Chantrabot Ros (ចន្រ្តាបុត្រ រស់) & Phnom Penh (ភ្នំពេញ)
Phnom Penh Publisher, 2016.
Reviewed by: Rosa Yi (PhD Candidate, National University of Singapore, HYI Visiting Fellow)
March Toward Peace in Cambodia, by political scientist Chantraboth Ros, is a welcome addition to the modest collection of Cambodian history written in Khmer. Intended for the general Cambodian reader, the book is motivated by the essence of learning about the past to better appreciate the present. Indeed, toward the end of the 20th century, Cambodia’s past was quite dark, marked by a genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge and a prolonged civil war shaped by the Cold War geopolitics, before the country could glimpse the light of peace. How Cambodia navigated such political turmoil to finally achieve peace is the central focus of the book. More specifically, it emphasizes the critical role that former Prime Minister Hun Sen played between 1985 and 1998 in this national endeavor.
The author develops his argument through a critical appraisal of foreign engagement in the so-called “Cambodian problem” (Kiernan, 1999). For example, the influence of the Cold War across Southeast Asia and the U.S. bombing campaigns in Cambodia during the 1960s and 1970s were directly linked to the Khmer Rouge’s rise to power in 1975. Its genocidal regime oversaw the deaths of nearly two million people before it was ousted by the Vietnamese army in 1979. To the author’s frustration, despite such a horrific act, foreign powers, including China, the U.S., and ASEAN, chose to back the Khmer Rouge in pursuit of their political interests. Their financial and military support revived the Khmer Rouge to wage a resistance war from the Thai border against the government for another two decades.
Indeed, after the Cold War ended in 1989, there was a growing regional and international interest in resolving the Cambodian problem peacefully. This led to all Cambodian warring parties signing the Paris Peace Agreements in 1991, culminating in a UN-organized election in 1993. However, the Khmer Rouge boycotted the election to continue fighting, which, the author argues, represented a failure of the international community in securing “real peace” for Cambodia (p. 47). The real peace, he adds, was not achieved until 1998, at which point the Khmer Rouge was eventually defeated and dissolved. Integral to this achievement was Hun Sen’s pursuit of the win-win policy from 1985, which prioritized national interests over political and ideological differences and openly engaged all parties in peaceful negotiations.
While the book has little to offer to the literature regarding novel contribution, its key insights drawn from the author’s engagement in the peace process as an academic-politician and important interviews with high-level political actors make it an essential read. Through these insights, the book could contribute more had the author not abandoned a critical examination of other political-economic developments interwoven with the peacebuilding process, including forest exploitation (Le Billion, 1999, 2000), state-sponsored political violence (Strangio, 2014; Springer, 2015), and pervasive corruption (Hughes, 2003), among others.
References
Hughes, C. (Ed.). (2003). The political economy of Cambodia’s transition, 1991-2001. RoutledgeCurzon.
Kiernan, B. (1999). Cambodia’s Twisted Path to Justice. The History Place. https://www.historyplace.com/pointsofview/kiernan.htm#:~:text=When%20the%20Vietnamese%20army%20ousted,on%20the%20issue%2C%20was%20France.
Le Billon, P. (1999). Power is Consuming Forest: The Political Ecology of Conflict and Reconstruction in Cambodia. PhD Dissertation, University of Oxford.
Le Billon, P. (2000). The political ecology of transition in Cambodia 1989–1999: War, peace and forest exploitation. Development and Change, 31(4), 785–805. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-7660.00177
Springer, S. (2015). Violent neoliberalism: Development, discourse, and dispossession in Cambodia. Palgrave Macmillan US.
Strangio, S. (2014). Hun Sen’s Cambodia. Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300210149