by Richard S. Ehrlich
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- Every rainy season, their living rooms are flooded for weeks by knee-deep swamp water. When the Vietnamese who have settled in this riverside, bamboo slum go out from their miserable huts, they often have to walk through oozing, mosquito-covered slime.
Copyright by Richard S. Ehrlich Richard S. Ehrlich's Asia news, non-fiction book titled, "Hello My Big Big Honey!" plus hundreds of photographs are available at his website http://www.oocities.org/asia_correspondent
September 1989
Vietnamese Settle in Bamboo Slum Amid Oozing, Mosquito-Covered Slime
But they are determined to remain in Cambodia.
These impoverished Vietnamese say life is delightful compared with their previous existence back in Hanoi or Saigon.
Cambodia's Pol Pot and his on-and-off ally, US-backed former Prince Norodom Sihanouk, both claim hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians are disguising themselves as Cambodians, and speaking Khmer, in an effort to secretly colonize this country.
The Vietnamese-installed Cambodian government denies the charges, and insists all Vietnamese troops withdrew in September 1989 after 11 years of war.
After their departure, Western diplomats said there was no evidence of Vietnamese soldiers hiding in Cambodia, though some technicians and advisers may still be present.
Pol Pot, Sihanouk, and others however are playing on ancient themes of ethnic purity, and stirring up ominous racial hatred against the remaining Vietnamese who live scattered around Cambodia.
Because the two nations border each other -- and southern Vietnam absorbed a big chunk of Cambodia long ago -- the two nationalities have a complex love-hate relationship.
Despite frequent intermarriages and historical influences, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge unleashed a nightmarish policy of killing anyone who was not "pure Cambodian" during his 1975 to 1979 reign.
Pol Pot idealized descendants of an ancient, "racially pure" Khmer-Mon people, and his stance attracted some support from Cambodia's peasantry.
Under Pol Pot, one million Cambodians perished in purges, slavery and forced starvation under his back-to-the-jungle, communal ideology.
Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978, toppled Pol Pot a few weeks later, and now backs Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen.
Today, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, Sihanouk, and others are jockeying for a return to power, amid a United Nations' plan for elections in May 1990.
Vietnamese in Cambodia are currently a thriving community of traders, businessmen, fishermen, transport workers, investors and laborers.
Former Vietnamese Ambassador Ngo Dien said in an interview, "Sihanouk is talking about one million Vietnamese settlers, including 300,000 in Phnom Penh. The truth is the Vietnamese residents in Cambodia number about 80,000. This includes maybe 20,000 in Phnom Penh."
Independent statistics are unavailable.
The best estimates of Vietnamese civilians now in Cambodia are somewhere between the two claims.
"They are (legal) residents, but they have no papers, no identity cards," Ngo Dien added.
"But after the genocidal regime of Pol Pot, nobody has identity cards" including Cambodians.
"The Vietnamese residents came to do business. Some are prostitutes and robbers, but there are not so many of them. The majority are former residents who lived in Phnom Penh but fled in 1970 and in 1975" when anti-Vietnamese pogroms were started by Lon Nol's government and later by Pol Pot.
The constant threats worry the Vietnamese community.
"This is our shop and we also sleep here," said Tanh, a Vietnamese settler in the monsoon-flooded Can Dong Quan slum in Phnom Penh, a few streets east of the Mekong River.
The floodwaters were so high that his living room was a wall-to-wall swamp, forcing him to walk through knee-deep slime simply to cross the room.
As a rubber sandal and other debris float through the flooded makeshift wooden house, Tanh and his wife Haeu sit cross-legged on bamboo chairs to keep their feet above the waterline while eating lunch.
"Even with this flooding, this place is better than Vietnam," Tanh said in an interview.
"What kind of life would we have back there? We came here seven years ago because in Vietnam we had no house and no family."
As in other pockets of Vietnamese in Phnom Penh, many of the 500 or so residents in this slum said they were worried about racial attacks now that Vietnamese troops have left.
"All the Vietnamese residents are afraid," said one woman who lives on higher ground in a dirt-floor shack made of wood scraps, cardboard, newspaper and rattan.
"I want to move from this area because everyone knows this is a Vietnamese neighborhood.
"If the situation gets bad, I'll go back to Saigon. Here I work with the blackmarket, taking goods to the Vietnamese border where I sell to people who take the stuff on to Saigon.
"I came to Cambodia because I had a dream. I had no money and I needed money. Now I sell things so life is O.K..," she said in an interview.
One elderly former Viet Minh soldier who fought against the French in Vietnam, said in an interview, "There are some Vietnamese who arrived here to open bars, brothels, casinos or other illegal things because the Vietnamese army was here. These people behaved like they were big bosses, but now that the Vietnamese army went back, they will also go.
"But the rest of us will stay because we haven't done anything bad or illegal. We respect the laws of Cambodia and we don't have any problems with the local police. We also speak Khmer and we mind our own business because there is a lot of money here and we have more freedom here. We are not stifled like we were back in Vietnam.
"To go into private business is quite easy here and you don't pay taxes" because Cambodia is unable to enforce tax collecting after the past 20 years of war destroyed the bureaucracy.
"I don't think the Khmer Rouge will come back soon. Pol Pot is like a king without a throne or capital," he added.
Recent arrivals of Vietnamese appeared in three waves.
The first came in 1979 and secured Cambodian citizenship when Vietnamese troops invaded.
Many of these people were born in Cambodia but fled to Vietnam in 1970 and 1975.
They also include bureaucrats, technicians, professionals and others brought in by Hanoi to help run the decimated nation.
The second wave occurred in 1983 to 1984 when many Vietnamese came for economic reasons, including humble southern Vietnam's farmers and laborers along with business-savvy ethnic Chinese-Vietnamese from Cholon.
Many of them now have successful businesses or shops here and are taking a wait-and-see attitude now that Hanoi's army is gone.
The third wave, during 1987 to 1988, included prostitutes, drug addicts, criminals and very poor people from northern Vietnam.
They are expected to stay on if possible because they have nothing back home to return to and hope to prosper in Cambodia.
The Cambodian government apparently accepts the first two waves because many of them were either born in Cambodia, acquired Cambodian citizenship, speak Khmer, have children who want to remain or run businesses which profit Phnom Penh.
The third wave's troublemakers are unwelcome. But since many of them do not want to leave, there may be problems in expelling them.
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