Cambodian Premire blasts France on border loss
By Chhay Sophal
Cambodia News
Phnom Penh (9 August, 2012): Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen Thursday blasts out France for making Cambodia to lose its territory to Vietnam and Thailand.
Speaking at the National Assembly where he claimed his remarks is aired on 101 radio stations and 13 TV stations nationwide, Hun Sen said that the France was lazy with the border demarcation in both the west and the east directions. He said that during the French colony, the French governors decided to draw a map but their implementers were lazy and drew in wrong different place.
Hun Sen also complained that France at that time was in favour with Vietnam and Laos by adding that “France is unfair for Cambodia.”
In 1863, Cambodia under king Norodom became a protectorate of France. In October 1887, the French announced the formation of the Union Indochinoise (Union of Indochina), which at that time comprised Cambodia, already an autonomous French possession, and the three regions of Vietnam (Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina). In 1893, Laos was annexed after the French threatened Siam‘s King Chulalongkorn with war, thereby forcing him to give up the territory.
According to Wikipedia, the seat of the Governor-General for the whole of French Indochina was based in Hanoi, which was situated in Tonkin (now northern Vietnam). Cambodia, being a constituent protectorate of French Indochina, was governed by the Résident Supérieur (Resident-General) for Cambodia, who was directly appointed by the Ministry of Marine and Colonies in Paris. It says “the Resident-General was in turn assisted by Residents, or local governors, who were posted in all the provincial centers, such as, Battambang, Pursat, Odong, and Siem Reap. Phnom Penh, the capital, was under the direct administration of the Resident-General.”
It says in a desperate effort to enlist local support in the final months of the war, the Japanese dissolved the French colonial administration on March 9, 1945, and urged Cambodia to declare its independence within the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
“Four days later, King Sihanouk decreed an independent Kampuchea (the original Khmer pronunciation of Cambodia). Son Ngoc Thanh returned from Tokyo in May, and he was appointed foreign minister. On August 15, 1945, the day Japan surrendered, a new government was established with Son Ngoc Thanh acting as prime minister,’ Wikipedia wrote.
When an Allied force occupied Phnom Penh in October, Thanh was arrested for collaboration with the Japanese and was sent into exile in France to remain under house arrest. Some of his supporters went to north-western Cambodia, then still under Thai control, where they banded together as one faction in the Khmer Issarak movement, originally formed with Thai encouragement in the 1940s.
Part of Wikipedia’s report writes that Sihanouk was making a high-stakes gamble, for the French could easily have replaced him with a more pliable monarch; however, the military situation was deteriorating throughout Indochina, and the French government, on July 3, 1953, declared itself ready to grant full independence to the three states of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos.
The French yielded: the police and the judiciary were transferred to Cambodian control at the end of August, and in October the country assumed full command of its military forces and then independence day was celebrated on 9 November 1953. Control of residual matters affecting sovereignty, such as financial and budgetary affairs, passed to the new Cambodian state in 1954.