Chinese New Year

Cambodia has quite a few holidays. Perhaps this is because people here never get a day off from work. Most of them work on holidays, anyway. I have a long weekend because of the Chinese New Year. There are no classes Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I'm going to take the opportunity to go to the beach at Sihanoukville and relax. After that it's seven straight weeks of classes with no breaks. My schedule this term is insane, so it's going to be a tiring two months.

Here they celebrate their Khmer New Year, what they call the International New Year on December 31 and the Chinese New Year. The latter is a bit of a sticky issue. Cambodia is heavily reliant on China financially and militarily. I've read that the bulk of the national budget here is funded by Chinese aid.

Shortly after I arrived last year a truly horrifying thing happened. After riots in the far western Chinese city of Urumqi, 22 people fled to Cambodia. They were members of an ethnic minority called Uighurs, most of whom are Muslim. They were seeking asylum in Cambodia. Under international law there was absolutely no question that they should have been allowed to stay.

The Cambodian government deported 20 of them back to China, over a chorus of outrage from foreign governments and human rights groups. (Two were and I believe still are missing.) They were deported on a Saturday. Two days later Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping was in Phnom Penh to sign agreements to give the Cambodian government $1.2 billion in aid.

A Cambodian government spokesperson said "China thanked the government of Cambodia for assistance in sending back those people to China because under Chinese law these people are criminals. This represents cooperation by the two sides." Cooperation!

To my knowledge no one has been able to find out what happened to these people in China. It is generally assumed they were all tortured and killed. Among the group were two children and a baby. The government here condemned those people to death for money.

Horrifying

Lest we judge too hastily from our comfortable western corner of the world, let's examine the situation. Cambodia is a small, poor country wedged between two bigger, more populous and more ambitious countries. The Thais and Vietnamese make no secret of their wish to carve up the country and wipe Cambodia off the map. People die with distressing regularity in border disputes.

Lately the Thai "Yellow Shirts", the fanatically royalist, whack-job faction that shut down the airport in 2008 has been protesting (again) to get the government to take a stronger stance in the border dispute with Cambodia. All the fuss is over Preah Vihear, a temple on the border. The Thais want Preah Vihear, but in 1962 the International Court of Justice in The Hague awarded the temple to Cambodia determined that it belongs to Cambodia.

Here we go again

Thailand and Vietnam have, shall we say, troubled relationships with China. Cozying up to the Chinese government means that border disputes between Cambodia and its neighbors might result in a few people getting shot to death from time to time, but won't escalate into war. If you don't want people starting fights with you, you make friends with the biggest, baddest guy on the playground. Where would Cambodia be without China? It might be gone.

Even if you remove the complicated history from the equation, the holiday still is a complicated issue. Why celebrate the Chinese New Year in Cambodia? For me, the answer is simple. It gives me four days at the beach, so bring it on!