Cambodia: SIHANOUK's SANGKUM REASTRE NIYUM (6of8) [KH]

Most dramatically of all, Phnom Penh throughout 1967 was abuzz with the news that three of Sihanouk's most outspoken leftist parliamentary critics had disappeared. There was a widespread belief that they had been murdered on his orders. There were many theories about how they had died. The most widely held view was that. After being savagely beaten, they had been buried up to their necks and then had their heads crushed beneath the tracks of bulldozer. The presumption that this had taken place was given greater force by the fact that it was a modern version of a traditional Cambodia punishment by which criminals and enemies were literally ploughed into the ground. Only six years later did it become clear that these men were still alive?

One of the many paradoxes of modern Cambodian history is that Sihanouk should have been the victim of men who wreaked terrible havoc on their countrymen but who are scarcely known outside the borders of Cambodia.

After an initial friendly view of Sukarno, Sihanouk and his courtiers came to see him as an ill-behaved boor, whom the prince denounced, as a 'scatter-brained old man fond of virgins'. The closer to home Sihanouk came; the more likely it was that foreign leaders would become the object of his criticism or scorn. He could not abide President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, while the Laotian king and successive Thai leaders were objects of bitter commentary.

When the referendum was held, ballot secrecy was generally disregarded. Voters were handed two voting papers: one white, indicating approval of Sihanouk, and one black. Under the gaze of officials and security men they were told to destroy on the spot the ballot they did not wish to cast. With his inherent sense of drama he arranged for his abdication to be announced over Phnom Penh radio, sending a recording in a sealed envelope to the station with instructions for it to be opened and played at noon on 2 March. King Sihanouk was to become, he has said in one of his accounts of this period, 'Citizen Sihanouk'. Under no circumstance, he vowed, would he never return to the throne. Shut up in the palace, he complained, he was prevented from knowing what went on outside. And that palace was 'stuffed full of a hierarchy of courts mandarins and intriguers. They are like the blood-sucking leeches that attach themselves to the feet of elephants.'

By 1960 the city could legitimately claim to be the most charming in Southeast Asia. Its population had grown from fewer than 100,000 before the second world war to nearly half a million. Perhaps a third of these were Cambodians, with ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese making up the bulk of the remainder in roughly equal proportions.

These three main ethnic elements of Phnom Penh's population were clearly divided along occupational lines. Educated Cambodians were officials, the uneducated were coolies. Whether educated or not, it was Cambodians who donned the robe as Buddhist monks and lived and worshiped in the city's many Wats (pagodas). There was, it is true, some blurring of lines, as intermarriage among Cambodians and Chinese was common, so that many of the most powerful business figures in Phnom Penh was Sino Khmers. But overwhelmingly, those Cambodians who were able to complete secondary school cherished the goal of becoming civil servants, a position seen as guaranteeing lifetime security, social prestige, and the opportunity to become part of complex web of pervasive corruption that oiled the cogs of daily life both in Phnom Penh and in the provinces. For those who did not have the opportunities that education offered but were determined to live in the capital there were few choices. The luckiest might become drivers for wealthy fellow countrymen, foreign diplomatic missions or trading houses. More likely was the harsh life of a coolie on the docks or a cylopouse (bicycle rickshaw) rider. Both jobs carried the risk of crippling injury, and the cylopouse peddlers also risked catching tuberculosis. Like their peasant relatives, Cambodians who laboured in the capital for wages had a life expectancy of barely 45 years.

The Chinese in Phnom Penh were businessmen, first and foremost, as they were throughout the country. They dominated business big and small. They were an essential link in the rice trading network that stretched from the rice mills of rural Cambodia to the great traders of cholon, Saigon's Chinese-dominated twin city, to the outside world. Chinese merchants controlled the purchases and export of Cambodia's high-grade pepper, grown along the seacoast of the gulf of Siam around the provincial capital of Kompot. They monopolized the production and sale of salt.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Cambodia
• Kampuchea
• Sihanouk
• Sangkum
• Reastre
• Niyum

[562long]

I always get numb when i see old video footages of Cambodia before the war. Cambodia was an established country and who would dreamed that we're so behind compare with other asian countries. With that being said im confident that Cambodia will thrive and be a great modern country again. YES WE CAN!!!

[khmerpride94]

cambodia is the bestttt