POLITICS-CAMBODIA: Identity Crisis Surfaces after Anti-Thai Riots

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

PHNOM PENH, Feb 25 2003 (IPS) - Since the anti-Thai violence here in late January, Saray Andeth finds himself caught between two distinct emotional poles – his loyalty to his native Cambodia on the one hand, and his gratitude toward neighbouring Thailand on the other.

It is an unavoidable predicament that the slightly built, quiet-spoken Saray finds himself in over the month since the riots, which sent Thai-Cambodian to their lowest point, broke out here.

Saray remains thankful to Thailand, a country that opened its doors to him as a refugee from 1979 to 1992.

There were hundreds of thousands of other Cambodians like Saray who sought safety in Thailand from the war and bloody turmoil in their country during the mid-1970s. ”They welcomed us; they offered us an escape,” adds the 27-year old.

But this gratitude is up against his strong sentiments of being a Cambodian, and a budding Cambodian writer of fiction at that. Saray, a member of the Khmer Writers’ Association, has written 18 short stories and novellas over the past four years.

As a voice of Cambodian culture, he cannot ignore how cultural exports from Thailand have infiltrated and dominated the entertainment and aesthetic landscape of this country of 9 million people.

”It is true, Thai culture is dominating Cambodian culture,” says Saray, referring to two television stations that air a steady diet of Thai programmes.

Saray’s predicament is shared by a cross section of people in the Cambodian capital, although their reasons for being warm to their economically powerful western neighbour may vary.

It is also one that is becoming more palpable here since the Jan. 29 attack on the Thai embassy, Thai commercial interests and Thai citizens, for which the Cambodian government has since apologised.

Yet the views held by Cambodians, ranging from those like Sary to some youth openly hostile to the Thailand, also reveal something more about this battle-scarred, poor South-east Asian country: its people are struggling to reconstruct an identity that they as a nation can feel proud of.

None conveys this better than what some students told a Cambodian-American academic in the aftermath of the anti-Thai violence, which resulted in Thailand reducing its diplomatic presence and demanding that Phnom Penh foot the bill for damages estimated to be over 40 million U.S. dollars.

”They said that the students were making a statement to the Thais and to the international community that the Khmer people are worth something,” says Leakhena Nou, a medical sociologist due to start work at the University of Cambodia. On the morning of the violence, Phnom Penh high school and university students had begun gathering outside the Thai embassy to express their anti-Thai sentiments following an account that had appeared in the local media days earlier.

One newspaper had a story that a Thai soap-opera actress popular in Cambodia was reported to have said that the famed Angkor Wat ruins, which Cambodians hold dear as mark of their identity and culture, belonged to Thailand.

This account, which the actress later denied having ever made and which leading Cambodian journalists agree was based on a rumour than fact, was added fuel to by Prime Minister Hun Sen. The premier criticised the actress during a public speech two days before the anti-Thai violence erupted.

”The students also used the occasion to express their feelings about a lack of appreciation of anything Khmer,” says Nou, who defended the students from the government’s charge that they were behind the anti-Thai violence. ”I believe politics got involved; the students cannot be blamed.”

”As things stand, the youth feel that the impressions being created here are that there is nothing worthy of being a Khmer,” Nou explains.

Even among moderate voices, this line of thinking – that a Thai presence hinders efforts to reconstruct a Cambodian identity – is readily articulated.

”Over the past 10 years, we have seen a Thailandisation of Cambodia,” says Kao Kim Hourn, executive director of the Phnom Penh-based Cambodian Institute for Cooperation and Peace.

”At the level of people, this cannot be taken for granted,” adds Kao. ”That is why what happened on January 29 should not simply be seen as an event triggered only by a rumour. It is the result of a longer process of the last 10 years of Cambodians feeling they are losing out to Thailand.”

To make their point, some Cambodians draw examples from television, sports and culture. ”While Thai TV programmes are popular, people don’t like the influence they are having on our life and culture,” says Yen Sophan, a Cambodian businessman.

”There is a feeling that the Thai way of living on these shows is being held up at the expense of the Khmer way of life,” he adds.

Some even object to the sport Thai kick boxing or ‘Muay Thai’ being called such, since in their view it is a Cambodian sport, called ‘free boxing.’

”The Thais used the years of the war in Cambodia, when we were cut off from the world, to name this sport ‘Muay Thai’ and give the world the impression it is theirs,” adds one editor, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Cambodia’s struggle to reclaim its identity hardly surprises Thai academic Chayan Vaddhanaphuti. ”I think it is natural in the process of nation-building in a country,” says Chayan, an anthropologist at Thailand’s northern Chiang Mai University.

These efforts – reinventing history, holding on to significant symbols from the past, and hostility to ”external forces” – are likely to be seen in a country coming out years of war and violence, he adds.

During the rule of the genocidal Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, its attempt to reconstruct Cambodian society and severe all its links with its history and cultural past led to nearly two million deaths.

”Cambodia’s effort to reconstruct its identity will go on, the way other countries do,” says Chayan. ”But if we are not careful about this trend – developing a sense of nationalism – it can become a time bomb.”