REGIONAL GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCE ON TWO KHMER POLITIES

Versions of the Khmer origin myth that discuss water covering the land, the defeat of a Cham king, and the thlok tree point to a geographic factor that has been important in more modern Khmer polities. The flat alluvial plain of the Mekong extends to the ocean and contains numerous navigable waterways. Hence the heartland of Funan coincidentally formed the route used by foreign armies to repeatedly invade central and northwestern Cambodia from approximately 1,000 A.D. until French colonization in the late 180Os. For example, in 1177 A.D. a Cham fleet sailed from the coast up the Mekong to the northern shore of the Tonle Sap, defeated and executed the Khmer king, and sacked Angkor.19 Following their obliteration of the Cham empire in the seventeenth century, the Vietnamese began annexing Khmer lands in the Mekong delta, a process which culminated in two occupations of Phnom Penh by the Vietnamese in the first half of the nineteenth century.20

The territory where the Khmer first developed surplus agricultural production, an organized system of political authority,21 and trade relations with other states was thus the same area most in danger of conquest by foreign invaders. The frequency of foreign invasion along this route gave rise to the belief among ordinary Khmers that they are constantly threatened by outsiders, and that harmony between Khmers must be maintained if Khmer society is to withstand foreign aggression.

Ordinary Khmer regard harmony in interpersonal relationships as the primary means of avoiding conflict within society at large,22 but the need for harmony does not extend to what Edwards23 labels the cultural "other." Khmer political elites have often described the Khmer people "from the outside in, manipulating negative imagery of what Cambodia is not . . . to project an assumed image of what Cambodia is." The traditional conceptualization of the non-Khmer as a threat has given Cambodian rulers the latitude to justify "policies designed mainly to perpetuate their own personal rule" as "a dedication to national interests."24 Simultaneously Cambodian rulers are invested with the authority to defend the Khmer against hostile external forces, making ordinary Khmer obligated to accede to the dictates of their rulers; to do otherwise would be to act against the Khmer nation and for those who seek to destroy it.

SOUTHEASTERN CAMBODIA IN DEMOCRATIC KAMPUCHEA

The policies pursued by the leadership of the state of Democratic Kampuchea (DK) between April 17,1975, and December 25,1978, have been called an implementation of "Mao's plan with Stalin's methods," "racialist" and "totalitarian,"25 and a "Utopian program of total and rapid social transformation."26 The decision-making process that lay behind these policies is obscure. Only approximately a dozen official DK policy documents written by DK leaders are known to have survived, and no high-ranking figure has written an official history of the regime or its leaders.

Pol Pot, leader of Democratic Kampuchea, declared in an April 1978 interview that the DK's objective was to create "a new culture based on national traits, national tradition, and progressive qualities."27 DK ideology emphasized territoriality, sovereignty, and the protection of the Khmer nation against the perceived ideological and physical aggression of the non-Khmer. As Pol Pot said in August 1976,