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Asia Buzz: False Legitimacy
Vietnam and Cambodia should stop abusing the past
By TERRY McCARTHY
April 19, 2000
Web posted at 4 p.m. Hong Kong time, 4 a.m. EDT
So we reach the end of April, and two significant anniversaries--the fall of Saigon and Phnom Penh, within ten days of each other, to communist North Vietnam and mad-dog communist Khmer Rouge troops, 25 years ago.
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A quarter of a century is a nice time span for journalistic purposes, giving the impression of a discrete chunk of time having elapsed that makes the anniversary somehow meaningful.
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"Pol Pot still haunts Cambodia", run the headlines, along with black and white pictures of the Khmer Rouge taking over Phnom Penh. The stories go back over the Killing Fields and then interview survivors who tell gruesome tales of friends or relatives having been killed. Certainly it was a horrific time, beyond human imagination until it happened, and hard to understand even in retrospect. The United Nations is still trying to get an international tribunal under way, as well it should, if only to lay down a marker to future tyrants that they cannot get away with genocide and other atrocities with impunity.
But does Pol Pot still haunt Cambodia? Well over half the population was not born until after the Killing Fields. For them and many of the older folk, daily life in Cambodia is traumatic enough in 2000, with gratuitous violence, unrestrained abuse of power by the military and police, frequent lynchings of suspected criminals, widespread landmine infestation in the countryside and a political leadership based exclusively on the principle of terror.
This is not to say Cambodians' lives have not improved since Pol Pot--of course they have. But they could be even better if their leadership did not constantly support their dictatorial legitimacy by reference to the abuses of the Khmer Rouge. That excuse is wearing a little thin now.
A similar conceit is being played out in Vietnam. Veterans and eager journalists are flooding into Saigon to hear of the tremendous cost the war wrought on Vietnamese--and it was horrendous, over 2 million dead, making the 50,000 U.S. casualties seem small by comparison. But the Hanoi-centric government has elevated this war into the justification of a continuing one-party regime--and a one-party regime that refuses to allow economic reforms even on the scale of China to take place, for fear of losing power. So Vietnam still struggles along with $300 per capita GDP, down there with the poorer countries of Africa and way out of sync with the rest of Asia.
Yes, the Indo-Chinese conflict in the '60s and '70s was immensely tragic. But after 25 years is it legitimate for governments--with the unwitting connivance of foreign journalists--to use the tragic past as an excuse for a miserable present and an unpromising future?
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