News
Newsfeed
News
Thursday
March 28
Show news feed

Armenian News-NEWS. amcontinues Arianne & Armenia project within the framework of which Arianne Caoili tells about numerous trips across Armenia and shares her impressions and experience of living in Armenia.

Armenia and Cambodia (part 2): a tale of two survivors

Ancient glory is not the only story that the Armenians and Cambodians share. Their very existence is a miracle: both have suffered at the hands of genocidal maniacs, and have managed to survive intact despite aggressive neighbors eating away at their territory for several hundred years. On the street, an atmosphere of political paranoia and conspiracy theorizing can always be felt. But considering their past, one can hardly point the finger.

The Grand Chessboard author and geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski famously termed the Southern Caucasus the ‘Eurasian Balkans’ (because like the Balkans, it is a cauldron of ethnolinguistic diversity and old-school rivalries). Pol Pot labeled the Cambodian neighborhood as a "nest of traitors". But the parallel is clear: both countries inhabit regions prone to messy ethnic and historical conflicts, sucking in the vested interests of foreign powers.

Both countries have enjoyed (endured) great and powerful allies (enemies) throughout time: but Armenia, due to its influential Diaspora - an important difference between the two countries - have certainly used the power vacuum characteristic to its advantage. Vietnam and China were (and are) the substrata of Cambodian commercial life, despite some rough patches in their relationships (especially China, with past links to the Red Khmer regime). They maintain strong economic relations to this day, as do the Russians in Armenia, who are indispensable partners.

Surrounded by hawkish neighbors from all sides, in 1863 the Cambodian King negotiated a French protectorate to intervene and save what was left of the gradual extinction of Cambodia. Sound familiar? It should: in the 16th century, Armenia was at the center of conflict between the Safavid Shahs of Persia and the Ottomans. The Armenians, as historian George Bournoutian has pointed out, "turned to the rising star in the North. Religious, geographical, and political considerations made the Russian empire the natural choice for the Armenians”.

Cambodia has been pillaged by the Thais to the West (in particular, temple-overtaking to the extent that tourists these days marvel at the wonders in Thailand without knowing that they are originally Cambodian), endured Vietnamese threats from the East, and swallowed a Japanese occupation during World War II. Add to this the humiliation of having to cede much of its territory over time, and they're left with much less than what they started with. Again, sound familiar?

Cambodians customarily claim that neighbors keep stealing their stuff: they resent the world-populous sport of Muay Thai (to the extent that they refuse to join the World Muay Thai Council), claiming that kickboxing originated from the Khmers (and apparently, bas-reliefs delicately carved onto the walls of Angkor Wat prove that this ancient marshal-art form originated in Cambodia, and the ‘stealing’ has led to the misnomer of Muay Thai, rather than its original name, kun Khmer).Cambodians seem to have a real bone to pick with the Thais: their script and language is often added to the list of stolen property. Armenians get wiled-eyed over the origin of certain dishes, not to mention Ararat and the lost lands. Then there is the dirty business of the Turks selling their tomatoes and trout to the Russian market branded as ‘Armenian’ (‘Sevan ishkan’), something the Uzbeks have tried to mimic with their ‘Armenian’ apricots.

Many Cambodians drool over fantasies to regain territories lost in centuries past, and the Khmer Rouge used this dream as justification for many of its actions. In both countries, history museums are adorned with maps showing the brobdingnagian size of their empires - of their significance and dominating presence throughout history. Almost too predictably – and I say this in humorbut with sincere compassion – the maps reveal in roughly 100 year intervals the gradual eating-away of their territory, which unfortunatelyfor them means that the current map shows a tiny dot in comparison with the first map in the series, in which the motherland was the centerpiece of the regional chessboard.

But for Armenia and Cambodia, already cut down to size by tumultuous histories, it would only get worse.Benedict Kiernan was one of the first academics to draw comparisons between the Armenian and Cambodian genocides, concluding that racism was a major factor of both regimes. Jean Lacoutre’s term autogenocide captures the fully sinister nature of the Cambodian bloodbath, much likeHenry Morgenthau’s equally vivid expression race murderwhich he used to describe what his informants witnessed under the Ottoman regime.

Between 1975 and 1979, 1.7 million people were systematically exterminated by the Red Khmers, and the butchery has left its trail in the 20,000 mass graves (quite literally, Killing Fields) that saturate Cambodia today. The diabolical leader of the Khmer Rouge, Saloth Sar (or, Pol Pot - his stage name), you could say, 'got away with murder', having often been seen peacefully carrying his baby daughter in his arms and devotedly tuning in to the Voice of America every evening before his death in 1998.

The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia effectively saved the Cambodians from the grasp of the Khmer Rouge. But no life-saving floatation device was thrown into the sea of blood that the Armenian population were drowning in. Instead, the rising tidesof the Turkish offensive shifted the Armenian population from historical Armenia towards the Eastern regions held by the Russians. Eventually after the genocide,'Russian Armenia' became the center of a political entity and the only hope for an Armenian homeland.

Both victims of unhinged carnage have been treated like hot potatoes in the hands of the powers that be. The crimes of the Red Khmer did not attract particular attention and international response was initially muted. The United Nations assessed Cambodia's human rights situation in 1978, and the sub-commission, in castrated fashion, urged the Government to urgently restore human rights but carefully put aside the thornymatter of genocide. Any issue of post-conflict justice was only taken seriously many years later (in 1994 the U.S. Congress passed the Cambodian Genocide Justice Act and the world started to take notice). The Paris Peace Agreements properly dealt with all the other post-conflict issues, but the term ‘genocide’was meticulously excluded from the text, which instead referredto past events using less-indictable words (to be fair, the term was deliberately avoided to oil the wheels of the peace process, which seemed more important to secure at the time).

In the same city over 70 years earlier, the Paris Peace Conference left the Armenian delegation with a number of grave disappointments, no doubtdressed-up in sympathy from the Allied Powers. By 1920, Western powers were subdued in their support for the Armenian cause, and the Europeansused the chance to masterresponsibility-shifting and managedto elevate it to a fine art.

For Armenians, the wounds lay wide open. Cambodia received their 'closure' after international recognition of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. Although our mental gears should always strive to be future-focused, the reality is that Armenians are sick of scratching the same itch over and over, which brings its ownprofound discomforts. It shrouds national consciousness in distrust, doubt, and insecurity – not to mention the amount of resources expended to try and dislodgethe itch’s remorseless power to render an entire people as liars, who aredisposable, forgettable, and ‘not worth the risk’.  And even more humiliating for the Armenians, is that as the years tick by, the itch gets more irritating; the knife in the back twists ever so deeper, especially when the one government (a neighbor, no less) that should be recognizing this historical monstrosity is prohibited by its own law to even talk about it (and when they do, it is wrapped up in sweet, bite-sized pacifiers for the world to suck on for a while, before the next crisis in the Middle East regains their attention).

This week, the day after Genocide Memorial Day, is AnzacDay –the most significant yearly event of my own nation. It commemorates all Australians who have generously and unreservedly risked their lives indefense against tyranny.Before his death, my Dutch grandfather, who famously fought in Indonesia (he received the highest medal of honor from the Dutch Queen), marched every year without exception in the Anzac parades, striding in silence and fighting back tears that always managed to eventually leak onto his firmly austere façade (the only outward expression of the bitter sweet pain that he voluntarily showed was in his reluctance to wear his full set of medals, which in his mind probably kept track of the agony more so thaninstill a sense of pride).In the same way that the protection of freedom is zealously remembered and praised, the annihilation of freedom(and sure death due to one’s race)must be named and shamed for what it is – and forcefully, without resorting to luke-warm words and compromise.

Perhaps we will have two sets of multiple generations grow up on two separate paths: the first will believe that they can, in organized and barbaric fashion, smite an entire race without consequence, and the second will live with the knowledge that they are inferior, easily discarded, and predisposed to abandonment. Extreme, I know – but this is the risk of any evasion strategy employed by the international community (and don’t forget – history has a nasty habit of repeating itself, in some form or another).

Truth is sharper than a double-edged sword: it brings both healing (not to mention the benefits of reconciliation), and consequences. And unfortunately, the truth holds more political risk than it does political currency.But "The dead of Armenia will never cease to cry out. Nor, on their behalf, should we cease to do so", remarked the late Christopher Hitchens. For their sake, and for the sake of future generations, it’s about time for a re-evaluation of the risk of non-recognition.

Arianne Caoili

Read Part 1 of this article: Armenia and Cambodia: through the lens of Lawrence of Arabia

!
This text available in   Հայերեն and Русский
Print
Photos