 | Cambodia: SIHANOUK's SANGKUM REASTRE NIYUM (2of8) [KH] RECALL OF THE ERRORS MADE BY SIHANOUK 1. Abdication in favor of his father in March 1955, in order to dispose more power. 2. Creation of the unique movement "Sangkum Reastre Niyum" in 1955 to destroy the political system established by the constitution of 1947 based on pluralism. 3. Repression against the various political parties to forever annihilate their movement. 4. In the context of the Vietnam war, weakening of National Defend, by sending the soldiers and civil servant to take part in agricultural work instead of reinforcing the means of the army and its drive (and not only ....) 5. Political support and logistic assistance with the Vietnamese Communists, leading to the installation of many bases VC/NVN in Khmer territory in the years 1960. Moreover, few instances of criticism from his leftist opponents have so provoked his anger as the suggestion that his regime did not provide education for the masses. The number of education institution and students in Cambodia increased dramatically under Sihanouk, particularly in the thirteen years between the founding of the Sangkum in 1955 and 1968. The number of primary school pupils mushroomed from just over 300,000 to over 1,000,000. But more spectacular still was the burgeoning of secondary and tertiary education. Some 500 high school students attended institutions in 1955. By 1968 there were more than one million. No universities existed in 1955. By 1968 there nine, with more than 30 faculties and a student population of early 11 000. The record, Sihanouk as presented it, is a glowing one. In this, as in other matters of importance, Sihanouk was responsible. Convinced, according to Charles Meyer, by a visit to an Indonesian university campus in 1964 that tertiary education should be promoted, the prince ordered a rapid expansion of campuses and faculties but gave little, if any, thought to how these were to be financed, stocked with books and equipment and staffed, or to what would happen to graduates of these institutions. Standards in most of the newly established faculties were deplorably low, not least because there were simply not enough trained university teachers. Meyer has written scathingly of what this hothouse approach meant in the case of the University of Takeo-Kampot. Started from scratch in the id-1960s, it boasted from its inauguration a faculty of oceanography, despite being 50 kilometers from the sea, and a hospital for its 'medical faculty'. In the closing years of Sihanouk's rule, Charles Meyer says, there were 131 students enrolled at the University of Agricultural Science, but the University of Fine Arts had no fewer than 787 students, of whom some 300 were studying choreography. Fish from the lake and rivers were plentiful. Cambodia regularly supplied its population more personally person than any other country in Southeast Asia, even when crops were poor. The landscape remained largely as in medieval times, awash with emerald rice paddies, shade and dotted by bamboo stands and knots of palm trees. Farmers lived in huts or traditional wooden houses built on stilts for protection from monsoon floods. The point spires of pagodas dominated village and the peasants' lives. As the embodiment of Cambodia's long help-belief, that monarch is a deva-raj or god king, a semi divine ruler with absolute secular power and the benedictions of the gods, Sihanouk saw Cambodia as his own paradise. He took it upon himself to design a state to "protect" Cambodia, to keep out unwanted foreign or modern influences that might disrupt the largely, rural, Buddhist life in his kingdom. Sihanouk saw independence from France largely as necessary step to prevent the first indo-Chinese war (1946-1954) from spilling into Cambodia and destroy it forever. Independence, in his view, was not the prelude for bringing Cambodia into the twentieth century. It was insurance that Cambodia could remain an Asian beauty, unspoiled by modernity that could also upset his own power. Commerce was handled by the city's ethnic Chinese, relatively new émigrés who arrived toward the end of the nineteenth century eager to become prosperous by performing exactly those activities Sihanouk considered beneath his elite. The Chinese held a near monopoly on business, trade, and informal banking. Those Khmer intellectuals interested in the country's economy were encouraged to become civil servants advising the government, and later to staff the government banks. This royal outlook was buttressed by traditional French attitudes, and the end results was a city cemented along racial divisions: the Chinese were the moneylenders and businessmen; the Vietnamese who had arrived with the French colonialists were middlemen or followed the service trades; the Cambodian were the farmers, civil servants, and intellectuals; the French who stayed on were the foreign experts, chief import-exporters, and plantation owners. |
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