Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0067/00670.txt

Text File | 1991-06-24 | 33KB | 511 lines

$Unique_ID{COW00670}
$Pretitle{250}
$Title{Cambodia
Introduction}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Russell R. Ross}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{khmer
cambodia
rouge
sihanouk
vietnamese
cambodian
government
penh
phnom
regime}
$Date{1987}
$Log{Figure 1.*0067001.scf
}
Country:     Cambodia
Book:        Cambodia, A Country Study
Author:      Russell R. Ross
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1987

Introduction

[See Figure 1.: Administrative divisions of Cambodia]

     Although the land occupied by Cambodia has been populated for millennia,
the area's history was unrecorded until the Chinese chronicles of the early
Christian era. In the fewer than 2,000 years of its imperfectly documented
existence, the Cambodian state has evolved along the lines of ascension,
dominance, and retrogression inherent in all civilizations.

     Historians surmise that by the first century A.D. a small number of Khmer
(or Cambodian) states already existed on the fringes of the earliest recorded
state in the region, the empire of Funan. Centered in the Mekong Delta of
present-day Vietnam, Funan derived its power from commerce. With its port of
Oc Eo on the Gulf of Thailand, Funan was well-placed to control maritime
traffic between India and China. According to Chinese annals, Funan was a
highly developed and prosperous state with an extensive canal system for
transportation and irrigation, a fleet of naval vessels, a capital city with
brick buildings, and a writing system based on Sanskrit. The inhabitants,
whose adherence to Indian cultural institutions apparently coexisted with
Mahayana Buddhism, were organized into a highly stratified society.

     When the small Khmer states to the northwest of the Mekong Delta emerged
into recorded history, it was to make war upon the declining empire of Funan.
Between A.D. 550-650, these Khmer states overran their adversary, which fell
apart, losing its tributary states on the Kra Isthmus and along the Gulf of
Thailand.

     Chaos and economic decline followed the fall of Funan, but the sequence
of events over the next 500 years led to the ascension of the Cambodian state
and its evolution into an increasingly powerful and dynamic entity. The first
unified and distinctly Khmer polity to emerge after Funan was Chenla. It
absorbed the Indianized cultural legacy of its predecessor and established its
capital near the Tonle Sap (Great Lake), the heartland of Cambodia, then as
now. Under expansionist rulers, its authority was pushed into the territories
of present-day Thailand and Laos. The development of Chenla was not marked by
an unrelieved accretion of power, however. Divisive forces quickly resulted in
a split into Land (or Upper) Chenla and Water (or Lower) Chenla. Land Chenla
demonstrated the greater vitality, controlled some thirty provincial cities,
and sent emissaries to China under the Tang dynasty. Water Chenla slipped into
vassalage to Java.

     The historical ascension of the Khmer polity began during the early 800s.
The initiator of the period was the first empire builder, Jayavarman II (A.D.
802-50), who carved out a feudal state generally encompassing modern Cambodia.
Jayavarman revived the cult of Devaraja, an Indianized cultural institution
that was intended to confer, through elaborate rituals and symbols, heavenly
approbation or even divine status upon the ruler. Following the reign of
Jayavarman II, the two Chenlas were reunited peacefully, and the Khmer polity
continued to develop, establishing over time a priestly hierarchy, an armed
force and police, a provincial administration of subordinate officials, a
system of courts, corvee labor by the peasants, and a capital on the site of
Angkor near the Tonle Sap.

     The Khmer state reached its apogee in the Angkorian period--also called
the empire of Angkor--during the period from the eleventh century to the
thirteenth century, when it was ruled by a succession of able monarchs. The
last great monarch of the Angkorian period was Jayavarman VII (1181-ca. 1218).
He reversed the Cham encroachments that had taken place after the death of
Suryavarman II (1113-50) and carried the war to the enemy, conquering Champa
itself and briefly reducing it to a Khmer vassal state. At its greatest
extent, the Angkorian empire of Jayavarman VII encompassed not only Champa on
the coast of southern Vietnam but also extended north to the vicinity of
Vientiane in present- day Laos and south to include the small trading
city-states of the Malay Peninsula. Jayavarman continued the public works
program of his predecessors, uniting his realm by elevated military causeways
with resthouses at intervals. He also built hospitals for the aged and the
infirm and sponsored the construction of Angkor Thom and the Bayon, the last
major temples of Angkorian times and splendid edifices in their own right, but
presaging the decadence that shortly set in (see The Angkorian Period, ch. 1).

     Jayavarman VII's wars and public works exacted a heavy toll on the
finances and the human labor force of the Angkorian empire. The drain of
resources coincided with the gradual intrusion of Theravada Buddhism, with its
egalitarian focus, at the expense of the Indianized cults that stressed a
hierarchical, stratified society (see Buddhism, ch. 2). Whether it was this
development or the inability of the Khmer monarchs to command the fealty of
their subjects that led to a societal breakdown remains open to conjecture.
Also coupled with these internal developments was the accelerated southward
migration of the Thai, who, dislodged from their state in southwestern China
by the Mongols in the mid-1200s, flooded into the Menam Chao Phraya Valley.
Subject to internal and external pressures, the Khmer state became unable to
defend itself at the very time its enemies were growing stronger. Thai attacks
were stepped up around 1350, and they continued until Angkor itself was
captured and sacked in 1430-31. The fall of Angkor ended the dominant period
of the Khmer state. Thereafter, its borders shrank, and it controlled little
more than the area around the Tonle Sap, the alluvial plain to the southeast,
and some territory west of the Mekong River. To the east, the collapse of the
kingdom of Champa in 1471 opened the Khmer lands of the Mekong Delta to the
steady Vietnamese expansion southward.

     The long waning of the Cambodian empire after the fall of Angkor is not
well documented. The transfer of the capital from the Angkorian region around
the Tonle Sap to the vicinity of Phnom Penh may have heralded the shift of
emphasis from an agricultural to a trading society. Even with this change, the
Khmer state retained some of its vitality into the seventeenth century,
alternately trading and warring with its neighbors. By the eighteenth century,
however, it had become a backwater buffer state, existing solely on the
sufferance of its increasingly powerful neighbors, Thailand and Vietnam. The
imposition of the French protectorate upon Cambodia prevented its neighbors
from swallowing it completely.

     Cambodia's status declined further under the French, however, when the
last vestiges of its sovereignty were lost, especially after 1884, when Paris
imposed another unequal treaty that went beyond the original protectorate of
1863. The newer pact limited the authority of the king, abolished slavery,
stationed colonial officials in the countryside, and codified land ownership.
Reaction to the 1884 treaty produced the only sustained rebellion during
colonial times. Unrest persisted until 1886 and was put down with troops from
Vietnam (see The French Protectorate, ch. 1). Thereafter, the French
consolidated their grasp on the country, and Cambodia became merely a heavily
taxed, efficient rice-producing colony, the inhabitants of which were known
for their passivity.

     As the Southeast Asian colonies of the European powers stood on the brink
of World War II in 1940 and 1941, the utter powerlessness of Cambodia was
illustrated by the fact that it was