When the War Was Over by Elizabeth Becker Page A

century. Previously, it was home to the Chams, who were among the rivals of the Khmers.) These Kampuchea Krom immigrants became the most ardent of nationalists in subsequent years, the favorite recruits of both the American CIA and the Khmer Republic.
    The Buddhist Institute quickly became the focus of a new intellectual life in this new crucial period between the world wars. The French built only a minimal, elite system of secular schools in Cambodia. Otherwise, they merely altered the curriculum taught by the monks in the country’s native pagoda schools. The youth in Cambodia were largely taught by monks, who were responsible for the high literacy rate in the country, far higher than in Vietnam, and the Institute easily gained a position as the fullest expression of Buddhist education in Cambodia. It also discouraged Cambodians from traveling to Thailand for further Buddhist education; in Bangkok it was easy for Cambodians to pick up dangerous anti-French, independent ideas from Thai Buddhists.
    The French aided other cultural institutions, particularly the arts. They reconstituted the royal ballet, built museums to house Khmer antiquities, and established schools where the arts could be taught to the younger generation. In 1920, Georges Groslier founded the School of Cambodian Arts to reverse the trends set off by colonial economic policies. Severe taxes on the country’s harvests and importation of cheap Western goods had ruined the market for local artistic objects. Buddhist bonzes who once employed retinues of native artisans no longer could afford to finance Cambodian art and were buying paper flowers and Western bric-a-brac for pagoda altars. Groslier’s school revived the artisan tradition and preserved Cambodian painting, silverwork, carving, and the other art forms.
    The French administration had done little to nurture a transformation of the Khmer economy. There was nearly no attempt at modernization. The major industrial development in colonial Indochina under the French was in agriculture and mining, primarily in Vietnam. In Cambodia the French introduced plantations, mostly rubber but also for coffee and other export commodities. They indirectly promoted one sector of the economy—the Chinese moneylenders—by severely taxing the peasants’ harvests. The peasants responded by showing less inclination to increase their rice production. The taxes and their debts to the moneylenders put them in a new cycle of poverty that often proved inescapable.

    To French administrators this behavior sealed the stereotype of the lazy Cambodians. A visiting American historian of French Indochina, a woman named Virginia Thompson, captured the French attitude toward the Cambodians in this contemporary account written in 1937: “The contrast is striking between a glorious past, an insouciant and gay present, and a future—in all probability—disastrous. . . . Many [French] feel that it seems almost hopeless to patch up a decadent race which makes no move to help itself. They will never be able to equal their ancestors artistically, politically, or spiritually. Their economic future is more than dubious. They are doomed to disappear before the Annamite [Vietnamese] immigration. . . .”
    Cambodians like Sihanouk and Pol Pot grew up with this condemnation by their foreign rulers. The French brought indentured Vietnamese laborers to work in Cambodian rubber plantations rather than trust “lazy” Cambodians. Nor was modern education encouraged. Cambodia did not have a French lycée until 1935, and then the majority of students were Vietnamese and French. Children of the Cambodian elite, like Sihanouk, grandson of King Norodom, were sent to study in Vietnam at French lycées.
    Nor had the French fostered a large native administration in Cambodia, in contrast to Vietnam. The Vietnamese continued to fill bureaucratic roles in Phnom Penh. There was the tiniest of new educated modern elite,