User:Eav Kirisamedi

Cambodia's history is characterized by ancient empires such as Funan and Angkor, which exerted considerable influence in Southeast Asia. The Khmer Empire reached its peak during the 9th to 15th centuries under King Jayavarman II. It was known for its advanced irrigation systems, grand temples (including Angkor Wat), and strong centralized government. However, external pressures from neighboring powers weakened Cambodia over time. The country faced territorial disputes with Thailand (formerly Siam) during the 18th century while also enduring French colonization in the late 19th century until the mid-20th century. Fast forwarding to recent times, Cambodia underwent an intense period during the late 1970s under Pol Pot's regime—known as "Khmer Rouge." This brutal dictatorship led to mass killings through genocide resulting in widespread suffering for Cambodian people. Cambodia has experienced significant intervention from international bodies like the United Nations Transitional Authority (UNTAC) during its path towards democracy. UNTAC played an influential role by overseeing democratic elections held in 1993, thereby ensuring some degree of transparency and accountability within Cambodian politics. In contrast, Cambodia's democracy faces different challenges due to historical contexts. Democratization efforts alongside electoral reform; however, these reforms do not seem to align with democratic principles effectively either. While both countries have undertaken reforms aimed at increasing representation through proportional representation methods like party-list systems or placing more seats under direct election opportunities for minority groups within each country like those proposed. For over two hundred years, beginning in the 1780s, the presence of two powerful, antagonistic neighbors forced the contentious Cambodian elite either to prefer one or the other or to attempt to neutralize them by appealing to an outside power. Cambodian kings tried both alternatives in the nineteenth century. Later on, Norodom Sihanouk, Lon Nol, and Pol Pot all attempted the second; the regime of the State of Cambodia (SOC), formerly the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, which lasted from 1979 until 1991, committed itself to the patronage of Vietnam. A UN protectorate (1991–93) neutralized the contending foreign patrons of Cambodia by removing it from Cold War rivalries. In the late 1990s Cambodia and Vietnam joined the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the Kingdom of Cambodia, established under that name in 1993, has so far avoided seeking a dominant foreign patron, although in recent years China has emerged as an increasingly important ally and benefactor of the regime. Another theme, really a present-day one, has to do with the relationship of contemporary Cambodians to their past. The history of Angkor, after all, was deciphered, restored, and bequeathed to them by their French colonial masters. Why had so many Cambodians forgotten it, or remembered it primarily as myth? What did it mean to have the memories and the grandeur brought back to life, in times of dependence? What happened to the “times between” Angkor and the modern era? And in what ways are the post-Angkorean years, the colonial era, and what has happened since 1954 connected to these earlier periods? How are the revolutionary events of the 1970s to be remembered, taught, and internalized? There has even been pressure from the government to play down the teaching of Cambodian history as too controversial. A third theme arises from the pervasiveness of patronage and hierarchies in Cambodian thinking, politics, and social relations. For most of Cambodian history, it seems, people in power were thought (by themselves and nearly everyone else) to be more meritorious than others. Older people were also ideologically privileged. Despite some alterations these arrangements remained unchanged between Cambodia’s so-called Indianized phase in the early years if the present era and the onset of Theravada Buddhism in the fourteenth century, when some egalitarianism, but not much, seeped into Cambodian social relations. The widespread acceptance of an often demeaning status quo meant that in Marxist terms Cambodians went through centuries of mystification.