Challenging Khmer Citizenship: Minorities, the State, and the International Community in Cambodia Stefan Ehrentraut Dissertation zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Doktor der Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften Eingereicht im März 2013 an der Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Universität Potsdam Betreut von Prof. Dr. Heinz Kleger This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License: Attribution - Noncommercial - Share Alike 3.0 Germany To view a copy of this license visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/de/ Published online at the Institutional Repository of the University of Potsdam: URL http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2014/7035/ URN urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-70355 http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-70355 Contents 1. The Incomplete Internationalization of Liberal Multiculturalism ....................... 1 1.1. Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1 1.2. Research Design and Methodology .................................................................................. 4 1.3. Multiculturalism and Liberal Values ................................................................................ 7 1.4. Liberal Limits of Multiculturalism .................................................................................... 9 1.5. Conservative Multiculturalism ....................................................................................... 10 1.6. Minority Rights as Response to State Nation-Building .................................................. 12 1.7. Minority Categories in the West .................................................................................... 12 1.8. Preconditions of Liberal Multiculturalism in the West ................................................. 14 1.9. Assessing Preconditions outside the West .................................................................... 16 1.10. Partial Internationalization of Multiculturalism: “Indigenous Peoples” ...................... 17 1.11. Internationalization Inconsistent, Unstable, and Unsustainable? ................................ 22 2. Cultural Diversity and Citizenship in Cambodia ....................................................... 26 2.1. Categorizing Cambodia’s Cultural Diversity: Polyethnic and Multinational ............... 26 2.1.1. The Chinese ............................................................................................................ 29 2.1.2. The Vietnamese ...................................................................................................... 30 2.1.3. The Cham and Cambodia’s Muslims ..................................................................... 32 2.1.4. Highland Peoples and the Lao ................................................................................ 34 2.1.5. Small Scale of Minority Challenges to State Authority .......................................... 40 2.1.6. Absence of Assertive Minority Rights Claims ........................................................ 41 2.1.7. Absence of Willingness to Accommodate Minority Rights Claims ...................... 45 2.2. Independent Cambodia and the Emergence of the ‘Khmer Citizen’ ............................ 48 2.2.1. Post-Independence Colonization of Highland Peoples .......................................... 50 2.2.2. Minorities under the Khmer Republic .................................................................. 53 2.2.3. Minority Destruction during the Khmer Rouge .................................................... 54 2.2.4. Subsiding of Nationalist Violence under the PRK and SOC .................................. 56 2.2.5. Contestations of Vietnamese’ Legal Status within UN Peace Initiatives ............. 57 2.3. Ethnic Minorities and Khmer Citizenship under the New Constitution ...................... 59 2.3.1. Khmer Insecurity .................................................................................................... 61 2.3.2. Neo-Patrimonial Governance ................................................................................ 63 2.3.3. Immigration and Nationality Laws: From Foreigners to Citizens? ..................... 67 3. Perpetually Temporary: Citizenship and Ethnic Vietnamese ............................. 71 3.1. The Prospect for Citizenship .......................................................................................... 71 3.2. Low Level of Institutionalization ................................................................................... 72 3.3. Contested (Co-) Habitation Histories: ‘New’ and ‘Old’ Vietnamese ............................. 73 3.4. Detached from Land and Citizenship – Living on the Water ....................................... 77 3.5. Livelihoods Limited by Law ............................................................................................ 78 3.6. Factors Constraining Khmer Language Acquisition and Use ....................................... 79 3.7. Factors Constraining Participation in Public Education ............................................... 80 3.8. Exclusion from Local Governance .................................................................................. 82 3.9. Few Benefits from Development and Poverty Reduction ............................................. 85 3.10. Obstacles to Ethnic Vietnamese’ Inclusion: the ‘Vietnamese Threat’ .......................... 86 3.11. Why Ethnic Chinese are Citizens and Ethnic Vietnamese are not .............................. 88 3.12. Compensation for Historical and Contemporary Injustice .......................................... 88 i 3.13. Integration into What? Conceptions of Khmer National Identity ................................ 89 3.14. The Dynamics of Party Politics ....................................................................................... 90 3.15. Conclusions ...................................................................................................................... 91 4. Facets of Failure: International Indigenous Rights Promotion ........................... 94 4.1. International Support to the Inter-Ministerial Committee (IMC) ............................... 94 4.1.1. The UNDP’s Highland Peoples Program ................................................................ 95 4.1.2. Diversity-Friendly Rhetoric amid Growing Challenges ....................................... 99 4.1.3. Attempting to Incorporate ILO Indigenous Rights Standards via the IMC ........ 101 4.2. The New Land Law and Nominally Improved Legal Protection ................................ 103 4.2.1. Misrecognizing Highland Peoples as Backward Khmer Entities ....................... 105 4.2.2. Land Law Implementation Challenges ................................................................. 108 4.2.3. Conserving Collectivist Communities .................................................................. 110 4.2.4. ADB-Support for ‘Indigenous Peoples/Ethnic Minority Issues’ ......................... 113 4.3. UNDP Access to Justice and Conservative Multicollectivism ....................................... 116 4.3.1. ‘Impunity, Corruption, Power of Position … De Facto Law of the Country’ ....... 119 4.3.2. Fabricating Traditions and Proposing Legends for Legislation ......................... 121 4.3.3. Documenting Ancient Past and Fixed Rules as Approach to Law-Making ....... 126 4.4. Why the International Attempt to Promote Indigenous Rights Failed ...................... 130 5. Decentralization and Indigenous Peoples’ Empowerment ............................... 136 5.1. Cambodia’s Decentralization Reform .......................................................................... 139 5.2. International Support to Decentralization: RILGP ..................................................... 140 5.3. Indigenous Development Priorities and Negative Impacts ........................................ 142 5.4. Commune Councils and Land Conflict ......................................................................... 146 5.5. The Significance of Draft Rights in a Predatory State ................................................. 147 5.6. Engineering Consent and Institutionalizing Misrepresentation ................................ 148 5.7. Mainstreaming Indigenous Peoples Instead of Indigenous Rights ............................ 150 5.8. The Unequal Benefits of Standardized Participation .................................................. 152 5.9. Expanding the Scope of Unmade Agreements and Broken Promises ....................... 153 5.10. Capacity Building and Discontinued Institutions ........................................................ 153 5.11. Monitoring the Other Way ........................................................................................... 154 5.12. Conflict-Resolution or Conflict-Creation? .................................................................... 155 5.13. A Strategy of Avoiding Safeguard Obligations ............................................................. 156 5.14. Conclusions .................................................................................................................... 157 6. Khmer Citizenship and Highland Peoples – Voices from the Field ................. 160 6.1. Self-Identification and Identification by Others .......................................................... 160 6.2. Separateness vs. Integration ........................................................................................ 162 6.3. In-Migration