When the War Was Over (10 page)

Nor had the French fostered a large native administration in Cambodia, in contrast to Vietnam. The Vietnamese continued to fill bureaucratic roles in Phnom Penh. There was the tiniest of new educated modern elite, virtually no new modernized bureaucracy to challenge the French, and with the court firmly in support of French rule, Cambodia remained a docile colony. Finally, the Buddhist clergy—the one Cambodian institution strong enough to challenge the king and, hence, the French—rose to the occasion and began harboring anti-French sentiments. The Buddhist Institute of Suzanne Karpelès became the first home of anticolonialism in Phnom Penh.

The Buddhists were eminently qualified for their part in bringing Cambodia into the modern political era. Under the tutelage of the French like Karpelès they had become some of the few Cambodians introduced to the ideas of the modern world. Importantly, this was said to be accomplished without sacrificing their identity as Khmers. Most of Cambodia's small aristocracy were conversant in the ways of the French, but they were compromised by their acquiescence to colonial rule.

This was the second time the Buddhists found themselves as agents of change in Cambodia. Seven hundred years earlier, during the demise of the Angkor Empire, their predecessors preached the new religion of Theravada Buddhism to Cambodians who were ripe for conversion. The political
integrity and morality of the kingdom were thrown into question at the time, and Cambodians converted en masse to this new faith that offered social tranquility without striving for material gain or power. The modest Buddhist bonzes were a welcome change from the arrogant and wealthy priests of the kings. The new Buddhists dressed in simple saffron robes. They possessed a sense of responsibility for all, not just the nobility. Eventually they became as revered as the
deva-raj,
who in turn became a Theravada Buddhist himself and patron of the faith.

By the twentieth century the Buddhist monks had extraordinary power, despite their modest appearance. At dawn, the monks appeared with their heads bowed and begged for food outside village doorways; they helped broker marriages and otherwise dictated behavior in the profound and mundane affairs of village life. The bonzes taught the children, raised the orphans, and set the moral and social standards of the country. In return, the people built their pagodas and monasteries and followed their strictures. The bonzes, who pledged their lives to poverty, filled the pagoda coffers and became the most important source of charity in the country, dispensing food or funds to the poorest of peasants.

Finally, the Buddhist monks were the only influential Cambodians in a position to question both the French and the king. The monks had attained an independent moral standing in the community not subject to the whims of royal beneficence. Unlike Vietnam and other countries of the Chinese tradition, Cambodia had no powerful mandarin class, only an aristocratic oligarchy that administered the government and whose fortunes were largely controlled by the king. The monks were recognized as a separate group protecting the country's values and culture. When these holy men began questioning French rule, their doubts struck a deep chord in the country.

Some monks had opposed the French from the start. Before the Uprising of 1885, two monks had preached against the French in the Cambodian countryside, calling upon Cambodians to defy colonialism in favor of what the French said was a wrong memory of Cambodia's ancient past. A contemporary French report said: “These two adventurers belong to this category of prophets who, adorned with supernatural influence, dreamed of restoring the Kingdom of Cambodia to its ancient splendor.” Other anti-French monks followed. At one point the monks fielded an army of 5,000 peasants, but they were defeated as much by the royal family as by the French. In 1867 the last Buddhist rebel leader was captured by the French, who cut off his head, mounted it on slate, and brought it to Phnom Penh for public display.

Monks quieted down but they never gave their full support to the French. They felt French colonialism undermined rather than preserved the Cambodian state, as the French claimed. Buddhist agitators led protests against sending Cambodians to fight for the French in World War I, tearing down recruitment posters in Phnom Penh. When Suzanne Karpelès established her Buddhist Institute it was these dissidents to whom she gave a base of operation. The Institute became the home for the first modern anticolonial agitator in Phnom Penh.

Son Ngoc Thanh was a Cambodian born and raised in southern Vietnam, in the Mekong Delta region that had been part of the Angkor Empire. Some of these Cambodians, known as Khmer Krom or Khmer from the lowlands, became fierce Khmer nationalists, a minority separated from their homeland and living under an alien, Vietnamese, rule. They developed the minority's sharp sense of indignities suffered at the hands of both the French and the Vietnamese, and from their ranks emerged many of Cambodia's most important, and infamous, independence fighters.

Significantly, Thanh's earliest education was in Khmer-language pagoda schools in southern Vietnam, or Cochin China. He transferred to the French system for his secondary education and went on to France for his university studies, which included one year reading law. As a citizen of a French colony, Cochin China, rather than the Cambodian protectorate, Thanh received an education rare for a Cambodian of that era. He returned to Cochin China and finally settled in Phnom Penh, where he joined the Buddhist Institute shortly after it was founded. Thanks to his education, Thanh became the Institute secretary. In 1936 he helped establish the country's first Khmer-language newspaper,
Nagaravatta,
which means “Temple Realm” in Sanskrit and is also a play on “Angkor Wat,” which means the same in transliteration in Khmer. He was establishing the Khmer call for independence in that name and paper—a call to reclaim the culture and preserve the nation; he believed the French wanted to keep Cambodia a dependent, backward nation and ultimately hand it over to the Vietnamese.

The newspaper called for seditious behavior but disguised it in religious language. Together Thanh and the Buddhists initiated the first serious discussion against colonialism in Phnom Penh. They were met with censorship and surveillance. Aware that in Burma political Buddhism had become a problem, the French moved quickly to curtail the activities of Phnom Penh's budding Buddhist nationalists.

Then the Japanese imperial army marched into Phnom Penh in 1941 and announced the end of Asian subjugation to European powers. The Japanese
occupation was the element that broke loose the Cambodian movement for independence.

France had already surrendered to Germany, Japan's ally in the fascist Axis. Germany ordered the French collaborationist regime in Vichy to command French colonial administrators in Indochina to cooperate with the Japanese. Hence there was no battle over Cambodia. The French colonialists willingly agreed to collaborate with Japan as long as their own interests were protected. There were few who sympathized with the French resistance against the Nazis.

Cambodia was singular for providing the Japanese with “cooperative” natives and colonialists. It was one of the few colonized countries in the region without an independence movement. The Vichy French were the only Western powers not opposed to the Japanese. The Dutch, British, and Americans fought the Axis and eventually convinced most of the independence fighters in their colonies to join them in fighting Japan.

With no worries of rebellion in Cambodia, the Japanese imperial army contented itself with establishing a small military headquarters in Phnom Penh, near the post and telegraph office. The Japanese asked the French colonial administrators to continue governing the colony. The might of the Japanese Empire was engaged in expanding and solidifying its “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” For the moment, Japan needed Indochina as a base from which the army could attack the rest of Southeast Asia.

By May 1942, one year later, the Japanese had conquered most of the territory they desired: Indochina, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, Indonesia, Burma, and the Philippines.

While Japan was occupied fighting these wars, Thailand sensed an opportunity to take advantage of the new weakness of French colonialists in Cambodia. The French had been reduced to custodians. Thailand attacked northwestern Cambodia in 1941 and then brokered a compromise with the Japanese military powers. In return for peace with Thailand, the Japanese forced the French colonialists to cede the provinces of Battambang and parts of Siem Reap to the Thais. In one stroke, Cambodia lost one-third of its territory and nearly half a million citizens.

Thai occupation of the northwest provoked three reactions that would help determine the course of the war over modern Cambodia. His anger and humiliation over the occupation hastened the death of the reigning King Sisowath Monivong. The French passed over the favored successor and chose, instead, eighteen-year-old Prince Sihanouk, grandson of King Norodom. At the time Sihanouk seemed little more than a carefree lycée student in
Saigon, fond of horses, ice cream, and the cinema, and eminently pliable. Eventually, however, he would turn himself into a modern
deva-raj
whom neither the French nor any other foreign power could take for granted.

And the loss of the territories helped ignite an alliance between Buddhist nationalists and members of the educated, urban elite. This alliance proved to be the spawning ground for nationalists who would work for and oppose Sihanouk, including the young Pol Pot and other future leaders of the Khmer Rouge.

The French had failed in their basic responsibility to protect Cambodia from its neighbors—the raison d'être for French colonial rule. The elite woke up from its delusions and saw the French in a severe light. They were receptive when Son Ngoc Thanh of the Buddhist Institute engineered a partnership, bridging the lower-class Buddhists with the elite. He was a rare figure, trusted by the Buddhists who otherwise had few connections with the French-speaking elite of Phnom Penh. The Buddhists were far too traditional. If they spoke a foreign language it was Thai. Their supporters and members were from the lower classes. The students they recruited in the capital for their drive against the French generally came from polytechnical schools.

Thanh had an entree into the upper strata through the Friendship Association of Sisowath School Alumni. The French had finally established a French lycée in Phnom Penh shortly before World War II. It was named the Sisowath School after that branch of the royal family. Its alumni founded an association to find jobs within the colonial administration and asked Son Ngoc Thanh to be their legal adviser. Thanh, in turn, helped coax the association into becoming a nationalist group.

The group became the sole elite association promoting modernization of the country and some form of independence for Cambodia. Neither goal matched the Buddhist desire to simply return Cambodia to an independent monarchy and allow Cambodia's traditions to flourish. But during the Japanese occupation, after the loss of the northwestern territories, Thanh was able to bring these groups together because both wanted independence.

The alumni group began sponsoring the monks to travel around the countryside preaching against French colonialism. The alumni association gave the Buddhists badly needed funds as well as a new legitimacy. Joined together, they represented a potent threat to the French and, indirectly, the monarchy, as long as the king supported France. The traditional Buddhists and the modern elite comfortable in European language and politics began to have immediate results. But the elite were very small in number, and it fell
on the monks to become the visible emblem of revolt and their saffron robes the symbol against French colonialism.

And thirdly, it sparked cooperation with the Thais against the French. In annexing Battambang and Siem Reap, the Thai promoted the notion that Cambodians in the provinces were becoming
Khmer Issarka
, or emancipated Khmer. Not a few Cambodians found the idea attractive enough to join an organization of the same name that sponsored Cambodians who wanted to take up the offer of Thai citizenship. Those who did won places in the Thai administration and army of the province as well as business opportunities.

It was not long before the colonial authorities fought back. The Vichy French, nervous over increasingly open calls for revolt, closed down the Buddhist newspaper
Nagaravatta
and a few months later, on July 18, 1942, arrested a leading monk, Hem Cheav. Cheav had audaciously appealed to Cambodian soldiers to desert from the French colonial army. He was a professor at the Ecole Supérieure du Pali and a master at translating Buddhist theology into a call for revolt. He preached nonviolence, but not exclusively, recognizing the formidable impediment of the French army and police in his fight for independence. One of the charges against him, and other monks, was translating seditious materials from Thai. But when the French jailed him they were asking for more trouble. Cheav was not only respected by intellectuals for his work at the école, but revered by peasants.