Scapegoating Cambodia’s “Yuon”: Historical Perspectives on Khmer Anti-Vietnamism

Despite macro-level advances in ASEAN regional cooperation, on the ground anti-Vietnamese xenophobia remains an unsavory reality in contemporary Cambodia. During the 2013 national elections the newly constituted Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP), a merger of the Sam Rainsy Party (SRP) and the Human Rights Party (HRP), has capitalized strongly on anti-Vietnamese sentiments, leading to some minor violent incidents and a prolonged discussion on a renewal of racialism in contemporary Cambodia. Against widely hold views that the strong anti-Vietnamese animus constitutes a century-old historical continuity, this paper argues that popular Khmer anti-Vietnamism is predominantly based on folklorist representations of the lower Mekong delta’s early and mid 19th century social history and that it has undergone two significant ? and closely interrelated ? transformations in the course of Cambodia’s political history throughout the 20th century. The first transformative framework concerns times of crisis in the constitutive periods of Cambodian independence in the 1940s as well as the reconstitution of Cambodian statehood and nationalism in the early 1970s and again in the early 1990s. Building on René Girard’s mimetic theory, this paper argues that the Vietnamese minority in Cambodia has been ‘scapegoated’ as a ‘dispensable other’ which could be sacrificed in order to re-establish social cohesion in times of intra-societal conflict. As a result, the colloquial Khmer term “yuon”, formerly used as a neutral ethnic denomination, has assumed an increasingly derogatory meaning. Intrinsically related to the issue of ‘scapegoating’ is a second transformative moment which concerns the politicization of anti-Vietnamese sentiments in late 20th century Cambodia. It is argued here that this latter transformation has been fostered by ultra-nationalist tenants of Khmer Rouge ideology in the wake of the Third Indochina War. Ever since, divergent political camps have been prone to the use of anti-Vietnamese racialism in order to mobilize support from the Cambodian electorate. By de-cyphering the historical repertoires of Khmer xenophobia against their Vietnamese neighbors, this paper suggests that contemporary Cambodian society continues to fail in its attempts to overcome the social legacy of decades of civil war and factionalist infighting.