Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0067/00672.txt

Text File | 1991-06-24 | 33KB | 517 lines

$Unique_ID{COW00672}
$Pretitle{250}
$Title{Cambodia
Chapter 1B.   The French Colonial Period, 1887-1953}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Donald M. Seekins}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{french
sihanouk
cambodia
khmer
independence
government
colonial
control
son
indochina}
$Date{1987}
$Log{}
Country:     Cambodia
Book:        Cambodia, A Country Study
Author:      Donald M. Seekins
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1987

Chapter 1B.   The French Colonial Period, 1887-1953

     In October 1887, the French proclaimed the Union Indochinoise, or
Indochina Union, comprising Cambodia and the three constituent regions of
Vietnam: Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina. (Laos was added to the Indochina
Union after being separated from Thai suzerainty in 1893.) Cambodia's chief
colonial official, responsible to the Union's governor general and appointed
by the Ministry of Marine and Colonies in Paris, was a resident general
(resident superieur). Residents, or local governors, were posted in all the
principal provincial centers. In 1897 the incumbent resident general
complained to Paris that Norodom was no longer capable of ruling and received
permission to assume the king's authority to issue decrees, collect taxes, and
appoint royal officials. Norodom and his successors were left with hollow,
figurehead roles as head of state and as patron of the Buddhist religion. The
colonial bureaucracy expanded rapidly. French nationals naturally held the
highest positions, but even on the lower rungs of the bureaucracy Cambodians
found few opportunities because the colonial government preferred to hire
Vietnamese.

     When Norodom died in 1904, the French passed over his sons and set his
brother Sisowath (1904-27) on the throne. Sisowath's branch of the royal
family was considered more cooperative than that of Norodom because the latter
was viewed as partly responsible for the revolts of the 1880s and because
Norodom's favorite son, Prince Yukanthor, had stirred up publicity abroad
about French colonial injustices. During their generally peaceful reigns,
Sisowath and his son Monivong (1927-41) were pliant instruments of French
rule. A measure of the monarchs' status was the willingness of the French to
provide them annually with complimentary rations of opium. One of the few
highlights of Sisowath's reign was French success in getting Thailand's King
Chulalongkorn to sign a new treaty in 1907 returning the northwestern
provinces of Batdambang and Siemreab to Cambodia.

The Colonial Economy

     Soon after establishing their protectorate in 1863, the French realized
that Cambodia's hidden wealth was an illusion and that Phnom Penh would never
become the Singapore of Indochina. Aside from collecting taxes more
efficiently, the French did little to transform Cambodia's village-based
economy. Cambodians paid the highest taxes per capita in Indochina, and in
1916 a nonviolent tax revolt brought tens of thousands of peasants into Phnom
Penh to petition the king for a reduction. The incident shocked the French,
who had lulled themselves into believing that the Cambodians were too indolent
and individualistic to organize a mass protest. Taxes continued to be sorely
resented by the Cambodians. In 1925 villagers killed a French resident after
he threatened to arrest tax delinquents (see The French Protectorate,
1863-1954, ch. 5). For poor peasants, the corvee service--a tax substitute--of
as many as ninety days a year on public works projects, was an onerous duty.

     According to Hou Yuon (a veteran of the communist movement who was
murdered by the Khmer Rouge after they seized power in 1975), usury vied with
taxes as the chief burden upon the peasantry. Hou's 1955 doctoral thesis at
the University of Paris was one of the earliest and most thorough studies of
conditions in the rural areas during the French colonial era. He argued that
although most landholdings were small (one to five hectares), poor and
middle-class peasants were victims of flagrantly usurious practices that
included effective interest rates of 100 to 200 percent. Foreclosure reduced
them to the status of sharecroppers or landless laborers. Although debt
slavery and feudal landholding patterns had been abolished by the French, the
old elites still controlled the countryside. According to Hou, "the great
feudal farms, because of their precapitalist character, are disguised as small
and medium-sized farms, in the form of tenancies and share-farms, and
materially are indistinguishable from other small and medium-seized farms."
Whether or not the countryside was as polarized in terms of class (or
property) as Hou argues is open to debate, but it is clear that great tension
and conflict existed despite the smiles and the easygoing manner of Khmer
villagers.

     To develop the economic infrastructure, the French built a limited number
of roads and a railroad that extended from Phnom Penh through Batdambang to
the Thai border. The cultivation of rubber and of corn were economically
important, and the fertile provinces of Batdambang and Siemreab became the
rice baskets of Indochina. The prosperous 1920s, when rubber, rice, and corn
were in demand overseas, were years of considerable economic growth, but the
world depression after 1929 caused great suffering, especially among rice
cultivators whose falling incomes made them more than ever the victims of
moneylenders.

     Industry was rudimentary and was designed primarily to process raw
materials such as rubber for local use or export. There was considerable
immigration, which created a plural society similar to those of other
Southeast Asian countries. As in British Burma and Malaya, foreigners
dominated the developed sectors of the economy. Vietnamese came to serve as
laborers on rubber plantations and as clerical workers in the government. As
their numbers increased, Vietnamese immigrants also began to play important
roles in the economy as fishermen and as operators of small businesses. The
Chinese had been in Cambodia for several centuries before the imposition of
French rule, and they had dominated precolonial commerce. This arrangement
continued under the French, because the colonial government placed no
restrictions on the occupations in which they could engage. Chinese merchants
and bankers in Cambodia developed commercial networks that extended throughout
Indochina as well as overseas to other parts of Southeast Asia and to mainland
China.

The Emergence of Nationalism

     In stark contrast to neighboring Cochinchina and to the other
Vietnamese-populated territories of Indochina, Cambodia was relatively
quiescent politically during the first four decades of the twentieth century.
The carefully maintained fiction of royal rule was probably the major factor.
Khmer villagers, long inured to abuses of power, believed that as long as a
monarch occupied the throne "all was right with the world." Low literacy
rates, which the French were extremely reluctant to improve, also insulated
the great majority of the population from the nationalist currents that were
sweeping other parts of Southeast Asia.

     Nevertheless, national consciousness was emerging among the handful of
educated Khmer who composed the urban-based elite. Restoration of the
monuments at Angkor, which the historian David P. Chandler suggests was
France's most valuable legacy to the colony, awakened Cambodians' pride in
their culture and in their past achievements. Many of the new elite were
graduates of the Lycee Sisowath in Phnom Penh, where resentment of the favored
treatment given Vietnamese students resulted in a petition to King Monivong
during the 1930s. Significantly, the most articulate of the early
nationalists, were Khmer Krom (see Appendix B)-- members of the Cambodian
minority who lived in Cochinchina. In 1936 Son Ngoc Thanh and another Khmer
Krom named Pach Chhoeun, began publishing Nagaravatta (Angkor Wat), the first
Khmer-language newspaper. In its editorials, Nagaravatta mildly condemned
French coloni