This chapter focuses on crime during the first two decades of the twentieth century, from 1900 to 1920. High levels of crime and violence characterised this period, and frequently rebellions merged with predatory and social banditry. However, at the end of this period, crime and violence started to decline. This decline was in great part associated with significant processes of state formation, notably important administrative and judicial reforms as well as more efficient policing institutions and practices gradually implemented during these two decades.
We have seen in the preceding chapter that the French intervention in Cambodia in the middle of the nineteenth century put an end to the threat of violence associated with Thai and Vietnamese invasions and also, at least until 1890, to internal wars of succession. On the other hand, the series of insurrections and rebellions, starting in 1864 with the uprising led by Achar Sva and ending in 1916 with nationwide peasant demonstrations, has shown that the colonial enterprise was resisted and at times massively and violently confronted. In this context, and particularly during the first 60 years of the French Protectorate, what were the types, patterns, and trends of crime and violence in Cambodia? Did the modernising project of the colonial power affect them, and if it did, then in what ways? In short, which forms did violence and crime take and how were they understood and responded to in the premodern peasant society of Cambodia under a colonial power whose espoused mission was to bring modernity?
Banditry, crime, and justice before 1910
The data that we were able to gather do not allow us to estimate rates of crime and banditry before 1910. Our description of patterns and trends in criminality during the first decade of the twentieth century draws from both primary and secondary sources; however, primary sources were patchy and most of the description only provides a qualitative account of the violence and crime in Cambodia between 1870 and 1910. First, we examine the characteristics and spread of banditry, which at that time and later was the main crime problem of the Protectorate. Next, we turn to common crime in the capital Phnom Penh and the provinces before discussing the emerging policing and judicial systems the French administration attempted to establish. In this section we use historical works on Cambodia such as Chandler (Reference Chandler2008), Forest (Reference Forest1980), Guérin (Reference Guérin2008), and Tully (Reference Tully2002) as well as some primary data from French Colonial Archives. These archival data consist of both monthly and yearly reports by the Résident Supérieur of Cambodia (RSC) and court data for Phnom Penh and some provincial courts.Footnote 1
Banditry
By the end of the nineteenth century banditry had almost disappeared from most of Europe, but in South East Asia it remained widespread during the nineteenth century and in some places up to the middle of the twentieth century (Bauzon, 1991). Rural banditry was a common phenomenon in most premodern peasant societies, and it flourished when the state was weak and corruption rampant. Cambodia was no exception, and banditry was endemic well before French colonisation (see Chandler, Reference Chandler2008; Forest, Reference Forest1980; Tully, Reference Tully1996, Reference Tully2002). In the 1880s banditry was so widespread that its repression became one of the first preoccupations of the colonial authorities. Hobsbawm (Reference Hobsbawm1969, pp. 33–4), drawing on European examples, suggested that bandits emerged essentially from the peasantry, particularly ‘from the rural surplus population’, but also included ex-soldiers and deserters. As elsewhere, this was the case in Cambodia, where, as we will see, bandits also counted a number of escaped convicts. In addition, the Cambodian landscape, particularly the mountainous and forested areas, the monsoons that transformed the shape and size of rivers and lakes, the porous borders, and the absence of good roads offered an ideal terrain for roaming groups of bandits. This was typical of other premodern societies, and Hobsbawm (Reference Hobsbawm1969) remarked: ‘It is commonplace that brigands flourish in remote and inaccessible areas such as mountains, trackless plains, fenland, forest, or estuaries with their labyrinth of creeks and waterways, where pre-industrial travel is naturally both slow and cumbrous. The construction of good and fast roads is often enough to diminish banditry notably’ (p. 21).
Social and common bandits
Hobsbawm distinguished between two main kinds of banditry: the mercenary type, which comprised common robbers, and the social type, which comprised individuals who robbed the rich and powerful, supported the poor, and sometimes led peasant rebellions. All peasant societies have produced heroic social bandits, some of whom became legendary like Robin Hood in thirteenth-century England, Cartouche and Mandrin in eighteenth-century France, and Mas Dyakaria and Entong Gendut in nineteenth-century Java (Kartodirdjo, in Bauzon, Reference Bauzon1991). In Cambodia, we have met Sena Ouch (Chapter 1) and will soon meet A-Chan, who were active in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, respectively. Depending on the particular cultural characteristics of these premodern societies, peasants were likely to applaud, even if silently, the targeting by social bandits of moneylenders, merchants, tax collectors, foreigners, ‘and others who upset the traditional life of the peasants’ (Hobsbawm, Reference Hobsbawm1959, p. 22). However, if these societies ‘know rich and poor, powerful and weak, rulers and ruled, they remain profoundly and tenaciously traditional and pre-capitalist in structure…The bandit is a pre-political phenomenon and his strength is in inverse proportion to that of agrarian revolution and socialism or communism’ (Hobsbawm, Reference Hobsbawm1959, p. 23). Social banditry also increased when crises, famines, and wars profoundly disrupted the traditional world of the peasantry and during ‘moments when the jaws of the dynamic modern world seiz[ed] the static communities in order to destroy or transform them’ (Hobsbawm, Reference Hobsbawm1959, p. 24).
In the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, Cambodian society was regularly shaken by such crises and upheavals and notably by continual attempts by the colonial power to transform the structure of this society. Widespread and endemic banditry, therefore, was a normal response not only to the structural anomie of a weak, shattered, and corrupt state but also to the developmental anomie brought about by the efforts of the colonisers to transform society. In a context where the peasantry was suffering from state failure not only to ensure security from civil wars but also to resist changes imposed by foreigners, millenarian rebels and social bandits seen as criminals by the state had a very different status in the peasant communities where they came from. They were ‘considered by their people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped and supported’ (Hobsbawm, Reference Hobsbawm1969, p. 18). However, writing about Cambodia, Tully (Reference Tully2002) warned: ‘It would be wrong to romanticize the bandits. The results of their raids on Khmer villages were often horrific. When Huy KanthoulFootnote 2 was a young child, he accidentally stumbled on a bloodstained cart, around which were a number of severed heads, the aftermath of a clash between bandits and villagers’ (p. 165).
The difference between social and common banditry was often blurred by the fact that ‘a man may be a social bandit on his native mountains and a mere robber on the plain’ (Hobsbawm, Reference Hobsbawm1969, p. 18). The colonial administration also tended to characterise as banditry any type of resistance against it and to consider that peasant support for bandits was motivated by fear of reprisals rather than by genuine sympathy. Whereas in many cases, but not all, fear of reprisals certainly played a role in the peasants’ lack of resistance so decried by the administration, the amalgamation of the political with the criminal has always been a distinctive response of ruling powers when confronted with subaltern/paralegal forms of contestation. Forest (Reference Forest1980) also noted the amalgamation of banditry with localised violent popular protest and contestations.
The bandits of Cambodia
Nonetheless, the colonial archives distinguished between professional bandits, who operated in large and well-armed bands and often specialised in rustling livestock on the Siamese and Vietnamese borders, and destitute peasants, who joined their ranks or formed small bands of thieves and robbers during periods of acute hardship. Souyris-Rolland (Reference Souyris-Rolland1950, p. 427) described three types of Cambodian ‘brigands’ (chor). The first type, chor plan (bandits), were armed and organised in bands. He likened them to the highway robbers of medieval Europe who ‘became the “gangsters” [in English in the French text] of modern times’. The second type, chor luoch (professional thieves, burglars), worked alone or in duo and were reluctant to use force; ‘their principal weapon was cunning’. The third type, chor han tayong (sneak), were the pickpockets who worked in full daylight on the markets. According to Souyris-Rolland, the ‘real’ bandits and the most feared and dangerous type were the chor plan, who in groups ‘methodically, professionally, got into the theft of livestock and valuable objects either to sell them or exchange them for a ransom, or even to destroy them…as an act of revenge’. People talked about chor plan ‘with mixed feelings of fear, admiration, and respect’. Apparently, peasants welcomed them in their village not only because they could be hired as hit men ‘to enact a revenge by proxy…against a neighbour who had harmed them or of whom they were jealous’ but also because local chor plan protected the village against other bandits.
Apprentices in banditry were generally recruited from young men who had learnt boxing, wrestling, or stick fighting and who competed in sporting events during festivals. Their teachers (krou) were also versed in the art of tattooing and claimed they increased the strength and agility of their students using the magical powers of symbols tattooed on various parts of the body. When these young men joined a group of bandits, they acquired the skills necessary for the preparation and completion of successful robbing expeditions through strenuous training under the supervision of the leader (me chor), who punished disobedience or disloyalty with death and whose authority was absolute (Souyris-Rolland, Reference Souyris-Rolland1950, p. 427).
Before launching an attack, usually at night and rarely in their own area, bandits consulted a kind of astrological calendar, the yeam krala, to calculate the most propitious day and time for the expedition. Each bandit was allotted a specific task, and after the performance of a myriad of occult rituals the band was ready for action:
Following the signal of the leader each bandit hurries to fulfil his prearranged mission. Whilst some take hold of the livestock and run away with it, others smash the doors of the house with axes, and, amidst the screams of the women and children, they steal all the valuable goods. Two men hasten to assault the master of the house and get the keys of the trunks and force him to reveal where he hides his money. If he does not respond quickly enough to the bandits’ demands, he may be wounded…Other bandits, armed with guns, have been positioned around the targeted house; their job is to fire at anyone approaching…In general, the leader does not directly take part in the action but supervises the operations in order to signal the withdrawal. Sometimes one of the lookouts is wounded by a villager and cannot flee when the time comes. The leader, who brings up the rear, gets to the man and cuts his throat in order to prevent his capture and the risk that he would reveal the names of the band members when questioned by the authorities.
Although professional bandits were ready to kill people if necessary, they were essentially robbers rather than murderers, and banditry in the mid nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was seldom lethal for the victims.Footnote 3 It is not that most of them were social bandits of the ‘noble’ type described by Hobsbawm (Reference Hobsbawm1969), although some certainly were. For example, in 1918, the peasants had already made the bandit A-Chan legendary during his lifetime, as the Résident of Battambang reported:
…a band of well-established evildoers under the command of the notorious A-Chan whom popular imagination represents as operating successively within and outside our borders, depending on circumstances, at time resurrecting him after having persistently spread the rumour of his death, at times representing him as a vagabond hounded everywhere, rejected by society, living in poverty in the mountain, subsisting from herbs and roots, and at other times attributing to him all kinds of riches and delights, living in royal opulence, heeded and feared by all, spreading his authority and his cruelty in many faraway places.
According to Hobsbawm's (Reference Hobsbawm1969) typology of social banditry, A-Chan would have been idealised by the peasantry as both an enlightened rebel, wild and frugal, and as a feared and cruel ‘avenger…whose terror actually forms part of their public image…who are heroes not in spite of the fear and horror their actions inspire but in some ways because of them. They are not so much men who right wrongs, but avengers and users of power [whose] appeal is not that of the agents of justice, but of men who prove that even the poor and weak can be terrible’ (p. 58). Among the bandits, A-Chan had earned the title of Dang-Khao (the powerful), ‘a title that is granted only to professional wrongdoers and band leaders who have gained by their prowess and first class acts of banditry the respect of their men’ (Résident of Battambang, 1918). ‘First class acts of banditry’ were unlikely to have targeted poor peasants, particularly given the widespread support he appeared to have enjoyed among them.
Even if we consider only the mercenary type of bandits, a likely reason for the relatively low number of lethal attacks is not only the rudimentary state of their weaponry but mainly that their victims knew they generally risked injuries or death only if they resisted or attempted to capture the bandits. Although the protectors encouraged resistance, they were aware of the reason why many villagers avoided doing so: ‘In many areas where looters’ attacks occur, the inhabitants run away at the first gunshot and, no doubt, any vague desire on their part to resist would often force us to register not just armed robberies but assassinations followed by pillage and arson’ (RSC, 1913 [RSC 430]).
The cowardice of the villagers, who ‘fly away at the noise of a firecracker’ (RSC, April 1909 [RSC 263]), soon became an integral part of the racial discourse on the ‘inherent character of the Khmers’. In 1914, the RSC lamented that the bandits ‘are generally not well armed but they use ploys that scare the populations; thus, for instance, they throw crackers when they reach the spot of their operation and the distraught inhabitants run away, leaving them a free hand’ (RSC 430). A possible explanation for the reluctance of the peasants to confront the bandits is that the latter belonged to the social type and they targeted village chiefs who had just collected taxes or Chinese merchants and moneylenders. More often, however, and particularly during the frequent periods of distress that pushed many destitute individuals into banditry, the main victims of mercenary banditry were ordinary villagers who gradually took a more active if not completely voluntary role in fighting it.
Trends and patterns in banditry
Rates of banditry were closely associated with periods of political and social unrest, economic downturns, poor harvests, as well as wars and the collapse of administrative systems. Hobsbawm (Reference Hobsbawm1969) pointed out that ‘all such catastrophes were likely to multiply banditry of one kind or another…all were likely to pass away, [but] political breakdowns and wars were also likely to leave behind bands of marauders or other desperadoes for a considerable period, especially if governments were weak or divided’ (pp. 22–3). Archival data from Cambodia certainly support these remarks. Banditry increased in the 1890s in the aftermath of the Great Insurrection of the mid 1880s (Chandler, Reference Chandler2008). In the years 1904 and 1905, rice shortages and famines led to a spike in banditry, particularly in Takeo where they were accompanied by drought, and then flood and typhoon (Tully, Reference Tully2002). In 1906 the price of pepper crashed, particularly affecting Kampot, where sacked labourers were reduced to engaging in criminal activities to survive (Forest, Reference Forest1980). In Battambang, banditry became rife in the shadow of the 1908 antiretrocession insurrection. In this province banditry targeted mainly livestock and was the subject of frequent communication between the Résident Supérieur and the Vice Consul of Battambang. For example, it described how in March 1908, in broad daylight, a group of bandits succeeded in robbing a village of 51 buffaloes and 21 oxen. The year after, 65 heads of cattle were taken from another village, and a group of 60 bandits attacked a convoy, stealing all its merchandise and killing one man. The Battambang police commissioner pointed out that such events happened daily (Forest, Reference Forest1980).
While criminal activity and acts of banditry were reported across Cambodia, it seemed that banditry was more frequent in Pursat, Kampong Cham, Kampong Thom, and Battambang than in Kampong Chhnang, Kandal, and Takeo. However, the ‘hot spots’ were all located in the east, particularly in the circumscriptions of Kratie, Svay Rieng, and Prey Veng. The RSC described the circumscription of Kratie as ‘one of the most unsafe provinces…[where] bandits too often gathered and pillaged indigenous villages. It has become the den of all prison escapees from Phnom Penh and Saigon’. As for Prey Veng, it was ‘a haven for all the bandits from Kratie, Kampong Cham, Svay Rieng, and Tayninh…a kind of republic for hardened bandits’. For the RSC, it was ‘an undeniable fact’ that the entire region of Prey Veng and Svay Rieng ‘lived only from banditry’, and
it had been going on for years with increasing audacity, due in part to the complicity of the Cochin-Chinese communal authorities and in part from the return in the region of bandits arrested and convicted by us who escaped from Phnom Penh after a few weeks spent in the Cambodian prison. These bandits could walk in Cochin-Chinese villages a gun in their hand, and we cannot obtain their arrest.
French authorities were particularly frustrated when bandits attacked officials, as they did in Kratie in 1909 when a group of bandits stopped a Khmer official transporting tax money with his escort and robbed them of 900 piastres, a small fortune at this time. Widespread banditry represented a real drain on the resources that the Protectorate was struggling to accumulate and a poor record in terms of its protective capacity. The administration tried hard to suppress it, but if the protectors sometimes managed to reduce the cost of banditry, they were never able to eliminate it.
Common crime
In the absence of reliable statistical data, we rely for this period on the ‘impressions’ of crime of French officials and contemporary and modern authors. According to Edwards (Reference Edwards2007), the new capital, Phnom Penh, and its 25,000 inhabitants suffered high crime rates. A French engineer was murdered in 1884, even though no more than 150 French civilians resided in Cambodia in the 1880s, and two others were murdered in Battambang in 1894 and 1903. As a result of famine in 1889, thefts multiplied and banditry even reached Phnom Penh (Meyer, Reference Meyer1985). By the turn of the century, about 40,000 people lived in Phnom Penh; petty thieves and pickpockets were ubiquitous, and even the small number of French, who probably enjoyed the best protection against crime, was targeted (Tully, Reference Tully1996). Swindlers targeted rural populations. Forest (Reference Forest1980) described how in 1904 a Turk called Mohamed Effendi, presenting himself as a shipbuilder, came to Kandal with the intention of defrauding Cham communities. He collected money from the Cham, telling them that a large ship would be constructed to transport them free of other charges to Mecca. Apparently things turned nasty for him when he also tried to extort money from the local bonzes and threatened to destroy their pagodas. In 1907 several crooks scoured the provinces in search of naive victims who would believe that the French had given Indochina to the Japanese and that they were collecting taxes on their behalf.
Elite crime was not unheard of either, particularly in Phnom Penh. In 1897, Résident Supérieur de Verneville was removed from office. It seemed that his ‘lack of tact’ in trying to implement reforms on the Council of Ministers could have ignited unrest. More importantly, de Verneville cohabited with his Khmer mistress, Neak Ruong, who was accused of crime and corruption. She was charged with receiving stolen jewellery and storing it at the Résidence. Worse, it was alleged she was also involved in ‘bribery of judges, trafficking in favours, swindling, kidnapping and theft’ (Tully, Reference Tully2002, pp. 108–9). She was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment, but it was suspected that a number of Frenchmen were implicated in these criminal activities.
Rural violence
If petty crime was rife in Phnom Penh, rural violence, particularly in remote areas, was a serious problem. In 1870, shortly after the Pou Kombo insurrection, Father Jeanneau (cited in Forest, Reference Forest1980, p. 374) reported that the assassination of overbearing governors by the Khmers was a rather common occurrence. Drawing on the Kratie archives between 1890 and 1904, Guérin (Reference Guérin2008) counted 10 conflicts recorded among highlanders that resulted in 17 individuals killed and 45 kidnapped. The situation described by Guérin is not representative of the whole of Cambodia because the Kratie hinterland was a frontier area largely outside the control of the state, with a particularly high level of violence and where the slave trade was still active. For instance, in 1891 a group of 40 bandits plundered a village, kidnapped 6 people and killed 2 others. In 1899, 35 highlanders raided several villages, killing 1 person and taking 5 as prisoners, and in 1904 a similar raid ended up with 9 dead, 7 wounded, and 80 taken as slaves. Accusations of sorcery were frequent and often lethal. In 1897, a highlander accused of sorcery was executed and the women in his family taken as slaves. It happened again in 1898 when 2 men killed a so-called sorcerer, and in 1902, when 3 men perished. Two years later, 3 women were murdered in retaliation. More violence flared up in 1909 in the northeast, where in one day, 2 alleged sorcerers were killed, 17 people were kidnapped, and 20 were taken as slaves.
Familial feuds, matters of honour, and revenge attacks – characteristic of collectivistic or premodern societies, according to Durkheim – were reported several times. In one case, in June 1908, a man kidnapped a young woman but was later lynched by her parents. In another case, in November, a man and several accomplices destroyed the property of a couple who had refused to let him marry their daughter. A year later, in Kandal again, a man who had abducted another's cousin was murdered (Forest, Reference Forest1980).
The Protectorate's response to crime and violence
The concern of the French administration with the repression of crime, particularly banditry, was not so much that the Protectorate was directly threatened by it but, as the official reports repeatedly showed, that its suppression was a matter of both prestige and revenues. As guarantors of public security, the protectors were required to act against banditry or risk losing not only revenues but also legitimacy. At the turn of the century, the policing system was too embryonic to be effective, and the population, through fear of or sympathy for bandits, was uncooperative. Tully (Reference Tully1996) remarked that despite larger numbers of police officers and soldiers, ordinary property crimes and violence were common in Phnom Penh and provincial towns. Ordinary people had an ambiguous attitude towards banditry: in Kampot, a Vietnamese thief was arrested for attempting to rob a junk carrying a load of pepper, and people spontaneously brought him presents and food. In addition, the collusion between Cambodian authorities and criminals was such that in an edict dated 16 April 1890, Norodom lamented:
Functionaries…sometimes connive with thieves and share the product of their crimes…It is still happening today that wrongdoers apprehended in the provinces are released for money. The envoys of the ministers, responsible for policing the country, frequently arrest thieves and bandits without informing the authorities so that they can secretly set them free after having extracted money from them.
In 1897, for instance, groups of bandits could operate unfettered in Kampong Cham thanks to the complicity of the Khmer authorities, which continued unabated until at least 1910. Chandler (Reference Chandler2008) described that at the provincial level (the sruk):
French officials found old habits of patronage, dependence, violence, fatalism and corruption largely unchanged from year to year. Offices were still for sale, tax rolls were falsified, rice harvests were underestimated…Banditry was widespread; and there were frequent famines and epidemics of malaria and cholera. The contrast between the capital and the sruk, therefore, sharpened in the early twentieth century, without apparently producing audible resentment in the sruk, even though peasants in the long run paid with their labor and their rice for all the improvements in Phnom Penh and for the high salaries enjoyed by French officials, fueling the resentment of anti-French guerrillas in the early 1950s and Communist cadres later on.
The colonial administration resorted to collective punishment, and in 1901 two villages in Kampong Cham were fined a hefty 200 piastresFootnote 4 each for having harboured escaped prisoners, but this did not have much effect on reducing banditry. The colonial administration also blamed the ineffectiveness of crime control on the inactivity of the Khmer administration, from governors to village chiefs, and demanded more zeal on their part in policing matters. They were ordered to focus all their activity on the repression of thefts and acts of banditry committed in their provincial territories in order to ensure the security of the inhabitants (Sorn, Reference Sorn1995).
In the fight against banditry, some attempts were made to improve cooperation between French and Cambodian authorities in the control of the bands of livestock thieves, robbers, and smugglers who crossed borders to escape justice (Sorn, Reference Sorn1995). The administration encouraged the extrajudicial killing of bandits by the populace and resorted to it regularly. Records suggest that banditry was far more deadly for the bandits than for their victims. For example, in 1909, the famous bandit A-Duong, who operated in the eastern region, was killed, and a few militiamen and a cohort of villagers trying to save their cattle gunned down at least five other bandits in Battambang. There were, nevertheless, some successes at jailing bandits. During the third trimester 1909 in Prey Veng, where armed robberies and acts of banditry had been on the rise, the RSC reported more than 100 arrests and ‘amongst the arrested criminals [were] the most dangerous ex-cons who had committed several robberies and murders’. In the year 1909 and for the entire kingdom, we counted from the RSC reports that at least 308 bandits had been arrested. Unfortunately, jail breakouts were also frequent, sometimes aided by the complicity of officials. In April 1909, 14 convicts escaped from Phnom Penh prison. At least three of them were professional bandits who, a month later, were leading a band of between 40 and 50 men and performing armed robberies in the circumscription of Svay Rieng. According to the RSC, most of the 31 bandits arrested during the second trimester 1909 were escaped convicts (RSC 263).
Cases in court
From the Archives Nationales d'Outre-Mer (ANOM) in Aix-en-Provence, France, we obtained some data from the courts in Phnom Penh for 1890 (GGI 64394) and in Kampot, Kampong Thom, and Kampong Speu for 1905 (RSC 243). These data consisted of court registers listing each case and included the adjudicated offence, the number of defendants involved in the case, and some information such as defendants’ nationality, marital status, and level of literacy. Records for Phnom Penh came from the Tribunal Mixte and the Tribunal de FranceFootnote 5 and included sentences. While these data are patchy and do not represent the whole picture of crime and justice in early-twentieth-century Cambodia, they give an idea of the types of crime that reached the courts under the French administration. More importantly, they show how very early on the French administration had managed to penetrate Cambodian society.
The most complete data came from the Tribunal Mixte in Phnom Penh and covered the whole of 1890, while data from the provincial courts covered only a few months in 1905 (Table 2.1). The data give the impression that Kampot province was not only rebellious but also a crime-prone area. During just 3 months of data, 38 cases were indicted, which was proportionally more than in the other jurisdictions. Generally, cases involved more than one offender, the highest being in Kampong Speu with an average of 2.2 offenders per case. The average age of offenders was 30 years. In Phnom Penh, two thirds were married and only three defendants could read and write well.
Table 2.1 Court data from Phnom Penh (1890) and three provincial courts (1905)
| Court | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Phnom Penha | Kampot | K. Thom | K. Speu | |
| Data period | 1890 | July to Sept. 1905 | July 1905 | June & August 1905 |
| N cases sentencedb | 51 | 38 | 6 | 5 |
| N offenders convicted | 88 | 57 | 8 | 11 |
| Mean N offenders/case | 1.7 | 1.5 | 1.3 | 2.2 |
| Type of case % (N) | ||||
| Violent | 8% (4) | 27% (10) | 33% (2) | 20% (1) |
| Theft/fraud | 47% (24) | 57% (3) | 50% (3) | 80% (4) |
| Opium-related | 41% (21) | – | – | – |
| Other | 4% (2) | 16% (6) | 17% (1) | – |
| Offender's ethnicity | N = 30 | N = 30 | – | – |
| Cambodian | 26% | 7% | – | 50% |
| Chinese | 41% | 53% | – | – |
| Vietnamese | 33% | 33% | – | – |
| Other | – | 7% | – | – |
| Mean offender's age (years) | 30.0 | 31.6 | Not available | 29.3 |
a Data are for the Tribunal Mixte, a Franco-Cambodian court with jurisdiction over Cambodian, Chinese, and Vietnamese defendants.
b Cases include felonies and misdemeanours.
Apart from Kampong Speu, where half were Cambodian, the bulk of the defendants were Chinese or Vietnamese. The proportion of violent offences was higher in the provincial courts (ranging from 20 per cent to 33 per cent of all cases) than in Phnom Penh (8 per cent), possibly again reflecting Durkheim's suggestion that higher levels of violence occurred in premodern and rural societies. In cases of theft, the stolen objects were sometimes specified. In Kampong Speu, three men had stolen a buffalo. In another case, two Cambodians had stolen a cotton blanket, something that we might interpret as a sign of the level of poverty that existed in this province (and still today one of the poorest provinces). In comparison with the objects stolen in Kampot, which included jewellery, gold, musical instruments, and relatively large sums of money, the theft of a cotton blanket in Kampong Speu appears very minor, but the theft of a buffalo would have been a significant loss. Opportunity, it seemed, was a greater driver of crime in Kampot province, particularly given its relatively wealthy Chinese community, than in Kampong Speu, where poverty was likely to be a more salient factor.
Sentences were reported only for Phnom Penh. In the Tribunal Mixte all convicted offenders received a jail sentence: for over 60 per cent of them, prison terms ranged from less than a month to a year; for 30 per cent, prison terms ranged between 1 and 5 years; and 10 per cent received more than 5 years imprisonment with forced labour. Although not shown in Table 2.1, we also had some data from the Tribunal de France, which dealt with French (and other white) citizens. There were 17 cases involving 17 offenders, and over one third of all cases (36 per cent) were violent offences (assault with injury and carelessness causing death). A striking difference from the Tribunal Mixte was what appeared to be the greater leniency of the Tribunal de France as well as the iniquity of a dual system of justice. Although 36 per cent of the European cases were violent offences compared to just 8 per cent in the Tribunal Mixte, and 18 per cent of the offenders were recidivists, more than one third benefited from mitigating circumstances, 30 per cent received a fine rather than a jail sentence, and none were sentenced to hard labour.
The second decade of the twentieth century: more of the same
During the second decade of the new century, a series of famines and economic recessions, the highlanders’ rebellion, the large peasant protest of 1916, and the war in Europe fuelled a crime wave and impeded efforts to control banditry and other crime. During this decade, however, the records were sufficiently rich to attempt quantitative estimations of the rates of banditry events and homicide victims.
Data for estimates of banditry and homicide, 1909–1920
Primary data were collected from the National Archives of Cambodia (NAC) in Phnom Penh and from the ANOM in Aix-en-Provence, France. Primary data included monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports circulated within the administrative hierarchy; specialised reports from the Ministry of Justice, police services, and special inspections of provincial residences; and population and justice statistics from the Annuaire Statistique de l'Indochine (Statistical Digest of Indochina). The chain of reporting within the indigenous hierarchy started with the village chiefs and reached their provincial governors (PGs), who in turn reported to the French administration via their respective Résidents of circumscription (RCs), who reported to the Résident Supérieur du Cambodge (RSC), himself accountable to the Gouverneur Général de l'Indochine (GGI). Reports written at each level of the administrative hierarchy usually included a section on crime, covering at least banditry and homicide.
Reports within the administrative hierarchy were available for most of the years 1910–20, but the reports’ origins varied in terms of the author's rank in the administration and the type of information provided. Reports could include quantitative data, such as number of events during the month, trimester, or year, or qualitative accounts of increasing or declining trends compared to previous periods, or both. Generally, a brief narration of all or some of the cases was presented, including location of the event, circumstances, number of offenders and victims, weapon use, and so forth. When the precise numbers of acts of banditry or homicides were not available for all the provinces, national figures were estimated from the available quantitative data as well as qualitative accounts on trends and secondary sources such as Forest (Reference Forest1980), Guérin (Reference Guérin2008), and Tully (Reference Tully1996, Reference Tully2002). Banditry (called piraterie by the French administration) included violent acquisitive crimes (e.g. robberies, house invasions) and acts of rebellion. We calculated rates based on the number of banditry events. For homicides, rates were estimated based on the number of victims, and three types of victims were distinguished:
1. Victims of lethal acts of banditry: these were individuals killed by bandits such as villagers, militiamen, and police officers
2. Victims of homicides, which occurred in incidents other than acts of banditry (labelled ‘assassinats’ in administrative reports)Footnote 6
3. Extrajudicial killings of offenders by authorities or villagers during the commission of a crime or when being chased; as mentioned earlier, the killing of offenders was openly endorsed and practised by the authorities, who also encouraged villagers to do the same
Trends in banditry events and homicide victims, 1909–1920
Figure 2.1 presents estimated rates of banditry events and homicide victims between 1909 and 1920. These rates both show large variations between some years. The rate of banditry peaked in 1912 and 1913, two years of great hardship marked by periods of famine and economic recessions. Then, it declined between 1914 and 1915 with two smaller peaks afterwards. The first, in 1916, coincided with the great peasant demonstrations discussed in the preceding chapter. The second, in 1918 and 1919, matched a new period of economic recession.
Figure 2.1 Homicide victims and banditry events, 1909–20 (rates per 100,000 population)
The rate of homicide increased steadily from 1911 to 1914, when it reached its highest level in the decade. It fluctuated during the period of the First World War and only dropped substantially in 1920. Rates of homicide were affected by the conjunction of socioeconomic hardship, political unrest, and increasing occurrence of extrajudicial killings of offenders. The average rate of homicide victims between 1909 and 1920 was close to 11 per 100,000 population. It was significantly higher than the rate of homicide known to police between 1906 and 1910 in England, which was estimated at 0.8 per 100,000, and – although the difference was not so pronounced – than the rate of homicide across 28 large cities in the USA in 1900 and across the entire USA in 1919, estimated, respectively, at 5.1 and 7.5 per 100,000 (Gurr, Reference Gurr1981).Footnote 7 In France, the rates declined from an average of 2.1 from 1900 to 1909 to 0.9 from 1920 to 1929 (Eisner, Reference Eisner2008). One must go back to the seventeenth century in Europe to find rates of homicide similar to those in Cambodia at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Drawing from the narratives presented by the Résidents and governors in their reports to the French administration, the rest of the chapter paints a broad picture of the criminality and types of violence as well as the response to these events in early-twentieth-century Cambodia. The French administrators were most concerned with banditry and wrote frequently about it. They seemed to have been less concerned with homicides and interindividual violence, as long as it did not target French officials. Because banditry is the most detailed, we first examine the record of these events before turning to homicides and other types of violence and corruption. We conclude this section by discussing the responses to crime encouraged by the administration.
Banditry
By 1910 the number of banditry events had decreased in many provinces, but incidents involving large groups were nevertheless still reported; for example, in January 1910 in the province of Sisophon, ‘40 bandits killed a woman, burned down four houses and three attics full of paddy before stealing 12 buffalos, 29 oxen and other goods’ (Forest, Reference Forest1980, p. 378). Similar acts of banditry committed by bands of between 6 and 20 individuals were noted by the RSC in Battambang, Svay Rieng, and Mimot. The decline was also short lived because the year 1911 marked the beginning of not only an economic depression that would last until 1914 but also widespread famines and food shortages due to bad harvests in the northwest as well as in the circumscriptions of Kandal, Kampong Chhnang, Kampot, Kratie, and Stung Treng. The Résident of Battambang (the source of the greatest amount of rice in the country) reported in 1912 that ‘the harvest has been virtually nil, misery is widespread’, and as a consequence, he concluded, ‘there is no doubt that professional thieves, already numerous in this region, will find it even easier to recruit men’ (RSC 237). The RSC (1911) admitted that incursions by armed bands in the northwest were not ‘acts of professional banditry; it is the famine experienced in the north that pushes the inhabitants of these Siamese hills to go down through the passes of these mountains to pillage some habitations in the Cambodian plain’ (RSC 237). Although he also blamed these ‘bad times’ on the laziness and improvidence of the Khmer peasantry that refused to diversify its agriculture, he wrote in 1912:
The misery experienced for almost two years in Cambodia has thrown onto the roads and in the forests a part of the population seeking means of existence…The more timid resign themselves to feeding on wild roots and other products from the forest. Others, abandoning their houses, take to the roads toward regions that appear better off and flock like long hordes of scrawny beggars. The most resolute obtain by force what is necessary for their survival or join bands of plunderers who swarm everywhere…Small acts of plunder and brigandage are reported a bit everywhere in all the provinces. The culprits let themselves be arrested without difficulties and cram the prisons where they find what freedom did not bring in these times of famine: the certainty of food and shelter.
In addition to the 6-year-long highlanders’ rebellion we discussed in the preceding chapter, the famine and economic depression worsened in 1912. Despite a ban on rice export and the allocation of emergency funds, misery, epidemics,Footnote 8 and crime spread all over the kingdom. In 1912 in the circumscription of Kampong Thom alone, the tribunal prosecuted 53 cases involving 106 offenders; of these, 43 were accused of violent crimes, a rate of 51.1 prosecuted violent offenders per 100,000 population.Footnote 9 The cases included four homicides, or a rate of 4.8 homicide events per 100,000 population. Homicide cases had the highest average number of offenders (an average of 4.3), followed by robberies (an average of 3.3). In the notoriously banditry-prone circumscription of Prey Veng, more than 400 attacks were recorded during the year (RSC 237). The country was engulfed in a massive crime wave, which the RSC acknowledged: ‘Not mentioning the simple thefts and the thefts of livestock, which are too many to count, crimes have been committed in all the areas of the country.’ The RSC also remarked, ‘Not content with having pillaged the inhabitants, the bandits have shown for some times an unprecedented cruelty’ (RSC 237). The déléguéFootnote 10 of Svay Rieng described how the region bordering Cochinchina ‘offers the sorry spectacle of burnt down houses after the pillage. Inhabitants, even women, are frequently tortured and often prefer to hide during the night in the forest, abandoning their houses’ (RSC 237). Illustrating the utter desperation of the populace, several pagodas – places normally highly respected by the Khmers – were plundered.
Banditry peaked in 1913 as the recession and food shortage continued to swell the ranks of the ‘criminal elements’, with, for example, an average of 290 cases of brigandage in the territory of Battambang in 1913 and 1914 (Forest, Reference Forest1980). However, the end of the famine and a more vigorous police activity soon led to a decrease in banditry, although some encounters seemed to turn more deadly. The crime reduction in some provinces was matched by a rise in other areas, perhaps reflecting the relative effectiveness of suppression in one place leading to displacement to less protected areas.
A trend characterised by an increase in the lethality of encounters for both victims and aggressors was also noted in the east. Early in 1914, a number of robbery-murders were recorded such as that of a Chinese merchant who was murdered and his commercial house pillaged by seven bandits and a commune chief who was killed by eight offenders. During the second trimester, the RSC reported numerous acts of banditry in the circumscription of Kampong Cham by small groups of between 5 and 7 men, and larger ones with 15 to 20 offenders, which resulted in violent confrontations. As we will see later, it is likely that the increasing violence is related to the villagers’ resistance and retaliation against the bandits.
In 1914, banditry was on the decline in most regions, particularly the interior, where policing was easier. The exception was the northwest, which remained a hot spot of crime. ‘Attacks against the public security committed in Battambang during the last few months have been far more numerous than in other Cambodian provinces’, wrote the RSC (RSC 430). Among the most serious of these attacks the RSC mentioned the assassination of a Cambodian by 8 men armed with sabres and the robbery of a convoy near Mongkolborey by 20 men, during which one traveller was killed, two were injured, and 3,000 piastres were stolen. In the northwest, large armed bands specialising in livestock theft and sometimes coming from Siam were particularly active. In Kampong Thom a group of 50 armed men pillaged a village and took with them 117 buffaloes and 8 horses. In another attack, 25 bandits tried to rob all the cattle from a village near Sisophon. In May 1915, a well-armed group of 21 (they had 18 guns) killed the former notable of a village and stole 130 oxen and buffaloes. Four days later, also in the Battambang territory, another group managed to take 177 oxen and cows from a village before moving back to Siam. In Oddar Meancheay in 1915, 50 men armed with 40 guns prepared to attack Chongkal, but the governor and a troop of infantry managed to repel the bandits and killed a few of them (RSC 430).
The high level of banditry in the regions bordering Siam and Cochinchina continued through 1916. In Siem Reap alone, 138 cases of banditry were registered for the entire year (Forest, Reference Forest1980, p. 377), and in Battambang, 300 cases during the first 9 months (RSC, 1916 [RSC 430]).Footnote 11 The small rise in banditry was certainly linked to the large peasant protests in the early months of 1916. Although the RSC tended to amalgamate disputes and protest with criminality, he was probably correct when he suggested that ‘the incidents that occurred during this first trimester were an opportunity for professional wrongdoers to mix with the demonstrators and to pillage the villages whilst they were absent’ (RSC 430). By 1917 banditry had dropped back, and no more than 400 cases of armed robberies were recorded nationally. The Résident Supérieur remarked, ‘Even in Battambang where the number of acts of banditry has usually been around one hundred per trimester, it has fallen to 41’ (RSC 431).
Some regions, such as Kratie, remained hot spots of banditry, with 94 cases recorded there compared to only 16 in Kampong Cham (Forest, Reference Forest1980).
Bad harvests and a recession exacerbated by protectionist policies that blocked trade with Siam and restricted foreign investments again led to a temporary rise in crime that peaked in 1919. Rice exports were prohibited to try and contain the extent of a threatening famine, which nevertheless worsened through 1919, a year of great hardship. Pauperisation and desperation once again resulted in the plundering of a number of pagodas as in Prey Veng where in August a band even chased the monks from Ba Phnom wat and settled in it (Forest, Reference Forest1980). Around 320 cases of armed robbery were reported in the first 6 months of 1919, but the Résident stressed ‘no event of a political nature has been recorded’ (RSC 431). In the meantime, and despite the severe economic and financial crisis, the construction of the road to Mount Bokor where the development of a luxurious sanatorium was planned had just started. Building this road would eventually cost the lives of hundreds of prisoners sentenced to hard labour. In 1920, the economic crisis and famine eventually subsided, and this coincided with declining crime rates. In his report for the second trimester of 1920, a more satisfied RSC declared: ‘There still exists, particularly on the borders, marauders who regularly engage in acts of banditry, sometimes even murders, but they are in decline compared to previous years. This is one of the problems that Cambodia has always suffered from, but far more in the past than today’ (RSC 431).
But some regions remained more affected than others, as the RSC noted during the third trimester: ‘Banditry has continued to ravage the same regions than in the past, those in the border zones of Cochinchina and Siam where a greater number of crimes have always been committed’ (RSC 431).
The colonial archives for this period show clearly that banditry was closely linked to economic conditions. During bad times, young peasants left their paddies and joined armed bands. Millenarian leaders and various eccentrics who took up banditry were sometimes mentioned in the reports. For example, in 1913 the RSC mentioned in Preah Vihear ‘a bandit named Suon described as one of those “cranks” appearing very frequently in the history of Cambodia who succeed in impressing naïve inhabitants by the prestige of their person and sorcery formulas’. Suon would have gathered 100 men, ‘professional thieves and inhabitants recruited by force, or attracted by the promise of some spoils’ (RSC 430). Bandits were typically men, but one band active in 1914 included five women:
Worth to report too is the comeback in the province of Soaiteap of the band led by the dreaded chief A-Khleang. This band, after having pillaged the house of an Annamite from the village of Bavet on July 27th, managed to escape and hide in the forest of Svai-Bada (Tayninh). The day after, on the 28th, the same band, with the addition of 5 women, were confronted by the night watch of the same village (Bavet) who ordered them to stop. The bandits immediately fired four times. A bullet killed the night watchman Chau Mau through the chest and another one slightly wounded another watchman in the hip. Only the 5 women were arrested.
The same year, the RSC reported another ‘crank, a defrocked monk, called Chuon, [who] had gathered around him a band of about 15 individuals armed with guns, sabres, and machetes, and started to extort money from the inhabitants of the Khum of Baset [circumscription of Kampot]’. The group did not last long, as ‘the rebel band, which had several members killed, was entirely destroyed’ (RSC 430). Some bandits were escaped prisoners or deserters from the infantry or the militia and were described as ‘professional’ bandits. For a start, ex-soldiers turned bandits generally deserted with their guns. Those without guns used various edged weapons, while some did not have any weapons. Examination of the reports on banditry from 1918 and 1919 suggests that on average there was one gun for every four or five bandits, one other weapon for every two bandits, and one in three to one in four bandits were unarmed.
Targets of banditry were varied. Large bands were able to ransack whole villages and pillage houses, but also livestock and cattle, particularly in the western regions bordering Siam. Near the Tonle Sap and along the Mekong River, they targeted junks carrying merchandise as well as ferries and travellers’ boats. In 1917 the RSC described how ‘near Phnom Penh five bandits attacked a Chinese passenger boat, beat the travellers, and tried to rob them but “thanks to the energy of the Chinese boss,”’ two bandits were captured and one of them grievously wounded (RSC 431). Smaller gangs of highwaymen roamed the countryside. For example, in his 1917 report the RSC noted, ‘The roads from Phnom Penh to Takeo and Kampot have been for some time infested with bandits who robbed isolated travellers’ (RSC 431). Khmer officials and functionaries were regular victims of bandits because they were wealthier than ordinary peasants but also because they were carrying and collecting tax and fine money. For example, during the second trimester of 1913 the RSC illustrated the risk of violence faced by officials:
It seems that bandits, chased away from the region of Svay Rieng, found refuge to the north, toward the circumscription of Kampong Cham, or having left to the west of the river in the résidence of Takeo and toward Chau Doc. Livestock thefts are reported to be very frequent on the border, and on May 23rd, a band of thieves led by the Cambodian Uong has even attacked, with an amazing savagery, the house of the Mekhum of Pechar and stolen the tax money temporarily under the care of this functionary; about 10 persons were seriously injured during this attack and several of them needed to be evacuated by car to the Phnom Penh hospital; however, the mekhum spontaneously volunteered for the search and capture of the chief Uong; he discovered him in his retreat and killed him.
Forest (Reference Forest1980) has highlighted the high proportion of Chinese victimised by banditry, noting, for example, that during the first 6 months of 1916, out of 20 houses plundered in Kandal, 5 (25 per cent) were owned by Chinese, adding, ‘It is about the same in the entire country.’ Our data certainly support Forest's observations, and year after year the RSC reported the robberies and murders of ethnic Chinese. Although xenophobia may have played a part in these attacks, it is more likely that because the Chinese were often merchants and businessmen, they were wealthy targets. As an illustration, the Prey Veng Résident in 1911 noted an increase in armed robberies whose victims were mostly Chinese merchants targeted for their houses and boats and was sorry to report that ‘several of these merchants had been seriously injured during the attacks’ (RSC 237). In November 1910, in the circumscription of Kratie, a Chinese man's house had been ransacked by a group of 30 bandits armed with guns and knives who also plundered the neighbouring house of a Cambodian family (RSC 691). The greatest armed robbery of 1911, during which the bandits pocketed no less than 3,000 piastres, involved a Chinese merchant in the Kampot circumscription (RSC 237). However, in an even more costly attack in 1919, 10 Chinese banditsFootnote 12 travelled by car from Cochinchina to Takeo and pillaged at night the house of a wealthy Chinese, killed him, and stole all his possessions valued at 50,000 piastres, a huge fortune at the time (RSC 209).
Homicides and other violence
The characteristics of the homicides described in the reports matched Gurr's (Reference Gurr1981) description of homicides in England during the thirteenth century when between 80 per cent and 90 per cent were the results of fights among neighbours, and between 10 per cent and 20 per cent were caused by thieves and bandits. Weapons were rather rudimentary and included mainly agricultural implements. Several offenders were generally implicated in each case, which often consisted of brawls between small groups rather than one-on-one attacks. As Durkheim (1893/Reference Durkheim1964) had suggested, these homicides were typical of a premodern society, and in their frequency, they seemed the result of the structural anomie that existed before and the developmental anomie that accompanied French colonisation. Examples of the lethal violence occurring during this period include the case in October 1911 in the Kampot circumscription of a village chief who killed a woman because he believed she was a witch who had made his child die (Forest, Reference Forest1980). The year after, the Battambang Résident described how in a village eight individuals murdered one man, gagged his wife, and pillaged his house, during what was possibly a crime of passion. In 1913 a ‘quadruple assassination’ was reported in Kampong Chhnang where, in order to steal 300 piastres, three men working on a junk threw in the water ‘their Annamite female boss, her daughter and two children; one of the children survived and reported the authors of the crime’. Ordinary murders were rarely mentioned by the RSC in his reports to the General Governor of Indochina because such events, as opposed to banditry, did not constitute ‘attacks against public security’ (RSC 237).
The protectors, however, did worry about any violent aggression against French nationals because such events could be motivated by anti-French political sentiments. Three such assaults occurred in early 1913. In March, the bandit Sena Ouch and his gang attacked the Apostolic Mission's plantation in Chhlong and seriously wounded Father R. P. David. Then, Mr. Canavy, a colonist resident in Kampot, was wounded on the head by a man wielding a meat cleaver, but he survived. Captain Castelin, knifed by one of his indigenous servants, was not so lucky and died a few days later from his wound. That these attacks may have been politically motivated was briefly considered, but eventually such fear was interpreted as the result of a worrying state of mind caused by the state of insecurity in the country: ‘During this trimester, three attacks have been committed against French citizens, and these events, which in a normal period might have been regarded as isolated incidents, may be linked to the political situation because of a worrying state of mind’ (RSC, 1913 [RSC 430]).
These fears reemerged in February 1918 when Thomas, a French settler in Kampong Thom, was killed by his domestic servants because of his ‘excessive demands’. Enraged by the despotism and Thomas's apparent brutality, his 20 or so murderers also killed his concubine and then pillaged and burnt down his house. Seventeen of the alleged murderers were later arrested in Siem Reap, and two others were shot dead by the police. The next year, a former Khmer sergeant who had been reduced in rank to corporal, murdered Duclos, the French commander of the Garde Indigène of Stung Treng. In this revenge attack, the man had also shot and wounded Duclos's wife and killed a militiaman before committing suicide. In the next section, we see that what we would call today ‘white collar’ or ‘elite’ crime was apparently also widespread among Khmer administrators.
Corruption
The monthly extracts from the provincial reports sent to the Second BureauFootnote 13 by the Chef du Cabinet of the RSC included a litany of the bad behaviour of Khmer functionaries. Embezzlement by Khmer public officials was a recurring theme, such as the case of three village chiefs caught red handed in the circumscription of Pursat in 1910 (RSC 691), a commune chief from Koh Kong who fled to Siam with 500 piastres of collected taxes, and a high-level official from Stung Treng accused of fraudulent collection of taxes and embezzlement to the detriment of many inhabitants in 1911. At least 14 cases of corrupt and criminal conduct were recorded in 1911, including the first deputy governor of Snoc-Trou in Kampong Chhnang circumscription, who illicitly profited from illegal gambling houses. In 1912, it was reported that the former governor of Prey Veng ‘has left a state of anarchy and the mandarins have taken the habit of looking at the money from the taxes as their personal assets’. In Kampong Chhnang circumscription, a balatFootnote 14 had gambled the tax money and lost nearly 600 piastres (RSC 237). In the words of the RSC (1912), the ‘most resolute’ among the populace may have regarded Khmer functionaries, motivated by greed rather than need and involved in the theft of public funds collected from an impoverished peasantry, as legitimate targets for retaliation. However, these cases of corruption and abuse and many others uncovered every year were also a major contributing factor in the surge of peasant protests in 1916. Indeed, the ‘1916 affair’ gave the French administration an opportunity to crack down on the corruption of the ‘native administration’ and extend French control by sacking and/or prosecuting hundreds of Khmer functionaries.
Officials were also sometimes complicit with bandits. The provincial governor of Kdol led a band of armed partisans who stole livestock in Siamese territory, but in 1910 he was captured when he returned to Cambodia with 50 head of cattle (Forest, Reference Forest1980, p. 383). Militiamen and prison guards also helped bandits escape from prisons, as in Kampong Cham when several prisoners escaped from jail with the complicity of the militiamen on guard duty, ‘who took this opportunity to desert’ (RSC, 1910 [RSC 691]). In 1912, the governor of Svay Rieng was accused of violence against prisoners, one of his associates of connivance with wrongdoers, and the chief warden of the Cambodian prison and 10 of his subordinates were accused of having facilitated the escape of several prisoners (RSC 237).
The conduct of French functionaries, however, was also far from being exemplary. For example, in an incident in Kampong Speu, Husson, a custom official and tax inspector, shot dead an indigenous sergeant during a drunken brawl with militiamen. A forestry guard, Brasier, was accused of brutality and abuse of power in Kratie, and according to the Chief of Cabinet (1911), ‘could one day, given that Cambodians are proud and vindictive, become victim of his way of doing things towards the indigenes’ (RSC 237). We do not know if Brasier eventually paid for his brutality, but such behaviours were frequent in the northeast and certainly contributed to the rebellion of the highlanders that broke out in 1912.
The French administration regularly attempted to clean the bureaucracy and suppress elite crime. In 1912, the vice president of the Cambodian appeal court was sent before the Council of Ministers to answer charges of corruption, and five province governors were charged with embezzlement (RSC 237). In 1913, the governor of Romduol and the balat of Snoc-Trou were suspended for corruption. A year later, an official in Battambang who, according to the RSC, was ‘a former Siamese functionary maintained by us and completely worn out by opium’, attempted to embezzle 1,000 piastres but failed. Because he paid back ‘the deficit’ and ‘given his great age’, he was not prosecuted, but his dismissal was requested before the Council of Ministers (RSC 430).
Policing response to banditry
The French administration tried hard to fight banditry by building up the capacity of the Khmer police forces and also encouraging villagers to resist and report attacks by bandits. In the same way that, according to the French administration, famine was in part the fault of a lazy and improvident population, unpunished banditry was in great part due to the communal authorities, which ‘were to be blamed as nothing is able to shake their inertia’. Arrests were sometimes made, but it seemed it was in spite of the Khmer authorities and the victims who apparently waited ‘8 or 10 days after the passage of the bandits’ to make a report. Frustrated, the RSC despondently remarked in his 1913 report to the GGI:
The spirit of the population is good if by ‘population’ we mean only the honest and working elements. However, next to the majority of the people, who have many times given us proofs of their docility and loyalty, unfortunately we have to witness a recrudescence in the audacity of the criminal elements, bandits and thieves, encouraged in their enterprise, on the one hand, by the insufficient means of repression at the disposal of Résidents, and, on the other hand, by the apathy and fear of the indigenous authorities.
Although the RSC often lamented that ‘all these crimes remained unpunished’, ‘achieved justice’, that is, the extrajudicial killing of offenders, became increasingly systematic. In the Battambang region, five bandits were gunned down between April and May 1912, and in other parts of the country at least 25 others met a similar fate (RSC 237). In Kandal circumscription, on 9 January 1913, ‘a band of 40 evildoers pillaged several houses in the village of Choeun-Ros and managed to escape all searches’, but 3 weeks later in Stung Treng, when 24 bandits attacked a village ‘they encountered fierce resistance from the inhabitants who killed one of the aggressors’ (RSC 430). These acts of local bravery encouraged by the RSC were apparently becoming more frequent, and when one of the sopheaFootnote 15 of the circumscription of Kampong Thom gunned down a bandit leader called A-Khom in February, it was another occasion for celebration. Banditry was becoming a more hazardous activity, although there were also many casualties among the villagers. For example, in 1916 in Takeo when bandits attacked the house of a notable, his son was murdered, but the villagers managed to also kill one of the bandits (RSC 430). In Kampong Cham, two separate attacks resulted in the death of two villagers. In Pursat, however, villagers counterattacked when seven offenders invaded their village; one bandit was killed and another wounded. In August 1918 Prey Veng saw the end of the band leader A-Meas and three of his men, killed during an encounter with a detachment of the Garde Indigène led by French officer Larriu, who was seriously wounded in the engagement (RSC 431).
The repression of those who had targeted French citizens was always pursued with great energy. In December 1909, three of the bandits who had killed the colon (colonist) Michelon had been arrested, but the others were still free and active (RSC 263). In March 1910 in his report to the GGI, the RSC was glad to announce that when eight of Michelon's murderers, armed with guns and spears, had come to the village of Chomka-Dampril in the Kratie circumscription to organise a complete pillage, the inhabitants let the bandits enter the village, surrounded them, and killed three of them. However, in June, six individuals armed with guns murdered a village chief from the circumscription of Prey Veng, and according to the RSC, it was a case of revenge ‘provoked by the energetic attitude of this village chief and his activity during the pursuit of the bandits in the Michelon case’ (RSC 691). The police response was often ruthless and not discouraged by the French administration, particularly when they were concerned about potential ‘political agitators’. They found two in 1917. In the Pursat region an ‘Annamite bonze led a band armed with old guns and spears’. They attacked the police detachment sent against them, which resulted in their leader's death. In February, the RSC mentioned some ‘agitation’ in Prey Veng when ‘a visionary called Meas, a kind of sorcerer very common in Cambodia, gathered 20 peasants in the forest [and] presented himself as the Messiah; when the communal authorities intervened during the ceremony they were somewhat manhandled’. The response was swift and brutal. The Gardes Indigènes were sent; they killed three, wounded two, and captured five of these apparently unarmed individuals, but Meas escaped. This response was not considered excessive, and the RSC casually remarked: ‘This incident, which did not spread thanks to the swiftness of the measures taken, shows how easy it is for unscrupulous individuals to impose themselves to the timidity and credulity of the Cambodian population in order to lead it into the worst excesses’ (RSC 431).
Referring to several acts of banditry that occurred in 1916, the RSC (1916) complimented the good work of the police: ‘All these depredations, which cost the lives of two militiamen and 10 inhabitants, have also caused the bandits significant losses with 27 of them killed and 47 captured, which shows the praiseworthy activity of our police detachments’ (RSC 430). Among the 47 offenders arrested, 2 of those who murdered the militiamen in a revenge attack were sentenced to death. Five other death sentences were pronounced in relation to the murder of the French curator of Angkor, Commaille. Commaille had been the victim of a robbery-murder committed in Siem Reap by six offenders who stole the 600 piastres reserved for the wages of the coolies at work on the monuments. Nothing could excite more fear and anger than the murder of a French notable by the ‘natives’. Fear and anger because ‘this scourge of banditry, which found a propitious place in Cambodia, constitutes a real danger not only for the native population but sometimes also for Europeans’ (RSC, 1916 [RSC 430]). A disproportionate repression followed. While only six people had been directly involved in the murder, in addition to the five death penalties, 58 persons were sentenced to hard labour or jail, ‘the latter group for giving hospitality to criminals and giving them information’ (Tully, Reference Tully1996, p. 210). Tully (Reference Tully2002) also reported: ‘The militia evicted the entire population of a nearby village and burned down their homes in an act of savage overkill that would have drawn gasps of outrage if committed against peasants in Metropolitan France’ (p. 165).
Despite the perennial complaints about the many hidden accomplices that restricted the number of arrests, the RSC regularly reported that the police and the SûretéFootnote 16 had managed to make arrests in Phnom Penh and the provinces. Records from the tribunal of Kampong Thom for 1918 mentioned, among other things, 12 homicide events involving 14 victims and 84 offenders and that 45 of them had been arrested (RSC 926). We also learned that 10 of the 17 individuals arrested for the murder of Thomas in February had, within 10 months of the murder, all died of beriberi in the Kampong Thom prison (RSC 926). Cambodian jails were clearly primitive and unsanitary, but it is hard not to suspect that the status of the victims (a Frenchman and his concubine) had something to do with the swift end of their suspected aggressors.
Villagers, nevertheless, carried most of the burden of the fight against banditry. The 1918 record of police action indicated that at least 166 banditry events had occurred in the Battambang circumscription (RSC 209). They cost the lives of nine villagers and injured nine others. No casualty was recorded among the police force, but 11 bandits were killed, 2 others wounded, and 77 captured. The weaponry carried by 337 offenders revealed that 61 (18 per cent) had been armed with guns, 175 (52 per cent) with other weapons, and 101 (30 per cent) were unarmed (no detail was provided for 91 events). Police or militia detachments intervened in 67 events; however, across all these events, 7 militiamen and 51 regional guards were engaged, compared to 455 villagers. The record for 1919 indicated that at least 194 events had occurred. Twenty-one villagers were killed and five others injured (RSC 209). Again, no casualty among the police, but 11 bandits killed, 7 wounded, and 90 captured. Among the 387 offenders, 95 (24 per cent) had guns, 196 (51 per cent) had other weapons, and 96 (25 per cent) were unarmed (no detail was provided for 90 events). Police or militia detachments were sent in 94 events in which altogether 23 militiamen, 128 regional guards, and 458 villagers participated. The proportion of events confronted by police or militia detachments had risen as well as the number of police personnel involved, but villagers were still the major front line engaged in antibanditry interventions.Footnote 17
Conclusion
Although Pannetier (1921, cited in Forest, Reference Forest1980, p. 385), relying on the testimony of Cambodians, asserted that banditry had increased between 1900 and 1920, our own research suggests that it drastically increased between 1911 and 1913 but then declined with some lesser spikes in 1916 and 1918–9 (Figure 2.1). We could only present an impressionistic picture for the period between 1900 and 1909, but this picture suggested a general decline rather than an increase, despite spikes during particularly eventful years such as 1905 and 1907–8. Forest (Reference Forest1980) acknowledged that the abolition of slavery by ‘[putting] back on the labour market a number of people who [could] not straightaway make a living’ (p. 385) and the strict regulation of taxes may have contributed to the process of bandit group formation. He also argued that banditry had declined due to the relatively better control exercised by the colonial state:
Yet, one can be sceptical about the idea that the conditions of the development of the phenomenon were more favourable under colonisation than under the power of a sovereign who did not have any apparatus of police control – apart from some haphazard punitive expeditions – on a country with no central administration and weakened by an arbitrary tax system…The testimony of the peasants must therefore be taken with some caution.
On the basis of data collected before and after 1920, as the next chapter shows, we agree with Forest's (Reference Forest1980, p. 385) discussion of the role of the colonial state in achieving better control over banditry. Forest alluded to the emergence of a particular ‘civilising process’, that is, from Elias's perspective (Elias, 1939/Reference Elias, Jephcott, Mennell, Dunning, Goudsblom and Kilminster2012), a new sensitivity to violence among the peasantry after at least three decades of relative peace, associated with the development of the modern state and its monopolisation of violence. This sensitivity to violence would bias popular perception and create the illusion of increasing levels of violence, a well-known criminological phenomenon:Footnote 18 ‘Moreover [we should consider] a change in the rural attitude toward this phenomenon: When the trend in village life is a movement towards stabilisation and equilibrium, would not banditry appear increasingly “abnormal” and threatening?’ (Forest, Reference Forest1980, p. 385).
At the end of the second decade of the twentieth century and after 60 years of precarious and sometimes seriously challenged control, it seemed that the French administration was finally entering the golden years of its ‘domination’.Footnote 19 In great part it was because during all these years it had worked hard to rationalise and modernise the Cambodian state. Modernisation of the state, however, is not synonymous with modernisation of the society, which can only be achieved through transformations in the economic, educational, and health domains, and importantly through fostering a lively and democratic civil society. Some improvements were made in these areas, but overall they were neglected (Slocomb, Reference Slocomb2010). As for the development of a democratic civil society and a pluralistic political consciousness, it was simply suppressed.
The next chapter describes the implementation of the colonial state, and Chapter 4 focuses on the two decades from 1920 to 1940 in Cambodia. We shall see that the violence associated with protopolitical contestations greatly diminished after 1920. Banditry, particularly in the border provinces, remained a concern for the Protectorate, but as we will see, the Protectorate became progressively more effective in the control of banditry. We do not argue that an era of social justice in which banditry had been eliminated began after 1920. Chandler's (Reference Chandler2008) observations about immense inequality and the persistence of rural violence in the 1920s is incontestable:
The gap in income between the French and the Cambodians – with the rare exceptions of a few favoured officials and the royal family – was very wide. A French official could earn as much as 12,000 piastres a year; with exemptions for his wife and two children, such an official would pay only 30 piastres in tax…A Cambodian farmer, on the other hand, with no salary other than what he could earn (at 30 cents per day, or 90 piastres a year) or what he could sell his crop for (seldom more than 40 piastres a year) was saddled with a range of taxes that totalled in the 1920s as much as 12 piastres a year. He was taxed individually and in cash payment in lieu of corvée, his rice was taxed at a fixed percentage, and he paid high prices for salt, opium, and alcohol and abattoir taxes when his livestock went to slaughter. What did the peasant receive in exchange? Very little, despite French rhetoric to the contrary. Monthly reports from French residents show widespread rural violence and disorder, which because it made no direct challenge to French control, seldom rose into the political portions of the reports. It is clear, however, that to most villagers the perpetual harassment of bandit gangs, especially in the dry season, was far more real than any benefit brought to them by the French.
We argue (as Elias did in relation to the civilising process in Europe) that the rationalisation of the state apparatus and the greater control it eventually came to exercise through its monopolisation of violence had a beneficial impact on reducing crime and violence between 1920 and 1940 in Cambodia. Next, we examine the purpose and the ways of the colonisers in their attempt at ‘modernising’ the Cambodian state and its security apparatus.
