When the French government established its Protectorate over Cambodia, it considered that the Cambodian state was moribund, and French representatives believed that the corrupt Khmer administration had descended into anarchy (Taboulet, Reference Taboulet1956). At least until 1884 not much was done to transform this situation. France considered Cambodia as essentially a buffer zone against Siam and the alleged influence England exercised over it; what mattered most was that the conquest and colonisation of Vietnam remained unhampered by anti-French manoeuvres from the Siamese and ‘perfidious Albion’ (Osborne, Reference Osborne1969; Taboulet, Reference Taboulet1956). In France, there was political unanimity neither about imperialistic ventures nor about colonial policies. Debate and controversy abounded around issues of direct or indirect rule, and establishment of colonies or Protectorates, straightforward annexation, or more subtle systems of control (Osborne, Reference Osborne1969; Taboulet, Reference Taboulet1956). The colonial enterprise was motivated by a mixed bag of mercenary, geopolitical, and idealistic interests associated with the diverse positions of the colonial actors as missionaries, explorers, scholars, aristocratic admirals, adventurers, entrepreneurs, and bureaucrats and administrators. Almost all of them were products of the Enlightenment and of the ‘Great Principles of 1789’. Most were devoted to the cult of Science, the fetish of Progress, and the morals of the work ethic and were great believers in the superiority of the Christian and European civilisation.Footnote 1 For example, missionaries and admirals alike were genuinely horrified by the state of misery, the underdevelopment of the country, and the arbitrariness and corruption of a regime reminiscent of the darkest periods of France's ancien régime. Informed by Beccarian perspectives on law, justice, and punishment,Footnote 2 they were therefore also genuinely shocked by slavery and the cruel and irrational treatment of offenders.
Initially for France, geopolitical interests dominated: Cambodia served to provide a buffer zone against Siamese and British influences so that it could pursue the colonisation of Vietnam unhampered by the expected anti-French manoeuvres of these challengers. That the Protectorate's interest in Cambodia was not at this stage economic but geopolitical is evidenced by the decision of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1867 to leave the western provinces, in particular the richest region of Battambang, under Siamese sovereignty. King Norodom and the military governor of Cochinchina, Admiral de la Grandière, protested this decision to no avail (Taboulet, Reference Taboulet1956). Economic interests eventually came to the fore in 1884, but their actualisation was imagined and realised in the context of a Protectorate that attracted few settlers compared to the colony of Cochinchina. Taxation rather than agricultural and industrial development, which required a larger investment, became the means deployed in Cambodia to fulfil economic interests conceived at the level of Indochina as a whole and largely for the benefit of Cochinchina. That Cambodia, the most heavily taxed state in French Indochina (Tully, Reference Tully2002, p. 310), should become the ‘milking cow’ of Indochina was not unanimously intended either. Some Résidents complained about this state of affairs, but eventually the economic and fiscal policies implemented in Cambodia led to and maintained Cambodia in this position. The colonial enterprise in Cambodia was characterised by a small number of colons, few investments, and little development. In this context, the Protectorate, ‘a model of domination à bon marché [cheap]’ (Brocheux & Hémery, Reference Brocheux and Hémery1995, p. 74), was an adequate option for Cambodia. On the other hand, as Brocheux and Hémery noted, ‘The priming and the development of colonial profit, investment, in a word the mise en valeur, demand the rapid financial profitability of the colony, putting its budgets in a position of surplus, and this implies a vigorous intervention of the colonial state apparatus in the functioning of the dominated societies’ (Brocheux & Hémery, Reference Brocheux and Hémery1995, p. 74).
Under this regime of ‘domination à bon marché’, the intervention of the colonial state in Cambodia vigorously targeted the collection and protection of revenues generated from taxes. The administrative, policing, and legal and judicial systems, that is, the political economy of the Protectorate, were geared towards the realisation of this goal, and this would determine the scope and limitation of the modernisation of the country. The repression of banditry and corruption was essentially a strategy to protect revenues, both directly by preventing losses and indirectly by preserving and extending the legitimacy of the protectors who were supposed to provide security. Maintaining the political consciousness of the Khmer population as low as possible through isolation from the potentially subversive influence of the Chinese and Vietnamese was also motivated by the need to ensure the ‘docility’ of this mass of taxpayers. The construction of roads facilitated not only tax collection but also the repression of banditry and its negative impact on revenues.
This is not to say that the unique preoccupation of the French in Cambodia was fiscal exploitation, and some actors in the colonial enterprise denounced this policy, but in practice it became the dominant characteristic of the Protectorate. We suggest that taking this particular political economy as a background helps us understand the development and reforms of the colonial state apparatus, their scope, and the limitation they imposed on modernisation, with consequences that played out at the end of French rule.
The penetration and control of the colonial state apparatus in and over Cambodian society necessarily followed a top-down process. It originated and was strongest at the central level of governance and in time gradually moved down with reduced strength to the level of provinces and eventually communes and villages. Urban areas, Phnom Penh and the provincial towns, were therefore the first to experience the penetration of the machinery of the colonial state. The surrounding villages and rural areas experienced it later and with greater difficulties, while remote areas often remained untouched. French control was thus more pervasive at the top or centre of society than it was at the periphery and diminished in proportion to the social and geographical distance from those centres of administrative concentration.
This particular pattern of development (i.e. modernisation, rationalisation, penetration) of the state apparatus eventually affected the regional trends and characteristics of criminality and its control. Therefore, before discussing the justice and policing systems of the Protectorate, we examine the development and penetration of the colonial apparatus over time.
Administration of the Protectorate
In the 1870s the French started to push for a number of reforms, including cleansing and reorganising the Khmer administration, a stricter control of the collection and distribution of public revenues, the creation of a council of ministers in which a French administrator would have a seat, reforming the regime of property, and the abolition of slavery (Forest, Reference Forest1980). On 15 January 1877 Norodom reluctantly proclaimed a series of reforms in the direction desired by the French, including a council of ministers in which he would only have a ratifying role. Administratively, these reforms stipulated a reduction in the number of provinces and functionaries, the remuneration of the mandarins according to their rank, the prohibition for ministers and provincial governors to be involved in commercial activities, and, already planning for a local administration, the election of village chiefs by the inhabitants. These were not implemented, and in July 1878, Admiral Lafont (Governor-General 1877–1879) complained to Norodom that the Ordinances of 1877 had remained a dead letter, in particular pointing out that there were too many provinces and mandarins and insisting on the nexus between unpaid mandarins and corruption (Taboulet, Reference Taboulet1956).
This first attempt at rationalisation and control was a failure, and the French resumed their efforts in 1884 but with disastrous consequences. Article 1 of the Convention of 17 June 1884 imposed on the King, stipulated: ‘His majesty, the King of Cambodia accepts all the administrative, judicial, financial and commercial reforms which, in the future, the Government of the French Republic will judge it useful to introduce in order to facilitate the accomplishment of his Protectorate’ (Taboulet, Reference Taboulet1956, p. 671). French Résidents were to be appointed to provincial regions to control and supervise the administration of Cambodian officials (Osborne, Reference Osborne1969) and a commune system instituted, ‘with a mayor and council of notables, to ease the administrative task of the French’ (Osborne, Reference Osborne1969, p. 211). It was an attempt at complete French control over central government and extending to provincial and village levels. The Great Insurrection that followed and the concessions made by the French regarding their program of reforms only slowed down the ineluctable expansion of colonial control, but this growth was often accompanied by unintended negative consequences. For instance, between 1882 and 1886 the governor of Cochinchina, Le Myre de Vilers, not only ‘forced the king's agreement to meeting the cost of the Protectorate’ but also eliminated his rights to a number of taxes (Osborne, Reference Osborne1969, p. 201). To compensate for the loss of revenues, the king increased his customary rent-seeking practices in the appointment of officials and ‘Norodom's increasing alarm over the loss of his wealth made financial gifts for the king the essential qualification for appointment’ (Osborne, Reference Osborne1969, pp. 232–3).
French attempts at a rationalisation of the Khmer administration between 1877 and 1884 had failed, but the colonisers had nevertheless consolidated their centralisation of power and extended their control. In 1887 Cambodia was integrated into the Union Indochinoise; in 1892 the protectors had control over virtually all the taxes; and between 1888 and 1894 the number of provincial Résidents increased from 4 to 10. At the local level, an 1899 Royal Ordinance defined the role and duty of village chiefs and their councils to include ‘the reception of royal envoys charged with the census of the population and the perception of taxes; the publication of royal ordinances; the raising of troops for the war; the adjudication of conflicts between villagers; the functions of rural police’ (Forest, Reference Forest1980, p. 30). Village chiefs were not properly remunerated before 1892, but they received a partial tax exemption on their harvested paddy in addition to a proportion of the fines they themselves imposed or helped authorities to impose. Forest (Reference Forest1980) aptly observed, ‘A village chief essentially makes a living from his role as gendarme’ (p. 30).
The most important and decisive reform initiative occurred in 1897 and achieved complete French control at the centre. The king and even the council of ministers were relegated to the role of rubber stamps for the Résident Supérieur, who ‘de jure and de facto…is indeed the chief of the Cambodian government [whose] power is only limited by the instructions he receives and the control that the Governor General exerts on him’, as the then Governor General Doumer wrote 8 years later in his memoirs (cited in Forest, Reference Forest1980, p. 63). In 1898 the number of provincial Résidences (also called circumscriptions; see Chapter 2) had reached 12, and Forest (Reference Forest1980) argues that their creation and development were at this stage essentially motivated by the need for effective collection of taxes, ensuring law and order, and showing the presence of the colonial power. The reform of the provincial administration also led directly to the dismissal of 14 corrupt governors (from among about 50 such officeholders) during the third trimester of 1897.
Between 1900 and 1920, the main reforms addressed the rationalisation of the Khmer administration through better control, discipline, and training of Khmer functionaries. Starting in 1902, all provincial functionaries had to sit a formal examination of their aptitude to obtain their post. In 1914 a school for kromokars (functionaries, from secretaries to governors) opened in Phnom Penh. In 1917, it became the School of Cambodian Administration, where secretaries of the various services were formed and candidates to the positions of functionaries and judges were trained. Students were recruited through a competitive exam and attended for 2 years. The same year, the Protectorate promulgated the Status of the Personnel of the Cambodian Administration, which enounced the principle of the separation of administrative and judicial powers, including the creation of two distinct administrative and judicial personnel. The role and duties of the provincial governors were also better defined:
The governor must in fact control, countersign, and keep two copies of all the administrative acts proclaimed in his province among other things…the registries of births, deaths and marriages and the registries of title deeds when the village chiefs transmit them to him. He keeps watch over the establishment of the tax rolls and the collection of the taxes in due course. He stamps the sale certificates of animals established by the village chiefs. He supervises the progress of public works in his circumscription. Finally he is responsible for maintaining order and delivering justice.
Concerning this last duty, Forest (Reference Forest1980) remarks that governors devoted much time to it as they also made important profits from it: ‘Indeed, judiciary acts, until the creation of the Inspection of the Indigenous Affairs in 1913, are still more or less escaping control and the governor draws substantial financial advantages from them’ (p. 103).
Recognising its status of capital city, the municipality of Phnom Penh was created by decree of the General Governor of Indochina (GGI), with a specific urban budget and under the authority of a Résident-Mayor, appointed by the GGI. Assisted by a municipal commission of eight members (five French, one Cambodian, one Vietnamese, and one Chinese), the Résident-Mayor combined the functions of Résident and provincial governor (Forest, Reference Forest1980). In the provinces also, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Protectorate returned several times to the difficult task of the local administration, and 1901 saw ‘the first embryo of a communal organisation and the first attempt to make the inhabitants of the srok (district) participate in its organisation’ (Forest, Reference Forest1980, p. 118). The ordinance of 21 August 1901 instituted elections of the mesrok (village chief) by the inhabitants of the srok, through secret ballot; however, the Résident provided the list of candidates, and if he judged the elected authorities were incompetent, illiterate or corrupt, he could immediately order new elections. These elections were intended to renew and bring fresh blood into the old local administration regarded by the Résidents as staffed by ‘the worst functionaries, sometimes conniving with livestock thieves or bandits, and very often with other villagers…to evade taxes’ (Forest, Reference Forest1980, p. 117). Forest argued that the dominant motive behind this local reorganisation was once again fiscal because the mesrok and his council now had the duty to collect personal taxes.
The creation in 1908 of the commune (khum) as a formal administrative unit encompassing a few villages shifted some of the mesrok's tasks, particularly in relation to taxes and public order, to the mekhum, elected every 4 years. This further reorganisation again increased control over the local population. For example, Article 5 of the 1908 Ordinance required all the inhabitants of a khum to be registered on the personal tax roll and to communicate to the mekhum the names and ages of his wife and children, as well as those of his domestics and their wives and children. Apart from a tighter surveillance of the population, some positive effects in terms of tax collection, and possibly better control of criminality, the commune was a failure as far as democratisation and economic development were concerned. The representative institutions never met, and local finances and economic development were neglected. In 1913, the election terms of the mekhums changed from being elected every 4 years to being elected until they reached 55 years of age, a decision apparently motivated by both fiscal considerationsFootnote 3 and the need to lighten the growing burden of responsibilities carried by the mekhums. Until 1901 the mesrok's main duties included recording the sales of cattle, the establishment of tax rolls and the control of tax collection, the gathering of corvée labour, and local policing. Starting in 1901, his bureaucratic tasks steadily increased to include the collection of personal taxes as well as agricultural taxes, the registry of births, deaths, and marriages as well as that of lands and crops, and the obligation to attempt free-of-charge mediation of conflicts between villagers prior to referring unresolved matters to the courts. Mekhums represented the khum in judicial proceedings. They had judiciary police function: they could undertake police investigations and were involved in the questioning and arrest of persons suspected of felonies and misdemeanours. Finally, after the great peasant demonstrations of 1916, the mekhums were charged with the surveillance of the monks to whom they had to provide certificates of identity.
Many mekhums were denounced and attacked by angry peasants during the demonstrations of 1916, which shows that if these administrative reforms at the grass-roots level permitted greater penetration and control by the colonial state, they also severed the traditional links between the peasants and their local representatives. With his new functions of mediator, policeman, and tax collector under the colonial authority, and remunerated from a percentage of the diverse taxes he collected, the mekhum represented less and less the interests of the villagers but increasingly those of the protectors as well as his own. Such functions also offered greater opportunities for abuse. However, mekhums found themselves in the unenviable situation of having to be ruthless with the villagers put under their authority to themselves avoid severe punishment by the higher authority who had appointed them. Forest (Reference Forest1980) remarked:
If there was a certain solidarity between inhabitants and mekhum regarding taxes, the system of profit sharing in the tax yield severed this solidarity: the mekhum became the tax collector and was no longer the representative of his constituents…And the French did not spare the village chiefs-tax collectors. It was not rare for the latter if they did not bring the tax in time, to be accused of embezzlement and incarcerated until full payment of the tax. (p. 125)
In addition, their new role as tax collectors had made mekhums prime targets for banditry.
Further reforms were introduced between 1920 and 1940, but the blueprint for the administrative penetration of the colonial state down to the village level was well in place at the beginning of the 1920s. Tully (Reference Tully2002) remarks:
According to Gabriel Maurel, the 1911 decrees [that defined the powers of the Résident Supérieur and his consultative body] meant that the Résident Supérieur's powers were ‘close to absolute’ in matters of law, the police, the fixing and collection of taxes, the drawing up and execution of budgets, public works and so on…While the consolidation of power by the French did help weed out corruption and incompetence in the Khmer bureaucracy, it did not break the pattern of despotic control. (p. 143)
This important observation encapsulates the scope and limitations of the modernising enterprise of French colonialism in Cambodia. It summarises the effect of French policies that focused on revenue collection, which required only minimal modernist efforts at rationalisation in specific domains in order to increase and protect revenues but which maintained premodern authoritarian modes of governance to better accomplish this goal. If this enterprise served to reduce crime and violence, it also reinforced a political pattern of an authoritarian rule by elites that would contribute to tragic developments in the future. However, in light of the Eliasian civilising process, these limited reforms corresponded to the despotic stage of the centralising monarchy, observed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, in the achievement of state monopolisation of force, violence, and taxation.
Justice and legal system
Very early the Protectorate had created two separate systems of justice. Cambodians were dealt with by the Cambodian courts; non-Cambodians – French, Europeans, subjects of an American or European power, and all ‘foreign Asians’, including Vietnamese and Chinese – were under the jurisdiction of French courts and subject to the law as it was applied by the French courts in Indochina. As we have seen in Chapter 2, French courts were more lenient than Cambodian courts. For example, court data for the year 1890 indicated that in Phnom Penh, 36 per cent of non-Cambodian accused were convicted of violent offences and 18 per cent were recidivists; none of them was sentenced to hard labour and one third received only a fine. The remainder of the non-Cambodians were acquitted or served short prison terms. By contrast, all Cambodians were sentenced to prison, including 10 per cent who were sentenced to more than 5 years of hard labour.
The fiscal regime also varied depending on the nationality of the potential taxpayers. The Chinese, for example, paid higher taxes than Cambodians but were under French legal jurisdiction. Sino-Cambodians could opt for one or the other nationality, which led to further inequities. Jurisdictional issues were only one aspect of the colonial influence on the Khmer justice system, which, as Tully (Reference Tully2002) remarked, remained inequitable. Although Ang Duong had revised the code around 1850,
it was still chaotic, arbitrary and in places cruel – even sadistic – and unjust…It was possible for those with money to buy immunity from prosecution or to otherwise pervert the course of justice. The word of a commoner carried less weight than that of a noble. The system encouraged corruption as ‘native’ magistrates relied on fines levied on real or imagined malefactors for at least part of their income…There were no examinations for judicial officials. (p. 141)
The French therefore saw it as their mission not only to rationalise but also to humanise the ‘indigenous’ justice system. They were genuinely horrified that ‘female adulterers could be partially impaled astride a sharpened bamboo stake’ (Tully, Reference Tully2002, p. 141) or by the frequent use of corporal punishment, spectacular and ghoulish public executions, and the legal and codified use of torture during interrogations, even though they themselves unofficially used some of these methods, particularly in their supervision of the convict colony of Poulo Condor.
As early as 1877 the French had tried to reform the justice system, and ordinances included that the practice of justice be entrusted to specialised mandarins, that justice fees be paid to the Treasury and no longer to the judges, that the latter be remunerated by the state, and that the conditions of the prisoners be improved (Taboulet, 1959). These were not implemented, but similar requirements were restated in the 1884 convention imposed on the king by R. S. Thomson, and French Résidents in the provinces were entrusted with strict control over the administration of justice. Felonies and misdemeanours were tried in provincial courts of first instance or in Phnom Penh, in the sala lukhum.Footnote 4 These courts were composed of one judge, the governor or his deputy, assisted by two notables, one prosecutor, and one clerk. The presence of a defender was not compulsory. The tariff of the fines and court fees were decided arbitrarily, and the functionaries of the justice system pocketed the revenues made from the cases according to the norms of patronage (Forest, Reference Forest1980). In 1897, the provincial Résidents became president-judges of the French courts where all non-Cambodians were judged. In addition the Résidence had to examine and stamp all the judgements made by the Cambodian courts in which the governors were the judges (Forest, Reference Forest1980).Footnote 5 In 1904, special examinations for officials with judicial functions were introduced.
This new judicial structure, however, did not stop the illegitimate accumulation of wealth through judicial practice. For example, in 1912 the vice president of the sala outorFootnote 6 and the deputy-minister of justice were sacked for corrupt conduct (Forest, Reference Forest1980). Yet, if such cases surfaced and were dealt with, it was because from 1900 onwards the French had put in place a system of control over Khmer functionaries to police and discipline them. The Council of Ministers was entrusted with the centralisation and judgement of all enquiries related to accusations against provincial authorities, including mekhums, and the Council ruled on sanctions, demotions, and dismissals. In 1918, a specialised agency was created to deal with these disciplinary issues (Forest, Reference Forest1980).
Reforms of the substantive law and matters related to punishment were introduced from 1904 with the beginning of the reign of Sisowath. Corporal punishments, chaining prisoners in their cells, harsh punishment for adultery, and inhumaneFootnote 7 methods of capital punishment were abolished (Tully, Reference Tully2002). At the end of 1911, a new criminal code was put in place that ‘provided for respect of the ancient principles of Cambodian law, but torture and corporal punishment were “suppressed as incompatible with the principles of humanity and justice”’ (Tully, Reference Tully2002, p. 142). In 1920, this complex and often contradictory criminal code was replaced ‘by new legislation attempting to better integrate tradition and the essential principles of French jurisprudence’ (Forest, Reference Forest1980, p. 109). However, it was not until 1922 that the judiciary became formally independent from the executive. From this date the provincial courts were no longer under the control of the governors: professional judges were now adjudicating cases and the judiciary service was placed under the authority of a French magistrate. Felonies such as homicide, robbery, and rape were no longer judged in the provincial courts but in Phnom Penh's criminal court.
Policing
The most direct way of maintaining order while raising and protecting revenues was through policing and the rapid development of an effective police force. The importance of policing for the Protectorate is demonstrated by the relatively large proportion of the total budget allocated to criminal justice expenditures (police, justice, prisons) and, within the criminal justice budget, the share allocated to policing. Forest (Reference Forest1980) calculated that between 1913 and 1920, policing expenditures represented on average 12.3 per cent of the total budget of the Protectorate compared to 4.1 per cent for education, 3.9 per cent for health, and a measly 1 per cent for agricultural development.Footnote 8 During the same period, policing consumed around 60 per cent of the total criminal justice system budget compared with 25 per cent for the prisons and 15 per cent for the courts.
At first glance it seems that policing in Cambodia attracted a disproportionate amount of resources and reflected the policing situation in France, about which Karl Marx would have quipped, ‘there is not a single rat that is not administered by the police’ (cited in Morlat, Reference Morlat1995, p. 9). In fact, if the aim was indeed to attain such a level of control, in terms of resources it was more a case of ‘much too little’. The overall government budget in Cambodia was rather light since only a small proportion of the resources raked from Cambodia were reinvested in Cambodia. Therefore, the police service that evolved also needed to be à bon marché. The reports of the provincial Résidents and the Résident Supérieur alike were full of complaints about the lack of police officers to effectively control banditry, and they constantly asked the GGI to increase the size of the Garde Indigène, the indigenous police and major frontline force in Cambodia. In fact the development of the police in Cambodia followed the development of the police in Indochina, and almost all the decisions, including the size of these police forces, came from the GGI.
Early development of the police forces
Initially, the policing of the Protectorate was a military affair. The tirailleurs (infantrymen) of the French colonial army, first mainly composed of Vietnamese soldiers and auxiliaries but later on recruiting more and more Khmers, were used early in the colonisation of Cambodia to fight insurrections, rebellions, and banditry and to control borders. Forest (Reference Forest1980) reports that in June 1886, during the Great Insurrection, the colonial army of intervention in Cambodia counted just over 3,500 men: around 40 per cent were Vietnamese, one third were French, and one quarter, Cambodians. Very quickly, the Protectorate created an indigenous police force in charge of day-to-day policing matters as well as more specialised forces dealing with political matters and intelligence.
The Garde Indigène
According to Daufès (Reference Daufès1933), the Cambodian Garde Indigène was created in June 1893, but Guérin (Reference Guérin2008) argued that it already existed in 1885, and Forest (Reference Forest1980) reported that in 1886 it had already enlisted 908 Cambodian militiamen. The earlier date is credible given that the 1884 Convention required Norodom to approve the creation of police posts throughout Cambodia (Osborne, Reference Osborne1969). It seems that 1893 was the date of its official creation but that it had been unofficially formed 10 years before. Although it was organised as a paramilitary police force, it was a civilian police, officially named the Garde Civile Indigène du Cambodge but referred to as the Milice, the Gardes, or the Miliciens (Morlat, Reference Morlat1995). Until 1903, it was the only formally constituted police force in Cambodia. Initially, enrolment was for 2 years, and villages were required to provide volunteers in proportion to the number of inhabitants (between 1 and 1.5 per cent). Single men were recruited first, and then married men, and if there were no volunteers, governors drew lots. Recruitment was always difficult, and because it relied on conscription more often than on free consent, desertions were frequent. In 1909 the Résident Supérieur du Cambodge (RSC) expressed satisfaction that conscription had not resulted in major troubles: ‘The normal tax collection and the ease that has marked the operations of drawing lots for the Garde Indigène and the Bataillon CambodgienFootnote 9 are an index of the good attitude of the population.’ Brigades of the Garde Indigène existed in all provinces and were headed by a Garde Principal, who was often a French gendarme or a former noncommissioned military officer. Small detachments were dispatched to fight banditry and rebellions, to escort mekhums during tax collection, but they were also employed to watch over convict labour in public works and to guard prison convicts. From the start, provincial Résidents and RSCs constantly complained about the insufficient number of Gardes Indigènes to ensure the effective policing of the country:
The calm that reigns in Cambodia – given that since February 1st no new acts of banditry have been reported in Svay Rieng – is illusory and will only last if the brigade of the Garde Indigène of Prey Veng/Svay Rieng is maintained with its reinforced staff numbers; however, this measure, taken temporarily by drawing staff from the Phnom Penh Brigade can only be made permanent if the size of the Garde Indigène is increased as I have requested many times…Prisons overflow with prisoners and the Garde Indigène is more than busy with guarding the premises and corvées on the working sites open to penal labour; the Résidents are unanimous in their request for an increase, even if only a modest one, of their militia brigades which are overworked and discouraged.
In 1912, the number of Gardes Indigènes was reduced from 1,600 to 1,300 (bringing the rate per 100,000 population from 76 down to 62), but the length of service increased from 2 to 3 years. It included 31 Europeans, all in supervisory roles. In 1913 the number was increased to 1,500 (70 per 100,000), and mobile columns were created to exercise a more effective surveillance of the territory. In 1915 its size was increased again; it peaked in 1916 at 2,400 (100 per 100,000 following the 1916 Affair) but dropped to 2,200 (92 per 100,000) in 1917 and 1,900 (79 per 100,000) in 1920.
Gendarmerie
The gendarmes had a military status and participated from day one in the colonisation of Indochina. They were employed for policing purposes as early as 1899 in a joint brigade for Cochinchina and Cambodia (Beaudonnet, Reference Beaudonnet1998). The Gendarmerie, always French, counted only a handful of members in Cambodia (e.g. 27 gendarmes in 1919 up to 50 in 1942), but they had important supervisory and officer roles, for example, in the Garde Indigène. Most often a gendarme headed the Commissariats (police posts) in provincial towns where the repression of illegal gambling was one of the gendarmes’ tasks.Footnote 10 Despite its small size, the Gendarmerie was an effective as well as very profitable police force. For example, with hardly more than 50 men, in 1940 and 1942 the Gendarmerie collected fines and taxes amounting, respectively, to 518,420 and 580,016 piastres; that is, more than double what it cost to run the force, estimated at between 150,000 and 200,000 piastres (GGI 65902).
The administrative and judiciary police and the municipal police
In 1903, the GGI created the Police Administrative et Judiciaire, placed under the authority of the RSC and the Procureur de la République (public prosecutor). Its mission was to ‘maintain public order, protect property and individual liberty, to ensure the surveillance of public morality and public health, the investigation of crimes and misdemeanours as well as the initiation or facilitation of the repression of infractions’. This new police force was operational mostly in Phnom Penh, but if circumstances demanded it, it could exercise its action over the whole Protectorate. In 1903 it was composed of both European and indigenous personnel (10 and 41, respectively), with, however, a huge pay difference between them: for the same rank the indigenous personnel was paid 14 times less than the European personnel. The Phnom Penh Municipal Police was composed of agents seconded from the administrative and judiciary police and was entrusted with looking after ‘public health, public roads, the repression of crimes and misdemeanours against public peace, to ensure that good order was maintained in the city's public spaces, to prevent accidents and calamities such as fires, epidemics, etc.’ (GGI 17198).
Police forces under Khmer administration
In addition to the police forces, mentioned above, all under French administration, a number of ill-defined policing bodies were under Khmer administration.
First mentioned in 1909, the Gardes Régionaux (regional guards) were mostly employed to fight banditry in the provinces under the authority of the provincial governors.
The Police Rurale (rural police) was formally created in 1925, but well before that many forms of policing in villages and communes had been attempted. It was part of the mekhums’ duties to perform some level of policing in their districts.
These self-help ‘community policing’ schemes were strongly encouraged by the French. Extensive engagement of villagers in fighting banditry was attempted, and in some instances weapons were provided to the local authorities to fight banditry and help maintain order during specific events. Villagers were frequently called upon between 1912 and 1918, particularly during the highlanders’ rebellion, to perform defensive functions. Around 1910 the engagement of villagers against banditry started to have some momentum:
This new attitude from the villagers as well as the police patrols effectively dissipated the last remnant of the band and brought back tranquillity in the province (RSC, 1910 [RSC 691]). Acts of banditry tend to disappear, thanks on the one hand to the ceaseless police patrols deployed to the far away regions, to the creation of militia posts, and on the other hand particularly to the support given to the indigenous authorities away from the main centres looking for the thieves by the inhabitants themselves who are in the end tired of being continually the victims of criminals.
The turning point: 1916
The year 1916 represented a turning point in the policing of Cambodia. A series of events in Indochina generally and Cambodia in particular led to the reorganisation of the police forces in Indochina. First, there was the suspicion during World War I that Germany supported anti-French revolutionary activities in Indochina and possibly assisted the anticolonial activities of Cambodian Prince Yukanthor and of the Chinese living in Cambodia. Then, the Cambodian peasant demonstrations of January 1916, although not politically linked to it, coincided with a serious insurrection in Cochinchina, and the highlanders’ rebellion was still an incipient risk in Cambodia's northeast. These events prompted a reorganisation of the police forces in Indochina, and particularly of political policing in Cambodia. Various reports by inspectors from the Department of Administrative and Political Affairs pointed out that the different police forces in the whole of Indochina lacked cohesion. They said that criminals took advantage of the absence of a central policing body to move to places where the police had no jurisdiction. This lack of cohesion and cooperation between Cambodia and Cochinchina was a recurrent complaint of the RSCs:
Regarding the special situation of the provinces bordering Cochinchina, I have to lament the negative consequences for public security of this border zone because the administrative authorities of Cochinchina do not always conduct on their side sufficient surveillance over elements causing trouble. Brigands, once their misdeed is done, too often find help and protection from cantonal and communal Annamite authorities, and if a police column tries to cross the border to pursue a band, they do not hesitate to complain against a so-called violation of frontier.
Border policing was an important issue, not only politically but also in the repression of banditry. Some collaboration between the Protectorate and Siam existed in 1910, but in 1913 the relationship deteriorated. However, with the entry of Siam into the war on the Allies’ side in 1917 the relationship improved significantly, and in 1919 a convention on the cooperation of the border police of both countries was in the process of being ratified, and a similar type of agreement was being discussed with the government of Cochinchina. Cooperation improved slowly from 1923 to at least the mid 1930s when the relationships between Siam and the Protectorate were regarded as excellent, and the decline in banditry in the border region was in part attributed to the better cooperation between the Siamese and Cambodian police forces.
In Cambodia itself, 1916 saw not only a substantial increase in the size of the Garde Indigène (from 1,700 to 2,400) but also the formation of what the RSC called the regional police, indicating that ‘400 Gardes Indigènes have been dispatched between the 51 Cambodian provinces and put at the disposal of the governors for the service of the regional police whose duty is to maintain order and arrest wrongdoers in the province in which they are posted.’ But, and this was underlined in the original report, ‘in no case whatsoever, will the governors or functionaries of the salakhets [provincial centres] employ the Gardes Indigènes as domestics or for personal services’ (RSC 430).
The extension and rationalisation of the police forces were not without effects on criminality, as the RSC commented in his report of the fourth trimester 1925: ‘Order and security having been normally assured in the kingdom, the public attitude has overall remained as satisfactory as possible, a situation to which has certainly contributed the organisation of the rural police, established on bases that our experience allowed us to achieve successfully’ (RSC 475).
The greatest development in the policing apparatus of the Protectorate, however, was in the organisation and extension of the service and the Police de la Sûreté (security police). In Indochina, like in France, the role of the Sûreté included political policing (surveillance, identity, and espionage) but was not limited to it. The official creation of the Police de la Sûreté in Cambodia occurred in 1918, but the Service de la Sûreté already existed in 1914. In 1916 a section of the RSC's report dedicated to ‘Measures of Political Surveillance’ already mentioned that the Protectorate was developing,
following the indications of the Gouverneur Général, its means of political and administrative surveillance within Cambodia as well as on its maritime and continental borders…The arrests, the resulting inquiries and the information gathered thanks to our new means of surveillance have permitted to identify the opponents of our authority, to foil their activities and plans, and to take the necessary measures to paralyse any of their attempts.
The RSC reiterated this view in 1917: ‘I believe that there remain in the Far East and in Indochina enough factors of local troubles to motivate a constant vigilance and the maintenance, if not the growth, of the administrative police forces upon which the principle of our domination or of our Protectorate rests’ (RSC 431).
The two main sections of the Police de la Sûreté were the Service de l'Immigration Asiatique (Department of Asian Immigration, mainly concerned with the Chinese community) and the Service d'Identification et de Renseignements (Department of Identification and Intelligence). Their role was to monitor and control the activities of foreigners in Cambodia. This task included the establishment of files and index cards targeting ‘defendants, convicts, suspects, foreigners, workers, sailors, and boys following the Bertillon method’Footnote 11 (Brocheux & Hemery, Reference Brocheux and Hémery1995, p. 109).
In Cambodia, because seriously threatening pro-independence political turmoil was almost absent, between 1920 and 1940, the political role of the Sûreté was not particularly important and was actually contested. For example, in 1919, the Battambang Résident expressed doubts about the usefulness of the Police de la Sûreté in his circumscription:
Inspector Crettier, who is full of zeal and enthusiasm, and spends much energy, is doing many rounds, yet without much substantial result, as the service he is managing at the moment includes only indigenous agents of very low quality. For a long time to come, the way it is functioning in the circumscription, the sûreté will not do any service from a political point of view and very little in term of investigating crimes and misdemeanours.
Yet, the Sûreté was apparently busy: in 1919, it had made 2,358 arrests in Phnom Penh and the provinces and 1,326 in a 6-month period the following year. During the same 6-month period, the details of 8,347 suspect foreigners were put on cards. These figures increased every year. In 1937, 3,835 ‘foreigners whose situation was irregular’ were arrested, and 1940 saw the creation of 73,776 new records, nearly 10 times as many as in 1920. This huge bureaucratic work was in great part motivated by the politics of isolation of ‘the docile Khmer’ from the allegedly pernicious influence of the Chinese and Vietnamese and was regarded as valuable by almost everyone in the Administration. Unfortunately, the restrictive surveillance of police and resistance to the development of a modern political consciousness, combined with the maintenance of premodern and authoritarian modes of governance and the poverty of educational developments, stunted the development of civil society. These politics of isolation were clearly identified over and over again in the RSC's reports.
The political situation of the country is satisfying; the surveillance of the apathetic and fearful Cambodian race is easy and it is rather on the foreign migrants and travellers of the Annamite race that the vigilance of our surveillance must focus. (RSC, 1913 [RSC 430])
The political situation is therefore satisfying in all Cambodia, the state of mind of the masse of the people is good, but needs to be carefully handled and shielded from all anxieties, which in fact could only come from foreign elements, restless Annamites or greedy Chinese who every year during the harvest spread alarming news intended to confuse peasants and lower the price of paddy for the greatest profit of Chinese commerce.
For, if on their own and until now Cambodians have not given us any troubles, it remains true that they are worked on/manipulated by foreign elements that are underhandedly hostile to us. These external influences are of two main kinds: first there are the conversations, attitudes, false news or occult excitations of the Sino-Annamite population…there is another important seat of xenophobic influence in the country and particularly in the Battambang territory, no so much through direct calls to insurrection but by the example of its own independence and its affinity of character with Cambodia itself; this is the brother kingdom, the free country of Siam…This is why our vigilance must focus particularly on the recently retroceded territories. Such are the two pernicious influences: Sino-Annamite and Siamese.
The implementation of the politics of isolation required the investment of energy and resources that competed with the resources needed to fulfil another no less important goal: assuring the legitimacy of the Protectorate in providing security. This, too, was frequently expressed in the reports of the provincial Résidents and the RSC:
It is toward a better organisation of the repression of these acts of brigandage that the efforts of the administration of the Protectorate must focus, because we should worry, indeed, that if firm measures are not urgently taken to give to the population the efficacious protection that we engaged ourselves to provide in Cambodia, discouragement may paralyse the best will of peaceful inhabitants and lead them through fear of retaliations to join the ranks of the plunderers. The movement generalising we might even have to dread more serious political preoccupations as our enemies would not miss the opportunity to use our inaction as an argument against us.
The very critical report against the Sûreté by an inspection of the police forces of Cambodia in 1924 appears to have expressed the resource-wise antagonisms between these two goals:
Its sole preoccupation is to please everyone, carefully taking shelter behind someone else. A complete re-organisation of the Service is required. At a lower cost, a well organised Sûreté will give far more interesting results that the current service, which produces an enormous quantity of useless wretched papers but does not provide the administration with any useful political information…The Sûreté cost around 50,000 piastres in 1914. It will cost over 150,000 piastres in 1924. Its spending has tripled…On the other hand, the Garde Indigène, which renders such valuable services, has only doubled its spending. The budgetary crisis allows neither an increase of its size despite its necessity, nor an improvement of the situation of such a deserving personnel…A rigorous reduction of police spending is indispensable now that the Protectorate needs all its resources to give public instruction and social welfare their necessary development; the reduction should, I think, be borne by the Police de la Sûreté: the development of the country and the political situation do not justify its current size.
It should be noted that in the following years, and particularly in the 1930s during the Great Depression, the Police de la Sûreté would be increasingly employed in fighting banditry and also developed the more conventional features of the typical judicial police.
Conclusion
As we show in the next chapter, it seems to us that the processes of modernisation and rationalisation of the colonial state and its penetration into Cambodian society from 1884 to 1920 eventually paid off and helped reduce criminality between 1920 and 1930. We will see that the relative economic boom of the 1920s also played a role and how the Great Depression of the 1930s reversed the downward trend in crime. However, these processes were constrained by the imperatives of a Protectorate ‘à bon marché’ that maintained premodern and authoritarian modes of governance as cheaper and more convenient ways of collecting revenues. These modes of governance were preserved through the co-option of traditional power so that real power was totally in the hands of the French, but the symbolic power of the king was not only preserved but also usefully reinforced by the French. This is the sense we give to Forest's (Reference Forest1980) remark that ‘if there is a papering over the cracks of the administration, there is not the creation of a properly Cambodian state apparatus’ (p. 112). However, from the point of view of the protectors, ‘The system of Protectorate implemented in Cambodia is a masterpiece, the powers mutually assist each other, each masking or shock-absorbing the imperfections of the other’ (Forest, Reference Forest1980, p. 115).
Another important mechanism generated by the colonial enterprise in Cambodia was the further isolation of the country both economically and politically. We have seen direct means of political isolation from the influence of ‘foreign Asians’ assisted by the services of the Sûreté. Forest (Reference Forest1980) discusses the politics of isolation in broader terms as arising from a colonial enterprise
that sabotages itself by proclaiming the participation of the people to the modernisation of the institutions, which in fact is ending up in the isolation of these people and the loss of their initiative…however, this isolation carries with it serious negative effects in the long term. The people can no longer express themselves: someone talks for them, thinks for them. They and the state get accustomed to this situation…by the absence of the diffusion, thanks to a lack of schools, of modern culture in the rural world, and by a kind of withdrawal into traditional modes of economic activities. (pp. 140–1)
These paternalistic politics of ‘protection’ via isolation were aimed at and resulted in the ‘infantilisation’ and political retardation of Cambodian society with dire consequences in the development and resolution of future conflicts. Next, we turn to the ‘golden years’ of the Protectorate between 1920 and 1940, when social peace seemed assured, and crime and violence were declining.
