REGIONAL GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCE ON TWO KHMER POLITIES

Journal of Third World Studies, Spring 2005 by Raymond, Chad

While Khmers inside Cambodia who were perceived as traitors were being eliminated, ethnic Khmers who lived on the other side of Cambodia's southeastern border were brought under DK rule to bolster national defenses. Officials from the Southwest Zone were told by their superiors in 1977 that "the Khmer Krom [ethnic Khmer living in southern Vietnam] were to be brought to live in Cambodia while [Cambodian] Khmer were to be sent to live in Kampuchea Krom," in part to gain "many forces" to fight Vietnam.47 In 1978, Southwest military units oegan launching raids across the border into Vietnam to forcibly drive ethnic Khmers into southeastern Cambodia; however, once inside Cambodia the Khmer Krom had to endure the same "tempering" - forced labor, political indoctrination, and in some cases torture and execution - as native Cambodians to prove their loyalty as "true" Khmers.

CONCLUSION

The construction of a national identity is usually assumed to have three prerequisites. The first prerequisite is a belief shared by a large group of individuals that each member of the group belongs to a community that is distinct from and bordered by other communities. According to Anderson,48 the nation is an "imagined community" in the minds of its members whose boundaries, while superseding the individual's immediate environment, are finite. While individual members of the community need not be identical in terms of class, religion, or even language, they feel a bond with other members of the community and therefore want "to act in unison on all matters of national importance."49

The second prerequisite is the belief by members of the community that the community should be governed by a sovereign state, and that the defense of this sovereignty legitimizes the use of power by the leaders of that state. Sovereignty links the shared belief in the community to the community's most important political institution - the state - and prescribes some of the necessary duties of that state and those who manage it. The belief in sovereignty grants the state's leaders the authority to act upon the nation as a whole in the name of national interests.

This paper has focused on the third prerequisite for the construction of a national identity: the existence of a tradition of a territory that the community regards as its ancestral home. The tradition of a territory provides a chronological anchor for the supposed authentic and pristine origins of the nation. The tradition also bolsters a nation's:

political claim to a specified area of land and its resources, often in the teeth of opposition from rival claimants. From this perspective, the homeland is indispensable for economic well-being and physical security; and the exploitation of its agricultural and mineral resources becomes a prime nationalist consideration.50

Nationality is thus a product not just of culture and history, but also of geography. Geography is central to national identity, and while geography is not destiny, "it comes awfully close to being so... tradition can be invented [but] it cannot be invented out of nothing."51 In the case of the Khmer, the geography of the lower Mekong river watershed - an unforested alluvial plain that is flooded annually by monsoon rains - made possible the development of food-surplus rice agriculture. Surplus agricultural production in turn permitted the Khmer to form their first highly-organized polity, the empire of Funan. The importance of the region once occupied by Funan to Khmer concepts of nationhood is demonstrated by the mythical account of the origin of the Khmer people. Though the historical accuracy of the myth of a foreign man marrying a native princess and establishing a dynasty over the land now known to Khmer as Kampuchea is impossible to verify, the Khmer have believed in it for over fifteen hundred years. When people believe in myths, the myths themselves become reality to the people who believe in them, and "people act, or even base their lives upon them, especially in times of crisis."52