survival
of their ill prepared rivals, and or other species in their own native habitats
and climates. Naturalists call these
predatory creatures ‘invasive species’ owing to their tendency and instinct to rest
their breeding and growth upon the annihilation and subjugation of ‘lesser’
able or equipped species by virtue of the latter’s own climatic conditioning
and adapting limitations.
Nowhere in the human universe and perhaps in human history has
there been witnessed man’s competition for survival and inter-state warring on
the scale and intensity as had been recorded and witnessed in the history of
the ‘Middle Kingdom’ where tribalism, the cause of good and evil, as well as internecine
violence and clashing ambitions would have been put to a sterner test and to
the greater limits and endurance of man. Even Marco Polo had allowed himself to
note the ironic, benign twist in this human drama when he touched upon the idea
[romanticised at best] that the rest of mankind would have to endure what would
have been unimaginable punishment and suffering had the ‘Chinese race’ not been
as peaceful by nature. By this we think he meant that unlike the Mongolian
hordes that terrorised and subdued more than half of the medieval world’s nations,
the Chinese and their rulers had, on the other hand, confined their ambitions
and warlike tendency to within the already immense boundaries or confines of
their Empire. Even the notion of such a kingdom, like the ancient Hebrews’
belief and conviction that they alone of all humanity had been elected as God’s
‘Chosen people’ implies [divine] closeness to and special relationship with the
Heavens; and if the Chinese had not looked to add to their empire all those
races of “barbarians” existing outside or on the fringes of this Middle Kingdom,
it is perhaps, because they had not thought it worth their bother and time
civilising races they inherently believed to have been exempt from this
heavenly mandate and thus beyond redemption anyway.
The Chinese had their great sages and philosophers too,
whose cerebral impact, like that of ancient India, had reached further afield and
had been welcome and assimilated into the enquiring minds and annals of learning
of contemporary western societies than would have been the march of their army.
The earliest inventions of paper and gun power, as is the science of astronomy,
are likewise attributed to these rich – if violent – cultural milieus. After all,
it is impossible to imagine the utility of gun power in a nation veered
wholeheartedly towards peace – as some think Marco Polo might have implied
through his famous account of China. Marco Polo had also brought a great deal
more to his native home of Venice than a collection of ideas on how to make spaghetti
and macaroni!
But more pertinent here for our present purpose and
discussion we ask: what has Vietnam as a nation and state brought out of this
violent and unforgiving caldron that was the Middle Kingdom where the
Vietnamese had been bonded and enslaved for over two thousand years, and as it
has resolved to move south and westward across lands that would have been
better described as ‘peaceful’ in character and inclination? Well, one
immediate reason appears to be that the Vietnamese have brought with them this warlike
tenacity and relentless predatory mindset of the former slaves with impossible
wounds to heal; a merciless vision and impulse to impersonate and equal – if not
exceed - their former captors and tormentors, and a will to destiny of the most
clinical and inhuman in nature, as well as an account to settle. Sadly, it has
not been their former enslavers or adversaries, but rather the wholesale
communities lying well outside of the immediate reaches of the Middle Kingdom
who have been - and are being - made to pay for these two thousand years of injuries
and injustices.
What had the ancient kingdom of Champa committed in the
worldly affairs of ancient China to have merited such a cruel, brutal fate of
having been first courted through the most devious schemes and treachery and
second, dismembered violently into nonentities, subsequently banished into
stateless exile and humiliation those fortunate enough to have escaped
organised enslavement and slaughter? Even the kingdom’s name of ‘Champa’ -
deriving from that most fragrant and exotic of flowers in what is now central
Vietnam - tells us something of the aesthetic and harmonious character of its
rulers and indigenous inhabitants. I know detractors would love to remind me of
the intermittent warring between the Khmer kingdoms and Champa. Yet, these
inter-state conflicts and violence had not on the whole been waged with the
conscious purpose of exterminating one another as an entity and people and,
more specifically, with the ultimate goal of seizing territories and arable
lands as living space and stepping stones to further territorial expansion. This would not seem to be the distinct trait
or characteristic of a kingdom that described itself as ‘Champa’ or ‘Sovannaphoum’
[Golden Land] – and would more fittingly describe a sub-Sino culture or state,
be it literally translates as ‘overpass...’, ‘southward-bound’ or ‘westward-bound’
as its preferred self-definition.
Why had these smaller kingdoms been so easily swept aside by
Vietnamese expansion and aggression? The clue to the question would be found in
these nations’ respective modes of survival and adaptation. Nothing in their temperament
or world view had prepared them for the seemingly sudden and rapacious invasion
of a hostile foreign species – and that’s where our analogy begins. History has
witnessed the destruction of the Montagnards, the Chams, and the Khmers of
Kampuchea Krom in systematic planned stages, and if any of us are alive and
breathing at this moment in time, their past horrors and miseries are being re-enacted
upon the people of Cambodia before our very eyes today.
It had taken the Vietnamese two thousand years to escape
Chinese repression and bondage. The Vietnamese state, however, has not needed
or does not appear to require that long a time to subjugate and annihilate
peoples and states whose plundered lands and liberties had ironically been a
central contributing factor in its historical emancipation from Chinese
hegemonic rule not that long ago.
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