From Politics to Economics at the Thai-Cambodian Border: Plus Ça Change...Author(s): Lindsay FrenchSource: International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Spring, 2002),pp. 427-470Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20020126Accessed: 23/11/2009 06:06

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International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 15, No. 3, Spring 2002 (? 2002)

From Politics to Economics at the Thai-Cambodian Border: Plus ?a Change...

Lindsay French1

This paper looks at border relations between Thais and Cambodians over the last thirty years, in the context of the developing Thai polity and econ

omy. It considers the salience of both ethnicity and nationality in shaping Thai interactions with Khmers. It suggests that as the threat of violent re

gional conflict diminished, the shared border came to represent important economic opportunities for both Thais and Cambodians. However, rhetorics of "national interest" and "regional development" notwithstanding, the ben eficiaries of this transnational trade are neither nation nor state, but specific interest groups working through the structures of government and military on both sides of the border.

KEY WORDS: ethnicity; national development; border trade; Thailand and Cambodia;

regional economies; transnational exploitation.

INTRODUCTION

This article looks at the making and remaking of a national border, and at what this can tell us about relations between the people who are joined and divided across it. It takes as its subject the boundary where Thailand and Cambodia meet, and focuses on the years between 1970 and 2000. The Thai-Cambodian border is a place where ethnic affiliation, national iden

tity, political contingencies and economic interests have collided, combined and recombined in a variety of ways over the last thirty years. This time

period brackets a dramatic shift from the political to the economic in the discourse of interaction at the border and in the region as a whole, as Cold

War conflicts have given way to globalization, and national struggles with communism have evolved into regional commerce and transnational trade

1 Rhode Island School of Design, 2 College Street, Providence, Rhode Island 02903.

427

0891-4486/02/0300-0427/0 ? 2002 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

428 French

networks. The Thai-Cambodian border has been right in the middle of these

epochal changes in the region. And while the actual location of the border

has not shifted significantly over this period, the political entities it divides

have changed, and the significance of the border has changed for people on

either side of it as well.

The article takes this shifting character of the border as a diagnostic of

relations between Thailand and Cambodia, Thais and Khmers; a point of ar

ticulation for the evolving political structures, economic interests and group identitites that meet and interact across it. It takes the position that while

political and economic conditions as well as the rhetoric of interaction have

changed dramatically over the last thirty years, actual interactions between

Thais and Khmers have changed very little at the border. A close examina

tion of these interactions suggests that, rhetoric aside, there is, in fact, no dramatic new "globalized, transnational" mode of interaction

and exchange. Nor is there a new or unfamiliar level of "corruption" associ

ated with the trade. Rather, there are familiar interest groups on both sides

of the border taking advantage of new circumstances to pursue their inter

ests in old and familiar ways. What has changed is the power and importance of certain political forms, and the relevance of certain social identitites. But

if anything, "border watching" testifies to the endurance of these underlying

interests, and the variety of forms in which they may present themselves.

Although the article focuses on relations between "Thais" and

"Khmers," neither one exists as an unproblematic national identity grouping within its own borders. "Khmer" is the dominant ethnic and cultural identity in Cambodia, but Cambodia itself has only existed as an autonomous and

independent nation-state since 1953, and its short history has been marked

by violent civil conflict. Thailand has a much longer history of indepen dence and political stability?indeed, it is often cited for its astute evasion of

European colonial domination in the 19th century. It has also avoided the vi

olent post-colonial political conflicts of the 20th century that have battered

all the mainland Southeast Asian nations that surround it: Burma, Laos,

Cambodia and Vietnam. Modern Thai governments have worked hard to

prevent the conflicts in neighboring countries from spilling across its bor

ders, and to maintain political stability within their own ethnically diverse

population as well. Indeed, a wide range of ethnicities and cultural groups coexist in contemporary Thailand in the context of the modern nation-state,

from Muslim fishermen in the south, to Chinese businessmen in Bangkok, to tribal groups in the north hills, to Lao and Khmer farmers in the north

east. "Ethnic coexistence" in one form or another has a long history in this

region; it predates by centuries the establishment of the modern Thai polit ical system. But contemporary ethnic coexistence has a particular history in

Thailand, one that has not been especially or even fundamentally benign.

From Politics to Economics 429

Tambiah (n.d.) has suggested that we think about ethnicity and ethnic

interaction in Thailand today in terms of minority-majority relations within

the developing nation-state, a clientelistic bureaucracy largely controlled

by the powerful Central Thai majority, allied with (and now often married

into the families of) wealthy Sino-Thai entrepreneurs. But as Tambiah's anal

ysis shows, dynamics vary significantly between different ethnic minorities

and the nation-state. Different groups have had different histories in the

region and different interests in the Thai state; "the state" has had differ

ent interests in them as well. Moreover, "ethnicity" is not necessarily the

most salient aspect of interethnic relations in Thailand, or in the region as a

whole. As a collective cultural marker in a heterogeneous population mix,

"ethnicity" was created by national divisions in Southeast Asia. But ethnic

differences cross-cut nationality, as well as political and economic interests, and none of these variables is invariably the most important group signifier. That is, there is no simple relationship between ethnicity and group interest

in Thailand, although an awareness of cultural difference is present in most

interactions among Thailand's ethnic groups. In examining the relations between Thais and Khmers during the thirty

year period from 1970 to 2000 in the context of the developing Thai (and

Cambodian) state and nation, I suggest that, while attitudes based on per ceived or assumed cultural differences enter into almost any interaction

between Thais and Khmers, political and/or economic interests can and

often do override these historical cultural distinctions. I also suggest that

in spite of much ethnic "cross-fertilization," nationality has acquired much

greater salience than ethnicity in interactions between Thais and Khmers

during this period, but that nationality functions much more as an economic

opportunity structure than a basis for broad national solidarity or interest. Thailand's national policies with respect to Cambodia and Cambodians typ

ically benefit particular interest groups within the state much more than they benefit the Thai people or that state as a whole.

I conducted the field research for this project on the border region be tween Thailand and Cambodia because it is the area of greatest interaction between Thais and Khmers, and because activity at the border has shaped at

titudes and policies that affect the position of Khmers throughout the rest of

Thailand, as well as those policies that concern Cambodia itself.1 Borders de lineate and distinguish political entities, they constitute economic resources, and they serve as a sign of both differences and relationships between the

people they divide. This is amply illustrated in the border regions of Thailand and its neighbors, both historically and today. During the 1970s the growth of communist insurgencies throughout mainland Southeast Asia prompted the Thai government to close and militarize its border with Cambodia, and

monitor activity on all its borders extremely closely. When the Vietnamese

430 French

overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, however, hundreds of thou

sands of Cambodian refugees fled to the Thai border. For the next twelve

years the Thai government and army were preoccupied with managing both a large civilian refugee population and three Cambodian resistance armies

intent on overthrowing the new communist government in Phnom Penh

from bases along the Thai-Cambodian border. The "border Khmer" were

political allies, but they were not allowed to settle permanently in Thailand or become Thai citizens; they were treated as aliens on Thai soil. Other

Cambodians, under the control of the government in Phnom Penh, were

considered enemies of the state.

In the late 1980s, however, Thai Prime Minister Chatichai Choonhaven

announced his intention to "turn Cambodia's battlefields into marketplaces,"

marking a dramatic shift in the orientation of Thailand's national policies toward Cambodia. It took three more years for the guerrilla war in Cambodia

to end. But since the Cambodian Peace Accords were signed in Paris in

1991, and official relations were re-established between the governments of Thailand and Cambodia in 1993, the border has become the focus of a

frenzy of commercial activity and transnational trade. In this article I trace

the development of and transformations in Thai relations with Cambodians, both inside and outside Thailand, during these three decades of turbulence

and change. While my focus is on the last thirty years of interaction at the Thai

Cambodian border, the specific character of relations between Thais and

Cambodians today is best understood in the context of a longer period of

history, and in relation to the processes that have shaped the development of the nation-state more generally in Thailand, especially as these pertain to Cambodia. Thus my analysis of recent ethnographic data (see note 1) relies on historical research into relations between Thailand and Cambodia, and Thais and Khmers, over the last 150 years. Both ethnographic and his

torical research have focused on interactions at the shifting border between

Cambodia and Thailand, on the northwestern provinces of Cambodia (Siem

riep, Banteay Meanchey, and Battambang) and on that part of northeast

Thailand that once was a part of the Angkor empire (Prachinburi, Buriram,

Surin, and Sisaket Provinces?see Maps 1 and 2). This is where the greatest number of ethnic Khmer live today in Thailand, and where most interactions

occur, and have historically occurred, between Thais and Khmers.

HISTORY AND ETHNICITY

Ruled from at least the 9th century as a classic Southeast Asian "galac tic polity" (Tambiah 1976), national integration began in what was then

From Politics to Economics 431

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From Politics to Economics 433

called "Siam" in the late 19th century with the bureaucratic reforms of King

Chulalongkorn (r. 1868-1910). (See Wyatt 1984; Bunnag 1977; Keyes 1977,

1987; Tambiah 1976 and n.d.; Ishii 1975; and Vella 1978.) Chulalongkorn's efforts to rationalize his administration and integrate outlying areas into a

centralized state were pursued in part to protect the Siamese kingdom from

colonial encroachment by both the French and the British. But this was only the beginning of transformations of the traditional state structure, and the

first stage in an ongoing process of ethnic integration in Thailand.

The creation of a modern Thai nation-state involved the transition from

absolute monarchy to a (frequently overridden) parliamentary system with

the coup of 1932, and the emergence of a new power bloc of military and

business interests, as well as the incorporation of many, mostly peripheral, non-Thais into the state system (Turton 1989). But with the rise of a new,

nonroyal power elite in Bangkok there appeared a greater divergence of

interests between the urban rich and rural poor, irrespective of their ethnic

ity (Girling 1981). That is, growing class divisions began to work at cross

purposes with "national unity" in Thailand. Then, in the 1970s, with the

threat of communist insurgency from within as well as without, loyalty to

the national government became a key criterion of citizenship, and certain

ethnic groups, especially those from bordering states with communist in

surgencies (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos), came under new suspicion. Thus

"national integration" was and is a complex and ongoing process, and the

integration narratives of different ethnic and cultural groups in Thailand

vary considerably. Most writing on ethnicity in Thailand has focused on the culturally dis

tinct hill tribes in the north, who conform to what Charles Keyes has called

the "conventional" conception of an ethnic group: "people who share a com

mon culture, speak a common language, and belong to a common society"

(Keyes 1979, p. 3). Incorporating the insights of Fredrik Barth on the multi

ple and shifting nature of ethnic identification, Keyes (1979, p. 5) points out

that ethnicity must involve sharing a common interest situation as well as a

common cultural identity. That is, "ethnicity" emerges in the opposition be tween culturally distinct groups with different interests and serves to make

interactions between these groups or their members meaningful. But, as

Keyes notes, "as social circumstances change, pre-existing ethnic identities become less adaptive" (1979, p. 5). Or, perhaps, simply less meaningful: cul

tural commonalties cease to be the foundation of peoples' most compelling concerns. Ethnicity may fade as an important distinction between groups of people, while other factors become more salient, cross-cutting ethnic divisions.

David Brown has suggested that ethno-regional consciousness in North east Thailand (Isan) has developed as a result of the systematic deprivation

434 French

of this region through a series of state policies relating to trade, labor, credit, investment and taxation (Brown 1994, pp. 200-205). That is, ethno-regional

identity depends less on the existence of a strong sense of cultural distinc

tiveness (in this case, Lao) and more on "the perception of the Thai state as

an agency of Central Thai economic domination" (p. 201). Ethnic identifi

cation per se does little for the people of Isan in relation to the Thai state, in part because their economic domination has little to do with their eth

nicity per se, and in part because they consider it important to distinguish themselves from the non-Thai Lao across the Mekong. Cultural distinctive

ness, while it may be an aspect of Isan group identity, is not its most salient

aspect.

In a similar way I suggest that conventional notions of ethnicity, defined

as ways of understanding group identity based on shared ancestry, culture, and interest, do not adequately encompass the most important issues at stake

in Thai-Cambodian relations today. These issues have to do with the way Cambodians/Khmers are categorized in relation to the Thai state, and how

they are treated, both as insiders (ethnic Khmer within the state: Thai nation

als) and outsiders (Cambodians: non-Thais). The Thai state has categorized Khmers living on Thai territory in different ways over the last 150 years, de

pending on the political and economic needs and contingencies of the time.

Currently, the state chooses to deny all Cambodians access to Thai citizen

ship, but does allow a great deal of commercial interaction with Cambodians across the national border. It also tolerates the presence (and, in fact, the

targeted recruitment) of extra-legal Cambodian migrant workers as long as

they do not compete with Thais for jobs. Almost all interactions between

Thais and Cambodians today seem to be shaped by complex evaluations of

(and misapprehensions about) the economic opportunities each has to offer

the other. There are many ways these interactions could be interpreted. I

choose to relate them to the evolution and operation of the Thai nation-state

itself.

The history of Thai/Khmer relations in Thailand and at the border

is, I suggest, a history of transactions and transformations between ethnic

identity and national citizenship, as these relate to the needs of the de

veloping Thai nation-state. These processes have been mediated by state

assertions, the contingencies of war and territorial vulnerability, and the in

creasing internationalization of commerce. Underlying these processes and

actual relations on the ground are long-standing attitudes that Thais have

about Khmers and vice versa. Explanations for some of these attitudes can

be seen in historical experience and tradition. But beyond this a picture

emerges of the production of attitudes through the processes of catego rization and "othering" of Cambodians, in which the Thai state is actively involved.

From Politics to Economics 435

ETHNICITY AND NATIONALITY

Questions about the meaning of the terms "Thai," "Khmer," and

"Cambodian" lie at the heart of this discussion. Do these terms refer to

ethnicity, or nationality, or some combination of the two? A clarification of

the terms and their meanings is a good place to begin. Tambiah (n.d.) cites

the administrative rationalization of King Chulalongkorn in the late 19th

century as the real beginning of Thai nation-making in the modern sense.

Before these administrative reforms "Thai-land" did not exist, and there was no category of person called "Thai." Instead, there was Siam, a tribu

tary state controlled by a king, consisting of territory inhabited by people of many different ancestries, languages, and cultures. The historian David

Streckfuss writes:

Siam, like, many other "multiethnic" polities in pre-modern Southeast Asia, pursued "nonracialist" strategies of statecraft. With abundant land, wars were waged for

control of people, not territory. Populations were moved around in time with the

rise and fall of kingdoms.the "multiethnic" nature of the kingdom was touted

in the king's formal title, unself-consciously affixed to the names of provinces, and even celebrated because it indicated the success of the king in defeating neighboring

regimes.A key factor in maintaining power was the ability to form alliances

with other rulers. As the political currency of these alliances was daughters, the most

successful dynasties produced the least "ethnically pure" progeny_(Streckfuss 1993, p. 132).

Thus, in premodern Siam there was no "primordial" sense of affinity between

people living under the same king's authority, but neither was there absolute

segregation between different ethnic groups. "Foreign" provinces were at tached to the kingdom through conquest and alliance. Support and control

were maintained through local leaders who provided tribute and labor to the

king in exchange for protection from their enemies and authority over their own local populations. There was little need for the king to establish a direct connection with these local populations, and no notion of "citizenship" with its attendant rights and responsibilities. Local linguistically and culturally distinct populations were Siamese "subjects," under the distant authority of the king. The fact that groups maintained their own way of life within this

overarching political system did not threaten the king's power or control. These were maintained through relationships with the groups' leaders, not

with the people themselves.

It was European designs on their territory in the second half of the 19th

century that forced the Siamese kings to develop a system for maintaining more direct control over the outlying areas of the kingdom. The administra tive reforms of King Chulalongkorn in 1892 accomplished this by replacing local and regional leaders with an administrative bureaucracy staffed by ap

pointees from the capital. In theory, this new bureaucracy extended with

436 French

equal authority to all parts of the kingdom. Household censuses were taken, a centralized revenue system was established, and courts were set up that de

pended on Bangkok for their authority. The Central Thai language became

the official language of the bureaucracy. In fact, outlying areas remained

rather loosely linked to the center; and the new administrators established

their power and authority in the provinces in the old ways, through well

known and well-understood relationships of patronage and muscle. Still, a

common bureaucratic structure was put into place throughout the kingdom; local administrators, instead of being local lords, were representatives of the

central state.

Thongchai Winichakul has shown how the late 19th century administra

tive reforms involved a profound shift in the way the kings understood their

sovereignty in relation to the land (Winichakul 1994). While sovereignty had in the past involved control over people rather than territory, the kings had no way of resisting the encroachment of the French army without more

direct control of the land itself. Streckfuss (1993) shows that the reforms

also involved a change in the way the kings constructed their relationship to the people living within their realm. It was not only the French threat

to territory, but also their challenge to the Siamese kings' right of control

over different "races" within their territory that generated the creation of a

new kind of polity called "Thailand." Streckfuss shows how, in the language of the Franco-Siamese treaties of 1893 and 1902, subjects were transformed into citizens and the kingdom of Siam was reconceived as a nation by merg

ing Siamese concepts of "race" (origin, lineage) with "citizenship" (political

allegiance and protection). In the process, a new category of people was

created, called "Thai."

"Chaat Thar is a designation which has come to refer to nationality or citizenship; its earlier meaning had to do with lineage or ancestry, how

ever (Streckfuss 1993, pp. 140-141, and Thongchai 1994, pp. 164-165). To be

"Thai" at the beginning of the century meant to be a part of the Thai nation, a political construct. But it implied a kind of shared identity of substance

with other "Thais" as well. There was a calculated lack of distinction made

between people of different ancestry living in Thailand expressed in the lan

guage of the treaties of this era. The "Thai" people, in the older, "racial"

sense of the term, included Lao, Shan, Lu, and Phu Thai as well as Siamese

(the ancestry of the kings)?all descendants of the "Tai" people, an ethno

linguistic grouping. In its nationalist sense, the term "Thai" also included

such racial/ethnic others as Khmer, Chinese, Burmese and Malays, who had

settled in the kingdom of Siam and made it their home. By conflating these

two meanings in one term, the controlling Siamese majority could posit a

national equality among all "Thais" and imply a shared ancestry, at the same

time it maintained its own position of power over ethnic others through the

From Politics to Economics 437

new administrative structure. In fact, as Streckfuss points out, racial or an

cestral differences were clearly recognized by the reforming kings, but were

glossed over in the interest of maintaining political control over both terri

tory and people. It was, after all, the Siamese (now called Central Thai) who

had produced the royal lineages, and it was from this majority group that

the new provincial administrators were drawn.

Komatra Chuengsatiansup has explored another aspect of this turn-of

the-century nation-building project in Thailand, namely the development of a new national historiography. These new official histories not only incorpo rated the outlying provinces into the nation-state, but clearly demonstrated

the enduring dominance of the Central Thai court, and the "submissive links"

through which peripheral people were subjugated to the center. By situating local histories within the framework of a national history, the dominance of

the center was naturalized and made to seem inevitable. Thus the hegemony of the Central Thai was maintained within a system that claimed to make no

distinctions between different ethnicities (Chuengsatiansup 1998). In fact, the relevant issue was political control not ethnic domination in any case.

In Cambodia, unlike in Thailand, most people belong to a single ethnic

group, the Khmer. At the time of the last countrywide population census

in Cambodia, only 16-17% of the population was non-Khmer. These non

Khmer were either of Vietnamese or Chinese ancestry, or else they were

members of a small Muslim minority group, the Cham.2 There are also sev

eral ethnically distinct hilltribes in the northeast provinces, but these have

been estimated to account for less than one percent of the population.3

Many of the Vietnamese, Chinese and Cham in Cambodia maintain a dis tinct sense of cultural difference and identity; others, especially the Chinese,

marry Khmers and are absorbed into the majority ethnic group. Until 1863 Cambodians operated under the same kind of political system as the people of Siam: a clientelistic kingship, with a provincial administration that drew its authority from the center but maintained largely undisturbed control of the local population itself through patronage and clientelism. Under the

French Protectorate (1863-1953) the authority of all political and adminis trative figures was subordinated to the colonial regime, but the underlying structure of local and provincial authority remained intact. Other common

alties of religion (Theravada Buddhism) and economy (wet-rice agriculture, only recently superseded by manufacturing in Thailand) led many people I

spoke with on both sides of the border to remark that Thais and Khmers are

culturally similar, and "understand each other."

Cultural similarities aside, the position of Khmers in Thailand has de

pended upon the way the state has chosen to regard them at different points in its history. This is where the distinction between ethnicity and nationality becomes important. At the time the territorial treaties were being worked

438 French

out between France and Thailand at the turn of the century, there were

people of Khmer ancestry living on what had been Thai territory for many centuries, and people of Khmer ancestry in the provinces of Siemriep and

Battambang, which were then under Thai suzerainty but had historically been a part of the Kingdom of Cambodia, and were even then held in

a sort of joint custody with France (Wyatt 1984, chapters 6 and 7).4 (See

Map 3.) The significance of this difference was not lost on the Thai royalty.

They had no doubt that the first category of people would be accepted as

"chaat Thar by the French; but they worried that the French would insist

the second category were "Cambodian," since the French then controlled

Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and were looking to claim authority over

anyone of "Indochinese ancestry" (Streckfuss 1993, pp. 141-142). Eventu

ally the Thai government gave up their claim to the provinces of Battam

bang and Siemriep.5 But in order to protect the integrity of what remained,

they merged notions of national identity with the ethnic differences con

tained within their territory. The result was a nation of difference articu

lated in the language of non-distinction. People within Thai territory were

"Thai."6

In this situation it was clearly in the new nation-state's interest to ex

tend its borders as widely as possible and claim that ethnic Khmer living within its borders were "Thai." The Thai state's interest in incorporating ethnic others into the nation has shifted over time according to political and economic circumstances, however, and the interest of ethnic others in being

incorporated has changed as well. Today, for example, Thai citizenship is ex

tremely difficult to obtain. Immigration is restricted, and citizenship is moni

tored: Thai citizens as well as non-Thais must carry identification that verifies

their legal status in the country.7 Citizenship is seen as a resource that many Cambodians now covet because it provides access to employment opportu nities not available to them in Cambodia.

But this has not always been the case. The incorporation into the Thai

polity of the Khmer people and several other ethnic groups living in what

is now northeast Thailand was a contested process in the early 20th cen

tury. For the Khmers, as well as for Lao and Kui communities, incorpora tion entailed a significant loss of local autonomy. Many indigenous leaders

were disenfranchised, and millennial movements with strong ethnonational

overtones occurred throughout the northeast in the early part of the century

(Chuengsatiansup 1998; Mikusol 1984; Keyes 1977). These movements were

forcefully suppressed, and control from the center was gradually solidified

through a combination of bureaucratization, patronage and military power. In effect, ethnic difference was subordinated to the authority of the new

state structure. Although the Khmer remained a culturally distinct ethnic

group, anything they did that threatened the political control of the center

MAP 3: THAI TERRITORIAL LOSSES, 1867-1909

1. Cambodian territory placed under protection by Franco-Siamese Treaty, 1867.

2. Black Tai muang taken by France, 1888.

3. East bank of the Mekong ceded to France by Franco-Siamese Treaty, 1893.

4. West bank territories ceded to France by Franco-Siamese Treaty, 1904.

5. Western Cambodian provinces ceded to France by Franco-Siamese Treaty, 1907.

6. Malay states ceded to Britain by Anglo-Siamese Treaty, 1909.

440 French

was suppressed. Twentieth century Thai citizenship thus entailed a new kind of political subordination to the central Thai state.

BORDER CONTROL

Thongchai (1994) has argued that in order to develop a sense of "Thai

ness" within the new Thai nation, the state had to emphasize differences

between Thais and non-Thai "others." One way this is done, he suggests, is

through the elaboration and control of its borders. But, as Wijeyewardene

(1991) points out, national borders are most carefully demarcated and de

fended when the nation itself is under threat. In the absence of political threat there may be little reason to enforce national divisions.

From the time the French arrived in Indochina, Siam's borders were

contested (see Map 3). But when the northwest provinces of Battambang and Siemriep were returned to Cambodia in 1907 the Thai-Cambodia bor

der stabilized for several decades; there was little need for the Thai govern ment to emphasize national distinction at that time. During World War II, with Japanese support, the Royal Thai Army tried to retake parts of these

provinces from the French, but was forced to relinquish them again in 1946.

Then in 1962 the World Court ruled that Preah Vihear, an Angkor era

temple straddling the Thai-Cambodian border that Thailand had kept at

the end of the war, be returned to Cambodian control (see Map 2). Re

lations had already soured between Thailand's then-military dictator, Sarit

Thanarat, and Cambodia's Prince Sihanouk, the leader of the newly inde

pendent Cambodia. Different responses to the growth of communism in the

region lay at the heart of their disagreements, and Sarit closed the border

for some time both before and after the World Court decision to emphasize these political differences (Keyes 1991).

The idea of the Thai nation continued to be developed internally

through the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932, and into the current

period of bureaucratic democracy, controlled to a great extent by the mil

itary. But apart from the few periods of controversy mentioned above, the

distinctiveness of the Thai people vis-?-vis neighboring nationals was not

especially emphasized by the state until the 1970s. People of common ances

try who had previously interacted under the umbrella of a common polity now interacted across national borders in northeast Thailand and northwest

Cambodia. There were many practical reasons for this interaction to occur, and no compelling governmental reason to prevent it.

Real changes in Thai policy toward all its neighbors came in the late

1960s and early 1970s, when political events in neighboring countries led

the Thai government to dramatically increase the defense of its borders.

From Politics to Economics 441

At that time the government's border policy with Cambodia, as with all

its Indochina neighbors, was shaped by the perceived need to protect the

Thai nation (or rather, its control of the Thai nation) from the dangers of encroaching communism. Fear of communist infiltration was generated not only by three ultimately successful communist revolutions in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, but also by the rising tide of popular discontent with

military control of the Thai government at home, and the growth of the

Thai Communist Party. The Thai government's brutal suppression of stu

dent protests in Bangkok in 1976 and its subsequent campaign to rout out

any hint of communist organization in the Thai countryside were fueled in

part by a new sense of geographic vulnerability with respect to its Indochina

neighbors.8 Concerted efforts were made to distinguish "Thais" from the

dangerous "others" at Thailand's borders during this period. The rhetoric surrounding the government's stance at this time is nicely

illustrated by the poster featured on the cover of Thongchai's book Siam

Mapped, in which Thailand is about to be devoured by a terrifying figure in

the shape of the three communist countries to the east (Fig. I).9 As Thongchai points out, Thai national identity was asserted in contradistinction to the

communism of its neighbors in this period. Communism was portrayed as

non-Thai; Thailand's borders had to be protected against the threat that all three countries posed to its security and national integrity. Even Thai polit ical dissidents were accused of being "non-Thai" in their alleged betrayal of

"nation, religion and king." The Border Patrol Police (BPP, created in the

early 1950s in response to U.S. pressure to develop a flexible counterinsur

gency force capable of crossing as well as defending borders) stepped up its

activity in Thailand's frontier areas from 1965 on. New paramilitary units such as the Village Scouts, the Red Gaurs, and Nawaphon were created to

monitor (and often harass and disrupt) the increasingly politicized activi ties of students, activist farmers and labor unions within the country, while the BPP patrolled the country's borders to protect against the dangers from outside (Bowie 1997, chapters 2-4). Thus nationalist rhetoric was combined with increasingly vigilant border control.

In fact, the area along the Dangrek mountain range at the northwest end of the Thai-Cambodian border (see Map 2) had been a hideout for Cambodian subversives for a long time. Before the Khmer Rouge used it to consolidate their power in the 1970s it was a haven for the anarchistic Khmer Issarak in the 1940s and 50s, and the anti-Communist Khmer Serei in the 50s and early 60s. These groups had generally found support in Thailand, as they

were working against, first, French colonialism, and later, the autocratic rule of Prince Sihanouk. But by the late 1960s, the Thai government feared the infiltration of Vietnamese communists into Thailand through Cambodia and

Laos, and its borders were increasingly militarized. When the Vietnamese

442 French

6 -oV/id

&^?m*mi??m W$kt0H**& ?#mw

Fig. 1. "Wake Up, Thai People" (By permission of Conrad Taylor.) (From Siam Mapped,

Thongchai Winichakul, 1994. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press).

From Politics to Economics 443

army overthrew the Khmer Rouge in early 1979 and hundreds of thousands

of Cambodian refugees fled to the Thai border, this concern not only in

tensified, but was combined with the additional anxiety of being overrun by

desperate Cambodians trying to escape communism. The result was a Thai

government policy which provided material and logistical support to a tri

partite Cambodian resistance (which included the Khmer Rouge) fighting the Vietnamese from the Thai border but which, after a brief period of le

niency, refused to allow any refugees across the border into Thailand itself.

Most Cambodians resettled to third countries through Thailand had crossed

the border during that brief period in 1979, or else managed to sneak into

the one official UNHCR refugee camp over the next ten years, and were

eventually granted refugee status (see Map 2).10

During the first half of the 1980s all other Cambodians seeking asylum in Thailand were pushed back across the border into Cambodia, at their

great peril. When the United Nations was finally allowed to build holding camps for the refugees just inside Thailand in 1985, the camps were ringed

by armed Thai guards: no Cambodian was allowed into Thailand proper. For

the political and economic security of the nation, Cambodians in Thailand were confined to the camps.11 Thai policy with respect to refugees from all

three newly communist Indochina states was the same: the nation's doors were firmly shut.12 The Thai government did not want to have to deal with

the refugees of communism any more than with communism itself. With the

Vietnamese-installed government in Phnom Penh the Thai government had no relations whatsoever.

This rhetoric of strategic disengagement notwithstanding, the Thai army was in constant interaction with the Cambodian resistance during the 1980s: it supplied military assistance and training as well as material and financial

support. Thailand was the conduit for outside assistance to the resistance

factions, aid which came from the United States, China and other ASEAN and European nations. A special unit of the Thai army, code-named 838,

was created to work exclusively with the resistance. Rather than operating through the ordinary chain of military command, 838 answered directly to the

Supreme Commander of the Thai Armed Forces. But the entire border area

had been placed under martial law for security reasons, hence the regular army was well-represented at the border as well, along with several other

military and paramilitary units. While 838 worked directly with the resistance

armies, all other military units cooperated in protecting Thailand's border from the encroachment of "dangerous outsiders."

The rhetoric of danger and distancing employed in relation to

Cambodians changed dramatically when Chatichai Choonhaven was elected Prime Minister of Thailand in 1988. While the policies of the previous government had been heavily influenced by the interests and concerns of

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the military, Chatichai represented a new breed of businessman-politicians and was interested in reducing the influence of the military in government

(Pongpaichit and Piriyarangsan 1994, chapters 1 and 2; Sesser 1993). His

goal of "turning Indochina's battlefields into marketplaces," first articulated

in 1988, was a dramatic switch from the foreign policy of the previous eight

years, during which Thailand's political integrity was protected both physi

cally and rhetorically through the aggressive defense of its borders.

"Battlefields into marketplaces" was a policy of economic interaction

and cooperation. It promoted trade with countries which to that point had

been embargoed by all the ASEAN countries in an effort to undermine

and weaken their communist regimes.13 This policy shifted the considera

tion of Thailand's neighbors onto a different plane entirely, suggesting that

economic engagement could overcome political difference and lead to mu

tual benefit and satisfaction. As a guiding principle, "battlefields into mar

ketplaces" continues to characterize the Thai government's foreign-policy orientation toward its neighbors in the region. Chatichai's slogan implies a

very different attitude toward Cambodians and a rather different mode of

border control as well. Was this, finally, a new form of regional cooperation and transnational economic integration?

It is the burden of the remainder of this article to show that, rather

than demonstrating cooperation and integration, current relations between

Thais and Cambodians are a complex form of assymetrically structured eco

nomic exploitation pursued not primarily in the interest of nation, or even

of ethnic group, but rather for the economic benefit of much smaller, often

apolitical constituencies. Economic opportunism has superseded loyalty to

any national or ethnic grouping, state pronouncements about the national

benefits of regional trade notwithstanding. In fact, the state apparatus on

both sides of the border can be seen to function primarily as an opportunity structure for those people in positions to take advantage of it, and much

political decision making can be seen as an effort by government officials to

protect their own or their powerful patrons' access to that structure. Political

contingencies and attitudes about "ethnic others" among Thais and Khmers

may affect the form of these interactions, but seem to have slight effect on

their substance.

BORDER RELATIONS ON THE GROUND

The incorporation of ethnic Khmer into the Thai state at the turn of the

century in effect created an ethnic minority within the nation-state. Before

this, they were simply Khmer; afterwards they were called Khmer loeu, or

upland Khmer, in reference to the fact that most lived on the plateau above

From Politics to Economics 445

the Dangrek escarpment, the current northeast border with Cambodia. They were distinguished from the Khmer kraom, or lowland Khmer, living below the plateau in what is now the State of Cambodia.14 Khmer loeu were Thai

nationals. There was, however, little reason not to interact with people on

the opposite side of the border. The border itself had shifted many times in the previous 800 years, and people on opposite sides were often relatives as well as neighbors. People spoke a common language; shared a common

culture. Certain aspects of their history were different, but many elements were the same.

People in the border region interacted in the ways most rural people do,

trading where trade was possible, trusting those people who proved them selves trustworthy regardless of their provenance, mistrusting those who did not. Identity was very local in this area before the 1970s, and probably some

what flexible: most villagers did not think of themselves as "Thai," although they did not think of themselves as "Cambodian" either. Rather, they came

from a "Khmer" village, i.e., where people spoke Khmer; they were part of this or that family, involved in this or that economic endeavor. People were

mostly poor?the four northeastern provinces where most Khmer are found are among the driest in Thailand?and they often needed to supplement their meager agricultural income through trade. Old trade routes that ran

between the provincial capitals of Surin (northeast Thailand) and Siemriep (northwest Cambodia) and on to the Tonle Sap, Cambodia's Great Lake, became active again after World War II (see Map 2).15 Government offi cials from Bangkok were no doubt more foreign to rural ethnic Khmer in Thailand than Cambodian villagers from across the border.

This situation changed in the late 1960s, when the Thai military began its

suppression of suspected subversives in the countryside, hiring local spies to

report on the movement of outsiders through villages, and punishing anyone with connections to Vietnamese, Cambodian or Lao nationals. Nationality began to matter to people on the Thai side of the border in a way that it had not before. It had become dangerous to associate with Cambodians. It was

important to be able to demonstrate Thai citizenship and loyalty. Between 1975 and 1979 there was very little movement of any kind

across the border. The Khmer Rouge had closed Cambodia to outsiders and Cambodians themselves were kept under constant surveillance, virtual

prisoners in work camps inside the country. But the tales of Khmer Rouge atrocities that began to filter across the border after 1975 further alienated Thai nationals from their Cambodian brothers and sisters. Thais seemed to draw back from the specter of such unimaginable horror. They did not want to be touched by it or associated with it. Many local Thais extended charity and hospitality to Cambodians who fled to the Thai border in earnest when the Khmer Rouge were overthrown in 1979, but everyone learned to be wary

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of Cambodians, whose desperate needs led them to sometimes desperate acts. Thais in the border area told me that the close relationships they had had

with Cambodians in the past changed during this period. Interactions were

more difficult; people became suspicious of one another. Shared ethnicity could not bridge the gaping chasm that the experience of the Khmer Rouge had opened up between Thais and Cambodians.

This being said, trade relations with Cambodians resumed with the first wave of asylum seekers in 1979. The refugee crisis that developed at the Thai

border was enormous?as many as one million Cambodians had arrived by 1981?and chaotic. International organizations arrived in force to provide

emergency assistance, but their work during the first two years after the

overthrow of the Khmer Rouge was overwhelming. Cambodians who fled

to the Thai border needed everything, from food to clothing to medicine

to housing materials to seed rice and agricultural tools. The international

assistance provided was insufficient to meet the demand for it, and many

people were desperate enough to pay Thai traders whatever they had (mostly

gold) for the things they needed.16 Many Cambodians say that all the gold left in Cambodia flowed across the border into Thailand in the first few years after the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime to pay for the refugees' survival.

There is a collective bitterness among Cambodians about the way the Thais

took advantage of their vulnerability at that time.

But Thais tended to regard this situation as, quite simply, a very good business opportunity. Many people set up trading businesses at the border in

the 1980s, working initially through connections with the international NGO

community which had come to Thailand to provide emergency assistance to

the refugees. Many of the early border encampments were organized by the

Cambodian resistance factions around a market, where Thais brought goods to sell, and Khmer bought and sold whatever they had in hopes of making

enough money to buy rice at the end of the day. The volume of trade at

that time was enormous (Mason and Brown 1983, chapter 2); many battles

were fought among Khmers over control of these markets which had little

or nothing to do with the resistance struggle (Heder, n.d.). With time many of the first wave of refugees realized there was little

to be gained at the border, and returned to their homes in Cambodia. By 1981 the number of refugees had halved. As the border situation settled

from chaos into armed camps controlled by different Cambodian resistance

factions, the border trade settled into more organized patterns as well. Lo

cal jaopho, corrupt Thai businessmen who used their power aggressively in pursuit of economic gain, took control of the markets on the Thai side.

Some goods were sold to Cambodian traders who then resold them inside

the country. But the devastation of Cambodia in the aftermath of the Khmer

Rouge period was such that few people inside could actually afford to buy

From Politics to Economics 447

very much. Cambodian traders did better to transport Thai goods down to

the Vietnam border, where buyers could always be found.17

In 1985, after several fierce attacks on the border encampments, the

civilian refugee population was moved into United Nations-run holding

camps inside Thailand. This changed the organization of cross-border trade.

Thai traders shifted to working directly with the resistance leaders, who pro duced trade goods from the territories they controlled inside Cambodia.

Logs and wooden furniture were brought out of the resistance areas and

sold. Guns supplied by the resistance's international backers were sold to

Thai middlemen, who transported them up to the Burma border to sell to

less well-endowed resistance fighters there. Valuable antiquities from the

temples in northwestern Cambodia were smuggled across the border. By the late 1980s, when the resistance factions had become firmly entrenched

in the northwest, Thai businesses were involved in the organized extraction

of timber and gems from the border areas as well.

There was an another important set of players in the border trade, how

ever, and that was the Thai military. Since the entire border area was under

martial law in Thailand, military rather than civilian authorities controlled

all the traffic moving to and from the border. This meant that any Thai con

ducting trade with Cambodians had to pass through military checkpoints in order to get to his or her trading partner. Thus, from the very beginning of martial law in the 1970s, when the Cambodian border was declared in

secure, the Thai military has been intimately involved in the border trade.

"Taxation" on the trade provided a reliable and often substantial source of

income to all Thai military units stationed there; it turned the Cambodian

border into a very desirable posting, and provided a powerful incentive for the army to protect its position in the border region. Members of the military

were well-positioned to involve themselves directly in border transactions, which they did?from the lowest ranking soldier to the highest levels of

command.18 Military involvement in the border trade is an important aspect of the dynamics of border interaction, to which I will return later in the

article.

To summarize, in spite of an official rhetoric of protectionism and non

engagement at the Cambodian border, throughout the 1980s the Thai mili

tary was actively engaged with the Cambodian resistance because this was

felt to promote Thai national interests at the border: support for the

Cambodian resistance was considered Thailand's best hedge against Vietnamese expansion into Thai territory through Cambodia. Access to the

border trade was a boon that went along with this territory for the military, but other Thais had recognized and begun to exploit business opportunities

along the border as well. So when Chatichai proposed to open Thailand's

borders to trade with its neighbors and turn Indochina's battlefields into

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marketplaces, he was not so much initiating trade with Cambodia as he was

changing the conditions under which it occurred, and trying to establish some

centralized control over it.

BATTLEFIELDS INTO MARKETPLACES

Chatichai's policy is interesting because it constituted both a major

change in the Thai government's terms of engagement with the governments of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and a significant break with the collective

ASEAN stance with respect to these countries. It also represented a turning

point in the Thai national discourse about Thailand's relation to its neigh bors in the region. What prompted such a dramatic change in policy, less

than three years after Thongchai's poster was circulated?

First, and most generally, the balance of political power was shifting in

the region. In 1989 the Vietnamese government announced it was pulling its

army out of Cambodia after a ten-year occupation. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam was in serious financial trouble; the government needed to call

home its resources and attend to its own internal affairs. It was no position to be exporting revolution and could no longer be considered a real threat

to Thailand's security. Thus the Thai government's rationale for maintaining a vigilant anti-Communist stance in the region was beginning to disappear.

Second, in an effort to improve its international reputation, the Phnom

Penh government had liberalized its constitution and begun to privatize much of the economy that had previously been controlled by the state. This

was a good pretext for Chatichai to initiate communication with the Hun Sen

government where there had been no official communication before. The

Communist Party of Thailand was dead?abandoned by China and crushed

by the Thai military in the 1970s (Chanda, 1996, pp. 324-325)?the Berlin

Wall was coming down, the Soviet Union had begun to crack, and the fear

of communist expansion in the region seemed an increasingly anachronistic

foundation upon which to base foreign policy. But third, and most significantly, Thailand's capitalist economy was

booming. Government technocrats had steered the Thai economy on a

very successful course away from the agricultural expansion and import substitution policies of the 1960s toward a manufactured-export-led eco

nomic strategy in the 1980s. Thailand had benefited from the regional relo

cation of foreign manufacturing to countries where labor costs were lower

than in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. The influx of foreign companies had, in turn, spurred the development of Thai manufacturing. During the 1980s,

manufacturing overtook agriculture in terms of its importance in the Thai

economy. But Thailand needed markets for its goods and the struggling

From Politics to Economics 449

socialist countries of Indochina represented just the kind of markets that

Thai producers were in a very good position to exploit.19

Additionally, all three Indochina countries (as well as Burma) were

sitting on valuable and largely untapped natural resources in timber, gems, oil and water power?resources that were increasingly depleted in Thailand

itself. Once again, Thai businessmen were well positioned to organize and

benefit from the extraction of these resources.

Thus, more than simply shifting the terms of regional engagement from

political to economic, Chatichai's new policy aimed at repositioning Thailand at the center of a new regional network of business and trade. In this

way, the policy had as much to do with changing economic relations among the ASEAN countries, which constitute Thailand's economic competitors in the region, as it did with changing political relations with the socialist

countries of Indochina. "Battlefields into marketplaces" represented a bold move on Chatichai's part, as the Cambodian conflict that had begun when the

Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge in 1979 was far from resolved in

1988, and none of Thailand's ASEAN allies had yet embraced the inevitable end of a communist threat in the region.

Subsequent events proved Mr. Chatichai and his advisors very pre scient. In 1991, three years after the policy was first articulated, a peace

agreement was finally signed between the communist government in Phnom Penh and the resistance factions at the Thai-Cambodian border. The 350,000 Cambodians displaced by the war to camps at the border were repatriated; UN-supervised elections were held; and the first ever democratically elected

government was installed in Phnom Penh, a coalition of former adversaries in Cambodia's twelve-year civil war. The Thai government, which had pro vided crucial support to the resistance coalition from 1979 until 1991, ended its support of the resistance armies as part of the terms of the Peace Agree

ment. Thailand now maintains full diplomatic relations with the new gov ernment in Phnom Penh and is actively promoting a more open border

with Cambodia for the purposes of tourism and trade. The ASEAN mem

bers have come around to thinking in regional economic terms as well, and Thailand is situated at the hub of an Asian Development Bank proposal to link the region in trade through a network of new and improved roads,

railways, and ports (Asian Development Bank, 1995, and Parsonage, 1997). What does this dramatic change in Thai policy vis-a-vis Cambodia sug

gest about changes in economic relations between Thais and Khmers? The

answer, I think, is not much. It tells us more about the ways Thais have found to take advantage of Cambodians' needs and resources through trade now that war no longer curtails this kind of interaction. It demonstrates how "national policy" can be manipulated primarily to serve the interests of a small group of insiders in government and industry, and not the "nation"

450 French

as a whole. And, as we will see, it shows how the contravention of official

policies is tolerated by national governments if these same private interests are being served. But in a more general sense it represents the same kind of

protectionism, and the same distancing of Cambodians from the benefits of

the Thai nation, as did the rigid border control of the 1980s. Attitudes about

cultural differences may inflect the way the trade is carried out, but more

important issues have to do with who is benefiting from the trade and how, and how this situation relates to the way the Thai nation-state is functioning, both internally and with respect to its neighbors in the region.

BORDER TRADE

Cross-border commerce facilitated by the Thai government's current

trade policy toward Cambodia falls into three broad categories.

1. The export of manufactured Thai goods to Cambodia. There are four

places where one can transport goods across the Thai-Cambodian

border legally, and the largest of these by far is the Klong Luek/Poipet

checkpoint, outside Aranyaprathet (see Map 2).

Aranyaprathet was the center of a twelve-year UN. refugee re

lief and assistance effort in the border camps, phased out after the 1991 Peace Agreement, and is where I chose to look at the conduct

of official trade. All manner of consumer items are trucked (or pulled

by handcart) across the border at Klong Luek,20 and either sold di

rectly at the market at Poipet or transferred to Cambodian trucks

and convoyed to Phnom Penh and provincial capitals throughout the country. Typically the trucks return to Thailand filled with local

Cambodian produce: fresh fish, dried and smoked fish, baskets and

woven mats, Pursat oranges, chili peppers, garlic and recyclable items

(metal, cardboard and glass bottles). More important than commodities export in terms of the value

of the trade, although not necessarily in term of the number of peo

ple involved, is the export of Thai building materials, especially ce

ment. There was a virtually unlimited demand for building supplies in

Cambodia at the time the research for this article was conducted;21 the bulk of the trucks crossing over from Thailand into Cambodia

carried some kind of building material. These goods are subject to

inspection and taxation at the border; they constitute the most trans

parent and "legal" aspect of the border trade.

2. The extraction and import of valuable natural resources from

Cambodia, especially those in short supply in Thailand: principally

From Politics to Economics 451

timber, gem stones, and more recently, water power. Much of this

business is (or was) in partial if not complete violation of diplomatic agreements and/or industry principles signed by the governments of either Thailand or Cambodia or both, although high level govern

ment officials on both sides are often involved in arranging these deals. The argument can be (and often is) made that these business

arrangements are technically legal; what is most noteworthy about them is their highly exploitative character and their dubious contri bution to the "national interest" of either country. Traffic in stolen goods or illegal substances. Thais buy Cambodian

antiquities that have been stolen from Khmer temples and brought to the border, and sell stolen cars and motorcycles across the border into Cambodia. There is also a significant volume of smuggling into

Thailand of high-tariff items like cigarettes, alcohol, electronic equip ment and cars and trucks. These goods come from elsewhere in Asia;

they are transshipped through Cambodian ports without paying tax, then smuggled by small boat up the coast to the Thai port of Klong

Yai, or else unloaded illegally in Cambodia and taken by truck to

the border. This smuggling route has been active since the late 1980s; it involves government officials on both sides of the border.22 There are also credible reports that heroin is being moved out of Thailand

through the same corrupt customs system in place in Cambodia's overland checkpoints and deepwater ports (Thayer 1995; Battersby 1998).

IMPORT/EXPORT

The volume of cross-border trade in all three of these areas is significant, although difficult to quantify, as even official figures for legal trade do not re flect the actual volume (see below). Trade with Cambodia, whether legal or

illegal, is a "growth industry" in Thailand. Cambodia represents a new mar ket for Thai goods as well as an important new source of raw materials at a time when certain natural products are in short supply in Thailand and manu

facturing has become an increasingly important aspect of the Thai economy. Indeed, the Thai government's trade policies toward Cambodia are shaped in part by its own evolving position in a changing regional economy. This

explains, in part, the push to open up to trade the checkpoint at Klong Luek

(and others elsewhere along the border) as soon as the Cambodian peace agreement was signed in 1991: Thai businessmen hoped to take advantage of their proximity to Cambodia, and beat other regional manufacturers to the new market.

452 French

Many people participated in this effort. The road from Aranyaprathet out to Klong Luek was widened and three hundred new concrete market

stalls were constructed next to the checkpoint. The Thai army even rebuilt the

road from Poipet, on the Cambodian side of the border, to Sisophon, the next

large Cambodian town, to help get their goods to market.23 Thai trucks were

not allowed beyond Poipet, but Thai exporters organized transportation

companies in Cambodia and hired Cambodians to run their goods inside.

The repatriation of 350,000 refugees between 1991 and 1993 provided many new business opportunities, and facilitated business arrangements between

Thais and Khmers who had known each other for 13 years in the border

camps. The volume of traffic back and forth across the border at Klong

Luek/Poipet in the early 1990s, both human and material, was enormous

(Robinson 1996).

Although informal cross-border trade between Thailand and Cambodia increased after the Peace Accords were signed in 1991, formal trade agree

ments did not appear until after the 1993 elections in Cambodia, at which

time the Thai government officially recognized the new Cambodian govern ment and re-established normal diplomatic relations. A series of agreements were issued thereafter, specifying in increasing detail the principles upon which trade and economic and technical cooperation between the two coun

tries should proceed. In addition to promoting trade in general, establishing these trade agreements could be seen as an attempt by both governments to

bring "irregular" business under the control of the state. In fact, however, the situation is more complicated than that. "Regularized" trade turns out to

be anything but regular, and much of the continuing illegal business occurs

with the tacit if not active connivance of government officials on both sides

of the border.

As in the past, personal relationships were the foundation of the new

cross-border trade. Business arrangements between Thais and Khmers were

made in the traditional way: among people who knew each other from their

earlier interactions along the border. This meant, primarily, Cambodians

who had been involved in the resistance working with Thais who had been

involved in the relief effort or the military border control. Although some

banks now provide international services to facilitate the transfer of funds

between Thailand and Cambodia, in the early 1990s, before any formal trade

agreements were signed, no such services existed. The border businesses

were thus built primarily upon trust and the quality of the relationship that

existed between traders on opposite sides of the border.

These relationships were and are often tenuous. Both Thais and Khmers

are drawn by the profits to be made in trade, but trust is in short supply on both sides of the border. Cambodians watched as Thais took advan

tage of their vulnerability at the border from 1979 to 1991; many came

From Politics to Economics 453

to hate the Thai people because of this, and feel justified in taking what ever they can from Thais whenever there is an opportunity. On the other

hand, Cambodians were in desperate straits when they came to the bor

der in the 1980s, and their desperation made many people bold; thus Thais learned to mistrust the border Khmer, with good reason in many cases. If

Thais in general are considered ruthless in their dealings with Cambodians, Cambodians in general are considered sneaky and unreliable in their deal

ings with Thais. One Thai businessman told me, "You can trust a Khmer until noon, but after lunch you had better watch your back." Cambodians tend to feel that if an individual Thai gets cheated, this is insignificant when

compared to the amount that Khmers have been cheated by Thais over the

years. Both sides feel quite justified in maintaining these polarizing positions about each other.

This generalized mutual mistrust is only overcome through personal relationships between trading partners who have dealt with each other in the past, where there is much to be lost in the spoiling of the relationship, and much to be gained on both sides by working together. At this level of trade, money is made through the demand for manufactured goods in

Cambodia, the volume of goods shipped in, and the various ways it is possible to reduce the cost of shipment. While a system of inspection, assessment and payment of duties exists at the Klong Luek checkpoint, the customs officials in Cambodia are usually bribable, and a good Thai businessman never pays the full tax on his goods. Moreover, there are always traders to be found in Cambodia who will buy inferior quality goods on the cheap and sell them at full price to unsuspecting customers, making their own

profit through the deception. In other words, Thais take advantage of the

opportunities for under-the-table profit that the border trade provides, but their Cambodians partners participate willingly in these exploitative deals if it makes them a profit individually as well. In Cambodia, there is no recourse if you discover you have been cheated in business, and the border trade

provides both Thais and Cambodians with many opportunities to cheat. Each side takes advantage of the other to benefit themselves, typically at the

expense of either the customer or the tax-collecting state.

NATURAL RESOURCES

The second category of cross-border business?the extraction of natural resources from Cambodia?is more complicated in terms of its political ram

ifications, and more significant in terms of the volume and value of the trade. For Thai businessmen, Cambodia (as well as Laos and Burma) represents an important source of raw materials increasingly depleted or unavailable in

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Thailand itself: timber, mineral deposits, and untapped water power. It is no

coincidence that commercial logging commenced in the resistance-held areas

of northwest Cambodia close to the Thai border in 1989, the same year that a complete ban on commercial cutting was implemented in Thailand. The

timber ban was imposed after decades of intensive logging in Thailand, when severe deforestation and serious environmental damage could no longer be

ignored (Leungaramsri and Rajesh 1992). Thai timber companies were sud

denly in critical need of new sources of wood. Focusing their attention on

Cambodia and Burma, these companies began buying concessions to cut

from whomever would deal with them. In Cambodia, it was the resistance

which controlled the territory opposite the Thai border that had wood it was

willing to sell. And significantly, the resistance included the Khmer Rouge. When Thais first began buying timber from the resistance factions, they

were not violating national policy: the Thai government considered the resis

tance coalition (the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea?the

CGDK) to be the legitimate government of Cambodia throughout the 1980s

and into the '90s. But after the Cambodian Peace Agreement was signed in

1991 and official support for the resistance ended, and after the Thai govern ment acceded to UN trade sanctions against the Khmer Rouge in January 1993, and especially after the Thai government resumed diplomatic rela

tions with the new Cambodian government after the April 1993 elections, the politics of this trade became much more complicated. Overnight the

Khmer Rouge was transformed from a legitimate trading partner in the

eyes of the Thai government to a sanctioned one. Trading with the Khmer

Rouge became an illegal activity. This created problems for Thai timber and

gem mining companies because a huge amount of money was tied up in their

business deals with the Khmer Rouge. The United States Embassy estimated

that by February 1993 $40 million US was invested in logging concessions

in Khmer Rouge held zones. Thai investments in gem mining in these zones

are reported to be even higher.24 The gem trade is a fairly straightforward situation. Since 1989 the Khmer

Rouge have controlled the area near the Thai border around Pailin (see

Map 2), where much of Cambodia's ruby and sapphire deposits are located.

Rather than get involved in mining operations themselves, the Khmer Rouge leased concessions to Thai mining companies who sent their own equipment and (largely contracted Burmese) labor into the area to do the work. The

risks to the concessionaires, both physical and financial, were considerable, but the profits were enormous. Estimates of the value of gems coming out

of the Pailin area in the early 1990s range from $1.5 to 5 million US per month.25 Other estimates are even higher.26 One reason for the Thai indus

try's keen interest in Cambodian gems is the depletion of mineral deposits in the Chantaburi/Trat area opposite Pailin, where the Thai gem business

From Politics to Economics 455

has traditionally been located. Digging just across the border in Cambodia, in spite of the risks, is still much cheaper in the end than traveling to Burma

or Sri Lanka, other places where the Thai gem industry has been forced to

look for uncut stones.27

The timber industry in Cambodia, and Thai involvement in it, is more

complicated. First, cutting has not been limited to Khmer Rouge-held areas.

Once Cambodians realized how much money could be made from timber,

everybody wanted to sell. Second, as Thais are quick to point out, they are not the only country involved in timber extraction. Malaysia, Indonesia,

Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, Russia, and China have all sought and been

granted legal timber concessions by the Cambodian government.28 Finally, the Thai companies are not alone in their questionable business practices:

practically everyone involved in the business seems to be engaged in ille

gal or exploitative activities.29 Chief among the offenders is the Cambodian

government itself, which has failed to monitor the cutting of timber and/or

the sale of timber concessions throughout the country, cannot collect rev

enues for the state on the trade it does not monitor, and does not always even collect revenues on the concessions it sells itself. Evidence is abun

dant that Cambodian officials at the highest levels have circumvented their own timber regulations through private arrangements with timber compa nies which allow for the extraction of timber in excess of government limits.

These sales, because they are outside regulation, are never recorded so the

tax revenue that should be collected upon them is lost to the state.30 In one

particularly notorious (and secret) deal, the two Cambodian Prime Minis

ters, along with the then-Minister of Defense (and later Prime Minister) of Thailand Chaovolit Yongchayud, arranged for seventeen Thai companies to

export one million cubic meters of timber in blatant disregard of their own

logging moratorium.31 The scandal surrounding this deal when it came to

light was so great that the Cambodian government was forced to renege on

the agreement.32

Even granting this level of complexity in the timber industry, the Thai

companies' business arrangements with the Khmer Rouge were significant for one very important reason: since 1991, when the terms of the Paris Peace

Agreement put an end to all forms of external assistance to the resistance

factions, they constituted the Khmer Rouge's most important source of in come. The argument can plausibly be made that their timber and mining deals were all that was keeping the Khmer Rouge alive financially after 1993. But the timber and gem industries were not acting alone. It is not pos sible for either timber or gems to be extracted from Cambodia without the involvement of the Thai military, which still controls the border across which the goods are transported. Indeed, the involvement of the Thai military in the protection of these businesses has been extensively documented (Global

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Witness 1995a and b, 1996a, 1999, Oxfam America 1995, and Keesee 1993). The fact that trade with the Khmer Rouge continued until May 1995 in spite of official government sanctions against it suggests that the Thai govern

ment was either unable or unwilling to put a stop to this activity. As the

"million-meter deal" cited above suggests, powerful business interests oper ate with the highest levels of military protection at the border regardless of

whether their businesses are in line with national policy or not. It was only when the Thai government was threatened with even more powerful eco

nomic sanctions from the U.S. government that then Prime Minister Chuan

Leek-Pai insisted that trade with the Khmer Rouge be stopped.33

Investing in natural resources extraction in Cambodia is not in itself

unethical or exploitative. Indeed, the Cambodian government has encour

aged foreign investment in these areas. What is problematic is the way Thai

companies have looked for ways around the regulation of the industry (in the case of timber) or targeted industries in which no regulation exists (gem

mining) and, until fairly recently, ignored the injunction against trading with

an enemy of the state (the Khmer Rouge). Thai companies have persisted in

these practices mainly, it seems, because the profits are enormous and they could get away with it: a bribable Cambodian official can almost always be

found, and the Thai military protected (and often participated in) their busi

nesses on the Thai side. It was only when the outcry against these practices reached international levels that the Thai government was in a position to

force Thai business interests to respect national policies and regulations. These examples demonstrate the degree to which Thai politicians are

controlled by the businessmen who support them, and how often govern ment policy reflects the interests of the politicians' backers (Pongpaichit and

Piriyarangsan 1994). It also shows how often the military operates as an entity unto itself in Thai politics, pursuing its own (business) agendas rather than

supporting governmental policies. There have been eighteen coups since the

first one in 1932 reduced the 700 year-old absolute monarchy to a symbolic institution and established a parliamentary system; the military has routinely

staged a coup when it feels the government is "not doing its job." In fact,

regardless of whether the government has been elected or has put itself in

power, it works as a patronage system, and coups often reflect the military's frustration at having been kept out of the government's business loop for

too long.34

SMUGGLING

The sale of stolen and/or contraband goods occurs across all national

borders. What is interesting about this exchange at the Thai-Cambodian

From Politics to Economics 457

border is not so much that it exists but rather what gets sold and who con

trols the trade. For example, Cambodians need and want motorized vehicles

(none are manufactured in Cambodia), but few people can afford to buy them new, so there is always a market for stolen cars and motorcycles smug

gled in from Thailand. (Stolen vehicles are a particularly good source of

income for the military border guards, since an especially high "tax" can be

collected on them.) Certain border crossings are particularly convenient for

the transfer of stolen vehicles and have become well-known for this; Cambo

dians looking to buy for resale congregate there. The northwestern provinces of Cambodia are full of right-hand drive cars from Thailand, in spite of the

fact that Cambodians drive on the left side of the road. Thais guard their

vehicles carefully when they are using them close to the Cambodian border.35

Cambodians have less to offer Thais, but Angkor era antiquities will

always find a buyer, and a lot of money can be made in such a sale. These

days, the theft and sale of antiquities is so well organized that prospective

buyers in Bangkok have been able to pick out stone carvings that are still

in place in certain temples in Cambodia, and have the carving delivered

to them within a matter of days (Coichon and James 1994, p. 49, Preston

2000, p. 100). The Cambodian government cannot afford to guard many of

its ancient temples at night, but given the difficult economic circumstances most Cambodians live with today, even a guard may be easily bribed. The cost of a bribe is small when compared to the profit to be made on a piece of

12th-century sculpture. Thailand's border with Cambodia is 500 miles long; it is not difficult to get a piece of Khmer art out somewhere along the length

ofit(ICOM1996). In many ways the most interesting form of illegal trade between

Thailand and Cambodia is the organized smuggling of goods that occurs

with the active participation of government officials on both sides of the

border. Here profit is made in the avoidance of import/export taxes, which are significant on many items coming into Thailand. Although smuggling occurs the whole length of the Thai-Cambodian border, the most active and

profitable route is the sea route between Koh Kong Province in Cambodia and Trat Province in Thailand. Here the ports are accessible to a range of sources of goods from throughout Southeast Asia, and the transportation of

goods across the sea border is easy to accomplish.

Smuggling through the port system is the most blatant example of gov ernment officials using their positions for profit through the avoidance of

government tax regulations. Customs officials and marines from both

Thailand and Cambodia participate in the profit from this trade, which has been little affected by politics; the national treasuries of both countries are

the poorer for it. In Thailand this smuggling route has never been seriously challenged; it is an important part of the economy in the southern province

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of Trat. In Cambodia in 1994, the then-Minister of Finance Sam Rainsy tried to shut down the most corrupt port on the route, in an effort to clean up the

Cambodian customs department and begin to collect some of the lost rev

enue for the state. For his efforts, he was expelled from his own political party, which cost him his cabinet position and his seat in the National Assembly.

Clearly too many people in the Cambodian government itself were profiting from the smuggling to allow him to continue in such a powerful position.36

There is a range of attitudes about this kind of extra-legal commerce

in the Thai government. It would seem to be in the "national interest" of

Thailand to reduce the extra-legal cross-border trade, implement strong trade regulations, and encourage legitimate business relationships with

Cambodians. In fact this is the attitude of the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which works together with the Commerce Department to try to safeguard the interests of Thais who conduct business with Cambodians. Much of their

work focuses on business investment in Cambodia, a new area of commercial

interaction entirely.37 But the border itself is still under martial law. The Thai

military and the Ministry of the Interior (which supervises all branches of the

police) continue to control what passes across the border. There are strong vested interests in maintaining a status quo of loose regulation, given that

illegal trade is such a good source of income for so many powerful people. At the time the field research for this article was conducted there was

a kind of power struggle going on within the Thai government over who was to control the border itself. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs sets the

border regulations, but the Thai Army in conjunction with the Ministry of

the Interior?the same people who controlled the border in the 1970s and

1980s?is in charge of enforcing these regulations, and many of them have

long-standing business interests there. 838, the special military unit created

to work with the resistance, no longer patrols the border itself because there

is no Cambodian resistance with which to work. A new unit has been cre

ated to deal with any border conflicts that arise, called the Thai Cambodian

Coordinating Office (TCCO). It has branches along the entire length of the

border and works directly with a Cambodian counterpart group on the op

posite side of the border to resolve any issues that may arise. But the TCCO, it turns out, is run by former members of the 838 unit, and its counterpart consists of former members of the resistance (excluding the Khmer Rouge), now absorbed into the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces. These units work

very well together, I was told. This is not surprising since the people involved

have known each other and worked together in business as well as military matters for more than 15 years.

A picture begins to emerge of Thai-Cambodian business relationships

forged on the border in the 1980s in a particular political context, which

persist today in a different context under the guise of new administrative

From Politics to Economics 459

structures and governmental regulations. These relationships have been put to use in this new context to take advantage of new opportunities for trade

in the 1990s. But underlying today's business relationships at the border is a

thirty-year history of distancing, differentiation, and exclusion of Cambodi ans from the benefits of the Thai nation-state. Current trade arrangements

may be profitable for a few canny Cambodians, but the overall effect is one

of exploitation and profiteering at the expense of the Cambodian people as

a whole.38 They could be seen as the outcome of a generalized nationalist,

protectionist stance toward Cambodia on the part of the Thai government. But while official trade policies are justified in terms of their benefits to the

Thai nation as a whole, actual trade practices tend to benefit a small number

of well-positioned or well-connected business interests. They may or may not end up benefiting the nation as a whole.

CONCLUSION

What can we make of all of this?

First, changes in the political stance of the Thai government toward the

state of Cambodia over the last thirty years, and changes in its border policy, can be seen as forms of national differentiation and distinction appropriate to particular moments in Thai (and Cambodian) history. What stance the

Thai government has taken toward the Cambodian government and toward

Khmers in Thailand has been influenced by the presence or absence of war,

perceived threats to the Thai state's territorial integrity and/or the existing government's control of it, the increasing internationalization of commerce,

and the new possibilities for regional trade that these factors create for

Thais. Official policies seem to have little effect on the way Thais and Khmers interact with each other individually, although they may create opportunities for new kinds of relationships that did not exist before.

It is now in Thailand's national economic interest to conduct business with Cambodia?that is at least part of what "battlefields into marketplaces" was all about. How these business relationships are established and carried out says a lot more about how Thais and Cambodians actually think about

each other, however, and good deal about how the Thai state works as well. Thais have been able to profit from Cambodia's material needs through their

ability to offer both goods and markets simply and directly to Cambodian traders. Whether these are good deals for Cambodians or not depends to a great extent upon the competition for their trade. From 1979 until 1991 there was virtually no competition. Thai traders took great advantage of

Cambodians' needs at that time; this is something that Cambodians have not

forgotten. Now, because there is more competition for Cambodia's markets,

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Thais must look for other ways to insure their profit. Generally, profit comes

from the ability to circumvent trade regulations in their business transactions

with Cambodians, and get their goods cheaply to Cambodian markets.

Cambodia represents a particular kind of economic opportunity for

Thai traders: the buyable opportunity. In Cambodia, regulations can always be circumvented; this is a large part of the attraction of doing business there.

Cambodia is, quite literally, the Thai frontier?it is where Thais go to conduct a kind of business that is increasingly difficult to conduct at home. Their less

rough-and-ready business they do well to take elsewhere.39

At the border, the idea of a unified Thai state fractures into many differ

ent interest groups, however, and "national interest" emerges as a resource

deployed by the cleverest of them under the protective coloring of the state.

The Thai army has historically operated in this way along the border, "pro

tecting the integrity of the nation" but all the while profiting richly from

the border trade, which must pass through its checkpoints and render its

"taxes." The timber industry, the gem mining industry, and the building ma

terials companies all work through patronage systems, providing support to

regional politicians as well as the military in exchange for access to goods and markets. The state itself, as embodied in and enacted through the cen

tral government, has changed so many times in the years since the absolute

monarchy was overthrown that these economic interest groups constitute, in a way, its most enduring structures. Chaovolit Yongchayud, for example, has been pursuing his business interests at the Cambodian border since the

early 1980s, first as head of the Royal Thai Army, then as Supreme Com

mander of the Thai Armed Forces under Prime Minister Chatichai, then

in the Banharn government as Minister of Defense, and then as the Prime

Minister of Thailand itself. He currently serves as Deputy Prime Minister

under Thaksin Shinawatra, as well as Minister of Defense.40 These kinds of

business relationships transcend the shifting postures of the state; they build

upon the fundamental needs and opportunities that the border presents, and

the particular opportunities that each new position provides. The Thai "state" has determined that trade with Cambodia is in the

national interest. If particular business arrangements turn out NOT to be

in the collective interest of the nation, the "state" may or may not be in

a position to discipline the offenders. Trading with the Khmer Rouge, for

example, shifted from being entirely within to entirely outside the bounds

of state-sanctioned practice; but it took two years and considerable pressure from the United States for the Thai Prime Minister to put a stop to it. The

highly contingent power of the central government is revealed through this

example. The state is, in many ways, a collection of competing business in

terests working through the structures of parliamentary government. The

common interests of Thai nationals are often hard to identify in its actions.

From Politics to Economics 461

If the Thai state fails, in spite of its nationalist rhetoric, to protect the

interests of all of its people, what about Cambodia? The United Nations

recognizes Cambodia as a sovereign state, but it can scarcely be said yet to constitute a nation. After thirteen centuries of god-kings, ninety years of arrested development under the French, seventeen years of charismatic

dictatorship under Norodom Sihanouk, and seventeen years of civil war in

terrupted by four years of starvation and genocide, the Cambodian nation

is still in its infancy. The failure of "national" governments in the past, the

isolation and deprivation of the people, and their tremendous current needs, all foster a kind of self-protective individualism in Cambodians. "National

interest" has little meaning when everyone, up to the highest levels of power in the government, feels the need to look out for his or her own personal interest first. The Cambodian government itself often seems to function as

little more than an economic opportunity structure. It does not concern itself

very much with governing the country, let alone protecting the collective in terests of the people. Mainly it works to keep itself in power, and individuals use their positions to protect themselves from need, often at the expense of the collective interest of the people. It is in a poor position to protect Cambodians from systematic exploitation at its borders.

In what terms can we talk about systematic exploitation? We have seen

how Thai traders and businessmen take advantage of whatever they can get away with at the border, and how little the Thai government has done to

prevent this. It is the contention of this article that the Thai government's tolerance of these exploitative practices at the border constitutes a new form of transnational "othering." Cambodians are different from Thais; they are

lower; they are non-Thai. They are, in effect, fair game for exploitation because they are different. They are risky business partners because they are so low-down and sneaky, but they are familiar, and this makes them even more

exploitable.41 The difficulty is that Cambodians participate so willingly in their own

collective exploitation as long as the deal benefits them individually. For some people this is simply a matter of options. For many Cambodians who live close to the border, the Thais are the only partners available when it comes to trade. They will take whatever deal they can get because a bad deal

with Thais is usually better than no deal at all. But it is not just a question of need and the lack of options. The most exploitative business arrangements

typically benefit one person at the expense of the collective good. In this case one could say that the Cambodian government's failure to regulate business and trade encourages exploitation, although the same could be said for the Thai government. This situation exists in part because very few

people in Cambodia at this moment in history are capable of thinking beyond their personal gain, regardless of their objective level of wealth. There is a

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kind of collective insecurity, a collective fear of once again being without, a collective doubt that any good fortune will last, and a collective mistrust

of any institutional strategies for dealing with the society's problems (and this mistrust is well-founded: Cambodians have repeatedly been let down

by their institutions) that causes people as powerful as the Prime Minister

to ignore their own regulations and sacrifice the collective interest of the

people for the sake of personal gain.42 Have actual relationships between Thais and Khmers changed much

over the last thirty years? I do not think so. The political and economic con

texts for the relationships have changed, and relations between the Thai and

Cambodian governments have changed. But underneath this superstructure, similar patterns of interaction persist. There is an enduring sense of superi

ority when Thais think about Cambodians. "They are lower than us when it

comes to development," one Thai professor told me.43 At an individual level, this sense of superiority enables Thais to behave in an exploitative fashion

toward Khmers, because as lower beings they do not require the same kind

of consideration that an equal would. Cambodians confirm this evaluation

by behaving in self-protective and self-serving ways that Thais read as un

trustworthy. Personal relationships are the basis of the cross-border trade, which many Thais engage in because there is so much money to be made. But

everyone acknowledges that it is risky, because fundamentally they believe

that Cambodians cannot be trusted. For Thais, trading with Cambodians is a calculated risk, which may be part of the reason for the often exploitative terms of the exchange.

There are many reasons why Cambodians might behave in "untrustwor

thy" ways toward Thais?desperation, revenge, an opportunity for greater

profit, the unexpected inability to meet the terms of the exchange. Many of these reasons can be attributed to historical circumstances: to the still

quite desperate straits in which Cambodians find themselves, emerging as

they are, in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge disaster, from a long history of thwarted development. While these explanations seem to make intuitive

sense it is well to treat them with caution. There is a dynamic relationship between Thais and Cambodians to which both sides contribute. If it hap

pens to be a particularly poisonous dynamic at this moment in history, it is

hard to attribute blame clearly to one side or the other. Although they are

at very different stages in their national development, neither state seems

capable of promoting the collective interests of its people, or preventing

powerful figures from promoting their own interests at the expense of the

collectivity. What does seem clear is that long-standing, dynamic "ethnic" relation

ships between Thais and Khmers became something much more threatening

during the 1970s, when the consequences of nationality were magnified for

From Politics to Economics 463

everyone in Thailand and Cambodia, but especially for those people living in the border areas. While it may not have mattered much before, it came to

matter a great deal then whether one was Thai or Cambodian. The powerful experiences of the 1970s alienated Cambodians from Thais, and vice versa;

they gave people good reason to be suspicious of each other. New efforts to

promote regional, transnational trade have not changed that dynamic much. The same kind of mistrust and "othering" goes on now, in the guise of trad

ing relationships, that occurred at the border throughout the 1980s, when Thai guards patrolled Cambodian refugee camps and maintained a protec tive buffer at its border in the form of the Cambodian resistance. This is

really not a new form of ethnic accommodation or regional cooperation, but rather a new way of acting out the differences that Thais and Khmers have come to feel about each other since the 1970s, with the tacit encouragement of both the Thai and Cambodian states.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was made possible by a grant from the Sasakawa Peace Foundation. It was conducted in conjunction with a program entitled "Culture and Identity: Ethnic Coexistence in Asia," organized by the In ternational Centre for Ethnic Studies in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Additional

support for manuscript preparation was provided by the Wenner-Gren Foun dation for Anthropological Research in New York and the Rhode Island School of Design.

I thank Thongchai Winichakul and Conrad Taylor for their generous permission to reproduce the poster of Thailand's threatening neighbors, David Wyatt for his assistance with maps, and Chae Ho Lee for his won derful production of them.

All anthropological research is collaborative, and involves the incursion of debt. Given the sensitive nature of this research topic, I was particularly dependent upon the openness and trust of my interlocutors, in both Thailand and Cambodia. But for the same reason it would be impolitic to acknowl

edge each person by name. I want to express my appreciation collectively to everyone who contributed to the research, however. I know who you are, and I am very grateful for the assistance I was offered.

Three people can safely be thanked by name, and deserve to be sin

gled out. Andrea Crossland provided hospitality, humor, keen insight, and her own good company in both Thailand and Cambodia?I cannot imagine how I would have done this project without her. Komatra Chuengsatiansup offered ever-thoughtful assistance in the form of observations, insights, and introductions from the project's very beginning. Larry Carney addressed his

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analytic attention to several drafts of this paper, clarified what it was really about, and refused to let it go unpublished. I am extremely grateful.

ENDNOTES

1. Ethnographic research for this study included twenty months at the Thai-Cambodian

border between 1989 and 1991, where I collected oral histories in a camp for displaced Cambodians in Prachinburi province (Thailand), and two months at the border in 1996, where I looked specifically at cross-border trade between Thais and Cambodians, from

both sides of the border. I conducted much of this later field research at or near the Klong

Luek/Poipet checkpoint between Aranyaprathet (Prachinburi province) and Sisophon

(Banteay Meanchey province, in Cambodia), where much of the recent commercial trad

ing between the two countries has been focused. Other legal trade routes between the two

countries include the Chong Chom pass between Surin province (Thailand) and Siemriep

province (Cambodia), and shipping routes between the southern ports of Trat in Thailand, and Koh Kong and Kompong Som, in southwestern Cambodia. I visited and talked with

people in Surin and Kompong Som, Cambodia's only deep water sea port, as well (see

Maps 1 and 2). Thailand's border with Cambodia is over 500 miles long, however, and

smuggling occurs along most of it: illegal and quasi-legal trade is a large part of the overall

picture. My information about illegal and quasi-legal cross-border trade comes from many of the same people who spoke to me about the legal trade, since the two are closely related.

Interviews in Bangkok and Phnom Penh and two month-long research trips to Cambodia

in 1991 and 1994 also inform the research.

Note that the field research for this paper was conducted before the July 1997 cur

rency crisis in Thailand, and before the coup in Cambodia, also of July 1997, in which the

first Prime Minister (Norodom Ranarrhidh) was overthrown by the second Prime Minis ter (Hun Sen). These events significantly affected the conditions under which Thais and

Cambodians interact at their common border, particularly in the immediate aftermath the

coup. I do not believe they have affected the overall dynamic of interaction which this pa

per describes; however, this paper does not deal firsthand with events that have occurred

in the last four years. 2. The last country-wide population census in Cambodia was conducted in 1962; since then,

there have been major changes in the composition and structure of the population due

to war, starvation, targeted genocide, and considerable in- and out-migration. In 1995 the

National Institute of Statistics of Cambodia released a demographic profile of the country, which estimated that more than 90% of the population was now Khmer. See "Cambo

dia: Demographic Profile" 1995. For the most detailed recent discussion of changes in

Cambodia's population structure, see "After the Nightmare: the Population of Cambodia"

by Judith Bannister and Paige Johnson, 1993.

3. See "Cambodia: Demographic Profile" produced by the National Institute of Statistics in

Cambodia, and published by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Publication

date is 1995; the figures were collected in 1992.

4. In 1794, after 13 years of chaos following regicide in Cambodia, the Siamese court invested

a new Cambodian king and established him in Phnom Penh with a coterie of Thai advisors,

setting up a tributary relationship. The western provinces of Battambang and Siemriep came under their direct control, with a Siamese governor. In 1867, four years after the es

tablishment of the French Protectorate in Cambodia, Siam gave up their claim of suzerainty in all of Cambodia except the western provinces. Not until the Franco-Siamese treaty of

1907 were they turned back to Cambodia and into French control. At the end of World

War II Thailand briefly regained then relinquished control of these provinces once again. 5. Keyes (1991) has shown that even though it relinquished political sovereignty in these

provinces, Thailand has continued to lay some claim to the ancient Angkorean culture of

From Politics to Economics 465

the region. Thai authorities refer to the ancient culture as "khom" to distinguish it from

modern Khmer, and present the Angkor era temples at Phimai and Phanom Rung, located

in what is now northeast Thailand, as forebears of Thai culture (see Map 2). A scale model

of the famous Angkor Wat complex (located in Siemriep Province) has been built in Wat

Phra Keo, adjoining the Grand Palace in the center of Bangkok, an odd statement about

the relationship between Angkor Empire and the Thai monarchy. 6. Note that while the country name "Siam" persisted until 1939, by 1902 the term "Thai"

was used in treaties with the French to refer to the people of Siam. Streckfuss suggests this was done to downplay the importance of the Siamese and emphasize the multiethnic

nature of the kingdom. 7. See the Immigration Act, B.E. 2522 (1979), and the Nationality Act (No. 3), B.E. 2535

(1992). 8. See Katherine Bowie's Rituals of National Loyalty (1997) for an excellent discussion of

the Thai government's reaction to the threat of communist insurgency, both within and

outside of its borders.

9. The caption below the figure reads "Wake Up, Thailand !" The inscription inside the map of Thailand reads "We have already lost 352,877 square kilometers of our territory. Only 514,000 square kilometers are left." This poster was circulated in 1986. See Winichakul

1994, pp. 164-174.

10. One official UNHCR refugee camp, Khao I Dang, was opened in Thailand in late 1979; it

was closed to new entrants two months later. See Shawcross 1983 for details of the politics

surrounding these decisions by the Thai government. 11. See introduction to "Documents on the Kampuchean Problem 1979-1985" published by

the Department of Political Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Bangkok, 1985, for the

Thai government's perspective. 12. There were, of course, exceptions. People who were able to find someone to take them

in and give them work melted quietly into the Thai population. Few Cambodians came

with money, but those who did could buy a Thai identity card. Later on, when the Khmer

resistance factions got organized, the leadership took up residence in Thailand, buying

property, and sending their kids to Thai schools. But in a way the exceptions prove the

rule: if people were useful, they could "become Thai." Upwards of one million desperate Cambodians?the number of people at the Thai border in early 1980?were not considered

useful to Thailand, and they were kept out.

13. This, again, was the official policy. There were businessmen in all the member states who circumvented the embargo, and made tremendous profits in trade.

14. These labels are very local. In Cambodia itself the term 'Khmer loeu' refers to the upland tribal people, while 'Khmer kraom' refers to ethnic Khmer living in the Mekong River

delta, once part of the kingdom of Cambodia but now within the territory of Vietnam.

15. Ethnic Thais were involved in this trade as well. Some lived in Cambodia's northwest

provinces, which had been under Siamese control from 1794 to 1907. 16. The only kind of wealth Cambodians had been able to hold onto through the Khmer Rouge

period was that which they could conceal. Thus if people brought anything with them to

trade at the border it was in the form of gold or jewelry. Needless to say, the refugees were

in no position to bargain, and their carefully concealed wealth disappeared very quickly at

the border.

17. The Vietnamese suffered under same political and economic embargo that Cambodia did, so imports were in great demand. This was a lucrative trade route in the early 1980s until

the Phnom Penh government cracked down on the smugglers and put an end to it. 18. These claims are, of course, difficult to document. Much of my evidence comes from

interviews with Thai immigration officials, Border Patrol Police, the Head of the Thai

Cambodian Border Liaison Office and a retired career Thai army officer who had also worked for the UN, as well as Thai businessmen involved in cross-border trade and long term employees of the UN Border Relief Operation, some of whom stayed on to monitor the border as Protection Officers after the repatriation of Khmer from the Thai border

camps. Written evidence, where available, is cited below.

466 French

19. For a concise and very informative discussion of the Thai economy in the 1980s and early

1990s, see Pongpaichit and Baker, 1996. For an unpdated version which addresses the

recent Asian financial crisis, see Pongpaichit and Baker, 1998.

20. Klong Luek was the largest border crossing before 1975 as well: there are train tracks that

run from Klong Luek to both Bangkok and Phnom Penh (the tracks are no longer linked), and large customs houses stand empty on both sides of the border, relics of an earlier era.

New customs offices have been built closer to the checkpoint itself.

21. In the summer of 1996, construction was booming in Cambodia. However, after the July 1997 coup, in which one co-prime minister was deposed by the other, tourism dropped

dramatically, and many foreign investors and donors left the country ( see the Phnom Penh

Post, vol. 6, no. 4, Nov./Dec. 1997). Since the 1998 election, when Hun Sen was re-elected to

the position of Prime Minister, tourism has increased and much of the foreign development

activity has resumed.

22. Although most of the earlier border trade was conducted between Thais and members

of the resistance coalition, this particular smuggling route was arranged with Cambodian

government officials, with whom the Thai government had no formal relationship. It is a

good example of the fact that political differences do not get in the way of a good business

deal at the border.

23. This road work was part of Thailand's contribution to the UN effort to repatriate Cam

bodian refugees from the border camps between 1991 and 1993. Thus the road was used

initially to transport people; after the repatriation it became a primary trade route.

24. See "Cambodia: Still Waiting for Peace" Oxfam America, 1995. All of the figures quoted are conservative estimates, as the actual figures are fundamentally unknowable.

25. See "Base Area Doctrine, The Pailin Blue Sapphire Trade, and the Solution to the Problem

of the Khmer Rouge" Allen P.K. Keesee, Cambodia Study Group, 1993.

26. See Phnom Penh Post, vol. 5, no. 17 (August 23-Sept. 5,1996). 27. Thak Chaloemtiarana, personal communication.

28. See "Forest Policy Assessment: Cambodia" a joint report of the World Bank, the United

Nations Development Programme, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the

United Nations, June 1996.

29. The best source of information on the timber industry in Cambodia, and especially on

the links between Thai logging businesses, the Thai military, and the Khmer Rouge, are a

series of reports issued by Global Witness, a London based non-profit organization which

explores the links between environmental exploitation and human rights abuse. See Global

Witness reports, March 1995, July 1995, February 1996 and May 1996, December 1999, May

2000, and June 2001. See also articles in the Phnom Penh Post, vol. 4, no. 5 (March 24-April

6,1995); vol. 5, no. 7 (April 5-18,1996); vol. 5, no. 8 (April 19-May 2,1996); vol. 5, no. 17

(August 23-Sept. 5,1996); and vol. 5, no. 19 (Sept. 20-Oct. 3 1996); and letters to the editor

in vol. 5, no. 16 (Aug. 9-22) and vol. 5, no. 24 (Nov. 29-Dec. 12,1996). 30. In October 1997 the International Monetary Fund canceled a $120 million loan to the

Cambodian government because it had failed after a year of probation to implement a

procedure for monitoring the cutting of timber and collecting the taxes owed by logging concessionaires. See the Phnom Penh Post vol. 5, no. 20 (November 29-December 12,

1997). 31. See Phnom Penh Post, vol. 5, no. 7 (April 5-28,1996) and vol. 5, no. 24 (November 29-Dec.

12,1996). 32. Things have improved since then. In 1999, the IMF granted a three-year, $80 million

poverty reduction and growth facilitation loan, after Prime Minister Hun Sen set up a

Forestry Crimes Monitoring Unit and promised to establish new concession agreements and crack down on illegal logging. These measures dramatically decreased the level of

anarchic logging and illegal export of timber from Cambodia. More recently, however,

Global Witness has documented corruption within the FCMU, and an increase in illegal

logging by legal concessionaires. See Global Witness press release "The Credibility Gap and the Need to Bridge It?Increasing the Pace of Forestry Reform," June 8, 2001.

33. See Phnom Penh Post, vol. 5, no. 17 (August 23-Sept. 5,1996).

From Politics to Economics 467

34. The role of the military in Thai politics has been extensively studied. See for example Chaloemtiarana 1979; Bunbongkarn 1987; Samudavanija, Snitwongse, and Bunbongkarn 1990; Phongpaichit and Piriyarangsan 1994; and Bowie 1997. For a muckraking review of

the military's role in business through politics, see Sesser, 1993.

35. I was told it takes about an hour to sell a motorcycle stolen in Surin town at the closest

border crossing, the Chong Chom Pass. This is fast work, as it takes almost an hour just to

get to Chong Chom from Surin. I was also told (by a Border Patrol Police officer) that a

crackdown on the smuggling of cars only occurs when the military feel they are not getting an adequate cut.

36. In March 1997 Rainsy was rewarded with a bloody assassination attempt for his ongoing

critique of corruption in government. Rainsy survived, but sixteen other people were killed

and over 100 were wounded. Although nobody has been brought to trial for this attack, it is widely believed to have been masterminded by Hun Sen's bodyguards. See Phnom

Penh Post, vol. 6, #7 (April 4-17, 1997) and vol. 6, #11 (May 30-June 12 1997). Rainsy has founded his own political party and continues as the Cambodian government's most

outspoken critic, protected now primarily by his international visibility. 37. Thai businessmen working in Cambodia have not done especially well, however. Business

in Cambodia is utterly without regulation or recourse; it is risky in the extreme. Initially Thai businessmen were keen on getting in on the ground floor of Cambodia's commercial

development. But after two major business deals fell through?a national airline and a large casino project?and a lot of money was lost, Thai investors have been much more cautious.

The number of Thai business investments in Cambodia dropped from 88 in 1991 to 21 in

1996. Thais tend to feel they are getting beaten in business in Cambodia by Malaysians and Singaporeans. See The Cambodia Daily, vol. 8, issue 7, June 21-23,1996.

38. Another important cross-border commodity that this article has not addressed is migrant labor. Although it is technically illegal for non-Thais to work in Thailand without a special visa, certain industries actually recruit labor in Cambodia because they can pay below min

imum wage, and get rid of surplus labor whenever they want to by calling the immigration

police. Alien labor fits into the Thai economy in a similar way that illegal trade fits into the

Thai economy: by working with cost differentials, supply, and demand, huge profits can be

made through the backdoor exploitation of Cambodians' need for work. An analysis of

illegal Cambodian labor in Thailand would serve as an appropriate companion piece to

this article. 39. Interestingly, the Cambodian side of the Thai-Cambodian border is now the site of a grow

ing number of extremely lucrative gambling casinos that cater primarily to Thai patrons.

Illegal in Thailand, these casinos have appeared on the border since 1999, when Prime Minister Hun Sen closed down sixty-five casinos in Phnom Penh and banned them from

within 200 kilometers of the city, citing a host of social problems which he blamed on them. The Bangkok Post estimates that Thai gamblers lose 200 million baht a month at the Poipet casinos alone. See Bangkok Post April 18, 2001.

40. See Battersby, 1998, p. 477 for an example of Chaovolit's economic diplomacy with respect to Burma. See also The Nation, "Opinion/Regional Perspective: Chavalit is back with a

vengeance" (3/5/01) for an example of his most recent private initiatives toward Burma, in contravention of his own government's diplomatic stance. This article describes very

well the historic military/civilian split in the Thai government's foreign policy toward its

neighbors. See below.

41. Cambodians are not the only "low" group considered fair game for exploitation. This kind of "othering" and exploitation occurs among Thais of different social status as well. The difference is that "othering" Cambodians strengthens a Thai's sense of national superiority, not simply an individual's sense of higher status. See Thongchai 1994, final chapter.

42. Sam Rainsy's experience sounds a cautionary note: even if one works hard to protect the collective interests of the people in Cambodia, there are powerful forces ready to subvert the effort because this inevitably gets in the way of other peoples' personal gain.

43. The same professor added that in, the past, Khmers were superior to Thais culturally. This unstable inequality makes Thais a bit nervous, he said.

468 French

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