Anatomy of a Crisis__Education, Development and The

ANATOMY OF A CRISIS

Education, Development, and the State in Cambodia, 1953 –1998 David M. Ayres

University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu

© 2000 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 05 04 03 02 01

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ayers, David M., 1971– Anatomy of a crisis : education, development, and the state in Cambodia, 1953 –1998 / David M. Ayers p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0 – 8248 –2238 –2 1. Education and state — Cambodia— History— 20th century. 2. Education— Social aspects— Cambodia— History— 20th century. I. Title. LC94.C16A94 2000 379.596⬘09⬘045— dc21 99 – 42870 CIP

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acidfree paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by Kenneth Miyamoto Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group

Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations and Acronyms

vii ix

Introduction

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1 The Traditional Setting: State, Society, and Education before Independence

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2 Sihanouk and the Sangkum: From Independence to Chaos

31

3 Lon Nol and the Republic: The Declining State

67

4 Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge: Building and Defending Cambodia

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5 The PRK and the SOC: The State in Transition

120

6 Ranariddh and Hun Sen: From Uneasy Alliance to Coup

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Conclusion

184

Notes References Index

193 229 251

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Acknowledgments

Writing this book would have been a much more difficult task if it were not for the love and encouragement of my family. My wife and my parents, Michael and Vicki, have endured my frequent absences, holding the fort together while I have been overseas or bunkered in my office. It is to each of them, and to my son, Dominic, that I dedicate this book. My work over the past several years would not have been possible without the advice, assistance, encouragement, and support of many people. Phillip Jones, at the University of Sydney, introduced me to the field of international education and development and has been an outstanding and inspiring guide and mentor ever since. In Cambodia, Vin McNamara generously shared with me his thoughts, materials, and experiences and was instrumental in my gaining access to all levels of the educational system. My debt to both of them is substantial. Many other people have assisted me since I began researching Cambodian education. To those who have commented on and critiqued drafts of my work, provided hospitality and introductions, lent me their materials, or offered assistance and suggestions, I express my sincere thanks. I wish to especially single out Nathan Waesch, who has lent me his ear (and his proofreading skills) on more occasions than I can recall. For their assistance, I need to also express my gratitude to the administrators, librarians, and archivists at the various libraries and document centers I have visited in Cambodia.

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Acknowledgments

My final word of thanks is to the many Cambodians in Australia and in Cambodia who welcomed me into their offices and homes and opened their lives to me over the course of my research. For some, our time together provided an opportunity to relive memories of happier times. Others selflessly shared with me recollections of days they would prefer to forget. Each of them taught me a great deal and served to heighten the enjoyment I derived from writing this book.

Abbreviations and Acronyms

ADB AEK ASEAN BLDP CCC CDC CGDK CIA CIVADMIN CPK CPP DK EDUCAM EU FAO FANK FUNCINPEC

Asian Development Bank Association des Etudiants Khmers (Association of Khmer Students) Association of Southeast Asian Nations Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party Cooperation Committee for Cambodia Council for the Development of Cambodia Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea Central Intelligence Agency Civil Administration (of the UNTAC) Communist Party of Kampuchea Cambodian People’s Party Democratic Kampuchea Education Cambodia (Education arm of the CCC) European Union Food and Agriculture Organization (of the UN) Forces Armées Nationales Khmères (Khmer National Armed Forces) Front Uni National pour un Cambodge indépendant neutre pacifique et coopératif (National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Co-operative Cambodia) ix

x

FUNK ICORC ICP ICRC ILO IMF KPNLF KPRP KR MCRRC MOEYS NGO NLF NPRD NVA NWO PCF PDK PRK RGOC RUPP SAP SEATO SNC SOC SRP STF STV UFNS

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Front Uni National du Kampuchea (National United Front of Kampuchea) International Committee on the Reconstruction of Cambodia Indochinese Communist Party International Committee of the Red Cross International Labor Organization International Monetary Fund Khmer People’s National Liberation Front Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party Khmers Rouges (Khmer Rouge, Red Khmer or Khmaer Krahom) Ministerial Conference on the Rehabilitation and Reconstruction of Cambodia Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport Nongovernment organizations National Liberation Front (Vietcong) National Program to Rehabilitate and Develop Cambodia North Vietnamese Army New World Order Parti Communiste Française (French Communist Party) Party of Democratic Kampuchea People’s Republic of Kampuchea Royal Government of Cambodia Royal University of Phnom Penh Structural Adjustment Programs Southeast Asia Treaty Organization Supreme National Council State of Cambodia Sam Rainsy Party Systemic Transfer Facility (IMF Loan) Standard Total View United Front for the National Salvation of Kampuchea

Abbreviations and Acronyms

UIF UN UNAMIC UNDP UNESCO UNICEF UNTAC U.S. USAID USSR WHO WPK WPV

xi

United Issarak Front United Nations United Nations Advance Mission in Cambodia United Nations Development Program United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization United Nations Children’s Fund (formerly United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund) United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia United States United States Agency for International Development Union of Soviet Socialist Republics World Heath Organization Workers’ Party of Kampuchea Workers’ Party of Vietnam

Introduction

At the heart of precolonial Cambodia, and at the heart of the country’s modern conscience, are the awe-inspiring towers of Angkor Wat. Built in the twelfth century by the Khmer king, Suryavarman II (r. 1113 – 1150), the temple embodies the two underlying tenets of Cambodian traditionalism.1 First, it represents a palpable testament to the glorious pages of Cambodia’s past, when the Khmer kingdom was among the most powerful in Southeast Asia. Second, the cosmology associated with Angkor Wat highlights the essential themes of traditional Cambodian conceptions of power: absolutism and the primacy of hierarchy. The story of Angkor Wat’s penetration of Cambodia’s modern conscience is the story of the enmeshment of Cambodian traditionalism within Cambodian modernity. The temple, like others constructed in the region during what is now referred to as the Angkorean period, is an architectural representation of unity between kingship and cosmology. In its ideal form, the perception of unity provided a framework establishing that the political order was a “microcosm of the cosmic order.” 2 Providing legitimacy to absolutist rule and a rigid political hierarchy, the traditional system, which had declined in stature after the fall of Angkor, was bolstered by the French, whose scholarship and restoration of Angkorean history brought its long since forgotten grandeur back to life. The French endeavors to conserve Cambodian kingship, designed to secure the legitimacy of their colonial project, accorded judiciously with the indirect

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Introduction

rule implied by Cambodia’s status as a protectorate. By according renewed prominence to kingship, and therefore reinforcing the associated notions of absolutism and hierarchy, the French effectively fused those “modern” institutions they had implanted in defining a geographical space called Cambodge with those that had sustained the precolonial Khmer polity. While the traditional political culture owed its renewal to the demands of the modernity underpinning the colonial enterprise, modernity in turn owed its limited successes to the legitimacy afforded by Cambodian veneration of tradition. Pol Pot, the figure most synonymous with what is now generally regarded as the tragedy of modern Cambodia, declared in 1977: “If we can build Angkor, we can build anything.” His assertion amplifies the extent to which the perception of the eminence of Cambodia’s past has permeated its present. Once a source of pilgrimage for those Cambodian peasants fortunate enough to move beyond their local world, Angkor Wat, depicted on each of the country’s national flags since independence, now stands alone as the paramount symbol of Cambodian nationalism.3 Embodying the hierarchy and absolutism of the traditional world associated with the precolonial Khmer polity, it has provided a reference point for modern political practice. It is within this setting, where the tension between modernity and tradition is played out, that this book considers questions of education, development, and the state. The book is about Cambodia’s education system, its relationship to change and development, the relationship between education and development, and the state. It unravels the “crisis” that has characterized education in Cambodia since the country was reluctantly granted independence by the French in 1953. In so doing, it not only illuminates our understanding of Cambodia’s firmly entrenched and pervasive educational problems but also contributes to a greater understanding of Cambodia’s tragic modern history and, importantly, a greater understanding of the inextricable link between that tragic history and the conditions of the present. Alongside “tragedy,” 4 the idea of timelessness is one of the dominant themes of Cambodia’s history. In one respect, the book amplifies this theme, demonstrating how time-honored notions of power, hierarchy, and leadership—the roots of tradition in Cambodia—have continued to enjoy prominence in the country’s economic, political, and cultural life. In another respect, the oversimplification associated with the idea of an unchanging society is highlighted. With the political extremities that have characterized Cambodia since independence as a backdrop,

Introduction

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the book examines the social institution most readily associated with change and dynamism in a country that continues to genuflect before the weight of tradition and the part-myth, part-reality perception of a glorious past. The focus on education informs both the broader theme of tragedy and the dichotomy between change and changelessness yet also communicates its own complex story. The notion of a crisis in education first emerged in the 1960s, when educational planners, politicians, social scientists, and economists throughout the world realized that the great optimism associated with the perceived potential of education to bring about desirable social change had not been realized. Put simply, the crisis was, and continues to be, a product of the disparity between the education system and the economic, political, and cultural environments that it has been intended to serve.5 In order to examine the Cambodian crisis, as it has been manifested, addressed, changed, and often ignored since independence, education is set within its historical and cultural context. In this respect, the book is concerned with addressing the role of education in constructing, and paradoxically being constructed by, Cambodia’s past. It focuses on a tension that Cambodia—along with many of its counterparts in the developing world—has played out time and time again: pursuing development (and one of its symptoms, modernity) in a manner at odds with tradition and the cultural underpinnings of the state. Education has been central to the tension between modernity and tradition and between development and state-making. On one hand, Cambodia’s leaders, with the notable exception of the notorious Pol Pot, have considered the education system an essential institution through which to create good citizens and realize their perspective on Cambodia’s future. In other words, embracing the same attitude as the leaders of developing countries across the globe, they have seen education as the key to modernization. On the other hand, these leaders, including Pol Pot, have embraced education in order to promote and ensure their personal power and legitimacy and that of the regimes over which they have presided. Formal education, therefore, has served a dual role: making Cambodia look modern and at the same time sustaining the key tenets of the traditional polity, where leadership is associated with power and where the nature of the state is perceived to be a function of that power. The crisis in Cambodian education—its disparity with the economic, political, and cultural environments—is easy to identify. Its symptoms

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Introduction

were evident only a few years after independence. The quality of educational instruction was rapidly degenerating, infrastructure was being constructed at a rate that was impossible to sustain, while unemployed graduates and disgruntled intellectuals not only began to agitate for reform and change but became increasingly drawn to the promises of equality whispered by those radicals who had rejected the status quo and fled to the countryside to prepare for a revolution. The horrors of the 1970s, when a crippling civil war was followed by the Khmer Rouge reign of terror, only served to exacerbate the problems for those entrusted with reconstructing Cambodia during the 1980s. The political and continued military unrest that accompanied this period not only undermined development but reinforced the educational disaster. The continuity of the crisis is such that, in the 1990s, education in Cambodia is in an arguably more parlous state than it was in the 1960s: teachers are poorly trained, learning aids and teaching facilities are practically nonexistent, unacceptable numbers of students continue to repeat grades and many others drop out before they have completed primary school, and the budget for educational development provides little optimism about the prospects for future improvements. In the spirit of setting education within its historical and cultural context, and therefore taking account of the manner in which the tension between tradition and modernity has become manifest over time, the book embodies several aims. The first is to examine the effects on education of the regimes that have ruled Cambodia since 1953. When Prince Norodom Sihanouk assumed almost absolute power following the country’s 1955 elections, he set in place a state ideology called Buddhist socialism. This ramshackle ideology was later replaced by the equally decrepit neo-Khmerism of Lon Nol and then by Pol Pot’s commitment to self-reliance and self-mastery. In 1979, as Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge carried their utopian ideals to their jungle hideaway, their replacements not only sought to rehabilitate Cambodia but also Cambodian socialism. When Eastern European Communism began its dramatic collapse in the 1980s, so too did these half-hearted attempts at socialist rehabilitation. Communism was eventually replaced by an unbridled official commitment to capitalism, to the free-market, and to the ideals of the so-called New World Order. In and of themselves, the effects on education of each of these ideological shifts are worthy of detailed study. In effect, however, the ideologies are nothing more than a small part of a bigger picture. How did the regimes promoting them assume state power? How did their behavior accord with these ideological

Introduction

5

convictions? In what ways did they change? What forces led to their eventual demise? Each of these phenomena needs to be explored and related to the nature, structure, and form of education since independence. The second aim of this book is to investigate the extent to which the paradigms that have informed our ideas about development have influenced state ideals, and in turn education, in Cambodia. How were Sihanouk’s Buddhist socialism and Lon Nol’s neo-Khmerism influenced by the modernization and human capital theories that dominated development agendas throughout the world from the 1950s through the 1970s? Although he would certainly have denied any such link, how was Pol Pot’s commitment to development based on self-reliance influenced by the ideas of exploitation, domination, and dependency that were at the core of the underdevelopment theories that emerged in opposition to the Westernized modernization and human capital models? How does the commitment to development based on free-market principles of the regime that has emerged in Cambodia since the United Nations sponsored elections of 1993 reflect the key tenets of the New World Order? While we can acknowledge that the development aspirations of Cambodia’s various post-independence regimes have not emerged in total isolation, we also need to question the degree to which these global development paradigms have been tempered and subverted by conditions tied firmly to the society and culture of Cambodia. In essence, how has the weight of the past, embodied by tradition, impacted on aspirations for the future? The book’s third aim, informing the educational analysis, is to provide a balanced account of the contributions separate regimes have made to Cambodia’s political development. Unlike its more populous neighbors, Thailand and Vietnam, research and publications about Cambodia’s recent past are decidedly thin. Apart from the information explosion generated by the Khmer Rouge holocaust (1975–1979), few scholars have attempted to account for developments in Cambodia since independence. Even fewer, if any, have concerned themselves with questions of social policy. In a review essay, Serge Thion wrote, “explaining Cambodia is typically a foreigner’s business.” 6 It is also, perhaps unfortunately, a business often colored by the embroilment of those foreigners in the politics of the Cold War. By weaving my narrative around the key issue of for what end Cambodia has used its education system, I have attempted to avoid political partisanship in the raging academic debates that often characterize Cambodian scholarship. Instead, by presenting what is essentially a chronicle of the continued

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Introduction

development and educational failures of every one of Cambodia’s postindependence ruling regimes, I have highlighted not the differences between them that their sides in the Cold War may have required, but the striking similarities. In focusing on these similarities, the book works toward its final aim: pointing to the relationship between past practices and the problems of the present. Through focusing on the relationship between tradition and modernity, I have attempted to tie questions of history and politics to those of culture. Within this framework, the book links the crisis in contemporary Cambodian education, as with those of the past, to the roots of Cambodian culture—traditional notions of power, hierarchy, and leadership. In doing so, it debunks the idea that the Khmer Rouge was some extreme historical anomaly whose legacy is the major impediment to development in contemporary Cambodia. It also, therefore, debunks the popular myth, manifested in the desire by many Cambodians to realize their nostalgia for the past, that the Sihanouk era of the 1950s and 1960s was some kind of golden era for Cambodia and Cambodian development. In reality, while acknowledging the horrors and debilitating effects of the Khmer Rouge period, it is evident that Cambodia’s prerevolutionary past is no more a golden era than is its present; both are characterized by political repression, state-sanctioned violence, factionalism, corruption, and absolute contempt by those with power for those over whom that power is exercised. It is the echoes of the voices of the past in the circumstances of the present that resonate through the chapters that follow. The foundations of tradition and modernity are established in chapter 1, which overviews Cambodia’s traditional sociocultural setting before exploring its initial interaction with a European vision of modernity. The nature of traditional Khmer society, including its education system, and the first inklings of modernity advanced under the patronage of the French are the two embracing themes of the chapter. Critical of French inertia in regard to the development of Cambodia, the chapter disentangles, through its examination of colonial educational development, a fundamental contradiction in the application of the mission civilisatrice that underpinned the colonial enterprise. On the one hand, it demonstrates the relative vigor with which the mission civilisatrice was applied to the Cambodian elite, whose assimilation into the so-called modern world represented a concerted French priority. On the other, however, the chapter establishes that the local world of the Cambodian peasant was left largely unvarnished by the brushstrokes of the colonial

Introduction

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period, with the country’s traditional patterns of hierarchy and absolutist rule reinforced by the colonial administration. Finally, the chapter reveals how it was the economic, political, and cultural changes ushered in by this contradictory agenda that served to influence the framework for the nation-state, and the state-sponsored education system, that emerged in Cambodia following independence. The remaining chapters accord with the neatly arranged periodization of Cambodia’s modern history produced by the changes in the country’s ruling regimes. Consideration is therefore given, within separate chapters, to the Sihanouk regime (1953 –1970), the Lon Nol regime (1970 –1975), the Pol Pot regime (1975–1979), the Heng Samrin/Hun Sen regime (1979 –1993), and the Hun Sen/Norodom Ranariddh regime (1993 –1997), whose tumultuous end was realized in a coup d’état in July 1997. The chapters deliver analysis at several levels, with change and changelessness, and the enmeshment of tradition and modernity, emerging as central themes at each level. At one level, the chapters trace the development of educational policy in Cambodia, illustrating its relationship with the past, and the involvement of both international (global) and indigenous (local/national) forces in shaping its orientation. At another level, related to the first, the chapters examine the articulation of educational policies in practice, taking account of the range of factors—local, national, regional, and global—that have affected the implementation of educational policies in Cambodia since independence. A third level of analysis broadens the field of exploration, relating educational policy and practice to the construction of the nation-state, taking account of the contradictions between the traditional ideals underlying the construction project and the state of modernity it has generally embraced. The final level of analysis, enveloping the first three, relates educational policy and practice, and the construction of the nation-state, to the crisis in Cambodian education. It is at this level that we are able to account for not only the failure of an education system to fulfill the expectations of national leaders, educational policy makers, and citizens but also the failure of a political culture to deal with change and to deal with the aspirations of those affected by that change.

A Note on Sources The Cambodian revolution of 1975 has been described as a prairie fire.7 For the researcher of Cambodia, the effects of that fire were to have a considerable and enduring impact. Given that the premise of historical

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Introduction

research is to “interpret past events by the traces they have left,” 8 it would seem that to interpret Cambodia is to comb the ashes of the fire for the traces not destroyed. It is a task that almost inevitably leads to a methodological hotchpotch, characterized by the problems generated by war, wanton destruction, genocide, and the geographical dispersion of a people affected by each of these. In constructing my narrative, I have attempted to accommodate these problems by drawing on a wide range of sources: print media, the transcripts of speeches, government reports, publications, legislation and decrees, and the reports of international and nongovernment organizations. Certain historical periods, through no other reason but necessity, are dominated by a reliance on certain groups of sources, while other periods are characterized by a similar reliance on different sources. At almost every juncture of the narrative, documentary and transactional records have been corroborated with data gleaned from personal interviews and discussions and with the substantial contribution to our understanding of Cambodia made by leading scholars.9 Keeping in mind the obvious constraints associated with reconstructing the past, and the more unique constraints presented by Cambodia’s tumultuous modern history, the book provides for many Cambodian voices to be heard. It is not intended to be a comprehensive history of Cambodian education, development, or the state, and it is therefore acknowledged, and regretted, that many stories remain untold. What has been undertaken is an attempt to peel away the many layers of Cambodia’s past, the ideologies of successive and radically different yet remarkably similar Cambodian regimes, to present a story about education. Like any other story, certain characters emerge, and twists and turns in the plot are taken, while others are not paid the attention they arguably deserve. While many other stories remain to be told, and a cacophony of voices remain to be heard, it is as a beginning and not an end that this study contributes a small drop in the shallow pond that is our understanding of modern Cambodia.

The Traditional Setting State, Society, and Education before Independence Just how people came to inhabit the land that now forms Cambodia remains something of a mystery. As in many other Southeast Asian countries, mythical legends about the creation of Cambodia provide tales rich in detail and adventure yet scant in terms of historical fact. One story revolves around a Brahman prince who marries a dragon-princess. The descendants of this couple, according to the legend, are the first inhabitants of Khmer lands, Kambuja. Like many such legends of emergence, Cambodia’s tale of Kaundinya has a number of variations, all established on similar themes.1 Although useless in terms of a historical narrative, the tale represents an illuminating thematic introduction to Cambodian culture and the Cambodian state. What is important about the tale of Kaundinya is its Indian influence. The name Kambuja is Sanskrit, while the story’s central protagonist, Prince Kaundinya, was a Brahman. Like much of the prehistory of Southeast Asia, and particularly Cambodia, the concept of Indianization, while rarely disputed, remains clouded. Scholars continue to grapple with questions about whether Indianization was a product of Indian or local initiatives, whether it was an imposed or invited phenomenon, and whether it began because of economic, political, or cultural concerns. Despite the many questions, there is general agreement that the Indianization of Southeast Asia was a two-way interaction that profoundly affected the nature of social relations in the region.2 The social system that emerged throughout the Indianized Khmer polity was one of reciprocal relationships and dependencies. A caste

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The Traditional Setting

system, such as that in India, did not gain momentum in Cambodia. A complex social hierarchy was, however, evident. The hierarchy can be thought of in terms of a pyramid, with its labyrinth of internal entrances and corridors representing a complex web of relationships between people and institutions. It is this web that served to link the local worlds of Cambodian villagers with the Khmer king. The social system was not static, changing many times between the initial Khmer-Indian interactions and the arrival of the French in the mid-nineteenth century. Despite these changes, the underlying basis of the hierarchy endured.3 The hierarchical social system was certainly evident in the precolonial Khmer villages of the sixteenth century. The villages were generally centered on a local wat (temple or pagoda). On the surface, they appeared “loosely structured,” with family and monkhood constituting the only durable groups. Beyond these groups, cohesion was maintained through a network of relationships between patrons and clients. People living in a village could be identified as either neak mean (a person who has), or neak kro (a person who does not have), depending on their status relative to each other. Weaker members of the village (neak kro) sought protection from those of greater strength (neak mean), such as local monks, bandits, or minor “government” officials. These neak mean were then considered neak kro in relation to officials from nearby centers who exercised greater power. Village life was a fragile, and often savage, existence. Reliant on the vagaries of the weather, on minimal protection or support from the state, and with no roads or means of long-distance communication, people were largely dependent on each other. In order to survive, alliances were formed and, as a result, the system of hierarchy endured.4 Cambodia’s social hierarchy was not unique. In many ways, it was typical of hierarchical social systems evident in other Asiatic kingdoms— Thailand, Burma, the Indonesian archipelago, and the Malay peninsula being obvious examples. At the apex of Cambodia’s hierarchical pyramid was the king, considered to be the protector of society. While self-preservation, motivated by a continued procession of rivals and would-be challengers, was often the primary consideration for Cambodia’s precolonial sovereigns, the institution of kingship was revered by the peasantry, whose ideas about the monarch, according to David Chandler, were “grounded in mythology rather than experience.” 5 A legacy of the idealized conception of the monarch inherited from the Angkorean period, which bestowed on Cambodia the notion of a God-King, was the widespread belief among the peasantry that it

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was the king who had determined the fertility of the soil and therefore the survival or otherwise of their crops. The village and the king were connected physically by the administrative cadre known as oknya. Like the villagers, they were participants in the web of patronage and dependence. The oknya, reliant for their status on continued royal patronage, were often directed by the king to govern a particular srok (district), where as chaoway srok (governor), they were provided with the authority to, among other things, conscript soldiers and impose taxes.6 Below the oknya were the people of the srok, often a number of villages, who were dependent on the continued patronage of the oknya. Spiritually, it was Buddhism, and particularly the Buddhist sangha (community of monks), that bound the system together by serving to legitimize both the status of the king and the system of social hierarchy that flowed from the monarchy. The relationship between the sangha and the monarchy was a reciprocal one: “the ideology of Buddhism needed a supportive political power and the ruler benefited from a legitimating theology.” 7 This theology stemmed from two key tenets of the Buddhist doctrine: first, that human beings are imperfect and need guidance and protection; and second, that individuals alone are essentially helpless. The Buddhist concept of political authority asserted the necessity of a king to balance these tenets and maintain social order. Given human imperfection and helplessness, the king, having accumulated great merit in his former lives (and therefore unquestionably entitled to his place on the throne), through his conduct and actions, was regarded as the determinant of the fortunes of his subjects.8 Belief in the political system was maintained and reinforced by the sangha through the moral and literary teachings of the monks at the village wat. 9 In respect of the present study, we need to keep in mind three central features of the precolonial system. First, the individuals who constituted Khmer society—the king, his officials, the clergy, and the people of the villages—participated in the system through their involvement in a web of patronage and clientship. Survival at the bottom of the hierarchy was reliant on securing powerful patrons, while survival at the top depended on establishing a network of clients large enough to neutralize potential rivals. Second, the notion of mutual obligation did not exist. While those at the top governed, those at the bottom existed to be governed. The relationship between those with power and those over whom that power was exercised flowed in only one direction. The result was that power became an end in itself: those with authority

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The Traditional Setting

sought to become more powerful while having absolutely no obligation to better the lives of those on whom their authority had been established. The third central feature of the social system was its maintenance through the teachings of local monks. It is to the essence of these teachings that we now turn.

Traditional Education Piecing together the nature of the traditional education system is hampered by a lack of sources. Our first evidence about how knowledge was imparted among the early inhabitants of Cambodia is dated from the late thirteenth century, some four centuries after the consecration of a unified Khmer state. The zenith of the powerful Angkorean state had long since passed when a Chinese embassy of Timur Khan, led by Chou Ta-Kuan, arrived at the court of Indravarman III. Chou’s observations highlight the centrality of religion, in terms of education, in Cambodian life. Chou reported that one of the three religious groups within the Angkorean city was referred to as pan-chi, or men of learning. He noted that although there appeared to exist no school or seminary for the panchi, they were often able to rise to positions of high status within the court. Chou also observed that “Children of the laity . . . become novices of the bonzes who teach them.” As he conceded that he was unable to make detailed investigation of this monastic-style education, we are able to discern nothing about the exact nature of the schools: who was taught, what was taught, where, what materials were used, and, importantly, how the provision of education diverged between the different social strata in the society.10 In effect, Chou drew us a sketch, or an outline, while omitting the color. Following Chou, there is a substantial gap in time before we encounter any further concrete evidence about the nature of education. Louis Manipoud, who would later become the country’s chief inspector of primary education, wrote that “the bonzes . . . were not only the agents of the moral and religious truth, but further, the guardians of total secular knowledge of their time.” 11 There are striking parallels between Chou’s observations and those of Manipoud, who provided details of the education system observed by the French on their arrival in Cambodia. Like Chou, he described how Cambodian children of the laity (mainly boys, as girls were rarely admitted) were receiving instruction at the wat. The bonzes taught the children to read sacred Cambodian texts, such as the satras, instructed them in the precepts of Bud-

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dhism, informed them about Cambodian oral and literary traditions, and provided them with the opportunity to develop vocational skills, such as carpentry, that could be easily associated with their rural lifestyle. According to one Cambodian historian, the traditional education system taught students the “principles of being a good individual and of good social conduct.” 12 Given the much noted continuity in aspects of Cambodian rural life between the Angkorean period and the arrival of the French, it is not unreasonable to assume that there was some degree of similarity in religious instruction through these years. The key to understanding the nature of the traditional education system is to examine its relationship to the system of social relations described earlier. The hierarchical social system, legitimized on a perceived need to deal with human imperfection and helplessness, drew its foundation from the interrelated Hindu-Buddhist notions of dharma, or ideas, ideals, and truths; and vinaya, concepts associated with social regulation. It is from these notions that the king was able to assert his legitimacy and villagers were able to locate their positions, and the appropriate behaviors they required, within the social hierarchy. Through probing how the concepts of dharma and vinaya were divulged, the nature and underlying ideology of Cambodia’s traditional system of education becomes apparent. Cambodia’s oral and literary customs are intimately connected, and both are connected with its Buddhist and Hindu traditions. Drawing on themes related to Buddhist and Hindu teaching, the customs were disseminated primarily through the wat. Prior to the arrival of the French, literacy (the ability to read and write text) was very low among the peasantry. For the vast majority, the only education they received was during a stay as a novice at the wat. As a result of this widespread illiteracy, many Khmers learned the rich cultural heritage contained in the country’s proverbs, chbab (didactic poems), epics such as the Reamker (local version of the Ramayana story), and the Gatiloke (folk tales) through word of mouth. According to tradition, copies of the texts, often printed on palm leaves, were stored at the local wat. The printed word helped to promote the integrity and originality of the texts and provided a source of consultation and instruction for those entrusted with their teaching. A consequence of the importance of the texts was the esteem accorded to those who were able to decode them. It has been argued of premodern Thai communities neighboring Cambodia that “monks assumed a pre-eminent social position commensurate with their monopolization of knowledge associated with written texts.” 13 As in Cambodia,

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The Traditional Setting

the monastic order was able to draw on this monopoly to play a significant role in determining what texts were worth reading and teaching and therefore what knowledge was worth knowing. The “teacher” became an essential conduit in the support and maintenance of the social and cultural systems. Whether through what they heard, or through their own ability to read, students of Cambodia’s monastic education system were socialized to understand the importance of the texts to Khmer society. A discussion of three such texts follows.

Chbab Chbab are the normative Cambodian poems, or folk laws, that incorporate “ancient wisdom . . . into the context of Buddhist teachings.” 14 Rather than describing norms of behavior, the chbab prescribed them. They served, and continue to serve, as a guide for Cambodian children, women, and men about what constitutes appropriate forms of behavior between people. The poems legitimized the system of reciprocal relationships and dependencies.15 They were not to be questioned nor to serve as a basis for critical discussion. Rather, they were a prescription for harmony, balance, regularity, and conformity. One of the poems emphasizes that “An official reaches heights because of the support of his men.” 16 The chbab Rajaneti does not encourage the questioning of this social arrangement, nor does it query the apparent inequality. Instead, the poem counsels the participants about how harmony can be maintained in this relationship. A second poem, targeted at children, stresses that a good person does not boast or abuse and exploit others. Rather, a good person acts like the snake, “its head lowered, disciplined and reserved.” 17 The chbab Kun Cau thus emphasizes deference in one’s dealings with other people. Relationships in the educational process provided an important subject for the chbab, which often dealt with the “lop-sided” friendship between a teacher and student. A verse from the chbab Kram reads: To know by oneself Is like being lost In the middle of the forest, Or like a blind man Left to himself, who sets out on his way With no one to take his hand. And when he looks for the path He never finds it,

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But wanders into the forest instead Because he has learned things by himself With no one to take his hand.18

In a world where day to day existence offered little security, the chbab stressed that people needed others to guide them and that solitude should be avoided. The presence of the forest in this poem is important. The Khmers associate the prei (forest) with connotations of what is wild and uncivilized. Thus the poem also emphasized the importance of maintaining the correct social relationship between the student and the teacher as a means of maintaining civilized behavior in society.

Reamker The Reamker is the Cambodian interpretation of the Hindu epic, the Ramayana. The story depicts the classical battle between good and evil. Cambodia’s version of the story is only vaguely related to the original Indian text, having been altered to fit the Khmer language and the Theravada Buddhist world of Cambodia.19 The plot of the story is summarized here: The skullduggery of his step-mother forces Prince Ream (Rama) to leave the kingdom he was about to inherit. Accompanied by his wife, Sita, and his younger brother, Leak (Laksmana), Ream travels in the forest, encountering many friends and foes. Sita is eventually taken away by the ruler of the city of Langka, the evil Prince Reab (Ravana). With the assistance of Hanuman, the prince of the monkeys, Ream attempts to rescue his wife by attacking Langka. He wins a series of battles against the evil forces before the narrative abruptly ends.20

While the story does not directly reinforce the hierarchical social order, it does emphasize the necessity of maintaining a social balance. Like the chbab, the Reamker draws on the metaphor of the forest, contrasting the goodness of civilized behavior with that of the prei, associated with evil and wildness. The association between the forest and evil is introduced at an early juncture in the story, when Prince Reab refers to an ogre as “a vulgar ascetic of the forest.” 21 Residing in the forest, Prince Reab, is associated with chaos and the overturning of the natural order, although his outward appearance is often austere and elegant. Prince Ream, on the other hand, represents virtue, goodness, and inward austerity, an embodiment of the dharma, or laws of the universe. The Reamker, since the era of Angkor, has formed a cornerstone of Cambodian cultural life. The epic is widely presented in dance, lkhaon

16

The Traditional Setting

khaol (masked theater), sbek thom (shadow theater), and mural art. In addition to this inspiring cultural exposure, it was also the subject of more detailed study within the traditional education system. The themes of the Reamker, its characterization, and the ideals it promoted were not open to discourse. Instead, the emphasis was “on memorization and emulating the qualities of the heroes rather than a search for a deeper analysis of the meaning of the conflict depicted.” 22

Gatiloke The Gatiloke is a collection of Khmer folk stories developed over centuries. They have been used by Cambodia’s monks in teaching about virtuous behavior. Literally, gati means “the way,” and loke means “the world,” leading to the interpretation that Gatiloke means “the right way for the people of the world to live.” 23 In this respect, the stories draw on a didactic notion similar to that presented in the Reamker. The significant difference between the two is that while the Reamker portrays a mythical world, the stories of the Gatiloke draw on the lives of ordinary people in ordinary situations and in local settings resembling those encountered in the daily lives of Cambodia’s peasants. The narrative style of the tales reinforces their role in moral guidance and instruction. The meaning of the stories is generally made explicit, demonstrating clearly the consequences of acting contrary to the social order. Unlike many Western tales, the stories from the Gatiloke do not conclude with a defining coda. Rather, the coda permeates the entire story.24 The tale of the “Chief Monk of the Monastery of Sohtan Koh,” for instance, tells the story of a chief monk dissatisfied with his simple life, and a rascal, called Sao, from a neighboring district. Through parading as a wealthy businessman, Sao is able to swindle a large amount of money from the chief monk, purporting to use the money to purchase fine silks to make him a new robe. The story does not conclude with goodness prevailing over evil, as to do so would ignore the stupidity and vanity of the monk. Instead, the tale concludes with the chief monk forced to return to his temple without money, a natural consequence of his actions throughout the story.25 The Gatiloke folk stories were not written down until the nineteenth century. Their value, in terms of traditional education, was not to enhance the rudimentary literacy instruction provided at the wat. The main purpose of the tales was to serve as a source of moral guidance and instruction. The monks would base sermons on particular Gatiloke tales, seeking to incorporate Buddhist teachings into the Cambodian

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way of life. In this manner, students were provided with advice concerning human relations, individual responsibility, punishment and reward, killing animals, and greed and ingratitude. The tales provided a model for living, urging their listeners toward the virtues of prudence, moderation, and foresight.26 In many respects, they provided a strategy for survival in the fragile Khmer social world. Examined collectively, Cambodia’s literary traditions, including the chbab, Reamker, and tales of the Gatiloke, have contributed to the creation of a plethora of didactic Khmer proverbs. Their central themes, and the virtues that they promote, have provided Khmer culture with an abundance of rules and advice about proper conduct, status, and interpersonal relations. One such theme is the observance of proper social relationships, implied either explicitly or implicitly in the three texts and genres discussed earlier. For the neak mean, a proverb advises that “the rich should take care of the poor like the cloth which surrounds you.” 27 The relationship is not one-sided, however, as the accumulation of clients from among the neak kro inevitably stems from such assistance. A second theme drawn from the proverbs is the maintenance of the status quo. In a society where survival was always a conscious motivation, revolutionary ideas were practically nonexistent. To try something new, or to experiment, may have resulted in disaster, starvation, pillaging at the hands of a hostile antagonist, or even death. People were encouraged to respect traditions and the way things had always been done: “Don’t reject the crooked road and don’t take the straight one; instead, take the road traveled by the ancestors.” 28 To examine these texts as constituting the curriculum for instruction at the wat is particularly problematic. It does not account for the overall structure of school instruction and ignores the attention paid to vocational skills and methods of literacy instruction. If the texts are taken as extracts of a wider instructional curriculum, however, they do serve to illuminate the nature and importance of traditional educational instruction in precolonial Cambodia. A definitive conclusion to be drawn from the instruction was its compatible relationship with the country’s hierarchical social system. Traditional education reinforced the social hierarchy presided over by the king and legitimized by the country’s Buddhist monastic order. Social regulation was not based on a discernible political ideology. Rather, it was based on a pragmatic acceptance of the necessity of regulation for survival. In essence, social regulation was the embodiment of the hierarchical political culture and was agreed to in principle, and in conduct, by those it exploited. Traditional

18

The Traditional Setting

education broadly reflected and reinforced this pattern of social regulation. The Buddhist notion of the helplessness of the individual served as a central socializing factor. Students were equipped to become citizens in a system in which they were taught to refer to themselves as knjom (slave) and to willingly accept the necessity of their subservience to individuals of higher social status. If a harmonious balance between the social system and education was a fundamental characteristic of precolonial Cambodia, then the impact of the French was to see a rigid fracture of past practices. The French paid scant regard to the traditions of Cambodian education. They sought to impose on the country an ideology that, while largely ignoring the peasantry, encouraged the loyalty and acquiescence of the elite. For these people especially, notions of modernity fostered and promoted by the French came into conflict with Khmer traditions, resulting in an irreconcilable fusion of conflicting cultural and political ideals that were to endure beyond independence. Colonialism, as we shall see, would serve to spawn the emergence of two distinct and ideologically opposed political cultures in Cambodia. The education system, as events unfolded, was to become one of their key battlegrounds.

Enter the French In 1863, after lengthy negotiations, the French concluded a treaty of protection with Cambodia’s King Norodom. The treaty was a lifeline for Cambodia, after continued Vietnamese and Thai annexation had threatened its very existence.29 French intentions, although marked with the air of self-righteous piety that characterized the French colonial experience in other countries, were decidedly nonchalant. Early French explorers, although exotic in their descriptions, generally believed Cambodia was inhospitable and its people lazy. The benefit to the French in establishing a Cambodian protectorate was to exploit its strategic geographic location. France was able to offer Cambodia protection against its predatory Thai and Vietnamese neighbors. In return, for no other reason than its position, Cambodia would “protect” the lucrative French colony in Cochinchina (now southern Vietnam) against encroachments by both Thailand and the British colonies west of Cambodia. It is difficult to understand what the French hoped to achieve in Cambodia. There is little doubt that for at least some of the French authorities, the mission civilisatrice was a fundamental concern. How much of a concern may never be known. There is also little doubt that

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in comparison to the neighboring Vietnamese colonies, the French demonstrated very little interest in establishing a serious presence in Cambodia. A revenue crisis, caused by King Norodom’s administrative ineptitude, in tandem with the righteous conviction conjured up by the mission civilisatrice, led to an increase in French intervention toward the end of the nineteenth century. At no stage was this intervention to seriously infiltrate the world of the Cambodian peasantry.

French Colonial Ideology French colonial policies were almost always developed in Paris. From there, they were sent to the furthest realms of French occupation. Any definition of French colonial ideology must therefore take account of what was happening in the French capital, where debates about the economic benefits of colonialism were coupled with a righteous sense that colonization would benefit uncivilized natives. As early as the sixteenth century, French colonists were accompanied on their journeys by a belief in the righteousness of their actions. A noted historian of the French colonial presence in Vietnam and Cambodia argued that “a dominant theme of colonial theory, in both Cochinchina and Cambodia, was the belief in a French mission civilisatrice.” 30 It was an argument firmly grounded in the writings of the early French explorers who traveled to the region, and it served to justify the French commitment to assimilation.31 Assimilation was arguably the backbone of French colonial ideology. The theory was aimed at “the elimination of parochial cultures and the creation of men who are peers and culturally undifferentiated.” 32 Its roots were grounded in the deep-seated political and philosophical traditions inherited and absorbed by postrevolutionary France: notions of egalitarianism, a commitment to administrative centralization, and a desire for precision in legal and constitutional matters.33 Each of these influences helps us to understand the French attempt to impose uniformity and European rationality on its socially, geographically, and culturally diverse colonies. Before arriving on the Indochinese peninsula, the French had actively pursued their assimilationist doctrine in Africa. Typical French colonial policy there was characterized by annexation, the attempted destruction of native culture, the destruction of native government, and the economic principle of l’exclusif, a tariff arrangement whereby French colonies could only export to France and could import only from or through France using French ships. The French initially approached

20

The Traditional Setting

Indochina in much the same way as they had approached Africa. The years that followed the establishment of the Cochinchinese colony saw protectorates established in the other states of Indochina, Cambodia being the first. Disregarding indigenous cultures, France attempted “to lump five dissimilar states into a loose union.” 34 In terms of our understanding of French Indochina, the period of early French involvement is remarkable only in terms of the depth of its failure. The French soon realized, in a most expensive manner, that Southeast Asian trade patterns bore no similarity to those of Africa and that traditional systems of authority and government were of considerable strength. The problems were compounded by the fact that colonial policy, directed with global uniformity from Paris, was placed increasingly under the microscope and was widely criticized by those humanitarians inspired by the Enlightenment. The impact of the doctrine of assimilation on Cambodia was negligible. The early years of French administration have been described as a “heroic period,” where the “government remained in the hands of young naval officers hungry for glory, eager for promotion, and entranced by the exotic setting in which they found themselves.” 35 By the late 1870s, with a reasonable degree of control established in Vietnam, the French increasingly turned their attention to Cambodia. They were immediately repulsed by the oppressive yet haphazard administration of King Norodom and his many sycophants. The French reaction, fueled by economic concerns, was the treaty forced on Norodom in 1884 by the governor-general of Cochinchina, Charles Thomson. The two main elements of the treaty were the placement of French résidents in provincial centers and the abolition of slavery. The presence of French officials throughout the country did little to incite the Cambodian elite. Their major contention arose from the decision to abolish slavery, a move that would significantly undermine the traditional system of exploitation through which the precolonial state had been maintained. The treaty, although ratified in 1886, was never fully implemented, after a nationwide rebellion sponsored by the elite broke out in 1885. The event was not an outright defeat for the French. Instead, it signaled the beginning of a shift in approach. In the following years, rather than directly attack the Cambodian monarch, French officials surrounded Norodom with an entourage of sympathetic advisers.36 In doing so, they were intricately weaving the threads of European modernity with the fabric of the traditional polity. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, the French slowly began to exert greater influence at the Cambodian court, although at no stage was it

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extended to the masses in the countryside. Elsewhere in Indochina, the French were having difficulty establishing control. Eager to hear of French conquests and victories throughout the empire, Parisian policymakers became disillusioned with the region, whose checkered history was a pall on the colonial landscape.37 It was within this atmosphere that Paul Doumer arrived in Indochina in 1897. Firmly committed to a rigid system of organization, Doumer believed he could bring economic development to the region. His appointment as governor-general is significant in that association, rather than assimilation, was more actively pursued in Indochina. The policy of association, in contrast to that of assimilation, “emphasized the need for variation in colonial practice.” 38 In effect, it adopted many of the practices of British colonial policy, where indirect rule through the retention and utilization of native institutions was a defining feature. Central to association policy was the achievement of economic development, as it was believed that cooperation would lead to a more responsive labor force whose efforts would increase productivity. The mission civilisatrice, rather than repudiated, was modified. The French, by their mere presence in a foreign land, still felt a moral obligation to improve the social, cultural, and material status of the natives. For Paul Doumer, Cambodia remained virgin territory. Indigenous institutions, although tinkered with by his predecessors, had functioned largely without the involvement of colonial administrators. Doumer’s approach was to allow Norodom and his appointed officials to govern as they had been, while continuing the delicate enmeshment of modernity and tradition by limiting French résidents to completely advisory functions. Like Thomson, he reinforced the presence of résidents throughout the country and attempted to abolish slavery. In terms of Cambodia’s development, the difference between Doumer and his predecessors was Doumer’s land titles ordinance of 1897, which recognized French titles to land.39 This new edict signaled the beginning of a more steady French infiltration of the Cambodian countryside. Despite Doumer’s influence and efforts to restructure the Cambodian bureaucracy, the French never seriously pressed their claims for a substantial role in Cambodian administration. Two notable events illustrate the limited extent to which the French had infiltrated the village world in the countryside. The first was the protests of 1916, when Cambodian peasants seeking to have the tax burden on them reduced, bypassed the French administration and presented their grievances directly to the king. It was only after the king canceled any further corvée for 1916 and ordered the peasants back to their villages that the protest

22

The Traditional Setting

delegations ceased.40 The second event, in 1925, was the assassination of French résident, Felix Bardez. After addressing an assembled crowd at the village of Kraang Laev, and arresting a number of delinquent tax payers, Bardez was set upon by a small group of people. The result of the struggle that ensued was the violent mutilation of Bardez and his companions. Reacting to the imperatives of local leaders, the large crowd that had earlier gathered to listen to Bardez then marched to Kompong Chhnang, demanding the remission of their taxes.41 In both cases, French administration, the French justice system, and French authority were all firmly rejected, and ignored, by the angry peasants. The protests and the assassination of Bardez provide important anecdotal evidence that the French grossly underestimated the strength of Cambodian social organization. In 1916, and again in 1925, the French were relying on their misguided perception of the docility and naïveté of Cambodia’s peasants in order to increase the degree of their exploitation. Both events were the result of the French attempting to increase their tax receipts in Cambodia, even though the country was already the most heavily taxed of the French concerns in Indochina. The marches on Phnom Penh and Kompong Chhnang are both evidence of the ability of the Khmer to organize and mobilize themselves and to establish effective lines of communication through their indigenous system of social relations. In turn, the so-called 1916 Affair and the assassination of Bardez point to a complete lack of French understanding of Cambodia and its people.42 At no stage did French policies in Cambodia ever reflect the idea of assimilation. On the surface, we could entertain the idea that association was more actively pursued in the Cambodian protectorate. A deeper analysis reveals, however, that this is clearly not the case either. The French did not pursue a coherent policy of indirect rule in Cambodia that would benefit both themselves and the native population. Instead, their policy direction, although characterized by a greater degree of control in matters of administration, resembled a series of contingencies, each determined by inadequate personnel and a complete lack of continuity. The impact of French control on the lives of Cambodia’s peasants, in the main, had been insignificant. Preoccupied with their day-to-day survival, with the food on their table, with rice cultivation, and with their Buddhist lifestyle, Cambodians continued to be locked into a cycle of localized patron-client relationships. They continued to pay taxes to a higher authority as they had always done, supporting the lifestyle of an elite whom they rarely saw and with whom they had little in common.

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French Educational Reforms Early French efforts in regard to education in Cambodia reflected the nonchalance of initial attempts at administering the protectorate. In 1867, after only four years of the protectorate, King Norodom, under French patronage, established the first secular school in Cambodia, for the children of the royal family. A second school was established by Ferreyrolles, a French military officer, in Phnom Penh in 1873.43 Little is known about these schools. French concepts of reform in Cambodia, and their idealistic desire to civilize its people, were consistent with their policies in Cochinchina. The difference between the two lies in Cambodia’s status as a protectorate and Cochinchina’s status as a colony, where a concerted attempt at full assimilation was pursued. With a shortage of personnel, and operating under the pretext of indirect rule, Cambodia’s protectorate status “was honored to the extent that French interference stopped short of the mass of the people.” 44 The schools established in the early years of the protectorate were testament to this pattern. Their most discernible characteristic was their establishment by French residents and their exclusive use by the children of French residents, members of the Cambodian elite, Chinese merchants, and children of Vietnamese immigrants, recruited by the French to undertake tasks of administration in Cambodia.45 The French education system had not touched the lives of the peasantry. Early attempts to extend secular education beyond the elite had been met with a lack of commitment and foresight. A program integrating secular with Buddhist education established by M. Baudoin, in conjunction with a French teacher, M. Menetrier, in Kompong Cham province, for example, had not been pursued by his successors, seemingly because of a lack of official instructions.46 The appointment of Albert Sarraut, a noted advocate of association policies, as governorgeneral of Indochina, marked a broadening of the mission, where education based on Western notions of formal schooling was to be extended to the local worlds of Cambodia’s peasantry. Prior to that, the token educational efforts of the colonial sovereign had catered to Cambodia’s ruling class. Cambodia’s peasants continued to be educated at the wat. In 1918, Sarraut approved an educational blueprint whereby the children in the five countries of Indochina would receive identical schooling. It is worth noting that the proposed system for French children and that for the non-French majority would differ. Whereas children from France would receive an education identical to that received in France, children native of the Indochinese countries would receive

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The Traditional Setting

an education similar to that of their French counterparts.47 While critics could not claim that the system, directed from Hanoi, had been designed in Paris and standardized for all colonies, its primary flaw was that it failed to take account of the diversity of Indochina. The religious, cultural, geographic, and demographic differences existing between the countries that made up the French union were steadfastly ignored. Even casting aside its ignorance of diversity, Sarraut’s system was not without other shortcomings. It was soon realized that few children remained at school longer than three years; that parents preferred for their sons to continue to receive an education at the temple; that cultural constraints excluded girls from regular participation; that a significant shortage of trained teachers existed; that the scarcity of the population meant that village schools were not accessible to many pupils; and finally, that the public was largely apathetic to the system. Writing from a perspective sympathetic to French colonial interests, one analyst prophetically declared that “it is natural for [Cambodian peasants] to think that a peasant’s son can acquire little information at the state school, where much French is taught but no agriculture.” 48 To overcome the obstacles, it was decided to use the temple schools, but to reform them. The reason for reform, it was stated, was that the temple schools, without curriculum, timetable, inspectors, or examinations, were inadequate and in a state of degeneration.49 To be fair, as one Cambodian historian observed, the temple schools were not without problems. The students often spent time engaging in activities in which their learning was limited, while the fact that monks could leave the pagoda as they pleased disrupted the stability of the system.50 While temple schools offered insufficient instruction, the underlying reason for the reforms sponsored by the French was that the monastic system was not synonymous with the Western notion of formal schooling. After deeming successful a teacher training program carried out in Kampot province in 1924, it was decided to expand the new system throughout the country.51 It is tempting to conclude that the severe jolt inflicted by the Bardez assassination in April 1925 was related to the rapid acceleration in the expansion of the use of reformed temple schools and therefore the potential expansion of French sovereignty in the following years. It could easily be argued that the “modernized” temple schools were a fine example of “association,” in which colonial ideas and native institutions were blended in harmony. A more cynical and possibly realistic assessment is that the modernization of the temple schools was a finan-

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cially prudent move for the French. Rather than finance an entire education system, they were able to rely on existing teaching staff and existing infrastructure financed by the villages themselves.52 Although it was stated that the modernized temple schools were only a temporary measure, with the aim being the establishment of universal Franco-Khmer public schools, very little progress was made in the transformation phase or, in fact, at any other level of education. Considering that modern education was regarded as a touchstone in the mission civilisatrice, the statistics of educational development prior to the onset of World War II paint a damning picture. In 1932/1933, there were 225 modernized temple schools in Cambodia. By 1938/1939, the number had increased to 908. Franco-Khmer public schools, offering the full primary curriculum, numbered 18 in 1932/1933, with the same number of establishments in 1938/1939. Despite the policy of transformation, there was not a single Franco-Khmer primary school inaugurated during these years. Enrollments at Franco-Khmer primary schools increased by approximately 150 percent during the period, compared with almost 500 percent for modernized temple schools. In 1938/1939, only 294 students passed the Certificat d’études primaires complémentaires (Certificate of Complementary Primary Studies), despite the fact that almost 60,000 students were enrolled at primary schools.53 Full secondary education was offered for the first time only in 1935, when the Collège Sisowath was given full lycée status.54 Although some technical and administrative education was available, students from Cambodia wishing to pursue further studies were forced to travel to Saigon, Hanoi, or Paris.55 It is questionable whether the French were ever truly serious about providing Cambodia’s peasants with modern education. Given the steady decline in French activity, it appears that the enthusiasm generated by Sarraut’s reforms quickly subsided in an avalanche of impediments and problems. It is obvious that Cambodia was never afforded the same degree of French commitment to education as were the French colonies in Vietnam. In order to carry out their mission civilisatrice there, the French had eagerly, doggedly, and eventually successfully pursued a policy of romanizing the Chinese-based Vietnamese character script.56 After initial resistance in Cambodia, concentrated in the monastic order, no concerted attempts were made by the French to change the sanscritized Khmer script.57 To be sure, the adoption of temple schools saw Khmer maintained as the language of instruction in elementary education. Similarly, the French in Vietnam were concerned with providing

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The Traditional Setting

education to the country’s minority ethnic groups, such as the Montagnards.58 No such effort was made in relation to Cambodia’s modest minority population. The French were well aware that the teaching standards in temple schools were poor, yet they did very little to correct them. They were also aware of intermittent attendance by children, yet they seemed to let the problem pass unnoticed. The vexing question then arises: What was the purpose of the token education provided to the peasantry? It is obvious that education was not provided to promote the “development” of the Cambodian peasantry. Rather, the provision of education accorded with a concerted French attempt to engender indigenous loyalty. The 1918 reforms implemented throughout Indochina occurred only after stirrings of discontent had begun to shake the corridors of colonial power in Vietnam. In providing the masses with access to modern education, the French could argue that they were providing people with a return on their taxes and possibly with a means of access to the administrative corps, considered a gateway to the Cambodian elite. The onset of World War II saw the Japanese arrive on the IndoChinese peninsula. As if to assert their authority, the French immediately increased their educational profile in the provinces. In 1942, they opened the Collège Norodom Sihanouk at Kompong Cham.59 Named in honor of the recently crowned monarch, who was “plucked” by the French from the Lycée Chasseloup Laubat in Saigon,60 the collège was an attempt by the colonizers to engender indigenous loyalty. To be sure, its name was no doubt chosen to boost the prestige of and reinforce French allegiance to the king.61 The Japanese occupation provided Cambodia’s students, especially those members of the elite privileged enough to be receiving a secondary education, with an interesting contrast. While they sat in class learning about the history and grandeur of France’s Third Republic, they were also witnessing firsthand the deterioration, and humiliation, of French sovereignty throughout Indochina. As in many other Southeast Asian nations, the legacy of Japanese occupation during the Second World War worked to fuel the emergence of an embryonic nationalist movement, whose leaders, in the Cambodian case, were able to draw on the rich and glorious history of the Angkorean empire. It is ironic that this history had been deciphered for them by French historians and archaeologists.62 The Japanese occupation saw the French attempt to accelerate the enmeshment of their project of modernity, the mission civilisatrice, with

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Cambodia’s traditional political order. A primary feature of the French reaction to the Japanese occupation was their attempt to associate themselves with the prestige of the Cambodian monarch and therefore with Cambodia’s hierarchical political and cultural traditions. The attempt proved ill-fated after the Japanese coup de force in March 1945. On March 10, in response to a Japanese directive, King Norodom Sihanouk proclaimed the end of the French protectorate in Cambodia and advised that the kingdom would be known as Kampuchea.63 While in many respects the coup merely substituted French supervision with that of the Japanese, the new king did move swiftly to abrogate the law regarding the romanization of the Khmer script. The aftermath of the coup effectively ensured that no matter what the outcome of the war, the French would not simply pick up where they left off if or when they returned to Indochina. The French decision to align themselves with the Cambodian monarch had three important consequences. The first was that the prestige of the monarchy, arguably in decline since the fall of Angkor, was reinvigorated. The second was the increased profile, and political awakening, of the young King Sihanouk, who was able to draw on the resurgence in the renewed eminence accorded his title. As a result, those Cambodians who were vehemently opposed to the return of the French were to provide the third consequence: a distinctly antimonarchic strand of the emerging Cambodian elite. Drawn largely from the alumni of the Lycée Sisowath, from the readership of Nagara Vatta (Pali for Angkor Wat), Cambodia’s first Khmer-language newspaper, and from the intellectual element associated with the Buddhist Institute,64 these “awakened” nationalists evolved into a distinct opposition to the monarchy. The 1946 Franco-Cambodian modus vivendi, negotiated after the French returned to Indochina, allowed Cambodians to form political parties and provided a vehicle through which the antimonarchic nationalists could be coordinated into a political force.

Evaluating the French It would be easy to argue that the overall impact of the French in Cambodia was minimal. On the surface, their influence would not appear great. They erected a Royal Palace (in Phnom Penh), sponsored the arts, and oversaw the restoration of the Angkorean temples.65 From this perspective, the French seemed to have touched the lives of only a select few people in the nation’s capital and other provincial towns. However,

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The Traditional Setting

when we begin to pay attention to those the French seemed to ignore, Cambodian peasants, we are able to reveal a more enduring and substantial legacy of the French colonial era. Cambodia’s traditional education system, centered on the wat, laid a foundation for survival in the harsh and fragile environment of precolonial Cambodia. Monastic instruction stressed the importance of appropriate conduct and behavior and of maintaining the correct relations between members of society. While it could be argued, with considerable justification, that the system was inadequately equipped to deal with social change, it did provide a strong and explicit tie between rural life and religious ideology. In simple terms, it perpetuated the notion of “taking the children from the rice-fields and giving them back to the ricefields.” 66 It has been written that traditional educational ideology, in the Durkheimian sense, could be regarded as contributing to the “mechanical solidarity” of the society, “ensuring social cohesion and the maintenance of traditional values.” 67 For Cambodia’s peasants, the colonial legacy in education, as the statistics would indicate, was not the erection of an educational infrastructure. Rather, it was the importation of a Western formal school system, its haphazard implementation, and the undermining of its traditional, religious counterpart. Ben Kiernan best illuminates the undermining of this traditional educational authority when he suggests that the French colonial period saw a severe decline in traditional intellectual institutions, “but did not provide a compensatory development of a modern educational system.” 68 For the peasantry, it was the introduction of the concept of social mobility that proved a significant factor in undermining the solidarity of the traditional, cohesive social system. The provision of modern education to Cambodian peasants was akin to a subtle social revolution. Unlike neighboring Vietnam and nearby China, where traditional education provided an avenue of social mobility through the arduous series of Mandarin examinations, Cambodia’s traditional education system had always reinforced the concept of helplessness, the idea that a person was unable to determine their position within the social strata. Like the pesantren of Java, the system promoted social cohesion by maintaining a sense of group identity. Through its association with the village wat, it provided a link between the elite and the peasantry.69 The provision of modern education, although slowly accepted by the peasantry, was to irrecoverably compromise the traditional scenario in Cambodia, opening windows where the panorama stretched beyond the local world of the village.

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The mission civilisatrice was applied to the Cambodian peasantry to the extent that it did not impose on French resources in the protectorate. While the peasantry had to wait until Albert Sarraut’s reforms in 1918 to be considered for “modern” education, the Cambodian ruling class, for whom the mission civilisatrice was pursued with relatively more enthusiasm, was afforded modern education much earlier. It was never pursued, however, with the same vigor as with the French concerns in Vietnam. The forerunner to the Lycée Sisowath, the Collège du Protectorat, was founded in 1893 on the premise of training Cambodians to assist with the work of colonization. It was followed, in 1917, by the establishment of the Ecole d’Administration Cambodgienne, to “train boys for the higher ranks of the civil service.” 70 Those at the highest echelons of the elite, generally members of the royal family, were provided with access to higher education in the Vietnamese colonies and with the possibility of attending an institution in Paris. For these people, assimilation into the “modern” world envisaged by the French was a possibility. By 1950, after the French had turned control of education over to an indigenous government, there were approximately one hundred Khmer students studying in France. Many returned to Cambodia, where they enjoyed privileged positions in the civil service and in the local business community. For another group, the intellectual environment of France spawned an awakening that caused them to question the very nature of the Khmer social system. For these elite students, the wave of Communism sweeping through Europe proved a catalyst and provided them with an increased motivation to remove the French and achieve independence in Cambodia. Among these emergent revolutionaries were Ieng Sary and the future Pol Pot, Saloth Sar. These radical Cambodian “intellectuals,” upon their return to the country throughout the early 1950s, were to prove the vanguard of the Cambodian revolutionary movement and the overseers of the radical egalitarian political culture that established itself in competition with the entrenched hierarchical status quo. Cambodia achieved independence in 1953, with much credit, either rightly or wrongly, lauded on King Sihanouk. For many nationalists, their goal had been achieved, and they soon rallied to embrace the politics of the king. At the same time, many of the French returnees aligned themselves with the local Democrat Party, formed after the French returned to Cambodia following the Second World War. The departure of many moderates, combined with the influx of a Marxist leaning intellectual corps, saw the ideology of the Democrats shift to the left.71 Although battered and repressed by royalists in the following years, these

30

The Traditional Setting

opponents of the political, and therefore hierarchical status quo, were to prove a significant force in postcolonial Cambodian politics. The overriding theme of the French presence in Cambodia is neglect. The colonial period represents a litany of half-hearted and rarely completed policies and plans that were immediately disbanded upon the realization that their costs, or the effort required to implement them, would outweigh those initially envisaged. French efforts in regard to education provide a glaring testament to this pattern. In hindsight, the French never appeared to have been concerned with the “development” or “modernization” of the Cambodian peasantry. Their token efforts at educating the peasantry, with legitimacy rather than development in mind, were never pursued with any vigor, and resulted only in undermining a system of semiformal instruction perceived by its users to be both successful and relevant. The French did not as quickly dismiss the Cambodian elite. Although never afforded the same commitment to modernization as were the Vietnamese, the French did offer selected members of the elite a window through which they could see aspects of a world very different to traditional Cambodian society. A small number of Cambodians were to step outside the walls enclosing this window and to embrace the Western world. It is here that some were to question the inherent inequality present in Khmer society and to seek alternatives to a system based on exploitation and patronage. Although their ideas were never widely embraced by the wider Cambodian population, the proponents of equality were to fracture the Cambodian social and political system, providing an opposition to the status quo that would endure for over forty years. The battle between the hierarchical political culture that has dominated Cambodian society for many centuries and the egalitarian culture, spawned by the French enmeshment of tradition and modernity, that has opposed it since colonial times, emerges as one of the recurring subthemes of this book.

Sihanouk and the Sangkum From Independence to Chaos

When King Norodom Sihanouk abdicated the Cambodian throne to contest the 1955 elections, he brought to an end two years of bitter political conflict as independent Cambodia had struggled to contend with its newly granted freedom. Drawing on the divine status accorded to his former title, Sihanouk seized control of the emergent Cambodian state, formulated its ideology, and exerted his influence on the direction of public policy. It was during the following years, under Sihanouk’s guidance as the builder of the modern Cambodian nation-state, that the country was popularly portrayed as an “oasis of peace,” a Southeast Asian “Camelot.” 1 From the mid-1960s, flaws became evident in the aspirations of Sihanouk’s development agenda. Domestically, the prince was under pressure from the Cambodian left, whose influence he had sought to nullify, and the right, who had become frustrated with his blatant political autocracy and left-leaning economic agenda. Beyond Cambodia’s borders, the escalating Vietnamese conflict was also beginning to impact on political and economic life. The country’s woes climaxed in 1970, when the National Assembly deposed Sihanouk. For the education system, the period began as one of great expectation. A foreign expert, sent to Cambodia in 1955/1956, provided ample evidence of the optimism that not only accompanied Cambodia’s emergence from colonial rule but also encapsulated the goodwill of the entire international community in respect to the developing world. He wrote:

31

32

Sihanouk and the Sangkum Cambodia seems to stand at the extended new road to life among the many nations. She has passed several tollgates and is entering the main highway. . . . In certain places in the world, there are unspoiled places awaiting training and education for the new era; Cambodia is one of those places.2

Over time, the optimism subsided. Goodwill was replaced by unattained aspirations, increased disillusionment, political awakenings, and despair. As in many other nations of the developing world, education was pursued in Cambodia with the promise of rapid economic development and modernization. These anticipated successes were not forthcoming, resulting in widespread discontent, especially among the nation’s students. This chapter picks up where the French left off, in the aftermath of the Second World War, with Cambodia moving steadily toward independence. The French never really left the educational picture. Their continued influence and intransigence emerged as a dominant motif throughout the period. But the French were not responsible for the “educational crisis” in Cambodia. The policy of Cambodianization, another motif that emerged, although threatened by the French, failed at the hands of Cambodians. Particularly culpable was Norodom Sihanouk, who had slavishly pursued the expansion of educational provision in order to promote and ensure his uncontested legitimacy. Sihanouk’s interference in all spheres of educational policy represents a third motif. As the educational chronology of the 1950s and 1960s unfolded, the voice of the former king faded in and out of the picture, his presence often marked by whimsical or flippant observations, his search for a scapegoat in the face of economic or political turmoil, or by his occasional, if relatively short, period of serious concern with educational provision. A final motif to emerge throughout the period was the continued development of contending Cambodian nationalisms. One such concept of nation was that of Sihanouk, whose aspirations for Cambodia continued to reflect a political culture based on its hierarchical precolonial predecessor. Sihanouk’s nation-building effort created a stark paradox. On one hand, the prince was fervent in his pursuit of economic development and modernization. On the other, he was equally fervent in reinforcing a political status quo that saw his rule unquestioned. The result of the paradox was the manifestation of discontent and dissent among the nation’s students and teachers. The other “nationalism” to

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emerge during the period, promoting ideals of egalitarianism, drew support from those disenchanted with the status quo. While the education system became a key battleground for these two opposing nationalist cultures, it was the nature of the entrenched hierarchical political culture that played a significant role in the manifestation of a Cambodian educational crisis.

The Prince, the Organization, and the Ideology The years that followed the achievement of Cambodian independence, not inclusive of the interregnum before the 1955 national elections, are widely regarded as the most politically stable in postindependence Cambodian history. They are also characterized by the ubiquitous presence of Norodom Sihanouk, whose rise to political supremacy began with his self-titled “Royal Crusade for Independence.” Once described by a senior United States (U.S.) government official in a confidential memo as “selfish, arrogant, personable, pragmatic, [and a] highly egocentric individual,” Sihanouk often appeared erratic and his actions spontaneous. Throughout the crusade, Sihanouk went into voluntary exile, as he would do many times later, providing an opportunity, as his biographer would say, for his compatriots to “come to their senses.” 3 He also traveled the world, seeking foreign support and sponsorship of his ideas, another tactic that would be repeated over the years. Following the success of the crusade, Sihanouk practically usurped political authority in Cambodia. His complete control seemed assured until the 1954 Geneva conference, which ratified the cessation of the First Indochina War 4 and which decided that Cambodia should conduct a national election. The decision came as a blow to the increasingly politically aware young king, providing an opportunity for the Democrat Party to attempt to regain the momentum it had enjoyed before Sihanouk’s independence crusade had effectively neutralized its central policy objective. In conjunction with the new Citizen’s Group, it was widely believed that the Democrats would win enough National Assembly seats to form at least an effective left-leaning parliamentary minority. Quite rightly, Sihanouk feared that the elections would erode the political dominance he had thus far achieved. In order to participate fully in the new political system, he surprised both friends and foes by abdicating the Cambodian throne in favor of his father, Prince Suramarit. Stressing that he was now merely a private citizen, Sihanouk nonetheless

34

Sihanouk and the Sangkum

accepted the title of prince and became Samdech Upayuvareach, the Prince Who Has Been King.5 Shortly after, he claimed: I hope that in abandoning my reign, my crown and my throne, my sacrifice will help to call the attention of our elite to the great importance of raising our Nation from its present state, which prompts foreigners to say that we do not know how to conduct ourselves with the dignity and courage required by the statute of independence.” 6

The prince’s reflections provide significant insight into two of his central aspirations that, despite the changes and convolutions in his adopted stance on many issues, would remain constant throughout the years when he ruled Cambodia. First, Sihanouk was determined to enhance the development of Cambodia; and second, he strove to have the country recognized, if not admired, by the international community. His power absolute, and alone at the helm of the Cambodian boat, the former monarch was in a position to chart the formation of the Cambodian state, promoting both “development” and “nationhood.” 7 In the first definitive act of nation building following his abdication, the prince announced the formation of the Sangkum Reastr Niyum (People’s Socialist Community). The Sangkum was not a political party but a vast assemblage or organization, embracing players from both the left and the right of the ideological spectrum.8 From the elections of September 1955 through the elections of 1958, 1962, and 1966, no nonSangkum politician was elected to Cambodia’s National Assembly. Prior to the elections of 1966, Sihanouk personally selected the Sangkum candidates for each electoral district. Throughout these years, until he refused to select candidates for the 1966 election and subsequently lost control of the Assembly, the Sangkum-controlled national body was to become nothing more than a rubber stamp for the prince and his policies. Put simply, the Sangkum, and the political institutions with which it was associated, merely reinforced Cambodia’s traditional political culture, where the power and position of the ruler were exalted, where the credentials of political opposition were not recognized, and where the aspirations of the ruled were largely ignored.9 With his capacity to control the Cambodian state seemingly assured, Sihanouk was in the enviable position of being able to formulate its direction. The ideology set down by the prince, Buddhist socialism, accorded entirely with his personal political convictions and with his aspirations for the Khmer nation. The ideology, the prince acknowledged, was formulated in contradiction to many of the basic tenets of Marxism.

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Its cornerstone, according to Sihanouk, was not a Western political ideology but the religious traditions of Cambodian life. Buddhist socialism asserted that the ruler should treat the people equally, with empathy and with goodness. This assertion repudiated the Marxist view that the ruled (the weak) should overthrow and eliminate the rulers (the strong) and establish a proletarian dictatorship. Marxist socialism advocated the abolition of private property ownership and encouraged state or collective ownership of all capital. Sihanouk opposed this belief, arguing that citizens should not be dispossessed of the fruits of their labor. Drawing on Buddhist beliefs, the rich, the prince argued, should be encouraged to give to the poor in order to gain merit.10 At best, the ideology was a hazy abstraction. An editorial in Kambuja magazine in 1966, published primarily for foreign consumption, attempted to explain and rationalize Buddhist socialism. In it, Sihanouk claimed that Buddhism is a religion of “stoic energy, of resolute perseverance, and of very special courage.” As a result, the prince was able to embrace an essentially conservative state ideology that, while preserving his own base of power, emphasized “a struggle against social injustice and underdevelopment” and was compatible with the goals of economic, if not social, modernization.11

Buddhist Socialism and the International Community The formation of the Sangkum, and particularly the promulgation of Buddhist socialism, provided a basis for Cambodia’s state-making efforts during a period when the state, and state intervention, was considered central to achieving development.12 The core of Buddhist socialism, an “intense and constant crusade for national development,” 13 was warmly welcomed within international circles at the time. The 1950s and 1960s had seen structural-functionalism emerge to dominate sociological thinking in the Western-oriented developing world. In relation to development, structural-functionalism resulted in the emergence of both modernization theory and human capital theory. Together, they shed some light on the nature of Sihanouk’s state ideology and on the unbridled drive for educational expansion that it accompanied. Modernization theory emerged during the early years of Sihanouk’s dominance of Cambodian political life. The theory asserted that industrialized societies had reached the “new” or “modern” era. Their past, the theorists assumed, would provide the path for the nations of the developing world to follow in their quest for modernity. Modernization was in no way definitive. Essentially, it implied Westernization, but to the

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Sihanouk and the Sangkum

leaders embracing it, the term also connoted recognition by the global community, mechanization, industrial development, and enlightenment. Although the meaning of modernization was unclear, it was the provision of modern, secular education that was at its core. “Cambodian education looks simultaneously in two directions: backward to a uniquely integrated Buddhist culture, and forward to modern, secular democratic forces,” wrote Jeanette Eilenberg in 1961.14 The provision of modernizing institutions, such as a school education system, were popularly regarded as the carts on which governments could ride in order to acquire modern behavior, modern values, and to become a modern society. If education had the potential to modernize minds, then it also had the potential to enhance economic development. While modernization theory preoccupied sociological thinkers, economists began to focus on manpower needs in the development process. The result of their thinking was human capital theory, articulated by Theodore Schultz in the celebrated article “Investment in Human Capital.” 15 The theory viewed education not as a form of consumption but as an investment that would provide the type of labor force necessary for industrial development and economic growth. As with modernization theory, human capital theory provided the builders of the world’s new nation-states, such as Prince Sihanouk, with a justification for large public expenditure on education.

Education: Looking Back The period surrounding and including the Second World War shaped the postindependence educational landscape in Cambodia. With the dawning of the belief that receiving a modern education would offer the prospect of upward social mobility, the queues at the enrollment desks of Cambodia’s public schools steadily lengthened. Increased demand resulted in unchecked expansion, constrained only by the financial capacity of the administration; problems were augmented, and the first UNESCO education advisers arrived in Cambodia.16 The extent to which their recommendations were adopted, and often ignored, is a recurring theme throughout this chapter. In the years preceding the war, the prospect of upward social mobility motivated many Cambodians to demand access to modern education. Unfortunately for these people, the French were unwilling to meet the demand. The 1936/1937 report of the head of the colonial Educational Service noted that “schools have been attended . . . by a total of

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17,725 pupils,” before concluding that “these figures are nothing compared to what they would be if we were in a position to satisfy all requests for admittance.” 17 The threat to the French administration caused by the war saw them begrudgingly begin to address the increased popular desire for education. The impetus for demand for the expansion of educational facilities came not only from among the peasantry and those who believed they would personally benefit from such provision but also from selected members of the Cambodian elite who believed that modern education would enhance the development of the country. An example was Sihanouk’s enduring ally, Nhiek Tioulong, who was the governor of Kompong Cham province between 1939 and 1945. During a period of tenure overshadowed by the Second World War, the number of primary education graduates in his province increased from nine annually to over ninety.18 Figures such as these were reflected throughout the country. The Japanese occupation of Indochina and the subsequent modus vivendi of 1946, which moved Cambodia further in the direction of independence, saw control of the Ministry of Education transferred to Cambodians. Government expenditure on education provides clear evidence of the emphasis the new indigenous Cambodian educational administration placed on expansion, increasing from an outlay of only 984,900 piastres in 1938 to over 165 million by 1952.19 With expansion came problems and the first evidence of the possibility of an emerging educational crisis. Speaking in 1952 about expenditure on public education, King Sihanouk stated: For these socially and culturally useful projects, which are of such vital importance for the kingdom, I must admit that we are sadly lacking in funds. To be frank, I have no great hope of improving this lamentable situation to any appreciable extent.20

Yet it was not only financial constraints that troubled the administration. There was a high number of adult illiterates; poor attendance by girls at school; widespread difficulties in communications; a scattered population distribution; the problems of hygiene and water supply within educational facilities; and of course, a severe shortage of adequately trained educational personnel.21 It was within this context that the first UNESCO experts were sent to Cambodia to study the problems in education and to make recommendations for the future. The UNESCO report, written during a period when there existed no significant body of literature on the negative

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Sihanouk and the Sangkum

aspects of the colonial legacy in education, applauded the progress made in the development of education in Cambodia. It praised the foundation of the Cambodian system on the French model, “which is one of the best organized in the world,” stating that “Cambodia could indeed be regarded as an example [to other developing nations].” Although critics could later argue that its faith in the French educational model reeked of neocolonialism, the UNESCO report’s key recommendations were insightful. In the first place, the report advised that educational expansion be tempered so as to be affordable and to provide time for the development of necessary resources; and second, it advised that the school curriculum be revised to adapt to the needs of Cambodia. The report concluded that the “final curriculum is thus bound to differ appreciably from that of Western countries.” UNESCO’s primary concern was with the attainment of compulsory education in Cambodia, a stated ambition of the Cambodian government. While agreeing that providing all children with a certain minimum of education was “a laudable ambition,” the report sternly warned that “it would be Utopian to attempt enforcing such a system immediately . . . The effort would be beyond the country’s power.” 22 UNESCO’s proposals were embraced by the Cambodian Ministry of Education during a period of heightened political instability. Sihanouk went abroad attempting to gain support for his “Royal Crusade”; much of the countryside was in conflict as the Communist-backed Issarak (independence) movement attempted their own campaign to dislodge the French; the Geneva conference of 1954 contributed to wider regional uncertainty; and the ensuing election campaign was among the most colorful, and violent, in Cambodian history.23 It was a climate hardly conducive to the implementation of educational policy reform, and the series of UNESCO-sponsored proposals, characteristic of the global educational imperatives of the period, were shelved until the domestic political environment was more accommodating. The state of the Cambodian education system in the aftermath of the elections was succinctly summed up by one observer with the following remarks: Cambodia found itself faced with too many pupils and students in crowded schools, taught by too few teachers who were inadequately prepared for their task. They used teaching approaches and methods which were copied from schools in France and which were intended to impart knowledge necessary for administrative assistants to French colonial civil servants.24

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In other words, educational demand outweighed supply, curricula were irrelevant, the quality of instruction was inadequate, and there was increasing disparity between the education system and the national economy. An educational crisis was already looming in Cambodia and, it should be noted, elsewhere in the states of the newly independent world.

1955 –1958: A First Attempt at Cambodianization In a variation of “l’état c’est moi,” a French author titled a chapter about Sihanouk “l’état c’est lui.” 25 The title of the chapter adequately captures the milieu of a period when Sihanouk’s rule was largely “unopposed.” 26 While UNESCO had called for educational expansion only in line with Cambodia’s financial capacity, the prince had other ideas. Ignoring the recommendation that Cambodia attempt to achieve universal primary education, Sihanouk was driving for compulsory secondary education. The unregulated expansion of educational facilities, encouraged by the prince, was a critical theme of these early years after independence. Another, more in accordance with UNESCO’s proposals, was the emergence of the idea of “Cambodianization” and the development of educational curricula suited to Cambodian needs and the building of the Cambodian nation. A final theme was the return from France of many of the students who had associated themselves with the international Communist movement. Many of these former students gravitated to the teaching profession.

Cambodianization The enthusiastic embrace of educational expansion following the elections of 1955 was reflected in the statistics. The number of modernized temple schools between the years 1955/1956 and 1957/1958 increased by only 47. During the same period, the number of Khmer public schools (formerly Franco-Khmer public schools) increased from 1,352 to 1,653. In the field of secondary education, not yet a priority, the increases were proportionately even greater: from 11 establishments in 1955/1956 to 18 by 1957/1958, and 29 by the following year.27 Despite the expansion, the system was poorly suited to the needs of Cambodia. It continued to reflect the centralized, rigid, and competitive French school system. Like the French system, the fine details of curriculum content were prescribed by regulation, including the number of hours

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Sihanouk and the Sangkum

teachers were to spend on each subject per week. The history and geography syllabi failed to provide students with an understanding of Cambodia or the Southeast Asian region, while French was the dominant language of instruction in all but the formative school years. The education system had originally been designed to impart the knowledge needed by administrative assistants to French colonial civil servants. Two consequences of such a model were apparent. The first was that while the system assumed students would progress beyond primary and even secondary school, by 1955 less than 1 in 3,000 students was enrolled in upper secondary school and less than 1 in 60 in lower secondary.28 A second consequence was that graduates of the system assumed they would find employment in the civil service. In February 1956, Prince Sihanouk declared that “students must adapt themselves to various professions. Unfortunately everybody wants to become a red tape artist.” In the same speech, Sihanouk noted that in order for the school system to achieve its functions, priority must be given to the reform of both primary and secondary education.29 A natural consequence of an education system that trains students to fulfill roles as fonctionnaires is that its graduates will expect to be employed in the area in which they received their training. Sihanouk, probably made aware of the relationship between students’ aspirations and the school curriculum, lent guarded support to those officials who were advocating reform.30 The first attempts at Cambodianization, embracing UNESCO’s proposals, were pursued within the boundaries of a limited charter. The central concerns of the reforms were the language of instruction, the structure of the primary education course, and school textbooks. The reforms adopted by the ministry included relegating French to the status of a second language in primary education, adjusting the number of teaching hours in the Khmer and French languages, and providing textbooks and teaching materials in Khmer. Importantly, while the reforms involved revising syllabi to take account of Cambodia’s independence, they did not address the heavy bias in the curriculum against rural Cambodian needs, nor did they address the relevance of the curriculum to the country’s economic and social circumstances. In fact, the system continued to train students to be “red tape artists.” The implementation of the reforms proved difficult. Notwithstanding the burden of educational expenditure stemming from the program of rapid expansion, the Cambodianization reforms placed further strain on the education budget. Resources remaining from the French pro-

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tectorate were increasingly obsolete, while the ministry’s capacity to purchase new resources, even with French and American assistance, was beyond its financial means. Further compounding the problem was the ministry’s capacity to produce new textbooks, with complications resulting from poor quality paper, imperfect and costly printing methods, and difficulties in printing the Cambodian script.31 Although the effectiveness of Cambodianization was undermined by educational expansion, the expansion did serve to benefit the task of building a Cambodian national consciousness. For the first time in Cambodian history, the state assumed a genuine presence in the localized world of the country’s rural villages through the erection of schools and, in turn, the appointment of state representatives: teachers. Textbooks served to promote, in the words of Hobsbawm, a “suitable historical past.” 32 Secular time replaced the traditional calendar, serving as a secondary conduit of modernization, while national “symbols” were actively promoted. In precolonial times, the wat had served as a cultural, religious, and educational focal point of the village. Among the peasantry, the French had done very little to alter this scenario. As in precolonial times, the wat continued to serve as a spiritual link between the king, and therefore the state, and the mass of the population. Physically, the link had been practically nonexistent, reinforcing the localized sociocultural milieu. With the wave of educational expansion ushered in by the modus vivendi of 1946, the dynamics of this traditional context irrevocably altered. In many villages, for the first time, the presence of the state was obvious. While the wat remained the religious and cultural center of the village, the school became an alternative repository of knowledge, with its teachers alternative authority figures in village life. Cambodia’s modern school teachers were to benefit from the status accorded to monks, who traditionally imparted knowledge in the education process. The teachers, known in Khmer as kru, a derivative of the Sanskrit guru, adopted an authoritarian approach, similar to that of their monastic predecessors. While continuing to serve an important role in the transmission of moral values, teachers no longer drew their authority from the institutions of religion. Rather, Cambodia’s secular teachers were invested with the authority of the state and were in a powerful position to impart the new values of the modern nation.33 A central element in establishing these values was the promotion of a certain “version” of Cambodian history. For students of postindependence Cambodia, Cambodianization resulted in the promotion of a

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Sihanouk and the Sangkum

“suitable historical past,” which acclaimed Sihanouk as the father of Cambodian nationalism and emphasized heavily his Royal Crusade for Independence. Former students recall learning about all of the dates of the Royal Crusade but could not recall ever examining the role of the Democrat Party, the Nagara Vatta newspaper, or the Issarak movement in directing the country toward independence. For secondary school students, Sihanouk’s own La monarchie cambodgienne et la croisade pour l’indépendence became a required history text. The themes of slavery, patronage and clientship, central to pre-independent Cambodian society, were glossed over in favor of an appreciation of the glories of Angkor.34 The “suitable historical past” led to an understanding of the present, the modern institutions created by Sihanouk in light of his crusade, the Sangkum and Buddhist socialism. Students would learn how these institutions, embodying the future in the glories of the past, were embracing modernization and, as Sihanouk claimed in 1962, a level of “democratization . . . never attained by any other country.” 35 Sihanouk’s “suitable historical past,” and the modern values that stemmed from it, were reinforced through the hidden school curriculum.36 Time, previously measured with the passing of the seasons, yearly flooding from the Tonlé Sap, the rise and fall of the sun, and the celebration of important village and religious festivals, became associated with a modern secular chronology and a regular, state-oriented routine. Like the productive economic labor units the government hoped they would become, students attended school according to a routine that involved set working days followed by a brief period of rest. The tenets of “nation” were promoted through important historical dates, which were emphasized by their celebration as public holidays. On other occasions, classes would be suspended while students prepared for or participated in events of “national” importance. Extending beyond the world of traditional village life, these national events often served to highlight independent Cambodia’s place in the global political sphere.

French Returnees A Cambodian student, studying in France in 1952, wrote an article in a Khmer student magazine, Khmer Niset, entitled “Monarchy or Democracy?” In the article, the author criticized the Cambodian monarchy: “The king is absolute. He attempts to destroy the people’s interest when the people are in a position of weakness. . . . The absolute king uses nice words, but his heart remains wicked.” 37 The article’s criticisms were in conflict with many of the key elements of statehood promoted through

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the education system. It was many years later that scholars revealed that the author of the article was in fact Saloth Sar (Pol Pot). In terms of education, the revelation would be quite unremarkable, except that only a few years after writing these criticisms, Saloth Sar would return to Cambodia and embark on a teaching career, his antimonarchic tendencies still intact. Saloth Sar was not the only Cambodian radical to return from France and enter the teaching profession.38 Many others, who would later become important officials in the Communist movement, also drifted into the teaching ranks after returning from France. Saloth Sar’s then close friend, Ieng Sary, became a teacher at the Lycée Sisowath and, later, at the private school, Kambuboth Collège. He was joined at the Lycée Sisowath by their wives, the sisters Khieu Ponnary and Khieu Thirith. Son Sen, later the director of the Ecole Normale, also taught at the Lycée Sisowath, while Chau Seng, Uch Ven, and Ros Chet Thor would all join the Ecole Normale’s teaching faculty.39 These students, later teachers, impeded the Cambodianization program through their opposition to the cultural system on which it was based. As teachers in Prince Sihanouk’s Cambodia, their freedom of speech was limited. Consequently, they were not able to criticize the prince directly nor the institutions he patronized. As Communists, their political leanings were rarely, if ever, revealed, and definitely never within the walls of a classroom. Instead, they conveyed their message by highlighting government corruption and inequality and, through their actions, presented to their students an alternative model of behavior. As more students came in contact with Cambodia’s growing band of radical teachers, their influence was to increasingly permeate the education system.

1958 –1963: Chau Seng, A National Attempt at Cambodianization Between 1955 and 1958, no less than nine ministries had been formed and then dissolved under the umbrella of a Sangkum government. Corruption, incompetence, and unresolved rivalries stemming from preSangkum politics were at the core of many of the problems. The instability worked to feed the power of the prince. An irreconcilable feud between Prime Minister Sim Var and members of the National Assembly eventually led to its dissolution and, in turn, to the elections of 1958. Eager to provide Cambodia with a more competent, and possibly more

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subservient Assembly, Sihanouk individually selected and endorsed each of the Sangkum candidates. Only five members of the 1955 Assembly were reelected.40 The election was important in terms of education in that it brought Chau Seng into public life. Upon his return to Cambodia from France, Seng had undertaken an independent study of Cambodia’s public school curriculum.41 After being elected to the Assembly, he was appointed under-secretary, and later secretary of state for education, and many of the recommendations of his study became education policies. The thrust of Chau Seng’s reform was a more concerted attempt at Cambodianization. Questioning the relevance to the Cambodian population of an education system imported from France, Seng’s recommendations were aimed at meeting the needs of modern Cambodia. Embracing the popular notion that education was a social investment, Seng believed that “unless progress in education takes place in conformity with a plan adapted to local conditions, economic expansion may be compromised in the long run.” 42 Seng’s reforms, concentrated on primary education, were based on the removal of subjects dealing with France, on the addition of Cambodia-related subjects, on further relegation of French language studies, and on devoting more time to science and technology.43 In effect, the policy reforms merely expanded those proposed by UNESCO in 1952. They substituted Khmer content into a French model without addressing Cambodia’s development needs, centered, in the first instance, on increasing agricultural productivity. The reforms also failed to address the terminal nature of the education system. While few students remained at school after receiving a primary education, the system continued to orient itself in favor of the education of those who proceeded beyond primary studies. Chau Seng was the first to admit that the new curricula were far from perfect, but they did represent “an advance on the old, which were merely reproductions of those in French schools.” 44 The effect of the reforms was a more intense wave of educational expansion, spawned by Prince Sihanouk’s confidence in Chau Seng and his optimistic belief in the capacity of education to bring about desirable social and economic change. By 1962, there were 667,310 students enrolled in some form of education in Cambodia, compared with 432,649 in 1958.45 Chau Seng’s reforms were a failure. First, they were undermined by Prince Sihanouk’s unabated obsession with the continued expansion of educational facilities. This obsession undermined potential improve-

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ments in educational quality and the achievement of fundamental changes in the structure of the education system. Second, they failed to address the colonial heritage of the system. Students continued to study in the hope of gaining employment in the civil service. Education continued to be regarded as the path to upward social mobility. These perceptions of social mobility, generally unattained, fueled dissatisfaction and dissension among students. Finally, the reforms failed to prevent the entrenchment within the education system of the radical egalitarian political culture first espoused by the returnees from France in the early days following independence. Expansion, declining quality, perceptions of social mobility, and the emergence of educational radicalism—all symptomatic of an “educational crisis”— were to prove the dominant themes of educational policy and practice until Sihanouk’s deposition in 1970.

Descent into Chaos From the moment Sihanouk formed the Sangkum, political life in Cambodia became a carefully managed theatrical production, with the prince as its director. Politicians and those fortunate enough to enjoy feted positions in public life became the actors. Foreign journalists were the critics; only those who reviewed the “performance” favorably had their visas renewed. Negative reporting, whether from foreigners or from any of the very few domestic commentators within the country, was not tolerated. If one listened to Sihanouk, whose speeches invariably dominated foreign understanding of the “island of peace,” there was nothing to criticize. Perceptions of strife in Cambodia, the prince would assert, were products of the imagination of those with ulterior motives and were certainly not the truth. In 1963, the environment began to change. The stage became bigger, extending beyond Cambodia’s shores, and was more difficult for the prince to manage. The troupe of actors became more aware, even venturing to question the prince’s directions, while backstage sat a growing band of extras, some wanting to take their place on the stage and others wanting a say in how the production was managed. These extras were Cambodia’s young, the generation most affected by the nation’s drive for compulsory education. Sihanouk’s rhetoric had led them to believe that their modern education entitled them to take their place on the stage of participation, deriving the benefits from education they had seen accrue to those who had preceded them. Their perceptions, unfortunately, were misguided. The rapid expansion of

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education, a feature of Cambodia’s educational policies since independence, was not the product of meticulous planning. Instead, it had been pursued at the whim of the prince, whose desire to reinforce his legitimacy through the distribution of largesse, had seen the platform of educational policy formulation and implementation subverted and convoluted. Not only could the nation ill-afford to continue maintaining the necessary human and physical resources the unchecked expansion of the system required, but the national economy was unable to absorb its graduates, who continued to demand posts in the civil service. When they could not act on Sihanouk’s stage, many of the extras searched for an alternative venue or, at least privately, started work on an alternative script. It is to their story we now turn.

1963 –1966: Economic Stagnation By January 1963, although it was not lost, Sihanouk’s development boat had obviously begun to stray from its bearings. In the third year of a fiveyear economic plan,46 anticipated returns on investment in infrastructure and education had been considerably less than anticipated. Poor results in the industrialization program and a burgeoning budget deficit were two major problems. In response to the difficulties being encountered, the prince declared that a “considerable” slowdown in the pace of infrastructure investment was necessary.47 The new finance minister, following the elections of 1962, was Long Boret. He stated in a press conference that Cambodia had experienced a 30 percent increase in working expenditure, one of the principal causes being the “heavy maintenance burden of schools.” 48 While the finance minister expressed support for Sihanouk’s proposal for a slowdown in investment, government records indicate that expenditure on national education increased in real terms, and proportionately, from 14.8 percent of the national budget in 1962 to 20 percent in 1963.49 The official Sangkum reaction to the economic problems was to align more closely with China in the adoption of an “agriculture first” policy. In terms of education, the alignment represented an opportunity to address problems with the school system. As shall be seen, the opportunity would never be realized and the prevailing crisis never addressed.

Erasing the Americans On November 19, 1963, in the midst of the budgetary crisis, Sihanouk decided to “erase the Americans” from Cambodia. By cutting

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off all military and economic assistance, the prince’s decision worked to compound already considerable problems. The country was to contend with a substantial decrease in its annual revenues, having accepted U.S. $278 million in economic assistance between 1954 and 1963. An economic aid program accounted for U.S.$88 million, 14 percent of it devoted to educational development.50 The cancellation of U.S. assistance by Sihanouk represented the culmination of a deterioration in U.S.-Cambodian relations that had been brewing for a number of years. The repeated American attempts to encourage Sihanouk to enlist Cambodia in the anti-Communist Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO); two coup attempts in 1958, allegedly sponsored by the CIA; the presence of antagonistic and U.S.supported regimes in South Vietnam and Thailand; and the lack of diplomatic courtesy Sihanouk believed he was being shown by America’s ambassadors in Cambodia contributed to perceptions of distrust.51 Sihanouk’s greatest contention with U.S. assistance in Cambodia was the culture of dependency it was breeding among the nation’s elite. One historian noted that “in Sihanouk’s mind, wealthy people in Phnom Penh had become dependent on the luxury products imported under the U.S.-sponsored commodity import program.” The announcement of the cessation of U.S. assistance was accompanied by a series of economic measures that Sihanouk believed would address the country’s deteriorating economic prospects. These “socialization” measures included the nationalization of Cambodia’s import-export trade, private banks, and distilleries and a curb on the importation of luxury goods.52 A CIA intelligence memorandum correctly noted that the measures alienated elements of the military, bureaucracy, and Chinese-dominated commercial community.53 Cambodia officially remained true to the Buddhist socialist ideology and maintained its policy of neutrality. To be sure, Sihanouk could justify his renouncement of U.S. aid on the grounds that the Americans were refusing to respect that neutrality.54 The reality was that the prince was accelerating Cambodia’s move toward the left. The shift had begun in the aftermath of the failed coup attempts of 1958 and, notwithstanding a series of oppressive crackdowns on the leftist political opposition at home, had continued steadily ever since. Sihanouk increasingly drifted toward a reliance on the nation’s young, usually foreign educated, leftists, who “drew praise . . . for their patriotism and integrity.” 55 Surrounding the education system, there exists evidence of a move toward the left stemming from as early as 1960, when Sihanouk, in a

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symbolic gesture, elected to send three of his sons to continue their studies in China. In 1961, Chinese educators were sent to Cambodia to provide technical education, and a technical school was established with Chinese aid.56 Sometime later, at the prestigious U.S.-funded Kompong Kantuot Teacher Training Center, the shift was even more conspicuous, when Son Sen, a known leftist, was appointed as director of studies.57 The moves, while embracing elements of the agenda of the international left, were certainly directed as a firm rejection of the West, and particularly the United States.

Education: Reform, Expansion, and Quality In December 1963, with the aftershocks of the cancellation of U.S. assistance still reverberating through Phnom Penh, the prince presided over a conference on education. The keynote of the conference, reflecting the new pro-China agenda, was to stress the necessity of an emphasis on practical activities within the curriculum. While glossing over many of the qualitative problems confronting education, the conference recognized that current educational policies, and the huge investment outlaid on their implementation, were not delivering the economic returns anticipated by the government.58 There were discussions about moving away from a purely academic curriculum in secondary schools, while a plan was established to introduce diversified practical training into the primary school curriculum.59 A further concern highlighted at the conference was the chronic shortage of teaching personnel. Earlier in the year, at an International Conference on Public Education, Cambodia’s representative had highlighted the extent of the problem. The ministry had estimated that in order to educate all eligible school-aged children at a ratio of 1 teacher per 35 students, the country would need to employ 18,667 new teachers. Considering that only 12,886 were currently employed and that marginally more than 8,000 of these had been trained in the ten years since independence, the task appeared an impossible one.60 To address the teacher shortage problem, officials consciously attacked educational quality. The ministry introduced half-day classes, expressing the hope that these could be phased out within five years. In the meantime, the government proposed to pursue “accelerated” training programs at the Phnom Penh Teacher Training Center (formerly the Ecole Normale) and the Kompong Kantuot Teacher Training Center. With U.S. aid rescinded, the well-advanced plans for a second rural teacher training center, related to that at Kompong Kantuot, had to be

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abandoned.61 Cambodia’s educational policy-makers were not alone in adopting these approaches. In order to meet public demand for access to both primary and secondary education, policy-makers throughout Southeast Asia, and elsewhere in the developing world, were making similar choices. The policy-makers were placed in something of a quandary. On the one hand, they had to be seen to be visibly supporting Sihanouk, whose educational agenda seemed concerned more with form than substance. Although the prince occasionally expressed concern with educational finance and quality, his overwhelming interest was the rapid expansion of educational facilities. On the other hand, policy-makers were forced to consider the finer details of the education system: how it was to be financed, how and where teachers were to be trained, and what would be taught. The outline of the “educational crisis” in Cambodia had been clearly drawn: Sihanouk’s agenda, concentrated on providing education in order to reinforce the legitimacy of his leadership and the institutions that supported it, was in direct conflict with educational needs and the international agenda promoted in Cambodia by UNESCO. Again, the circumstances were not unique to Cambodia. The governments of the world’s newly independent states were pursuing the provision of education in order to legitimize the authority of their regimes and to reinforce their attempts at nation building. While it may have been desirable in terms of the provision of quality education to restrict access to education or to reorient the education system’s goals and objectives, such moves would have proved, as these governments were all too aware, politically disastrous. Classrooms began to suffer under the burden created by the fiscal strain. As was the case elsewhere, it was costing the Cambodian government more and more money to provide education of an ever-declining quality.62 Teachers were inadequately prepared for the task required of them, while the resources available to them were not sufficient to meet either their own needs or those of their students. The ongoing attempts at providing a curriculum relevant to Cambodian social and economic needs were continually overwhelmed by the day-to-day requirements of a system in dire need of both massive reform and a significant injection of funds. Despite the fiscal situation and the declining quality of education, the system continued to expand. Following the earlier establishment of the Royal University, the year 1964/1965 saw the beginning of rapid expansion at the tertiary level.63 The decision to expand into tertiary

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education was not a product of detailed planning. Nor was it a decision of the education ministry to act on the advice of an international agency. Instead, like so many other significant turns in Cambodia’s educational history, the decision was the brainchild of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. It disregarded UNESCO’s advice in favor of sustainable educational expansion. It also contradicted the nation’s current five-year plan, which advised that expansion be stabilized in the interests of maintaining educational quality.64 Charles Meyer, a French adviser to Sihanouk, in his embittered memoirs, explains the prince’s quest for expansion. Meyer asserts that Sihanouk’s decision to expand the provision of tertiary education stemmed from a visit to Indonesia in 1964, when he toured a university campus. The prince exhibited little concern with how the new institutions were to be financed, staffed, and resourced. The new universities were aimed, according to Sihanouk, at ensuring that students could obtain almost all higher education within Cambodia. This was particularly important to the prince, who had long been concerned at the politically unsettling influence of study overseas, especially in France, where many young Cambodians had been influenced by Communism.65 In spite of his assertions, there is little doubt that foremost in Sihanouk’s mind when he decided to expand tertiary education was Cambodia’s international prestige, his desire to see “his” country admired throughout the world, and his uncontested legitimacy as the builder of modern Cambodia. By 1966, 7,360 students were enrolled at Cambodia’s tertiary educational institutions.

1966 –1970: Political Awakening The Cambodia over which Prince Sihanouk presided in 1966 was very different from the Cambodia that he inherited from the French thirteen years before. For a start, state-sponsored public infrastructure dotted the countryside. Internal communications had also improved, melting the localized srok Khmaer into the geographical space of modern Cambodia. The prince, praised for his role in orchestrating the improvements, appeared to be increasingly losing interest in domestic politics and was beginning to turn his attention to a new passion, film-making.66 The conflict in neighboring Vietnam was having considerable economic and diplomatic effects on Cambodian society.67 Meanwhile, graduates of the education system were increasing in number and facing the prospect of being unable to find employment. At the same time, demand for ac-

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cess to all levels of the education system continued unabated. Further to this, students were increasingly willing to question the many monologues of the prince. Although Cambodia’s education policies, especially since 1963, had sought to emphasize “practical activities” in the curriculum, the reality, as practiced in the nation’s classrooms, was somewhat different. A lack of ministerial strength and continuity, Sihanouk’s interference, bureaucratic factionalism, and chronic financial difficulties worked to impose significant impediments on the application of policies that would deliver to Cambodia’s population a more relevant system of education. The problems of educational quality were obvious at every level of the system. A former primary school teacher and principal at a school in Kampot province, in the southwest of Cambodia, recalled that the process of “regionalizing” education to meet local needs was one of eliminating from the curriculum those areas of study for which materials could not be found. Teaching materials and resources had to be found by the teachers themselves; all that they were provided with was an overcrowded classroom and a blackboard. Problems with materials, and with teaching aspects of the syllabus, were reported to district school inspectors, although very little action was taken to rectify the problems. Rather, the inspectors merely approved the elimination of content for which materials were often unavailable.68 A former Phnom Penh secondary school teacher recalled being directed to teach more “practical” content in her science class. The syllabus to be used by the teacher in the science course had not been modified to meet the new demands, while the school did not have the resources that would enable the teacher to undertake the task required. The teacher recalled attempting to introduce practical experiments in her class. When it was realized that the school did not have the basic equipment to conduct these experiments, her task was reduced to illustrating on a blackboard how the experiments would have appeared if, indeed, they could have been conducted. While the nature of classroom instruction had changed, it was no more practical than it had been before the shift in the emphasis of the curriculum.69 In tertiary education, problems of quality and mismanagement became even more pronounced. A former lecturer and later a dean at the University of Fine Arts, while generally positive in his recollections of the university, recalled that facilities for lecturers were inadequate.70 In discussing the University of Takeo-Kampot, Charles Meyer illustrates Sihanouk’s role in creating the problems. A product of the prince’s

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inexplicable drive for tertiary expansion, Meyer notes how the university boasted a Faculty of Oceanography, despite being over fifty kilometers from the sea. There was also a Faculty of Electrical Engineering and one of medicine, complete with a hospital, but no doctors.71 There is no denying that Cambodia had a very real demand for oceanography and medicine graduates. What is problematic is that the decision to create these faculties failed to adopt a measured or reasoned approach to planning. To do so may have led to the creation of an oceanography faculty with access to water and a training hospital with doctors to attend to its patients.

Education: Social Mobility A consequence of rapid educational expansion was the perception that modern school education would lead to well-paid employment. To even the poorest peasants, education was regarded as a means to escape from a life in agriculture. It was the entry visa into the more lucrative “modern” employment sector, centered in Phnom Penh, and on the civil service. To what extent were these beliefs and perceptions a product of policies and practices in education? Educational policy-makers, at every juncture in the nation’s educational development, had stressed the need for the system to orient itself to Cambodia’s rural population and rural economy. Following Sihanouk’s desire for expansion, their attempts at reorientation were continually doomed to failure. The result was that a poorly equipped and resourced education system continued, in practice, to reflect the system put in place by the French to train colonial civil servants.72 Despite official policies that advocated rural reorientation, the government continued to promote the system as a reflection of its colonial heritage. In many respects, it believed it had no alternative, fearing that to do otherwise would have undermined its legitimacy in the eyes of the nation’s students and in the eyes of the families of those students. The expansion of an outdated education system, with the government’s legitimacy and ideal of the state at its core, was not unique to Cambodia. What was unique, however, was the backdrop to the education system: a political culture so firmly entrenched in and reverent to the practices of the past. It was the deep divide between the ruling regime’s reliance on this traditional political culture, and an official state ideology that advocated modernization, that was to account for the uniqueness and the severity of the Cambodian educational crisis of the 1950s and 1960s.

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Further educational reforms were introduced after 1965 to address what had become very conspicuous problems. Sadly, they were a case of too little too late. In the minds of Cambodia’s students, education was the vehicle for social advancement and not for a return to the agricultural world of the past. Despite the introduction of new, more practical subjects in schools and tertiary faculties, students continued to study the liberal arts and humanities subjects they perceived would lead to their employment in the modern sector. It is a perception borne out in enrollment patterns. In 1968, a combined total of 1,213 students were enrolled in the “technical faculties” at the Royal Technical University and at the University of Kompong Cham. In that same year, 1,903 students enrolled in arts and humanities faculties: 904 in the Faculty of Arts and 466 in the Faculty of Law at the Royal University and 533 students at the University of Fine Arts.73 The fact that students had so soundly rejected the government’s shift toward vocational and practical education was due in large part to two factors. First, despite rhetoric that emphasized practical education in primary school, students were introduced to a classical, liberal curriculum. Legislation passed by the National Assembly in 1967 continued to reinforce this trend. Manual work, the cornerstone of the new, Chinesestyle focus on meeting Cambodian needs, encompassed only one hour (out of thirty) per week in the elementary primary education course and two hours in the complementary course. In the same hour, teachers were also required to provide lessons in music, drama, and chanting. Despite an official commitment to addressing Cambodia’s needs, French language study remained the most time-consuming subject in the complementary course, comprising between six and seven hours per week.74 The second factor in accounting for the students’ rejection of vocational and technical education was a fundamental contradiction between Sihanouk’s state ideology, Buddhist socialism, and his actions as a national leader. According to his ideology, the prince was aiming to set Cambodia on the path to development and modernity. The education system, either rightly or wrongly, was widely regarded as the tool through which these aims could be realized. Through the promotion of Buddhist socialism, students regarded schooling as an opportunity to acquire virtues of modernity: modern behavior, modern attitudes, and modern thoughts. In turn, they then believed they were entitled to participate as informed citizens in Cambodia’s so-called socialist democracy. Two obvious by-products were their beliefs that they were entitled

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to participate in the country’s modern employment sector and to be heard on its political stage.75 It was at this point that the contradiction in Sihanouk’s state ideology became evident. The prince stated in 1968 that “there were now about 1,060,000 students who had finished their studies and applied for employment with the administration,” claiming that each year 10,000 students graduated from the education system and sought employment in the civil service. While Sihanouk had continually emphasized the creation of a modern nation, with students naturally believing they were entitled to a modern role within that nation, the reality, finally conceded by the prince, was that the nation’s “modern” sector was too small to absorb the graduates of the modern education system. Further, Sihanouk conceded, the problem could not be solved because of a six hundred million riel budget deficit.76 In many respects, the problem was of the prince’s own doing. It was the policies he had implemented in his bid to “train up an elite” that had contributed to student perceptions of their right to employment in the modern sector.77 It was Sihanouk’s education policies that had advocated rapid expansion of the outdated, French-style education system, and, although he had occasionally halfheartedly called for reform of the educational curriculum, it was his policy of expansion that had drained the system so chronically of resources that any attempts at serious policy reform had inevitably failed. For graduates of the system, the problem of unemployment became a source of great anger, as Michael Leifer noted in 1963: The source of opposition to the government in 1962 was the growing number of young educated members, particularly those with foreign training. . . . The general problem remains of removing the disparity between the new educated class seeking prestige appointments and the number of openings available. . . . Some young men remain voluntarily unemployed rather than take a job which they consider beneath their dignity.78

Magnifying the gulf between Sihanouk’s rhetoric and his actions as a national leader was the manner in which he allowed unemployed education graduates to express their anger. Sihanouk claimed that the government was unable to solve the unemployment problem because of the budgetary situation. Through their observations of both the corruption pervading Cambodia and the cronyism surrounding the prince, students had many reasons to believe otherwise.79 Despite this, and despite a state ideology that offered a role in political life to those who had be-

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come “modern,” Sihanouk continued to maintain and defend the status quo. His rule remained unquestioned, and opposition to it was regarded as an act of lèse-majesté. It is a point illustrated in the quiet protestations, in July 1965, of a student from Kambuboth Collège. After writing an anonymous letter to a newspaper about a scandal involving the director of the National Bank, the student was identified and paraded before a national audience: Sihanouk berated him for his impudence and asked him if he wanted to be Prime Minister. The student replied courageously that he wanted Cambodia to make progress. Sihanouk threatened him with a jail sentence of five to twenty years and sent him home.80

In introducing her examination of the relationship between Communism and nationalism in Cambodia, Katharya Um provides an essential insight into the dilemma posed by Sihanouk’s contradiction: While institutional resiliency and flexibility are among the key ingredients to successful development, the problem often comes from élite intransigence, which prevents the development of those institutions to absorb and channel the social forces that have been mobilized by the process of social and economic modernization.81

What happened in Cambodia when the institutions that needed to absorb and channel the social forces created by the development of modern education were found to be both inadequate and in contradiction with a traditional political culture that failed to neither recognize nor comprehend the needs and aspirations of the ruled? What were the effects of students and graduates not being absorbed into the political and economic systems in the manner in which their schooling, and Sihanouk’s ideology, had led them to perceive they were entitled? What were the consequences of the unemployment problem? In turning to these questions, we return to those radical teachers who took their place in the education system in the early years after independence.

Education: Political Detonator As the 1960s unfolded in Cambodia, the nation’s already extensive domestic problems were magnified by both Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China and the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam. In a fated twist of the colonial legacy, Cambodia’s citizens were painted to resemble le drapeau tricolore. The Reds were Cambodia’s Communists, believed by Sihanouk to be servants of either the Viet Minh or the Thai Patriotic

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Front. The Blues were the Cambodian right, “lackeys” of the imperialist United States and staunch opponents of Sihanouk’s 1963 socialization measures. The prince, and the remainder of the Cambodian population were White “middle-of-the-roaders”: patriotic, neutral citizens.82 The colors were a physical embodiment of Sihanouk’s neutrality balancing act. His 1963 decision to “erase the Americans” had been followed by the cessation of all diplomatic ties with the United States in May 1965.83 Fearing the impact of the United States in the region, the prince increasingly turned to the Communist world in his bid to safeguard Cambodia. In turning to the left, Sihanouk placed both the Reds and the Blues in a quandary. The Blues became isolated, marginalized through their opposition to Sihanouk’s state-centered, socialist leaning economic agenda, while the Reds, at least on the surface, had been upstaged, their socialist thunder stolen by Samdech Upayuvareach. The political left and right began to direct their criticisms at the Sangkum. Reacting to claims that he was an autocrat and a dictator, Sihanouk refused to endorse candidates for the 1966 National Assembly elections. The poll, dominated by large-scale vote-buying and electoral thuggery, resulted in a sound victory for Cambodia’s political right wing. The newly elected Assembly, who “owed nothing to Sihanouk and little to anyone else,” 84 soon became embroiled in factional battles, some stemming from the pre-Sangkum era. The result was a spill of factionalism, instability, and turbulence that could not be contained by the Sangkum and that eventually was to affect the very roots of Cambodian society, the education system included.

Political Protests Political rallies, protests, and assemblies, often dominated by students, were a continuing theme of the 1960s. They could easily be used as evidence of the growing political conscience of Cambodia’s student body and the physical manifestation of student grievances during the period. Unfortunately, to do so only tells a partial fragment of the truth. In essence, it fails to account for the hierarchical culture that underpinned Cambodia’s social and political systems. To examine political rallies in Cambodia does, however, provide a clear window through which we can begin to examine the extent to which alternative notions of nationalism were able to infiltrate the education system. By 1963, it was evident that education was not creating the “good citizens” the government had intended to make. The first significant act

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of political defiance by students came at Siem Reap, in northern Cambodia, in February 1963. It started simply when a local policeman began harassing students about riding their bicycles on certain paths at night. After a schoolboy was found beaten to death, the students accused the police of brutality and murder. When local authorities defended the officer at the center of the controversy, student meetings were called to organize protest demonstrations. These finally resulted in the sacking of the local police headquarters, the removal and desecration of Prince Sihanouk’s portraits from all public buildings, and the brandishing of placards reading “The Sangkum is rotten,” “The Sangkum is unjust,” and “Down with the Sangkum.” 85 The result of the protests was the death of at least two students and the beginning of a political “witch hunt.” It culminated in Sihanouk publishing the names of thirty-four Communist subversives, including the two former school teachers, Saloth Sar and Ieng Sary. Was the protest a sign of the political mindset of the student population? One historian has implied that the protest was an indication that “discussion groups” conducted after school hours by Communist teachers had begun to bear fruit.86 In so doing, he highlights a central characteristic of student protests in Cambodia: while the students had overwhelming grounds for grievance, the imperative for action generally emanated from someone of more status in the social hierarchy than those who actually participated. Students protested against the Sangkum, Sihanouk, and later Lon Nol both during and after school hours. Opposed to these pro-left demonstrations were protests and rallies organized to counter the Reds (and Blues).87 Many of the students were divided in their political allegiances. The majority, however, were reacting to the imperatives of their teachers or the imperatives of education ministry officials. In March 1967, with Sihanouk increasingly a spectator of the domestic and regional turmoil into which his country was becoming embroiled, an antigovernment rebellion broke out at Samlaut, in Battambang province in northwestern Cambodia. By the end of the year, it had spread throughout many provinces of the country. The uprising sprang from local grievances: the buying up of land by Cambodians repatriated from Vietnam, rural indebtedness, and the government policy of buying rice at highly deflated prices. Many students and teachers were leading or lending support to cells of so-called rebels in the initial outbreaks.88 David Chandler has argued that “leftist teachers and students

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from Battambang city undoubtedly encouraged people to blame their troubles on feudalism, Lon Nol, and the United States” and “probably helped them prepare their banners.” 89 The history of Cambodia’s Communist movement provided by Pol Pot (Saloth Sar) ten years after the rebellion suggests that the students who participated in it were not members of the Communist movement. Pol Pot, down-playing the role of the Communist party, stated: this [peasant uprising] was set off by the people through their own movement. The party central committee had not yet decided on a general armed insurrection throughout the country.90

The protests did not all favor the cause of the radical left. At the height of the rebellion, the government called on citizens to demonstrate their allegiance to the Sangkum. A teacher from Sangker district, in Battambang province, recalled being sent to Samlaut district to assemble his students on the riverbank to deny the rebels access to water.91 The teacher, like his students, was not acting from his conscience but was following the orders of those with more authority than himself. As the conflict raged on, government news reports proudly boasted of the number of people “who expressed their loyalty to their country by staging demonstrations against the Khmer Reds.” 92 A spokesperson for senior secondary and tertiary students in the capital, Thou Thonn, expressed his profound indignation at the “barbaric criminal acts” perpetrated by the rebels,93 while the Ministry of Education officially pledged its allegiance to the prince.94 A series of anti-Khmer Red and antiKhmer Blue demonstrations in the provinces of Kompong Speu and Kratie were allegedly well attended by “young men and women” and “students.” 95 Participation in these events, like that in militant groups formed in Battambang, was not voluntary. A former Phnom Penh secondary school teacher described teachers and students as “scapegoats” and “pawns” in the political struggle, placed under pressure by the education ministry. The teacher recalled how officials would order the cessation of classes to allow time for students to prepare placards to protest against the Khmer Reds.96 The political turmoil drew a panicked response from the education ministry. In the first place, at the insistence of Sihanouk, it was announced that secondary school instruction would be “Khmerized,” as had instruction in primary schools in 1958, with French relegated to the status of a second language. While a commission was established to over-

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see the reorientation of the language of instruction, the plan was very much a pipedream.97 The reality was that it was totally beyond the means of the administration, requiring the redevelopment of almost all resources and textbooks used in secondary education. The shift away from France was designed to counter the influence of French-inspired Communism. A second element of the reform was intended to counter the influence of Communism in private schools, which had flourished under Sihanouk’s encouragement. Concerned at the popularity of Mao’s Cultural Revolution among the students at these schools, measures were introduced to make them more accountable to the Ministry of Education.98 It would seem that the hastily installed measures were overwhelmed by the weight of the political crisis. In 1968, Sihanouk continued to lament the private school problem. The French-administered Lycée Descartes was especially problematic, criticized by the prince for acting like a “state within the state.” 99 Sihanouk made many references to Cambodia’s so-called Reds. In doing so, he was addressing those people he believed were Communists. He announced in May 1968, for example, that he had instructed provincial governors and the Ministry of Education to give him a list of Red leaders in secondary schools. Unfortunately, Sihanouk was often incorrect when he labeled a Communist. It was a difficulty compounded by the united front “soft policy” adopted by the Communist movement. Members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK)— of which there were few before 1970 —hid their revolutionary affiliations and ambitions not only to protect themselves from the wrath of Sihanouk but in response to the party’s preference for an underground struggle.100 If the Red teachers were not all Communists, who were they? How, and why, did they attract support from among the student population?

Contending Nationalisms In the face of the country’s economic malaise and the unemployment problem stemming from it, Cambodia’s students were unable to find within the political system Sihanouk controlled the institutions needed to bring about social and economic reform. It was in this atmosphere that many became receptive to ideas of change and the prospect of a more personally favorable alternative. As he so often did, Sihanouk blamed the turn of events on foreign influences, such as the Vietnamese conflict, American imperialism, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In doing so, he failed to recognize the bitter divide created by

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the education system he had engineered.101 It was not so much Communism that had ignited Cambodia’s students into action. Rather, it was a massive failure in educational policies and practices. The idea of a change in the social order to most Cambodians was an abstract, arguably unthinkable, concept. Traditionally, the notion of a padeawat (revolution), the replacement of one ruling stratum by another, held little sway with the Cambodian populace. Serge Thion, a French sociologist and former school teacher in Cambodia, has argued that the idea of a “revolution” in Cambodia emerged because of the French school system and the international Communist movement. The French school syllabus exposed students to the French revolution of 1789 and to the replacement of an ancien régime with a universal bourgeoisie, representative of the whole population. Meanwhile, Khmer students who studied in France, many of whom became teachers on their return to Cambodia, were exposed to the Communist movement. Favorable to ideals of egalitarianism and opposed to the traditional feudal dominance of the monarchy at home, they saw Communism emerge as the most viable vehicle through which they could achieve a padeawat and, therefore, dispense with a social system that genuflected before a rigid hierarchy.102 Were the students who came under the influence of these teachers supporters of a revolution? Were they Communists? There is no doubt that some were. How many we shall never know, although it would be reasonable to assume they were a numerically small and politically isolated group. Their numbers were centered in Cambodia’s radical strongholds, the private Kambuboth and Chamroan Vichea Collèges, and at the Lycée Sisowath, where Ieng Sary and the sisters Khieu Ponnary and Khieu Thirith, all Communists, were teachers. What of the remainder of those students who appeared to be supporting the Communist cause? To many teachers and their students, Communism did not imply a revolution. For many, to be a Communist was to stand as a model of high morality, of nationalism, a bastion of incorruptibility, and a proponent of equal opportunity. Many liked “the theory” because it promoted equality between rich and poor and the elimination of corruption. Teachers, some Communists, others merely impressed by these more general values, were able to exert a profound influence in the development of the worldview of a body of students who saw inequality, corruption, and unequal access to the institutions of modernity denying them access to the life they believed their education had entitled them.

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Describing Pol Pot’s appeal as a teacher in the 1950s, his biographer points out how “he drew on the reservoir of reverence Cambodians have always had for their teacher.” 103 From a parent’s perspective, as this popular adage indicates, the teacher was the source of all authority: I give to you my whole child. Teach him everything you know. You set the rules. Whatever you do is up to you. I need only the skin and bones.104

It was this reservoir of reverence that the government hoped to draw on in reinforcing among students its modern state ideology. The teachers were the representatives of the state and were therefore the conduits of state ideals. It was Cambodia’s teachers who were to promote a “modern” curriculum, one that led students to believe that by succeeding in their studies, they were entitled to employment, participation, and a prosperous modern future. In practice, the outcome was very different. As discussed earlier, a number of teachers entered the profession to provide a front for their subversive “revolutionary” activities. Many others entered the teaching profession after being unable to gain employment elsewhere in the more lucrative branches of the civil service.105 What emerged was a body of many teachers with alternative agendas and motivations and an often indifferent, sometimes hostile, attitude toward the state. Among those who were not Reds, many were “Pink,” not members of the Communist movement but certainly not White, patriotic citizens of neutral Cambodia. It was these teachers who often presented their students with a more personally favorable alternative. Their whispers of equality remained true to the students’ beliefs that they were entitled to participate and to be heard. The appealing alternative was rarely presented through formal instruction, although this did happen. A teacher at the Lycée Sihanouk, in Kompong Cham province, for example, was known to have presented the theory of Communism to his senior students, usually when discussing civic responsibility and nationalism. Students would then be asked to discuss the pros and cons of a particular issue. It was claimed that those students whose reaction was a positive or favorable one were tacitly invited to join after-school discussion groups.106 Often, the personally favorable alternative perceived by students was manifested in the behavior of their teachers, who were seen as a welcome contrast to the moral decadence and institutionalized corruption so rampant in Phnom Penh. Many Red teachers were remembered for their simple lifestyle and their genuine commitment to the social and

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economic betterment of Cambodia. Khieu Samphan, although better remembered as a politician and newspaper editor, was also a teacher who shunned luxury, lived in a simple dwelling with his aging mother, and was often seen riding a bicycle around the capital city. Unremarkable though this may seem, it drew the attention of many of Cambodia’s students, who witnessed first-hand the incredible divide between rich and poor in Cambodia. A former student, describing this divide, recalled riding his bicycle through a “very poor shanty town” en route to the Sangkum II Lycée in Phnom Penh, passing as he did so the opulent surrounds of the Royal Palace.107 To many of their students, it was Red teachers who seemed to be the only people above them in Cambodia’s social hierarchy who visibly exhibited some concern with the plight of the poor. The prosperity promised to them by Sihanouk’s state ideology had been denied.

Education and Development: An Evaluation The educational policies and practices of the Sihanouk era were an overwhelming failure. In the seventeen years following Cambodia’s independence, there was prolific expansion of a Westernized formal education system. In 1969, the year before the country was thrust into the throws of a protracted civil war, 1,160,456 students were enrolled in some form of formal education throughout Cambodia’s schools, colleges, and universities. This compares with only 432,649 students in 1956. Although expanding access to education at a rate far in excess of many of its counterparts in the developing world, Cambodia was not alone in its quest for educational development. Throughout the newly independent nations of Asia and Africa, education was pursued with the promises of rapid development and economic modernization. The promised riches were not forthcoming, resulting in dissatisfaction, dissent, and protest. In many instances, the very people in whom the government had invested the funds and resources for education became its greatest and, ironically, most articulate critics. Despite the superficial link between the two, educational expansion was not the underlying cause of the crisis in Cambodian education. Rather, the crisis was a function of the tensions between tradition and modernity manifested in Sihanouk’s attempts to construct a modern Cambodian nation-state. The global imperatives of modernity, reflected in Cambodia’s officially stated “struggle against underdevelopment” and in its educational policies, were subverted in their interaction with Cambodia’s local so-

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ciopolitical milieu. It was here that the weight of the past continued to dominate power relations and political behaviors. The construction of the nation-state was a function of this enmeshment of tradition and modernity. In accounting for the crisis in education, and its role in the construction of the modern Cambodian nation-state, a number of issues emerge. The first is the appropriateness of the policies pursued in education; the second is the forces that were at work in developing and implementing those policies. A third issue, derivative of the first two, was the compatibility between education and Sihanouk’s Buddhist socialist state ideology. A first criticism of the appropriateness of education policies was the fact they were rooted in historical circumstances far removed from the realities of Cambodia. Modern educational development in Cambodia was paralleled by the disintegration of the traditional education system directed by the monastic order for over six centuries. The process of disintegration, as Chapter 1 demonstrated, was initiated by the French, whose haphazard agenda provided Cambodia with notions of “Westernization” and “modernization.” The French model, designed to train a small indigenous administrative elite, was used by Sihanouk’s administration as the model for educational expansion. A second criticism was that the policies were not economically affordable. Rapid educational expansion led to an exponential growth rate in enrollment, as students graduating from one level of education sought enrollment at the next, while demand for the lower institutions continued unabated. In order to meet the demand, the costs of maintaining the education system also proved to be exponential. The result of the expansion, in practice, was a rapid deterioration in educational quality. Schools were poorly constructed, teachers hastily trained, too many students were crammed into classrooms, and teaching facilities and materials were inadequate. A final criticism of the appropriateness of education policies was that the system was totally incompatible with the productive economic capacity of the country. Graduates of the modern education system firmly believed in their right to participate in the country’s modern employment sector. Although Cambodia was an agrarian nation, education was regarded as the means to escape the often very difficult life of a rice cultivator. An education dominated by schooling in the liberal arts bore no relevance in a nation where over 80 percent of the population was engaged in some form of agriculture. Students’ perceptions of their future, created by the very nature of the education system, were

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incompatible with the social and economic capacity of the country to absorb their aspirations. In accepting that policies in education were inappropriate, we need to understand the nature of the policy formulation process. Rather than following “modern” methods of government and administration, policies in Sihanouk’s Cambodia were subverted by local sociopolitical imperatives both above and within the education system. The subversion, linked to the construction of the nation-state, accounts for the second dimension of the crisis in education. Educational policies developed in Cambodia by the country’s Ministry of Education bear a striking resemblance to those developed elsewhere in the developing world during the period. At most turns, there exists evidence of action taken on advice from international organizations, particularly UNESCO, in developing, formulating, and reforming educational policies in accordance with the global imperatives of development. It was on the advice of UNESCO that the Cambodian Ministry of Education implemented its first program of Cambodianization, and it was with its assistance that attempts to implement Chau Seng’s Cambodianization reforms were undertaken in 1958. It was UNESCO that continually advised educational administrators to temper the rate of infrastructure expansion, and it was international influence that advised in favor of a “rural reorientation” of the school system. Why then, in light of the influence these organizations wielded at the time, were their recommendations only rarely, if ever, realized in educational practice? The answer is in the subversion of the educational policy framework by forces acting above and within the education system. Above the system was the indomitable presence of Prince Sihanouk, whose impact on policy development was immeasurable. One critic has argued that “until the closing months of his rule, the Prince’s wishes determined the fundamental policies that were followed. . . . Sihanouk was responsible.” 108 Responsible he may have been; but knowledgeable about the probable effects of educational policies, the prince was not. His influence and interference was concentrated on his desires for personal legitimacy, national adoration, and international prestige. Its legacies were many of the elements of the educational crisis. While Sihanouk supported curriculum reform, and occasionally demonstrated some concern with financing education, his enthusiasm rarely extended beyond a desire to see rapid educational expansion at all levels. It was a desire that severely undermined the capacity of officials at the education

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ministry to implement the policy reforms the system needed to ground it in the social and economic needs of the country. Coupled with Sihanouk’s subversion of policies from above were efforts to undermine the system from within. This subversion, most notable in the influence of “radical” teachers, centered on the concept of good citizenship and highlighted the gulf between the promises and the realities of Sihanouk’s development agenda. It is this gulf, centered on the relationship between educational policy and state ideology, that constitutes the third dimension of the educational crisis. Buddhist socialism linked Cambodia to the goals of development and modernization dominating the agendas of governments throughout the developing world. In one respect, the education system was aligned to these global imperatives. Students, and their families, believed their training would entitle them to economic participation in the new “modern” Cambodia. In another respect, education policies were promoting among students a belief in their right to political participation. In this regard, Sihanouk preferred to ignore the so-called democratic aspects of the ideology he had formulated, and instead, insisted on the maintenance of the status quo. The prince became what Samuel Huntington would describe as a “modernizing monarch,” “the prisoner of the institution that makes his modernization possible.” 109 Sihanouk was a prisoner in that he was presented with basically two choices. The first was to continue to venerate traditional political behaviors and, in doing so, marginalize those members of the population entitled to participate in the modern life he was allegedly attempting to bring to Cambodia. His second choice was to appease these members of the community by relinquishing some degree of his power. Sihanouk chose the former, attempting to construct the modern Cambodian nation-state while maintaining a firm grasp on the traditional monarchical institutions that would enhance his power and, therefore, thwart the access of others to share that power. It was these actions, within a political and social system whose core was the precolonial notions of helplessness, human imperfection, and hierarchy, that accounts for the unique circumstances and outcomes of the Cambodian educational crisis of the period. The economic incompatibility that existed between the policies adopted in education and the realities of Cambodia’s social environment, in conjunction with this dogged refusal to facilitate change, worked to marginalize Cambodia’s educated population.

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Whether Sihanouk was aware of the simmering problems over which he presided is secondary to the fact that he provided no impetus for change or reform. On March 18, 1970, while the prince was in France receiving medical treatment, Lon Nol, Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak, and the right wing dominated Cambodian National Assembly, deposed Sihanouk. Within days, the infuriated prince had aligned himself with his former enemies, the Khmer Rouge (Red Khmers, or Communists), to form the National United Front of Kampuchea (FUNK). Over the next five years, Cambodia was at war with herself, a “sideshow” to the conflict in neighboring Vietnam. It is to this period, with the education system essentially crumbling from within, that we now turn.

Lon Nol and the Republic The Declining State

Neil Davis’ recollections of the bombing of the Ecole Wat Phnom, a private primary school in the center of Phnom Penh, in the final weeks of the life of the Khmer Republic, serve as a poignant metaphor for the five years that followed the Sihanouk era and preceded the Democratic Kampuchea holocaust in Cambodia: 1 The rocket had gone straight into a classroom with children aged six to nine years. There were fourteen or fifteen dead, thirty or forty seriously wounded and it was like a scene from Dante’s Inferno. Bloodied children wounded and screaming in terror were trying to get out of the school. There were several hundred more children in other parts of the school who were also desperately trying to get out of the place, and calling for their parents. Some of the wounded children were being carried out by policemen and soldiers and some of their teachers and civilians. It was the most horrifying sight I remember from the Cambodian war.2

In the aftermath, government reports condemned the attack, while the Communists, who had ringed the city, continued to reign bombs on the besieged capital.3 Essentially, the period was one of despondency, rivalry, factionalism, corruption, and eventually, for those who supported the Khmer Republic, one of defeat. At the time the Ecole Wat Phnom was bombed, the Cambodian state could be defined almost in terms of the city limits of Phnom Penh. Government-controlled territory had been steadily shrinking since March 1970, when Prince Sihanouk was deposed by the National 67

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Assembly and he aligned himself with his sworn enemies in the Communist movement. The increased insurgent control of Cambodia was but one dominant theme of the period. A second was the nation’s failed experiment in democracy and republicanism, spawned in the aftermath of Sihanouk’s deposition, when the institutions of the Cambodian monarchy were steadfastly dismantled. A third theme was the emergence of a new battlefield. Like the U. S. soldiers who flooded into Vietnam, aiming to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese peasantry, both the government and the self-declared liberation forces in Cambodia strove to win the hearts and minds of the nation’s students. This battle, fought with propaganda and through protests, was to provide education and the education system with a leverage and importance that in a climate of war it certainly would not otherwise have enjoyed. Despite its importance, at least in terms of rhetoric, an educational crisis in Cambodia remained a fundamental theme of the period. The educational crisis in Cambodia between March 1970 and April 1975 was a function of the material and human destruction generated by a nation at war. The civil conflict, however, was not the sole precipitating cause of the crisis. Rather, the crisis was the product of the battle between the forebears of the country’s contending nationalisms. Each was attempting to assume absolute state power, and each was hoping to reconstruct the nation-state. The story that emerges is one about the attempts by two ideologically opposed yet remarkably similar regimes, to construct separate nation-states within the same geographical space. Supported by the West, Lon Nol’s Republican regime embraced, at least through its rhetoric and promises for participatory democracy, the imperatives of global modernity. Educational policies were, in turn, formulated and adopted to reflect this orientation. The alternative regime, that associated with Cambodia’s Communists, also embraced educational reform in its attempt to reshape Cambodia. Like the Republicans, it promised equity, access, relevance, and qualitative improvements. In the end, despite their rhetoric, neither regime delivered educational reform. The educational policies of the despondent Republic collapsed under the weight of the past: by the delusions of grandeur of Lon Nol, who conceived of himself as a predestined chief of state, or modern God-King; by corruption within, as those in positions of influence saw in their roles no accountability to the people; and by the influence of Sihanouk among Cambodia’s peasantry, who remained true to the traditional reverence accorded the monarchy. Similarly, the aspiring Communist regime, riding to power on the coat-tails of Sihanouk’s popular-

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ity in the countryside, intentionally subverted their educational agenda, associating Cambodia’s Westernized formal education system with imperialism. For these potential leaders of Cambodia, the version of modernity promoted in their rhetoric was enmeshed with traditional conceptions of power and leadership, where the needs and aspirations of the ruled were born no consideration in the political behaviors of the rulers. Both regimes promised change for the better, yet both relied on the traditional social hierarchy in their half-hearted attempts to deliver that change. Studying the educational crisis under the banner of the Khmer Republic is a task fraught with the considerable difficulties stemming from a nation at war. The period was one of substantial human devastation and material destruction, with Cambodian Republicans, Cambodian Communists, Vietnamese Communists, their South Vietnamese enemies, and the United States all inflicting extensive damage on the rural Cambodian countryside. It was also a period of inflated rhetoric, as the protagonists battled for the loyalties of the population. Education policies were announced that could never be achieved, while counterpolicies and criticisms were launched that were only ever intended to inflict damage in the propaganda war. Finally, it was a period of division: between supporters of Communism and republicanism; between supporters of the political left and those of the political right; between inhabitants of the city and those of the country; between the rich and the poor; between the beneficiaries of corruption and its victims; and between those Cambodians whose conception of nationalism constituted the notion of social equality and those whose conception supported the status quo.

A Nation Divides: Looking Back The division of the Cambodian nation is a phenomenon easily traced to the emergence of contending Cambodian nationalisms in the aftermath of independence, the camouflage of factionalism caused by the formation of the Sangkum, and the political autocracy of Sihanouk. The division was accelerated in the aftermath of the 1966 elections, when a gathering largely hostile to Sihanouk and his policies took its place in the National Assembly. Between these elections, and the fateful events of March 1970, a train of events was to occur that would see those Cambodians opposed to the country’s social hierarchy in direct armed conflict with the forebears of the hierarchical social order. It is ironic that Norodom Sihanouk, as the former king, was in alliance with those op-

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posing the hierarchy over which he had presided. It is also ironic that the Communists drew legitimacy from a figure whose popularity was a product of that which they were fighting to eliminate. The conflict between the two sides spawned the emergence of “two Cambodias” during the period, each pursuing their own vision of the state, their own perspective on development, and their own educational agenda. When, throughout 1967, the Samlaut Rebellion escalated with the support of the radical left to embrace other regions of Cambodia, Sihanouk called on Lon Nol, who the left despised, to resign as Cambodia’s prime minister. The prince formed an “Exceptional Government,” cracked down severely on the domestic left, and began secret negotiations with North Vietnam and the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF, Vietcong) on the use of Cambodian territories.4 To appease the right, and primarily to counterbalance the Vietnamese presence, the prince gradually drifted toward a resumption of relations with the United States. The result, beginning in March 1969, after Richard Nixon had assumed the presidency of the United States and was pursuing his policy of “Vietnamization,” was the systematic bombing of the Cambodian border region by U.S. B-52s.5 By the middle of 1969, if it was not already, Cambodia’s destiny was out of its own hands. In the meantime, sections of the population had become disenfranchised and disgruntled. Many rural dwellers saw their livelihoods destroyed by U.S. bombs, while those in urban areas were angered at Sihanouk’s financial ineptitude and apathy and his unwillingness to deal with the Vietnamese who, in order to avoid U.S. bombardment, were encroaching further into Cambodian territory. In July 1969, when a National Congress proposed the formation of a “government of National Salvation,” Lon Nol again assumed the prime ministership. Importantly, Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak, a critic and a cousin of Sihanouk, was appointed deputy prime minister. When Lon Nol left Cambodia for medical treatment in France on October 30, 1969, Sirik Matak became Cambodia’s acting prime minister. He took no time accelerating the speed of economic reform, overturning much of the Sangkum’s socialization program of the previous six years. At a National Congress in December, Sihanouk vainly strove to reassert his authority by attempting to undermine his cousin’s economic reforms. The move failed, resulting only in the resignations of the cabinet’s four pro-Sihanouk members. The left-wing Australian journalist, Wilfred Burchett, a long-time observer of Cambodia with connections to the prince, described Sirik Matak’s actions as a “carefully staged mini-

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coup.” 6 The division between the political right, comprising the country’s commercial elite, and those in support of maintaining the political and economic status quo, centered around supporters of the monarchy, became a chasm. What transpired over the next three months continues to prompt considerable debate among analysts of Cambodian politics and history. The central areas of contention are the extent to which Lon Nol was a party to the coup maneuvers being staged in Phnom Penh while Sihanouk was overseas and the extent of the role played by the United States in orchestrating Sihanouk’s fall from grace.7 Whatever the case, a number of events have been etched on the historical record. On March 8, in Svay Rieng, with the assistance of students acting under imperatives from the education ministry, demonstrations broke out against the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodian territory. On March 11, possibly with Sihanouk’s approval, the Phnom Penh embassies of North Vietnam and the South Vietnamese NLF were sacked by demonstrators. The following day, in response to the growing political unrest, the government ridiculously demanded the withdrawal of all North Vietnamese and NLF troops from the country within seventy-two hours. On Monday, March 16, with the demand not met, 30,000 youths met outside the National Assembly in Phnom Penh to protest about the Vietnamese presence. A National Assembly meeting discussing smuggling allegations surrounding Sihanouk’s brother-in-law, Oum Mannorine, was adjourned to hear the resolutions of the student protesters. After the Assembly adjourned for the day, Queen Kossomak, at Sihanouk’s urging, summoned Lon Nol and Sirik Matak to the Royal Palace. There she urged them to end the demonstrations and to return to the policies of Sihanouk. They didn’t. On March 18, at a meeting of the National Assembly to discuss the Vietnamese situation, confidence was withdrawn from Sihanouk.8 The Cambodian public was informed in a communiqué issued by the president of the Assembly, Cheng Heng, at 1:00 p.m.: In view of the political crisis created in recent days by the Chief of State, Prince Sihanouk, and in conformity with the Constitution of Cambodia, the National Assembly and the Council of the Kingdom during a plenary session held on 18th March 1970 at 1pm have unanimously agreed to withdraw confidence in Prince Sihanouk.9

Without the fanfare that had accompanied major acts in Cambodia’s political history since independence, its most colorful player was effectively removed from the political scene. In the following days, the

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government moved to reinforce its position. The National Assembly voted, on March 19, that in light of the Vietnamese situation, the “nation was in danger” and declared a state of emergency. Stage-managed protests, held in favor of the decision to depose Sihanouk, were organized in Phnom Penh. On March 20, the Sangkum youth movement announced that it would recognize and support the ouster of the prince, while a meeting of the Cambodian Students’ Association and Youth Committee agreed to an education ministry proposal that March 23 and 24 be declared public holidays so that students could return to their families and explain the Assembly’s decision.10 The extent to which students actually understood or, more importantly, failed to understand what they were required to explain, adds substance to the argument that student action generally flowed from the imperatives of a person or body of higher standing in the social hierarchy. The late Ngor Haing Seng was a student at Phnom Penh’s medical faculty when the North Vietnamese and NLF embassies were sacked. Writing about the incident many years later, he recalled “that the rioters, for all their deep feelings, had been manipulated by hidden organizers like puppets on strings.” 11 Another former student, May Someth, recalled being organized to march in protest: At nine o’clock we were called down to the school yard and told we were going on a march to the independence monument. We were given banners telling the Vietcong to get out of the country. . . . We shouted anti-Vietcong slogans as we went. We were all very excited. It was the first such event in our lives.12

At no stage were the majority of students participating of their own volition in the events to which they were a party. Their participation reflected the view of a high-ranking officer of the time, Ros Chantrabot, who wrote that the protests were “the work of some ‘sorcerer’s apprentice,’ and the . . . crowd were nothing but sheep.” 13 In Peking, on the return leg of his overseas journey, it took the prince very little time to react to his deposition. On March 21, the same day as Cheng Heng was being sworn in as Cambodia’s new head of state, Sihanouk declared that his removal from office was illegal. To neutralize any possible impact of the former monarch, the Assembly later voted to ban Sihanouk and his entourage from entering the country. The prince, meanwhile, announced his intention to form a government of national unity. In coalition with the Khmer Rouge, and with the military assistance of Cambodia’s traditional enemy, the Vietnamese, Sihanouk be-

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gan his campaign to win back his country. Many of the nation’s youth heeded his call to arms, as did many rural peasants, and joined Samdech Euv in the forest.14 Others remained in Cambodia’s major cities, relieved that the specter of Sihanouk’s corrupt regime had been finally eliminated. T. D. Allman, in the Far Eastern Economic Review, perceptively summed up the state of the nation when he wrote: For the first time since independence in 1953, Cambodians were killing Cambodians, travel through the countryside was restricted and sometimes dangerous, and the Phnom Penh government’s hold on the rural population was in doubt.15

With the nation, and particularly its youth divided, the battle for the hearts and minds of the student population had begun.

1970: Planning the Future, Revising the Past In the days, weeks, and months following the coup, the government struggled to maintain stability, to achieve international recognition in the face of the considerable publicity being generated by Sihanouk, and to quell the upsurge of unrest in the countryside. In order to maintain support, and in accordance with the wishes of Lon Nol, who was a devout Buddhist, they continued to pursue their attacks on the Vietnamese (and Cambodia’s growing band of insurgents), referring to them collectively as nonbelievers, or thmil. As waves of young Cambodians enlisted to fight in the holy war, reports of massacres of the many Vietnamese civilians living in the country made international media headlines.16 With the war as a backdrop, it is difficult to discern the forces at work in shaping the Cambodian state over the five years of the republic. It is possible, however, to identify a number of threads that serve to provide an understanding of the ideology guiding Lon Nol’s attempt to reconstruct the Cambodian nation-state. The first was Lon Nol’s perceptions of Cambodia and himself in religious terms. The marshall “saw himself as a predestined Buddhist chief of state, leading his people in a religious war.” 17 Buddhism, Lon Nol conceived, was the force that bound all Cambodians.18 A second thread was Lon Nol’s ramshackle “neoKhmerism.” 19 Like Sihanouk’s Buddhist socialism, this ideology drew on the glorious past of the Khmer nation and was based around Lon Nol’s belief that he could reunite the Khmer people living in Thailand and Vietnam, particularly the region of South Vietnam known to Khmers as

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Kampuchea Krom. A third thread was the promotion of democracy, through the institutions of a Khmer Republic. In drawing on Buddhism, on past glories as the basis of a new Khmer nationalism, and on democracy, Lon Nol was promulgating an ideology similar to that of the prince. The differences between Lon Nol and his predecessor, including the establishment of republicanism, were more pronounced. Both leaders urged Cambodians to participate in a “struggle.” Where Sihanouk had promoted the “struggle against underdevelopment,” Lon Nol’s struggle was against the thmil, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong, whose incursions had sought to undermine the stability of the nation. Another difference stemmed from the leaders’ application of Cambodia’s neutrality. Sihanouk had long advocated for Cambodia a policy of “extreme neutrality,” although on balance, he leaned considerably to the left throughout his years of tenure. Lon Nol, on the other hand, while advocating Cambodian neutrality, was definitive in his opposition to Communism and considered the United States as Cambodia’s “number one friend and ally.” 20 A final difference could be found in the relative strength of personality of the two leaders. Sihanouk was a member of the royal family, he was charismatic, often flamboyant, energetic, and entirely confident in his capacity to lead Cambodia. Lon Nol was the antithesis of this profile: he was a quiet, unassuming character whose political successes had been few and whose primary role had been executing orders, not formulating them. In terms of policies in education, Lon Nol’s tendencies and state ideology were to result in two significant differences in his attempts at state formation. The first, stemming from neo-Khmerism, was a shift in what constituted a good citizen, with loyalty to the Cambodian monarchy no longer a desirable trait. Second, the direct involvement of the national leader in the formulation of educational policies diminished. For the first time since independence, the Ministry of Education would be able to assume almost full responsibility for the development of educational policies.

Education: Interpretations of the Past In order to reconstruct the Cambodian state, the new regime sought to denigrate its predecessor. One of its earliest educational priorities was to interpret the past, discrediting the achievements acclaimed by Sihanouk as examples of the national progress made by the Sangkum. A new periodical, New Cambodge, distributed its first issue in May 1970.

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Among many articles proclaiming alleged Cambodian successes on the battlefields in the war against the unbelievers were other articles that sought to discredit the former regime. Phouk Chhay, the founder of the General Association of Khmer Students, who would ironically later rally to Sihanouk’s National United Front of Kampuchea (FUNK) organization, wrote an article of sweeping economic and social criticisms of the former regime. Noting that the “time of personal rule, based on absolutism, individualism, favoritism, and terror is thus overthrown,” Chhay turned to education when highlighting the burden of Sihanouk’s development aspirations on Cambodia’s peasants. Referring to Sihanouk as an “excellent demagogue,” he claimed that while the prince would invite his “children” to “accept heavy burdens in order to build schools,” the people who contributed to the construction were too poor to afford the exorbitant school admission fees. “The poor peasants,” he concluded, “had no chance at all of sending their children to high school.” 21 Another article, in the second issue of New Cambodge, highlighted the development of education under the Sangkum. While it can be conceded that the article was written for an explicit political purpose far removed from the realms of educational policy, it was both perceptive and incisive in its criticisms. The article predictably leveled its criticisms at Norodom Sihanouk, arguing the prince “was seized with a desire to convince foreigners at any cost that in the realm of education Cambodia was a progressive country.” In regard to higher education, the article noted Sihanouk’s “opposition . . . to any preliminary studies” that “had serious results,” while in secondary education, the article noted the unsuitability of many sites selected for educational infrastructure development. These were often “enforced [by Sihanouk] against the explicit and considered advice of the people concerned.” A second criticism centered on Sihanouk’s lack of concern with the specific details of educational policy. The article argues, quite rightly, that “neither the cost of construction, nor the plans, . . . nor the availability of the necessary teaching materials mattered to him.” A final criticism highlighted Sihanouk’s tendency to act out of compulsion, citing the prince’s inclination, “whilst touring a province, as a reward, he said, for the welcome he received, to decide suddenly to transform a junior high school into a senior high school” without taking other factors into consideration. In summing up, the article argued that Sihanouk “introduced uneasiness, improvisation and disorganization into a field which should by definition be controlled by a sensible and practical organization.” 22 The decks were being cleared by the ship’s new crew.

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Education: A New Direction? In the halls of the educational bureaucracy, the many silent critics of Sihanouk’s policy interference greeted his removal from office with a sense of relief. Like their compatriots in elite circles elsewhere in the nation, they were optimistic about the prospects for Cambodia’s future development. Throughout 1970, as the domestic political climate became clearer, the ministry began to feel its wings, unrestrained for the first time since independence. Without Sihanouk, it was finally provided with the opportunity to adopt a measured and rational approach to the process of formulating educational policy. Its first actions, in line with the national move toward ideals of republicanism and democracy, were largely symbolic. An immediate priority was to eradicate the symbols of the past. Apart from the removal of Sihanouk’s portrait from official buildings, including classrooms, the use of the word Royal was removed as a prefix on the names of government buildings, while schools named after Sihanouk, other members of the royal family, and institutions of the former regime were promptly renamed. Other symbolic gestures were aligned with the government’s anti-Vietnamese, Buddhist nationalism. The Ministry of Education organized, for example, religious ceremonies in memory of high school and university students killed as a result of the “aggressive invasion of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese.” The ceremonies, a reflection of Lon Nol’s nationalist thinking, stressed the commitment of the nation’s students to the ideals of “independence, democracy, and social justice.” 23 While these notions also formed the cornerstone of Sihanouk’s state ideology, the new administration stressed how the former head of state had ignored such ideals in favor of nepotism, political crackdowns in response to legitimate opposition, and ignorance of the nation’s intellectuals. For Sihanouk, the ideology was nothing more than rhetoric. The reality was that the functioning of the Cambodian state had been based on a precolonial political culture predicated on notions of hierarchy, inequality, and exploitation. In accordance with Lon Nol’s neo-Khmerism, the notion of Cambodianization again became a fundamental concern for policy-makers. Neo-Khmer Cambodianization was inextricably tied to the political considerations of the post-Sihanouk era. Many of the educational bureaucrats entrusted with Cambodianization during the Sangkum period shouldered the responsibility for implementing this new policy. It is not surprising then that neo-Khmer Cambodianization bore a remarkable resemblance to the Buddhist-socialist Cambodianization of the Sang-

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kum. The policy comprised three pivotal elements: first, a civic education tied to the economic and political needs of the new regime; second, the use of Khmer as the language of instruction; and finally, in a move enacted to address the nation’s political situation, the mobilization of students to participate in direct actions against the national “enemy.” A newly formed Committee of Intellectuals took responsibility for the program of civic education. In sharp contrast to priorities for civic education under the Sangkum, the committee’s proposals did not include the monarchy as a symbol of national unity. In every other respect, however, it is difficult to see how the program was different from its predecessor. The committee proposed that political and economic education be included in the formal school curriculum, while courses in history, geography, and civics be reoriented to embrace the new goals. Employing Khmer as the language of instruction embraced a policy initiative of 1967, when officials had begun instituting instruction in Khmer in secondary schools. Progress in implementing the new language policy had been slow, however, and had achieved very little success by 1970. With the change in government and the renewed government emphasis on Cambodianization, the program to replace French instruction with lessons in Khmer was pursued with renewed vigor. Committees were established within the faculties of schools and in school districts to Khmerize educational materials. The journal, Revue de l’Instituteur Khmer, which had a monthly circulation of 14,000, also published certain school texts in Khmer.24 The mobilization of students was orchestrated in response to the nation’s political situation, involving students directly in the national campaign to remove the Vietnamese from their occupation of large tracts of Cambodian territory. The ministry used its Commissariat Générale à la Jeunesse to recruit student volunteers for service in Cambodia’s military, the Forces Armées Nationales Khmères (FANK), or to work on refugee aid projects. While there is little doubt that some students were conscripted into the armed forces, the claim by the Sihanouk faction’s radio that Lon Nol had closed down universities so as to force students to join the army was totally without foundation.25 One historian has argued that in response to Lon Nol’s appeal for 10,000 volunteers to join the army, 70,000 enlisted. “Many were schoolboys and students.” 26 William Shawcross wrote that they could be seen “setting out from the city . . . wearing shower clogs or sandals . . . as they headed for the war.” 27 The majority of students were mobilized for public information campaigns, while “youth battalions” were formed within schools to protect them

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against possible onslaught by the North Vietnamese or Vietcong. The government then drew on the support of the battalions and student groups in their campaign to demonstrate the level of popular support they enjoyed or to promote political goals such as the formation of a republic.28

Formal Curriculum: Reflecting the Past? Although many official documents from the period disappeared in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge victory and the subsequent social and political turmoil in Cambodia, the remaining evidence clearly indicates that Cambodia’s future development agenda represented a return to the past, albeit without the diluting influence of Sihanouk. The policy goals in education were reflected in the nation’s second five-year plan, which had been developed in 1967 for implementation at the beginning of 1968. The aims of educational policy centered on tempering the rate of the quantitative expansion of educational infrastructure and focusing on improvements in educational quality. In broad terms, the aim of educational policy was to address the symptoms of the crisis that had been evident in Cambodian education since before independence. The basis of the government’s policy was outlined by Minister of Education Chhan Sokhum at a press conference in December 1970. Sokhum noted to those present that the previous administration had tended to focus on secondary and tertiary education, to the neglect of primary school studies, showing “interest in the blossom at the expense of the tree.” 29 His discussion addressed the very purpose of education. Was primary education to serve as a “terminal” course of study or was it to serve as a gateway to secondary studies? These questions were central to the crisis of the 1960s. While generally ignored under Sihanouk’s rule, they were not unique to Cambodia’s educational circumstances, having been a focus of attention throughout the developing world during the period. Their roots in Cambodia could be traced to international concerns about the role of education in development and particularly to questions in relation to “manpower planning.” Human capital theory contributed directly to a wave of international interest in manpower planning throughout the 1960s. Manpower planning, in turn, became a primary instrument in social and economic planning, especially for the nations of the developing world. Its basic premise was that education’s role in development was to create a suitably skilled and qualified workforce.30 Cambodia’s second five-year plan had adopted many of the tenets of manpower planning, drawing on the guidelines of the Asian Model of education developed at UNESCO’s

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Bangkok conference in 1965. The Asian Model expanded on the recommendations of two earlier conferences at Karachi and Tokyo, addressing the relationship between manpower needs and the expansion of secondary and university education.31 Again, the concern was with the balance of priorities among primary, secondary, and higher education and with the nature of the courses within each stage. The assumptions of the Asian Model, which were concerned with educational quality as much as quantity, became an educational priority for the administration of the new regime. The policies eventually adopted recognized that the manpower needs of the Cambodian economy did not require an abundance of secondary and tertiary graduates. For his part, the minister announced that an attempt would be made to regionalize primary education, so as to halt the undesirable drift of rural dwellers to the city.32 The policy involved an emphasis on maritime fishing, rubber cultivation, rice growing, and freshwater fishing, depending on the characteristics of particular regions of the country. Adopting a similar approach to earlier attempts at developing a relevant school curriculum, however, the policy continued to implant an essentially Western educational model on the needs of the rural population. In addressing rural needs, and in accepting the advice of international agencies, never did Cambodia’s educational policy-makers (or the international advisers) address the structure or French heritage of the education system. It was this structure that implied that the vast majority of students would proceed beyond primary school studies. As with the Sihanouk regime it had succeeded, an attempt by the new regime to address the colonial heritage of the education system would have proved untenable. It would have undermined the fundamental reasons most students were pursuing an education: to become a civil servant and to escape the prospect of toiling for long hours in the rice paddies. The Lon Nol regime’s legitimacy in the eyes of the people was considered to be of more importance and a higher priority for the administration than introducing and implementing the education system’s most sorely needed measure of reform. As with the Sihanouk period, the educational crisis in Cambodia during the Lon Nol era, at least in terms of official policies, could be traced to the regime’s quest for legitimacy and its desire to construct a nation-state around that legitimacy.

Education: Policy in Practice? To what extent were the policies of an education ministry free from the influence of Sihanouk realized in practice? Adam Curle, writing

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about Nigeria, noted that “civil war is the absolute antithesis of national development.” 33 Like Nigeria, the fundamental problem facing the education system in Cambodia was the nation’s civil conflict. Not only was education undermined by the material destruction being wrought by the conflict; it was also the victim of other factors: financial constraints, the severe dislocation of the population, and, finally, the continued impact of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. The prince’s continued influence on the social fabric of Cambodia, backed by centuries of tradition, increasingly resulted in large tracts of Cambodian territory falling under the administration of the Cambodian rebels in the so-called liberated zones. Increased insurgent control of government territory saw the closure, abandonment, or destruction of the majority of Cambodia’s schools throughout 1970. While official policies in education called for the retention of pupils in rural areas and were intended to prevent a drift of poorly qualified youths into the cities, the realities of the civil conflict were dictating otherwise. In masses, refugees fled strife-torn areas. The increasing numbers of dislocated rural dwellers posed an educational dilemma, for by the start of the 1970/1971 academic school year, almost 40 percent of students attending primary schools in Phnom Penh were refugees.34 Double, and in some cases triple, shifts were established within schools to cater to the eligible students.35 Certain elements of the curriculum had to be eliminated to cater for the demand, while kindergarten classes ceased functioning.36 The problems caused by the civil conflict on Cambodia’s educational enrollments and infrastructure were not the only impediments to the implementation of educational policies. The Khmerization of instruction was disrupted as committee members employed to translate educational curricula and materials were forced to flee the conflict.37 Many looked for refuge in the city, while others secured passage to France, from where they attempted to continue their work, although without any substantial degree of success.38 Teaching materials were scarce and frequently inadequate, while the impoverished and malnourished state of many children, having fled from the country and often squatting on the outskirts and riversides of the city, was not conducive to effective learning.39 The conflict provided the educational crisis with a second dimension, exacerbating the already considerable problems in educational provision and practice. While education, and the fabric of society in general, was deteriorating in those areas of Cambodia controlled by the Khmer Republic, a greater force was gaining momentum in the countryside.

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1970: Norodom Sihanouk and the “Other” Cambodia At the time of his deposition, Sihanouk’s rule had been unpopular in Phnom Penh and in other major cities where the nation’s “modern” sectors were located. It was here that the intellectuals, merchants, bankers, and civil servants were gathered, drawn together in their disdain for the repressive nature of Sihanouk and the cohort of cronies who presided over the kingdom. While the prince’s ouster was greeted with a sense of relief, opportunity, and optimism among city dwellers, in large tracts of the Cambodian countryside, the overthrow of the former monarch was perceived to have been an overturning of the natural order and was met with a sense of outrage. Cambodia’s peasants, whose lives had continued to revolve around a cycle of patronage and clientship firmly rooted to loyalty to the Cambodian monarchy, in the main never recognized the legitimacy of the new Phnom Penh regime. Many continued their devotion to Sihanouk, or at least to the institution of the monarchy. For these people, there was no choice to be made in deciding between Lon Nol and the now exiled prince. Sihanouk was royalty, and Cambodia was therefore his to rule. While Lon Nol’s new regime was embraced in Cambodia’s urban centers, rural support for the prince had manifested itself within days of his deposition in an uprising of peasants in Kompong Cham. Reacting to Sihanouk’s call to arms, they demanded both his immediate return and the dissolution of the National Assembly.40 Sihanouk’s call to arms was voiced in light of the formation of FUNK, an alliance between the prince and the Cambodian Communist movement, who would fight alongside the Vietnamese Communists in an attempt to seize state power in Cambodia.41 The alliance was to provide a focus for those disenchanted with the Lon Nol regime, facilitating the control of large sections of the country by the Communist movement and resulting in an inflated belief in their own legitimacy on the part of a number of members of the movement. The impact of these effects is central to understanding not only the remainder of the life of the Khmer Republic but also the revolutionary nature of Cambodian society, development, and education over the next twenty years.

“Liberated” Cambodia The magnitude of the initial defeats inflicted on Lon Nol’s army provides startling evidence of the degree to which the Phnom Penh regime had become blinkered to the reality of the republic’s prospects. In the first month of the civil war, with FUNK relying on the strength and

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numbers of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), the Republican army had lost control of almost all of the provinces of Svay Rieng, Rattanakiri, and Mondolkiri, and over a half of Kompong Cham, Prey Veng, Kandal, Takeo, and Kampot.42 As the year continued, the FUNK-NVA forces continued to “liberate” Cambodian villages, districts, and provinces. The Republicans, experiencing heavy losses, withdrew further toward Phnom Penh and Cambodia’s second largest city, Battambang, where their officers and generals concentrated on enriching themselves with the fruits of American assistance. What was life like and who was in control of these “liberated” zones of Cambodia? Where was Sihanouk, and the monarchy from which he drew his legitimacy, located in the hierarchy of the FUNK organization? The Cambodian Communist movement, despite the inflated rhetoric of its leaders throughout the Democratic Kampuchea period, attracted very little support in rural Cambodia between 1963, when the former school teachers Saloth Sar and Ieng Sary fled Phnom Penh for the relative security and obscurity of the countryside, and the 1970 coup. At the start of 1970, their number totaled no more than 4,000 fighters throughout Cambodia, less than half of whom were armed.43 The coup against Sihanouk, and the formation of FUNK, provided the Communists with the opportunity to gather support among the peasantry. The Khmer Rouge soldiers often declined to reveal their Communist identity, preferring to conceal themselves behind a veil of support for Sihanouk’s Front.44 It was as the figurehead of the organization that Sihanouk outlined the FUNK political program and the development policies it was to pursue in liberated Cambodia.45 In presenting the FUNK program, Sihanouk retraced a path already well worn by himself, Lon Nol, colonial and precolonial Cambodian leaders, by drawing on and calling for a return to the “glorious pages” and “noble traditions” of Cambodian history. The program, making no mention of the Communist movement, summarized FUNK’s plans to build a “democratic and prosperous Cambodia.” In parallel with the political and ideological agenda of Lon Nol, FUNK made guarantees of freedom of expression, demonstration, association, and movement, maintained Buddhism as the state religion, respected the practice of other religions, and guaranteed economic freedom. Also in parallel with the Lon Nol agenda, corruption, smuggling, profiteering, and inhuman exploitation were officially condemned, while “development” continued to constitute a fundamental concern and ultimate priority of the regime.

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In respect to education, policies also reflected those of the past. The FUNK agenda, under the direction of Chan Youran, had shifted very little from the recommendations put to Cambodia by UNESCO in 1952. Priority was accorded to the Khmerization of the curriculum, while other aspects of the program were also tied firmly to past policies: Adapt the educational program to the different regions of the country. Encourage an experimental and scientific emphasis in the curriculum. Promote research and scholarship in Cambodian national history. Ensure free education (including a system of scholarships for the needy). Support an extensive civil, political and cultural education among the nation’s youth.

The FUNK agenda, as with that of Lon Nol, was directed at securing the loyalty of the nation’s students. The thrust of the propaganda campaign of both sides was the reconstruction of the nation-state, promising an alternative to past practices, ironically, within the context of an emphasis on past glories.46 As in areas of the country controlled by the republic, civil war undermined development, and therefore education, in the so-called liberated zones of Cambodia. Throughout 1970, with the conflict already widespread, three factors were particularly important in relation to the delivery of education. The first was the immediate priority of the FUNK organization to remove and eliminate the Lon Nol government. The second factor was the degree of control enjoyed by the liberation forces in the areas they occupied. On the one hand, FUNK often controlled territory intermittently and was unable to secure a system of administration within villages that would be periodically assaulted or overtaken by Republican forces. On the other hand, the front did not have a sufficient number of indoctrinated cadres to implement its political program. Aware of its own logistic limitations, it is obvious that FUNK was not genuinely committed to education. Its educational program, even more so than that of the republic, was nothing more than a key in the battle for the loyalty of the nation’s “intellectuals,” who constituted the largest politically active group in Cambodian society.47 The third factor affecting education in liberated Cambodia, although not evident to outsiders during the early phases of the conflict, was the internal dynamics of FUNK. The secret agenda of Cambodia’s

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Communists, who gained increasing ascendancy within the front, did not include Sihanouk nor the institutions he patronized. Rather, it involved revolution, an overturning of the Cambodian social order, and a precursor to the years of Democratic Kampuchea.

1971–1975: The Republic on Its Knees Lon Nol’s assumption of power in Phnom Penh was greeted with optimism among the administrative and commercial elite in the capital and other major provincial centers. His “neo-Khmerism” struck a chord with those members of Cambodian society who considered their prospects constrained under the autocratic, monarchical rule of Sihanouk. The pronouncement of the Khmer Republic on October 9, 1970, while serving as a metaphor for the “new” Cambodia, ironically heralded the beginning of the regime’s dismal demise. Shortly after the pronouncement, Lon Nol suffered a debilitating stroke. It not only diminished his capacity to effectively lead the nation but was also seen among the people as a bad omen.48 As military defeats of the Republican army became more frequent, corruption steadily worsened, and political factionalism and infighting more destabilizing, public confidence quickly drifted away from Lon Nol and the small group of sycophants, most noticeably his brother Lon Non, who were actively supporting, promoting, and flagging his credentials. Although it seemed from as early as late1970 that the days of the new regime were numbered, the Khmer Republic would struggle on for almost four more years, supported financially and militarily by the United States in a war they always seemed destined to lose.

Liberated Cambodia: The CPK Assumes Control A defining feature of liberated Cambodia during the period was the assumption of control of liberated zones by the Khmer Communist movement. Fueled by a dramatic increase in their number—a function of Sihanouk’s popularity and the anger generated by U. S. bombardment of the countryside—and a subsequent decreased reliance on the Vietnamese,49 the Communists began to implement their revolutionary agenda throughout sections of Cambodia from as early as 1972.50 Then began their implementation of a program driven by an ideology in stark contrast to that of FUNK. “Anti-Sihanoukism” and increased “communalization” were two themes of the ideology.51 A third theme, in parallel

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with the regime the Communists were in conflict with, was a distinctive anti-Vietnamese sentiment. While politically astute enough to maintain the emphasis on Sihanouk as a figurehead for the front organization, throughout the course of the conflict, and especially after 1973, the Communists intensified their emphasis on each of the themes, destroying the old society and preparing Cambodia for an independent revolution, not connected with that occurring in neighboring Vietnam.52 Why were the Communists so virulent in their opposition to the institutions of the monarchy upon which Cambodian society was based? Essentially, their opposition stemmed from their rejection of the Khmer social hierarchy and could be traced to the egalitarian political culture spawned among a number of the French returnees in the aftermath of independence. It is ironic to observe, however, that their radical conception of modernity contrasted sharply with their behavior in attempting to bring about its realization. While the Communist core of FUNK had rejected the Cambodian social hierarchy, they relied on its premise of absolute power and its contempt for the needs and aspirations of the ruled in implementing their program. As with Sihanouk, and as with the regime of Lon Nol, with whom they were fighting, the Communists had effectively enmeshed their aspirations for modernity with the weight of Cambodian tradition.

FUNK, the CPK, and Education What of education in these post-Sihanoukist liberated zones? Clearly, the FUNK program, as announced by Sihanouk in the aftermath of the coup, held little sway with the Communists. They were merely using the organization as a front to pursue their own revolutionary end. The nature of education in the liberated zones was a function of the fractured character of Communist control. There was considerable regional variation in policies and practices, depending on the beliefs of those in charge and the degree to which they adhered to the extreme views of the party Center. The fractured nature of the party was demonstrated in the confession of Hu Nim at the Tuol Sleng interrogation center in 1977. Reflecting on the prerevolutionary period, he recalled: A-Soeun was appointed Deputy Secretary of Region 22 by brother Phim. At that time in Region 22 secondary schools were opened, and a number of textbooks were published which were no different from those of the old society.53

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While his testimony is enlightening in highlighting the problems being faced by educators in the liberated zones at the time—for example, inappropriate teaching resources—its greatest benefit is in accentuating regional variations in Communist applications of the ideology of the party Center. Region 22, in the Eastern Zone of Cambodia, remained in close affiliation with the Vietnamese throughout the civil conflict and was, in many respects, distant from the party Center. It was this distance that arguably facilitated an attempt at the continuation of the formal educational setting. Upon learning of the schools, the party Center quickly moved to quash them, despite their congruence with the official FUNK agenda, regarding the system as a vestige of the old society. Other schools in the region had been closed since 1971 and were used by the Khmer Rouge as stables and storage centers or as prisons.54 Other evidence supports this notion of regional variation. A U. S. State Department assessment noted that in Kampot, in the southwest, where the party Center was particularly strong, the “National Democratic Revolution” had resulted in “destruction of most of the schools” built prior to 1970.55 In Kratie, in the Northeast, on the other hand, Tiv Ol, as the head of the zone, reopened the school after the Communists assumed control of the area.56 While the party Center of the Communist movement eliminated vestiges of the old society, and therefore those institutions that would have supported FUNK’s educational program, they did establish schools and a form of education more in keeping with their revolutionary ideology. These schools, exclusively for party cadres, boasted a curriculum dealing with revolutionary discipline, social classes in Cambodian society, revolutionary hate, and collectivism.57 “Graduates” of the schools assumed important educative roles in promoting the revolution in liberated villages by attempting to raise, or establish, the class-consciousness of the peasantry.

The One-Man Republic As the Communists increased their hold over Cambodia, Lon Nol’s republic continued its rapid decline. The end seemed near by the beginning of 1973, before the massive U. S. bombardment prolonged the life of the regime.58 Three themes dominated the last years of the republic, described by one historian as “violent and melancholy.” 59 The first was the political factionalism disabling the war effort in Phnom Penh. The

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second, pumping the first, was the flood of U. S. assistance pouring into the coffers of the republic. The final theme was the fracture between the republic’s rulers and those they ruled, with Phnom Penh’s decisionmakers demonstrating a total ignorance of the plight of the nation’s poor. The education system, caught up in this atmosphere of decline, was to become the vanguard of criticism of the regime. The political factionalism in Phnom Penh was dominated by Lon Nol’s brother, Lon Non, who had sought to destabilize the two major political parties formed after the declaration of the republic. While supporters of a rejuvenated Democrat Party followed In Tam, and those of the Republican Party, Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak, Lon Non supported neither organization and, instead, concentrated his energies on promoting the leadership of his brother, who preferred not to participate in the party process. Remaining above party politics, Lon Nol became an autocratic leader in the mold of his predecessor. Two years after the coup that was meant to herald an end to autocratic rule, he dismissed Cheng Heng as chief of state and assumed the position. He later proclaimed a constitution, modeled on that of France and South Vietnam, that augmented his already considerable powers. A presidential election was called where, to Lon Nol’s “chagrin, several rivals presented themselves, and two of them—In Tam and Keo An—refused to withdraw.” The results of the election were corrupted and fraudulent, as were those for the National Assembly held in September, in which the new SocioRepublican Party, established by Lon Non to support his brother, won all of the 126 seats.60 Traditional political practices and behaviors, and traditional conceptions of power and leadership, had been intricately fused with the institutions of modernity adopted in the name of the republic. The presidential and Assembly elections reinforced the proAmerican agenda of Lon Nol, resulting in a continuance of the flow of American military assistance. The nation’s politicians, and many in the higher echelons of the military, exhibited very little concern with the administration of the country, preferring instead to concentrate on enriching themselves. The practice of enlisting “phantom soldiers” continued, while members of the government found it profitable to trade with the enemy. The U. S. administration, aware of the widespread corruption, encouraged Lon Nol to initiate changes, although the Marshall demonstrated little impetus to do so. He preferred to ensconce himself in a world of mystics and fortune-tellers.61

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While they were preoccupied with enriching themselves, members of the elite became totally ignorant of the plight of the country and the reality that surrounded Phnom Penh. It was an ignorance manifested in the plight of the Cambodian poor. As highly ranked military officers speculated on Phnom Penh real estate, buying up villas and driving luxury cars, the number of refugees escaping the conflict and squatting in the city increased markedly. Starvation, malnutrition, and disease manifested themselves among the masses eking out a miserable existence in Phnom Penh’s parks, the riverbanks, and the shell of the incomplete Cambodianna Hotel. By 1973, the government had all but ceased functioning. The United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP) resident coordinator in Cambodia became, in many respects, a de facto prime minister, holding weekly meetings with representatives of the specialized UN agencies, who had assumed virtual responsibility for the country’s day-to-day administration. The Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) representative, for example, had assumed the responsibilities of the minister of agriculture, while the representative from the World Health Organization (WHO) had taken on the role of the minister of health. Although there were a few notable exceptions, government officials had lost interest in national development priorities, leaving education to drift with the tide of countrywide despair. Sensing the lack of concern with the future, the director-general of UNESCO, hoping that the conflict would end quickly (with a Khmer Rouge victory), began to examine postwar possibilities. Believing that the return to peace would provide an opportunity for attracting a substantial amount of external development assistance, UNESCO and the International Labor Organization (ILO) sent a mission to Cambodia to identify development issues and priorities in education and training. Arriving in Phnom Penh in February 1973, the UNESCO/ILO consultants were accommodated at the Hotel le Phnom, where they circulated among war correspondents, CIA agents, and corrupt army generals having cocktail parties with their beautiful young mistresses. The consultants’ task, hampered by the fact they could only travel freely in Phnom Penh and Battambang (Cambodia’s second city), was to suggest how the objectives of the education system could be aligned with the nation’s socioeconomic and cultural conditions. Certainly, their observations and the nature of their recommendations were pertinent to the educational evolution of Cambodia, and particularly

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the nation’s prewar educational problems. There is little point, however, in dwelling on the final report of the mission, which had understandably failed to predict how the Khmer Rouge would behave after its victory. In one respect, we can reflect on the mission as yet another instance of opportunity lost. If we step back from its finer educational details, we can dwell on the mission as an illustration of the surrealism that had gripped those pockets of the Cambodian countryside that remained under Republican control.62 While the government attempted to convey a sense of normalcy— often through press briefings conducted by the unfortunately named Major Am Rong—the UNESCO/ILO consultants were witnesses to the stark reality of decay evident at almost every turn: from the curfew to the sandbags surrounding major government offices and hotels, and from the homeless to the senior military officials joining their soldiers on the front lines during the day before retiring to the bars of Phnom Penh in the evening. Political and social life in the Khmer Republic eventually became more pathetic than that of the kingdom it had succeeded, with Lon Nol a fading shadow of the leader he had replaced. Increased corruption, factionalism, autocracy, and, among the people, poverty and desperation resulted in a marked drift of support away from Lon Nol and his regime. Leading this drift were students, disgruntled that the optimism ushered in by Sihanouk’s dismissal had not materialized.

The Voice of the Students The disruption to education caused by the outbreak of civil unrest in 1970 did not improve during the remaining years of Lon Nol’s republic. While there exist stories of valiant efforts to maintain the provision of education in areas controlled by the government, including Phnom Penh, the story, like that of the republic itself, was largely one of decline.63 The problems manifested in 1970 only intensified during the following years. Educational policy, which had been based largely on the second Five-Year Plan, was disrupted by its abandonment in light of both the war and its neglect by the government.64 Educational practice reflected the fractured policy framework. The Khmerization of instruction was at first slowed before being almost totally abandoned as the conflict drew to its inevitable conclusion. The quality of instruction continued to deteriorate as materials and resources were exhausted and as teachers were dislocated by the conflict. A further problem, emerging later in the conflict, was the closure of schools in light of security risks 65

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and the industrial action of teachers, who went on strike in response to the decreased purchasing power of their salaries.66 The crisis in Cambodian education had taken on a chaotic dimension inconceivable in earlier, more peaceful times. The teachers were not alone in expressing their anger with Lon Nol’s regime. The student movement, which had been a vocal supporter of the overthrow of Sihanouk and a strong advocate of the decision to declare a republic, also lent its support to protests against the regime. Beginning with the protests sparked by Keo An’s sacking as the dean of the law faculty, the students continually rose in anger against the perceived injustices and corruption of the government.67 While the government enacted laws designed to thwart their momentum, the students continued their protests until the last days of the republic, serving to highlight the bitter divide between the rhetoric of the national leaders who ousted Sihanouk and the reality of the regime over which they presided.68 The culmination of their protests came in June 1974, in an atmosphere of confusion surrounding a protest at the Lycée 18 Mars, when the Minister of Education Keo Sangkim and the former minister Thach Chia were assassinated.69 While the assassin or assassins were never found, the incident and the severe crackdowns that followed it demonstrated clearly the divide between the students and the government. It was a divide continually reinforced by FUNK propaganda. Students in Phnom Penh were generally unaware of the revolution being carried out under Communist sponsorship in the countryside. Ngor Haing Seng recalled that much information circulating in Phnom Penh was either government propaganda or it was rumor.70 Phnom Penh’s students believed that Sihanouk still guided the movement, and given his continued broadcasts over FUNK radio, they had few reasons to believe otherwise. FUNK boasted of prominent defections from the Lon Nol regime and broadcast appeals to the nation’s youth to join the struggle to overthrow Lon Nol.71 Continually reinforcing its commitment to equality, the front was admired by many in Phnom Penh. Kun Thon Thanarak, the secretary-general of the Khmer Students’ Association, in an interview with Donald Kirk, noted: If we make a comparison between this side and the other side, we see this side [the Khmer Rouge] has a lot of discipline and no corruption, and this side [the Phnom Penh government] has a lot of corruption. This side is worse.72

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Many students and teachers rejected the Phnom Penh regime, fleeing to the “liberation” forces in the countryside, following a path established by the former school teachers, Saloth Sar and Ieng Sary, in 1963.

Awaiting the Reds: The Death of the Khmer Republic The ultimate collapse of the Khmer Republic began on New Year’s Day, 1975, when the Khmer Rouge launched their final offensive against Phnom Penh.73 Those schools that had remained opened were closed in the aftermath of the bombing of the Ecole Wat Phnom, as the Communist noose around the city was tightened. Access to Phnom Penh via the Mekong river was closed with the placement of floating mines, while the U.S.-sponsored airlift of rice into the city became insufficient to feed the estimated two million refugees who then lived there. Lon Nol, along with many of those either rich enough or fortunate enough to secure passage, fled the country. When last-minute diplomatic efforts failed, it was simply a matter of watching and waiting. The debilitating effects of Cambodia’s civil war overshadowed both public policy and civil society between March 1970 and April 1975. Addressing the educational crisis without taking substantial account of the effects of the conflict on Cambodia’s educational system is, therefore, an undertaking of considerable unfairness. It is clear, however, that it was not only the civil war that augmented the educational crisis that had emerged during the Sihanouk era. During Lon Nol’s regime, the educational crisis was exacerbated by the failure to address the education system’s colonial heritage. On the side of the Communists, who drew their legitimacy from the deposed Prince Sihanouk, the crisis was intentionally pursued, a derivative of the alternative regime’s contempt for institutions they associated with imperialism and with the West. In Lon Nol’s republic, the crisis in education was a function of the new regime’s reluctance to address the historical legacies of the education system created under French patronage almost a century before. The beleaguered Khmer Republic inherited from its predecessor an education system that was designed to train administrative assistants for the colonial regime and was therefore incompatible with the needs of an essentially agrarian nation. Stemming from this historical legacy, the system was financially unaffordable and was incompatible with the economic needs of the newly independent Cambodia. The deposition of Norodom Sihanouk, who had slavishly pursued this educational model with little regard for either its costs or consequences, provided the Cam-

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bodian administration with the opportunity to reorient the education system in favor of a more appropriate model. Its failure to adequately undertake this task accounts for the fundamental educational policy failure of the Lon Nol regime. Underpinning the failure was the contradiction between Lon Nol’s commitment to modernity, as reflected in educational policies, and his reversion to the traditional cultural practices and ideals of his predecessor. Like Sihanouk, Lon Nol’s belief in his right to rule was paramount. Questioning that right was not tolerated. Neo-Khmerism was predicated on a belief in the fundamental superiority of the Khmer race. Stemming from this belief, it promised development and equality among Khmers and it implied a correction of the wrongs of the past: an end to nepotism, corruption, and autocracy. Education policies were enacted to reflect this new equality, with a reorientation of the notion of Cambodianization and the provision of civics and political education in keeping with the new agenda. Unfortunately, for those swept up in the optimism of the new ideals, the political and social realities were somewhat different. In the same mold as Sihanouk, but without his capacity, Lon Nol perceived of himself as the savior and invigorator of Khmer civilization. Connected with this perception was his belief in his right to rule and his subsequent refusal, like Sihanouk’s, to share responsibility with others. Nepotism and corruption, shaded by the umbrella of traditional power relations, flourished under the weak Lon Nol leadership, serving to marginalize a section of the population that provided overwhelming support in his ascension of power. In rural Cambodia, increasingly under the control of the Communist inspired FUNK organization, the educational crisis was even more profound. For the residents of “liberated” Cambodia, the effects of the civil war on education were also chronic: teachers had fled their posts and classrooms had been destroyed, while students were often unable to leave the relative security of their homes to attend school. More enduring than the effect of the war, however, was the subversion of the education system from within FUNK. Despite its educational policies, formal education was intentionally undermined and dismantled by those in control of the Cambodian Communist movement, whose conception of the Cambodian nation-state was centered on dispensing with the institutions of modernity associated with the colonial and postindependence periods. As Cambodia’s civil conflict magnified in its intensity, and Lon Nol’s regime reached new heights in its capacity for corruption, many of those

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who originally supported Lon Nol drifted back to Sihanouk, or to the Communists, whose standards of discipline and anticorruption provided a stark contrast to those of the Republicans and their allies. Alternatively, many fled “liberated” Cambodia, unable to adjust to the dismantling of their local worlds caused by the Communist’s communalization agenda. Others supported neither side in the conflict. They merely waited, hoping that the conflict would soon end so they could return to a semblance of normalcy at school, at work, or on their farms. On April 17, 1975, their hopes were partially realized, for the conflict had in fact ended. A return to normalcy, however, was a dream many would have to harbor for the rest of their lives.

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge Building and Defending Cambodia By April 1975, most of Phnom Penh’s students had not attended classes for more than a month. When they saw the soldiers of the Khmer Rouge finally enter the city, many of these students, and their parents, were relieved. The fighting had stopped and they could finally return to school. A former student of the Lycée Yukanthor remembered his father, who was a teacher, expressing the hope that the new Khmer Rouge government would eliminate the corruption that had flourished in schools during the five years of Lon Nol’s Khmer Republic. When the Khmer Rouge soldiers finally reached the front of Kong Sao’s modest Phnom Penh villa, they told Sao’s father that his family would have to leave immediately and go to the countryside for a few days. “My father trusted them,” Kong recalled, “because some of his friends had joined the Communists.” The family left hours later with a small suitcase full of clothes, a sack of rice, and two chickens. “We weren’t worried because we could come back in three days.” Sao came back five years later. His parents never came back.1 The Communist troops, as they marched victoriously into Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, did not return the smiles of the capital’s war weary population, relieved that the specter of fighting, grenade attacks, and curfews would be finally lifted from their heads. Instead, they addressed the people assembled to welcome them without the deferential terms of reference that had characterized social relations in Cambodia since precolonial times, and they ordered the immediate evacuation of the city. Angkar (the organization, not to be confused with Angkor), everyone was assured, was in control of everything. Rather 94

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than a return to the normalcy of the lives they had enjoyed prior to the war, it quickly became clear that the seizure of state power by the new regime would be accompanied by a whirlwind of momentous social change.2 The regime that seized control of state power in Cambodia in April 1975 was known as Democratic Kampuchea (DK). The leaders of DK were members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), referring to themselves collectively as Angkar Leou (the High Organization) or Angkar Padeawat (the Revolutionary Organization). Their agenda was simple: replace perceived impediments to national autonomy, coined in terms of self-reliance, with revolutionary energy and incentives. Impediments to national autonomy included Cambodian individualism, family ties, Buddhism, urban life, money, ownership of property, and the monarchy, which, ironically, as members of FUNK (National United Front of Kampuchea), the Communists had allegedly been fighting to restore.3 The four years of DK were an era of almost incomprehensible social change, where aspects of Khmer cultural and economic life, which had developed over centuries, were totally ruptured. Traditional patterns of social relations were broken down, the nation’s market-based economy was ruthlessly dismantled, while state-sanctioned violence and terror reached heights inconceivable in previous times.4 Yet in spite of the massive changes, it is often forgotten that the era was resplendent with continuities that could be easily traced to Lon Nol and, before him, Prince Norodom Sihanouk. DK’s leaders, like Sihanouk and Lon Nol, stressed the superiority of the Khmer race and sought to return Cambodia to the glories of its illustrious past. Like their predecessors, they aimed to draw on and exploit the age-old rivalry between Cambodians and their neighbors to the east, the Yuon (Vietnamese). Finally, like Lon Nol and Sihanouk, they could conceive only of their righteousness as rulers. Their legitimacy was beyond question, and challenges to their authority were testament to high treason. DK’s leaders, with a ferocity and brutality inconceivable during the Sihanouk and Lon Nol periods, assumed and superseded beyond all measures the fundamental characteristic of the leaders of the regimes they had succeeded: a blissful and willing ignorance of the people’s needs. It is these factors that account for the stunning ferocity of the DK revolution and the equally stunning suddenness of its demise. What intellectual forces were driving the CPK in its bid to transform Cambodia? What was the ideology of Angkar? Was it a derivative of Communist models adopted elsewhere? How did it permeate DK? These key

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questions are central to an understanding of the relationship between the formation of the state and policies and practices in education in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The CPK’s assumption of state power signaled the rise in Cambodia of a political culture committed to equality. Spawned among nationalists at Cambodia’s colonial twilight, this egalitarian culture was actively promoted among many of the Khmer students who had studied in France and drifted into the Communist movement on their return to Cambodia. A commitment to equality starkly opposed that which had sustained Lon Nol and Norodom Sihanouk, who both enjoyed absolute power. Both presided over social and political systems in which people knew their places. In turn, both saw their development and educational aspirations descend into chaos. How did egalitarianism affect aspirations for education? What was the educational agenda of Angkar Padeawat? Was education pursued in order to assert the legitimacy of the new regime, as Sihanouk and Lon Nol had done and as the new Communist government would do in neighboring Vietnam? Or was education merely another impediment to “national autonomy”? Responding to these questions is fraught with difficulties. Interpretations of DK, and the policies pursued within the country, have continued to shift significantly over the past twenty years. Throughout the DK period, views were polarized. On one side, initial reports and analysis by anti-Communist Western scholars, such as John Barron and Anthony Paul in their Peace with Horror, attempted to paint the events transpiring in Cambodia as a nationwide cataclysm.5 Michael Vickery called this the Standard Total View (STV) of the Cambodian revolution.6 Alternatively, writers whose attitudes toward the revolution were sympathetic sought to discredit these reports.7 With the regime’s self-imposed exile from the international community, it was difficult for either side to firmly establish its case. In the aftermath of DK’s defeat, extreme anti-Communist analysts focused their criticisms on the Vietnamese-backed successor to the Khmer Rouge, further clouding understanding of what actually transpired between April 1975 and December 1978. Vickery’s 1984 study of the DK years attempted to analyze the alleged excesses of the Khmer Rouge. He argued: I am convinced that all the worst atrocities which have been reported occurred at some place at some time, but not as the STV would have it, everywhere all the time.8

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Vickery then estimated that approximately 741,000 people died “in excess of normal and due to the special conditions of DK.” 9 While his study successfully undermined elements of the so-called STV, highlighting the regional and temporal variations characteristic of the period, more recent research has shown that Vickery significantly underestimated the extremities of DK.10 While the death of Saloth Sar (Pol Pot) in April 1998 virtually ensures that we will never fully comprehend the motivations and actions that guided this most tragic period of Cambodian history, there is still much we can add to the historical record in attempting to understand the extremities alluded to here.11 DK’s educational agenda, we shall see, correlated with its radical attempt to reconstruct the Cambodian nation-state. Conceiving of a Cambodian state that was completely self-sufficient, without dependence on the West, and that firmly rejected capitalism, DK’s leaders attempted to destroy the old society. Education became a victim of the motivation toward destruction. The crisis was a function of the regime’s sweeping onslaught against vestiges of the past, the fervent ideological dogma inherent among its leaders, an unrealistic quest for immediate self-sufficiency, and unparalleled contempt for its perceived beneficiaries.

Angkar: The Roots of the Organization The leadership of DK was not revealed to the Cambodian population, nor to the rest of the world, until September 1977, when the CPK first admitted its existence. Prior to this, the world remained confused about the shadowy figures that called themselves Angkar. Pol Pot and Saloth Sar, for example, were often presented as separate identities by the Western media.12 With this in mind, it is interesting to recall that the roots of the organization that seized control of Cambodia in 1975, and then attempted to sacrifice individualism and the “cult of personality” surrounding national leaders in favor of collectivism and anonymity, centered around a small group of closely associated and often intermarried personalities and individuals. The rise of Angkar Leou was the story of the rise of these individuals within the Cambodian Communist movement. In order to understand the dynamics of Angkar, and therefore the dynamics of DK, it is necessary to examine the roots of the organization and the rise to power of the faction led by and synonymous with Pol Pot. It is a story of how one group capitalized on opportunities, often at times when the Communist movement had seemed to have reached its lowest ebb.

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Communism in Cambodia was born among the ethnic Vietnamese community and among supporters of the Thai-based Khmer Issarak Committee. Both were aligned with Ho Chi Minh’s Indochinese Communist Party (ICP). When the independence struggle against the French gained momentum in the aftermath of the Second World War, membership in Cambodia’s splintered and fledgling revolutionary movement increased steadily in rural areas. The urban base of the movement, apart from recruits among the Vietnamese community, remained largely without support. It has been suggested elsewhere that the revolutionary movement in Phnom Penh “was so negligible, even by 1954, that it was open to a relatively easy take over by a small outside group.” 13 Between the return of the French in 1945 and the Geneva conference of 1954, the revolutionary movement in rural Cambodia, driving for independence, had assumed a steady ascendancy. In early 1951, at its second conference, the ICP resolved to dissolve itself in favor of the formation of separate national Communist movements in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. By late 1951, the Cambodian party, the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party (KPRP), had 1,000 Khmer members.14 The movement’s ascendancy was halted in the aftermath of the Geneva conference. The conference resolved that Cambodia’s resistance forces, the United Issarak Front (UIF), within which the KPRP was integrated, should not be granted a regroupment zone, unlike the similar movements in Vietnam and Laos. Leading KPRP cadres were given two alternatives. The first was to participate in the national elections scheduled for 1955, while the second was to secretly withdraw to North Vietnam with the retreating Viet Minh forces. Many adopted the latter, which dealt a devastating blow to the movement.15 It was a blow compounded in 1959, when Sieu Heng, the KPRP Central Committee member responsible for rural Cambodia, openly defected to the government. After gathering intelligence for a number of years, Heng’s eventual defection fanned a fire that would decimate Cambodia’s revolutionary momentum.16 Into the revolutionary power vacuum drifted a new group. Saloth Sar was among the first members of this assemblage, the Cambodians privileged enough to have studied in France. Based in a rural area, he joined the local revolutionary movement in 1953. After the Geneva accords were signed, Saloth Sar returned to Phnom Penh. With fellow students who had returned from France, especially after the return of Ieng Sary

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in 1956, the Saloth Sar faction soon began its opportune domination of the Phnom Penh committee of the KPRP.17 Sieu Heng’s defection to the government provided the returned students with a further opportunity to extend their influence. As an internal copy of the party’s history would later note, the debilitation of the rural activities of the party saw the urban committee assume control of the national movement. At the second general assembly in 1960, it was decided to form a Marxist-Leninist party, assuming the title, the Workers’ Party of Kampuchea (WPK).18 Saloth Sar and Ieng Sary assumed positions on the new Central Committee, with the future Pol Pot becoming a member of the politburo. The second major opportunity for the returned students came when Tou Samouth, the secretary-general of the party, disappeared, allegedly kidnapped and killed by the Sihanouk regime. With Samouth’s disappearance, and many cadres still in North Vietnam, the Cambodian party was devoid of its leading veterans, providing an avenue for the former students to seize control of the movement. This was achieved at the third general assembly of the party in February 1963, when Saloth Sar became the WPK’s secretary-general, Ieng Sary and Vorn Vet assumed positions in the politburo, and Son Sen was admitted to the Central Committee. Within a few months after the assembly, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary had taken to the jungle, where the Communist party began its preparations for a peasant revolution.19 The “Pol Pot group” was based initially in the northeast of Cambodia, where it recruited a band of loyal young followers among Cambodia’s ethnic minorities. The group extended its influence to the Northern Zone in the early 1970s and, by 1975, to the Southwest. A second faction of the party, largely made up of veterans of the revolutionary movement, was centered in the Eastern Zone. It extended its influence, especially before the Communist victory in 1975, into Kandal province, regions of the southwest, and Battambang in the northwest. The Pol Pot group, in control of the Central Committee of the CPK, had sought to eliminate members of this faction as early as 1971, when party veterans returning from Hanoi to participate in the liberation struggle were purged.20 With the benefit of hindsight, we are able to look back on the period as one of shifting power. In essence, the ascendancy of the Pol Pot group within the Communist movement signaled the transfer of power from a faction of the movement constituted largely of party veterans, whose allegiance to the Vietnamese Communists was substantial, to a new

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faction, whose experiences of the local Communist movement were minimal and whose grounding was instead in the intellectual environment of postwar Europe.21 It is through examining the forces influencing the ascendancy of the Pol Pot group that we are able to begin to ascertain a DK state ideology.

CPK’s Revolutionary Ideology When an article critical of the Cambodian monarchy appeared in the Cambodian student magazine in France, Khmer Niset, in 1952, there was little evidence to conclude that its author, Saloth Sar, would one day seek to radically transform Cambodian society.22 In a similar manner, it is difficult to conclude that the embrace of Communism by a small group of Cambodian students in France would one day result in one of the world’s bloodiest revolutions under one of its most tyrannical regimes. Cambodian students in France were not immediately drawn to Marxism. The Cambodian student representative body in France, the Association des Etudiants Khmers (AEK), formed in Paris in 1946, originally represented nationalist interests aligned to the Democrat Party at home. The association was radical in that it advocated Cambodian independence from France, and it was more nationalist than overtly political or ideological in nature. In 1950, with the arrival of Ieng Sary in France, dissension emerged within the Association and several factions were formed. Vann Molyvann, later the Sangkum’s longest serving minister of education, Hang Tun Hak, and Tan Kim Huon, later the rector of the University of Agronomy under the Khmer Republic, were among the moderate faction. On the right were Mau Say, Long Pet, Douc Rasy, Douc Phana, Sam Sary, and Prom Tos. Members of the leftist grouping, who formed a Marxist study cell, included Ieng Sary, Saloth Sar, Thiounn Mumm, Khieu Samphan, Keng Vannsak, Sin Khem Ko, Hou Yuon, and Phuong Ton. By 1951, the Marxist group had assumed control of the AEK, with Hou Yuon appointed as its president.23 The motivation for the adoption of Marxism by these emergent radicals is difficult to determine. In her examination of the origins of the Vietnamese revolution, Hue-Tam Ho Tai provides an illuminating starting point. She poignantly argues that revolution came to seem the only possible solution to many young Vietnamese students, who saw “an existential predicament that bound their personal concerns to those of the nation in a tight and seeming natural unity.” These students, argues Tai, saw a symmetry between the national struggle for independence from

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colonial rule and their own efforts to “emancipate themselves from the oppressiveness of native social institutions and the dead-weight of tradition.” 24 Like their Vietnamese associates, Cambodia’s elite students were caught between two worlds. One was the hierarchical social world of Cambodia, with the monarchy presiding at its apex. The other was the new world presented by their surroundings in a foreign country. Distanced from the ties of monarch, sangha (the monkhood), and family, they were easily able to associate the emancipation of Cambodia from the French with their own emancipation from this traditional social world. Marxism, with its promise of equality, provided the avenue for emancipation. Despite occasional differences in opinion between the left-wing faction of the AEK and the Parti Communiste Française (PCF), the Stalinist orientation of the PCF no doubt affected the ideological alignment of the future CPK leaders.25 Such Stalinist ideas as rapid collectivization and the elimination of class enemies were reflected in the policies later adopted by DK.26 Karl Jackson, whose examination of the intellectual origins of the Khmer Rouge points clearly to a relationship between the experiences of the Pol Pot group in France and the ideological orientation of DK, notes other influences, including Samir Amin, a major reference for Khieu Samphan’s doctoral dissertation, which is often simplistically argued to have been a blueprint for DK’s economic policy platform.27 The intellectual environment of France did not, however, provide the future DK leaders with their only frame of ideological reference. In 1950, Saloth Sar spent a month in the former Yugoslavia constructing housing in a mobile youth group at the University of Zagreb—this at a time of intense hostility between Stalin and Tito.28 Sar, who later recalled the trip with great fondness, no doubt reported to his Cambodian colleagues how impressed he was with the Yugoslavian ideals of agricultural collectivization, self-reliance, and mass mobilization for public works, all of which would later be reflected in DK.29 In his first interview in over twenty years, in October 1997, Saloth Sar denied the influence of foreign ideas. Instead, he claimed, his political awakening came when he saw “the actual situation in Cambodia.” 30 While there is little doubt that he was influenced by the situation in Cambodia, there is also no doubt that Pol Pot’s experiences in France and Yugoslavia, and later his affinity with Mao’s China, colored how he perceived the Cambodian situation. Along with other former overseas students of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Saloth Sar, on his return to

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Cambodia, quickly aligned himself with the indigenous Communist movement. After assuming positions of influence within the party, the French returnees sought to influence the ideological direction of the local Communists. In particular, they attempted to shift away from a reliance on and subservience to the Vietnamese party. Evidence of the shift is explicit. First, from as early as 1971, party veterans returning to Cambodia from Hanoi were treated with suspicion, and often open hostility, by their Khmer colleagues. A second source of evidence is the antiVietnamese demonstrations organized by the CPK in late 1972, after three of the four North Vietnamese Army (NVA) divisions fighting in Cambodia had withdrawn to Vietnam. A third source is the account of the former primary school inspector, Ith Sarin, who observed during his stay in “liberated” Cambodia that “there is also distrust of North Vietnamese unstated intentions.” Hou Yuon, Sarin recalled, was adamant that the CPK “has foreseen all in preparing for danger from the VC/NVA,” asserting that the Cambodians were “absolutely not under the guidance of the Vietnamese Communist Party.” 31 A final, retrospective source of evidence in relation to the movement away from the Vietnamese is the Livre Noir, published by the government of DK in September 1978 in order to justify its conflict with its former Vietnamese allies. The Black Paper continually attempted to characterize the Vietnamese Communists tactics throughout the 1970 –1975 period as expansionist and recalled the party’s “heroic” struggle to maintain independence. Pol Pot, the paper noted, refused to become a “client” of the Vietnamese.32 While the Khmer Rouge leadership sought to distance itself from its Vietnamese neighbors, it grew ever closer to China, embracing the Maoist notion of complete self-reliance. Arriving at a Cambodian revolutionary base upon his return from France in 1953, for example, Saloth Sar is alleged to have said “that everything should be done on the basis of self-reliance, independence, and mastery. The Khmers should do everything on their own.” 33 The historical record clearly indicates that the Khmers did not do everything on their own: they secured the support of the peasantry only through an alliance with Sihanouk and through U.S. bombardment of the Cambodian countryside, won the 1970 –1975 war against Lon Nol only with the considerable military support of the Vietnamese Communists, and administered DK with substantial Chinese aid and technical assistance.34 Despite this overwhelming evidence, the leaders of Angkar would later proudly boast that “the Khmer revolution was without precedent” and that Cambodia was

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“building socialism without a model.” 35 The notion of self-reliance, however half-hearted its application, would prove to be a fundamental harbinger of change for the education system and would lie at the core of an educational crisis, which, because of its devastating nature, severity, and effects, was incomparable to that experienced under both Sihanouk and Lon Nol.

1975 –1976: Gaining Total Control The evacuation of Phnom Penh in April 1975 provides ample evidence that, at the moment of its greatest triumph, Cambodia’s Communist movement was not united. Controversy and conflicting stories abound about when the decision to evacuate the city was reached, whether the evacuation was to be permanent, and which “enemies” of the revolution should be dispensed with in the evacuation process.36 Communists from the East, who entered Phnom Penh from the Southeast and controlled territory east of Norodom Boulevard, were acting on orders often in conflict with those being acted upon by troops from the Northern Zone, where Pol Pot had been located, and from the Southwest, led by Mok, and later described as “Pol Pot-ism par excellence.” 37 The Southwest became the focal point for Pol Pot’s party Center. While it has been argued that the evacuation of the cities was ordered as a solution to a looming food crisis, to prevent a possible epidemic of disease, or to forestall and negate any possible resistance, the Center’s overwhelming rationale for ordering the evacuation was that it suited its ideological agenda. Cities were representations of capital, Western ideas and Western thinking, Western institutions, the exploitation of the poor, decadence, and corruption. In a society where there was to be absolute equality, there remained little room for highly populated urban centers. Cambodia, according to Angkar, was to become self-reliant and self-sufficient. Agriculture, particularly rice production, was to become the basis for economic reconstruction and development.38 “For the revolution to proceed and for Cambodia to survive,” wrote one analyst, “everyone had to be put to work.” 39

Plans for Education What of education in this new egalitarian and agrarian society? Given the forced closure of schools by the CPK center between 1970 and 1975, it was probably naïve of Kong Sao and his father, and many others, to believe that the Communist victory would see them return to school as

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normal. It was very clear that the education system, as it had operated under Lon Nol and Sihanouk, would cease to function. Although it could be argued that the closure of schools in areas under the control or influence of the Center between 1970 and 1975 was a contingency in a climate of war and social unrest, both Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot, in 1977 and 1978, respectively, would put such views to rest. Samphan rhetorically asked whether children of the old regime knew “anything about the true natural sciences?” They did not, he asserted, arguing that “everything was done according to foreign books and foreign standards,” that education in the old regime was “useless” and failed “to serve the needs of the people” or help in building the nation.40 Pol Pot would later reinforce Samphan’s assertions, stating that “there are no schools, faculties or universities in the traditional sense . . . because we wish to do away with all vestiges of the past.” 41 It is a glaring irony that both men, especially Samphan, were the beneficiaries of that which they sought to comprehensively discredit. Samphan’s criticisms, however, were central to many of the problems that had beset the education system since independence, residing at the core of the crisis in Cambodian education. At one level, his rhetoric pointed to the relevance of the system to its end users. At another, he identified the lack of relevance with the system’s adoption of foreign models, echoing the words of the American scholar, Hans Blaise, whose study of the education system, referred to in Chapter 2, had been undertaken more than ten years earlier. Blaise had quite accurately observed that Cambodia’s teachers used “approaches and methods which were copied from schools in France and which were intended to impart knowledge necessary for administrative assistants to French colonial civil servants.” 42 Samphan’s conclusion made it clear that DK had rejected the former education system in both structure and content. Given its rejection of an educational model that had contributed significantly to the crisis in Cambodian education, how did the Center perceive the future of education? As is so often the case in attempting to unravel the complexity that was DK, the evidence in regard to the regime’s approach to education is ambiguous. It emerges from four sources: a conference in Phnom Penh on May 20, 1975, a document circulated by the Center in September 1975, the 1976 Constitution of DK and, finally, the 1976 FourYear Plan. The Phnom Penh conference, held in the almost deserted capital less than five weeks after the final capitulation of the republic, was attended

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by all of the new regime’s civilian and military officials and represented the “Center’s first major attempt to run its political writ throughout Cambodia.” Ben Kiernan’s interviews with three of the participants at the meeting and two subordinates whose superiors (now dead) were also at the meeting allow us to shed some light on the events that transpired. In relation to education, the conference is important in terms of what was not said. Two of the participants remembered no mention of school closures at the conference, while two—a participant and a subordinate—recalled that closing schools was one of the items on the agenda. No mention of schools or education was made by Sin Song, the second subordinate.43 Whose version of events is correct is secondary to the fact that unlike the regimes preceding them, the leaders of DK were not about to accord significance to school education. Sihanouk’s Sangkum had devoted over 20 percent of its budget to the education system, while Lon Nol made particular mention of students and the importance of school education in his first months in government. The leaders of DK were not to imitate their predecessors. Education was clearly no longer a priority of the state. A document circulated by the Center in September 1975 affirmed official ambivalence. The internal document noted that “since the war we have been very busy. Neither children nor youth have received much education.” While the document then proceeded to note that “in some places schooling has started gradually,” it suggested that when people “arrange to study at twelve noon,” this part-time education “gives quite good results.” Further, the document then proposed that the “state must organize to have exercise books and pencils for schools” and that “later on” expert teachers would be needed, but they would have “to educate themselves among the people’s movement first.” 44 The document’s references to the future of education were tokenistic. As former school teachers, the leaders of DK could not have been anything but fully aware that providing education during a lunch break to people often working fourteen hours a day in harsh and trying conditions would have provided little benefit. Likewise, it is difficult to concede that they were not aware that experts were unable to “create” themselves among the people. As 1975 drew to a close, the Center felt in enough control of Cambodia to establish a CPK government. Sihanouk had been effectively eliminated, the economic class of almost all citizens reduced to that of peasants, and the monastic order dismantled.45 With the conclusion of a major center-administered political course in December 1975, “the

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CPK project went into full swing.” 46 On January 5, 1976, Cambodia’s new constitution was proclaimed, officially giving the new state the title Democratic Kampuchea. The new constitution further indicated that nothing would be done by the new regime in relation to education. While the September statement had noted the presence of education and had half-heartedly hinted at a possible future direction, the new constitution offered nothing.47 Shortly after it was promulgated, an eminent historian described the document as a “manifesto” that made “no mention . . . of home, family, inheritance, health, education, or rights before the law [emphasis added].” 48 Obviously buoyed by their assumption of almost complete control of the movement, the Standing Committee of the CPK, the Center, began the process of attempting “to build socialism in all fields” in Cambodia. Between July 21 and August 2, 1976, the Center met to formulate and consider a proposed Four-Year Plan. Two documents have emerged from the process, which, for the first time since they had seized power, outline CPK plans for the education system. The first is the typescript of a “preliminary explanation” given by the CPK secretary, Pol Pot, to members of the Center between August 21 and 23, 1976. The second document is “The Party’s Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields, 1977–1980.” Pol Pot’s plan for the education system comprised three central ideological elements. The first was that education, specifically literacy, “to learn letters and numbers,” was essential only in order to “learn technology.” The second, following from the first, was that technology could not be learned without practice. The third was that learning could only occur swiftly “by cultivating good political consciousness” at the expense of “culture” in order to demonstrate that the “line” of the party “is correct.” 49 These elements reflected the ideological orientation of Angkar: an emphasis on “mastery” and self-reliance, an emphasis on physical labor, and the elimination of “culture”—that is, the old society—in favor of following a desirable revolutionary “line.” Unfortunately, the plan that followed Pol Pot’s preliminary explanation offered little that could be subjected to detailed analysis. Again, it serves to highlight Angkar’s outright rejection of the formal educational setting. Formal education, according to the plan, was to consist of three years of primary education in “general subjects,” three years of “general” secondary education, three years of “technical” secondary education, and tertiary education in “technical subjects,” also for three years. A second section deals with “daily education methods,” which adopt,

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although this is never conceded, the Chinese model of incorporating half study and “half work for material production.” 50 The plan makes almost no mention of the educational curriculum, other than to list the “general subjects” for study. These subjects were reading and writing, arithmetic, national geography, natural science, physics, and base chemistry, the history of the revolutionary struggle of the people and, finally, the party’s politics, consciousness, and organization.51 Taken in isolation, the contents of the curricula, with the obvious exception of the last two subjects, had the potential to address many of the elements of the educational crisis of the 1960s and early 1970s. There was a definitive movement away from the humanities subjects that occupied the endeavors of many of Cambodia’s prerevolutionary students, and there was the desire to link the education system with the economic capacity of the country. On the other hand, there were no details, and there was no concern with the quality of education, the adequacy of educational infrastructure, educational finance, or the training of a national body of teachers. In essence, there was official contempt for educational development. The Four-Year Plan was a product of the Center, written without consultation with the rank and file of the CPK and without the input of those party veterans who had survived the regime’s early purges. As a result of opposition to sections of the plan from within the party, in tandem with the possibility of an attempted coup d’état, a conflict over the Party’s founding date, and the death of Mao Zedong in China, the announcement of the Four-Year Plan was canceled, the announcement of the existence of the CPK (to Cambodia and to the world) was postponed for another year, and the number and ferocity of purges rapidly intensified within the party. The Center perceived itself as being surrounded by enemies, both within the country and externally. Increasingly looking inward, and outwardly xenophobic, the CPK, unbeknown to itself, was plotting its self-destruction. The remaining years of the regime would see that self-destruction manifest itself in the lives, and the misery, of almost every Cambodian.52

Education: Temporal and Regional Variation When two veteran Cambodian revolutionaries, Nay Sarann and Keo Meas, were arrested by the CPK center in September 1976, the DK revolution turned a corner. For the remainder of the brief life of the regime, Angkar Leou would be obsessed with extinguishing its internal

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enemies. Sarann and Meas would finish their revolutionary careers at the former southern Phnom Penh lycée, Chau Ponhea Yat, turned by the CPK into S-21, or Tuol Sleng, DK’s most infamous security and interrogation center. Here, the party’s enemies were ruthlessly eliminated in a way reeducation could never achieve. The two were not alone. Hu Nim, DK’s minister of information, would be interned and tortured at S-21, as would Koy Thoun, the former school teacher and CPK secretary of the North and Chau Seng, the former secretary of state for education. They were joined by almost the entire CPK administration in the Eastern Zone and, throughout 1977 and 1978, over 15,000 others. All were perceived to be enemies of the revolution, people who had strayed from the “line” of the Center.53 The elimination of the party’s internal “enemies” was not the only variation that distinguished this period from that which it had succeeded. There was the so-called second migration, in which “new people” (neak phnoe or neak thmei),—those from urban areas and those whose backgrounds the new regime regarded as suspicious—who had evacuated Phnom Penh to the East and Southwest, were forcibly transferred to the North and Northwest.54 There was also an escalation in hostilities between DK and its former Communist ally in neighboring Vietnam. For the population, the effects of these changes were devastating. While the second migration, and the exhaustive work practices and decreased rations that accompanied it, resulted in mass starvation and disease in many districts, the conflict with Vietnam further intensified the Center’s quest to root out and eliminate so-called enemies. A final significant change, in effect driving the other changes, was the assumption of power throughout the North, the Northwest, and the East by Mok’s Center-aligned Southwest. These major changes are the pivotal points in the story of a revolution becoming increasingly bloody and self-destructive. They account, to an extent, for the negligence in the establishment or development of education throughout the early phases of the revolution. The Center was preoccupied with more pressing priorities: asserting total control within the CPK and asserting total control over the population, many of whom they still considered “class enemies.” The complexity of understanding Cambodia’s revolution, and therefore understanding the nature of revolutionary education, is exacerbated not only by these temporal variations but also the very significant regional variations that prevailed throughout the country. These regional variations depended on several factors: the nature of and differences between regional, dis-

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trict, subdistrict, and even village leaders, the regional leadership’s relationship with the Center, the prerevolutionary conditions in the region, the region’s agricultural fertility and potential, the population of the region, and the ethnic composition of the population in particular areas.55 In 1975 Angkar had divided Cambodia into zones (phumipheak) based on the military divisions of the 1970 –1975 war. There were seven zones, in addition to an autonomous zone at Kompong Som, and a special zone (505) in Kratie. With a long CPK history, the Northeast, Southwest, and East, at least before 1977, enjoyed the most favorable conditions in DK. Conditions were at their worst in the North and Northwest, where most of the former residents of Phnom Penh, the “new people,” were eventually resettled.56 Education was a function of the complex social and political environment in which it existed. A Ministry of Education existed in DK. Like other DK ministries, it would have achieved nothing, with its skeleton staff required to combine their bureaucratic duties with labor in the fields. Little is known of the ministry’s activities other than the production of several texts that were intended to guide teachers.57 Few ministerial documents have ever come to light, while educational statistics were certainly never compiled.58 Despite these overwhelming deficiencies, it is a myth to suggest that DK abolished all schools. Certainly, the educational infrastructure of the Sihanouk and Lon Nol regimes was cast aside. So too were the educational agendas, teaching corps, and curricula of prerevolutionary times. What emerged, at certain times in certain places throughout DK, in a quite primitive and pathetic form, was an alternative education system. Piecing together the puzzle that was education in DK is particularly difficult. Without a base of documentary evidence, we are forced to rely on the accounts and recollections of the regime’s survivors, whose definitions of what constitutes education vary widely. Do we categorize the Mondolkomar (children’s barracks), for example, as institutions of education? We know that primary-school-aged children were generally taken, on a more or less permanent basis, to these centers, where they were housed, fed, and indoctrinated with DK ideology. With their often horrendous memories of the period as a backdrop, many DK survivors quite understandably refuse to concede that these centers were educational institutions, despite the fact that children taken to them were often taught basic literacy and numeracy. Whatever our definitions and categorizations, there is little doubt that DK’s education system was characterized by massive qualitative deficiencies and by a curriculum

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haphazardly attuned to DK’s revolutionary agenda. The crisis in education, having undergone a revolutionary metamorphosis, and while completely overshadowing the crises of the past, could again be linked and attributed to the ruling regime’s attempt to reconstruct the nation-state. “In national terms there was no education system,” wrote David Chandler of the DK period.59 It is a view mirrored and often exaggerated elsewhere.60 A national system of education did exist, however, although in certain parts of the country, no education was provided at any stage of the DK period. Schooling was provided in every zone of DK and in almost every region. Throughout the country though, were villages, subdistricts, and districts where there was no education at all. There is no single reason why education was provided in particular areas at particular times and why it was not provided in other areas. What is clear is that the provision of education decreased throughout the life of the regime and markedly so after the “second migration” of 1976. These tendencies are born out in the discussion of the Southwest, Northwest, and Eastern Zones that follows. Sum, a “new” person from Phnom Penh, lived at the birthplace of Mok, Tram Kak. This was one of DK’s few “model” districts, in the Southwest, the CPK Center’s stronghold. Sum recalled that parents could only see their children every couple of months, as the children were formed into separate work groups and “were given lessons one or two hours per day.” Kem Hong Hav, a former medic, lived at Prey Krabas, to the east of Tram Kak, between June and November 1975. Hong recalled that schooling continued for all children under eleven, although the teachers were ignorant. Similarly, Hap, a “base” person from nearby Kong Pisei recalled that there were schools in some of the villages, where children “were mostly taught to work.” A former student of the school of pedagogy, Van, lived in the Chouk district, in the Elephant Mountains to the east of Tram Kak. He noted that schools existed in the district, with teachers who were poor peasants with minimal education. All children “were supposed to acquire basic literacy along with work education,” although Van asserts that the literacy was neglected and the children were still illiterate in 1979.61 At the same time, at Bati, to the north of Prey Krabas, Ngor Haing Seng related that education did not figure in the plans of local officials. Recalling a meeting at the sala (hall) next to the historic Tonlé Bati temple, Haing Seng remembered the speech of a CPK spokesperson. “Under our new system, we don’t need to send our young people to school,” the spokesman told those present. “The farm is our school. The land is our paper. The plough is our pen. We will write by ploughing.” 62

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Although it contrasts with the stories of Sum, Kem Hong Hav, Hap, and Vam, there is no reason to question the accuracy of Haing Seng’s account. Moeung, from Tonlé Bati, was a thirty-three-year-old “base” person in 1975. No schooling was provided in her village after the “first migration” in 1975, she asserted. “Only later, when the new people left, could the children of the base people go to school. . . . It was hardly a school, though. They learned nothing.” At nearby Khnar, Sau, a twentyseven-year-old “base” person in 1975, recalled a “little” schooling in 1975. “The children did nothing. They only learned how to collect dung.” 63 The Northwest Zone comprised the greatest proportion of “new” people in the country. With a comparatively large population, it was one of DK’s worst zones in terms of food shortages. In spite of the hardship endured by the zone’s population, education was provided in some areas. A new person, sent to damban 3 in the Northwest, allegedly the best of the seven regions in the zone, told Michael Vickery she had been “employed” to teach “small children.” Another from damban 3, a teenage girl, believed most teachers in her district were “real school teachers who had joined the revolution before 1975.” Mun Savorn was also evacuated to damban 3, from Pailin, where her family had been on holiday in April 1975 to escape the conflict in the city. Savorn’s recollections differ from the other accounts. Moving between a number of villages in the region between 1975 and 1979, she was adamant that she had encountered no schools at all.64 Former residents of damban 4, to the east of damban 3, admitted to Vickery that there had been “centers for indoctrination of primary school-age children.” He notes, however, these people refused to qualify the centers as schools “and claimed that the children learned nothing.” In damban 5, to the north, Ben Kiernan recorded Ang Ngeck Keang’s recollection of schooling in 1977 under the supervision of a young woman from the southwest. The children, separated from their parents, were taught revolutionary songs and a little of the Khmer alphabet.65 Ngeck’s experience was an isolated one. With the arrival of “new” people from other parts of the country after 1976, the provision of education in the zone declined markedly. It was a decline mirrored throughout the country.66 An education “system” also functioned throughout sections of the Eastern Zone. Thun, a “new” person, lived in Prek Pou village of Srey Santhor subdistrict between April 1975 and December 1976. “There were schools,” she noted, “and the teachers were well-educated, like many in that region.” 67 Drawing on the accounts of survivors, Vickery

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argued that the East was one place where central policy seems to have been applied. “There, or at least in the best-run districts, children of primary school age attended classes in the mornings and performed productive work in the afternoons.” The teachers, according to Vickery, were all from the “base” population, and there were DK textbooks for the guidance of the teachers in reading, arithmetic, and geography.68 Ung Bunheang was a “new” person who, after being evacuated from Phnom Penh in 1975, settled at Andong, in the Maesor Prachan subdistrict of Pearaing district in damban 22. The village was only ten kilometers from Prek Pou village, where Thun had settled. Bunheang’s account is enlightening. It corroborates the assertion that in sections of the east, school and productive work were combined. In doing so, it illuminates the quality of education in this region of DK and provides a valuable insight into the curricula at these schools. The children in Andong would attend school in the morning, “in the buffalo stables,” while the buffaloes had been taken to graze. In the afternoon they worked, building small dykes, tending paddies or vegetable gardens, watching over the cattle grazing, or carrying dung to the fields.69 The experiences of children in nearby Prek Kamphleung, where Ek Seng lived, were the same, although the “school” there was a thatched sala built for that purpose.70 Elsewhere throughout the country, educational infrastructure was remarkably similar, with schooling provided in former houses, village halls, occasionally former schools or, as Lam Larn recalled, outdoors with “mother earth for a floor and an old tree for a roof.” 71 While the adequacy of the “classroom” facilities undermined the quality of education, the nature of the teaching corps further exacerbated problems. The teaching staff, according to both Bunheang and Seng, whose accounts of Andong and Prek Kamphleung differ to that of Thun in Prek Pou, was drawn from the “old people,” despite the fact that they had no formal teaching qualifications. Educational materials were also inadequate. While the DK Ministry of Education produced a number of school texts, their presence in village schools was obviously very isolated. Both Bunheang and Seng assert that children had no pencils or books and were required to make chalk from clay, while Bunheang recalls students having to write on waste paper from used cement bags. The conditions at the so-called schools were hardly conducive to effective learning. In addition to working in a buffalo stable, in a thatched sala, or under trees, under the supervision of “teachers” with no credentials, the students were required to make their own primitive learn-

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ing instruments. While the leaders of Angkar could claim that the students were self-reliant, the “masters” of their education, and not dependent on foreign models, materials, or textbooks, the cost to the Cambodian population, in terms of educational quality, was immeasurable. The consistency of educational conditions throughout the country indicates that a central educational policy was at work in DK. The schools were almost always located within a similar structure, almost all catered to children of approximately primary school age, almost all adopted a study-work routine and used identical self-made materials and, finally, almost all taught similar curricula: rudimentary literacy, numeracy, revolutionary songs, and, through slogans, revolutionary morality.72 Elements of the school structure and curricula can be found in the Four-Year Plan. Specific curriculum documents, however, if they existed, have not come to light. By examining the content of the curriculum, as it was practiced in schools, the relationship between the DK education system and the state-making efforts of the leaders of Angkar Padeawat becomes clear. At Andong, the children were taught in four grades. “They learned to read and write, though painfully slowly,” recalled Bunheang. “Apart from some elementary arithmetic, most of the time was taken up by learning revolutionary songs, how to love Angkar, and in being indoctrinated into socialist morality.” The children “were told again and again of the need to work hard, to protect the revolution by reporting on their parents and relatives, of the glories of Kampuchean socialism, and the danger posed by Vietnam.” Phnom Penh radio, monitored overseas, had broadcast a similar description of the curriculum in 1976. “Children follow a cultural and literary program,” the broadcaster announced. “They learn to love the country, to hate the Americans and to love the workers and peasants.” Summing up, he referred to the “children of the cooperatives” as “revolutionary artists.” 73 The curricula comprised two central elements. The first was literacy and numeracy, which as the Four-Year Plan noted, were essential in order to learn technology. The second element, like the civic education sponsored under Sihanouk and Lon Nol, was the development of Cambodian nationalism tied closely to Angkar’s revolutionary egalitarian ideology. DK’s literacy and numeracy training was an overwhelming failure. Although Pol Pot was to boast proudly that Angkar had eradicated illiteracy in Cambodia, the reality was far removed from the image he and those sympathetic to his cause had attempted to portray. With no texts, inadequate writing materials and school infrastructure, unqualified and

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often illiterate teachers, and students who were all too often overworked and malnourished, the result of education, in many cases, was negative development by children.74 In those areas where school texts were available, the students were exposed to a view of the world which reflected the ideology of Angkar. In a DK geography text, it was written that “rice is the base crop and the capital for building and defending the country.” The semantics of the text are similar to a geography text of the Sihanouk era, which also stressed the importance of rice to Cambodia. The difference between the two was in the choice of language, with the DK text stressing that rice was essential for “building and defending” the country. Building Cambodia reflected Angkar’s emphasis on self-reliance, while defending the country reflected the xenophobic nationalism at the heart of Cambodian distrust and hostility towards the Vietnamese.75 The phrase was to become one of many used widely throughout Cambodia between 1975 and January 1979. School texts were not widely used in spreading the DK world view. Prerevolutionary Cambodian society had depended on the didactic chbab poems for reinforcing social order and social regulations. In 1975, with all people declared equal, the chbab (Khmer didactic poems) became obsolete. They were replaced by revolutionary songs imparting the new social ideology and moral order. One such song referred to the “loving kindness” of Angkar. 76 Personifying Angkar, the song portrayed the organization as a father, overturning the traditional social order that stressed the importance of the family. A second song, “Children of the New Kampuchea,” again suggested the personification of Angkar as a replacement for the family: We, the children have the good fortune to live the rest of our time in precious harmony under the affectionate care of the Kampuchean revolution, immense, most clear and shining. We, the children of the revolution make the supreme revolution to strive to increase our ability to battle, and make the stand of the revolution perfect.77

The song, typical of others taught to children in DK schools, reflected the keynotes of Angkar’s ideology, emphasizing battles and struggles and deemphasizing the past and the primacy of family life. Far removed from the conception of social hierarchy portrayed in Khmer chbab, the songs embodied the egalitarian moral order imposed by Angkar. 78

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1977–1978: Self-Annihilation and Appeasement By mid-1977, the frenzied self-annihilation of Angkar was beginning to reach its peak. Two events then dominated the final eighteen months of DK. The first was the conflict with Vietnam. It is ironic that DK’s nemesis to the east, which it had shunned for so long, would bring about the unrestrained self-destruction of the CPK by the Pol Pot faction. The second, a reaction to the conflict with Vietnam, was a relative opening up of Kampuchea to the world from which it had been closeted since April 1975. Both events were to affect education. The conflict with Vietnam and subsequent self-destruction of Angkar resulted in the closure of most village schools that had not already been closed. Paradoxically, when DK opened up to the world, a new rhetoric emerged within Angkar, with several pronouncements regarding education.79 The pronouncements were nothing more than a half-hearted, poorly staged attempt by the leadership to convince the world that the regime was not as brutal and repressive as it was being increasingly painted by refugees fleeing to both Vietnam and Thailand. In September 1977, Pol Pot finally announced the existence of the CPK, shortly before traveling to China. The trip, no doubt, was taken to shore up Chinese support for the rapidly escalating conflict with the Vietnamese. In May 1976, Vietnamese and Cambodian officials had sat down together to discuss the issue of the two countries’ shared border, resolving very little.80 With the assumption of almost absolute power within the CPK by the Pol Pot faction, the border situation deteriorated rapidly. In January 1977, Cambodia sent troops to occupy tracts of disputed territory in Vietnamese-held areas. The result, by the middle of 1977, was the outbreak of open hostilities. The Vietnamese, not U.S.inspired imperialism, became Cambodia’s number one enemy.81 Vietnamese forays into Cambodia were greeted by the Center with a massive purge of the Eastern Zone. The zone’s close proximity with Vietnam resulted in its cadres being labeled traitors, or people with “Khmer bodies but Vietnamese minds” (khluon Khmae khou khbal Yuon). Some of DK’s schools, established in 1975 and 1976, had run for only a few months, with the priorities of the local leadership concentrated elsewhere, such as building dams and dykes or growing rice. With the escalation of the Vietnamese conflict, village schools elsewhere were closed. Concentrating on flushing out its internal enemies and “defending” the country against the external threat from Vietnam the regime could no

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longer afford to devote precious resources to the cause of education. The decision does not seem to have been a direction from the Center. Instead, it was in all likelihood a pragmatic reaction by local leaders to the Center’s demands for unattainable rice harvests and human resources. Local leaders throughout the country, their own heads on the block, perceived the need to put “all hands on deck.” Pol Pot’s trip to China and North Korea signaled a partial opening up of DK. A reason for his trip “was to display the ‘human face’ of DK and to counter charges emerging in Thailand and the West of human rights violations, terror and starvation in Cambodia.” 82 On Pol Pot’s return to Cambodia, foreign delegations were permitted to enter the country. One was a television and news reporting team from the former Yugoslavia, who were able to meet with Yun Yat, the DK minister charged with education and culture. Her description of the education system accords with that which had been functioning throughout the country in the period prior to the outbreak of hostilities with Vietnam. Noting that school teachers had only the “diploma of a revolutionary,” Yun Yat told the team that school and work were combined. While the rhetoric of the minister demonstrated a concern with the new education system, the reality was that very few functioning schools of any kind remained in DK. The attempt by Angkar to display a “human face” included an effort to “make cosmetic improvements in people’s standards of living.” 83 In April, the party celebrated the third anniversary of the liberation of Phnom Penh, while in September, the anniversary of the party was also celebrated. On both occasions, for the first time since April 1975, people were excused from work. Education, a critical platform of social policy, was suddenly embraced enthusiastically by the regime. At the Fourth Party Congress in Phnom Penh, in September 1978, Pol Pot unveiled a plan for a revolutionary technical education system. He shared the stage with Thiounn Mumm, the French-educated revolutionary then in charge of technical education. Elizabeth Becker has argued that “Mumm put an intellectual gloss on the program,” which she added, “was little more than establishing a basic trade school in the capital.” 84 David Chandler referred to the school as a “faculty of a technological university.” Fifteen intellectuals, whose status would previously have invited persecution and probable death, were brought into the city and selected to work under Mumm.85 As part of displaying a “human face,” a few schools appeared in a few selected cooperatives. With their eyes on Vietnam, the regime could not yet afford a serious attempt at mass education. Whether the sudden em-

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brace of education was designed to impress foreigners or to ingratiate the regime with the populace it had been terrorizing for over three years shall never be known. In all probability, the opening of selected schools throughout the country and the technical school in Phnom Penh, signaled an attempt by the regime to implement the educational program outlined in its Four-Year Plan. Evidence has emerged that DK’s leaders became worried about having few suitably qualified engineers and technicians to implement their planned industrialization program. There is also evidence of attempts to begin training primary school teachers, with the mattresses already found for a residential training course to take place in Phnom Penh! While the prospects for the success of the these educational initiatives remain an unwritten chapter, a former Khmer Rouge official intimately associated with DK’s educational plans believes, in hindsight, they would have been “a disaster.” 86 On December 25, 1978, only three months after the Party Congress, the Vietnamese launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia. They were supported by the United Front for the National Salvation of Kampuchea (UFNS), defectors from the DK regime who had taken sanctuary along and inside the Vietnamese border. By January 1, 1979, gunfire could be heard in Phnom Penh.87 On the afternoon of January 6, 1979, Norodom Sihanouk, who had been retired as head of state in 1976 and was under house arrest in the Royal Palace, took the last flight out of Phnom Penh. As he did so, he agreed to Pol Pot’s request to put DK’s case to the United Nations. With almost two million Cambodians left in its wake, DK finally collapsed on January 7, 1979.

Evaluating Education in DK The DK regime was provided with a great opportunity to address the crisis in Cambodian education. In many respects, the notions of selfreliance and self-mastery, which underpinned the rhetoric of Angkar Padeawat’s leaders and the state ideology of DK, were compatible with the changes necessary in order to address the symptoms of the crisis that had characterized the 1960s and 1970s. Self-reliance, for instance, represented a justification for eliminating the education system’s blinded replication of the French school education system. Evaluating and assessing the regime’s failure to capitalize on the opportunity provided to it not only necessitates criticism of the policies pursued and the practices that ensued in education during the turbulent years of DK but condemnation of the extremity and savagery of the leaders of a regime,

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whose pursuit of a social and political ideal debased, devalued, and eventually disregarded those people who were supposedly to benefit from its commitment to equality. Essentially, the failure to reorient and reform the education system was, as this chapter has made clear, a function of the regime’s attempt to achieve its own Great Leap Forward, swiftly and brutally reconstructing the Cambodian nation-state. The first phase of DK’s educational agenda was to dismantle and eliminate the French-imbued education system of the old society. It was a task achieved rapidly and effectively. The second phase of the agenda was concerned with the reconstruction of the nation-state, aiming to ingrain in students a desire and capacity to build and defend the country. It is the regime’s failure to realize this aim that accounts for the nature and the severity of the educational crisis in Cambodia between 1975 and 1978. The failure can be attributed to three factors. First, in the shortterm, the highest echelon of Angkar effectively desired and pursued a failure in education. Second, educational quality was so deficient that it undermined the process of learning. Finally, the ideology of Pol Pot’s CPK Center, which would eventually become the state ideology of DK, was incompatible with the cultural fabric of Cambodian society. It was not only illegitimate in the eyes of the Cambodian peasants in the countryside but in the eyes of many who were supportive of the revolutionary cause. The educational agenda of DK’s leaders was entirely hostile to the development of education. The initial underlying objective of the DK economic and social agenda was to pursue self-reliance at the cost of social development. The regime intended to build a solid agricultural base and to eliminate Cambodia’s reliance and dependence on foreign capital. The education system, a siphon for substantial government revenues and foreign aid since being rapidly expanded in the aftermath of independence, became a victim of the self-reliance agenda. Forced to develop with resources that could be locally manufactured and with teachers whose only qualification was the “diploma of a revolutionary,” the system was doomed to abject failure. How serious the regime was about developing the education system after securing an agricultural base shall never be known, as DK collapsed before later phases of the economic and social development agenda were implemented. The quality of education received by children in DK was mediocre in every respect. Teachers, almost exclusively “old people” from rural areas, were either poorly trained or not trained at all. Students, meanwhile, were forced to learn in makeshift shelters, in stables, or under

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trees. School buildings, condemned as vestiges of the old society, were abandoned and left to decay or were used as ammunitions factories, silos, or prisons. Where they were fortunate enough to be able to attend school, children had to contend with a lack of the most basic educational materials, often in an environment characterized by dislocation from their families, severe overwork, and chronic undernourishment. That these conditions prevailed throughout the country is directly attributable to the Utopian ideals that underpinned the policies pursued by the individuals that constituted Angkar. A final issue in accounting for the failure of education in Cambodia was that the educational policies pursued by the DK regime were a direct manifestation of an ideology that enjoyed no political or social legitimacy in Cambodia. The CPK assumed state power on account of the anger generated throughout the countryside by U.S. bombardment, the military support provided by the army of North Vietnam, and the coattails of Norodom Sihanouk’s popularity among the peasantry. It drew support from among the country’s small, urban-based intellectual population, who were impressed with its ideals of social equality. At no stage was there a widespread revelation to the population to the effect that the CPK did not support the deposed Prince Sihanouk or the institution of the monarchy. Intellectuals, meanwhile, were never given notice of the extent of the Communists’ revolutionary social agenda or that they too would eventually become its victims. The lack of legitimacy also extended within the CPK itself. Pol Pot’s Center, from the moment its members began to maneuver into positions of power in the late 1950s, never enjoyed total support within the movement. As time passed, and its enemies accrued, the Center sought to eliminate those whose views were divergent with its own. In splintering Cambodia’s revolutionary movement between those sharing their views of an extreme racist nationalism and those supporting fraternity within the international socialist movement, and especially with the Vietnamese, the Pol Pot group created the framework for the postDK era. With the DK regime defeated in January 1979, the Vietnamese installed in power in Cambodia a regime whose leadership was tied firmly to those factions of the CPK that had opposed or been powerless to halt the ascendancy of Pol Pot. The People’s Republic of Kampuchea was born.

The PRK and the SOC The State in Transition

In 1973, the commander of the Khmer Rouge’s 126th Regiment, based in the Eastern Zone, advanced across the Mekong river in pursuit of Lon Nol’s Republican army. His troops attempted to climb Phnom (Mount) Chisor, in Takeo province, in search of a traditional malarial cure, whereupon twelve of them were arrested, taken away, and killed. They were not arrested by Republican soldiers nor by the Republic’s South Vietnamese allies who frequented the East. The commander’s troops were arrested by their fellow Communists, troops of the Southwest, under the notorious command of the Center-aligned Mok.1 More than five years later, with Cambodia having been controlled by the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) regime for over three years, the same commander again crossed the Mekong with his troops. On this occasion, as the appointed leader of the United Front for the National Salvation of Kampuchea (UFNS), and backed by the military might of the Vietnamese army, his advance was not thwarted by Mok, nor by the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) Center, with whom he was aligned. Pol Pot (Saloth Sar), and the entourage of leaders collectively known as Angkar, quickly fled in the face of imminent defeat. Phnom Penh, practically deserted for almost four years, was captured. The People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), under the leadership of Heng Samrin, the former commander of the 126th Regiment, was formed.2 The story of the fate of the PRK and its successor, the State of Cambodia (SOC), is one of geopolitics. With the support of the Vietnamese, the leaders of the PRK sought to reconstruct the devastated nation-state

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of Kampuchea, as the country was then known. Vietnamese patronage and occupation brought with it international condemnation. As a result, an international development assistance embargo was imposed on Vietnam and Cambodia, supported by the United States, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the Chinese and approved by the United Nations. The denial of Western assistance to Cambodia as it attempted to recover from the traumas of the “Pol Pot time” emerges as a dominant theme of the period. The absence of the West and the socialist orientation of the PRK, bringing with it the support of the international socialist bloc led by the pro-Vietnamese, anti-Chinese Soviet Union (USSR), represents a second dominant theme. In 1989, the European Communist bloc began to collapse and, with it, the substantial foreign assistance enjoyed by both Vietnam and Kampuchea. The Vietnamese, unable and unwilling to continue to support the Kampuchean economy, honored a longstanding commitment to fully withdraw from the country. In order to prevent economic collapse and to promote development, the Vietnamese adopted an economic liberalization program, doi moi, similar to Mikhail Gorbachev’s perastroika in the USSR. Kampuchea soon followed suit, with a new constitution, new economic ideals, and a new name, the State of Cambodia. The gradual embrace of a market-driven economy in Cambodia at the expense of socialism is a third theme of the period. These themes are reflected in education. What was the DK legacy in education? How did the influence of Vietnamese occupation and patronage impact on education and development in Cambodia? What was the effect of the international embargo on the rehabilitation of the Cambodian education system? How did Cambodia’s place on the Cold War chess board impact on this rehabilitation? In what ways did the sociopolitical circumstances that emerged in Cambodia as a result of the DK legacy, Vietnamese patronage, and Western isolation contribute to an educational crisis in the country during the period? Responding to these questions is the fundamental concern of this chapter.

The PRK: Fraternity with the Vietnamese The PRK was spawned from the same seed as Pol Pot’s DK. Both regimes trace their roots to the evolution of revolutionary politics in Cambodia, to the struggle for Cambodian independence in the aftermath of World War II, and to notions of egalitarianism that emerged in contrast to Cambodia’s established hierarchical political culture. The difference

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between the two regimes can be examined by unraveling the nature of their relations with the Vietnamese and examining their commitment to revolutionary self-reliance. In order to understand the nature of Heng Samrin’s PRK, an understanding of these roots and the divergent paths of Cambodia’s two post-independence Communist regimes, is essential. An examination of the controversy surrounding the founding date of Cambodia’s revolutionary movement represents a key to understanding these divergent paths. While the CPK was an underground movement throughout the 1960s and remained so until Pol Pot’s announcement of its existence in 1977, the question of the founding date was a source of considerable internal consternation. It was almost certainly a precipitating factor in the execution of one of the party’s founding veterans, Keo Meas, in 1976. In essence, there are two accounts of the founding date of the party: one maintains that the party was born in 1951, while the second argues that the party was not founded until 1960.3 The 1951 founding date was that adopted by Keo Meas, who had been a revolutionary since before independence. Meas maintained that Cambodia’s revolutionary party was launched in 1951, when the division of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) into three separate organizations saw the formation of the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party (KPRP). When the Geneva conference of 1954 failed to grant a regroupment zone to Cambodia’s revolutionary movement, Meas was one of the few revolutionaries who elected to remain in Cambodia rather than travel to Hanoi. Through the KPRP’s legitimate political branch, the Citizen’s Group (Krom Pracheachon), he participated without success in the 1955 elections. A combination of factors saw the fortunes of the KPRP wane throughout the 1950s. First, they were successfully hunted, intimidated, and often assassinated by Sihanouk’s police. Second, the loss of many leading cadres to Vietnam saw the depletion of the party’s membership and its most experienced political activists. Finally, the defection to the government in 1959 of Sieu Heng, the KPRP Central Committee member responsible for rural Cambodia, heightened both the effects of Sihanouk’s police hunt and the loss of cadres to Vietnam. By 1960, in order to survive, the party needed a change of direction. The change was provided when twenty-one KPRP delegates met in secret at Phnom Penh railway station on September 28 –30, 1960. As a result of this congress the KPRP changed its name to the Workers’ Party of Kampuchea (WPK). The WPK used the meeting to elect a Central Committee, with Saloth Sar and Ieng Sary assuming politburo positions alongside KPRP veterans Keo Meas and Nuon Chea. As we saw in Chap-

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ter 4, in the years that followed, especially after Tou Samouth’s disappearance in 1962, Saloth Sar and fellow revolutionary returnees from France assumed increasing control of the movement. It was the Pol Pot faction of the Communist party (renamed the CPK in 1966) that promoted the 1960 founding date. A party spokesman, arguably Pol Pot, explaining the shift in a special issue of the party’s official journal, Tung Padeawat (Revolutionary Flags), referred to the 1960 date as a “new numeration.” It was necessary, the spokesman explained, because “we must arrange the history of the party into something clean and perfect, in line with our policies of independence and self-mastery.” 4 The timing of the explanation corresponded with the assumption of almost complete control of the revolutionary movement by Pol Pot’s party Center. It also corresponded with the beginning of a marked deterioration in Vietnamese-Cambodian relations. Changing the founding date of the CPK was conceived with the Center’s radical agenda as its motivation. The Pol Pot group’s conception of a “clean and perfect” revolutionary history involved removing references to the party’s fraternity with the Vietnamese and the wider socialist bloc. This was a fraternity that had been openly acknowledged throughout the KPRP years. The controversy over the CPK’s founding date provides confirmation that the legitimacy of Pol Pot’s DK, especially after 1976, was not universally recognized within Cambodian revolutionary circles. The regime lacked legitimacy in the eyes of a number of groups. The first group comprised those Cambodian revolutionaries who had elected to remain in Hanoi throughout the 1970 –1975 period. While a number returned to Cambodia during the civil war, where they were often killed by the Center, many others remained in the North Vietnamese capital, from where they continued their revolutionary alliance with Vietnam. A second group comprised those Cambodian revolutionaries in Cambodia who had split with the Pol Pot group before the revolutionary victory in April 1975. Most notable among this group was Sae Phouthong, a veteran revolutionary from Koh Kong, whose small force continued to fight Pol Pot’s Center between 1975 and 1978.5 The final group comprised those DK cadres, especially from the Eastern Zone (bordering Vietnam), who fled Cambodia for Vietnam between 1975 and 1978. Included among this group were Heng Samrin, Chea Sim, and Hun Sen, all prominent PRK, and later SOC, personalities. It is from this body of revolutionaries that the UFNS was formed. The background of the group accounts for the nature of the state ideology it attempted to promulgate upon its sudden seizure of power in Phnom

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Penh in January 1979. The ideology bore a number of central themes. The first was an attempt to paint the DK period as an apparition, where the revolutionary momentum in Cambodia had been usurped by what the new rulers universally referred to as the regime of the “Pol PotIeng Sary clique,” who were clients of the “expansionist Chinese.” The second theme, stemming from the first, was that the PRK was the only true socialist regime in Cambodia. Associated with this was the promotion of the PRK’s position within the international socialist community.6 A final theme evident in the ideological orientation of the new regime was a pragmatic acceptance of the damage done to the people’s attitude toward socialism by the Pol Pot regime. In this regard, the UFNS attempted to portray itself as a regime that would be far more palatable to the Cambodian people than was its predecessor. On January 1, 1979, six days before it was installed in power, the UFNS annulled the categorization of Cambodians into “new people” and “old people,” promised that Cambodians would have sufficient food, ensured freedom of movement and religion, and, importantly, undertook to eradicate illiteracy and to rebuild primary schools.7 The ideological orientation of the regime, as with the apparatuses of the state through which the ideology would be promoted, was stitched together very quickly. The UFNS congress at Memut, in Kompong Cham province, to “re-launch the ‘authentic’ Communist party” was interrupted on its third day by the capture of Phnom Penh. No one, it seems, least of all the Vietnamese, expected the Pol Pot regime to capitulate so quickly and so easily.8 The very swift emplacement in power of the successor to the DK regime, at least initially, had two significant effects. The first was that the UFNS was heavily reliant on its Vietnamese allies. Prior to its victory, the new regime had announced a number of important policies, including foreign policy, clearly indicating that significant Vietnamese support, advice, and resources were being employed in the salvation effort. Kampuchean fraternity with the Vietnamese and with the Soviet-led international socialist bloc, was swiftly reinforced after the UFNS victory with treaties of friendship and understanding signed between Vietnam and Kampuchea. This fraternity was to include educational cooperation, as the Treaty of Friendship signed between the two socialist neighbors in March 1979 reflected.9 The second effect of the swift emplacement of the new regime was the reliance of the leadership on many people from nonrevolutionary backgrounds. One observer commented

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that the cadre force of the new regime was “then still less than skeletal,” while another noted its “embarrassingly low quality.” 10 To describe the task ahead of the new regime as daunting was an understatement. Eva Mysliweic, a long-time resident of Cambodia during the PRK period, described the state of the nation in 1979. She noted that the country “had no currency, no markets, no financial institutions and virtually no industry.” In addition, there was no system of public transport, no postal system, no telephones, very little electricity, and virtually no clean water, sanitation, or education.11 Apart from these pervasive deficiencies, other factors also heightened the difficulty of the reconstruction and rehabilitation effort. First, thousands of people, dislocated from their homes and separated from their families by the Pol Pot regime, were moving erratically around the countryside. Second, especially in the northwest of the country, fighting continued with the scattered remnants of DK. The fighting would continue on a considerable scale until at least July 1979. Third, there was the fear of an impending famine in Cambodia. In the initial months after the new regime assumed power, there were few fears of a massive food shortage, as people were still able to harvest the 1978/1979 rice crop. However, with many people continuing their migrations across the country throughout 1979, and with many of the nation’s draft animals dead, an inadequate rice crop was planted for the 1979/1980 harvest.12 A fourth factor was the number of people electing to flee to the ThaiCambodian border. Taking advantage of the freedom of movement being offered by the new regime, many people fled in fear of the possibility of a famine. Others fled hoping to establish contact with relatives living abroad, while a third group fled to engage in the illicit, yet comparatively lucrative, cross-border trade. While only 5,000 Cambodians had taken refuge in Thailand in the three months following the overthrow of Pol Pot, approximately 300,000 fled in the last three months of 1979.13 The final factor exacerbating the difficulty in reestablishing a sense of normalcy to Cambodian life was the question of international assistance. Commentators remain unresolved in their dispute over who should accept the greatest proportion of blame for the very conspicuous delay in the provision of humanitarian assistance to Cambodia following the defeat of DK. Regardless of whether the delay was the result of a tactical ploy by the Vietnamese, the ineptitude of the international relief agencies, or the conditions for aid imposed by the new regime in Phnom

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Penh, it can be attributed to consternation over the question of whether the Vietnamese had liberated or invaded Cambodia. The initial delay in the delivery of humanitarian assistance to the PRK, and the aid embargo that was to follow it, both impacted on the PRK regime’s capacity to rehabilitate Cambodia and the devastated Cambodian people.14

1979 – 1980: Rebuilding an Education System In announcing and celebrating the beginning of the 1979/1980 school year on September 24, 1979, PRK President Heng Samrin focused his attention on the horrors and destruction of the DK period. “Having passed four years of the barbaric genocidal regime of the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique,” Heng commented, “our infrastructure in the domain of education and of teaching is completely shattered.” The nation’s professors, teaching personnel, and students, the president pointed out, had been “tortured, massacred horribly.” Heng Samrin’s address highlighted the critical issue facing the new regime as it attempted to rehabilitate the education system that was the legacy of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.15 This legacy of destruction, turmoil, and trauma was but one of two central educational themes of the regime’s rise from the ashes of the educational crisis imposed by the Khmer Rouge. The second was the pervasive influence of the Vietnamese, and particularly the so-called Vietnamese “experts,” in the reconstruction effort. The legacy of DK was immeasurable. On one count, the human cost was severe. DK policies targeted those with a higher education, particularly teachers, those who could read, sometimes those who wore glasses, or even those whose hands were soft and were therefore unaccustomed to physical labor. It was claimed by the PRK regime in 1984 that 75 percent of teachers, 96 percent of higher education students, and 67 percent of primary and secondary school-aged pupils were murdered by the Khmer Rouge.16 In terms of the direct legacy of DK, the figures are somewhat exaggerated. They do reflect, however, the cumulative human cost to education of DK, the civil war that preceded the Khmer Rouge holocaust, and the number of former educators and students who later fled to Thailand. This latter figure, one analyst has suggested, may have been in the thousands.17 While the human resources of the education system were severely depleted in 1979, so too was educational infrastructure. It is completely false, as some have suggested, that the Khmer Rouge “destroyed all

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schools.” While it has been politically expedient for extreme antiCommunists, education officials of the PRK, and those, especially foreign advisers, with little background in Cambodian history to make such claims, they are simply not true.18 Henri Locard, a teacher of higher education in Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge period and again in more recent years, correctly argues that the Khmer Rouge “destroyed none of [the] educational buildings.” Instead, Locard accurately points out, the DK regime were using former educational buildings for other purposes, such as for prisons and stables or as an ammunitions factory, as was the case with the Royal University of Agriculture.19 Asserting that the Khmer Rouge did not destroy all schools is not to say that the PRK did not confront incredible destruction in 1979. Educational infrastructure had been widely destroyed during the five years of civil war that preceded the 1975 revolution. Those buildings that survived the civil war were then put to other uses or were often completely abandoned during the DK period, leaving them in a state of neglect and sometimes chronic disrepair by 1979. In the same way that the DK regime did not willfully destroy all educational infrastructure, it is also the case that it did not systematically destroy educational materials, especially books. The UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), created by the UN to oversee Cambodia’s 1993 elections, mistakenly assessed, for example, that “all educational books, equipment and facilities had been destroyed.” Henri Locard again presents a more accurate account, arguing “not many books in Khmer Rouge days disappeared either: they were just abandoned to rot where they happened to be.” These were troubled times, however, and there was destruction. Refugees of the 1970 –1975 civil war, forced to flee the countryside for the city, used school books when they could not find wood to start a fire. Many often illiterate soldiers of the Khmer Rouge army rolled their cigarettes with the paper they had ripped from textbooks they could not read. The youngest daughter of a wealthy Phnom Penh family, considering herself lucky to have survived the Pol Pot time, recalled her horror, shame, and disgust at having to use her brother’s hidden economics books when going to the toilet. A former educational official of the PRK admitted that in 1979 he pilfered all the paper he could find so his wife could wrap the produce she was selling at the market. On a more considerable scale, it is alleged that surviving print media from the 1960s was taken from the National Library in 1979 and pulped to supply the new regime with a sorely needed supply of paper.20

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Whether the depletion of Cambodia’s educational human resources and its infrastructure were products of the civil war, Khmer Rouge neglect and destruction, or the ensuing chaos in 1979, the new regime was faced with a profound legacy of social upheaval as it attempted to rehabilitate the education system. In this respect, in Cambodia in 1979, there was a severe crisis in education. There was no educational administration in place, no curricula, no adequate learning materials, and few qualified teaching personnel. As shall be seen, it was a crisis heightened by the PRK regime’s efforts to swiftly legitimize its authority and the new socialist state in which it was based. As Chan Ven took his place at a desk in a dimly lit room in a run-down building in Phnom Penh in 1979, the enormity of the task before him must have weighed heavily on his mind. The new minister of education was not a revolutionary. Nor was he an administrator. In fact, Ven’s only previous educational involvement had been as a high school physics teacher. With the human and physical destruction wrought by the previous decade as a backdrop, the former teacher was charged with collaborating with a team of Vietnamese advisers to plan the rehabilitation of the Cambodian education system. Ven and his few equally unqualified Cambodian colleagues were largely without ideas and without a sense of direction.21 Their only aims were to place as many students in schools as quickly as possible and, in so doing, build Kampuchea into a nation of “new Socialist workmen.” 22 Responses to questions of educational quality and access, including the concern over the recruitment and training of teachers, whom would attend school, and of what would be taught, were clearly beyond the capacity of the new Cambodian Ministry of Education. Into the vacuum of expertise stepped Cambodia’s Vietnamese “liberators” with an army of technical and political advisers. There is little consensus on how many advisers the Vietnamese sent to Cambodia after the so-called liberation. Estimates vary considerably, from as few as 2,000 to as many as 12,000.23 Whatever the number, which was unquestionably much higher in the period immediately after the liberation, there is no doubt that the influence and control of the Vietnamese over the PRK, especially before the mid-1980s, was pervasive.24 It was not, however, the basis for the “planned ethnocide” suggested by one Western commentator.25 Instead, it can be thought of as an orchestrated Vietnamese project concerned not only with Vietnamese political and economic goals but with providing humanitarian assistance to a neighbor.

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1979: Drawing the Chaos Together Suon Serey, a student at the Lycée Sisowath before 1975, had spent the DK period in a village in Kandal province. Within a month of the Vietnamese liberation of her village in 1979, Serey had established a “school” and was teaching a “class” of young children. There were eighty students, she recalled, in a classroom that was an old disused building. “I had no pedagogical training and I had no teaching materials. I just taught the students Khmer from my memory.” The children, Serey added, “used clay as a pen and wrote on boards.” 26 Serey was not alone. In May 1979, a Vietnamese observer in Phnom Penh witnessed a primary school established in a former DK administrative building. The children were “sitting seven to eight to a desk, with only one book and a stub of pencil, practicing reading out loud in chorus.” Kim Din, the secretary of the management committee of Kompong Cham province, also noted that “a number of schools run by the people have been opened with alphabet [literacy] classes and some elementary classes.” The classes, Din observed, “do not follow a systematic program. The teaching staff . . . have some degree of instruction but no teaching experience.” 27 The first schools to function in Cambodia after DK were neither organized nor sanctioned by the PRK administration. Instead, they sprang from the initiatives of dedicated individuals like Serey. By April 1979, the PRK’s leaders had turned their attention toward the recommencement of an officially sanctioned school year. It was a task they approached with great haste and without due consideration of the obstacles they faced. The structure and orientation of the education system implemented in Cambodia during the PRK (and SOC) period reflected this haste. The task of reestablishing a national education system aligned with the promises and assurances made by the regime in the UFNS platform. It was begun with significant Vietnamese support at both the provincial and national levels.28 Throughout April and May 1979, the few functional Khmer education officials, in tandem with their respective Vietnamese advisers, began a concerted campaign to set up a national body of officials and teachers.29 The Vietnamese managed the effort, recalled one former official, “because we did not know where we should start. We were lost.” The officials originally focused on recruiting former teachers and officials who had survived the DK period. Later, they turned to the wider community in order to recruit enough teachers to fill the nation’s

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classrooms. Teachers were “virtually picked up from city streets and village pathways.” 30 An official proclamation circulated throughout the country on July 30, 1979, announced the new educational program of the PRK.31 It had been developed in less than two months. The system inaugurated by Heng Samrin in September 1979 was a function of the haste with which it was created: a combination of diametrically opposed revolutionary Vietnamese and French educational ideals and ill-conceived contingencies in the face of significant obstacles. The new educational structures put in place by the administration were a hybrid, reflecting both Vietnamese educational practices and the French-oriented prewar background of many of those Cambodians entrusted with the system’s rehabilitation. Vietnamese advisers imposed on a Cambodian ministry lacking both ideas and expertise a system of education that bore a striking resemblance to that functioning in Vietnam. The primary school course, which had been divided into two three-year cycles prior to 1975, was condensed into four grades. Secondary school involved a further six years of study, broken into two three-year cycles. The ten-year structure, and the ascending numbering system adopted to denote school grades, were identical to those of Vietnam. A second feature of the system, which was the same as that of Vietnam’s, was its decentralized management. Provincial education committees, rather than the powerful central ministry of prerevolutionary times, were vested with a high degree of responsibility for decision-making.32 The changes were not “de-Khmerization.” Nor were they “ethnocide.” 33 Rather, they were a removal of French influence from the structure of the Cambodian education system. In respect of both structure and management, they were also changes that accorded with the prevailing post-DK conditions in Cambodia. The country was without the infrastructure, facilities, and personnel necessary to reintroduce a thirteen-year system of education. Similarly, a decentralized management structure was entirely appropriate for a country in which there was not the staff to manage a powerful central ministry and in which the national system of communications lay in ruins. While the structure and management mechanisms of the system were almost entirely Vietnamese, the school curriculum was more complex. On one side, it reflected Vietnamese socialist and revolutionary educational ideals. On the other, it was a product of the memories of prerevolutionary teachers. The socialist goals were expressly stated in the regime’s official decrees and in its English and French language propa-

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ganda. The “Decree on the Establishment of the Cabinet of the Minister of Education” stated, for example, that the Ministry of Education was an organization “to protect and build the People’s Republic of Cambodia [sic] into a socialist country.” 34 A later report, published after the transition to the SOC, noted that a “new and progressive” education system had been created that would serve “to defend and firmly build the country on the way to socialism.” 35 The socialist influence in the development of the educational curricula was most clearly manifested in the history syllabus, in the emphasis on practicality, and in the introduction of “political morality” as a subject for study. The remaining curriculum areas, in both primary and secondary education, reflected the subject matter of the prerevolutionary education system. The similarities, in terms of the structure of the primary education syllabi, are illustrated in Table 1. Moral education had replaced the ethics and civics education of the Sihanouk era, bringing with it a socialist conception of what constituted a “good citizen.” Study of the French language had been eliminated, while a renewed emphasis had been placed on the practical and physical activities that reformers of the Sihanouk and Lon Nol periods had called for but had never been able to achieve. Despite the changes, the curriculum Table 1. Primary Education Syllabus by Subject, Pre-1970 and Post-1979. Pre-1970 Primary Education

Post-1979 Primary Education

Ethics Civics Khmer Language French Language Arithmetic History Geography Science and Hygiene Manual Work

Moral Education Khmer Language Arithmetic History Geography Manual Work Practical Knowledge Drawing Arts/Dancing/Singing Physical Education

Source: C. Bilodeau 1954, p. 54; and H. Rieff 1980, Annex XI.

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remained a classical academic one. In respect of both the time devoted to them and the traditional esteem with which they were held, humanities subjects continued to be emphasized by teachers, whose capacity to implement a detailed curriculum was, at best, negligible. Success, as had been the case in the past, was measured by passing academic examinations and paid scant regard to the students’ capacity to demonstrate proficiency in the practical skills they had allegedly acquired.

Dimensions of the Crisis By the end of 1979, UNICEF and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had successfully negotiated an agreement with the Phnom Penh regime for the provision of humanitarian assistance.36 A UNICEF consultant was sent to the country in February 1980, providing the first illuminating insight into the educational crisis that had developed in Cambodia in the DK period. The crisis assumed three critical dimensions. The first was a crisis of quality, where deficiencies in human resources and physical infrastructure continued to debilitate educational provision. The second was a crisis of orientation, with an obvious conflict and contradiction between the goals and structure of the system on the one hand and its continued reflection of a French educational curriculum on the other. The final dimension was a crisis of timing. In its attempt to legitimize its authority and legitimize socialism, the new regime, with the support and encouragement of its Vietnamese advisers, had attempted to do too much too quickly. The crisis of quality was staggering. In the first instance, there was a chronic shortage of qualified educational personnel. While the ministry was without adequately trained or experienced cadres, the shortage of qualified staff was even more pronounced in the nation’s schools. A former student’s recollection that there were “many students in every class” is certainly corroborated by statistical evidence.37 By November 1979, when 716,553 students had officially enrolled in primary schools throughout Cambodia, the nation had only 13,619 teachers, at a ratio of 1 teacher for every 53 students. Only 4,000 of the teachers had formal qualifications.38 In addition to their lack of qualifications, teachers had other concerns. “I was not a good teacher at that time,” said Mon Pon. “Every day I would think about my parents who had died, and think about my wife, who I could not find.” Troubled by the effects of the previous four years, with concerns about the whereabouts of family members, poor physical health, psychological trauma, and poor memory and concentration, the teaching corps was certainly ineffective.39

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Problems with staff were heightened by problems of infrastructure and materials. Systematic national data relating to the state of Cambodia’s educational infrastructure in 1979 was never compiled. Anecdotal evidence, however, clearly demonstrates the extent of the dilapidation and decay. At a school in Phnom Penh, for example, UNICEF’s consultant observed that a “grade one class takes place under a tree but needs to be closed as soon as the rainy season starts.” A school in Svay Teap district of Svay Rieng province was “an ex-hospital and surrounded by mines and graveyards of soldiers [where] children sit on [the] floor [and there are] no windows!” At a school in Prey Veng province, there was a “lack of textbooks . . . and insufficient furniture.” In each class, there were only eight pens per fifty students. At a Teacher Training Center in Phnom Penh, the capacity of the school was affected by a lack of chairs and tables, while at the Teacher Training Center in Prey Veng there was “no furniture.” The lack of materials was coupled with a shortage of school texts.40 A Center for Program Writing and Textbooks, staffed by seventy-seven Cambodians and several Vietnamese advisers, was one of the first units to be functioning within the ministry. By February 1980, the center had produced thirty-nine texts for use in primary school, several for secondary school, and a single text for use in adult literacy education courses. Owing to a lack of materials and problems with distribution, however, few of the texts had been printed or distributed to the provinces.41 A final dimension of the crisis of quality was the learning capacity of the nation’s students. Many were suffering from either malnutrition or diseases, especially malaria, that they had contracted during the previous years. Others continued to move about the country looking for missing relatives they had lost under the Khmer Rouge. Coupled with these concerns, many students lacked basic shelter and clothing. UNICEF’s consultant observed, for example, that some children at a school in Svay Rieng were attending school “completely naked.” 42 The crisis of orientation stemmed from the conflict between the system’s goals and structure on the one hand and its European-oriented academic curriculum on the other. The regime’s primary goal for the education system was to create a socialist society in Cambodia. Ensconced within the broad goal of creating a socialist political economy through education were more acute considerations of “Khmerization,” “ruralization,” and “cultural identity,” all of which were expressly stated by the Ministry of Education.43 The leaders of the PRK, in concert with their Vietnamese advisers,

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firmly believed that the education system would serve to build or construct and also legitimize the post-DK socialist state in Cambodia. Quite simply, the educational curriculum did not reflect the goals underlying this belief. UNICEF’s consultant observed in 1980 that with the exception of manual work and practical activities, the curriculum was “rather classical” in nature. He also noted the problem of reflecting educational policies such as Khmerization, ruralization, and cultural identity within “appropriate educational structures, content and media.” This problem, commented the consultant, was “gradually being considered by educational authorities.” 44 If only he were correct. Questions of educational structures, content, and media had already been hastily considered and resolved by the administration. A former official, intimately connected with the early reconstruction of the system, remembered that the process began with two tasks. “First, we needed to recruit people from everywhere and second, we needed a structure.” The Vietnamese experts provided the structure. Cambodian officials “did the curriculum,” he remembered, “but only with the approval of the Vietnamese experts.” 45 The only resource available to the Cambodians charged with curriculum development was their prerevolutionary educational experiences. The process was not as simple as the ministerial official described. A former official at the program writing and textbook center remembered much turmoil in the center after its inception. “The center was the largest department in the ministry,” he recalled, with “many officers [who] worked for the Lon Nol government and were from the Sangkum period.” There were few revolutionaries at the center, he said. As such, “many people did not agree with the new history. Others did not like Marxism or Lenin.” There was much disagreement, with several officers leaving and fleeing to Thailand.46 The conflict over ideals was eventually won by neither the revolutionary nor the prerevolutionary faction of the center. Led by the Vietnamese, who one former textbook author remembered as the “big bosses” of the center, the revolutionary history syllabus, revolutionary morality syllabus, and the emphasis on practical activities, were all quickly ratified as policy.47 In all other curriculum areas, and in the pedagogical methods adopted, it was prerevolutionary educational ideas that prevailed. While the ministry, with difficulty, could manage the goals of Khmerization and promoting Khmer cultural identity, both ruralization and the creation of the “new socialist man” represented a problem. A former

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ministerial official vividly recalled: “when we saw the word ruralization in the policy, we just put one hand over our eyes and read the next word.” Officials were aware of the policy, he remembers, but “didn’t know how to implement it.” Creating the “new socialist man” was the same. “Many people did not understand it and many people did not trust it.” 48 In addition to the problems of quality, the crisis was a product of the regime’s failure to consider a more relevant, rurally oriented school curriculum. To be fair, the country was without resources and was being ignored by the international community, which may have been able to provide alternative ideas. As such, the educational leaders of the PRK had few choices but to draw on their past experiences in reconstructing the education system. It was, however, their embrace of substantial elements of the “classical” former French-oriented education system that was to prove the greatest impediment to improving the relevance and the quality of education. Two issues are particularly significant. First, the French model as it had existed under Prince Sihanouk and then Lon Nol carried with it in the eyes of the people considerable baggage. Primarily, it was encumbered by a perception that graduates of the education system would be able to assume posts in the civil service. Employment in rural production, in the eyes of those who were educated, was inevitably devalued. Second, the French-imbued system would prove to be a difficult model through which the government could build socialism by their stated aim of “linking study to practice, school to productive labor, school to society.” 49 The crisis of timing resulted from the new regime’s steadfast and speedy attempts to legitimize its authority. Cambodia in 1979 and 1980 was a tormented and traumatized country, without adequate food, with infrastructure in ruins, with the family unit significantly undermined, and with a government that was continuing its struggle to wrest control of outlying areas still under virtual Khmer Rouge control. Despite the torment and the trauma, the rehabilitation of the national education system was pursued by the new regime with unbridled vigor and unbridled Vietnamese encouragement and support. The vexing question then becomes why was educational rehabilitation pursued with such vigor, given that other social policy sectors, including the national health system, were in a state equally as dire as education? Essentially, education was seen as the primary tool for state-building and establishing legitimacy. The rehabilitation of education, while it had humanitarian motives, was a massive exercise in hegemony, an

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attempt to rapidly diffuse among the masses the regime’s socialist worldview. With the damage done to the socialist cause by the DK period, it was a task of paramount importance if the regime was to be perceived as legitimate in the eyes of the people.

1981– 1985: Internal Legitimacy, External Rejection In September 1979, the Heng Samrin regime was denied the Cambodian seat at the UN. Instead, the right to represent the Cambodian people was granted to the government of DK, despite universal horror at the tragedy it had inflicted over the previous four years. The decision was not born out of a desire to represent the needs of the country. Rather, it was the result of several regional and international geopolitical imperatives. The ASEAN states had wanted to punish the Vietnamese for their December 1978 invasion; China was hoping to “bleed” Vietnamese resources by promoting a continuation of the Cambodian conflict; the United States was concerned about an increasing Soviet presence in Southeast Asia; while Vietnam was reluctant to negotiate while ever they considered the Chinese were attempting to secure greater influence in the region. On the Cambodian stage, the geopolitical drama was played out in two ways. First, the United States, China, and the ASEAN states, especially Thailand, financed, supported, and sponsored the Cambodian resistance forces: the Khmer Rouge; FUNCINPEC, a royalist resistance movement led by the indefatigable Norodom Sihanouk; and a republican resistance movement, the KPNLF, led by the former Sangkum-era prime minister, Son Sann.50 Second, the international community punished both Cambodia and Vietnam by denying them development assistance. The drama reached its peak in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in June 1982, when the Khmer Rouge, FUNCINPEC, and the KPNLF came together in a shotgun alliance to form the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK). The aim of the alliance was to liberate Cambodia from Vietnamese occupation. The CGDK would hold the Cambodian seat at the UN General Assembly for the remainder of the decade.51 In Phnom Penh, meanwhile, the PRK regime continued the task of rehabilitating social, economic, and political life in Cambodia. By 1981, the regime considered its legitimacy and control strong enough to promulgate a national constitution, hold national elections, and announce the formation of a Communist government under the control of the

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Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party (KPRP). The story of education following the initial crisis of 1979 –1980 was one of consolidation in the face of the considerable difficulties imposed by the international embargo and the less significant impediment engendered by the resistance forces. It was also the story of the PRK regime’s continued attempts to create good socialist citizens in Cambodia.

Education: Quantity, Quality, and Good Citizens The PRK’s initial educational problems persisted through 1981. In a follow-up to his report of February 1980, UNICEF’s consultant returned to Cambodia in October 1981. He remarked that the progress made in education, “if measured in quantitative terms, has been exceptional.” 52 The crisis of quality was, however, no less severe than it had been twenty months before. The concerns raised by the balancing act between improving educational quality and expanding educational services were to remain a critical theme for the next several years. A second theme was the revival, with Vietnamese and Soviet support, of the higher education system, and the continued development of a national system of adult literacy education. Central to these themes was the regime’s attempts to build a socialist state through the development of education. The growth of the education system during the first two years of the PRK, although not surprising, was more accelerated than at any other time since independence in 1953 (see Table 2). Given the state of the nation in January 1979, the statistics were a credit to the dedicated administrators who sought to rebuild the Cambodian education system. The impressive picture is significantly distorted, however. As was the case in Cambodia and its developing world counterparts throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the educational expansion pursued by the PRK regime was achieved at the crucial expense of educational quality. Following visits to schools in Phnom Penh and Kandal and Kompong Speu provinces, the UNICEF consultant’s observations of educational quality in 1981 mirrored those of his first visit. At the Lycée Phnom Daun Penh (formerly the Lycée Sisowath), Cambodia’s premier educational institution, there were “no textbooks available to students” and there was a lack of “basic pedagogical materials.” Throughout Phnom Penh, there was a lack of classrooms, textbooks, and workshop and laboratory facilities and an insufficient supply of basic stationery materials. The situation in the provinces of Kandal and Kompong Speu was no better, with a lack of classrooms and teaching materials, especially textbooks, representing the most critical problems. Overwhelmed by the

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Table 2. Quantitative Growth in Education, by Level, 1979 –1980 to 1980 –1981. School Year 1979 –1980

School Year 1980 –1981

Growth Rate (%)

Primary (Grades 1– 4) Schools Classes Pupils Staff

5,290 17,761 947,317 21,605

4,334 27,217 1,328,053 30,316

⫺18 53 40 40

Colleges (Grades 5–7) Schools Classes Pupils Staff

14 101 5,104 206

62 394 17,331 671

343 290 240 226

1 7 301 20

2 15 555 28

100 100 84 40

Level of Education

Lycée (Grades 8 –10) Schools Classes Pupils Staff Source: H. Reiff (1981), Annex V, p. 10.

number of students enrolling in both primary and secondary schools, the regime was unable to divert resources to the training and retraining of school teachers, leaving the caliber of classroom instruction at a deplorably low standard.53 The crisis of quality was aggravated as the administration turned its attention toward the development of higher education and adult literacy education. Both were promoted with the significant support and assistance of Vietnamese advisers and staff. In the case of higher education, Soviet support was also influential. As with primary and secondary education, the haste with which the new regime attempted to develop higher and adult education was a function of its desire to create a new socialist society. The rehabilitation of higher education began in early 1979, when plans were set in motion for the reopening of the Faculty of Medicine. This was eventually celebrated on December 12, 1979. In July 1980, the Teachers’ Training College was opened, followed by the Institute of Languages and Tuok Thla Professional Training Center in February

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1981, the Khmer-Soviet Friendship Higher Technical Institute in September 1981, the Economics Institute in September 1984, and the Chamcar Daung Agricultural Institute in January 1985. The new regime was particularly concerned with the rehabilitation of higher education, as it was regarded as a solution to the country’s chronic shortage of technicians and leaders in “economics, politics and culture.” 54 Its primary importance, however, was in the promotion of socialism. A KPRP Central Committee decision noted the “the main objective of higher and technical education is to provide good political training and good technical training.” Good political training, it went on, should be “concerned with serving and protecting the nation leading to the socialist way and following the objectives of socialism.” 55 Without the capacity to administer higher education, the PRK relied almost exclusively on Vietnamese and Soviet support. In so doing, the policy of the “Khmerization” of tertiary education, although addressed by the administration, was practically abandoned. By the mid-1980s, Vietnamese and Russian were the dominant languages of instruction in those tertiary faculties where there was no adequately trained or qualified Khmer staff.56 The PRK’s adult literacy program was adopted by the People’s Revolutionary Council on June 19, 1980, which was declared the National Day of Struggle against Illiteracy. The broad objective of the program, the “liquidation of illiteration,” was a laudable one. While the regime’s claim that 1,025,794 people had been left illiterate by Cambodia’s former regimes, especially “the genocidal Pol Pot-Ieng Sary régime,” cannot be verified, there is little doubt that the legacy of civil war and destruction since 1970 had left a significant literacy problem among Cambodia’s young adult population. Even more so than the development of primary, secondary, and higher education, the regime’s adult literacy program was an explicit exercise in diffusing socialism. Arguing that the literacy plan was “necessary and urgent” in the struggle against “enemies” (who were not specified), the regime associated participation in the program with “patriotism” and “love of the fatherland.” 57 If Paul Quinn-Judge’s observations of an adult literacy class in Kompong Cham province in June 1980 are any indication, we can reasonably question how much was actually learned at these schools. The class observed by Quinn-Judge was held in a school building, its “musty smell” a legacy of its use as a “grain store” during the Khmer Rouge period. The classroom had no electricity, its fifty students relying for light on small oil lamps made out of ink bottles.58 Koy Nong, an English teacher in

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Phnom Penh and a former instructor in the literacy program in his native Kratie province during 1984 and 1985, corroborated these observations. The program was “poor,” he said, concluding that the “conditions were very bad” and “students did not learn very [much] in the classes.” 59 UNICEF’s consultant to Cambodia reported in 1981 that “government priorities in the education sector are gradually shifting from quantitative expansion to qualitative improvements.” 60 Except in relation to attempts to improve the quality of teachers, there is very little evidence to support this claim. Contrary to its educational priorities, the regime’s political priorities were given precedence. These political priorities relied explicitly on the expansion of educational provision. A former official, who played a significant role in the policy development process throughout the 1980s, believed that in its attempt to achieve “universal school enrollment,” the ministry neglected questions of educational quality. “Quality was a long-term project,” he asserted. “At that time, we were concerned only with enrollment.” Importantly, the “Vietnamese were too.” Providing a socialist education for everyone was “a government ‘number one’ priority.” 61 The former official was unable, or perhaps unwilling, to account for the motivation behind the regime’s emphasis on the quantitative expansion of the education system. It is abundantly clear, however, that legitimizing its socialist state was at its core. In its statement of educational goals and needs for 1980/1981, the ministry demonstrated an awareness of the crisis of quality, noting that maintaining quality in education was “a serious problem.” 62 Despite an awareness of the problem, and despite a policy emphasis on improvements in educational quality, it continued to base the project of building a new socialist society on the rapid expansion of educational provision. The project, as the years that followed were to unquestionably demonstrate, was a failure.

1985 – 1988: The Winds of Change The “Kampuchean problem” continued to represent a most important foreign policy issue in Southeast Asia during the 1980s. The CGDK, led by Prince Sihanouk, dominated by the Khmer Rouge, and funded by the United States, ASEAN, and China, continued to represent Cambodia at the UN and continued its attempts to disrupt the Vietnamese-backed socialist government in Phnom Penh. With Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascendancy in the USSR throughout the 1980s, Soviet support for the Vietnamese regime, and therefore Cambodia, began to wane. As pressure

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mounted for a reconciliation between Vietnam and ASEAN, the winds of regional change increasingly affected the Cambodian climate. Although still occasionally a theme in the rhetoric of the PRK regime, by 1989 socialism was all but a faded memory on the Cambodian political and economic landscape. The education system again became a victim of shifting state priorities and a renewed Cambodian state ideology. The reorientation of the Cambodian state was evident as early as 1985. The first signs of the shift had come before the KPRP’s Fifth Party Congress. After the surprise death of Prime Minister Chan Si in December 1984, Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge officer and the foreign minister of the PRK, was elected as his replacement. The election was significant in that it reinforced a shift away from the party’s Hanoi veterans in favor of younger KPRP members, former DK officials, and those who were without revolutionary backgrounds. While the party’s allegiance to the Vietnamese had not and would not diminish, the shift signaled an increasing confidence by the Cambodian Communist movement in its capacity to independently govern Cambodia. It was a confidence embodied by the nonrevolutionary PRK Minister of Education Pen Navuth, who had told a French visitor to Cambodia in 1983 that “we can fend for ourselves.” 63 The most significant shift in the orientation of the PRK came at the KPRP’s Fifth Party Congress in October 1985. The president of the party, Heng Samrin, announced in his political report that, for the first time since 1979, “in order to mitigate the weaknesses of the state sector,” the party would recognize private enterprise as a legitimate sector of the economy. In effect, the move merely legitimized what had been the status quo since 1979, with acute observers recognizing that a private sector had been operating in Cambodia since the overthrow of the DK regime.64 The announcement represented the first official recognition that the task of building socialism in Cambodia was not achieving the success anticipated by the government or its Vietnamese patrons. It was a failure caused by a lack of competent cadres, a lack of cadres who believed in the system, and a lack of cooperation from the Cambodian peasantry.65 In short, the goal of building socialism lacked legitimacy. Despite what seemed a recognition that the building of a socialist state was failing, the PRK’s rhetoric, although cautious, was nonetheless defiant. Heng Samrin, in his speech at the Fifth Party Congress, called for “making every effort to complete economic restoration, reorganize production, and build socialist education and culture.” He also emphasized that the state “must gradually build a national economy with socialist norms.” Samrin’s report conceded the existence of several problems in

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building socialism, including a “thin and weak” organizational system that was “incomplete at district and especially at grass-roots level.” 66 A sympathetic observer of the PRK argued that the report indicated a “clear implicit recognition” that the weaknesses of the party “derive from general apathy to socialist goals among the mass of the population.” 67 Following the lead of Samrin, there was both defiance and caution in relation to education. In a report to a conference of Ministers of Education of Socialist Countries in November 1985, Pen Navuth declared that the essential objective of education was to “form new and good hard-working citizens with a baggage of culture, of technical awareness, of a capacity for work, of good health and of a revolutionary morality ready to serve the Kampuchean revolution.” This self-assurance was tempered, however, in noting that the apprehension of the population and distrust of Cambodia’s Vietnamese neighbors were both “problems our schools were compelled to face.” 68 The education system, as it had through other periods of social transition in Cambodia’s history, was left to struggle with the prospect of adjustment in a vacuum of irrelevance. While the state ideology of the PRK, both in economic and political terms, continued to promote Cambodia’s alignment with the Soviet-led socialist bloc and continued to reject capitalism, the movement toward a more capitalist economic orientation had gathered substantial momentum. The crisis in education crisis had taken another turn, again a product of the ruling regime’s efforts to build a Cambodian state. The contradiction between explicit socialist rhetoric and an “unsocialist” economic orientation saw the education system perceived as increasingly irrelevant by its users. Chea Saron, a former student of the Lycée Phnom Daun Penh, recalled learning about “socialist economic theory,” about “socialist solidarity,” and about “Marxism and Leninism” during his senior high school years. Saron, who believed that “socialism could not work in Cambodia,” recalled his lack of interest, and that of his peers, in classes that examined or discussed the socialist cause. “We studied [these subjects] because we had no choice.” Nobody was interested in socialism, Saron asserted, but it was a necessity for students who aspired to higher education. “I remember writing in my exam: ‘The Mekong river will dry up and the mountains will be crushed before solidarity between the Kampucheans and Vietnamese disappears.’ But I did not believe it.” 69 The contradiction was also evident in relation to the study of foreign languages. Officially, the study of English and French was illegal in the PRK. Both were rejected by the regime as vestiges of imperialism. Stu-

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dents were encouraged to study Vietnamese, Russian, German, and Spanish, while opportunities for higher education abroad were provided in the Soviet Union, Vietnam, East Germany, and Cuba.70 Despite the orientation toward these languages of the socialist world, students continued to prize a knowledge of both English and French, and a flourishing private industry emerged in Phnom Penh and other provincial centers catering to the increasing demand for languages the ruling regime was unwilling, and to be fair, unable to provide.71 The students’ perception of irrelevance was not the education system’s only problem. While the extraordinary school enrollment expansion of the first years of the decade had appeared to stabilize and marked improvements had been achieved, the crisis of quality continued to concern education policy-makers. The supply of school textbooks, supplies of basic stationery materials, and educational infrastructure all remained inadequate.72 Contributing to the crisis of quality was Cambodia’s continued international isolation, with the government still denied sorely needed development assistance. The major obstacle to improving educational quality in Cambodia remained the nation’s teaching corps, who were very poorly trained and poorly remunerated. Provincial teacher training facilities, where future primary school teachers were trained, were staffed by teachers whose credentials should have often failed to gain them employment as the teachers they were charged with training. Secondary teacher trainers were recycled teachers without the training, experience, or knowledge necessary to prepare future educators. In higher education, lecturers were generally either Vietnamese or Russian nationals who were poorly understood by their students, or were Cambodians who had been promoted from senior secondary school teaching, and who were without either a background in research or experience in the delivery of tertiary education. Lacking experience, poorly trained, and led by a ministry that was lacking the credentials to adequately administer the system, the national teaching corps was ill-prepared to cope with the clouds of change whose rains were about to flood the Cambodian countryside.

1989 – 1991: Abandoning the Past In 1987, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen met for the first time with Prince Norodom Sihanouk. The prince had spent the previous eight years oscillating between his demand for the Vietnamese to fully withdraw from Cambodia and his frequent disagreements with his CGDK coalition partners, the Khmer Rouge, and Son San’s KPNLF.

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The dialogue between Hun Sen and his predecessor did not come about in isolation. As with many significant developments in the melody that is Cambodia’s postwar history, the score was orchestrated by larger powers. Moves toward an improvement in Sino-Soviet relations saw Chinese support for the Khmer Rouge decrease and resulted in a diminished Soviet concern with the Vietnamese. These factors, combined with ASEAN pressure for a comprehensive political settlement of the “Kampuchean problem” and Vietnamese tiredness of their role in Cambodia, resulted in a crescendo that was to climax with the historic meeting between the two rivals. Little was achieved in either the first or subsequent meetings between Sihanouk and Hun Sen. However, the ongoing dialogue, considered a first step in bringing about a peaceful solution to the Cambodian conflict, had been established.73 By 1989, the political and economic landscape of the PRK had shifted considerably. International leaders and the international media focused their attention almost exclusively on the various initiatives proffered in order to bring an end to the Cambodian conflict. Meanwhile, in Phnom Penh, significant domestic changes, related to those in the international arena, were taking place. First, the PRK regime became increasingly less reliant, both politically and militarily, on Vietnam. Second, with the shifting priorities of the Soviet Union, its economic assistance to the Indochinese states was decreasing. Finally, in light of these two factors, the KPRP, through a program of economic liberalization, effectively sought to reconstruct the Cambodian state. These factors constitute the underlying motifs of the remaining years of Communist party rule in Cambodia. A central theme was the gulf between the ideology of Cambodia’s ruling KPRP on the one hand and its reoriented state ideology on the other. A second theme of the period was Cambodia’s continued international isolation. The isolation had been heightened by the drying up of Eastern bloc assistance since the collapse of the Soviet Union. A final theme was the nation’s political limbo, as the “peace process” frequently fluctuated back and forth between unbridled hope, when settlement seemed near, and bitter disappointment, when it appeared increasingly unlikely. These themes are taken up in considering the crisis in education. With Cambodia’s leaders attempting to promulgate an alternative and radically different state ideology from that which they had pursued over the previous ten years, the education system struggled to contend with its purpose in the new society. The final three years of KPRP rule in Cambodia were characterized by the widening divide between the

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party’s socialist aims and objectives for the education system, and the reality of a state that was increasingly embracing capitalist ideals.

Socialism Abandoned In April 1989, during an extraordinary session of the PRK National Assembly, members adopted a raft of amendments to the constitution. The reforms, which enjoyed popular support, included reinstating Buddhism as the state religion and abolishing the death penalty. More cosmetic changes were made to improve the image of the regime overseas. These included changing the name of the country to the State of Cambodia (SOC), amending the national flag, and changing sections of the national anthem. The most significant and the most popular amendments were those pertaining to economic life in Cambodia. A “mixed economy” sector, providing an avenue for joint ventures between the state and private enterprise, and the right to “own, use, bequeath and inherit land” were both introduced. The changes not only undermined the socialist orientation of the regime but also placed Cambodia firmly on the path to capitalism. The constitutional amendments were followed in September 1989 by the complete withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia and therefore a further assertion of Cambodian independence. Despite the changes, at the end of 1989 the mood in Cambodia descended from high expectation to be a somber one. The breakdown of peace talks in Paris had been a significant setback for those hoping to end the ongoing conflict. The economy meanwhile, showed few signs of benefiting from the government’s program of economic liberalization. Without the financial backing of the Eastern bloc, the SOC was left with few alternatives other than to pursue its current course. This it did over the following years, becoming increasingly capitalist in its economic orientation and increasingly accessible to the Western world. The education system became caught between the past and the present. Sitting in the nation’s generally dilapidated classrooms, Cambodia’s students witnessed a confused pattern of change and continuity in light of the transition to the SOC. The promotion of symbols of the state, used by the regime to project a particular view of the world, typified this confusion. In many schools a new flag took its place aloft the pole that was generally located at the center of the school grounds. Other schools continued to use the flag of the PRK. Inside many classrooms, above the blackboard, there continued to hang pictures of Heng Samrin, the president of the KPRP, Stalin, and occasionally the founder of the Vietnamese

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Communist movement, Ho Chi Minh. In other classrooms, Ho Chi Minh and Stalin were removed with the departure of the Vietnamese. A former student captured the confusion: “We stood at the morning assembly and faced the flag of [the] People’s Republic and we sang the anthem of the State [of] Cambodia. It was a silly time.” 74 Students who sat for their final-year political education matriculation examinations in 1990 were presented with a set of values reminiscent of those of the SOC’s PRK predecessor, which certainly were not in congruence with the new orientation of the state.75 The examination text provides salient evidence that the core values of the educational curriculum of the SOC continued to reflect the status quo of the PRK era, promoting the virtues of Marxism-Leninism and the view that education should turn “students and pupils into new [socialist] workers.” 76 The examination text asserted that the party “strictly follows scientific MarxismLeninism,” clearly contradicting the emphasis on private property rights that characterized the 1989 constitutional amendments. Contradictions between state ideology and the inherent values of the curriculum are manifested in reference to the role of the front, the “defense” and “construction” of the country, labor, and the state of the Cambodian revolution.77 While the curriculum failed to keep abreast of the significant social changes in Cambodia in 1989, the organizational structure of the ministry appeared to be shifting with the sands of the new tide. The 1991 State Plan, for instance, reflected the reorientation of the state promulgated by the National Assembly in 1989, addressing both the private sector and international assistance. The State Plan called on the education ministry to “strongly stimulate in opening more private kindergartens and gradually reduce the state sector.” The directive was coupled with another in relation to higher education that called on the ministry to “open the door to have relation [sic] with international institutions in order to get assistance for the development of education.” 78 The plan, in contradiction to values promoted in the school curriculum, advocated a break with past practices, signaling a more capitalist planning structure and a move toward the capitalist nations of the Western world. In combination with a Council of Ministers decision of 1989 that repealed the ban on the learning of French and English, the State Plan bore little resemblance or similarity to the socialist ideology of the ruling KPRP, to the ideals they had promoted over the past decade, or to the examination paper completed by prospective higher education students only months before.

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The final report of Cambodia’s National Conference on Education for All represents the last significant education statement of the State of Cambodia. It also represents Cambodian education’s debut before an international audience, ending almost thirteen years of international isolation. The conference was held less than a month after the SOC and its three resistance rivals had agreed, in principle, to a comprehensive UN-sponsored political settlement of the Cambodian crisis. It was also held less than two months before the official signing of the Paris Peace Agreements in October 1991 and before the formal abandonment of Communism by the KPRP, which was renamed the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP).79 It is within the context of these momentous events that the report must be considered. Those students who had been accepted into Cambodian higher education institutions for the 1990/1991 academic year had done so partially on account of their capacity to demonstrate an understanding of the Marxist-Leninist orientation of the KPRP in their political education examination. By the beginning of the 1991/1992 school year, however, all references to the socialist orientation of the Cambodian state had been abandoned. In their speeches before the Education for All conference, both the minister of education, Yus Son, and the prime minister, Hun Sen, addressed the policies adopted by the PRK government in order to rebuild the education system after the DK period. The most discernible feature of both speeches is what the two leaders failed to address. Marxism and Leninism, arguably the cornerstone of the rebuilding effort, were not mentioned. Gone too, were references to creating a new socialist man and to constructing and defending the fatherland. Instead, Hun Sen addressed the “need to lighten the government’s burden, together with the assistance of international organizations, and to permit the opening of private schools.” There is a recognition of the “need to make urgent reform of the curriculum of general education at all levels,” to “improve teacher competencies,” and to strengthen educational quality and the management capacity of the ministry.80

The Crisis in Education: Evaluating the PRK /SOC The PRK did not create a crisis in education. It inherited one. When it was installed by the Vietnamese as the government of Cambodia, the PRK was confronted with an educational chaos that is arguably unparalleled in modern history. This chaos, the legacy of both a civil war and the DK period, is a fundamental factor in considering the educational

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crisis of the period. A second factor, heightening the chaos, was Cambodia’s international isolation, resulting in the country being denied desperately needed development assistance. Though they cannot be blamed for creating an educational crisis, the leaders of the PRK, and later the SOC, were guilty of sustaining one. The post-DK regime’s attempt to reconstruct the nation-state through unchecked educational expansion spawned the crises of quality, orientation, and timing, which were hallmarks of the period. In this respect, the crisis in education was a predominately Cambodian project (with Vietnamese influence and compliance), whose central cause, as with the periods of the past, was the PRK /SOC regime’s approach to legitimizing and constructing a nation-state that reflected its ideological orientation and agenda. As with the regime of Prince Sihanouk in the 1960s, the number one educational priority of the PRK regime upon being installed into power in Phnom Penh in 1979 was rapid educational expansion. Despite a paucity of resources and materials, dilapidated infrastructure, and a virtually nonexistent teaching corps, and despite continued fighting in the countryside, the regime embarked on an inauguration frenzy, reopening primary, secondary, higher, and adult education within its first twelve months of governance. Over subsequent years, without these initial qualitative problems being rectified, the regime continued to boast of increased educational enrollments. The overwhelming concern of the Cambodian administration in pursuing this program of rapid expansion was to diffuse its socialist ideology among the entire population. The leaders of the PRK, in concert with their Vietnamese advisers, sought to build socialism in Cambodia by creating “new socialist men” through education. With educational expansion given priority over qualitative progress or improvement, the seed for the growth of a sustained crisis in education had been sowed. A second factor in the relationship between the regime’s attempts at state formation and the crisis in education was the ideological orientation underlying the KPRP’s state-building project. With the nightmares of DK as an enduring backdrop, the Cambodian people were largely unwilling to embrace the socialist ideals of their leaders. The educational agenda of the regime was, therefore, undermined by a general lack of interest by students in learning about Marxism-Leninism, socialist theory, or socialist economic principles. Further, it was undermined by a lack of specialized knowledge and enthusiasm among many of those charged with promoting the socialist worldview. The result of the edu-

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cation ministry’s incapacity to adequately enshrine socialist principles in school curricula was an educational setting that continued to resemble, in many respects, the allegedly “reactionary” pre-DK system it was supposed to replace. The final dimension of the crisis in education was the failure of education to keep abreast of and adjust to the reorientation of the Cambodian state. The leaders of the PRK were not encumbered by the legacy of the state structures and ideology of the DK regime, with the former nonexistent and the latter universally deplored by the Cambodian people. They were, however, forced to contend with both the political and the French-imbued educational culture of the regimes that preceded the rule of Pol Pot. In this regard, in order to effectively diffuse its view of the world, the KPRP was required to effect a shift in Cambodia’s educational culture, emphasizing the relationship between study and work and deemphasizing the liberal-academic mind-set that had fueled aspirations of social mobility among students during the Sihanouk and Lon Nol regimes. Largely reliant on the remaining bureaucrats of the regimes they were intending to supplant, the PRK failed to achieve this crucial cultural shift. The failure to replace the cultural values of the previous regimes with a socialist alternative was exacerbated when the regime attempted to reorient the underlying ideology of the Cambodian state in 1989. At this time not only did the regime require a further shift in educational thought but it was obliged to reform the educational curriculum it had been promoting over the previous ten years and to reorient both the nature of classroom instruction and school texts that had supported that curriculum. It was within this climate of social change and adjustment, with education struggling to contend with its purpose, that the peace agreements, which were intended to bring about a political settlement to the Cambodian conflict, were signed. The agreements provided the political watershed that saw the arrival, en masse, of the international community into Cambodia. The Cambodian state, development, and the education system, carrying with them the baggage of past practices and tradition, were to turn another sharp corner.

Ranariddh and Hun Sen From Uneasy Alliance to Coup On July 5, 1997, Cambodia’s second prime minister, Hun Sen, appeared on national television dressed in military fatigues. With none of his usual flamboyance, he calmly read a statement in which he accused his counterpart, First Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh, and other officials from Prince Ranariddh’s National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful, and Cooperative Cambodia (FUNCINPEC) party, of illegal acts that were “dangerous to the nation.” Hours later, bullets began to fly as troops aligned with Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) attempted to forcibly disarm those troops and security personnel aligned to FUNCINPEC. Within two days, Hun Sen was in control of Phnom Penh; his coup had been successful.1 On July 10, the second prime minister was again before the cameras, explaining that the coup wasn’t really a coup, and that he was merely acting to prevent anarchy. To astute observers, Hun Sen’s coup came as no surprise, merely finalizing the deterioration in relations between the two major parties that had formed Cambodia’s coalition government following UN-sponsored elections in 1993. The days and weeks that followed the coup were as much a farce as they were a tragedy. Ranariddh, in France at the time he was ousted, was threatened with arrest if he attempted to return to Cambodia. In order to maintain a semblance of normalcy and the illusion of a FUNCINPEC-CPP coalition, Hun Sen rounded up those members of FUNCINPEC who had not fled the country and announced that Foreign Minister Ung Huot, a former minister of education, would assume the position of first prime minister. Human

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rights groups and sympathetic nongovernment organizations (NGO), meanwhile, sheltered those who were afraid for their lives. Their fears were not without good reason; at least forty FUNCINPEC officials, including General Chao Samboth and Secretary of State for the Interior Ho Sok had been executed. Apart from providing a striking testament to the failures of the UN’s expensive Cambodian operation, the coup also quite explicitly demonstrated the absolute power enjoyed by Hun Sen over the institutions of the Cambodian state. It is a power that reinforced the sense of déjà vu that permeated Cambodian social and political life after the country again became a kingdom in 1993. For many long-time observers, Hun Sen’s apparent paranoia, his continuous and all-pervading presence in the media, monumental speeches, uncanny ability to find scapegoats for his country’s ills, and capacity to eliminate his political opponents, were an acute reminder of years when Sihanouk was the undisputed captain of the Cambodian boat. Continuities aside, there also existed fundamental differences between the Cambodia that entered the 1990s and that of the immediate postindependence years. A first distinction between the periods was in the legacy of the past they inherited. While their predecessors inherited from the French a negligibly developed political and economic infrastructure, Cambodia’s leaders following UN intervention were forced to contend with an infrastructure whose fabric had been repeatedly reconstituted and often destroyed since 1970 and whose status, in terms of key development indicators, had plummeted in comparison to its counterparts in the developing world.2 A second distinction was that the Cold War had ended, and therefore Cambodia’s political allegiances, and the ideological orientation associated with those allegiances, were no longer a consideration. A final distinction, related to the second, was that Cambodia was faced with a world in which globalization, especially in terms of economic integration, was a fundamental concern and in which national development was—and continues to be—almost universally regarded as a celebration of capitalism. Within the context of this climate of political instability, continuities and discontinuities, and globalization, the central concern of this chapter is the extent to which those charged with the development of Cambodian education learned from past policies and practices. The key question is if the mistakes of the previous forty years were repeated. The evidence, sadly, shows overwhelmingly that the optimism generated by the unparalleled international intervention in Cambodia was un-

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founded, pointing to an educational crisis that overshadows, with the obvious exception of the Khmer Rouge period, those of the past. The basis for Cambodian and international optimism, and the manner in which that optimism unraveled—shifting from a sense of hope to one of despair—is the focus of this chapter, which capitalizes on a range of sources more comprehensive than was available for the periods discussed in previous chapters. A first theme to characterize the postelection period was the confused nature of state-making that followed the UN’s intervention. On one count, state-making was, until only hours before the coup of July 1997, characterized by the tension between the nation’s copremiers and their respective political parties. Each regarded the post-UN political period as one of transition, hoping to wrest total control of the state apparatuses. With this in mind, each was attempting to secure the legitimacy of his leadership and his party while attempting to discredit the credentials of their opponents. Essentially, before Hun Sen’s military subjugation of Ranariddh’s party (FUNCINPEC), two states were being made within the same apparatuses. On a second count, state-making continued to demonstrate an irreconcilable fusion and enmeshment of modern institutions with traditional behaviors. Cambodia’s official embrace of modern political institutions and a modern, developmentoriented state ideology were sharply at odds with a firmly reasserted and entrenched traditional political culture. It was within this environment, where national leadership was almost exclusively equated with securing and maintaining power, that the education system functioned. A second theme, a reflection of the past, was that of form over substance and politics over policy. An official concern of the Cambodian government, and the source for great optimism in the aftermath of the UN-sponsored elections, was the improvement of the quality and relevance of education. In a similar vein to Cambodian regimes of the past, however, there is ample evidence demonstrating that the goals, objectives, and policies of the Ministry of Education were often abandoned in the name of the immediate political priorities of those with higher authority than the policy-makers. The result was an obvious failure to improve the quality and relevance of education. A final theme was the government’s lack of commitment to its agreements with the international donor community. These agreements, arising from the internationally-sponsored peace settlement in Cambodia, were designed with Cambodia’s capacity to participate in the global community as a key concern. A willingness on the part of the coalition

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government to cast aside these agreements, often for reasons of immediate political expediency, has not only served to damage short-term educational prospects but has had an alarming effect on the government’s capacity to continue to secure large amounts of development assistance in the medium to long term.

“Free and Fair” Elections: A Platform for Change? The political climate in Cambodia following the 1993 elections was a function of the conditions it had succeeded: Angkorean power, rule by a monarch, colonialism, civil war, genocide, Vietnamese occupation, and the Cold War. Primarily, the climate was a product of the failings of the Paris Peace Agreements of October 1991,3 the signing of which led to the establishment of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), the 1993 elections, and, in turn, the coalition administration led by Ranariddh and Hun Sen. In order to understand the nature of the post-1993 political climate, an understanding of the agreements and the period of UN intervention that they heralded is essential. The agreements, signed by Cambodia’s four warring factions in October 1991,4 were the culmination of negotiations that had been ongoing since 1988. They could be traced to a plan that called for the establishment of an international control mechanism that would temporarily rule Cambodia while preparations were made for elections to be conducted.5 The purpose of the period of temporary international rule, which the agreements eventually enshrined, was to create a neutral political environment that would facilitate the conduct of “free and fair” elections in Cambodia. Following these, a Constituent Assembly could be elected, a government formed, and a new constitution, following “a system of liberal democracy,” promulgated.6 Several elements of the agreements and their implementation are worthy of consideration. A first notable element, in terms of the agreements’ implementation, was the slow deployment that characterized the UN operation. Reflecting on the UN’s tardiness, one analyst noted that “although the transitional period began at the time the Paris Agreement was signed,” in Cambodia “there was no sign of UNTAC.” 7 UNTAC’s predecessor, the United Nations Advance Mission in Cambodia (UNAMIC)—itself an afterthought hampered by poor and inadequate planning, slow deployment, and a limited mandate—was finally merged with UNTAC in midMarch 1992, more than five months after the agreements had been signed. It was not until September 1992, however, that UNTAC was fully

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operational. For Cambodia’s factions, the delay resulted in increased violations of a very fragile cease-fire agreement. While waiting for the UN to shift the arena of confrontation from the battlefield to the ballot box, the factions had attempted, according to the Far Eastern Economic Review’s Cambodia specialist, Nate Thayer, to fill Cambodia’s power vacuum “in the only way they know how—by resuming their struggle for control of the exhausted country.” 8 A second element of the agreements worthy of consideration was the fact that Cambodia’s warring factions had few options but to agree to them. With a shattered state, no money, few remaining foreign supporters, and with the permanent five members of the UN’s Security Council finally committed to a resolution of what had been the “Kampuchean problem,” the Khmer leaders came to the negotiating table with few realizable options. While it must be noted that the factions had significant input in the wording and complexion of the Paris Peace Agreements, one commentator quite accurately suggested that the factions were “unlikely candidates for national reconciliation” with “no common agenda for Cambodia.” 9 The outcome of both the continued power struggle and the fictitious reconciliation that underpinned the peace agreements was a lack of confidence in the UN operation (especially by the Khmer Rouge) and a marked deterioration in the level of mutual understanding between the agreements’ signatories, especially between the State of Cambodia (SOC) and the Khmer Rouge. In the end, although it was invested with extraordinary power in order to fulfill its mandate, UNTAC was unable to achieve its initial goal of cantoning, demobilizing, and disarming 70 percent of the military forces of the four factions and was therefore unable to create a neutral political environment suitable for the conduct of the elections. A third noteworthy element of the 1991 agreements was their provision for a separation of authority between the UN body (UNTAC), the existing SOC, and the Supreme National Council (SNC), a body presided over by Norodom Sihanouk, whose role was to “delegate to UNTAC all powers necessary to ensure the implementation of the comprehensive agreement.” 10 In theory, UNTAC’s mandate provided for “existing administrative structures” to be placed under the direct control or supervision of UNTAC in order to “ensure strict neutrality.” 11 The reality, however, was that “what UNTAC seemed to control, it usually did not.” Instead, the firmly entrenched SOC “simply administered around UNTAC,” 12 with one observer commenting that UNTAC staff “often faced . . . labyrinthine local administrations backed by all of the resources (police included) of the party-state.” 13

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A final noteworthy element of the Paris Peace Agreements was the Declaration on the Rehabilitation and Reconstruction of Cambodia. This final component of the agreements facilitated Cambodia’s return to the fold of development assistance from the Western world, particularly from multilateral and international financial institutions and from bilateral assistance arrangements. The declaration called for the “advancement of the Cambodian people” and “economic aid to benefit all areas of Cambodia.” 14 While it also stated that “no attempt should be made to impose a development strategy from any outside source,” Cambodia had little choice but to accept the imperatives of international donors. With virtually nothing—money, infrastructure, means of communication, or adequately skilled human resources—the atmosphere of cooperative needs assessment envisioned by the declaration was more akin to a beggar, empty bowl in hand, seeking assistance from a wealthy benefactor.

Education: The Transitional Period The tardiness of UNTAC’s planning and deployment, the fragility of the reconciliation between the warring factions, the confusion over who had power, and the declaration on Cambodian reconstruction all affected the policy-making process in education. How did these preelectoral administrative arrangements impact on education? In response to this key question, five themes emerge. The first was the SOC’s continued control, although with cosmetic concessions, of the education system. In order to create a neutral political environment, the civil administration component of UNTAC (CIVADMIN) was charged with exercising “full control” over five key ministries: national security, defense, foreign affairs, consular affairs, and finance. It also had the authority to intervene (“control”) in other areas of public administration, including education, should it be deemed necessary in order to establish and maintain a neutral political environment.15 In essence, UNTAC’s objectives and mandate provided for minimal intervention in the education sector, which would continue to function under existing administrative structures. As a result, there were very few educational changes during the UNTAC period. With the exception of an education committee comprising representatives from each of the four factions, the SOC effectively maintained its complete control over education.16 One analyst has alleged that a financial controller from CIVADMIN’s financial services division was seconded to the education ministry, as occurred with all other ministries. A former UNTAC financial controller, however, was

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adamant that there were no financial controllers in ministries, with the exception of those involved with producing and controlling revenue: finance, treasury, and customs.17 In attempting to realize its objective of creating a neutral political environment, UNTAC assumed no responsibility for Cambodian education. The direction and management of the education system remained in the hands of those entrusted with its development during the previous decade. A second educational theme of the transitional period was the increased presence and profile of NGOs in the education sector. While the governments of the Western world had shunned Cambodia through the 1980s, NGO assistance had been provided since 1979, when the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) began to provide humanitarian assistance in the aftermath of Democratic Kampuchea (DK). The NGO presence steadily increased throughout the 1980s, although it was continually limited in its capacity to assist by several factors, including the continuing conflict, the ideological orientation of the PRK administration, and the international aid embargo ratified by the UN.18 With the political and economic liberalization evident in Cambodia following Hun Sen’s historic 1987 meeting with Norodom Sihanouk, NGO activities proliferated, especially in the provision of training and technical assistance. The imminent signing of the Paris Peace Agreements in 1991 saw a further increase in NGO involvement, with several organizations undertaking feasibility and needs assessment studies in order to plan their future involvement in the education sector. These studies are useful in providing a window to the third theme of the period: the parlous state of the education system. A study for CONCERN in 1991 identified a raft of educational problems: inadequate training and remuneration for teachers, an inappropriate curriculum, rare and unevenly distributed teaching aids and materials, dilapidated schools, a high drop-out rate, elitist preschool and secondary school sectors, and a socio economic environment that often constrained parents from sending their children to school.19 The central educational problems highlighted in the report, poor educational quality and an irrelevant curriculum, were reiterated in a study of Siem Reap province the following year. Redd Barna’s Siem Reap study identified three key areas of concern in relation to education: the low attendance of students at school, the problem of low achievement by students, and the difficulty of reintegrating into schools former refugees from the nearby ThaiCambodian border. The study also expressed concerns in relation to the qualifications of teachers, the state of the provincial Teacher Training

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College, and the fact that the centralized educational curriculum failed to account for regional differences between provinces.20 Both reports, with conclusions that were supported in other studies of the period, provided salient proof that the crisis conditions prevalent in the PRK / SOC years were still very much in evidence during the transitional period.21 Given that little time had passed, that there were few policy changes in education during the period, and that the system continued to be controlled by the overseers of the crisis in the 1980s, the continuation was entirely comprehensible. The fourth theme, a product of the transitional nature of the period, was that educational development was taking place, although very slowly, without an articulated direction of its future function, structure, or importance. The introduction to the United Nations Children’s Fund’s (UNICEF) 1993 Education Plan noted, for example, that as a result of the “transitional process,” decisions “regarding curricula, content of new textbooks, a credentialing policy for new teachers, and other decisions must wait.” 22 While UNICEF’s education plan, which was intended to address national educational concerns, proposed that UNICEF wait for the outcome of the elections before implementing education projects, many NGOs adopted an alternative approach. These NGOs, working in partnership with local educational authorities, who enjoyed significant independence from the central ministry, actively implemented educational rehabilitation and reconstruction projects throughout the country. Although the projects often had positive shortterm effects, in the long term, they further complicated the problem of establishing a national direction for educational policy. These were problems conceded throughout 1994, when a concerted effort was made to develop a national framework.23 A final theme of the transitional period preceding the elections, a long-term response to the lack of direction alluded to earlier, was the assistance and impact of international multilateral actors in shaping the future direction of the education system. While NGOs had been involved with Cambodia since 1979, it was not until the signing of the Paris Peace Agreements in October 1991 that the bilateral and international financial and multilateral organizations established a recognizable presence.24 The Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) Economic Report on Cambodia opened the floodgates in December 1991. Over the next six months, the torrent included the United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP) Comprehensive Paper on Cambodia, the UN secretarygeneral’s Consolidated Appeal for Cambodia’s Immediate Needs and National

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Rehabilitation, and the combined UNDP, World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and ADB report, Cambodia, Socio-Economic Situation and Immediate Needs. 25 Although their immediate impact on education was negligible, the documents were particularly important in reinforcing the principles for rehabilitation and reconstruction forwarded in the Paris agreements, steering education and development in Cambodia toward increasingly global trends.

The Voice of the People On Sunday, May 23, 1993, the people of Cambodia began pouring into polling booths throughout the country. By the time the polls closed on Friday, May 28, 4,242,454 of Cambodia’s registered voters had turned out to cast their ballots in the national elections.26 Summing up the mood of the historic occasion, William Shawcross wrote: When thunder broke over Phnom Penh early on the morning of Sunday, 23 May [1993], many people awoke fearing that it was a Khmer Rouge barrage. It was not. That morning hundreds of thousands of people arrived at Ballot stations in the rain.27

The elections, however, had not proceeded as smoothly as the UN would have liked, with the buildup characterized by increasing violence, intimidation, and a refusal by the Party of Democratic Kampuchea (PDK, the Khmer Rouge) to adhere to the agreements it had signed in Paris in 1991.28 Despite the problems, the elections were declared “free and fair” by the UN secretary-general’s special representative, Yasushi Akashi, who announced before the SNC that they were “a stinging rebuke to the men of violence and to those who tried to prevent [the Cambodian people] from exercising their inalienable rights.” 29 As the elections utilized a system of proportional representation, there was always the expectation they would deliver to Cambodia a coalition government. It was also the expectation that Hun Sen’s CPP would emerge as the dominant partner in any governing coalition. Against these expectations, however, the elections resulted in a narrow victory to Norodom Ranariddh’s FUNCINPEC party.30 Unaccustomed and unwilling to accept defeat, Hun Sen’s CPP, the former Communist Party, refused to acknowledge the voice of the people. Declaring the election result invalid, and with the key elements of state apparatus still in its control, the CPP left FUNCINPEC with few alternatives other than a coalition based on power-sharing. The result, after much negotiation,

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was the formation of a coalition government constituted of the CPP, FUNCINPEC, the Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party (BLDP), and a fourth party, Moulinaka. Ranariddh was appointed first prime minister and the defeated Hun Sen assumed the role of second prime minister. Further negotiations resulted in Prince Sihanouk agreeing to resume the throne he had given up in 1955. Cambodia again became a kingdom.31

The Kingdom of Cambodia: A Modern State? The preamble to the constitution of the Kingdom of Cambodia provides a penetrating testimony to one of the unstated aims of the UN intervention in Cambodia: the generation of a framework and motivation for the creation of a modern Cambodian state. Accustomed to having been an outstanding civilization, a prosperous, large, flourishing and glorious nation . . . having declined grievously during the past two decades . . . having awakened and resolutely rallied to unite for the consolidation of national unity . . . and the fine Angkor civilization, and the restoration of Cambodia into an “Island of Peace” based on a multi-party liberal democratic régime. . . .32

The constitution eventually adopted provided for a bureaucracy, a legislature, a judiciary, a separation of powers doctrine, and a head of state whose official role extended no further than ceremony. Despite these institutions of modern statehood underpinning the constitution, a functioning modern state has not emerged in Cambodia. Ironically, it is the two central themes of the constitution’s preamble that provide a key to understanding why. The first is Cambodia’s focus on the greatness of the Angkorean era, when the country constituted one of the most powerful in Southeast Asia. One historian has argued that one of the tragedies of Cambodian history is “the weight of its past and the effect of that weight on politicians and ordinary people.” Among Cambodia’s leaders, he argues, the past has produced a folie de grandeur, with the nation’s postindependence rulers either allowing themselves to be compared with the rulers of Angkor or using Angkorean greatness as a frame of reference for Cambodia’s future. Associated with these Angkorean parallels have been inherited notions of power and leadership, perceived in terms of “hierarchy and ranking, deference and command, hegemony and servitude,” 33 far removed from the pluralism envisioned by the UN. The preamble’s second theme is its recognition of the conflict of the

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past, and its claim that Cambodians have “resolutely rallied . . . for the consolidation of national unity.” Superficially, through signing the Paris Peace Agreements, the leaders of Cambodia’s four factions did agree to promote national unity. Beyond the surface, however, national unity did not figure in their respective agendas. The four Cambodian political factions each represented remnants of Cambodia’s ruling regimes since independence: FUNCINPEC, a royalist remnant of the Sihanouk era; the BLDP, a republican remnant of the Lon Nol era; the PDK, a remnant of the Pol Pot era; and the CPP, a remnant of the PRK /SOC period. While their roles in the negotiations that eventually led to the Paris Peace Agreements were substantial, never once did there emerge among them a unified vision of Cambodia. In a tragic resurgence of neoauthoritarianism, each faction, regardless of the people’s aspirations, refused to acknowledge the credentials of its opponents. In turn, each regarded the state as nothing more than a collection of institutions whose purpose was to protect and promote the power and entrenched position of those invested with that power. The UN had a firm idea of the outcome it envisioned for the Cambodian state after UNTAC had departed. In this regard, the agreements had bound Cambodia’s factions to principles on which the new constitution would be drafted. These included the inviolability of the constitution and a declaration of fundamental rights, which was, the agreements noted, required in light of “Cambodia’s tragic recent history.” Also to be included was a declaration that Cambodia was a “sovereign, independent and neutral state,” and a statement that “Cambodia will follow democracy, on the basis of pluralism,” with a provision for periodic elections and universal and equal suffrage.34 Failing to account for the traditional political culture and conceptions of power as just described, the UN’s encouragement did not succeed in motivating Cambodia’s political leaders in favor of the formation of a modern state. The political environment that emerged in the country in the aftermath of the electoral process continued to reflect the traditional political culture that has characterized the Cambodian nation-state since precolonial times, although with a fusion of imported, poorly understood, and superficially embraced Western democratic ideals. Within this context, Cambodia’s post-UNTAC polity emerged. While UNTAC forced on Cambodia a constitution that embraced democratic ideals and was able to educate Cambodia’s population about the essential elements of democracy and about the principles underlying the electoral process, it was not able to change the country’s traditional

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leadership culture. The result: “politics as usual is the game being played by all the parties that have gained power.” 35 The July 1997 coup was the final chapter in that game, one in which political expressions not in concordance with those who hold power are not tolerated.

The Kingdom: The Question of Ideology The government formed by the coalition agreement between FUNCINPEC, the CPP, the BLDP, and Moulinaka, was one of manifest tensions. In representing a hybrid of the regimes of Cambodia’s past, the government was a melting pot of ideologically opposed elements that brought together the hierarchical and egalitarian ideological worldviews that had fought over control of the Cambodian nation-state since independence. In practice, despite the official commitment to a pluralist, liberal democracy by all of Cambodia’s political factions, the egalitarian element of Cambodia’s political culture—if it ever truly existed—was dead. The CPP, who inherited the egalitarian tradition, officially revoked its revolutionary past, declaring in 1992 that it would “continue the line of the Sangkum Reastr Niyum such as . . . Sihanouk pioneered it.” 36 While the CPP still harbored a significant Communist “old guard,” there was little evidence of egalitarianism in the behavior of the CPP’s most powerful and most visible public figure, Hun Sen, nor in the behavior of the party’s senior ministers and officials, many of whom accumulated sizable personal fortunes following the elections. Similarly, a commitment to pluralism was difficult to detect in FUNCINPEC, which continued to be administered like a royal court. In political practice, it was Cambodia’s traditional hierarchical political culture, implicitly revoked in policy and stated ideology by all of the country’s regimes since independence, that exclusively dictated the nature of political behavior among the country’s post-UNTAC rulers. With the political tensions between the coalition’s two major parties as a backdrop, it is very difficult to identify the state ideology of the kingdom. Despite the tensions, in contradiction to the hierarchical culture that has sustained political behavior in Cambodia and in parallel with the institutionalized aspirations of the UN’s intervention in the country, it was a commitment to development that underpinned the conception of the state subscribed to, at least officially, by the country’s coalition partners. This commitment to development is, therefore, the most readily identifiable and universal element of the contemporary Kingdom of Cambodia’s state ideology.

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The official commitment to development did not emerge in isolation. In parallel with its role in promoting the emergence of a modern state in Cambodia, the international community played a substantial role in imposing on Cambodia’s government an ideology in harmony with the imperatives of the New World Order (NWO) that emerged in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War. As with the imposition on the country of the institutions of the modern state, the imposition of an ideology on Cambodia was both willingly embraced and poorly understood by the leaders of a regime eager to be credited with undertaking the rehabilitation and reconstruction of the country and, in doing so, enhancing their personal legitimacy among those over whom they exercised power.

Commitment to Development The developmentalism of the so-called NWO traces its immediate roots to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact. Characterized by the neoclassical economic imperatives on which the restructuring of First World states was undertaken in response to the global economic crisis of the late 1970s, the NWO symbolizes a global conquest by the free market paradigm in which “competitiveness in the global economy is the ultimate criterion of public policy.” 37 The shift in global politics and economics ushered in by the end of the Cold War affected perceptions of development in the countries of the Third World. In stark contrast to perspectives on development between the 1950s and the 1970s, the post-Cold War period has seen increased skepticism in regard to the capacity of the state to serve as an engineer of both social change and economic growth, and an increased belief in the supremacy of the free market. Further, the period has been characterized by a perception of the reduced sovereignty and legitimacy of the state, such that its role becomes one of adjusting national economies to deal with the dynamics of an unregulated global economy.38 The post-Cold War period’s emphasis on the supremacy of capitalism has seen, cloaked in the gown of neoclassical economic theory, the reassertion of the basic tenets of the modernization theory of the 1950s and 1960s. Developmentalism in Cambodia embodies the aim of the “rejuvenated” modernization model to integrate into the global capitalist economy the nations and, therefore, the markets of the developing world.39 Central to the NWO modernization model’s diffusion into ideology and enactment into development policy in Third World states are the Struc-

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tural Adjustment Programs (SAP) promoted and imposed on developing countries by international financial institutions, most notably the World Bank and the IMF. It has been argued, for example, that the World Bank disburses loans conditional on adherence to marketoriented reform through a policy of leverage, whereby conditions are attached to loans that are designed to “impinge quickly and directly on government’s fiscal policies and developmental priorities.” 40 In Cambodia, the imposition of a SAP, and an economically oriented and marketcentered conception of development, was easily facilitated by the UN-sponsored international intervention. It was this conception of development that provided the framework for an internationally coordinated program for the “rehabilitation and reconstruction” of the country. Cambodia’s first steps on the path toward modernization, and therefore reintegration into the global capitalist economy, were taken in June 1992, when Japan hosted the Ministerial Conference on the Rehabilitation and Reconstruction of Cambodia (MCRRC). The principal accomplishment of the conference was the establishment of the International Committee on the Reconstruction of Cambodia (ICORC), a consultative body and international mechanism whose members comprised countries and organizations contributing to Cambodia’s development. It was the formation of ICORC, with the assent of the leaders of Cambodia’s factions, that initiated the process of placing Cambodia’s future development orientation in the hands of foreign governments and multilateral organizations. The declaration of MCRRC was quite explicit in illuminating the roles of ICORC: Provide a “forum for the exchange of views and information with the Cambodian authorities” (clause 1). Enable the government of Cambodia to “put its views” before the contributors (clause 2). Enable the contributors to “consult with and advise the Cambodian authorities on development requirements” (clause 2). Provide for the “coordination of assistance to Cambodia to develop an economic and social planning and aid-management capacity” (clause 3). To “welcome as observers at ICORC meetings NGOs nominated by the NGO Coordination Committee for Cambodia (clause 7)”.41

Although the conference did not explicitly state that the role of ICORC was to impose an international agenda on Cambodia, the roles defined

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by the conference did establish a power relationship in which imposition became an unstated assumption. While the framework allowed the Cambodian government to “put its views” before the international contributors, it was the international contributors who were to “advise” the Cambodian authorities and who were to “provide” for the coordination of assistance. Given that the money and expertise were to flow in only one direction, there was never the expectation or serious belief that Cambodia’s “views” would shift or alter the nature of the “advice” of international contributors. The Tokyo conference also provided an indication of the nature of the “advice” that was to emanate from ICORC. The concluding declaration of the conference made explicit the issues “for the development of Cambodia’s economy in the future”: International financial institutions [World Bank, IMF, and ADB] stressed the importance of market-based reforms in Cambodia to increasing output in major sectors of the economy. . . . There remain fundamental institutional and policy-related constraints to further economic progress. . . . We stress our resolve . . . to extend appropriate assistance . . . to Cambodia . . . that ensure[s] and strengthen[s] Cambodia’s own capacity to sustain its development. . . . We are hopeful that . . . Cambodia can expand and diversify its external trade and investment relationships, so that it will be integrated into the dynamic economic development of the Asia-Pacific region and of the world.42

The commitment to modernization ushered in by the conference was consolidated in October 1993, only a month after the formation of the coalition government. Cambodia’s arrears to the IMF, accrued during the 1970s, were paid by grants from bilateral donors, paving the way for an IMF loan only days later. The loan, embracing the key recommendations of the 1992 MCRRC, required, as did IMF structural adjustment agreements elsewhere, the Cambodian government to implement tight fiscal and monetary policies. The National Plan to Rehabilitate and Develop Cambodia (NPRD), presented by the government to the second ICORC meeting in Tokyo, in March 1994, provides striking evidence of the extent to which the developmentalism of the NWO had been adopted as an ideology of the state in Cambodia.43 Based on the principle that the government is a

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“manager” of development and a “partner” of the private sector, the NPRD defined Cambodia’s short-term (eighteen months) and mediumterm (three years) rehabilitation and development strategies. Clearly reflecting the agenda of the international community summarized in the MCCRC declaration cited earlier, the strategy embraced six “mutually-reinforcing and interdependent” fields of operation: Create a legal and institutional environment conducive to fostering the emergence of a strong private sector. Achieve the stabilization and structural adjustment of the economy through macroeconomic controls. Develop the human resources base . . . with a view to strengthening . . . the private sector. Rehabilitate and build up physical infrastructure and public facilities . . . in order to support investment. Open the country to international trade and private foreign investment in order to integrate into the regional and world economies. Achieve rural development and the sustainable management of natural resources and the environment.44

The underlying themes of the “fields of operation” were market-based economic reform, a powerful private sector, overcoming institutional restraints, capacity building, and economic diversification and regionalization. In short, they are the themes of the economically oriented modernization model of the NWO. Formulated by foreign experts, they were enthusiastically rubber stamped by the co-prime ministers and constituted, at least in terms of policy, the central tenets of the state ideology of the postelection Kingdom of Cambodia.45 It is human capital theory, first articulated in the 1950s, that linked education to the government’s development priorities. As “human resource development,” education in the post-Cold War world is associated with enhanced efficiency and rationality in decision-making. It is, in turn, perceived to be a determinant of competitive advantage in the market. The education policy measures associated with the human capital theory of the NWO have been established according to the “rules and norms of the World Bank.” 46 These norms, based on notions of increased efficiency in the use of resources, qualitative renewal, and improved sectoral management, were evident in the education policy program formulated by foreign advisers in Cambodia. They were willingly and enthusiastically embraced by the Cambodian government, which proudly boasted as fundamental development priorities the

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“sustainable development of human resources” and “sustainable economic growth.” 47

Establishing the Framework The NPRD was the culmination of early attempts to establish a framework for development in Cambodia following the formation of the kingdom and therefore the conclusion of UNTAC’s mandate. While the UNTAC forces had all but left the country by the end of 1993, the international presence remained substantial and was focused primarily on the tasks of reconstruction and rehabilitation. Over the next two years, the commitment to development became a concerted international and domestic project, with considerable energy and finances expended in ensuring its success. The process was orchestrated by international actors, particularly the World Bank, whose annual reports to ICORC achieved unparalleled influence.48 The educational project associated with the commitment, steadily gaining momentum since the 1991 Education For All conference, went into full swing when the Rebuilding Quality Education and Training in Cambodia Program was ratified at the National Education Seminar in January 1994.49 The program formed the cornerstone of policy-making in education over the next two years, providing a comprehensive policy framework to deal with the crisis in Cambodian education. At the seminar, the recently installed minister of education, Ung Huot, outlined the regime’s educational priorities: Universalizing nine years of basic general education. Modernizing and improving the quality of the education system. Linking training development with the requirements of both employers and workers.50

Responding to the educational imperatives included in the kingdom’s constitution, these priorities reflected the regime’s commitment to development.51 In doing so, they made a positive contribution to addressing the educational crisis that had beset the country for over three decades. In one respect, they engaged the qualitative concerns that all previous Cambodian regimes had failed to address. Second, the priorities addressed the question of the relevance of the system to its beneficiaries, the nation’s students and the nation’s social well-being. The remainder of 1994 was concerned with generating a framework through which the program could be implemented. The Education Sec-

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tor Review conducted by the Asian Development Bank was particularly influential.52 The review’s medium-term development strategy, the “Indicative Policy and Strategic Directions 1994 –2000,” reflected the policy advice given to the Cambodian government over the previous forty years. The strategy included increasing the hours of instruction to accord with international norms, reducing the number of underqualified teachers, Khmerizing instruction (in higher education), emphasizing improvements in educational quality, and simplifying the curriculum to foster greater relevance. Coupled with these measures were others that reflected the market-oriented ideological tone of the developmentalism of the NWO. The Education Sector Review recommended a performancebased scale of salary incrementation, downsizing the education service through redeployment, departure, and retraining schemes, commercialization of selected education support services, merit-driven matriculation examinations, privatization of schooling in selected urban areas, the introduction of student charges in higher education, business sponsorship of higher education faculties, and the introduction of shortterm contracts for future staff employed by the ministry.53 An education plan, stemming from the ADB’s review, was adopted by the government in December 1994. Presenting the plan to international donors, the government committed itself to increasing its budget share allocated to education to 15 percent by the year 2000 (from its present level of approximately 7 to 8 percent).54 Despite reservations about the capacity of the government to implement the reforms, the international community remained, in 1994, confident about the prospects for the successful rehabilitation and reconstruction of Cambodia. With the cooperation of the Cambodian government, the development-oriented state ideology that was imposed on the country was intended to assure Cambodia’s emergence into the global economic market. The education system, as it had in Cambodia’s development programs of the past, was considered essential to realizing that goal. The minister of education, Ung Huot, articulated this expectation at the National Forum on Foreign Aid to Education: One of the country’s major objectives is to turn out a new generation of youth who will [be] fully employable and capable of making a contribution to the defense and construction of the nation. . . .55

Good citizens, the minister implied, would be those Cambodians capable of assuming the qualities of modernity necessary to take their place on the stage of global economic interdependence. In articulating his

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expectation, Ung Huot’s rhetoric revealed the extent to which the government had embraced the educational imperatives associated with the developmentalism of the NWO: To reach this objective, we deem it necessary to carry out our immediate tasks: the refinement and the reform of the whole system of education and the reorganization of the whole managerial structure with a view to improving the effectiveness of the system.56

Toward Despair The emergence in Cambodia of a pluralist democracy, the marketoriented reform and reconstruction of the country’s shattered economy, and the creation of an environment conducive to securing foreign investment and trade, all underlying the development ideology embraced by the government, were dependent on the establishment of the rule of law.57 Contrary to the widespread sense of hope that accompanied the 1993 elections, political developments in Cambodia following the departure of UNTAC were characterized by a very conspicuous failure to establish anything that even closely resembled the rule of law.58 It was a failure that stemmed from the strength and endurance of Cambodia’s traditional political culture. The first underlying cause of the failure was the development of dual power structures following the formation of the coalition government in 1993. As reconciliation between the major parties was, at best, cosmetic, there was never any attempt to create a depoliticized state apparatus. Instead, authority, roles, and responsibilities in the new administration were split between the coalition parties. The result, observed David Ashley, was the creation of “two separate and competing party states operating within every ministry, province, military command and police commissariat.” 59 As the coalition had been formed on a “consensus” principle, whereby both parties were to agree to the decisions of the royal government, the gradual development of a two-party state saw communications between the coalition partners grind to a halt, leaving crucial administrative decisions and institutional reforms dormant. In short, the executive and legislative decisions that may have facilitated the rule of law were never undertaken. A second cause of the failure to establish the rule of law, tied to the first, was the increasing rivalry between the two major coalition parties

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and especially that between Hun Sen and Ranariddh. As the development of a two-party state gathered momentum, traditional power structures overwhelmed those of an emergent modern state. Both prime ministers attempted to establish vast networks of clients and bases of power within the bureaucracy, business community, media, military, and police. In doing so, they were often quick to cast aside considerations of policy, economic reform, the unity of their parties, and morality. The expulsion from FUNCINPEC and the National Assembly of Sam Rainsy (the high-profile former minister for finance), the rape of Cambodia’s natural resources, the government’s unwillingness to deal with drug trafficking, and the pitiful scurry to enlist defectors from the decrepit and self-destructive Khmer Rouge were all tragically linked to the incapacity of Cambodia’s leaders to put policy over politics and nation over self.60 In 1994, one astute analyst described the process of decision-making in the coalition administration as one of “scorn.” He cited the “scorn of a political class that goes on increasing the number of highly paid officials with no thought for the poverty of the vast majority of the population.” Adding to the assertion, he summed up the character of the Cambodian political environment, referring to “scorn” in terms of ability and merit among those exercising power and “scorn” toward the Cambodian voters whose electoral voice was ignored.61 To this list could be added the “scorn” of the Cambodian government toward the international community, whose massive investment in Cambodia was treated with contempt, and the “scorn” of the government toward its own state ideology. What of education in this environment? At the heart of human resources development, and therefore at the core of the country’s development project, the education system was the source of considerable government attention and optimism in planning its quest to rehabilitate and reconstruct Cambodia. To what extent was the flawed coalition government able to deal with the educational crisis inherited from previous Cambodian regimes in attempting to realize the optimism associated with its investment in education? In light of the explosive political environment, how effective were the detailed plans and policy directions formulated by the government’s foreign advisers, at the behest of the international community, in addressing long-standing problems in education? Sadly, Cambodia’s enduring and pervasive educational crisis re-

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mained a function of the attempts of the country’s rulers to construct the nation-state. In the process of construction, as in the past, traditional conceptions of power, hierarchy, and leadership enmeshed with institutions of modernity and the government’s officially sanctioned commitment to development. In respect to the crisis in education, state formation saw a subversion of the Westernized models of planning associated with modern educational development, and enthusiastically embraced in the rhetoric of the government. A nostalgia for times passed, traditional patterns of authority, and traditional understanding of the nation-state all played their part in creating a tension between the weight of history and the demands of modernity that underscored postUNTAC Cambodia.

Fading Optimism While in hindsight its optimism may have been misguided, the international community, in 1995, still remained hopeful that Cambodia would continue its tenuous progress toward development. In March 1995, the Cambodian government again met with international donors in Paris to reflect on the developments of 1994 and to set priorities and targets for the period 1995/1996. First Prime Minister Ranariddh described the outcome of the meeting as “a great success for Cambodia and its people.” On the surface, his enthusiasm was rightly founded. Despite confusion about the specific amounts of aid pledged to Cambodia during the meeting, it was clear that the government’s request for U.S.$295 million had been exceeded.62 At a superficial level, the World Bank’s report reflected the government’s optimism. It noted, for example, that “the Government is to be commended for its achievements in 1994 and for the realistic approach it takes in addressing the daunting work that remains to be done.” 63 Beyond the surface though, the World Bank report was replete with the concerns of international donors. In relation to restructuring the economy, for example, the bank’s report noted that “strong efforts in the area of tax reform are needed,” concluding that “the Government must keep in mind that the current high level of external budget support is not sustainable.” Other economic concerns raised by the bank included the government’s overrun in defense spending and its failure to include revenues from logging in the national budget.64 At one level, the concerns could be attributed to the effect of the tragedies of the past and a

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failure on the part of the Cambodian administration to fully understand the nature of accountable administration. A more realistic assessment is that those areas of concern raised by the bank paralleled the attempts by the government’s leaders to reinforce their respective bases of power. It was certainly the case in relation to the bank’s concerns in regard to spending on education. In March 1994, the government had introduced a salary supplement of 20,000 riels (then U.S.$8) per month for teachers. In one respect, this prime pédagogique accorded with the government’s stated aim of improving the “performance and morale of the teaching force.” 65 It was the ADB’s Education Sector Review, however, that put the salary supplement in perspective: What has the government or public got in return?—very little. There is little sign of improved staff performance. MOEYS [Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport] staff have retained their second and third jobs. . . . The prime pédagogique could have been used to influence policy—as an incentive for working longer hours or improving staff performance. . . . The prime pédagogique of 1994 . . . a chance missed.66

The World Bank’s ICORC report was similarly critical: “this pay rise has clearly not been linked to increases in teacher performance nor to necessary plans to restructure and downsize the education service.” 67 As with the government’s failure to properly collect tax and the Ministry of Defense’s control of logging, which were attributable to an attempt by FUNCINPEC to secure the loyalty of those who were granted tax exemptions and by the CPP to secure the loyalty of the military, respectively, the prime pédagogique was a blatant attempt by FUNCINPEC to secure legitimacy among the staff of a FUNCINPEC-headed ministry.68 The three examples highlight the themes that dominated educational development in post-UNTAC Cambodia. The ascendancy of political expedience over policy, quantity over quality, and contempt for technical advice and the processes and outcomes of planning emerge as the underlying themes of the period of “lost opportunity” that was evident from at least 1995; and it was arguably inevitable from the day in 1993 when two belligerent factions, with no shared aspirations, agreed to share power in order to bring peace to Cambodia. Absolute power, its manifestation and its maintenance, as in the past, were the hallmark of politics and policy in Cambodia and were the desired outcome of statemaking. The coalition government’s official commitment to develop-

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ment was the tool and the funds provided by the international community were the conduit. As consistently happened in the past, education was the victim. The crisis in Cambodian education following the 1993 elections was an inherent function of Cambodian politics. In essence, while rhetoric often indicated otherwise, the development of a financially and qualitatively sustainable education system in Cambodia remained a secondary priority of Cambodia’s administration. Before Hun Sen’s military takeover of the government in July 1997, the primary priority of the two prime ministers, and their associated political parties, was power. As a result, policies in education existed at the whim of the two national leaders, whose concern with legitimizing, reinforcing, and sustaining political power saw policies and commitments ignored, delayed, or altered in the name of short-term political expedience. The lack of genuine commitment to education, and the government’s willingness to ignore, delay, or alter policies and commitments is apparent in relation to questions of educational finance, planning, and quality, which will be discussed next. Failures on each of these counts resulted in a reassertion of the underlying causes of the crises of the past: unsustainable expansion and declining quality leading to educational graduates whose credentials were both incompatible and irrelevant in respect to the nation’s socioeconomic development requirements. In essence, the disparity between the education system and the economic, political, and cultural environments that it was intended to serve remained as evident in the early-1990s as it did throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Educational Finance: The Question of Commitment In May 1994, the Cambodian minister of finance and minister for rehabilitation and development signed a preliminary IMF Structural Adjustment Agreement in which it was agreed that the government would increase the budget for education.69 In December 1994, Ranariddh and Hun Sen signaled the government’s adherence to this direction by promoting the intention “to increase the budgetary share for education from around 9 percent in 1994 to at least 15 percent by the year 2000.” 70 Keeping in mind the IMF agreement, the crises of the past, and the funding necessary to finance the government’s development program, the commitment was not only highly desirable but absolutely necessary. By 1995, the World Bank had expressed concern with Cambodia’s commitment to this fundamental educational measure. The bank’s 1995

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ICORC report, for example, noted that “budgetary shortfalls constrain improvements to the education system, and the low quality and lack of relevance of education lead to . . . inadequate achievement.” 71 The bank’s concerns were mirrored by the NGO community and by the government’s own advisers.72 The government remained defiant, reiterating in the 1996 socioeconomic development plan its commitment “to allocate a minimum of 15 percent of the total budget to education.” 73 In December 1996, the minister in charge of rehabilitation and development, Keat Chhon, finally conceded the government’s financing failure: The national budget for the education sector as a whole over the past four years has remained at less than 10% of [budget expenditure]. Given these figures, the goal of reaching from 12% to 15% of the budget in the year 2000 will not be achieved [emphasis added].74

Chhon’s concession was formally realized less than two weeks later when the National Assembly ratified the government’s 1997 budget. The budget papers, contrary to the misleading reports in the press, revealed that the education system’s share of the total national budget would fall to 8.11 percent in 1997, down from 11.83 percent in 1996.75 Why was the government unable to achieve this key educational and financial goal? Following the budget, an obviously exasperated Keat Chhon made the reasons immediately apparent. In short, the administration had failed to channel all state revenues into the national budget. Whether through corrupt taxation and customs officials, the diversion of forestry revenues, or extrabudgetary expenditure by the leaders of the two major political factions, the bottom line of the budget’s revenue column had consistently been lower than it should have been.76 While government revenues no doubt affected the paltry amount of money allocated to education, it is even more disturbing to examine how those funds raised were actually spent. Although budget allocations rose in most ministries, the education, environment, finance, and national defense ministries all received reduced disbursements. Given the government’s commitment to human resources development through education, the problems of environmental degradation, and the difficulty in collecting revenue, the reductions to the education, environment, and finance ministries appear quite inexplicable, if not irrational. The reduction in the national defense budget, on the other hand, was a laudable measure, given that the seemingly paralyzed Khmer Rouge were of no threat to the government. The reduction was countered,

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however, by a 32 percent rise in the budget for the Ministry of the Interior, the stronghold of the CPP.77 The national budget provided salient proof of the government’s neglect of education. Other goals, such as the CPP’s bid to shore up its control over the state through the Ministry of the Interior, had been given priority. The financial neglect of education, for overt political ends, was even more conspicuous in relation to how money was spent on education. What emerged was a situation in which over 80 percent of total recurrent expenditure on education was devoted to salaries and operating expenses. The majority was absorbed by three central ministerial departments. Given that central departments catered to only 3 percent of students (in higher education) and that the funding for the education of the majority of the nation’s students was disbursed by provincial authorities, the budget raised the serious question of education for whom? The emphasis of recurrent educational expenditure on salary payments to a select few within the central departments of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport (MOEYS) demonstrated the government’s lack of concern for those most affected by education. There was an obvious careless attitude toward the provision of school and classroom materials, the provision of funds for the ongoing maintenance of school infrastructure, and the continued professional development of the nation’s poorly trained teaching corps. Stemming from this lack of concern was the system’s culture of corruption. Notwithstanding corrupt practices that existed at the higher echelons of the ministry, widespread institutionalized corruption was endemic at two levels within the education system. At one level, informal fees were charged by poorly paid teachers throughout the country. By charging students for attendance at “extracurricular” classes, where they were taught the subject matter essential for effective participation in examinations; by providing only a certain number of free hours of tuition per day; or by conducting after-school tutorials within school facilities, where the essential subject matter in the syllabus is covered, this “informal fees” corruption existed right through the education system.78 The second level of corruption, while not as pervasive as the first, involved corruption in relation to matriculation examinations. The transition of students from secondary to tertiary education in Cambodia was marked by three examinations. The examination period each year was characterized by an elaborate management, supervision, marking, and security scheme that made it “essential” for the administration to provide salary supplementation to selected ministerial employees, but in-

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evitably there was a proliferation of corrupt practices, as examination papers and responses were sold by those charged with protecting their impartial distribution and supervision.79 The corruption was a product of the very poor salary received by Cambodia’s teachers and education officials. Even when an educator’s salary was paid, it was frequently late in arriving and often did not equal the total entitlement. The effects of the corruption, in respect to the crisis in education, were direct. Students without the means to provide their teachers with additional remuneration were denied access to a comprehensive education and were subsequently denied the equity guaranteed them in Cambodia’s much lauded constitution.80 Teachers, on the other hand, quite rightly continued to consider that their professional capacity and status in the community were in decline. These effects were directly attributable to government policies that denied funding to the education sector in the name of either more attractive political propositions elsewhere or in order not to offend those sections of the electorate on whom their legitimacy and their patronage were based. Contributing in no small measure to the problems was the approach to planning taken by both the Ministry of Education and those who directed the ministry.

Educational Planning: The Question of Expedience In their foreword to an education policy document, Cambodia’s coprime ministers asserted that the government’s education plan demonstrated its “determination to address the human resources development needs of the country in a systematic yet dynamic fashion.” 81 How effective was the government in adopting this “systematic” planning approach? Was the commitment to this process, encouraged by international donors, genuine on the part of the Cambodian administration? These questions can be answered by focusing on just one aspect of reform: the government’s commitment to the rationalization of the public service. This crucial element in the nation’s development plans is a core issue in the developmentalism of the NWO. It was also considered by major multilateral donors to be a critical plank in the government’s attempts to liberalize the economy. The government’s 1994 agreement with the IMF included a commitment that it would reduce the size of the bloated civil service by 20 percent by 1997. In February 1995, the government began moves toward this rationalization when it conducted a “headcount” to remove “ghosts” from the various ministerial payrolls

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and to identify those civil servants in dereliction of their duties by engaging in employment elsewhere.82 The rationalization agreement reflected the government’s commitment to development, and in turn, its commitment to market-based economic reform through both publicsector efficiency gains and strengthening the private sector. In terms of education, the agreement recognized that graduates of Cambodian universities would no longer be guaranteed automatic recruitment into the civil service, an arrangement that was ratified with the passing of legislation by the National Assembly in 1994.83 By the end of that year, the government had decided, with reference to dubious statistical projections, that with an expected increase in educational enrollments, they could not afford to reduce the educational corps. Instead, it was announced that efficiency gains would be achieved by transferring to school-based positions many of those office administrators who were also qualified teachers.84 In essence, the policy of the government, embraced at both the level of the Ministry of Education and by the Council of Ministers, implied that few teachers would need to be recruited in the immediate future, as the need for qualified staff could be achieved through internal rationalization. The policy changes effectively transformed the nature of the Royal University of Phnom Penh (RUPP), which had served, quite haphazardly, as an upper secondary school teacher training institution since 1979.85 The 1995 graduating class of the RUPP were awarded Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science degrees and, according to the 1994 agreement and its associated legislation, were to seek their own employment in the private-sector-oriented free market. It was a situation immediately rejected by the students, whose historical appreciation of tertiary education had convinced them they were entitled to employment in the civil service. At the 1995 RUPP graduation ceremony, the speaker representing the 1,460 graduands expressed the students’ concerns: In previous years, because of the needs of the country, everyone received a degree in education. While this is a valuable degree, the overall needs in Cambodia have changed. However, we feel somewhat concerned as this is the first time that we graduates must find jobs for ourselves, so we ask you, Your Highness [referring to Prince Ranariddh], to think of us as you work to develop and expand the economy in Cambodia.86

The concerns of the students were not lost on the first prime minister, who had earlier addressed the ceremony:

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Besides, . . . all the new graduates want to be officers of other status [sic] in government position, even if the salary is lower than many private companies.87

In the aftermath of the graduation ceremony, both prime ministers, in a move designed to generate immediate political goodwill, guaranteed the university graduates employment with the government. Drawing on the government’s emphasis on human resources development, it was decided that the students should be employed as teachers by the Ministry of Education. Fully aware that the ministry did not need to employ further staff, the Minister of Education proposed several compromise solutions. They were immediately rejected by Second Prime Minister Hun Sen.88 In late 1995, in contradiction to Cambodia’s agreement with the IMF and in defiance of its own legislation and the clearly articulated policies of the Ministry of Education, which had been approved by the Council of Ministers, the minister of education received a direction from the prime ministers that the 1,460 RUPP graduates would spend a year at the Faculty of Pedagogy, where they would be trained as teachers of upper secondary school. An adviser to the minister recalled he had “no discretion in this matter,” finally capitulating to “force majeure.” 89 The government’s employment of the university graduates, in contravention of both its own policies and its agreements with international donors, represents a stark example of both the underlying nature of the educational policy-making process in Cambodia and its eventual outcomes. First, it can be seen that policy-making existed at the same two levels it did in the 1960s. The first level was that of the Ministry of Education, where policies were developed that were in accordance with the imperatives of international agreements and were harmonious with Cambodia’s stated development objectives. The second level of educational policy-making was that of the national leaders, whose politically motivated interference in the policy-making process often contradicted the very objectives of the government’s overall development agenda, subverting the processes of policy formulation and implementation. The underlying nature of this policy-making process was not a new phenomenon in Cambodian politics. Rather, it was a clear manifestation of the hierarchical political culture that provided the behavioral model for the leaders of all of Cambodia’s postindependence political regimes. The model, whereby the deeds and actions of the leader are generally perceived as being beyond reproach, has created a state controlled

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totally and absolutely by that leader. In the context of the recruitment as teachers of the 1995 graduates of the University of Phnom Penh, this state-making project by the national leaders impacted directly on the crisis in education. First, the new graduates of the Faculty of Pedagogy perpetuated the problem of inadequately trained teachers in schools. While Hun Sen directed the minister to provide positions for the graduates at the Faculty of Pedagogy, he failed to address the capacity of the faculty to cater to the educational needs of such a large class. The Faculty of Pedagogy was without the necessary staff, facilities, textbooks, and equipment to provide for the students and did not have a curriculum in place that could cater to their needs or prepare for them for teaching in the nation’s upper secondary school classrooms. Second, the unnecessary recruitment of the teachers placed further strain on the education budget. The problem of devoting an exorbitantly disproportionate amount of the budget to the payment of salaries was heightened, further eroding the capacity of the ministry to provide adequate materials to students, adequate resources for teachers, and the necessary maintenance of educational infrastructure and facilities. Issues such as the Khmerization of instruction, the development of second language education in primary and secondary schools, and ongoing curriculum development and reform were all neglected, further affecting the ministry’s ability to align the national education system with the country’s development objectives. The problem caused by employing the graduates in government was not one that could be alleviated in the short term. In 1996, the government indicated that it would continue to employ university graduates as teachers. Minister of Education Tol Lah asserted that steps would be taken to recruit students for the civil service as soon as they graduated from high school or university. In relation to university graduates, the minister noted: We can guarantee these students [university graduates] they will not have any problems getting jobs with the government. They will become teachers or lecturers at the university.90

The purpose of employment guarantees, a Council of Ministers paper asserts, is to ensure political and social stability. “If there is no stability, it is not possible for the government to be succeeded [sic].” 91 While it may be concerned with the stability of the government, and

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therefore the entrenched positions of power held by the government’s leaders, the policy failed to consider Cambodia’s development agenda, its agreement with an increasingly frustrated IMF,92 and, importantly, its capacity to avert a crisis in education. The pattern of failing to honor agreements and disregarding technical advice in order to enhance the state-building project of the national leaders was again conspicuous in relation to the questions of educational quality and quantitative expansion. It is to these questions we now turn.

Educational Quality: The Question of Quantity The quantitative expansion of educational provision was a goal embodied in Cambodia’s constitution. Article 68 states both that “the state shall provide free primary and secondary education to all citizens in public schools” and that “citizens shall receive education for at least nine years.” 93 In order to achieve the guarantees provided for in the constitution, the government’s educational policies embraced as a mediumterm objective to expand primary education by one year providing a school system of twelve years based on a 6 ⫹ 3 ⫹ 3 model (primary, lower, and upper secondary, respectively). By any reasonable measure of educational quality, the education system of Cambodia in the aftermath of the UN-sponsored elections was in a parlous state and had certainly not improved since the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements. There remained an abundance of unqualified teachers, the absence of a national curriculum framework, inadequate book supplies, and high student repetition and drop-out rates.94 An Australian education adviser, reflecting on the developments in education since the signing of the Paris agreements, substantiated these observations. He recalled: The curriculum was basic in the extreme. Math consisted of a one page list of topics per class, each topic to be completed in a week. . . . The schools were bare. Hardly a book or a poster to be seen and other equipment no more than a dream. Teachers . . . were usually two months behind in salary, often missed out completely, and rarely got their full entitlement. Ministry offices were no better. No funds were available for paper, pens, water supply, electricity or fuel. . . .95

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Keeping an eye on educational quality, the ADB addressed the government’s objective of achieving nine years of basic education through a 6 ⫹ 3 ⫹ 3 structure: The mission proposes a gradual approach to introducing six years of primary schooling, starting a grade six class around the year 2000. Any acceleration of the process . . . would leave insufficient time to finalize new curriculum frameworks, textbooks and staff development programs. . . . The key objective of ensuring that quantitative gains do not sacrifice quality improvements would be in jeopardy [emphasis added].96

In 1996, the government proudly boasted that Cambodia would have in place a six-year primary education system, marking this progression as the first in a list of major achievements in education.97 It was an announcement, reflecting government initiatives, that expressly contradicted the technical advice provided by international donors. Why was the ADB’s sound advice rejected? Certainly, the qualitative problems that preceded the decision had not been addressed. Likewise, secondary education had not been rationalized or reorganized in order to cope with the reforms in primary education. While the government guaranteed six years of primary education from the beginning of the 1996 –1997 academic year, it failed to consider the demand for further infrastructure; the finalization of curriculum, textbooks, and materials and the number and adequacy of available teachers. In essence, the decision had been made to pursue a politically attractive program of educational provision in favor of addressing long-standing educational concerns, of which the government was quite aware. The pursuit of form over substance was a principal feature of the education system pursued in Cambodia during the Sangkum period of Sihanouk. For the then-prince, educational expansion represented a key to legitimizing his Buddhist socialist state and reinforcing his indispensability as the nation’s leader. In the political climate of post-UNTAC Cambodia, the pursuit of form over substance was a result of the attempts by the two major factions of the ruling regime to secure greater legitimacy among the people. It was a trend reflected in Hun Sen’s belief that the CPP is a “superpower” when it comes to school construction and in his prolific program of school inaugurations.98 During a visit to the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Samlaut, for example, he promised to build ten new schools in the district.99 The second prime minister’s announcement was made without the involvement of the Ministry of Education and without a needs assessment study. Instead, it

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was a spontaneous response to a plea by the new governor of the district, Hem Sophal, to assist in developing Samlaut. Aside from questions of extrabudgetary expense and with a disregard for the planning process, the prime minister’s announcement was made without any consideration of educational quality. Who would teach at these schools? Where would they be located? What materials would be available? To where would the students graduate upon completion of their studies? These key questions were never addressed. The politically motivated educational expansion pursued by the government, and particularly the CPP, since the elections of 1993, undoubtedly fueled the crisis in Cambodian education. On one count, the financial capacity of the ministry to effect necessary changes, especially when considered in the light of the government’s poor record of budgetary commitment to education, was significantly diminished. Forced to contend with the immediate demands stemming from quantitative expansion, especially in relation to infrastructure and the recruitment, training, and deployment of teachers, the ministry was financially and logistically unable and incapable of diverting the necessary resources to those existing areas of the system in dire need of improvement. On a second count, the orientation toward quantitative expansion reduced the planning options of the Ministry of Education in relation to the realization of qualitative improvements. The state of the quality of the education system provided testament to the severity of this problem and testified to the magnitude of the task facing the government—both the ministry and the national leaders—if improvements in educational quality were to become a serious policy concern.

Education: Learning from the Past? To what extent did those charged with the development of education in post-UNTAC Cambodia succeed in orchestrating successful reforms? At one level, the detailed and intricate educational policies formulated following the international community’s renewed involvement with Cambodia indicated that the mistakes and problems of the past had guided educational policy formulation. The educational policies prepared in Cambodia following the 1993 elections represented a laudable program of reform that offered possible solutions to several of the country’s firmly entrenched educational problems. Although criticized on many fronts, especially in respect to its negative effects on the countries of the developing world, a NWO-oriented development program, eagerly

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embraced by the government, underscored Cambodia’s education policy framework. Primarily, the program of educational reform was concerned with qualitative revitalization, demonstrating both an awareness of long-standing problems with Cambodia’s teaching corps, educational materials, and curriculum and an understanding that efforts to rectify these problems could only be facilitated with access to scarce resources. In addition, the program demonstrated a concern with questions of equity, addressing the needs of female students, students from ethnic minorities and, importantly, students from rural Cambodia. Given that the policy program appeared to address Cambodia’s educational problems, why was it not fully realized in practice? Why was the crisis in Cambodian education augmented following the 1993 elections? The answer lies in understanding the totality of the policy formulation and implementation arena. In simple terms, the educational policy formulation process is not restricted to a single arena, where educational decisions are made in accordance with the Westernized planning process synonymous with notions of modernity. The planning processes congruent with NWO-oriented development, and therefore with ideas about global modernity, were continually subverted by conditions tied firmly to Cambodia’s local sociopolitical milieu. It is quite evident that educational policies in post-UNTAC Cambodia were subjected to the whims of the nation’s political leaders. Educational policies developed by the Ministry of Education, in consultation with international advisers and in congruence with international practice, were implemented only where they did not conflict with the immediate political imperatives of those in control of the apparatuses of the state. The cases of the prime pédagogique, the commitment to a 15 percent budgetary allocation to education, the public service agreement with the IMF, and the implementation of a 6 ⫹ 3 ⫹ 3 school structure all highlight the capacity of Cambodia’s national leaders to subvert planning processes, dispensing with or overturning stated and official educational policies and replacing them with cosmetic contingencies and reforms designed to augment their power. In this respect, formal education, rather than the key to realizing the government’s stated commitment to human resources development, was a tool utilized, and often abused, in the interests of building a Cambodian nation-state geared to the entrenched positions of those in power. In the context of the coalition government formed following the United Nations-sponsored elections, it was a situation exacerbated by a

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divided coalition government whose prime ministers (Hun Sen in particular) used the education system in their attempts to outdo each other. The NWO-oriented framework that dominated educational policies in Cambodia may have eventually failed. The simple reality, though, is that it was never given a chance to succeed. While critics may have balked at its overtly Western and modernist tone, the policy framework offered, at the very least, a costed, coherent, and arguably relevant sense of direction. The rejection of this framework, in favor of an ad hoc policy framework based solely on political criteria, was a manifestation of the conditions that sustained the educational crisis in Cambodia over an extended period. While the quality of education at all levels of the system remained deplorably low throughout the country, the government, in light of directions from its leaders, failed to provide the system with the funds necessary to effect sustainable improvement. Further, it continued to force on the Ministry of Education policy directions that undermined the capacity of educational officials, and their advisers, to work toward the realization of the system’s stated goals and, therefore, the alignment of the education system with the country’s development agenda. Underlying the continued convolution and subversion of educational policies was an enmeshment of tradition with modernity. Supported by the presence of those state institutions commonly associated with modernity, Cambodia’s commitment to development was enacted with an eye to securing the country’s position in the global community. Central to the commitment were the key tenets of the NWO: the preeminence of pluralism and democracy, a small and noninterventionist state apparatus, and the dominance of the free market. Enmeshed with these institutions of modernity were Cambodia’s hierarchical political traditions, in which democracy represents a hindrance to those exercising power and in which all authority rests with those who control the obtrusive and intrusive apparatuses of the state. These traditions, in sharp contrast to those underlying the Westernized development ideology embraced by the government, were at the core of the construction of the Cambodian nation-state, which informed the country’s process of educational policy formulation and implementation and which eventually accounted for the nature of Cambodia’s educational crisis.

Conclusion At twilight, the modern world recedes from Angkor Wat as the last stragglers leave with memories of sunset over the western entrances. Reclaimed by the twelfth century again, the temple slowly disappears from view during the encroaching darkness. . . . Silence descends, and in the soundless night, time seems to stand still. E. Mannika, Angkor Wat: Time, Space, and Kingship

Like Angkor Wat, where the traditional and modern worlds are enmeshed by the rise and the fall of the sun, the modern Cambodian nation-state embodies both tradition and modernity. Shrouded by the dark cloak of twilight, the temple’s disappearance from the horizon is followed at dawn by the slow ascent of the sun from behind its central towers, where it again joins the modern world. The Cambodian nationstate, with Angkor Wat at its core, oscillates between these two worlds, attempting to reconcile the demands of each. The education system, central to state-making, is caught in the middle of the reconciliation process. It is tempting to conclude that the crisis in Cambodian education began with the consecration of a unified Khmer state, under King Jayavarman II, in the ninth century. Just how Jayavarman ruled the Khmer polity we do not know. In fact, we know very little about him or about the lands and people he ruled. We do know, courtesy of an eleventh-century inscription, that in the year 802 he participated in a ritual whereby he became a chakravartin (universal monarch) and where the cult of the devaraja (God-King) was celebrated. In the same way that Cambodian villagers would pay homage to local neak ta (ancestor spirits), Jayavarman’s Angkorean successors would honor his spirit at

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Roluos, where he eventually settled. While the ideas of a universal monarch or a God-King have never been fully explained, they have provided the cultural core for the Cambodian beliefs about power, hierarchy, and leadership that are at the core of the educational crisis. Focusing on the legacy of Jayavarman II provides us with a poignant image of a timeless society. But history is not so simple. When the French arrived in Cambodia in the nineteenth century, much of the country’s early history was unknown to the local population. No one had bothered to decipher the eleventh-century Sdok Kak Thom inscription. No one even knew the names of the kings who had reigned over Angkor. In fact, kingship was in decline and had been so for several centuries. It was French scholars and archaeologists who told Cambodia of its former greatness. The French deciphered the many inscriptions scattered throughout the country, listed the great Angkorean kings and their many victories on the battlefields, and described the massive irrigation works that had once sustained a mighty kingdom. In doing so, as David Chandler suggests, the French “bequeathed to the Khmer the unmanageable notion that their ancestors had been for a time the most powerful and most gifted people of mainland Southeast Asia.” 1 The French drew on this former greatness in boosting the prestige of the monarchy, thereby fusing Cambodia’s long forgotten past with the modernizing mission civilisatrice. It might be appropriate then, that we exonerate Jayavarman II and attribute the educational crisis to the failings of French colonialism. The case is a compelling one. France provided Cambodia’s contemporary leaders with not only aspirations to reclaim the grandeur of the past but also a path to the future. It was the French who turned Phnom Penh into a “capital city.” They introduced electricity, constructed public buildings, turned canals into drains, established a post and telecommunications system, and linked the capital to other parts of the country through an elaborate system of highways and a railway line. Importantly, it was the French who undermined the traditional system of temple education, replacing it with a modern counterpart, and introduced ideas about social change and social mobility that were almost as unmanageable as those about former greatness. The capital city, public works, and modern education system were all evidence of the mission civilisatrice. This path to the future hardly extended beyond Cambodia’s capital. In the countryside, where the majority of the population lived, the French did very little. While they were intent on ridding Cambodia of its traditional education system, the development of a modern counterpart

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was pursued only to the extent that it was not a drain on colonial resources. The legacy of French colonialism on Cambodia and Cambodian education was the creation of a social contradiction. With one hand, through the development of Phnom Penh and the promise of secular education, the French offered Cambodia modernity. With the other hand, they took it away. While Phnom Penh was developed, much of the remainder of the country was ignored. Instead, through aligning themselves with the prestige of the monarchy, the French reinforced the country’s hierarchical social order and its associated concepts of power, authority, and patronage. Their half-hearted attempt to provide education, which offered the prospect of upward social mobility, was never fully realized. The fundamental contradiction between a social environment that offered modernity yet celebrated tradition, and an education system that promised change but was never fully implemented, sowed the seeds of educational disparity. On the basis of the evidence presented here, however, the educational crisis was not a French construction. While it was the French who introduced modern education to Cambodia, they were never particularly serious about it. It is appropriate that we condemn them for their ambivalence and their inertia. But it is not appropriate that we condemn them for Cambodia’s long-standing educational problems. Rather, as we have seen, the crisis has been almost a distinctly Cambodian outcome. In particular, it is an outcome that stems from Cambodia’s leaders, whose attempts to promote their visions of modernity within a framework of absolute power have had disastrous and sometimes tragic consequences. State-making has been a priority of the leaders of each of Cambodia’s ruling regimes since independence. Each has sought to reshape local worlds by promoting radically different ideas about what constitutes a “good Cambodian citizen.” Prince Norodom Sihanouk intended to mold Cambodians into good “Buddhist socialists,” committed to the monarchy and to the struggle against underdevelopment. His successor, Lon Nol, sought to transform the people into “neo-Khmer” Republicans, while Pol Pot endeavored to destroy their individuality in favor of collectivization. Burdened by the legacies of the Khmer Rouge, Heng Samrin and Hun Sen, through the 1980s, attempted to rescue the Communist cause in Cambodia. They believed that Cambodians, like their new-found allies in neighboring Vietnam, could become “new Socialist workmen.” Finally, Cambodia’s contemporary leaders have consigned

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themselves to transforming the people into pluralist democrats, committed to securing Cambodia’s place on the global stage and, importantly, in the regional and global economies. Central to each of these attempts at state-making, with their alternative visions of development and modernity, have been the traditional political behaviors that evolved in precolonial times and that were later reinforced by the French. It is as a result of this traditional political culture that state-making in Cambodia, since independence, has been associated with asserting and reinforcing the power and legitimacy of national political leaders. The education system has been caught in the middle of these statemaking aspirations: one hand is used to promote development, change, and modernity, yet the other is used to sustain the key tenets of the precolonial polity. These contradictory expectations for education have produced the educational crisis, a disparity between education and Cambodia’s economic, political, and cultural environments. The economic disparity in many respects is a product of the colonial heritage of the education system. All of Cambodia’s postindependence regimes have acknowledged the importance of agricultural development to the economy. None, however, has used education to address this sector and its needs. Periods of educational expansion in Cambodia have been characterized by the proliferation of the Westernized education system the country inherited from the French. Originally intended to socialize selected members of the elite into the colonial civil service, the system has remained inappropriate in an environment where few students progress beyond primary school and where there exist few employment opportunities in the nonagricultural “modern sector” associated with the civil service. The rapid expansion of this Western educational model has not been pursued in accordance with expert advice or even with ministerial policies. Both have almost universally argued that education should address rural needs and that “modernist” educational expansion should be tempered. The rapid expansion of Westernized education in Cambodia has been a function of the weight of the past: a desire by Cambodian leaders to secure legitimacy among the populace and an unwillingness by those charged with developing educational policies to contradict the wishes of those with more power (national leaders, for example) in the traditional hierarchy. The political dimension of the disparity between Cambodian education and the country’s social environment also stems from the enmeshment of tradition and modernity. In one respect, the education system

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has stood as a cornerstone of modernity in Cambodia. It has promoted among students the acquisition of values aligned with the development aspirations of different regimes; it has been perceived to represent a key to social mobility; and it has been congruent with social change. The values, perceptions, behaviors, and implications analogous with this institution of modernity have often been eschewed, however, in the wider political environment. The political actions and decisions of Cambodia’s leaders—Norodom Sihanouk, Lon Nol, Pol Pot, Heng Samrin, Hun Sen, and Norodom Ranariddh—provide testament to their reliance on the values of the traditional polity and to the sharp contrast between this polity and the values they have attempted to promote, often through education, as the basis of state ideology. Finally, the cultural dimension of educational disparity in Cambodia has served to inform the economic and political disparity. With the stark exception of the Democratic Kampuchea period, the evidence indicates that the crisis in Cambodian education has often not been the product of poorly directed or misguided education policies. In the 1950s and 1960s, Cambodia’s educational leaders and bureaucrats were presented with an abundance of advice from international agencies, particularly UNESCO, on the reform of education. Although the passage of time has revealed flaws in this advice, it was considered praiseworthy during the period when it was given. In Cambodia’s case, the advice was eagerly embraced by those entrusted with educational development. Similarly, during the early 1970s, Cambodia was given advice by UNESCO pertaining to educational reform. During both periods, although international advice had been officially embraced in educational policies, it was never implemented. It is a situation that continues to resonate in contemporary Cambodia. Central to this failure to implement educational policies are the traditional cultural values that have characterized attempts to implement social and economic policies in Cambodia. It is these cultural values that have subverted many of the assumptions that underlie the Westernized development ideologies often embraced by Cambodia’s leaders. Policies and practices in Cambodian education do not reflect those at the core of global development paradigms. Instead, they reflect the contest between the tenets of these global paradigms and those of the traditional polity. The educational crisis is a product of the contest, a result of the failure to absorb the competing demands of those, influenced by both tradition and modernity, seeking to construct the nation-state.

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Beyond the 1997 Coup If we look beyond Hun Sen’s coup of July 1997, we find few reasons to be optimistic. Despite the second prime minister’s efforts—with the compliance of Ung Huot—to convey a sense of normalcy following his elimination of Ranariddh, the international community wasted little time in condemning his actions. In addition to imposing on the country another bout of diplomatic isolation, which included denying Cambodia membership of the Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN), international organizations and donors punished Cambodia where it hurt most: financially. Several donors imposed a blanket suspension on all assistance, while others imposed a development assistance embargo similar to that of the 1980s, providing only humanitarian aid to those perceived to be most in need. The donor pullout in education was particularly conspicuous, with programs funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the European Union (EU) practically grinding to a halt. Although it tried to present a brave face, Hun Sen’s regime was certainly bruised by the international community’s financial punishment. Prior to the coup, in December 1996, Keat Chhon (minister of the economy and finance) had declared that 1997 would be the “moment of truth” for Cambodia. “The 1997 budget is fragile,” he had asserted when explaining its economic framework and fundamental contents. Warning that both expenditure and revenue, which was highly dependent on international donors, would need to be tightly controlled, Chhon pointed out the possible consequences of a budgetary blow-out: “Cambodia would again plunge into the inflationary spiral and monetary wildness.” 2 The coup and its aftermath found Cambodia miserably wanting in terms of its moment of truth: expenditure on defense and security exploded, while essential tourism revenues were devastated, sending the country down the well-worn path of “monetary wildness” Chhon had earlier warned against. Coupled with the financial effects of the coup was the political climate it produced. Hun Sen busied himself with cementing his rule and condemning Ranariddh as a criminal. The prince, meanwhile, traveled through Europe and North America urging governments to continue to punish Hun Sen and his regime. In Cambodia’s north, in areas close to the Thai border, the remnants of the armed forces loyal to Ranariddh clashed with those loyal to the CPP. When a protracted 1980s-style

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conflict again seemed likely, sinking into oblivion the more than $2 billion spent by the United Nations since 1991, the international community again shuttled between the protagonists, seeking to find common ground in order to reach a settlement acceptable to the major political factions. This they eventually did, and national elections scheduled for 1998 were conducted. While international observers declared the elections sufficiently fair, the losers—this time Ranariddh’s FUNCINPEC and the Sam Rainsy Party (SRP)—refused to accept what many considered was Hun Sen’s inevitable victory. In November 1998, further international encouragement and cajoling resulted in an agreement to form another CPP-FUNCINPEC coalition (the SRP electing to remain in opposition).3 Some things have changed: this time around the CPP is the dominant coalition partner; there is only one prime minister (Hun Sen); and the international community, while promising to help, is much more wary about writing checks to the Cambodian government than it was following the 1993 elections. But other things remain very much the same. Importantly, the country is again governed under a coalition arrangement, where both coalition factions remain suspicious of and often openly hostile toward each other. In education, Hun Sen continues to fly around the country in a helicopter funded by a businessman widely suspected of drug-trafficking, descending on villages to inaugurate schools. As with those who led Cambodia before him, he remains unconcerned about the finer details of educational quality and relevance. Bare-walled classrooms, devoid of books, continue to crumble, while teachers, who went on an indefinite strike in January 1999, remain reliant on the proceeds of petty corruption to boost their pitiful salaries.4 Looking to the future, it is difficult to perceive of any genuine commitment in the Cambodian government’s embrace of development policies. In October 1997, King Sihanouk lamented that “in a blossoming Asia . . . we are the only oasis of war, insecurity, self-destruction, poverty, social injustice, arch-corruption, lawlessness, national division, totalitarianism, drug trafficking and AIDS.” 5 His words were a sad indictment and, unfortunately, continue to ring true. While millions of Cambodians continue to live without adequate food and shelter, others are still busy enriching themselves by selling the country’s natural resources to the highest bidder. Parliamentary process remains irrelevant, high profile criminals act with impunity, basic human rights are largely ignored, and policies and commitments seem to be often worth no

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more than the paper they are written on. In essence, the aspirations of the long-suffering Cambodian people continue to be ignored in favor of the aspirations of its leaders. Angkor Wat, meanwhile, sits aloft flagpoles throughout the country, while Jayavarman II and his Angkorean successors look down from the heavens. Cambodia’s future, I am reminded, remains a prisoner of its past.

Notes

List of Abbreviations AER AKP AS BBC SWB BCAS BEFEO BP BUROEA CD CER CSQ CT FA FBIS FEER HE IC II JAS JCA JSEAS JSS LM LS MAS NC NWCR

American Economic Review Agence Khmère de Presse Asian Survey BBC Summary of World Broadcasts Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars Bulletin de l’Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient Bangkok Post Bulletin of the UNESCO Regional Office for Education in Asia The Cambodia Daily Comparative Education Review Cultural Survival Quarterly Cambodia Times France-Asie Foreign Broadcast Information Service Far Eastern Economic Review History of Education Indochina Chronicle Indochina Issues Journal of Asian Studies Journal of Contemporary Asia Journal of Southeast Asian Studies Journal of the Siam Society Le Monde Le Sangkum Modern Asian Studies New Cambodge Naval War College Review

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194 NYT PA PPP RC SEAA SEAC SEAQ VC WT

Notes to Pages 1–10 New York Times Pacific Affairs Phnom Penh Post Réalités Cambodgiennes Southeast Asian Affairs Southeast Asia Chronicle Southeast Asia Quarterly Vietnam Courier The World Today

Introduction 1. Detailed discussion of Angkor Wat is provided in E. Mannikka, Angkor Wat: Time, Space and Kingship. See also G. Cœdès, Angkor: An Introduction. 2. C. Neher and R. Marlay, Democracy and Development in Southeast Asia: The Winds of Change, p. 19. 3. David Chandler eloquently noted that “Cambodia is the only country in the world to display a ruin on its national flag.” D. Chandler, “Reflections on Cambodian History,” CSQ 14 (1990), p. 18. 4. For the most recent scholarly articulation of the themes of tragedy, see D. Chandler, “The Tragedy of Cambodian History Revisited,” in Facing the Cambodian Past: Selected Essays, 1971–1994, pp. 310 –325. 5. For the first detailed scholarly examination of the idea of an ‘educational crisis’, see P. Coombs, The World Crisis in Education: A Systems Analysis. Coombs reiterated the essential themes of the crisis almost two decades later in P. Coombs, The World Crisis in Education: The View from the Eighties. 6. S. Thion, Explaining Cambodia: A Review Essay, p. 1. 7. D. Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War and Revolution since 1945, p. 1. 8. H. Hockett, The Critical Method in Historical Research and Writing, p. 68. 9. This book, as with any contemporary work on Cambodia, is particularly indebted to the work of David Chandler, Ben Kiernan, Milton Osborne, and Michael Vickery.

Chapter 1: The Traditional Setting 1. I. Mabbett and D. Chandler, The Khmers, pp. 7–9. 2. Ibid., pp. 61– 65; see also I. Mabbett, “The Indianization of Southeast Asia,” JSEAS 8 (1977), pp. 1–14. Also R. Choudhary, Some Aspects of the Social and Economic History of Ancient India and Cambodia; G. Cœdès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, 3rd ed.; and M. Vickery, Society, Economy, and Politics in Pre-Angkor Cambodia. 3. For a discussion of the notion of caste, or varnas, in the Cambodian context, see I. Mabbett, “Varnas in Angkor and the Indian Caste System,” JAS 36 (1977), pp. 429 – 442. 4. D. Chandler, “Cambodia Before the French: Politics in a Tributary Kingdom, 1794 –1848.” Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan (1974), pp. 37–38. Jan Ovesen and his colleagues note that the term “loosely structured” is quite simplistic. They argue that “Khmer society is certainly structured . . . but the struc-

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tures are cultural and ideological rather than immediately social organizational.” See J. Ovesen, I. Trankell, and J. Öjendal, When Every Household is an Island: Social Organization and Power Structures in Rural Cambodia, p. 86. 5. Chandler, “Cambodia Before the French,” p. 41. On the self-preservation motive of Cambodia’s kings, see introductory paragraphs in M. Osborne, “Kingmaking in Cambodia: From Sisowath to Sihanouk,” JSEAS 4 (1973), p. 169 and pp. 169 –170, note 3. 6. Chandler, “Cambodia before the French,” pp. 44 – 47. 7. S. Bit, The Warrior Heritage: A Psychological Perspective on the Cambodian Trauma, p. 20. 8. S. Somboon, “Buddhism, Political Authority and Legitimacy in Thailand and Cambodia,” in Buddhist Trends in Southeast Asia, pp. 105–106. 9. Martin Stuart-Fox discusses this notion in his analysis of Theravada Buddhism in Laos. Stuart-Fox argues that through “its monopoly over education,” the sangha “ensured the propagation of an acceptable belief-system which effectively maintained existing social distinctions.” See M. Stuart-Fox, “Marxism and Theravada Buddhism: The Legitimation of Political Authority in Laos,” PA 58 (1985), p. 432. 10. Chou Ta-Kuan, Notes on the Customs of Cambodia, 2nd ed., pp. 11–12. 11. L. Manipoud, La rénovation des écoles de pagodes au Cambodge. Author’s translation. 12. Sorn S., “L’évolution de la société cambodgienne entre les deux guerres mondiales (1919 –1939)” (these pour le doctorat, Université Paris VII, 1995), p. 181. Author’s translation. 13. C. Keyes, “The Proposed World of the School: Thai Villagers’ Entry into a Bureaucratic State System,” in Reshaping Local Worlds: Formal Education and Cultural Change in Rural Southeast Asia, p. 93. 14. Bit, The Warrior Heritage, p. 100. 15. D. Chandler, “Normative Poems (chbab) and Precolonial Cambodian Society,” JSEAS 15 (1984), p. 272. Chandler refers to the social system as one of “lop-sided friendships.” 16. S. Pou and P. Jenner, “Cpap Rajaneti.” BEFEO 65 (1978), p. 387. English translation cited in Chandler, “Normative Poems,” p. 274. 17. S. Pou and P. Jenner, “Cpap Kun Cau.” BEFEO 64 (1977), p. 191. 18. P. Jenner and S. Pou, “Cpap Kram.” BEFEO 66 (1979), p. 139. English translation by Chandler, “Normative Poems,” p. 275. 19. For details of the distinctness of the Khmer version of the Ramayana story, see S. Singaravelu, “The Rama Story in Kampuchean Tradition.” Seksa Khmer 5 (1984), pp. 24 –28. Also S. Pou. “The Indigenization of the Ramayana in Cambodia,” Asian Folklore Studies 51 (1992), pp. 89 –103; and S. Pou, “Some Proper Names in the Khmer Ramakerti,” The Southeast Asian Review 5 (1980), pp. 19 –29. 20. See D. Chandler, A History of Cambodia, 2nd ed., p. 91. A more detailed summary of the plot of the story is found in F. Bizot, Ramaker: L’amour symbolique de Ram et Seta, pp. 42 –124. 21. J. Jacob, Reamker (Ramakerti): The Cambodian version of the Ramayana, p. 8. 22. Bit, The Warrior Heritage, p. 17.

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Notes to Pages 16 –23

23. M. Carrison, Cambodian Folk Stories from the Gatiloke, p. 12. In the late nineteenth century, Cambodia’s colonial government commissioned a monk, Oknya Sotann Preychea, to compile a volume of Gatiloke stories. His tenvolume compilation contained 112 stories, representing the first and last known written collection of Gatiloke stories written in the Cambodian language. This ten-volume compilation formed the basis of Muriel Carrison’s rendering of the stories in English, used as the textual basis for the present study. 24. In discussing Cambodian folk tales, the eminent Cambodian linguist, Judith Jacob, refers to a naïveté in the narration of the tales, which, she argues, leads to no surprises in the story, “since all the steps of the story are revealed to us as they happen.” J. Jacob, “The Short Stories of Cambodian Popular Tradition,” in Cambodian Linguistics, Literature and History, p. 254. 25. Carrison, Cambodian Folk Stories, pp. 52 –57. 26. Ibid., pp. 15–16. 27. Cited in K. Fisher-Nguyen, “Khmer Proverbs: Images and Rules,” in Cambodian Culture since 1975: Homeland and Exile, p. 99. 28. Ibid., p. 97. 29. Khin Sok, Le Cambodge entre le Siam et le Vietnam, de 1775 à 1880. 30. M. Osborne, The French Presence in Cochinchina and Cambodia: Rule and Response, 1859 –1905, p. 34. 31. For an acute summary of the writings of a number of these explorers, see D. Meyers, ed., The French in Indo-China: With a Narrative of Garnier’s Explorations in Cochin-China, Annam and Tonquin. See also a reprint of the first English language translation of French explorations in Indochina in L. de Carne, Travels on the Mekong: Cambodia, Laos and Yunnan— The Political and Trade Report of the Mekong Exploration Commission ( June 1866 –June 1868). 32. R. Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890 –1914, p. 16. 33. D. Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires: A Comparative Survey from the Eighteenth Century, p. 306. 34. S. Roberts, The History of French Colonial Policy, 1870 –1925, p. 419. 35. Chandler, A History, p. 142. 36. Ibid., pp. 144 –145. 37. Roberts, The History of French Colonial Policy, pp. 421– 433, 451. 38. Betts, Assimilation and Association, p. 106. 39. Roberts, The History of French Colonial Policy, pp. 457– 458. 40. A more detailed discussion of the “1916 Affair” can be found in M. Osborne, “Peasant Politics in Cambodia: The 1916 Affair,” MAS 12 (1978), pp. 217–243. See also J. Tully, Cambodia under the Tricolour: King Sisowath and the ‘Mission Civilisatrice’, 1904 –1927, pp. 187–211. 41. On the assassination of résident Bardez, see D. Chandler, “The Assassination of Résident Bardez (1925): A Premonition of Revolt in Colonial Cambodia,” JSS 70 (1982), pp. 35– 49; and Sorn, “L’évolution de la société cambodgienne,” pp. 333 –339. 42. Chandler, A History, pp. 156 –158. 43. R. Morizon, Monographie du Cambodge, p. 178. 44. Osborne, The French Presence, p. 54.

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45. A. Forest, Le Cambodge et la colonisation Française: Histoire d’une colonisations sans heurts, 1897–1920, pp. 154 –156. Forest notes the divergence between the education provided for Cambodians and that provided for Vietnamese and Chinese nationals in Cambodia. 46. Indochine Française Section des Services d’Intérêt Social, La pénétration scolaire en pays Cambodgien et Laotien, Indochine Française, p. 8. 47. On Sarraut’s reforms, see C. Bilodeau, “Compulsory Education in Cambodia,” in Compulsory Education in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, p. 18; also Tully, Cambodia under the Tricolour, pp. 244 –246. Gail Kelly argued that the “system was not planned as a replica of French schools or a diluted version but rather as a distinct system that would be appropriate not merely to the colonized but to the Vietnamese who were colonized.” See G. Kelly, “Colonial Schools in Vietnam: Policy and Practice,” in Education and Colonialism, p. 102. 48. Bilodeau, “Compulsory Education in Cambodia,” p. 20. 49. Ibid. 50. Sorn, “L’évolution de la société cambodgienne,” p. 181. 51. Bilodeau, “Compulsory Education in Cambodia,” p. 21. See also Indochine Française Section des Services d’Intérêt Social, La pénétration scolaire, pp. 9 –10. 52. The annual training cost per student at modernized pagoda schools was only one-quarter that of the secular schools. See Ministère du Plan, Annuaire statistique rétrospective du Cambodge, 1958 –1960, p. 19. 53. J. Montllor, Foreign Service Despatch from the American Embassy Phnom Penh to U.S. Department of State, “School Enrollment Increases in Cambodia,” Air Pouch 851H.43/3-653, March 6, 1953, pp. 2 –3. 54. Le Khmer (May 18, 1936), p. 1. Cited in B. Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power: A History of Communism in Kampuchea, 1930 –1975, p. 18. 55. In 1939, there were no Cambodian students enrolled at the only university in Indochina at Hanoi. See United Kingdom Naval Intelligence Division, Indo-China, p. 158. Vu Duc Bang discusses the evolution of higher education in French Indochina, noting its elitist orientation. See Vu Duc Bang, “Higher Education in former French Indo-china: A Success Story for a Fortunate Few,” Compare 23 (1993), pp. 63 –70. 56. See, for example, Osborne, The French Presence, pp. 156 –174. 57. The proposed romanization of the Khmer script, based on a transliteration by George Cœdès, did not take place until 1943, when it was announced by Cambodia’s new French résident, Georges Gautier. See Chandler, A History, pp. 169 –170. 58. On the education of Vietnam’s minorities, see G. Hickey, Sons of the Mountains: Ethnohistory of the Vietnamese Highlands to 1954, pp. 331–334. 59. The Collège Norodom Sihanouk is interesting in terms of its school roll. Students included Hu Nim, Hou Yuon, Khieu Samphan, and Saloth Sar, later to gain notoriety under his nom de guerre, Pol Pot. See D. Chandler, Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot, pp. 18 –19. Renamed the Lycée Kompong Cham in 1970, Amnesty International alleges that the school was used as a political torture center by the Vietnamese throughout the 1980s. See Amnesty International, Kampuchea: Political Imprisonment and Torture, p. 88.

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Notes to Pages 26 –29

60. Norodom Sihanouk was not the logical choice for the Cambodian throne. The French furthered their control over the Cambodian monarch by manipulating succession to the throne. As they had done in the case of King Sisowath, the French passed over traditional succession procedures and chose Norodom Sihanouk, the great-grandson of King Norodom. As Sihanouk was an offspring of both the Norodom and Sisowath branches of Cambodian royalty, the French were able to justify their selection on the grounds that it would heal a rift between the two. A more logical explanation is that Sihanouk was thought to be more malleable and submissive, especially in light of the problems that World War II was causing the French. See R. Smith, “King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia,” Asian Survey 7 (1967), pp. 354 –355. Details of Sihanouk’s genealogy can be found in J. Corfield, The Royal Family of Cambodia, 2nd ed., p. 111. 61. David Chandler cites the change in the format of Cambodia’s Royal Chronicles as further evidence of the manner in which World War II forced changes in the French approach to Cambodian kingship. See D. Chandler, “Cambodian Palace Chronicles: Kingship and Historiography at the End of the Colonial Era,” in Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia, p. 207. 62. For a discussion of the impact of the Japanese occupation elsewhere, the Indonesian experience is worthy of consideration. It is widely believed that the Japanese occupation was regarded as a significant turning point in the development of Indonesian nationalism. See J. Legge, Indonesia, pp. 137–140. A second thesis, which is somewhat more controversial, and seemingly a less plausible argument in the Cambodian case, was that Japanese misrule and neglect inspired nationalist movements in the region. See S. Sato, War, Nationalism and Peasants: Java under Japanese Occupation, 1942 –1945. 63. For a discussion, see D. Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War and Revolution since 1945, pp. 14 –15. See also D. Chandler, “The Kingdom of Kampuchea, March–October 1945: Japanese Sponsored Independence in Cambodia in WW2,” JSEAS 17 (1986), pp. 80 –93. 64. The Buddhist Institute was established in Phnom Penh by the French scholar Suzanne Karpelès in 1930 in order to diminish the influence of Thai Buddhism on the Cambodian monastic order. The early Cambodian nationalist, Son Ngoc Thanh, served as a librarian and later as deputy director at the institute. 65. On the significant and very laudable French contribution to the study and reinvigoration of Cambodian heritage, see Tully, Cambodia under the Tricolour, pp. 221–225. 66. Slogan cited in F. Keesing, Education and Pacific Countries, p. 95. 67. O. Quinlen, “Education Reform in Cambodia” (Master of Science thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science, 1992), p. 8. 68. Kiernan, How Pol Pot, p. xiii. 69. On the pesantren of Java, see S. Jones, “The Javanese Pesantren: Between Elite and Peasantry,” in Reshaping Local Worlds, p. 21. 70. Bilodeau, “Compulsory Education in Cambodia,” pp. 16 –18. 71. This shift was led by a member of the Paris “circle,” Keng Vannsak. Kiernan, How Pol Pot, pp. 122 –123, 131.

Notes to Pages 31–35

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Chapter 2: Sihanouk and the Sangkum 1. D. Chandler, A History of Cambodia, 2nd ed., p. 200; also Sydney Morning Herald (May 4, 1994), p. 20; The Australian (May 14, 1994), p. 6. 2. W. Leslie Garnett, “Cambodia,” Educational Horizons (Summer 1957), pp. 146, 147. 3. Memo, Charles Mann to the Vice President, August 9, 1966, C. O. 40, confidential files, Papers of Lyndon Baines Johnson, Box 7, LBJ Library. See also M. Osborne, Sihanouk: Prince of Light, Prince of Darkness, p. 78. 4. On these events, D. Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War and Revolution since 1945, pp. 61– 65. On Geneva, see J. Davidson, Indochina: Signposts in the Storm, chapter 10. The result of the conference was the partitioning of Vietnam into north and south. A second outcome was the granting of regroupment zones to the Communist forces of Vietnam and Laos but not to those of Cambodia. 5. M. McDonald, Angkor and the Khmers, p. 147; and Osborne, Sihanouk, p. 92. 6. AKP, March 15, 1955, p. c/1. Cited in Southeast Asia: Documents of Political Development and Change, p. 489. 7. Prince Sihanouk often metaphorically conceived of himself as the captain of the Cambodian boat. See, for example, BBC SWB, FE/2461/B/24. 8. BBC SWB, FE/2313/B/16. 9. Michael Leifer contends that the effectiveness of the Sangkum was determined, to a large extent, by the institutional apparatuses of the Cambodian political system. He asserts that Sihanouk failed to “effectively institutionalize the political system so that it would be able to sustain his departure without clear prospect of disintegration.” Milton Osborne extends Leifer’s argument by affirming that while the formation of the Sangkum was a “brilliant answer” to a short-term problem, the organization “was so broad in composition that the old political rivalries it had been designed to eliminate reappeared once the unifying election campaign [1955] had ended.” See M. Leifer, “The Failure of Political Institutionalization in Cambodia,” MAS 2 (1968), p. 138; and M. Osborne, Politics and Power in Cambodia: The Sihanouk Years, pp. 55, 59. 10. Ministère de l’Information, Considerations, sur le socialisme Khmer (Phnom Penh, 1960), pp. 2, 5. Norodom Sihanouk, “Our Buddhist Socialism,” Kambuja (December 1965), p. 18. See also Sihanouk’s inaugural address to the 6th Conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists held in Phnom Penh, November 14 –22, 1961, in FA 18 (1962), p. 28. On the economic rationale of the ideology, see P. Preschez, Essai sur la démocratie au Cambodge, pp. 117–122. 11. Norodom Sihanouk, “Our Buddhist Socialism,” p. 15; and Norodom Sihanouk, Souvenirs doux et amers (Paris: Hachette, 1981), p. 262. On Buddhist socialism and development planning, see Ministère de l’Information, Considerations, pp. 13 –14. 12. For a more detailed discussion, see A. Hoogvelt, Globalization and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of Development, pp. 48 – 49. 13. Norodom Sihanouk, Souvenirs, p. 262.

200

Notes to Pages 36 – 40

14. J. Eilenberg, “New Directions in Cambodian Education,” Comparative Education Review 5 (1961), p. 188. 15. T. Schultz, “Investment in Human Capital,” AER 51 (1961), pp. 1–17. 16. Cambodia had been a member of UNESCO since July 1951. UNESCO, A Chronology of UNESCO, 1945 –1987: Facts and Events in UNESCO’s History with References to Documentary Sources in the UNESCO Archives and Supplementary Information in the Annexes 1–21, p. 51. 17. Cited in C. Bilodeau, “Compulsory Education in Cambodia,” in Compulsory Education in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, p. 28. 18. On Nhiek Tioulong, see LS (March 1966), p. 20. See also the obituary written on his death in 1996 in PPP ( June 14 –27), 1996, p. 20. 19. Bilodeau, “Compulsory Education in Cambodia,” pp. 28, 56. Jean Imbert argues that expansion was one of two educational aims of the Cambodian administration during this period. The other aim, according to Imbert, was the creation of a system of higher education in Cambodia, manifested with the establishment of the Institut National d’Etudes Juridiques, Economiques et Politiques, the Ecole Royale de Médicine, and the Ecole d’Agriculture. See J. Imbert, Histoire des institutions Khmères, p. 170. 20. Bilodeau, “Compulsory Education in Cambodia,” p. 58. 21. See M. Tabellini, “From Fundamental Education to Community Development: The Story of a Project Carried out in Cambodia,” UNESCO Chronicle 8 (1962), p. 285. On the teacher shortage, see International Bureau of Education, “Cambodia: From the Reply Sent by the Ministry of National Education,” International Conference on Public Education XXVI Session 260, p. 20. 22. Bilodeau, “Compulsory Education in Cambodia,” pp. 30, 49, 62. 23. On the Issaraks, see B. Kiernan, How Pol Pot came to Power: A History of Communism in Kampuchea, 1930 –1975, pp. 125–134. On the elections, see Chandler, The Tragedy, pp. 81– 84. 24. H. Blaise, “The Strategy and Process of Institution Building: A Case Study in Cambodia” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1964), p. 107. 25. J. Lacouture, Cambodge, pp. 33 –52. 26. “Sihanouk Unopposed” is the title of a chapter of David Chandler’s history of the period after the Second World War. See Chandler, The Tragedy, chapter 3. 27. On the plan, see Ministère de l’Intérieur, Cambodge, p. 214. Source for statistics cited: Ministère du Plan, Annuaire statistique du Cambodge, 1963 –1964, pp. 16, 19. Of the eighteen establishments noted for the 1957/1958 school year, only four offered a full secondary education (lycée). See Departement de l’Education Nationale, Rapport annuel, année scolaire de 1957/58, pp. 7–9. 28. Ministère du Plan, Annuaire statistique rétrospective du Cambodge, 1937– 1957, p. 15. 29. Cited in D. Steinberg, Cambodia: Its People, its Society, its Culture, p. 271; and Blaise, “The Strategy and Process of Institution Building,” p. 128. 30. See U.S. Embassy Phnom Penh Foreign Service Despatch 851H.00/122954, December 29, 1954. The United States Operations Mission in Phnom Penh was aware of the potential credentialism problem as early as 1954. In a re-

Notes to Pages 41– 46

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port of December 11, 1954, it was noted that “while there is no present problem in placing educated young people, the current emphasis on purely academic education could lead eventually to over-production of white collar professionals.” The report states that the U.S. Embassy “will continue to exert its influence toward the prevention of a repetition in Cambodia of the tragedies which have resulted from this tendency [students moving away from rural life] in other colonial and ex-colonial countries.” 31. International Bureau of Education, “Cambodia: From the Reply Sent by the Ministry of National Education,” International Conference on Public Education XXII: Primary School Textbooks 204, p. 88. 32. Hobsbawm, cited in C. Keyes, “State Schools in Rural Communities: Reflections on Rural Education and Cultural Change in Southeast Asia,” in Reshaping Local Worlds: Formal Education and Cultural Change in Rural Southeast Asia, p. 10. 33. Author’s interview with Om Prasit, Sydney (Australia), July 1996. On respect for authority figures in education, the recollections of Cambodian refugees in the United States, as related to Usha Welaratna, provide an illuminating starting point. See selected accounts in U. Welaratna, Beyond the Killing Fields: Voices of Nine Cambodian Survivors in America. 34. Om Prasit recalled that students were taught “nothing at all . . . because Sihanouk did not want us to know it.” Interview with Om Prasit. See also Norodom Sihanouk, La Monarchie cambodgienne et la croisade royale pour l’indépendance. 35. Sihanouk cited in Chandler, The Tragedy, p. 118. 36. On the idea of a hidden curriculum, see J. Watt, Ideology, Objectivity and Education, pp. 163 –166. 37. Saloth Sar, “Monarchy or Democracy?” Copy of text cited in Khmer Rouges! Materiaux pour l’histoire du communisme au Cambodge, eds. S. Thion and B Kiernan, p. 357. 38. Saloth Sar taught at the private college Chamroan Vichea (Progressive Study). On his teaching career, see D. Chandler, Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot, pp. 51–55. 39. See Kiernan, How Pol Pot, p. 176. 40. Chandler, The Tragedy, pp. 94 –98. 41. Chau Seng’s study was published as Programme de l’enseignement secondaire Khmer. 42. Kambuja ( June 1965), p. 67. 43. Secondary education, according to the ministry in 1960, was still aimed at “giving Khmer youth a humanist training.” See International Bureau of Education, “Cambodia,” Preparation of General Secondary School Curricula: XXIII International Conference on Public Education, 216, p. 134. 44. Kambuja ( June 1965), pp. 68 –71. 45. Ministère du Plan, Annuaire statistique, 1963 –1964, p. 91. 46. BBC SWB, FE/ W44/B/33. The plan, entitled “Norodom Sihanouk Five Year Plan,” called for eight billion riels of state investment during the five years, 40 percent initially to come from foreign aid. 47. FEER ( January 31, 1963), p. 195.

202

Notes to Pages 46 – 49

48. Ibid. 49. Ministère de l’Information, L’œuvre du Sangkum Reastr Niyum: Présente au XV e Congres National, p. 104. 50. FEER (December 5, 1963), p. 510. Also Ministère de l’Intérieur, Cambodge, p. 235. 51. For details, see Chandler, The Tragedy, pp. 86, 99 –107. On lack of American respect, see Osborne, Sihanouk, p. 103. 52. Chandler, The Tragedy, p. 131. 53. CIA Directorate of Intelligence, “Current Intelligence Memorandum, Subject: Sihanouk’s intentions,” OCI No. 3519/63, December 19, 1963. 54. As early as March 1961, Sihanouk had stated that “the United States has from the beginning searched for means to bend our neutrality, and even to overthrow our régime, which the Khmer people have charged with applying the neutral policy.” Sihanouk, cited in R. Smith, Cambodia’s Foreign Policy, p. 137. 55. Chandler, Brother Number One, p. 60. See also Kiernan, How Pol Pot, p. 181. 56. BBC SWB, FE/ W66/A/8; BBC SWB, FE/ W92/A/13; BBC SWB, FE/ W98/A/13. On China’s aid to Cambodia, see A. Marsot, “China’s Aid to Cambodia,” PA 43 (1969), pp. 189 –198. 57. Kiernan, How Pol Pot, pp. 176 –177. 58. Secretary General of the Cambodian Commission for UNESCO, “Directorate of Education Services, Cambodia,” BUROEA 3 (1968); Secretariat of the Cambodian National Commission for UNESCO, “The Development of Education in Cambodia since 1955,” BUROEA 1 (1966), pp. 9 –14. 59. Ministère de l’Education National et Beaux-Arts, Office National de Planification de l’Education, Le Royaume du Cambodge vu par les Planificateurs de l’Education. On primary education reforms, see J. Griffon, Rapport de mission au Cambodge, octobre-decembre 1964, pp. 20 –24. 60. International Bureau of Education, “Report from Cambodia: From the Reply Sent by the Ministry of National Education,” Shortage of Primary Teachers: International Conference on Public Education XXVI Session 256, pp. 20 –21. 61. International Bureau of Education, “Cambodia: From the Reply Sent by the Ministry of Education,” International Conference on Public Education XXVI Session 260, p. 109; Secretariat of the Cambodian National Commission for UNESCO, “The Development of Education in Cambodia since 1955,” p. 13. See also C. Meyer, Derriere le sourire khmer, p. 266. 62. On problems being encountered elsewhere in Southeast Asia, see Le Thanh Khoi, “Problèmes generaux de l’education et du développement en Asie,” in Education et développement dans le Sud-Est de l’Asie: Colloque tenu a Bruxelles les 19, 20 et 21 avril 1966, pp. 7–32. 63. New institutions, opened over the next four years, included the Royal Technical University, the Royal University of Fine Arts, Royal University of Kompong Cham, Takeo-Kampot Royal University, Royal University of Agronomic Science, and the Royal University of Battambang. On the development of these institutions, see H. Hayden, ed., Higher Education and Development in Southeast Asia, Volume 2: Country Profiles, pp. 197–204.

Notes to Pages 50 –56

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64. J. Griffon, Rapport de mission. On the educational aspect of the plan, see UNESCO, “Cambodia,” BUROEA 3 (1968), p. 49. 65. Meyer, Derriere, pp. 162 –165; and M. Leifer, “Cambodia: The Politics of Accommodation,” AS 4 (1964), p. 676. 66. Sihanouk’s film, Apsara, was the first of nine films written, produced, and directed by Sihanouk between 1966 and 1969. Bereft of reality, the films depicted Sihanouk’s vision of an ideal Cambodia, with absolutely no expense spared in their production. See Osborne, Sihanouk, pp. 179 –183. 67. See Chandler, The Tragedy, p. 145. For an acute summary of the economic situation in Cambodia at this time, see D. Kirk, “Cambodia’s Economic Crisis,” AS 11 (1971), pp. 239 –245. 68. Interview with Om Prasit. 69. Author’s interview with Tea Hour Yith, Sydney (Australia), February 1994. Her recollections were mirrored by those of an education adviser sent to Cambodia by the U.S. International Cooperation Administration in the early 1960s. Robert Bullington recalled that “although the curriculum calls for much direct observation and the use of . . . objects and some equipment, it is likely that most instruction is by word of mouth.” See R. Bullington, “Science Education in Cambodia,” Science Education 48 (1964), p. 297. 70. Written responses to questions from Kao Nhek-Kiang, Canada, August 1996. 71. Meyer, Derriere, p. 164. 72. The authoritative treatise on the Cambodian economy of the 1960s by Remy Prud’homme clearly demonstrates this point: “primary, secondary and tertiary education do not prepare for much more than a career in the civil service. The agronomists, technicians, accountants, engineers, economists, and entrepreneurs who play an important role in economic development are too few in Cambodia.” See R. Prud’homme, L’economie du Cambodge, pp. 55–56. Author’s translation. 73. Ministère de l’Education, Règlement scolaire des écoles primaires publiques Cambodgiennes, pp. 29 –31, 34 –35. 74. Ibid., p. 16. 75. See LM ( July 9, 1968), p. 2. 76. BBC SWB, FE/2790/B/24. 77. While Sihanouk continued to urge students to “return to the soil,” he also continued to boast about the quantitative progress made in the development of education. See, for example, his speech at the Lycée Santepheap in Kompong Speu, AKP ( July 26, 1967), p. 1. 78. M. Leifer, “Cambodia: Its Search for Neutrality,” AS 3 (1963), p. 56. 79. On corruption in Cambodia, see Osborne, Sihanouk, pp. 159 –161; and M. Martin, Cambodia: A Shattered Society, pp. 66 – 68. 80. Chandler, The Tragedy, p. 146. 81. K. Um, “Brotherhood of the Pure: Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia” (Ph.D. Thesis, University of California, 1991), p. 8. 82. BBC SWB, FE/2792/A3/2.; BBC SWB, FE/2784/A3/1; BBC SWB, FE/2806/A3/1; BBC SWB, FE/2478/A3/2; BBC SWB, FE/2313/B/17. See

204

Notes to Pages 56 –59

Sihanouk’s explanation of his coloring of Cambodia in a series of interviews conducted in July and August 1979 in P. Schier and M. Schier-Oum, Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia: Interviews and Talks with Prince Norodom Sihanouk, p. 7. 83. On the break with America, see J. Corfield, Khmers Stand Up! A History of the Cambodian Government 1970 –1975, pp. 36 –37. For an American reaction, see Memo, Arthur McCafferty to the President, May 3, 1966, Cambodia Memos Vol. III, Box 236, NSF, LBJ Library; also Memo, McGeorge Bundy to the President, May 3, 1965, Cambodia Memos Vol. III, Box 236, NSF, LBJ Library. 84. BBC SWB, FE/2313/B/16; on the elections, see Corfield, Khmers Stand Up!, pp. 39 – 40. See also Chandler, The Tragedy, p. 154. 85. L. Summers, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Cambodia’s Economy and Industrial Development, p. 17. 86. Chandler, Brother Number One, p. 66. 87. See BBC SWB, FE/2715/A3/11 and BBC SWB, FE/2716/A3/12. 88. On the Samlaut Rebellion, see B. Kiernan, The Samlaut Rebellion and its Aftermath, 1967–1970: The Origins of Cambodia’s Liberation Movement. See also B. Kiernan, “The Samlaut Rebellion,” in Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea, 1942 –1980, pp. 166 –205. On a visit to Pailin (in southern Battambang) in 1966, Milton Osborne observed the presence of “an increasing number of educated people who could not find jobs” working as coolies in gem mines. See M. Osborne, Before Kampuchea: Preludes to Tragedy, pp. 39 – 41. 89. Chandler, The Tragedy, p. 166. 90. Pol Pot, cited in ibid., p. 166. 91. Author’s interview with Men Bunroeun, Adelaide (Australia), March 1994. 92. BBC SWB, FE/2715/A3/11. 93. AKP (April 10, 1967), p. 9. 94. AKP (April 24, 1967), p. 9. 95. BBC SWB, FE/2716/A3/12. 96. Interview with Tea Hour Yith. 97. LM ( July 9, 1968), p. 2. 98. BBC SWB, FE/2480/A3/7 and FEER ( July 13, 1967), p. 115. 99. BBC SWB, FE/2792/A3/2. 100. It should be noted that many teachers who fled to the forest, allegedly because they were “Reds,” were on a mission of self-preservation. Cambodia’s volatile domestic political climate led to the “coloring” of many people merely suspected of being enemies of the state or, more tragically, enemies of those with more status or influence than themselves. Many fled in fear of Sihanouk, while others ran, afraid of the brutal and repressive head-hunting campaign being conducted by the army of Lon Nol. See interview with Tea Hour Yith, who recalled that a friend had “to run away . . . go away, far away.” See also M. Caldwell and Lek Tan, Cambodia in the Southeast Asian War, pp. 156 –157, who argue that teachers fled to avoid “possible or certain persecution in Phnom Penh.” On Sihanouk’s demand for a list, see BBC SWB, FE/2784/A3/2. On the soft policy of the Communists, see T. Carney, “The Unexpected Victory,” in Cambodia, 1975 –1978: Rendezvous with Death, pp. 17–19.

Notes to Pages 60 –71

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101. On blaming others, see BBC SWB, FE/2571/A3/1, in which the prince blamed problems on events in China. 102. S. Thion, “The Cambodian Idea of Revolution,” in Watching Cambodia: Ten Paths to Enter the Cambodian Tangle, pp. 80, 82 – 85. 103. Chandler, Brother Number One, p. 53. 104. For a discussion of this adage, see interview with Tea Hour Yith; interview with Hem Sophearak, Sydney (Australia), February 1994; and author’s interview with Ek Seng, Sydney (Australia), January 1996. 105. Although teaching was a lowly rated civil service vocation for many education graduates, the extent of the unemployment problem resulted in school graduates clamoring for the available places at teacher training institutions. In 1967, for example, 12,000 candidates applied for 1,600 teacher training openings. LM ( July 9, 1968), p. 2. 106. Interview with Hem Sophearak. 107. Author’s interview with Nuon Vuthy, Sydney (Australia), February 1994. 108. Osborne, Sihanouk, p. 269. 109. S. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, p. 168.

Chapter 3: Lon Nol and the Republic 1. Davis provided details of the incident in an article written at the time. See FEER (February 21, 1975), p. 13. See also BBC SWB, FE/4826/A3/4. 2. T. Bowden, One Crowded Hour: Neil Davis, Combat Cameraman, 1934 –1985, pp. 312 –313. 3. See BBC SWB, FE/4828/A3/2. 4. Sihanouk’s negotiations were aimed at ensuring the territorial integrity of Cambodia. 5. “Vietnamization,” in line with President Nixon’s promise to remove U.S. troops from Vietnam, involved handing the conduct of the war over to the South Vietnamese. The bombing was the brainchild of General Creighton Abrams, who wanted to strike at Vietnamese frontier bases to ensure no “come back” after the Americans began their withdrawal from Vietnam. The bombing campaign, code-named “Menu,” was to concentrate on eliminating the mobile Communist military headquarters (known as COSVN), located in Cambodia. The first of 3,695 B-52 raids flown over the Cambodian sanctuaries took place in a veil of secrecy on March 18, 1969. On the bombing, see A. Isaacs, Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia, pp. 194 –195. 6. W. Burchett, The Second Indochina War: Cambodia and Laos, p. 47. 7. See J. Corfield, Khmers Stand Up! A History of the Cambodian Government, 1970 –1975, p. 53; D. Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War and Revolution since 1945, pp. 192 –199; M. Leifer, “Peace and War in Cambodia,” SEAQ (Winter 1971), p. 59. 8. On the Svay Rieng demonstrations, see LM ( June 3, 1970), p. 1. On the embassy sackings, see BBC SWB, FE/3328-3331/A3; BP (March 13, 1970), p. 1; FEER (March 19, 1970), p. 4. On the demand for the Vietnamese withdrawal, see BBC SWB, FE/3330/A3/1; FEER (March 26, 1970), p. 4. On Oum Mannorine, see BBC SWB, FE/3331/A3/4 –5. On Kossomak’s order, see FEER (April 9, 1970), p. 20. On the withdrawal of confidence, see BBC SWB, FE/3334/A3/

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Notes to Pages 71–78

3-5. The “coup” has been discussed in detail elsewhere. See, for example, Corfield, Khmers Stand Up!; W. Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, chapter 8; F. Sille, Die roten Khmer, pp. 71– 83; M Leifer, “Peace and War in Cambodia,” SEAQ (1971), p. 59; also, M. Leifer, “Political Upheaval in Cambodia,” WT 26 (1970), p. 185. 9. BBC SWB, FE/3333/A3/7. 10. On the state of emergency, see BBC SWB, FE/3334/A3/3. On the protests, see BBC SWB, FE/3334/A3/6. On the youth movement, see BBC SWB, FE/3336/A3/9. On the public holiday, see RC, December 18, 1970, p. 14. 11. H. S. Ngor and R. Warner, Surviving the Killing Fields: The Cambodian Odyssey of Haing S. Ngor, pp. 39 – 40. 12. S. May, Cambodian Witness: The Autobiography of Someth May, p. 93. 13. See Ros Chantrabot, “La république khmère et l’Asie du sud-est après sin écroulement” (These pour le doctorat, Ecole des Hautes études en Sciences Sociales, 1978), p. 97. 14. BBC SWB, FE/3338/A3/12. 15. FEER (April 9, 1970), p. 5. 16. NYT, April 13, 1970, p. 1. 17. Chandler, The Tragedy, p. 198. 18. On Lon Nol’s philosophy in regard to Buddhism and his penchant for the occult and mysticism, see E. Becker, When the War was Over: The Voices of Cambodia’s Revolution and its People, pp. 135–136. 19. B. Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power: A History of Communism in Kampuchea, 1930 –1975, p. 348. See also, Lon Nol, Neo-Khmèrisme, p. 3. 20. Emory Swank, the U.S. Ambassador in Cambodia between 1970 and 1973, recalled in 1983 that “Lon Nol’s faith in us was child-like, unquestioning.” See E. Swank, “The Land in Between: Cambodia Ten Years Later,” II 36 (April 1983), p. 2. 21. Phouk Chhay, “The Social and Economic Heritage of the Old Régime,” NC 1 (May 1970), pp. 50 –52. 22. Phuong Ton, “The National Education under the Old Régime,” NC 2 ( June 1970), pp. 38 –39. 23. See “Conference de presse,” Documents sur l’aggression Vietcong et NordVietnamenne contre le Cambodge, pp. 70 –71. 24. Author’s interview with Tea Hour Yith, Sydney (Australia), February 1994. On the circulation of the Revue, see D. Whitaker, ed., Area Handbook for the Khmer Republic, p. 114. 25. BBC SWB, FE/3343/A3/7. 26. Corfield, Khmers Stand Up!, p. 92. 27. Shawcross, Sideshow, p. 131. 28. See, for example, NC 3 ( July 1970), pp. 33 –35. Teachers were also involved in the military activities. An Australian teacher working in Cambodia at the time recalled teachers turning up to class in military uniforms, sometimes wearing pistols. The same teacher recalled one student arriving at school in a French paramilitary uniform. G. Coyne, personal communication, December 1996.

Notes to Pages 78 – 82

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29. RC (December 18, 1970), p. 14. 30. M. Bray, “Economics of Education,” in International Comparative Education: Practices, Issues and Prospects, p. 254. 31. UNESCO, “Education in the Khmer Republic,” BUROEA 6 (1972), pp. 89 and 92 –93. Also UNESCO, Modèle de développement de l’éducation: Perspectives pour l’Asie, 1965 –1980 (Paris, 1967). 32. RC (December 18, 1970), p. 14. 33. A. Curle, Educational Problems of Developing Societies: With Case Studies of Ghana, Pakistan and Nigeria, p. 86. 34. Whitaker, Area Handbook, p. 113. 35. Ibid. See also author’s interview with Suon Serey, Phnom Penh, January 1997. 36. Author’s interview with Mun Savorn, Sydney (Australia), July 1996. 37. Throughout 1970 and 1971, before the effects of the civil conflict almost totally enveloped Cambodian society, significant progress had been made in “Khmerizing” school texts and curricula. See Ministère de l’Education Nationale et de la Culture, Rapport sur le mouvement éducatif en 1970 –1971: Présente à la 33e session de la Conférence Internationale de l’Education, Genève, septembre 1971. 38. M. Martin, Cambodia: A Shattered Society, p. 74. 39. On reports of malnutrition, see Isaacs, Without Honor, p. 223. 40. See BBC SWB, FE/3340/A3/6. On the Kompong Cham uprising, see B. Kiernan, “The 1970 Peasant Uprising in Kampuchea,” JCA 9 (1979). 41. Thomas Englebert and Christopher Goscha accurately point out that Vietnamese motives in Cambodia were concentrated on maintaining their sanctuaries in Cambodia and, in particular, maintaining their control of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. See T. Englebert and C. Goscha, Falling Out of Touch: A Study on Vietnamese Communist Policy towards an Emerging Cambodian Communist Movement, 1930 –1975, pp. 91–96. Gareth Porter has argued that the Vietnamese believed they had a major role to play in fostering a revolution in Cambodia and therefore considered their alliance with Sihanouk, who had significant local support, more important than that with the Cambodian communists. See G. Porter, “Vietnamese Communist Policy towards Kampuchea, 1930 –1970,” in Revolution and its Aftermath in Kampuchea: Eight Essays, p. 83. 42. Corfield, Khmers Stand Up!, p. 99. 43. The figure of 4,000 is that cited by Saloth Sar in his 1977 speech commemorating the founding of the CPK. Saloth Sar, Discours prononcé par le Camarade Pol Pot, Secrétaire du Comité Central du Parti Communiste du Kampuchea, traduction non officielle (Paris, 1977), pp. 38ff. Others have provided lower estimates. David Chandler cites U.S. intelligence, who estimated that at the time of the coup, the Communists had less than 3,000 men and women under arms. See D. Chandler, Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot, p. 91. See also G. Hildebrand and G. Porter, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, p. 66. 44. K. Frieson, “Revolution and Rural Response in Cambodia,” in Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community, pp. 35–36. 45. On Sihanouk as a figurehead, see D. Chandler, A History of Cambodia,

208

Notes to Pages 83 – 86

2nd ed., p. 91. For a commentary on the program, see L. Summers, “The Cambodian Liberation Forces: Political and Economic Doctrine,” IC 17 (1972), pp. 1– 6. 46. BBC SWB, FE/3372/A3/5–10. 47. On FUNK attempts to secure the loyalty of the nation’s “intellectuals,” see Chan Youran’s appeal to Cambodia’s youth, and Son Sen’s appeal, one week later, to Cambodia’s intellectuals, which highlighted the disrespect of the Lon Nol regime for education: “How can we remain indifferent . . . when our schools, libraries and research institutes are being turned into barracks for the aggressor troops?” he asked. A third appeal was broadcast by Sihanouk in August 1970, urging Cambodia’s intellectuals to switch their allegiance to FUNK. See BBC SWB, FE/3379/A3/6 – 8; BBC SWB, FE/3393/A3/6; BBC SWB, FE/ 3461/A3/4 –5. Ironically, the Khmer Republic was to accuse its opposition of similar acts. Long Boret asserted that “the occupiers are attacking our . . . schools.” See Long Boret, The Struggle for Survival or the Violent [sic] of Neutrality, p. 6. 48. See Corfield, Khmers Stand Up!, p. 110, citing an interview with Jacques Nepoté. 49. In an interview in 1990, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen recalled that “the Americans had been dropping bombs on Memut, my birthplace. Being a Khmer and the offspring of the Angkorean age, I had no choice but to join the popular movement to fight against external aggression.” Chou Meng Tarr, “A Talk with Prime Minister Hun Sen,” CSQ 40 (1990), p. 6. 50. K. Quinn, “Political Change in Wartime: The Khmer Krahom Revolution in Southern Cambodia, 1970 –1974,” NWCR (Spring 1976), pp. 3 –31. See also S. Thion, “Within the Khmer Rouge,” in Watching Cambodia: Ten Paths to Enter the Cambodian Tangle, pp. 1–19. 51. Ith Sarin, “Nine Months with the Maquis,” in Communist Party Power in Kampuchea (Cambodia): Documents and Discussion, pp. 38 – 41. Milton Osborne argued that Sihanouk was used by the Cambodian Communists to ensure their international legitimacy and that the prince was well aware, by 1973, that he did not figure in the long-term plans of the Communists. See M. Osborne, “Norodom Sihanouk: A Leader of the Left?” in Communism in Indochina, pp. 239 –241. 52. On the anti-Vietnamese sentiment, see Kiernan, How Pol Pot, pp. 357– 362. On the intensification of the Communist’s revolutionary “zeal,” see Quinn, “Political Change in Wartime,” pp. 11–17 and Frieson, “Revolution and Rural Response,” pp. 42 – 43. 53. “Planning the Past: The Forced Confessions of Hu Nim, Tuol Sleng prison, May–June 1977 (trans. by C. Boua),” in Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976 –1977, p. 263. On Tuol Sleng, a former high school, see B. Kiernan, C. Boua, and A. Barnett, “Bureaucracy of Death,” New Statesman (2 May 1979), pp. 669 – 676. See also W. Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience, pp. 39 – 44; and D. Hawk, “The Photographic Record,” in Cambodia, 1975 –1978: Rendezvous with Death, pp. 209 –215. 54. Author’s interview with Ek Seng, Sydney (Australia), June 1996. A resi-

Notes to Pages 86 –90

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dent of damban 22, Prey Veng province, the informant recalled that the Sney Pul high school was converted into a prison facility. 55. Kenneth Quinn, cited in Kiernan, How Pol Pot, p. 335. Quinn’s report, “The Khmer Krahom program to create a Communist society in southern Cambodia,” was a U.S. Department of State Airgram (February 20, 1974) and should not be confused with the journal article cited in note 50 (although both are based on the same data). 56. On the school, see C. Meyer, Derrière le sourire Khmer, p. 389. On Tiv Ol’s fate, see Chandler, The Tragedy, p. 291. 57. See Ith, “Nine Months with the Maquis,” p. 40. 58. On the bombing, see B. Kiernan, “The American Bombardment of Kampuchea,” Vietnam Generation (Winter 1989), pp. 4 – 41. 59. Chandler, A History, p. 206. 60. See Chandler, The Tragedy, pp. 221–222. See also Corfield, Khmers Stand Up!, pp. 142 –151. See also P. Poole, “Cambodia: Will Vietnam Truce Halt Drift to Civil War?” AS 13 (1973), pp. 76 – 82. 61. For details of the corruption within the armed forces, see Becker, When the War was Over, p. 33; Corfield, Khmers Stand Up!, pp. 124 –125. For personal accounts, see May, Cambodian Witness, pp. 96 –97; and H. Locard and Mœung Sonn, Prisonnier de l’Angkar, pp. 54 –58. On U.S. encouragement for changes, see FEER (October 7, 1972), p. 20. On Lon Nol and fortune-tellers, see FEER (March 25, 1972), pp. 5– 6. 62. The final report of the consultancy: B. Duvieusart and R. Ughetto, Projet de restructuration du système d’éducation, 13 février–20 avril 1973 (Paris: UNESCO, 1973), no. 298/RMO.RD/EP. Apart from noting the obvious damage being caused by the ongoing conflict, the consultants also noted that the system bore little relationship to Cambodia’s economic and social development needs (pp. 26 –31). The discussion of the social and political context surrounding the mission is based on B. Duvieusart, personal communication, January 29, 1999. 63. Justin Corfield notes that in areas of Kompong Speu, where Col. Norodom Chantaraingsey led the thirteenth Infantry Battalion, schools were established under Chantaraingsey’s sponsorship and with funds raised from the sale of his Phnom Penh real estate and the proceeds of illicit gambling in the capital. See Corfield, Khmers Stand Up!, p. 125. 64. Tan Kim Huon, Role of the Universities in Development Planning: The Khmer Republic Case, p. 8. 65. See, for example, BBC SWB, FE/4505/A3/6, and BBC SWB, FE/4543/ A3/3. 66. On the strikes, see Corfield, Khmers Stand Up!, pp. 178 –180. See also FEER (February 4, 1974), pp. 20 –21. Michael Snitowsky of the FEER argued that the momentum of the teachers’ strike was sapped when the government announced the closure of schools in light of rocket attacks. See FEER (February 4, 1974), pp. 20 –21. 67. On Keo An’s sacking, and the protests that followed it, see Corfield, Khmers Stand Up!, pp. 126 –129, 138, and 140 –141. See also FEER (March 18, 1972), pp. 5– 6.

210

Notes to Pages 90 –97

68. See BBC SWB, FE/3973/B/2; BBC SWB, FE/4581/B/1. 69. On the assassination, see Corfield, Khmers Stand Up!, pp. 199 –202. See also FEER (10 June 1974), pp. 17–18; RC ( June 8, 1974), p. 10; and RC ( July 13, 1974), pp. 25–26. On the government reaction, see BBC SWB, FE/ 4618/A3/1. 70. Ngor Haing Seng and R. Warner, Surviving the Killing Fields, p. 71. 71. BBC SWB, FE/3638/A3/1–2; BBC SWB, FE/4871/A3/13; BBC SWB, FE/3656/A3/6. See also “Declaration of Patriotic Intellectuals, Issued on September 30, 1971, in the Liberated Zone,” in Cambodia in the Southeast Asian War, pp. 418 – 433. 72. D. Kirk, “Cambodia in 1974: Governments on Trial,” AS 15 (1975), p. 58. 73. On the final days, see Chandler, The Tragedy, pp. 233 –235; Corfield, Khmers Stand Up!, pp. 217–233.

Chapter 4: Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge 1. Author’s interview with Kong Sao, Phnom Penh, December 1996. 2. April 17, 1975, is arguably the most written about day in Cambodian history. Written from the perspectives of Westerners and Cambodians from all walks of life, the accounts are surprisingly uniform in their presentation of the evacuation. See, for example, J. Criddle and T. Mam, To Destroy You is No Loss: The Odyssey of a Cambodian Family, chapter 1; May S., Cambodian Witness: The Autobiography of Someth May, chapter 11; Ngor H. S. and R. Warner, Surviving the Killing Fields: The Cambodian Odyssey of Haing S. Ngor, chapter 6; Pin Y., Stay Alive, My Son, chapter 1; F. Ponchaud, Cambodia: Year Zero, chapter 1; I. Simon-Barouh and Yi T., Le Cambodge des Khmer Rouges: Chronique de la vie quotidienne, pp. 13 –22. For a report written at the time, see New York Times (17 April 1975), pp. 1, 18. The Communist takeover is also depicted in the 1984 movie, The Killing Fields. 3. See D. Chandler, A History of Cambodia, 2nd ed., p. 209. 4. D. Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War and Revolution since 1945, p. 240, refers to the changes as “discontinuities.” 5. J. Barron and A. Paul, Peace with Horror: The Untold Story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia. The text was first printed in the United States as Murder of a Gentle Land. On the responses of the Western media to the Cambodian revolution, see J. Metzl, Western Responses to Human Rights Abuses in Cambodia, 1975 –1980. 6. M. Vickery, Cambodia, 1975 –1982, pp. 36 ff. 7. See, for example, D. Boggett, “Democratic Kampuchea and Human Rights: Correcting the Record,” Ampo 11 (1979), pp. 13 –18. 8. Vickery, Cambodia, p. 50. 9. Ibid., p. 187. 10. More recent estimates by the U.S.-funded Cambodia Genocide Project have raised the possibility that the death toll for the period may be significantly more than the 741,000 estimated by Vickery and 1.5 million estimated by other authors. See Reuters News (19 February 1996); see also the article by the director of the Cambodia Genocide Program, Ben Kiernan, in which he estimates 1.7 million deaths: BP ( January 31, 1999). 11. Of course, Pol Pot’s death does not mean that attempts to further

Notes to Pages 97–101

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understand DK are doomed to failure. Other notable DK personalities, including Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan, and Nuon Chea, now reside in the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Pailin and are arguably more accessible than they have been at any time since 1975. 12. See, for example, FEER (29 October 1976), pp. 22 –23 and FEER (21 October 1977), p. 23. 13. B. Kiernan, “Origins of Khmer Communism,” Southeast Asian Review (1981), p. 167. 14. Ibid., p. 169. 15. Ibid., p. 175. KPRP cadres to retreat to North Vietnam included Son Ngoc Minh, Sieu Heng, Mey Pho, Nuon Chea, So Phim, Ney Sarann, Keo Moni, Leav Keo Moni, Sos Man, Hong Chhun, Nhem Sun, Chan Samay and Pen Sovan. Sieu Heng, Nuon Chea, So Phim, and Ney Sarann all returned from Hanoi after a few months. KPRP members to engage in political struggle in Cambodia, within the Citizen’s Group (Krom Pracheachon), included Keo Meas and Non Suon. 16. Ibid., p. 175. See also D. Chandler, Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot, p. 59. 17. Kiernan, “Origins,” p. 176. 18. The internal copy of the party’s history, compiled by the Eastern Region military political service, was captured in 1973. See “Summary of Annotated Party History,” in Cambodia, 1975 –1978: Rendezvous with Death, pp. 251–268. 19. On Tou Samouth, see Kiernan, “Origins,” p. 177, and Chandler, The Tragedy, p. 120. 20. On the control of the different factions, see B. Kiernan, “Pol Pot and the Kampuchean Communist Movement,” in Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea, 1942 –1980, pp. 228 –229. On the purge of party veterans, see K. Quinn, “Political Change in Wartime: The Khmer Krahom Revolution in Southern Cambodia, 1970 –1974,” NWCR (1976), p. 11. 21. Ben Kiernan’s pioneering study of Cambodian Communism referred to this transfer as a “changing of the vanguard;” see B. Kiernan, How Pol Pot came to Power: A History of Communism in Kampuchea, 1930 –1975, chapter 3. 22. Saloth Sar, “Monarchy or Democracy?” in Khmer Rouges! Materiaux pour l’histroire du communisme au Cambodge, pp. 357–371. 23. M. Martin, Cambodia: A Shattered Society, pp. 97–98. 24. Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution, p. 4. 25. Khieu Samphan, in an interview in 1980, pointed clearly to his time in Paris as the origins of his becoming a revolutionary and a Communist. See C. Pilz, “Khieu Samphan: Giving up on Socialism,” Asia Record (October 1980). 26. K. Jackson, “Intellectual Origins of the Khmer Rouge,” in Cambodia, 1975 –1978, p. 248. 27. Khieu Samphan, “L’economie du Cambodge et ses problemès d’industrialisation” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Paris, 1959). For arguments in favor of Samphan’s thesis as a blueprint, see C. Twining, “The Economy,” in Cambodia, 1975 –1978, pp. 109 –150, and W. Willmott, “Analytical Errors of the Kampuchean Communist Party,” PA 54 (1981), pp. 212 –225.

212

Notes to Pages 101–105

28. On Saloth Sar’s visit to Yugoslavia, see Chandler, Brother Number One, pp. 30 –31. 29. Saloth Sar recalled the trip with affection to a delegation of Yugoslav journalists who visited Kampuchea in 1978; see “Pol Pot’s Interview with Yugoslav Journalists,” JCA 8 (1978), pp. 413, 421. 30. FEER, October 30, 1997. 31. On the hostility toward returnees from Vietnam, see Quinn, “Political Change,” p. 11. On the anti-Vietnamese protests, see Chandler, The Tragedy, p. 226. See also Ith Sarin, “Nine Months with the Maquis,” in Communist Party Power in Kampuchea (Cambodia): Documents and Discussion, p. 39. 32. Démocratique Kampuchéa, Livre noir, faits et preuves des actes d’aggression et d’annexation du Viet-Nam contre le Kampuchéa, pp. 48 – 49. See also S. Thion, “The Ingratitude of the Crocodiles: The 1978 Cambodian Black Paper,” in Watching Cambodia: Ten Paths to Enter the Cambodian Tangle, pp. 95–118. 33. Kiernan, How Pol Pot, p. 123, citing an interview with Chea Soth. For a discussion of the CPK’s perception of the “independent” nature of its party, see K. Frieson, “The Political Nature of Democratic Kampuchea,” PA 61 (1988), pp. 407– 408. 34. On the extent of Chinese aid and assistance, see Kiernan, The Pol Pot Régime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, pp. 125–131. 35. Ieng Sary: “The Khmer revolution has no precedent. What we are trying to do has never been done before in history.” See FBIS (May 4, 1977). Also Pol Pot’s now infamous speech before an assembled group of Yugoslav journalists in 1978: “We are building socialism without a model. We do not wish to copy anyone.” See S. Stanic, “Kampuchea—Socialism without a Model,” Socialist Thought and Practice 18 (1978), p. 67. 36. B. Kiernan, The Pol Pot Régime, chapter 2. Kiernan notes the opposition of the prominent revolutionary intellectual Hou Yuon to the evacuation plan (pp. 32 –33), the conflicting stories over whether the order was permanent or temporary (pp. 34 –35), and the different treatment by Khmer Rouge soldiers of the population on the different arterial routes out of the city. 37. Vickery, Cambodia, p. 86. On the control of different areas by the troops from different zones, see Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime, chapter 2; Vickery, Cambodia, pp. 69 –72; and Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, chapter 1. 38. FEER (October 29, 1976), p. 23. 39. Chandler, The Tragedy, p. 249. 40. FBIS (April 18, 1977). 41. Stanic, “Kampuchea,” p. 67. 42. H. Blaise, “The Process and Strategy of Institution Building: A Case Study in Cambodia” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Pittsburgh), p. 107. 43. Kiernan, The Pol Pot Régime, pp. 55–57. 44. “Examine the control and implement the political line to save the economy and prepare to build the country,” Document No. 3, September 19, 1975. Cited in Kiernan, The Pol Pot Régime, p. 98. 45. Sihanouk made his return to Phnom Penh on September 9, 1975, at the invitation of Cambodia’s revolutionary leaders. In early October, the prince returned to Beijing, then traveled to France before returning to Cambodia in

Notes to Pages 106 –109

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December 1975. By April 1976, he had resigned as the Democratic Kampuchea head of state and spent the remaining years of the regime under virtual house arrest in Phnom Penh’s Royal Palace. On these events, see N. Chanda, Brother Enemy, the War after the War: A History of Indochina since the Fall of Saigon, pp. 42 – 45, 103 –107. Sihanouk also discusses his return in J. Gerrand (producer, director, writer), The Last God-King: The Lives and Times of Norodom Sihanouk, J. Gerrand and SBS Independent (1996). On Sihanouk’s “resignation,” see FEER (April 30, 1976), p. 37. 46. Kiernan, The Pol Pot Régime, p. 101. 47. FBIS ( January 6, 1976). For an English translation of the Democratic Kampuchea constitution, see R. Jennar, The Cambodian Constitutions, 1953 – 1993, pp. 81– 88. 48. D. Chandler, “The Constitution of Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia): The Semantics of Revolutionary Change,” PA 49 (1976), p. 513. 49. “Preliminary Explanation Before Reading the Plan, by the Party Secretary,” trans. in Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976 –1977, pp. 120 –163. 50. “The Party’s Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in all Fields, 1977–1980,” trans. in Pol Pot Plans the Future, pp. 37–119. On the Chinese model, see Mao’s perspective on the work-study principle in “Comrade Mao Tse-Tung on Educational Work,” Part I, Chinese Education 2 (1969), pp. 40 – 41. 51. “The Party’s Four Year Plan,” p. 114. 52. On the attempted coup d’état, see Chandler, Brother Number One, p. 129; Chandler, The Tragedy, p. 270; and Kiernan, The Pol Pot Régime, pp. 337–348. On the conflict over the founding date of the CPK, see D. Chandler, “Revising the Past in Democratic Kampuchea: When was the Birthday of the Party?” PA 36 (1983), pp. 288 –300. On Mao’s death, see Chanda, Brother Enemy, pp. 74 – 80. On purges, see Chandler, Brother Number One, pp. 128 –129. On enemies, see “Report of Activities of the Party Center according to the General Political Tasks of 1976,” trans. in Pol Pot Plans the Future, pp. 189 –190. 53. On Toul Sleng, see B. Kiernan, C. Boua, and A. Barnett, “Bureaucracy of Death,” New Statesman, (2 May 1979), pp. 669 – 676. Hu Nim’s Toul Sleng confession is translated in “Planning the Past: The Forced Confessions of Hu Nim, Toul Sleng Prison, May–June 1977 (trans. by Chantou Boua),” in Pol Pot Plans the Future, pp. 227–318. Tuol Sleng (S-21), while the most famous, or infamous, of Democratic Kampuchea’s security centers, was not the sole center, nor was it the largest. For a discussion of Democratic Kampuchea security centers, see PPP (11–24 August 1995), pp. 17–19. 54. For a discussion of the division of the Cambodian population into “new” and “base” or “old” people, see S. Heder, Kampuchean Occupation and Resistance, p. 5; and T. Carney, “The Organization of Power,” in Cambodia, 1975 –1978, pp. 82 – 84. On the second migration, and its effect on individuals, see Kiernan, The Pol Pot Régime, pp. 217–230; and Vickery, Cambodia, chapter 3. 55. On the fate of Cambodia’s ethnic minorities, see Kiernan, The Pol Pot Régime, chapter 7. 56. For an overview of conditions in the different regions, see Chandler, The Tragedy, pp. 265–272. More detailed analysis and discussion can be found in

214

Notes to Pages 109 –112

Kiernan, The Pol Pot Régime, pp. 159 –250; and Vickery, Cambodia, pp. 82 –138. Ben Kiernan also highlights the variations within a particular zone in “Wild Chickens, Farm Chickens and Cormorants: Kampuchea’s Eastern Zone under Pol Pot,” in Revolution and its Aftermath in Kampuchea: Eight Essays, pp. 136 –211. 57. See, for example, Ministry of Education, Seipao Rien: Uksaa, T’nak Ti Bpee [Study Book: Writing, Second Class], which is glowing in its praise for the efforts of “the children of the revolution.” Author’s translation. 58. Grant Evans and Kelvin Rowley perceptively noted that “Government ministers were expected to fulfil their duties on a part-time basis and they devoted most of their energies to work in the ricefields, and no bureaucracy was established to implement policy.” G. Evans and K. Rowley, Red Brotherhood at War: Indochina since the Fall of Saigon, p. 105. A firsthand account of a ministry at work can be found in L. Picq, Beyond the Horizon: Five years with the Khmer Rouge, chapters 2 –10. Picq, a French woman married to a Democratic Kampuchea official, worked in Ieng Sary’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Phnom Penh throughout the period. David Chandler noted “the scarcity of documentation, which reflects official policy, is compounded by the régime’s contempt for paperwork and research, and its much publicized preference for practice at the expense of theory.” D. Chandler, “A Revolution in Full Spate: Communist Party Policy in Democratic Kampuchea, December 1976,” in Facing the Cambodian Past: Selected Essays, 1971–1994, p. 256. 59. Chandler, The Tragedy, p. 265. 60. D. Ayres, “The Khmer Rouge and Education: Beyond the Discourse of Destruction,” History of Education 28 (1999), pp. 216 –225. See, for example, UNICEF, Cambodia: The Situation of Women and Children, which states that “between 1975 and 1979 there was deliberate destruction of all educational books, equipment and facilities.” 61. On Sum and Kem Hong Hav, see Kiernan, The Pol Pot Régime, pp. 182, 188; on Van, see Vickery, Cambodia, pp. 95–96. 62. H. S. Ngor and R. Warner, Surviving the Killing Fields: The Cambodian Odyssey of Haing S. Ngor, p. 139. 63. Author’s interview with Moeung, group interview, Takeo Province, December 1996; author’s interview with Sao, group interview, Takeo Province, December 1996. 64. On the Northwest Zone, see B. Kiernan, “Rural Reorganization in Democratic Kampuchea: The Northwest Zone, 1975–1977,” in Indochina: Social and Cultural Change, pp. 35–78; on accounts of “teacher” and “teenage girl,” see Vickery, Cambodia, p. 171; see also author’s interview with Mun Savorn, Sydney (Australia), July 1996. 65. Vickery, Cambodia, pp. 171–172; Kiernan, The Pol Pot Régime, p. 289. 66. On the decline after the second migration, see D. Ayres, “Tradition and Modernity Enmeshed: The Educational Crisis in Cambodia, 1953 –1997,” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Sydney, 1997), Appendix 3. 67. B. Kiernan, The Eastern Zone Massacres: A Report on Social Conditions and Human Rights Violations in the Eastern Zone of Democratic Kampuchea under the Rule of Pol Pot’s (Khmer Rouge) Communist Party of Kampuchea, p. 56. 68. Vickery, Cambodia, p. 172.

Notes to Pages 112 –117

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69. M. Stuart-Fox and B. Ung, The Murderous Revolution: Life and Death in Pol Pot’s Kampuchea, p. 66. 70. Author’s interviews with Ek Seng, Sydney (Australia), January–September 1996. 71. Written replies to questions from Lam Larn (United States), August 1996. 72. On the consistency, see Ayres, “Tradition and Modernity Enmeshed,” Appendix 3. 73. Stuart-Fox and Ung, The Murderous Revolution, p. 66. Phnom Penh radio cited in F. Ponchaud, Cambodia: Year Zero, p. 142. See also FEER (18 July 1975), p. 30. 74. See, for example, Vickery, Cambodia, pp. 171–172. 75. Translation cited in J. Marston, “Metaphors of the Khmer Rouge,” in Cambodian Culture Since 1975: Homeland and Exile, p. 113. For the original text, see Ministry of Education, Phuomisah Kampuchea Pracheaneathipdei [Geography of Democratic Kampuchea]. For text of the Sihanouk era, see Tan Kim Huon, Géographie du Cambodge et de l’Asie des moussons, p. 73. On “building and defending” the country, see “The Current Political Tasks of Democratic Kampuchea,” in Ieng Sary’s Régime: The Diary of the Khmer Rouge Foreign Ministry, Document 1. 76. Translation cited in Marston, “Metaphors,” p. 110. 77. Ibid., pp. 110 –111, who cites Chamrieng Padaewat on pp. 33 –34, a publication of the Committee of Patriots of Democratic Kampuchea in France. 78. For other DK songs, see B. Kiernan and C. Boua, “Six Revolutionary Songs,” in Peasants and Politics, pp. 326 –328. The songs were coupled with a plethora of revolutionary slogans. On these slogans, and the themes they encapsulated, see H. Locard, Le de Pol Pot, ou les paroles de l’Angkar: Entendues dans le Cambodge des Khmer Rouge du 17 avril 1975 au 7 janvier 1979. 79. See, for example, BBC SWB, FE/5959/B/3. 80. See J. Pouvatchy, “Cambodian-Vietnamese Relations,” AS 26 (1986), p. 447; and S. Heder, “The Kampuchean-Vietnamese Conflict,” in The Third Indochina Conflict, pp. 31–32. 81. On Pol Pot’s visit to China, see FBIS (September 29, 1977), and Chandler, Brother Number One, pp. 142 –144. On the build up to the CambodiaVietnam conflict, see Evans and Rowley, Red Brotherhood at War, pp. 115–118. Norodom Sihanouk recalled Khieu Samphan declaring in 1978: “the number one enemy is not U.S. imperialism, but Vietnam, ready to swallow up Cambodia.” Norodom Sihanouk, Chroniques de guerre et d’espoir, p. 56. 82. Chandler, Brother Number One, p. 146. 83. Ibid., p. 152. 84. E. Becker, When the War Was Over: The Voices of Cambodia’s Revolution and its People, p. 329. 85. Chandler, Brother Number One, p. 153. 86. Personal communication from a former high-ranking Democratic Kampuchea official, March 8, 1999. 87. Norodom Sihanouk notes that “Pol Pot’s cannonfire had shaken the windows in my prison home.” See his vituperative War and Hope: The Case for Cambodia, p. 100.

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Notes to Pages 120 –125

Chapter 5: The PRK and the SOC 1. B. Kiernan, The Pol Pot Régime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodian under the Khmer Rouge, 1975 –1979, p. 65. 2. For details of the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, see N. Chanda, Brother Enemy, the War After the War: A History of Indochina Since the Fall of Saigon, chapters 8 –10; G. Evans and K. Rowley, Red Brotherhood at War: Indochina Since the Fall of Saigon, pp. 121–126. 3. For a detailed discussion, see D. Chandler, “Revising the Past in Democratic Kampuchea: When was the Birthday of the Party?” in Facing the Cambodian Past: Selected Essays, 1971–1994, pp. 215–232. See also V. Frings, Allied and Equal: The Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party’s Historiography and its Relations with Vietnam, 1979 –1991, pp. 5– 6. 4. Cited in ibid., p. 217. See also S. Heder, “Origins of the Conflict,” SEAC 64 (1978), pp. 3 –18. 5. M. Vickery, Kampuchea: Politics, Economics and Society, pp. 25, 47. 6. References to the “Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique” abounded in PRK propaganda. The label was used in all official documentation that referred to the DK period and was also promoted by the regime in its dealings with foreigners. A second tendency was to relate this “clique” to fascism and the barbarity of Adolf Hitler, thus attempting to create a distance between DK and the socialist world. See, for example, Ros Samay’s interview with the Vietnam courier, VC 15 (February 1979), pp. 6 – 8. The references to the Chinese were especially encouraged by Vietnam. A Vietnamese pamphlet in 1979 argued that “The Pol PotIeng Sary butchers have completely sold their souls and bodies to Beijing’s expansionism.” See G. Lockhart, “Strike in the South, Clear the North”: The “Problem of Kampuchea” and the Roots of Vietnamese Strategy There, p. 1. 7. “Kampuchea’s Eight Immediate Policies for Liberated Areas,” VC 15 (February 1979), pp. 3 – 4. 8. B. Kiernan, “Kampuchea 1979 –1981: National Rehabilitation in the Eye of an International Storm,” SEAA (1982), p. 168. 9. A copy of the text of the treaty is in VC 15 (March 1979), p. 5. The first Cambodian “instructive visit” to Vietnam, led by Pen Navuth, then responsible for adult education in the PRK, was undertaken in 1979 (specific date not mentioned). On this visit, see Ministère de l’Education, “Une visite instructive: Des enseignants Kampuchéans s’informant en République Socialiste du Viet Nam,” in Pour ressusciter l’éducation en République Populaire du Kampuchéa, pp. 7–9. 10. See Kiernan, “Kampuchea 1979 –1981,” p. 168; and S. Heder, Kampuchean Occupation and Resistance, p. 9, note 1. Michael Leifer referred to the regime as “little more than a list of names on an information sheet,” while a PRK official told Kathleen Gough in 1980 that “we enlisted anybody who could read and write. . . . The problem is we have too many incompetent people in our ministries.” See M. Leifer, “Kampuchea 1979: From Dry Season to Dry Season,” AS 20 (1980), p. 34; and K. Gough, “Interviews in Kampuchea,” BCAS 14 (1982), p. 56. 11. E. Mysliweic, Punishing the Poor: The International Isolation of Kampuchea, p. 11.

Notes to Pages 125–128

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12. On continued fighting, see FEER ( June 29, 1979), p. 23. On the famine, see M. Hiebert and L. Hiebert, “Famine in Kampuchea: Politics of a Tragedy,” II 4 (1979), pp. 1–2. 13. Kiernan, “Kampuchea, 1979 –1981,” p. 175. See also J. Reynell, Political Pawns: Refugees on the Thai-Kampuchean Border, pp. 31–36. 14. For two perspectives on the apportion of blame over the delay in providing humanitarian assistance, see W. Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience, chapters 5–7; and B. Kiernan, “Review Essay: William Shawcross, Declining Cambodia,” BCAS 17 (1985), pp. 56 – 63. 15. Heng Samrin, “Message à la nation,” in Pour ressusciter l’éducation, pp. 1, 6. Author’s translation. 16. Ministry of Education, Education in the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, 7.1.84, p. 1. Subsequent commentary has generally reaffirmed these estimates. Grant Curtis’ 1989 study for the Swedish Development Agency (SIDA), for example, estimated that as many as 80 percent of teachers and educational administrators “died or fled the country.” Eva Mysliweic forwarded a more conservative estimate of 7,000 of an original 20,000 remaining. See G. Curtis, Cambodia: A Country Profile, p. 132; and Mysliweic, Punishing the Poor, p. 11. 17. M. Vickery, Cambodia, 1975 –1982, p. 244. 18. D. Ayres, “The Khmer Rouge and Education: Beyond the Discourse of Destruction,” History of Education 28 (1999), pp. 216 –225. 19. H. Locard, “Draft Report on Higher Education in Cambodia: Phnom Penh-Canberra, July–August 1995” (unpublished UNESCO paper, 1995), p. 11. Michael Vickery’s analysis accords with this view, noting of the DK period that “all infrastructure . . . and buildings had been allowed to deteriorate.” See M. Vickery, “Cambodia (Kampuchea): History, Tragedy and Uncertain Future,” BCAS 21 (1989), p. 49. 20. UNTAC, United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, p. 19; Locard, “Draft Report,” p. 11. On refugees of the 1970 –1975 war: author’s interview with Ngorn Som, Phnom Penh, January 1997. On books for toilet paper: author’s interview with Sau Sina, Phnom Penh, December 1996. On books for paper at market: author’s interview with H, a former high-ranking textbook author, Phnom Penh, December 1996. On pulping 1960s print media, see J. Corfield, Khmers Stand Up! A History of the Cambodian Government, 1970 –1975, Southeast Asian Studies, 1994, p. 58, note 15. 21. On Chan Ven: author’s interview with E, a former high-ranking PRK education ministry official, Phnom Penh, December 1996. See also “National United Front for the Salvation of Kampuchea Founded,” VC 15 ( January 1979), p. 9; BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, FE/5986/A3/2-3; and T. Clayton, “Education and Language in Education in Relation to External Intervention in Cambodia, 1620 –1989” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Pittsburgh 1995), p. 252. 22. Ministry of Education, Education, 7.1.84, p. 4. 23. Clayton, “Education and Language in Education,” p. 243. 24. David Chandler, after noting the difficulty in determining the extent of Vietnamese control over the PRK, described the country as “a satellite of Vietnam.” Nayan Chanda asserted that “Ministries were set up, with Vietnamese

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advisers running things behind the scenes,” while Michael Haas concluded that evidence of Cambodian independence from Vietnam was “difficult to detect.” See D. Chandler, “Cambodia in 1984: Historical Patterns Re-asserted,” in Facing the Cambodian Past: Selected Essays, 1971–1994, p. 286; Chanda, Brother Enemy, p. 372; and M. Haas, Genocide by Proxy: Cambodian Pawn on a Superpower Chessboard, p. 48. Also author’s interviews with I, a former primary school director, and J, a former secondary school director, Phnom Penh, December 1996. 25. On claims of “ethnocide,” see M. Martin, “Vietnamized Cambodia: A Silent Ethnocide,” II 7 (1986), p. 2. Martin argued that the Vietnamese were attempting to “de-Khmerize” Cambodia through a program designed to destroy Cambodian cultural identity. In terms of the rehabilitation of the education system, she argued that Vietnamese experts had attempted to impose the Vietnamese model of education on Cambodia through the “type of schools” opened, the “curriculum adopted,” the “disciplines taught,” and the treatment of the country’s many orphans. 26. Author’s interview with Suon Serey, Phnom Penh, January 1997. 27. Nguyen Hoang, “Notes taken in Phnom Penh,” VC 15 ( June 1979), p. 9; and VC 15 (September 1979), p. 15. 28. Author’s interview with A, a former high-ranking PRK education ministry official, Phnom Penh, December 1996. “A” recalled that there were two Vietnamese advisers seconded to each of the ministry’s seven departments and an additional three advisers assigned to the minister. These figures accord with those solicited by Thomas Clayton. See Clayton, “Education and Language in Education,” pp. 243 –244. 29. Author’s interview with G, a former PRK official at the ministry personnel bureau, Phnom Penh, December 1996. 30. UNESCO, Inter-sectoral Basic Needs Assessment Mission to Cambodia p. 47. 31. Ministère de l’Education, Réalisations dans le domaine de l’éducation: Exposition à l’occasion du 1er anniversaire de la grande victoire, 7/1/79. See also H. Reiff, Educational Emergency Assistance and Rehabilitation in Kampuchea: Consultant Report to UNICEF of a Mission Undertaken from 16 February to 1 March 1980, p. 10. 32. Ibid., p. 12. 33. Marie Martin has charged that the changes represent evidence of deKhmerization and ethnocide. See Martin, “Vietnamized Cambodia,” pp. 3 – 4; and M. Martin, Cambodia: A Shattered Society, p. 230. 34. People’s Republic of Kampuchea, People’s Revolutionary Council, “Decree on the Establishment of the Cabinet of the Minister of Education.” Unofficial translation in author’s possession. 35. Ministry of Education, Education: State of Cambodia, p. 5. 36. UNICEF was one of few multilateral agencies to operate in Cambodia throughout the 1980s because of its emergency relief mandate. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the World Health Organization (WHO), and UNESCO, because of their development-oriented mandates (as opposed to emergency relief ) were prevented from working in Cambodia by the UNsanctioned development aid embargo against the country. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) was able to work in Cambodia between 1979 –

Notes to Pages 132 –139

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1982 but later had to limit its assistance because of the development embargo. For a discussion, see Mysliweic, Punishing the Poor, pp. 72 –76. 37. Author’s interview with Ung Phanna, Siem Reap, December 1996. 38. Reiff, Educational Emergency Assistance . . . 1980, Annex V. 39. Author’s interview with Men Pon, Phnom Penh, January 1997. Men was separated from his wife in 1976 and was not reunited with her until 1983, after he had moved to Siem Reap, where he discovered that she was still alive. On other effects, see Reiff, Educational Emergency Assistance . . . 1980, p. 17. 40. Ibid., Annex IV. 41. Ibid., pp. 25–27. 42. Ibid., p. 4. 43. See, for example, Ministère de l’Education, “Evolution de l’Education au Kampuchéa,” in Pour ressusciter l’éducation, pp. 10 –14. 44. Reiff, Educational Emergency Assistance . . . 1980, pp. 16 –18. 45. Author’s interview with A. 46. Author’s interview with F, a former official at the Center for Educational Research and Textbook Development, Phnom Penh, December 1996. 47. Author’s interview with H; also author’s interview with F, a former official at the center, Phnom Penh, December 1996. Although a revolutionary history syllabus was ratified, it was not implemented until 1986. The delay could be attributed to consternation over the question of what constituted an “acceptable” version of Cambodian history. A history text written by a Soviet historian in 1985 was rejected by the Cambodian ministry because it was “incorrect.” Texts distributed after this time were written by Cambodians. Details on the delay are from author’s interview with F. For a discussion of the Soviet text, see J. Jordens, “Scripting Cambodia: The PRK and its Rewriting of Cambodian National History” (B.A. honors thesis, Monash University, 1991). See also Vickery, Kampuchea, p. 157. 48. Author’s interview with C, a former high-ranking ministerial official of the PRK /SOC, Phnom Penh, December 1996. 49. Ministry of Education, Educational Réalisations, 1981–1985, p. 6. 50. On the resistance, see J. Corfield, A History of the Cambodian nonCommunist Resistance, 1975 –1983. 51. For a detailed discussion, see J. Bekaert, “The Khmer Coalition: Who Wins, Who Loses?” II 28 (1982); and Evans and Rowley, Red Brotherhood at War, chapter 8. On the quite compelling case against granting the seat to the CGDK, see also J. Leonard, “Time to Unseat Pol Pot,” II 36 (1983), pp. 4 –5. See also R. Amer, “The United Nations and Kampuchea: The Issue of Representation and its Implications,” BCAS 22 (1990), pp. 52 – 60. 52. H. Reiff, Educational Emergency Assistance in Kampuchea: Report of a Mission, 19 –31 October 1981, p. v. 53. Ibid., pp. 19 –36. 54. Ministry of Education, Education . . . 7.1.84, p. 15. 55. “Decision #129 of the Central Committee of the Party about Problems of Higher and Technical Education” (30 April 1983), cited in Clayton, “Education and Language in Education,” p. 336. The document, according to Clayton (personal communication, April 30, 1997), was written by the Vietnamese. In 1990,

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the ministry claimed that the April 30 decision saw a “decision on the revolution of higher and specialized education based on socialism,” Ministry of Education, Education: State of Cambodia, p. 14. 56. The exception was the Faculty of Medicine, the first of Cambodia’s tertiary institutions opened after 1979, which used French as the language of instruction. 57. Ibid., pp. 11–12; Ministry of Education, Education . . . 7.1.84, p. 11; Ministry of Education, Some Aspects of the Literacy Movement and Complementary Education from the Great Victory of January 7 1979 to the end of 1987, p. 3. 58. P. Quinn-Judge, “Chamcar Leou: A Gradual Recovery,” SEAC 77 (February 1981), p. 26. 59. Author’s interview with Koy Nong, Phnom Penh, January 1997. 60. Reiff, Educational Emergency Assistance . . . 1981, p. v. 61. Author’s interview with C. 62. Reiff, Educational Emergency Assistance . . . 1981, p. 40. 63. On Chan Si’s death and Hun Sen’s appointment, see Vickery, Kampuchea, p. 47; M. Eiland, “Cambodia in 1985: From stalemate to ambiguity,” AS 26 (1986), p. 121. On the shift, see Vickery, Kampuchea, chapter 6. The shift away from Hanoi veterans has been argued by a number of analysts to represent a movement away from greater Cambodian independence. Michael Eiland posits that Chan Si’s death occurred in “mysterious circumstances amid rumors of his disenchantment with the Vietnamese occupation.” See Eiland, “Cambodia,” p. 121. On Pen Navuth, VC 19 ( July 1983), p. 26. 64. On Heng’s report, see Vickery, Kampuchea, p. 86. On the economy, see M. Vickery, “Notes on the Political Economy of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea,” JCA 20 (1990), p. 442. 65. The conclusions are drawn by Viviane Frings in her examination of agricultural collectivization in the PRK. See V. Frings, The Failure of Agricultural Collectivization in the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, 1979 –1989, pp. 54 – 66. 66. Vickery, Kampuchea, pp. 85– 87. 67. Ibid., p. 88. 68. Pen Navuth, “Rapport sur le rôle de l’école dans la lutte idéologique contemporaine à la 6e conference des ministres de l’éducation des pays socialistes,” Républiques Populaire de Pologne, Varsovie (17 au 23 novembre 1985), pp. 1–2. Author’s translation. 69. Author’s interview with Chea Saron, Phnom Penh, January 1997. 70. In 1985, 464 students were studying in the USSR, 111 in East Germany, 75 in Vietnam, 30 in Hungary, 26 in Czechoslovakia, 15 in Bulgaria, 11 in Poland, and 5 each in Cuba, Laos, and Mongolia. See Ministère de l’Education, Departement de Planification et de Finances, Bulletin de statistiques de l’éducation l’état du Cambodge: D’année scolaire 1979 – 80 à 1989 –90, p. 9. 71. On the illegality of learning French and English, author’s interview with D, a higher education official of the PRK /SOC, Phnom Penh, December 1996, and author’s interview with E. David Ablin noted that “English and French study were illegal from 1979 to 1988, excepting a few official efforts such as . . . in the medical school.” See D. Ablin, “Foreign Language Policy in the Cambodian Government: Questions of Sovereignty, Manpower Training and Development

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Assistance” (unpublished UNICEF consultant’s report, Phnom Penh, 1991), p. 27. On the private industry, see Ablin’s report (p. 27), and author’s interview with Koy Nong. 72. Author’s interview with Keo Soth, Phnom Penh, January 1997; author’s interview with Nou Si, Phnom Penh, January 1997; and author’s interview with Men Pon. Also Ministry of Education, Education: State of Cambodia, pp. 22 –25. 73. On the buildup to and content of subsequent meetings between Hun Sen and Norodom Sihanouk, see N. Chanda, “Cambodia in 1987: Sihanouk on Center Stage,” AS 28 (1988), pp. 110 –115. On the external factors influencing the peace process, see D. Pike, “The Cambodian Peace Process: Summer of 1989,” AS 29 (1989), pp. 843 – 846. See also W. Duiker, “Looking beyond Cambodia: China and Vietnam,” II 88 (1989). On later meetings, the most significant being known as Jakarta Informal Meeting I ( JIM-I) and Jakarta Informal Meeting II ( Jim-II), see K. Um, “Cambodia in 1988: The Curved Road to Settlement,” AS 29 (1989), pp. 73 –78; and K. Um, “Cambodia in 1989: Still Talking but no Settlement,” AS 30 (1990), pp. 97–100. 74. Author’s interview with Long Visal, Phnom Penh, January 1997. 75. The primary education course had been extended by one year in 1985, thus the matriculation examinations after eleven years of schooling and not the ten of the immediate post-DK years. 76. On the text, see J. Jordens, A State of Cambodia Political Education Text: Exposition and Analysis; also author’s interview with Sok Sarun, Phnom Penh, January 1997; author’s interview with Sao Bunroeun, Phnom Penh, January 1997; and author’s interview with Li Ben, Phnom Penh, January 1997. 77. Jordens, Political Education Text, pp. 10 –22. 78. Ministry of Education, State Plan: 1991, pp. 3 – 4. Unofficial translation by Redd Barna in author’s possession. 79. F. Brown, “Cambodia in 1991: An Uncertain Peace,” AS 32 (1992), pp. 93 –94; M. Vickery, “The Cambodian People’s Party: Where Has It Come From, Where Is It Going?” SEAA (1994), p. 110. 80. For Yus Son’s speech, see State of Cambodia, National Conference on Education for All: Final Report, pp. 39 – 41; for Hun Sen’s speech, see pp. 42 – 47.

Chapter 6: Ranariddh and Hun Sen 1. On the coup, see the special edition of the PPP ( July 12 –24), 1997. This chapter is based on D. Ayres, From Hope to Despair: Education, Development and the State in Cambodia since UNTAC. 2. A United Nations Development Program (UNDP) report in 1994 saw Cambodia ranked 147 out of 173 countries on the UNDP-devised Human Development Index. In terms of Cambodia’s GNP, the country ranked 74th on a list of 93 developing countries. See PPP (August 26 –September 8, 1994), p. 1. 3. “The Agreements on a Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodian Conflict,” in The United Nations and Cambodia, 1991–1995, A/46/608S/23177, pp. 132 –148. 4. The four factions were the leaders of the incumbent State of Cambodia: the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP); the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Co-operative Cambodia (FUNCINPEC); the

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Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (KPNLF); and the Party of Democratic Kampuchea (PDK, Khmer Rouge). 5. The plan for an international control mechanism was the brainchild of Stephen Solarz, a member of the U.S. Congress. It was later expanded by Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans. See J. Heininger, Peacekeeping in Transition: The United Nations in Cambodia, pp. 15–16; and K. Berry, From Red to Blue: Australia’s Initiative for Peace. 6. On the principles for the constitution set down in the agreements, see “The Agreements,” pp. 145–146. 7. S. Peou, Conflict Neutralization in the Cambodian War: From Battlefield to Ballot-box, p. 178 8. FEER (February 27, 1992), p. 22. 9. D. Shoesmith, Cambodia: The Obstacles to Peace, pp. 4 –5. 10. “Letter dated 30 August 1990 from China, France, the USSR, the United Kingdom, and the United States transmitting the Statement and Framework Document Adopted by their Representatives at a Meeting in New York, 27–28 August 1990,” in The United Nations and Cambodia, A/45/472-S/21689, p. 90. 11. “The Agreements,” pp. 138 –139. 12. M. Doyle, UN Peacekeeping in Cambodia: UNTAC’s Civil Mandate (Boulder: International Peace Academy, 1995), p. 35. 13. W. Shawcross, Cambodia’s New Deal, p. 13. 14. “The Agreements,” p. 148. 15. Doyle, UN Peacekeeping, pp. 38, 40. The concept of “full control,” spelled out by the secretary-general, was quite ambiguous, meaning that UNTAC should “control” Cambodia, not “govern” it. 16. The education committee, without access to the management apparatuses of the education ministry, was only able to make recommendations in relation to educational policies. These recommendations, according to an observer, amounted to nothing more than sweeping statements about access and quality, which had been the key tenets of the 1991 Education for All conference. 17. Doyle, UN Peacekeeping, p. 40; personal communication by e-mail from former UNTAC financial controller, May 3, 1997. 18. J. Charny, NGOs and the Rehabilitation and Reconstruction of Cambodia, pp. 3 – 6. 19. O. Quinlen, Education [in] Cambodia in Practice (unpublished consultant’s report for CONCERN, July 1991), pp. 8 –10. 20. V. Vorona, The Educational System of Siem Reap Province: Problems and Prospects, pp. 6 –16. 21. For other reports, see H. Blom and P. Nooijer, Higher Education and Vocational Training in Cambodia: Report of a NUFFIC Fact Finding Mission, pp. 28 –29; A. De Mello e Souza, Cambodia Book Sector Study: Specialist Report on the Economy, Budget and Educational Finance; T. Read, Cambodia Book Sector Study: Specialist Report on the Education System, Authorship, Copyright and Publishing Industry. 22. United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF Education Plan 1993, p. 1. 23. EDUCAM, “Education,” in The Development Context of Cambodia: Sectoral Position Papers, March 1994, p. 29. 24. The UNDP had undertaken a needs assessment study in August 1989.

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While providing those with an interest in the rehabilitation of Cambodia’s infrastructure after 1991 with a point of reference, the 1989 report was otherwise largely ignored. See UNDP, Report of the Kampuchea Needs Assessment Study. 25. Asian Development Bank (ADB), Economic Report on Cambodia; UNDP, Comprehensive Paper on Cambodia. On the appeal, see “First progress report of the Secretary-General on UNTAC,” in The United Nations and Cambodia, S/23870, pp. 189 –190; UNDP, World Bank, IMF and ADB, Cambodia, Socioeconomic Situation and Immediate Needs. 26. On the elections, see PPP ( June 6 –12, 1993), pp. 1, 4 –5, 16; FEER ( June 3, 1993), pp. 10 –11; NYT ( June 3, 1993), p. A18. See also commentary in K. Um, “Cambodia in 1993: Year Zero Plus One,” AS 34 (1994), pp. 74 –76. 27. Shawcross, Cambodia’s New Deal, p. 20. 28. For examples of the increasing chaos in the buildup to the elections, see Time (May 24, 1993), pp. 30 –34; FEER (May 20, 1993), pp. 10 –11; FEER (May 27, 1993), pp. 11–12. For an examination, see S. Heder, “The Resumption of Armed Struggle by the Party of Democratic Kampuchea: Evidence from NADK Self-Demobilizers,” in Propaganda, Politics and Violence in Cambodia: Democratic Transition under United Nations Peacekeeping, pp. 73 –113. 29. Y. Akashi, “Letter dated 2 June 1993 from the Secretary-General transmitting statement by the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Cambodia at the Supreme National Council meeting on 29 May 1993; endorses the statement of the Special Representative that the conduct of the election was free and fair,” in The United Nations and Cambodia, S/25879, p. 310. 30. In the total popular vote, FUNCINPEC won 45 percent, the CPP 38 percent, and the BLDP 4 percent, with the remainder spread among the minor parties. With a system of proportionality in relation to provinces, FUNCINPEC won 58 seats in the Constituent Assembly, the CPP 51, the Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party (BLDP) 10, and Moulinaka 1 seat. 31. On Sihanouk’s political maneuvering, see M. Vickery, Cambodia: A Political Survey, pp. 20 –25. On becoming a kingdom, see Washington Post (September 22, 1993), p. A25, and PPP (September 24 –October 7, 1993), pp. 1–2. 32. For an unofficial translation of the constitution, adopted from several sources, see R. Jennar, The Cambodian Constitutions, 1953 –1993; preamble on p. 8. 33. D. Chandler, “The Tragedy of Cambodia Revisited,” in Facing the Cambodian Past: Selected Essays, 1971–1994, pp. 316 –317. 34. “The Agreements,” pp. 145–146. 35. D. Chandler, talk at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Cambodia, November 23, 1994; unofficial transcript in author’s possession. 36. V. Frings, “The Cambodian People’s Party and Sihanouk,” JCA 25 (1994), p. 358. 37. R. Cox, “The Crisis in World Order and the Challenge to International Organization,” Cooperation and Conflict 29 (1994), p. 105. 38. E. Coxon, “Politics and Modernization in Western Samoan Education” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Auckland, 1996), p. 105. 39. Joel Samoff, in reference to changes brought about by the economic and political climate of the 1980s, argued that by the end of the 1980s “moderniza-

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tion was rejuvenated.” See J. Samoff, ed., Coping with Crisis: Austerity, Adjustment and Human Resources, p. 246. 40. P. Jones, World Bank Financing of Education: Lending, Learning and Development, p. 15. 41. “Tokyo Declaration on the Rehabilitation and Reconstruction of Cambodia, Issued at the Conclusion of the Ministerial Conference on the Rehabilitation and Reconstruction of Cambodia on 22 June 1992,” in The United Nations and Cambodia, pp. 197–198. 42. Ibid., p. 197. 43. Royal Government, The National Program to Rehabilitate and Develop Cambodia. 44. Royal Government, Implementing the National Program to Rehabilitate and Develop Cambodia, pp. 2 –5. 45. In discussing government policies, David Ashley noted, for example, that “economic reconstruction is its [the government’s] principal, indeed perhaps its only policy aim.” See PPP ( June 2 –15, 1995), p. 6. 46. Ibid., p. 94. 47. Royal Government, Implementing the National Program, pp. 2 –3. 48. World Bank, East Asia and Pacific Region, Country Department 1 (hereafter World Bank), Cambodia Rehabilitation Program: Implementation and Outlook; World Bank, Cambodia: From Recovery to Sustained Development. 49. Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, Rebuilding Quality Education and Training in Cambodia. 50. Ung Huot, “Education Policy Statement,” in Rebuilding Quality Education and Training in Cambodia, ed. Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, p. iii. 51. See Jennar, The Cambodian Constitutions, pp. 18 –19. 52. ADB and Queensland Education Consortium (hereafter QEC), The Royal Government of Cambodia Education Sector Review, Volume 1: Executive Summary; ADB and QEC, The Royal Government of Cambodia Education Sector Review, Volume 2a: Education Sector Strategic Analysis; ADB and QEC, The Royal Government of Cambodia Education Sector Review, Volume 2b: Education Statistical Digest; ADB and QEC, The Royal Government of Cambodia Education Sector Review, Volume 3: Education Investment Framework and Program. 53. “Medium Term Education Development: Indicative Policy and Strategic Directions, 1994 –2000,” in ADB and QEC, Education Sector Review, Volume 3: Education Investment Framework and Program, pp. 67–73. 54. Hun Sen, “Opening Address,” Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports and Council for the Development of Cambodia, Investment Framework, Education Sector: 1995 –2000. 55. Ung Huot, “Closing Speech,” in Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, National Forum on Foreign Aid to Education, Youth and Sport, March 21–23, 1994. 56. Ibid. 57. Establishing the rule of law was one of the stated goals of the Cambodian government in the NPRD. See Royal Government, Implementing the National Program, p. ii.

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58. See, for example, FEER ( January 27, 1994), p. 18; FEER (May 19, 1994), pp. 16 –19; Asiaweek (September 15, 1995), p. 40; Asiaweek (November 24, 1995), pp. 38 – 44. 59. D. Ashley, “The Failure of Conflict Resolution in Cambodia: Causes and Lessons,” in Cambodia and the International Community: The Quest for Peace, Development and Democracy, eds. F. Brown and D. Timberman, p. 55. 60. For a discussion, see ibid., pp. 53 –58. 61. R. Jennar. “Cambodia: After the UNTAC mission,” in Indochina Today: Emerging Trends, p. 45. 62. PPP (March 24 –April 6, 1995), p. 12. 63. World Bank, Cambodia Rehabilitation Program, p. ii. 64. Ibid., p. 19. 65. “Policy and strategic framework,” in MOEYS and Council for the Development of Cambodia, Investment Framework. 66. ADB and QEC, Education Sector Review, Volume 2a, p. 81. 67. World Bank, Cambodia Rehabilitation Program, p. 74. 68. The announcement of the prime pédagogique was made by FUNCINPEC officials Norodom Ranariddh, the Minister for Education Ung Huot and the Minister for Finance Sam Rainsy at a mass meeting of teachers in March 1994. In an attempt to broaden its impact, and in contravention of the subdecree that established the payment, the prime pédagogique was not only awarded to teachers but to every employee of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports: clerical staff, drivers, cooks, and maintenance staff. 69. On this agreement, see John McAndrew, Aid Diffusions and Illusions: Bilateral and Multilateral Emergency and Development Assistance to Cambodia, 1992 – 1995, pp. 39 – 40. 70. Norodom Ranariddh and Hun Sen, “Foreword,” in MOEYS and Council for the Development of Cambodia, Investment Framework, Education Sector: 1995 –2000 p. i. 71. World Bank, Cambodia Rehabilitation Program, p. 74. 72. Cooperation Committee for Cambodia, Towards Genuine Partnership, NGO Strategies for Development in Cambodia, 1996 –2000: Position Paper to Consultative Group, Tokyo, p. 10; and “Cambodian Government Support for Education Funding” (unpublished paper, July 1996). 73. Royal Government, First Socioeconomic Development Plan, 1996 –2000, p. 51. 74. Keat Chhon, “Keynote Address,” given at National Higher Education Taskforce seminar, Phnom Penh, December 19 –20, 1996, p. 3. 75. See, for example, the Cambodia Times article that erroneously claimed that the government’s expenditure on education had increased by 16 percent: CT ( January 6 –12, 1997), pp. 1–2. On the figures, see Ministry of the Economy and Finance, Gestion 1997, Tableau du travail: Depenses du budget général de l’état (Annexe 2). 76. Cambodge Nouveau 65 (fevrier 1–15, 1996), p. 1; CT ( January 6 –12, 1997), p. 1; PPP (May 31–June 13, 1996), pp. 1, 13; PPP (November 29 – December 12, 1996), p. 13. 77. See Ministry of the Economy and Finance, Gestion 1997.

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Notes to Pages 174 –179

78. See, for example, PPP ( July 30 –August 12, 1993), p. 3; PPP (September 23 –October 6, 1994), p. 2. Also author’s interviews with teachers and students at the following educational institutions in Phnom Penh: Bak Touk Secondary School, Beng Trabek Secondary School, Takhmau Secondary School, Norodom Primary School, and Faculty of Medicine (December 1996 and January 1997). 79. On “essential” salary supplementation, author’s interview with K, Phnom Penh, December 1996. PPP ( June 17–30, 1994), p. 8; PPP ( July 14 –27, 1995), p. 20; CD ( June 11, 1996), p. 6; CD ( July 2, 1996), pp. 1, 6. The problem is also prevalent in higher education, as indicated by the 1994 demonstrations at the Faculty of Medicine. See PPP (September 23 –October 6, 1994), p. 5. 80. PPP ( June 17–30, 1994), p. 8; CT (October, 21–27, 1996), p. 2. On the lateness of the payment of wages, see CT ( January 27–February 1, 1997), p. 1; author’s interviews with teachers and students at Bak Touk Secondary School, Beng Trabek Secondary School, Takhmau Secondary School, Norodom Primary School, and the Faculty of Medicine; and PPP ( July 12 –25, 1996), p. 17. 81. Norodom Ranariddh and Hun Sen, “Foreword,” in Investment Framework, p. i. 82. PPP (February 10 –23, 1995), p. 7. 83. Royal Government, Implementing the National Program, p. 23. 84. “Summary of Proceedings,” in Compendium of Plan Documents Presented to Donors: Round Table Meeting on Education Sector, Phnom Penh, 7/12/94, p. II. 85. On the RUPP, see H. Locard, “Social Sciences at the University of Phnom Penh” (unpublished papers, 1993); G. Coyne, “Education and Sociopolitical Transitions in Asia: The Case of Phnom Penh University,” in Higher Education in Cambodia: Perspectives of an Australian Aid Project, pp. 23 – 40; and L. Fergusson and G. le Masson, “A Culture Under Siege: Post-colonial Higher Education and Teacher Education in Cambodia from 1953 to 1979,” History of Education 26 (1997), pp. 91–112. 86. “Graduation Speech of Student Representative,” in Ceremony to Award Bachelor Degrees to the Twelfth Graduating Class, 7 October 1995. 87. Norodom Ranariddh, “Speech of the First Prime Minister,” in Ceremony to Award Bachelor Degrees. 88. CT (December 31, 1995–January 6, 1996). 89. “Confusion over Employment Policy” (unpublished paper, December 1995). 90. CT (September 9, 1996), p. 4. 91. Council of Ministers, “Reduction of the Number of Civil Servants” (unpublished paper, September 1996). 92. On the IMF’s increasing frustration with Cambodia, see for example, CT (November 25–December 12, 1996), p. 1; and PPP (November 29 –December 12, 1996), p. 13. See also the joint “Memorandum of Economic and Financial Policies for 1997” produced by the government in consultation with the IMF; the text was printed in PPP (May 16 –29, 1997), pp. 14 –16. 93. Jennar, The Cambodian Constitutions, p. 19. 94. ADB and QEC, Education Sector Review, Volume 2a, p. 5. 95. PPP (February 9 –22, 1996), Supplement, p. 3.

Notes to Pages 180 –190

227

96. ADB and QEC, Education Sector Review, Volume 2a, p. 103. 97. Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, European Union Member States Consultation: Ministerial Presentation. 98. PPP ( July 26 –August 8, 1996), p. 4. 99. CT (December 16, 1996), p. 5.

Conclusion 1. D. Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War and Revolution since 1945, p. 6. 2. See Keat Chhon, “Cambodia 1997, A Moment of Truth: The Finance Act for 1997 in its Economic Framework and Fundamental Contents” (Unpublished paper, December 1996). 3. For an analytical perspective, see also speech delivered by Tony Kevin (former Australian Ambassador to Cambodia) at the Australian Institute of International Affairs, Melbourne, November 16, 1998; transcript in author’s possession. 4. “Cambodian teachers to strike for more pay,” Reuters News ( January 24, 1998). 5. NYT (December 9, 1997), p. 13.

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Interviews Several interviewees, who very willingly shared with me their recollections of the past, did not wish to be identified in the book. These interviewees, mostly education officials of the former PRK regime who remain involved in educa-

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tion, have been referred to using an alphabetical code. The interviewees cited in the notes of the text are all referred to in this section. The list is not a comprehensive catalogue of all of those who contributed to this study. The recollections, opinions, arguments, and perspectives of many others—students, teachers, expatriate consultants and advisers, and “people on the street”— while not cited in the text, played a significant role in the construction of my narrative.

Unnamed Informants A. Education official of the former PRK attached to the Cabinet of the Minister; current member of the National Assembly. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, December 1996. B. Secondary school principal and later planning official of the PRK /SOC; current high-ranking planning official in the Ministry of Education. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, December 1996. C. Secondary education official and later high-ranking ministerial official of the PRK /SOC; current high-ranking ministerial official in the Ministry of Education. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, December 1996. D. Higher education official of the former PRK /SOC; current higher education official. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, December 1996. E. High-ranking ministerial official of the former PRK; current member of the National Assembly. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, December 1996. F. Official at the Center for Education Research and Textbook Development during the former PRK; current member of the National Assembly. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, December 1996. G. Official at the Ministry of Education Personnel Bureau during the former PRK; current ministerial official in another ministry. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, December 1996. H. Secondary school teacher and later textbook author at the Center for Education Research and Textbook Development during the former PRK. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, December 1996. I. Director of three primary schools in Prey Veng province during the former PRK. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, December 1996. J. Director of Kompong Cham secondary school during the former PRK. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, December 1996. K. Official at the Ministry of Education. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, December 1996.

Named Informants Asterisks indicate pseudonyms. Chea Saron.* Former resident of damban 4 during the Democratic Kampuchea period; secondary school student in the PRK period; and presently lecturer at a higher institution funded under a bilateral aid program. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, January 1997. Ek Seng.* Former resident of Prey Veng (until 1981). Various interviews at Sydney, Australia, January–September 1996.

248

References

Hem Sophearak.* Former Sangkum period secondary school teacher, Lycée Sihanouk. Interviewed at Sydney, Australia, February 1994. Heng Pon.* Student at Beng Trabek secondary school, Phnom Penh. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, January 1997. Keo Soth.* Current primary school principal and former PRK primary school teacher. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, January 1997. Kong Sao. Former Khmer Republic period secondary school student, Lycée 18 Mars. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, December 1996. Koy Nong.* English teacher at a private school in Phnom Penh and former PRK primary school and literacy education teacher. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, January 1997. Li Ben.* Former student of the Economics Institute, SOC period. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, January 1997. Long Visal.* English teacher at private school in Phnom Penh and former PRK /SOC secondary school student. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, January 1997. Men Bunroeun.* Former Sangkum period primary school teacher, Battambang. Interviewed at Adelaide, Australia, March 1994. Men Pon.* Former PRK secondary school science teacher. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, January 1997. Mun Savorn.* Former Khmer Republic period lycée student (Tuol Kork Lycée), Phnom Penh. Interviewed at Sydney, Australia, July 1996. Ngorn Som. Former resident of Svay Rieng who lived as a displaced person in Phnom Penh 1971–1975. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, January 1997. Nou Si.* Current and PRK /SOC secondary school mathematics teacher. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, January 1997. Nuon Vuthy.* Former Sangkum period lycée student (Sangkum Reastr Niyum II Lycée), Phnom Penh. Interviewed at Sydney, Australia, February 1994. Om Prasit.* Former Sangkum period primary school teacher and principal, Kampot province. Interviewed at Sydney, Australia, July 1996. Sao Bunroeun. Former student of the Chamcar Daung Agricultural Institute, PRK /SOC period. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, January 1997. Sau Sina.* Resident of Phnom Penh evacuated to the southwest in 1975, before returning to Phnom Penh in 1980. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, December 1996. Sok Sarun. Former student of the Faculty of Medicine in the SOC period. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, January 1997. Suon Serey.* Former student of the Lycée Sisowath (1969 –1975), teacher in the PRK period, and, since 1993, lecturer at a higher institution funded under a bilateral aid program. Interviewed at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, January 1997. Tea Hour Yith.* Former Sangkum period secondary school teacher, Phnom Penh. Interviewed at Sydney, Australia, February 1994. Ung Phanna. Former PRK secondary school student. Interviewed at Siem Reap, Cambodia, December 1996.

References

249

Group Interviews Bak Touk Secondary School, Phnom Penh Municipality, Cambodia. Selected interviews with educational personnel and students, December 1996. Beng Trabek Secondary School, Phnom Penh Municipality, Cambodia. Selected interviews with educational personnel and students, December 1996. Faculty of Medicine, Phnom Penh Municipality, Cambodia. Selected interviews with educational personnel and students, December 1996. Norodom Primary School, Phnom Penh Municipality, Cambodia. Selected interviews with educational personnel, January 1997. Phum Khnar, Takeo Province, Cambodia. Selected interviews in relation to education in Democratic Kampuchea, December 1996. Phum Tonlé Bati, Takeo Province, Cambodia. Selected interviews in relation to education in Democratic Kampuchea, December 1996. Takhmau Secondary School, Phnom Penh Municipality, Cambodia. Selected interviews with educational personnel and students, January 1997.

Index

aid, 125–126, 156 –158, 162 –168, 189; Chinese, 48, 102; Soviet, 138 –139; Vietnamese, 102, 124, 128 –130. See also Asian Development Bank; International Monetary Fund; Scientific and Cultural Organization; United Nations Development Program; United Nations Educational; World Bank Akashi, Yasushi, 159 Allman, T. D., 73 America. See United States Angkorean period, 1–2, 12, 184 –185 Angkor Wat, 1–2, 184 ASEAN. See Association of Southeast Asian Nations Asian Development Bank, 157–158, 166 – 167, 171, 180 Association des Etudiants Khmers (AEK), 100 –101 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 121, 136, 140 –141, 144, 189 Bardez, Felix, 22 Becker, Elizabeth, 116 BLDP. See Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party Buddhism, 11, 12 –14, 18, 145; political ideology and, 34 –35, 53 –54, 65, 73 – 74, 76 Buddhist Institute, 27, 198n. 64

Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party (BLDP), 159, 160 Buddhist socialism, 34 –36, 47, 53 –54, 65, 73 Burchett, Wilfred, 70 Cambodianization (Khmerization): during Khmer Republic era, 76 –77, 80, 83, 89; during PRK /SOC era, 134 – 135, 139; during Sihanouk era, 32, 39 – 42, 43 – 45, 58 –59 Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), 150, 189; coalition with FUNCINPEC, 159 – 160, 161, 171, 174, 180 –181; elections and, 158, 190; formation of, 147, 158, 160, 161, 174, 190. See also Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party (KPRP) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 47, 88 CGDK. See Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea Chamroan Vichea Collège, 60 Chan Si, 141, 220n. 63 Chan Ven, 128 Chan Youran, 83 Chao Samboth, 151 Chau Seng, 43 – 45, 108 chbab, 14 –15 Chea Sim, 123 Cheng Heng, 71, 72, 87 Chhan Sokhum, 78

251

252 China, 46, 48, 136, 140; Cultural Revolution, 55, 59; Democratic Kampuchea and, 101–102, 107, 115 Chou Ta-Kuan, 12 CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency civil war (1970 –1975): end of, 67, 91, 93; impact of, 80, 87– 89; military offensives, 81– 82; United States involvement, 86 – 87 Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, 137, 141 colonial education. See education, colonial Colonial era (1863 –1953): affair of 1916, 21–22; Bardez incident, 22, 24; beginning of, 18, 19 –20; development of nationalism, 26; ideology underlying, 19 –21; impact of, 22, 26, 27– 30, 185–188; naiveté of French, 22; tightening of control, 19, 20 –21. See also Japanese occupation; mission civilisatrice colonialism. See Colonial era Communism in Cambodia: decline of, 141–143, 145–147; French influence on, 29, 50, 60, 100 –101; origins of, 98 –99; support for, 60 – 62, 90 –91. See also Communist Party of Kampuchea; Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party; Workers Party of Kampuchea Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK): factionalism, 103, 120; history of, 84 – 85, 94 –95, 97–100, 121–123; ideology and political program, 85– 86, 95–96, 100 –103, 115–117; purges, 107–108, 115, 123; Sihanouk and, 55–58, 81, 84 – 85, 208n. 51. See also Communism in Cambodia; Democratic Kampuchea; Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party CONCERN, 156 corruption, 54, 60 – 61, 84, 87– 88, 90, 190; in education, 94, 174 –175 CPK. See Communist Party of Kampuchea CPP. See Cambodian People’s Party Crusade for Independence, 33, 42 Curle, Adam, 79 curriculum, 39 – 40, 42, 53, 107, 113 –114, 130 –133, 178, 179 –180; irrelevant, 145–146, 149; reform of, 38, 44 – 45, 48, 51, 77, 79, 83, 131, 134 –135; traditional (precolonial), 17–18

Index Davis, Neil, 67 Democratic Kampuchea (DK): fall of, 115, 117; Four Year Plan, 105–107; legacy of, 125, 126 –127, 132 –133, 210n. 10, 217n. 16; legitimacy of, 119, 123; opposition to, 107; purges, 99, 107–108, 115, 123; regional variation, 108 –109; repudiation of history, 123; social change, 95–96; temporal variation, 107–108; Vietnam and, 102, 115–116. See also Communist Party of Kampuchea; Pol Pot Democrat Party, 29, 33, 87 development, 5; Cambodian commitment to, 31–32, 35, 53 –54, 82, 155, 161– 166, 182; human resource development and, 175–176 DK. See Democratic Kampuchea Douc Rasy, 100 Doumer, Paul, 21 Ecole d’administration cambodgienne, 29 Ecole Normale, 43, 48 Ecole Wat Phnom, 67 economic problems, 47, 54, 170, 173, 189, 203n. 72 education, colonial: Cambodian control of, 29; contrast with Vietnam, 25–26; first attempts, 23; French commitment to, 30, 37; legacy of, 185–186; mission civilisatrice and, 25, 29; problems with, 24, 26; reformed temple schools, 24 – 25; Sarraut’s reforms, 23, 197n. 47; social mobility, 28 education, enrollments, 25, 36 –37, 39, 44, 50, 62, 135, 138, 148, 200n. 19; problems coping with, 40 – 41, 48 – 49 education, financing of, 46, 63, 167, 172 – 175 education, quality of: problems with, 51– 52, 63, 112 –113, 118 –119, 137–138, 174; teachers and, 48 – 49, 112, 132 – 133, 143 education, planning of, 48 – 49, 78, 103 – 105, 106 –107, 116 –117, 130 –131, 146, 166 –168; failures in, 45– 46, 83, 170, 175–179, 182; Sihanouk and, 50. See also Cambodianization; language of instruction education, politicization of, 56 –59, 68 –70

Index education, precolonial, 12 –14; contrast with China, Java, and Vietnam, 28 education, primary, 25, 51, 78 –79, 106, 129, 179 –180 education, reform of, 23 –24, 38, 40 – 41, 44 – 45, 58 –59, 76 –79, 118, 166 –167, 175–177, 180. See also Cambodianization; language of instruction education, secondary, 25, 138, 179 –180 education, tertiary, 49 –50, 51–52, 53, 143, 176 –178, 202n. 63 educational crisis: causes of, 64 – 65, 91– 93, 117–119, 128, 148 –149, 170, 172, 187–188; contribution of war to, 69, 80, 83; emergence of, 3; political dimensions of, 52; symptoms of, 3 – 4, 38 –39, 44 – 45, 48 – 49, 51–52, 112 – 113, 132 –133, 156, 178 Eilenberg, Jeanette, 36 elections, 34, 43 – 44, 56, 69, 87, 153 –155, 158 –159, 189 –190, 223n. 30 Ferreyrolles, 23 Four Year Plan, DK, 105–107 FUNCINPEC. See National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Co-operative Cambodia FUNK. See National United Front of Kampuchea Gatiloke, 16 –17, 196nn. 23, 24 Geneva conference, 37, 38, 98 God-King, 10, 184 –185 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 121 Government of National Salvation, 70 Hang Tun Hak, 100 Heng Samrin, 120, 123, 126, 141–142 hidden curriculum, 42 higher education. See education, tertiary Ho Sok, 151 Hou Yuon, 100, 102, 212n. 36 human capital theory, 35–36, 78 –79, 165 Hun Sen: character, 151; coup (1997), 150 –151; early years, 208n. 49; Khmer Rouge officer, 123; meeting with Sihanouk, 143 –144; Prime Minister, 158 –159, 177, 180 –181, 190; PRK / SOC experiences, 141, 147; rivalry with Ranariddh, 168 –169, 172 Huntington, Samuel, 65

253 ICORC. See International Committee on the Reconstruction of Cambodia ICP. See Indochinese Communist Party ICRC. See International Committee of the Red Cross Ieng Sary: Communist activities, 57, 82, 99, 122; student, 29, 100; teacher, 43 ILO. See International Labor Organization IMF. See International Monetary Fund Indianization, 9 –10 Indochinese Communist Party, 98, 122 In Tam, 87 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. See World Bank International Committee of the Red Cross, 133, 156 International Committee on the Reconstruction of Cambodia, 163 –164, 171 International Labor Organization, 88 – 89 International Monetary Fund, 159, 163 –164, 172, 175 interpersonal relations, 14 Issaraks. See Khmer Issaraks Ith Sarin, 102 Japanese occupation, 26 –27 Jayavarman II, 184 Kambuboth College, 43, 55, 60 Kambuja, 9 Kaundinya, Prince, 9 Keat Chhon, 173, 189 Keng Vannsak, 100 Keo An, 87, 90 Keo Meas, 107, 122, 211n. 15 Keo Moni, 211n. 15 Keo Sangkim, 90 Khieu Ponnary, 43 Khieu Samphan, 62, 100, 101, 104, 211n. 11 Khieu Thirith, 43 Khmer Issaraks, 38, 98 Khmerization. See Cambodianization Khmer Niset, 42 Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party: early years, 122 –123; formation of, 98; PRK and, 137, 141–142, 144, 147. See also Communist Party of Kampuchea Khmer Republic: decline of, 86 – 88; fall of, 67, 91; formation of, 84

254 Khmer Rouge. See Communism in Cambodia; Communist Party of Kampuchea; Democratic Kampuchea Kingdom of Cambodia (1993 –), 152, 159 –160, 161–162; coalition government, 168; commitment to development, 162 –163 kingship, 10 –11, 65, 184 –185; criticism of, 42 – 43. See also social system Kompong Cham uprising, 81 Kompong Kantuot Teacher Training Center, 48 Kossomak, Queen, 71 Koy Thoun, 108 Kun Thon Thanarak, 90 language of instruction, 25, 40, 58 –59, 77 literacy, 13 –14, 106, 113, 139 –140 Long Boret, 46 Long Pet, 100 Lon Nol: character of, 73 –74; coup against Sihanouk, 71; flees Khmer Republic, 91; Sihanouk era Prime Minister, 57–58, 70; stroke, 84; United States and, 87– 88. See also neo-Khmerism Lon Non, 84, 87 Lycée 18 Mars, 90 Lycée Descartes, 59 Lycée Norodom Sihanouk, 26, 61, 197n. 59 Lycée Sangkum II, 62 Lycée Sisowath, 25, 27, 29, 43 Manipoud, Louis, 12 manpower planning, 78 –79 Mau Say, 100 May Someth, 72 Meyer, Charles, 50, 51–52 Mey Pho, 211n. 15 mission civilisatrice, 6, 18 –19, 21, 25, 26 – 27, 185. See also Colonial era modernization, 162 –164; commitment to, 3, 36; theory of, 3, 35–36; link to education, 36 Mok, 103, 110, 120 Moulinaka, 159 Nagara Vatta, 27, 42 National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia, 150, 160, 171;

Index coalition with CPP, 150 –151, 152, 158 –159, 161, 190; resistance movement, 136 National United Front of Kampuchea: CPK and, 83 – 85; formation of, 66, 81; ideology and political program, 82 – 83, 85– 86; military successes, 81– 82 Nay Sarann, 107, 211n. 45 neo-Khmerism, 73, 76 New Cambodge, 74 –75 New World Order, 162, 168, 182, 183 NGO. See non-government organizations Ngor Haing Seng, 72, 90 Nhiek Tioulong, 37 Nixon, Richard, 70, 205n. 5 non-government organizations, 156 –157 Norodom, King, 18, 20, 23 Norodom Chantaraingsey, 209n. 63 Norodom Ranariddh, Prince: coup against, 150 –151; Prime Minister, 158 –159, 170; rivalry with Hun Sen, 168 –169, 172 Norodom Sihanouk, King (and Prince): abdication, 31; break with United States, 46 – 47; Crusade for Independence, 29, 33 –34; Democratic Kampuchea experiences, 105, 117, 212 – 213n. 45; development agenda, 34 – 35, 39; early years, 26 –27, 198n. 60; educational involvement, 40, 42, 44, 49 –50, 64 – 65, 75; FUNK and, 72 –73, 81– 82, 85; meeting with Hun Sen, 143 –144; opposition to, 45– 46, 50 – 51, 54 –55, 56 –59; overthrow of, 66, 71; resistance leader, 136, 143 –144; since UNTAC, 154, 159, 190; Vietnam and, 70. See also Sangkum Reastr Niyum Nuon Chea, 122, 211nn. 11, 15 Paris Peace Agreements, 147, 153 –155, 158 Pen Sovan, 211n. 15 People’s Republic of Kampuchea: aid embargo, 125–126, 144; economic liberalization, 145; formation of, 120, 121– 124; ideological orientation, 124; propaganda, 216n. 6; reliance on Vietnam, 124, 133 –134, 217–218n. 24; State of Cambodia, 145 Phouk Chhay, 75 Phuong Ton, 100

Index political culture, 34; effects of, 55, 161– 162, 169, 178 –179; egalitarian alternative, 29, 32 –33, 85, 96, 161; influence on policy-making, 52, 162; origins in Cambodia, 17 Pol Pot: early years, 29, 98 –99, 101–102; education and, 104; FUNK and, 102; identity of, 97; secrecy of, 97; student, 100; student in France, 42 – 43, 100; teacher, 29, 43, 57, 58, 61, 115–116, 123; rise of, 98 –99; visits China, 115– 116; visits Yugoslavia, 101. See also Communist Party of Kampuchea; Democratic Kampuchea PRK. See People’s Republic of Kampuchea Ramayana. See Reamker Reamker, 15–16 Redd Barna, 156 –157 Ros Chantrabot, 72 Ros Chet Thor, 43 Royal University of Phnom Penh, 176 –177 S-21. See Tuol Sleng Sae Phouthong, 123 Saloth Sar. See Pol Pot Samlaut rebellion, 57–58, 70 Sam Rainsy, 169 Sam Sary, 100 Sangkum Reastr Niyum, 34, 43, 45, 199n. 9; opposition to, 57 Sarraut, Albert, 23, 197n. 47 Schultz, Theodore, 36 SEATO. See Southeast Asia Treaty Organization Siem Reap demonstration, 57 Sieu Heng, 98 –99, 211n. 15 Sihanouk. See Norodom Sihanouk Sim Var, 43 Sin Khem Ko, 100 Sisowath Sirik Matak, Prince, 66, 70, 87 SNC. See Supreme National Council social mobility, 36 –37, 45, 52 –54; origins of concept, 28 social system, 194n. 4; hierarchical, 9 –12, 13; literary traditions and, 13 –14; opposition to, 85; precolonial education and, 17–18. See also kingship Son Ngoc Minh, 211n. 45 Son Sen, 43, 99 So Phim, 211n. 15 Sos Man, 211n. 15

255 Southeast Asian Treaty Organization, 47 State of Cambodia. See People’s Republic of Kampuchea structural adjustment programs, 163, 164, 172 students: attracted to Communism, 60 – 62; in France, 29, 42 – 43, 100 –101; persecuted during DK, 126; protests by, 54 –55, 56 –58, 71, 89 –91; social mobility and, 40, 52 –54, 176; support for 1970 coup, 72, 76 –78 Supreme National Council, 154 Suramarit, Prince, 33 Suryavarman II, 1 Tan Kim Huon, 100 teachers: Communism and, 43, 59, 60 – 62; fear of Sihanouk, 204n. 100; monks as, 13, 24; persecution during DK, 126; problems encountered by, 49, 51, 89, 171; shortage of, 48, 129 – 130, 132; status and moral authority, 41, 61, 175; strikes, 89 –90, 190, 209n. 66; training of, 48, 105, 117, 143, 177–178 Thach Chia, 90 Thiounn Mumm, 100, 116 Thomson, Charles, 20 Tiv Ol, 86 Tol Lah, 178 Tou Samouth, 99 Tuol Sleng, 85, 108 Uch Ven, 43 UFNS. See United Front for the National Salvation of Kampuchea UNAMIC. See United Nations Advance Mission in Cambodia UNDP. See United Nations Development Program unemployment, 50, 54, 200 –201n. 30, 204n. 88 UNESCO. See United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization Ung Bunheang, 112 Ung Huot, 150, 167–168 UNICEF. See United Nations Children’s Fund United Front for the National Salvation of Kampuchea, 117, 120, 123, 124 United Nations Advance Mission in Cambodia, 153

256 United Nations Children’s Fund, 132 –133, 157, 218n. 36 United Nations Development Program, 88, 157, 218n. 36 United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 37–39, 64, 78 –79, 88 – 89, 218n. 36 United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, 153 –155 United States, 46 – 47, 56, 70, 86, 202n. 54 UNTAC. See United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia U.S. See United States Vann Molyvann, 100 Vietnam: colonial experience, 25–26;

Index FUNK and, 82; PRK and, 121–122, 124, 128, 133 –134, 216n.9, 217–218n. 24; protests against, 71–73 Vorn Vet, 99 WHO. See World Health Organization Workers Party of Kampuchea. See Communist Party of Kampuchea World Bank, 170 –171 World Health Organization, 88 Yun Yat, 116 Yus Son, 147

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David M. Ayres is the Ewing Post-doctoral Fellow in Education at the University of Sydney in Australia. He became interested in Cambodia while an undergraduate, and subsequently wrote an honors thesis and doctoral dissertation on the politics of educational policy in Cambodia. Dr. Ayres’ previous publications and undergraduate teaching at the University of Sydney have combined his interest in Cambodian history and politics with his background in international and development education.