The Khmers "from below "

du Mékong Magazine (03/01/2010)
Source: youphil.com
Translated by Monikhemra Chao
06 Jan, 2010


Earth of water where Mekong manufactured an unpublished lake life, the hang glider is also the fatherland of the Khmers Krom. And the opportunity of unforeseen meetings.

Projected by a yelling motor, the small boat goes up and down the tracery of the channels of Kra-moun Sar (Kieng Giang). With a manual skill of routine, our Vietnamese guide manoeuvers from a riverside to the other one, avoiding branches raveled by mangroves and women who bustle about in washing to a ritual show in all hang glider of Mekong. But in this bordering province of Cambodia, the red and white kramas mingles with the conical hats. And everywhere in villages around, the Khmers kroms to the Vietnameses.

Assessed about a million, these descendants of the Khmers established in the hang glider of Mekong before its progressive occupation by the Vietnameses from the XVIIth century are far from being seen well from Hanoi, which NGO of defence of human rights accuses of taking their name literally (krom mean, that is to say of low lands of the hang glider "from below ").

Despised, the Khmers Krom make the object of a suppression augmented since demonstrations, in 2007 and 2008, by activists for rights to landowning ownership. Last February, Human Rights Watch produced a researched report reporting the persecutions victims of which are notably their bonzes, among that arbitrary imprisonment.

Distant relations with Cambodia

Consequence of this forced assimilation, what there remains from Cambodia to this minority in which Phnom Penh loses interest in the name of friendship with the Vietnamese neighbour, it is at the bottom little of thing. So, to Sokpheak, daily agrarian of 33 years, son of two Khmers krom and couple of a khméro-Vietnamese, everybody speaks both languages. But he does not know how to write the Khmer language and, he specifies, " the Khmer that we speak is not any more understood by the Cambodians ".

His neighbour, Nhean, is not one Khmers Krom. It was born in Kampot, in Cambodia, and ran away in 1975 here having lost her husband in the camps of the red Khmer. A Vietnamese soldier felt pity of her and got it for his wife. Today married to a Khmers Krom, she asserts feeling " in family " here and has never tried to go back in Cambodia.

Meeting with Po Lin, fruit of a Franco-Khmer union

Farther, on the narrow strip of land which separates two neighbouring channels, stands another home, simple wooden shack with the roof of foliage. Barely the small boat accosted that a woman and her three children go out of it. A glance is enough to differentiate this family of his neighbours. Bigger, the more clear skin. Almost diaphanous for the elder girl.

The mother, 55 years old, unwinds an unforeseen history. His own mother was khmer, his French father: " He had to be officer because I remember of his jeep ". After the independence of Cambodia and their marriage in France, his parents arrived at the Vietnam.

Then his father left again in the country with his elder brother by leaving them here. Of him, she knows nothing and he has nothing, if it is not its forename which she pronounces by being applied: Robert. And also his – Po Lin, Vietnamisation of Pauline.

In this lost shack, surprise is in the measure of those that deliver corners most ignored by Asia. The meeting of these impromptu cousins does not end it up fascinating reciprocally. They feel each other hands. They bring closer to the arms by laughing at their identical complexion.

Po Lin explains that she would have been able to use a repatriation, in the seventies, in France of the children born in coeducational couples. But by marrying a Khmers Krom, it had chosen to make its life here. More question to leave for a country about which she knows nothing, as the Khmers from here ignore everything of Cambodia. However, when they ask him where from it is, answer rings out: " I am a person with two souls ". The one is linked to this earth of the hang glider. Other one in the persistent nostalgia of an unknown fatherland.

* This article is appeared in the number 158 of the children the Mekong Magazine