Anatomy of a Crisis: Education, Development, and the State in Cambodia, 1953-1998

5 The PRK and the SOC: The State in Transition

The PRK and the SOC The State in Transition 120 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 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 The State in Transition 121 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...