Cambodia's Khmer Serei Movement

Abstract

with the Phnom Penh government are becoming familiar news items to students of Asian affairs. The origin of one particular group of Cambodian dissidents is quite interesting, however, and is historically linked with U.S. military activities in the Second Indochina War. Even though the particular politico-military group known as the Khmer Serei (free Khmer) has been segmented and in some quarters is held in disrepute, the group itself and its founder, Son Ngoc Thanh, were a formidable military force in the 1960s and 1970s. The story of the Khmer Serei's dissidence predates the Second Indochina War. It originated in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, the birthplace of Son Ngoc Thanh. Thanh was born in 1908 in the town of Tra Vinh, Vinh Binh Province, of mixed Vietnamese and Khmer Krom (ethnic Cambodians born in Vietnam) parentage.' After spending some time in France, he returned to Indochina (Vietnam) and made an unsuccessful attempt to enter the French Colonial Service. In the early 1930s, he moved to Cambodia and soon became an avowed Cambodian (Khmer) nationalist. Through religious contacts he became associated with the Cambodian Buddhist Institute and was eventually appointed its secretary.2 Through the secretary's office, Thanh supervised a select group of zealous and patriotic monks whom he used to carry nationalistic messages and Buddhist sermons throughout Cambodia and into the Mekong Delta. In 1936, he founded a newspaper to publicize his antiFrench and pro-independence views and was soon acknowledged as Cambodia's foremost nationalist spokesman.3 In 1942, Thanh was involved in an anti-French demonstration and, fear