C ambodian scholar Michael Vickery witnessed the crippling pressures under
which the Cambodian government had to operate after 1979. Here is his frank
reply to the critics of the PRK regime.
"I feel compelled to
write," as Soizick Crochet began her scolding of Chantou Boua, whose article I
missed, but with whose views of PRK Cambodia I have been familiar (and which I
largely share) since traveling with her and three others on my first post-DK
trip to Cambodia in 1981.
Crochet's comments follow very closely the
themes of Le Mur de Bambou, by Esmeralda Luciolli, a book which I thought had
been deservedly forgotten, but about which Phnom Penh Post readers should now be
warned.
Le Mur de Bambou is a peculiarly vicious book purveying a certain
number of lies about the Peoples Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), many apocryphal
anecdotes which might be true but unacceptable without more precision of time
and place, some truths which, apparently unknown to the author, represent
continuity from the pre-1975 Cambodia which she professed to wish restored, and
some less trivial accurate information about the present which, however, has
been torn dramatically out of context in order to suggest situations which are
not true.
Luciolli, a doctor who worked in Cambodia for 15 months in
1984-1985, like her colleague Crochet, blamed the PRK exclusively for all the
difficulties of life in Cambodia, especially for Western NGO egos, as though
there were no economic blockade by major Western powers, no hostility by
Southeast Asian neighbors, no danger of attack from rival Cambodian enemy forces
armed and supported by those Western and neighboring Asian states, and no
foreign aid workers already converted to the line of FUNCINPEC and the KPNLF.
Implicitly, for Luciolli and Crochet, the only thing preventing a normal happy
bourgeois life-style for all Cambodians and their NGO counselors was the
malevolence and mischievousness of the PRK leadership.
So eager was
Luciolli to undermine the PRK on any grounds that she even charged them with
exaggerating the damage done by the Pol Pot regime. The "new regime attributes
all responsibility to the person of Pol Pot, crystallizing around this name the
very idea of evil". That was true, but the author showed her ignorance in
falling victim to the same misapprehension of DK destruction in her (false)
charge that the National Museum, "it seems", possesses a "limited number of art
objects since 1975 because of destruction caused by the Khmer Rouge" (in this
connection note George Smith's accurate letter about the National Library in the
Phnom Penh Post, 24 Feb-9 March, p8); or in her repetition of the canard that
"forced marriages were frequent, in particular between Khmer Rouge soldiers,
sometimes invalids, and young women of the 'new people'.'' In fact the exhibits
on view in the museum in 1981 were virtually unchanged from before 1975, with
only very few minor pieces missing; and marriages between Pol Pot soldiers and
'new people' were explicitly forbidden by DK policy, and extremely
rare.
Luciolli's ideology implied approval of private business and a free
market; but while acknowledging that considerable market freedom prevailed, she
charged the state with complicity in the economic inequalities which inevitably
developed. The PRK was by definition wrong whatever it did, even if the measures
concerned would have been considered normal anywhere else in the world. The
state insisted on doing such horrible things as collect taxes from merchants and
shopkeepers, and conscripting young men to defend the country after the
Vietnamese troops left.
Similarly she denounces inequalities between
cadres and ordinary citizens and the privileges of the former, an unjustified
criticism, for PRK policy, and practice, successfully minimized the social
distances which had been part of the old Cambodian culture, and which are now
encouraged again under the impact of UNTAC and the FUNCINPEC returnees.
Nevertheless, and defying consistency, Luciolli and Crochet, like true children
of the petty bourgeoisie, were unable to bear the sight of cadres, that is
intellectuals, professionals, or white-collar workers, being obliged to spend
weeks or months at a time working at the grass roots, dressed like the citizens
among whom they worked and in whom they were supposed to imbue new ideals. They
abuse the PRK for the rough health conditions in which civilians drafted for
defense work had to live, which was factually accurate, but they are equally
critical of sending medical teams to the work sites to attempt to cope with the
health problem. Luciolli and Crochet, unlike Chantou Boua, are totally
unresponsive to the positive social policy of the PRK toward women, who could
aspire to responsible positions quite out of their reach before 1975, and again
since UNTAC.
Having observed that traditional music was popular, with
tapes recopied from those circulating in border camps openly on sale, Luciolli
opined that "the authorities close their eyes". It seemed inconceivable to her
that the PRK would desire the preservation of traditional music. She was forced
into this position because of the border-camp lie that the traditional classical
ballet had been terminated, and that in the Beaux-Arts School traditional art
had to give way to "production of works which conform to the party line...
especially paintings illustrating the liberation of Kampuchea by the
Vietnamese". Here Luciolli added one of her clever little truths which projects
a lie - "the only vestiges of tradition [are] paintings of Angkor Wat or
apsaras, and some landscapes of the Cambodian countryside." What did she think
Beaux-Arts students traditionally produced before 1975? Precisely paintings of
Angkor Wat, legendary celestial maidens, and idealized rural landscapes; and
throughout the PRK period, including in 1984 when Luciolli visited the place,
the Beaux-Arts sales room was stuffed with such traditional work to the extent
that party-line illustrations were hard to find.
There was some truth in
"parties and dancing are considered inappropriate" in the PRK, which contrasted
with the refugee camps where there is often "dancing all night long for
marriages and festivals", and she heard somewhere the lament, "you know, before
we danced a lot in Cambodia, but now...'." In the non-Pol Pot refugee camps
where Luciolli took lessons in Cambodian politics and culture, few had to get up
and go to work the next day, and in Phnom Penh there was a 9pm curfew imposed
because of danger of attack or sabotage by enemies supported by the refugee camp
organization. Otherwise even the most casual visitor to Phnom Penh who was not
totally blind could see that marriage festivals at least were not at all
'inappropriate' and were celebrated in the same way as before 1975. As for
dancing, there was a lot of it in the good old days (pre-1975), but not husbands
with wives or young men and women of the same social stratum. Men went to night
clubs where they danced with 'taxi girls', and at private functions where girls
from the nearest brothel might be brought in to dance with male guests, while
wives observed decorously from the sidelines. It was perhaps such pre-socialist
habits of the 'traditional culture' which made the PRK uneasy about dancing,
whereas in Luciolli's favorite border camps the first institutions of the old
society to be established after 1979 were officers' clubs and
brothels.
It was impossible to ignore the valiant efforts to rebuild an
educational system after 1979, and Luciolli set out the facts accurately enough,
but for her it was only because "the Heng Samrin government recognized the
revolutionary usefulness of schools". If "in principle schooling is free...
parents are constantly asked for contributions" for registration, exams, books,
and equipment. Well, if so, this was just like the Sihanouk days for which
Esmeralda yearned (and which I saw); and indeed it was overt policy, quite
reasonable in prevailing circumstances, that local communities contributed
toward construction and equipment of schools.
According to Luciolli,
"reading texts are 'adapted' to socialism, the vocabulary of the old regimes of
Lon Nol and Sihanouk is banned in favor of revolutionary language, and teachers
must use the official terms, the same as under the Khmer Rouge". Luciolli
provided no illustrations, and her statements, which must have been fed to her
by border-camp friends, can be dismissed as the most arrant nonsense (I also
heard such things in the refugee camps in 1980, but then took the trouble to
check them out). The Ministry of Education after 1979 was firmly in the hands of
pre-1975 professional pedagogues, the school syllabus was very traditional and
nationalist, reading texts were in general the same as in the old days, and to
the extent that there were linguistic innovations they were along lines
developed before 1975 by a group of Khmerizing nationalist educationalists (the
Khemarayeanakam movement), most of whom perished under Pol Pot. But Luciolli's
intentions were made transparent by her complaint that the high moral standards
demanded of school teachers represented oppression by the regime.
Perhaps
a key to Luciolli's assault on PRK education, and to her attitude in general,
was "[f]ormerly classes were organized as in France, from twelfth [lowest] to
[... third, second, first, and] terminal [end of lycee]... [t]oday it is the
school system of Vietnam which serves as model and primary school has four
levels [numbered 1 to 4]". What horrors! The French system turned upside down;
and this was presented seriously as an example of 'silent ethnocide'. Was
Esmeralda's problem a rage that Cambodians wished to be Khmer (for the final
product differed significantly from Vietnam as from France), not brown
Frenchmen?
There was less factual accuracy in her, and Crochet's,
treatment of foreign language instruction, and again the facts which survive are
reconstructed to support a false impression. Language instruction "is generally
limited to... Vietnamese, taught in secondary and higher [levels]", an
inaccurate rendering, but made a bit truer with the additional remark, "but...
not always... for lack of teachers", a statement true in itself. Still further
on Luciolli said, "study of other languages is limited to Russian, German, and
Spanish". The true situation in 1984-1985 when Luciolli was in Cambodia was that
no foreign languages were yet taught in secondary schools, although Russian,
German, Vietnamese, and Spanish, in that order, were formally in the curriculum,
and the reason given for absence of instruction in all of them was lack of
teachers. At a higher level, all four languages were taught in the Language
School which trained interpreters and prepared students for university studies
abroad.
It was true until 1985, as she wrote, that no history courses as
such were taught, but the reason was not that Vietnamese advisers refused to
allow the use of French and English sources. The new textbooks put into
circulation in 1986 treated Cambodian history in a very traditionalist manner.
Members of the history textbook preparation committee told me in November 1988
that they had relied mainly on George Coedes, Adhemard Leclere, and Madelaine
Giteau, just as pre-revolutionary school books did. There was a difference,
however, in the lesser emphasis on the accomplishments of royalty and in
attention to examples of inter-Indochina friendship, rather than the Royalist
sycophancy and chauvinist prejudice which permeated pre-1975
education.
According to Crochet and Luciolli, French and English were
'forbidden' until 1985, and it is true that they were not included in the
secondary school curriculum, although private instruction was widespread, and as
Luciolli acknowledged in another context, by 1984 at least, tacitly encouraged
by the state. Her description of the use of French in the Medical School,
however, was the opposite of the truth. In 1985, she wrote French was finally
authorized but only for first-year medical students, a concession obtained after
years of negotiations in which the Vietnamese advisers tried to insist on their
language for teaching. Although all medical books in Cambodia were in French,
she remarked, "up to 1985 beginning students did not speak a word of that
language", a typical Luciollian quasi-truth.
The Medical School was the
first tertiary institution to reopen, almost immediately after the formation of
the PRK in 1979. While hypothetical, beginning students without any previous
medical study might not have known French, the first medical students who
resumed study again were survivors of the last pre-1975 classes, all of whom had
the experience of studying medicine in French and who were familiar with the
French textbooks which had also survived. Because of this, the medical teachers
sent from Vietnam were also chosen from among the older generation for their
knowledge of French, or where insufficient Francophones were available,
French-speaking interpreters were provided for communication with the Kampuchean
students.
Luciolli preferred to blame the low level of health care on PRK
malevolence rather than objective conditions. As so often her perversity started
with a truth, at least sort of. When medical training was revived in 1979 the
surviving doctors and administrators tried to "reproduce the only model they
knew, medical care modeled on that of France thirty years ago", that is the
"training of numerous doctors rather than basic health care personnel, following
the practice of occidental countries", whereas what was needed in Cambodia was
to "develop basic health care, hygiene, and preventive medicine". What she did
not tell the reader was that to the extent the practices she approved were
finally adopted, it was due to the Vietnamese influence in the medical school,
which she had castigated, and which was resisted at first by Cambodian personnel
simply because it was Vietnamese.
Or, because it reminded the former
urban bourgeoisie of DK medical theory. When I was working in the Khao-I-Dang
refugee camp in 1980, where health care was dominated by western aid
organizations who emphasized prevention, hygiene and simple basic remedies over
exotic medicines and complex treatments for conditions which should have been
prevented, their efforts were often little appreciated by former Phnom Penhites
addicted to "medical care modeled on that of France thirty years
ago".
Crochet and Luciolli condemn the time lost to political
indoctrination of medical personnel, apparently without realizing, or refusing
to recognize, that the changes in outlook which Luciolli acknowledged as
necessary were not strictly medical, but social and political, requiring
ideological re-indoctrination to make the medical re-indoctrination
acceptable.
Luciolli even managed to condemn the PRK policy to fully
integrate the Islamic Cham minority into Cambodian society after the abuse
directed at them by DK and the prejudice against them in earlier times, because
PRK policy demonstrated "in fact that the present government has chosen to
encourage ethnic particularism, and moreover by means of it, divisiveness and
resentment by certain groups against the Khmer majority." Why the PRK
government, a group of Khmers, should want to encourage ethnic hostility against
themselves is beyond comprehension; but perhaps Luciolli was trying to encourage
an impression that the PRK was not Khmer, something she dared not say, for it
would so obviously have been a lie.
Both Crochet and Luciolli speak as
neo-colonialists in denying Cambodia the right to decide on admission of foreign
organizations and to define the scope of their activities, and in their horror
that the PRK did not allow foreign NGOs to take over Cambodia's educational and
health services, at least. In this they seem to have been encouraged by
border-camp Francophile FUNCINPEC-ists, from whom much of Luciolli's, at least,
information was derived.
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