Bad history and good neighbours

3 February 2003

The longest, bloodiest, and most graphic battle scene in the Siamese chronicles recounts King Naresuan’s capture of Cambodia in 1594. Three enormous armies are recruited. They march out in glorious array with all the omens good, all the flags flying, and Naresuan himself at their head. With masses of firearms and help from western ships, they take the outer towns with arrogant ease, slaughter thousands, and burn the crops. The Cambodian capital of Lawaek falls to the Siamese siege. In the final climactic scene, the Cambodia king pleads for his life by offering his country instead. Naresuan spurns this. He took an oath before setting out “to bathe our feet in your blood”. The Cambodian king is ritually beheaded. His blood is collected on a golden salver and taken to bathe Naresuan’s feet while Brahmans blow into conches and bang gongs. The Siamese army returns home with 30,000 prisoners.

 The point about this account is that most historians are sure it never happened. At least, not in all this bloody and bombastic glory. In the oldest chronicle, there is just one line: Naresuan took the Khmer capital and captured the king. The battle scenes, the surrender of the country, and the execution are great melodramatic fiction composed two hundred years later.

 And for a reason. By then Siam wanted to control Cambodia. King Taksin sent an army in 1768, and then another four years later which burnt Phnom Penh to the ground—just like the Burmese had burnt Ayutthaya five years earlier. At the time of the coup which started the current dynasty, the future King Rama I was leading another military expedition into Cambodia.

 Soon after that he had the bloodthirsty story about Naresuan written to “prove” that Siam had dominated a weak Cambodia for centuries.

 But both before and after Rama I’s expeditions, Siam was no match for the Vietnamese. Still it sent army after army into Cambodia, including a force of 35,000 in 1840, one of the biggest armies raised in this period.

 By then, Siam had begun to shape northern Cambodia—Siam Reap, Battambang, Sisophon—including Angkor, as a separate Siam-dominated principality under a puppet ruler. Through the 1840s, Siam tried to put this ruler on the throne in Phnom Penh, but could never make it stick for more than a short time. This was traditional imperialism. Cambodians started to resent the Siamese control over Angkor Wat. Right back to this time, it became a Cambodian nationalist symbol in opposition to the Siamese. The Cambodians partly welcomed the French because they hoped they would throw the Siamese out of Angkor.

 In 1867, the French grabbed Cambodia, but the Siamese held onto their tributary state in the northeast, including Angkor. The Aphaiwong family ran it on behalf of Siam from Battambang. But the Aphaiwong were good at playing off the French and Siamese against one another. There was very little Siamese immigration, very little trade, and only loose control.

 From the 1890s, Siam was under great pressure from the European imperialists. On 23 March 1907, this whole area of northeast Cambodia was ceded to the French. In exchange Siam got Dansai, Trat, and (most importantly) the end of the extraterritorial rights which the French were cleverly manipulating to undermine Siam itself. In short, Siam abandoned the territory as part of its strategy to survive the high imperial era. The Aphaiwong moved to Prachinburi.

 These bits of Cambodia—along with bits of Laos, Burma, and Malay—now became the “lost territories”. In truth, before the late nineteenth century, borders had been vague and changeable. But such historical details did not matter. As the world slid towards war in the 1930s, Siam’s new military nationalists saw an opportunity to build jingoistic popular support by reclaiming these “lost territories”. They drew up maps showing Siam’s supposed historical boundaries, including Angkor and much else. In a nationalistic historical play, one of Naresuan’s commanders discovered that the Khmer are “Thais like us”. This campaign was hugely successful in internal politics. Thousands took to the streets and waved flags.

 After the Japanese invaded and the French fled, the Siamese generals thought that French Indochina would collapse. They seized the opportunity. On 16 January 1941, Thai troops crossed the Maekhong into French Cambodia and gained the upper hand in a major skirmish with troops of the French Foreign Legion. The French responded by attacking a Thai flotilla in the Gulf, and sinking three vessels with the loss of 800 Thai lives. The Japanese intervened to stop it. The Thai generals pushed the Japanese to give them all the “lost territories” in Cambodia. The Japanese agreed, but with a small and important exception. They granted Thai control over Battambang, Sisophon and Siam Reap, but left out Angkor and the area immediately around it. The Thai generals were not happy.

 After the war, Thailand had to give up this territory. But reluctantly. The Thai prime minister of the time, Khuang Aphaiwong, was descended from the family which had ruled in Battambang. His brother and brother-in-law tried to set up a mini-state in Battambang in 1946 but were thrown out. The Thai generals only really gave up hope in the 1950s when the US had become involved.

 Siam is to Cambodia as Burma is to Siam. In Thailand’s history books, the country is always being attacked by a bad neighbour to the west, Burma, which keeps sacking the capital. Siam is never aggressive but defends itself well and honourably. In these books, there is little about wars to the east. But of course, the Khmer history books are different. They also have an aggressive neighbour to the west, which sacks its capital and covets its most glorious monument.

 Bad neighbours can generate a lot of bad blood out of bad history. Good neighbours take the trouble to understand each others’ histories, so they can move beyond them.