Introduction
‘Mr Lon Nol is a real Khmer hero. I love him,’ reads a comment on the compilation of ‘rare pictures of Lon Nol before his departure in April 1975’ uploaded by the Cambodian heritage group Preah Sorya on YouTube in April 2020.Footnote 1 Other comments praise the heroism and patriotism of the Khmer Republic’s leader. These positive views contrast with what is usually said of Lon Nol and, more broadly, of the republican regime itself. Proclaimed in October 1970, a few months after the coup that ousted head of state Norodom Sihanouk, the Khmer Republic was short-lived. Engulfed in a mixed civil/proxy war against Cambodian and Vietnamese communists, insufficiently backed by the United States (on their way out of the Vietnam War), it collapsed on 17 April 1975 with the Khmer Rouge takeover of Phnom Penh. The Khmer Republic is often viewed as a shell state, a corrupt and incompetent American puppet. Marginalised in academic research, it remains a black hole in Cambodia’s recent history. Its archive (official records, publications, newsreels) is limited and scattered. Yet all sorts of texts, documents, pictures, videos and sounds circulate on the internet. They include public and declassified records of the Vietnam War digitised by archive institutions and sites like Wikileaks, websites from veterans of the Khmer National Armed Forces (FANK), Meta (Facebook) pages on pre–1975 architecture in Phnom Penh and other cities, online collections of news agencies such as Reuters, television interviews of former republican officials, or popular songs from that period on Spotify.
The new media ecology of the internet makes thus available a wide range of materials that were not so easily accessible before.Footnote 2 This postscarcity culture changes the conditions, practices and forms of remembrance.Footnote 3 I try to assess the potentiality of the digital at a twofold level: 1) the space it affords for people’s articulation of memories of the republican era; and 2) the tools it provides to researchers for mapping resources from and about the Khmer Republic. To discuss that, my paper looks at materials that can be found on YouTube. Launched in 2005, YouTube remains the most important video-sharing platform with 2.70 billion users as of 2024. Although it comes behind Meta in terms of use, it represents over 20 percent of Cambodians’ social media activity (2024).Footnote 4 However, my investigation is not restricted to Cambodian nationals, but includes Cambodian (and international) users from abroad as well. Through the analysis of a selected set of videos, I aim to explore YouTube’s archival potential for the remembrance of the Khmer Republic and the affective, historiographical and political dimensions of online memory practices. The 1970–1975 republican regime has little if any official or institutional presence in Cambodia today. In fact, it mostly survives in the Khmer diaspora. By examining its digital afterlife, the paper suggests a reconceptualisation of the Khmer Republic’s time and space beyond the civil war years and beyond Cambodia. It engages with the defunct regime’s existence in imaginaries and the transnational, essentially informal memory networks that coalesce around the videos and gather different generations of Cambodians in the diaspora and Cambodia alike. Therefore, it proposes to investigate the possibility of memory formation beyond the nation-state.
While I situate the paper within the rich interdisciplinary scholarship on memory and the digital,Footnote 5 I build on the linkages between several bodies of literature: Cambodian studies, Asian-American and Asian Diaspora studies, critical archive studies and research on social media in Asia, more specifically Southeast Asia. Asian-American studies scholars have consistently explored traumatic memory and transmission through the lens of literature, cinema, visual and performing arts and more recently digital practices.Footnote 6 In the latter field, research on people’s memories of South Vietnam proves particularly relevant.Footnote 7 If the global history of the nation-state is full of short-lived and often disparaged experiences which could be compared productively, the Republic of Vietnam or RVN (1954–1975) resonates more strongly with the Khmer Republic because of their obvious historical and political linkages and parallels. In this light, the reappraisal of the RVN that has been taking place since the early 2000s in Vietnamese studies suggests possible research directions for the Khmer Republic too, such as the integration of hitherto neglected voices of ordinary people and a broader definition of resources.Footnote 8 These developments in turn reflect the larger decolonial rethinking of archives and digital cultures across academic disciplines in the past decade.Footnote 9 They also reflect the boom of digital Asia studies, a fast-growing research field, especially for observing and collecting data about civil society, political participation and social movements in the region.Footnote 10
The paper weaves these strands to unpack the relationship between the memory and history of the Khmer Republic. As said earlier, little has been written about the republican regime and the digital, and this attempt should be considered for what it is—a foray into a more experimental or recursive historiography based on a different approach to sources.Footnote 11 It has no pretension of redefining practices and forms of remembrance and transmission in the Khmer diaspora or in Cambodia. Instead, what I try to offer is a glimpse at the type of interaction the digital enables and a different disciplinary perspective on knowledge production vis-à-vis the republican regime and the civil war. Moreover, I seek to articulate anew in this context the question of the Khmer Republic’s archive or republican archive–what it contains, what is accessible, what still needs to be retrieved, and what can be produced. I reflect on our relationship with mediated artefacts and mediation and on the possibly transformative impact of the digital on existing resources. I propose to rethink postmemory not only as a topic to be investigated but also as a research practice related to the generation of a critical archive. I take this point further to reflect back on the activist dimension of postmemory and the digital. As suggested by Birgit Bräuchler in the introduction, the question of cultural (or historical) intergenerational transmission via social media does not revolve only around traumatic legacies. It also revolves around the integration of difficult past into a more future-oriented dynamic, in which knowledge production and exchange can empower people and create new types of interaction. I try thus to understand how the digital republican archive fits in this dynamic. The first section of the paper gives a historical background about the republican period and its historiography. In the second section, I discuss the existing archive of the Khmer Republic and the challenges posed by the integration of YouTube materials into this corpus. The third section provides a qualitative analysis of the content and comments of a selected set of 30 clips collected in 2024.
Historical background and historiography
Even today, public views of the Khmer Republic remain largely negative. At best, the republican or Lon Nol regime is seen as an interregnum without any substantial ideology. For its harsher critics, it is an entity which, from the start, was doomed-to-failure and bears the responsibility of Cambodia’s collapse in 1975. These judgements recall the enduring and widespread public perceptions of South Vietnam. However, while in the past two decades there has been in academia an upsurge of critical studies reassessing the RVN, the Khmer Republic is still under-researched, especially compared to Cambodia’s Sangkum or post-independence (1955–1970) and Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1979) periods.
The first historical studies were published in the 1980s and early 1990s (David Chandler, Ros Chantrabot, Justin Corfield), with later additions on American-Cambodian relations (Kenton Clymer and the as-yet-unpublished work of the late Ray Leos) and the Khmer Republic’s wartime economy (Margaret Slocomb) in the 2000s. More recently, William Chickering has published a book on FULRO (United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races) and his own war experience, and Cambodia expert Steve Heder maintains ongoing research on the Cambodian civil war.Footnote 12 To this core body of scholarly literature in the fields of (military) history, political science and international relations, new studies by a younger generation of scholars have appeared in the past years. Focused on popular culture, ideology, nation-building and minorities, biographies of lesser-known political figures, and historiography, this emerging subfield proposes new types of material sources, disciplines and methodologies.Footnote 13
An in-depth history of the republican regime would exceed by far the paper’s length. Since the country’s independence in 1953, Sihanouk had been dominating the political scene. Throughout the 1960s, discontent had grown over his domestic and international policies. Moreover, his insistence on Cambodia’s neutrality had become increasingly difficult to sustain as the conflict in neighbouring Vietnam spread across borders, with the US military response to the presence of Vietnamese communist sanctuaries on Cambodian soil (allowed by Sihanouk). It was during one of his trips abroad that Sihanouk’s deposition took place, voted by the National Assembly on the main charge of treason. The main engineers of this bloodless coup were General Lon Nol, then Prime Minister of the Government of Salvation established in 1969, and Sihanouk’s cousin Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak.
When Sihanouk heard of he had been ousted, he flew to Beijing where Zhou Enlai convinced him to form an alliance with his former enemies, the Khmer Rouge. In a radio speech on 23 March, Sihanouk enjoined the population to join the resistance forces against the usurpers in Phnom Penh. The stage was set for conflict escalation. On the other side, the new government struggled to impose its legitimacy. The war against the Vietnamese aggressors provided a way to cement national unity through the mobilisation of the population. However, the enthusiasm with which the Khmer Republic had first been received, at least by urban and educated circles, soon faded away as the regime did not live up to people’s expectations. Inflation, black market, internal strife in the government, endemic corruption, together with the intensive militarisation of society and the refugee crisis caused by bombardments and combats created an increasingly unstable and fragile situation. The republican army gradually lost control over large parts of the country to the insurgents.
With the signature of the Paris Peace agreement in January 1973 (ending the official American aerial assistance to the Khmer Republic), President Richard Nixon’s post-Watergate resignation in August 1974, and the opposition of US Congress to the continuation of the war, things took a turn for the worse for the Khmer Republic. The siege of Phnom Penh in January 1975 marked the beginning of the last offensive. On 17 April, the day of the fall of the capital city, some republican officials and military managed an eleventh-hour escape. Those who stayed in Cambodia, by decision like Sirik Matak, or because they had been unable to leave at the last minute, like Prime Minister Long Boret, were killed within hours of the Khmer Rouge takeover. The Khmer Republic had lived less than five years, and its traces disappeared in the turmoil of Democratic Kampuchea.
My objective is not to rehabilitate the republican regime. It is to reassess it on its own terms and understand why disparaging views have persisted for so long, as a result, for example, of the enduring influence on historiography of Western scholars critical of the American intervention in Indochina who often dismissed the republican officials and their (alleged) lack of political programme beyond an anti-communist and anti-Vietnamese stance. The Khmer Republic politicians, more particularly leader and president Lon Nol, also suffered from the comparison with the more charismatic and internationally well-known Sihanouk. Moreover, the Khmer Republic was open to foreign journalists. Their articles— focusing mostly on the failures of the regime—were rarely positive and in some cases downright patronising, to say the least. The republican regime’s legitimacy and the nature of the conflict in which it was engulfed remain contentious issues to this day. Was the Khmer Republic born out of a coup or a constitutional act of deposition, as the new authorities claimed it? If it was a coup, who did it? Were the United States (or the CIA at least) behind it? Was the conflict a war of aggression by the Vietnamese communists? Was it a civil war opposing Khmer republicans and communists? Unsurprisingly, these questions feature in many of the digital interactions discussed in the paper.
YouTube assemblages of the republican archive
Archival asymmetries
The proposed reassessment poses methodological questions. It implies finding sources, which is challenging given the structural asymmetry of the republican archive. If we look at the textual and visual materials produced by and inside the Khmer Republic and kept in Cambodian and international archive and research institutions, we find only a limited number of materials. This hard archive consists primarily of small and often discontinued collections of national dailies and weeklies, illustrated magazines, monthly publications by the Cambodian Chamber of Commerce and the FANK, and information bulletins from the Agence Khmère de Presse.Footnote 14 Some are in Khmer, but many are in English and French. The foreign-language publications survived in part thanks to their international distribution. Some institutions which had acquired them in the 1970s later made donations to Cambodian archives. Several newsreels and contemporaneous movies are currently available at Bophana Audiovisual Centre in Phnom Penh. Memoirs from republican actors are unfortunately few and far between.Footnote 15 Another category of sources includes the interviews given by ex-republican officials to reporters in Cambodia and abroad years and decades later, the documentation generated by the trials of senior Khmer Rouge at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) in 2009–2022, the confessions extracted from republican civil servants and soldiers at the Khmer Rouge prison S-21 and now kept at the Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-Cam) in Phnom Penh.
The list is not exhaustive. What it shows nevertheless is the blind spots of the hard archive. There is little vernacular material, no posters, rare official documents such as inter-ministerial and diplomatic correspondence, and hardly anything produced by civil society. In contrast, resources in public archives in the United States provide a significant and easily accessible body of materials, including governmental and military records; press articles; photos; memoirs by politicians, military and journalists. This asymmetry extends what journalist William Shawcross called then a sideshow, that is, Cambodia’s peripheral position in the bigger—American—story of the Vietnam War.Footnote 16 At the time, republican voices were already hardly audible, caught as they were between the rock of US narratives (state departments, army circles, intelligence agencies, press correspondents) and the hard place of the international left’s anti-imperialist discourse. How to recover these voices is thus a major ethical and methodological challenge for any historiography of the Khmer Republic. It is why it is so interesting to look at the developments in the study of the Republic of Vietnam in the past 20 years. Using different disciplinary perspectives, a growing number of works has integrated the voices of South Vietnamese actors and therefore renewed perspectives on the RVN. These works have also shown the existence of a double asymmetry. For a long time, researchers have focused on American rather than Vietnamese sources, and within Vietnamese sources themselves, on the North Vietnamese ones.Footnote 17 A similar situation can be observed with respect to the Khmer Republic. American sources have long prevailed over Cambodian ones, and there has been greater interest in the Khmer Rouge regime than in the republican one. In the wake of the ECCC, institutions and individuals have made a tremendous effort to interview Democratic Kampuchea victims and perpetrators. Of course, this material provides valuable information on the civil war years, but it remains a kind of back-story. Can we tell this story differently? What new, expanded or hybrid archive do we need for that?Footnote 18
Oral history is certainly the first way that comes to mind for broadening the republican archive. It is all the more urgent now that those who experienced the Khmer Republic first-hand are getting elderly. To my knowledge, there is at the moment no systematic or institutional project underway to collect accounts from these witnesses, only individual attempts such as John Pirozzi’s documentary film Don’t think I’ve forgotten: Cambodia’s lost rock and roll (2014). Pirozzi and scholar LinDa Saphan’s interviews of artists from the 1960s and early 1970s are a goldmine about popular culture, entertainment and night life in wartime Phnom Penh. Yet, if the voices of military officials, politicians and public figures from that period are somewhat more audible, what happens with ordinary people? Scholar Lina Chhun’s work on the remembrance of the bombardment of the river city Neak Loeung by US air forces in August 1973 demonstrates the benefits of a diversified approach to sources to understand the persistence of traumatic memories of the civil war and question hegemonic narratives.Footnote 19 Chhun juxtaposes her father’s recollection of the incident, interviews of survivors of American bombardments by the DC-Cam, the landscape histories in Cambodian artist Vandy Rattana’s multimedia installation Bomb ponds (2009), and her own observations during a 2015 trip in the Memot province of the vegetation growing in bomb craters (2016: 42, 2).Footnote 20 She thus combines artistic, material and environmental sources with oral ones to generate a wider archive that departs from dominant American sources. Other paths to be productively explored involve, for instance, the architectural traces of the Khmer Republic, especially in urban settings, using different archives to locate instutional buildings, housing, emergency structures, and monuments constructed or repurposed in 1970–1975 and thus have a better idea of the regime’s spatial organisation and daily life in wartime Phnom Penh.
One should add the digital sources. The internet and digital technologies radically transform the archival landscape. They extend it quantitatively and qualitatively by giving access to a miscellaneous volume of inventoried and non-inventoried documents. This expanded archive is doubly hybrid, for the diversity of materials and practices it proposes and for the entanglement of older and newer archives it produces. Let us take, for example, the photos posted by the blog KI Media of the full military honour to Lon Nol paid by veterans of the USNDC ninth division at his grave at Fullerton, California, in 2012 for the anniversary of 18 March.Footnote 21 The picture evidences the enduring collective memory of the Khmer Republic among FANK veterans. Now, how shall we call this memory? Scholar Cathy Schlund Vials talks about the Cambodian syndrome, which she defines as ‘a set of amnesic politics manifest in hegemonic modes of public policy and memory’.Footnote 22 There is no official space for Cambodian veterans in the United States (or Australia, or France) to commemorate the republican regime, only private ceremonies that can be then shared online. In Cambodia, the Khmer Republic is simply not there. Survivors and their children are thus left to their own devices to remember, and younger generations of Cambodians have few elements of reference to figure out what happened during the civil war. In this context, it is easy to look at materials on the internet as counter-memories. Yet, I am particularly careful not to overemphasise the idea of contestation, which would imply overtly anti-Republican views from post–1979 successive Cambodian governments. To be sure, there is no commemoration in Cambodia of key republican figures. Still, if we want to speak of official politics of memory vis-à-vis the Khmer Republic, then it is a politics based on silence and invisibility, not a politics that seems as active as, for example, the one related to the memory of the 1965–1966 massacres of communists in Indonesia.Footnote 23 Additionally, one may want to keep in mind scholar Hue-Tam Ho Tai’s warning that, however tempting it is to study the relationship between memory and history ‘in terms of hegemony and counterhegemony’ (state against individuals, losers against winners, etc.), attempts ‘to come to grips with the legacy of a century’s work of war and revolution raise issues that are more complex than a simple story of tension and opposition might suggest’.Footnote 24 It is with this caveat in mind that I will look at YouTube videos of the Khmer Republic.
Working with YouTube: Possibilities and limitations
My interest in YouTube was sparked by a series of eight one-hour-long videos entitled Khmer Republic posted on YouTube in 2016. The series collates multiple footage images, mostly originating from news agencies active in Cambodia in the early 1970s. Some parts include a soundtrack of popular songs from that period; others do not. These latter parts are particularly absorbing because one can hear snippets of conversations. Initially, I was just curious to see if I could find materials that did not belong to the collections I already knew and thus complete my inventory of audiovisual sources (currently a work in progress). In the process, I became interested in the various assemblages of these footage images and how they possibly made the Khmer Republic visible in a different way. In other words, I wondered whether they could help read archival sources against the grain.
At first, watching all the parts of Khmer Republic seemed just like a long journey into the defunct state, a sort of immersive experience, sometimes innocuous (people buying ice creams), sometimes graphic (lengthy shots of dead soldiers). If the series initially gave me the feeling of having unfiltered access to archive materials, I soon realised that it was not the case. If there was no index or information that interfered with my viewing—unlike the online collections of the same news agencies which are often keyworded—there was still some mediation. Morodock Khmer, the YouTuber who had created the series, had certainly decided about an order (even though I did not find any apparent organising themes), and added or not music and texts to the compilations. I was thus looking at and listening to the Khmer Republic through human and algorithmic filters. By providing information about the videos, the comments further mediated the materials. They told me how these bits and pieces were received, and therefore they gave me insights into how the Khmer Republic was remembered by different individuals and groups. What had started as an interest in the epistemological status of YouTube materials in an expanded archiving process became at that point an interest in remediation itself, more specifically in people’s memory-making and archival activism.Footnote 25
As shows the substantial literature generated by YouTube since its inception, the platform’s potential as a digital archive, more particularly for marginalised voices, has long been a topic of academic research.Footnote 26 Scholars have explored multiple aspects of this archive, including its instability because of the threat of commercial interests and copyright infringements; the heterogeneity and fragmentation of the content, and paradoxically its homogenisation due to the levelling effect of algorithm-based accessibility; the question of authenticity and reliability of these endlessly remediated materials; the alternative indexical hierarchies and production of knowledge enabled by the platform; the democratising potential of user-generated memory and its affordances to challenge institutional practices. These themes inform my analysis. As noted in the introduction, the digital is embedded within economic, technological and representational structures of power, which materialise and operate through these different aspects.
One finds many things about the Khmer Republic on YouTube: series, playlists, reportages, slideshows, even animations. User Common Cambodian, for example, uploaded a photo of the battle of Kampot (1974) with in the foreground a drawn figure (possibly a self-portrait).Footnote 27 User FroogyC produced several short pieces, using the online game creation system Roblox. The one entitled Roblox | Khmer Republic | Lay all your love on me shows a rather fanciful FANK parade with tanks, and then fighter jets flying over republican soldiers in the countryside.Footnote 28 There are also interviews of former republican officials, such as the one made in April 2015 by Radio Free Asia of ex-Minister of information Chhang Song (1939–2022).Footnote 29 At present, it is difficult to provide an estimation of the number of videos. It keeps changing as people upload materials all the time. Moreover, checking every video, that is, collecting en masse and classifying, would require semi-automated data acquisition using different types of queries (a process made even more complex by the multilingual context of collection) and data cleaning and pre-processing—in other words, a technological infrastructure for quantitative analysis that not all researchers have at their disposal. As well, while a cross-platform acquisition of data to find how specific images get remediated across Meta, Instagram, X, TikTok, and YouTube would certainly bring about valuable information with regards to social networks and the circulation of materials, it too implies technological means. Such a development remains, as of writing, only one of the potential options, alongside a more ethnographic approach based on interviews of YouTubers.
Therefore, my research design at this stage is far simpler. In terms of sources, I consider YouTube at two distinct levels: the digitised archival documents themselves (posted by institutions, press agencies, universities, etc.); and the documents or rather assemblages that are digitally born and include remixes of original footage, comments, tags, links, playlists, likes/dislikes, emojis and so forth. The transformation of the original artefact into a remediated one implies the transformation of the objects and methods of study as well, and I propose to use the two in a complementary way. For this study, I worked with a small sample of 150 videos. To work my way through YouTube, I entered the keywords Khmer Republic, Lon Nol, Sirik Matak, Long Boret, as well as the names of high-ranking military such as FANK commander-in-chief Sosthène Fernandez in English, French and Khmer in the YouTube search bar. On the basis of the initial results, I worked associatively, using playlists and suggestions. I collected the clips manually because part of my research, beyond this paper’s scope, involves authenticating original footage, demarcating it from countless online variations, and indexing it with a view to building a primary sources-based video archive of the Khmer Republic. To classify the videos, I used a combined set of basic descriptors: year, topic (military operations, political events, daily/urban life), actors, locations. I selected 30 of them on the basis of two criteria. Since I was interested in the way people appropriate existing materials, I retained the videos posted by individuals and remixing footage produced in 1970–1975. This footage often comes from news agencies. In many cases, the agency’s logo still appears on the image, which makes identification easy. There are other ways to identify the footage, for example the countdown at the bottom part of the image which signals the journalistic nature of the clip. Last but not least, there is also my own familiarity with the materials. Then, out of this group of 150, I kept only the videos with comments.
In terms of analytical framework, my paper comes from the qualitative side of social media research (discursive and visual analysis), with a focus on the clips themselves and people’s reactions to the videos. Content analysis is obviously speculative. Comments are usually short, often cryptic. There is no real structure of discussion that emerges from them. In fact, they are mostly standalones and rarely become part of a sustained exchange between two or more users. I decided to focus on verbal forms of interaction. I left emojis, likes/dislikes, or view counts out of the field of investigation because I consider them even more complex to examine. View counts, for example, do not provide any reliable indication as to whether people actually watched the entire clip, parts of it or just clicked on the link.Footnote 30 Moreover, at this current stage of my work, the multimodality of people’s reception of YouTube’s republican archive is not a research priority and I chose not to include these non-verbal elements into my analysis.
It is clear that this research design has limitations, the main one being the lack of information on users and viewers’ identity. As scholar Khatharya Um reminds, the people exiled from the Khmer Republic included different categories: the country’s elite who managed to trickle out of Cambodia before 1975, the small group that evacuated with the Americans, the civilians and military personnel who escaped at the last minute.Footnote 31 Let us add those who stayed in Cambodia, survived the Khmer Rouge regime, and after 1979 made their way to the United States (Australia, Canada, and France) via refugee camps. In the case of users, the channel description provides meagre information (sometimes the country, the date when the user joined YouTube). People cannot be directly contacted either unless they indicate their other social media platforms. With so little at hand, only a dissection of the comments may bring additional elements. Some people plainly say who they are and what their story is. In the absence of such biographical details, the minimum assumption is that comments in English come from the Khmer diaspora in North America and those in Khmer from Cambodian nationals. Of course, in the latter case, people may also react in English, and language mastery is not always a clear indication. Another issue is the age group. Here again, people sometimes disclose quite a lot in their comments. Some mention they were children, teenagers or young adults during the civil war. Others refer to a family member (often the father) who was a soldier from the FANK or an air pilot. Some say they are too young to have known that period. These biographical details indicate that several generations interact via videos and comments, and that YouTube provides thus a good terrain to explore the ways in which memory and postmemory of the Khmer Republic are articulated.
Analysis
Comments weave different thematic strands. In the next subsections, I try to differentiate between them while marking their linkages. The first theme to emerge from comments relates to the affective dimension of the acts of remixing, uploading and commenting. The second theme connects to the documentary dimension of the clips and consequently YouTube’s historiographical potential. The third theme is redress in the face of a lack of recognition. Directly related to that is the fourth theme, which I describe as a form of corrective act. Expanding on this idea, the last theme to emerge is the possibility of forms of activism that go beyond the past and try to convey a more contemporary message.Footnote 32
Republican nostalgia
The video Phnom Penh Cambodia 1974, a modern society shows miniskirt-clad ladies sitting in bars and pouring beers, and people buying ultra-modern sound systems, tape recorders and vinyl discs. The original footage is probably a Japanese reportage since all the brands on screen are from Japan (Sapporo and Asahi beer, Yamaha motorbikes, Sony and Sanyo equipment and so forth). The video closes with a sequence of traffic in Phnom Penh.Footnote 33 For Flying Apsara, who posted the video, these images show how modern and prosperous Cambodia was at the time of the Khmer Republic. For some people maybe… For others, the republican period was one of hardship. The government’s failed attempts to stabilise the war economy and the country’s dependence on external assistance speak of a different reality. Many urban residents struggled (inflation, shortages, black market, rocket attacks on the city), especially the refugees from provinces who had come by hundreds of thousands to find shelter in Phnom Penh.
Some viewers are surprised by the contrast between the apparent normality of daily activities and the war context. Joseenricoquinsaat4137, for example, marvels at Phnom Penh’s ‘calmness and peace’ despite the circumstances. But not iiii5256, who replies: ‘the civil war was red hot in the countryside, but everyone’s in the video is Cambodia’s upper class not doing the fighting, their lifestyle is still peaceful for now.’Footnote 34 The same viewer goes on to signal elements that belie this rosy perception of wartime urban life: ‘That long line at the gas station is because the city is surrounded, and deliveries were cut off. So, all supplies had to be airlifted. Things were already falling apart by this point.’ Indeed, one finds many signs of the civil war in the videos, such as the presence of soldiers controlling people’s papers and cars at check points or the tanks driving on boulevards. Yet, the idea that everything was fine then, and that the country’s development was cut short by the Khmer Rouge and never really resumed after that appears in several comments. ‘I miss Mr. Lon Nol era. Our country was ready to compete with the world our law and order was so organizes,’ writes suryavarman6058.Footnote 35
That people look at street scenes through the idealising prism of nostalgia is understandable, given the strong relationship between cityscape and memory-scape. Buildings, sites, street names and urban landmarks are often associated with souvenirs, moods and the sensory spectrum of recollection, as practices such as psycho-geography demonstrate. For those who experienced wartime Phnom Penh first-hand, watching this old footage is a means of going home virtually—not the home in the present, but the one remembered (on this phenomenon, see for example Khiêm Bui 2023: 82ff). Commenting on the video Phnom Penh Cambodia, early 1970s,Footnote 36 gigitoronto3662 sums it up: ‘I miss my hometown 1970.’ Guitrich remembers the ‘micro bus’ that ‘I used to ride… to school and go to the markets with my mom,’ while Vimolkhun879 recalls that ‘before 1975, most people rode a Vespa Lambretta to the market. There was a children theater. It was happy.’ For younger Cambodians who live in Cambodia today, as indicated by the information they give in their comments, these videos provide ‘missing pictures’Footnote 37 that can be superimposed on the present-day urban fabric and allow them to imagine what it was like before. Nostalgia also pervades the archives from the Sangkum period (1955–1970), often seen as Cambodia’s halcyon days, but there is something more poignant in images of the Khmer Republic. There is a haunting quality to them. Viewers often write that the Cambodians we see in the YouTube videos have no idea that in a week, a month or a year time, they will be dead. ‘Seeing… crowds of civilians, it’s sobering to know that one-fifth to one-quarter of them were to lose their lives during the Khmer Rouge rule that followed,’ KonradAdenauerJr writes.Footnote 38 People’s (relative) carefreeness as they attend their daily business—like buying food at the market, walking, or cycling—is thus perceived through the prism of the end. In this sense, YouTube enables—to draw on Nguyen-Vo—a kind of ‘spectral writing’ of everyday life in wartime Phnom Penh.Footnote 39 People (and to some extent the city) are like ghosts. Clips of daily life in wartime Phnom Penh have thus the potential to bring back ‘past people [who] exist in the present as a trace yet cannot be fully assimilated into the present any more than they can be materially resurrected.’Footnote 40
YouTube’s historiographical potential
This affective dimension of YouTube videos is deeply entangled with the documentary one, and it is this entanglement that raises, at least in part, the question of the value of such materials as historiographical resources. Depending on the way we look at them, the videos may offer precious information about life in the Khmer Republic, but is it enough to call them primary sources, especially considering they are just remediations of original recordings? Many videos come with popular songs from the late 1960s and early 1970s. The music adds to nostalgia and the haunting aspect of the videos since many of these artists (Pen Ron, Sin Sisamouth, Ros Sereysothea, Yos Olarang to name but a few) were killed or died in Democratic Kampuchea.Footnote 41 The Khmer Republic anthem too triggers people’s recollection.Footnote 42 Users sokha6943 and benehan1726, for example, share the memory of singing the song in high school, in honour of the flag.Footnote 43
Viewers generally appreciate the soundtrack. They ask information about the songs and try to identify unnamed singers. Some, however, deplore this musical mediation which diminishes the documentary contribution of the footage, as we cannot hear anymore bits of ambient sound and fragments of conversations. It is clear that listening to families who communicate with their men across the recruitment centre’s fence is not the same experience as seeing these images with a soundtrack.Footnote 44 Yet, while this specific video deserves a place of choice in the republican (sonic) archive, to what extent does it qualify as a primary source? Provenance is key to answering this question. The video Embassy of the Khmer Republic in Thailand 1975 posted by Lim Soknarith is, for example, undeniably very valuable material. It features the interview of the Cambodian military attaché as he hears the news of the fall of Phnom Penh. In the opening sequence, we see an embassy employee who tries to pick up a signal from the Khmer Republic radio station but only gets static.Footnote 45 Where does it come from? Who filmed it? In the absence of a clear chain of evidence, it can hardly be seen as a primary source.
The situation is different in the case of Soundbyte Khmer Republic Radio.vmw posted by chhmar.Footnote 46 It was taped by mistake off the Khmer Republic military radio one Friday night in 1974, as the news announcer closed the weekly music programme with a political message. The tape was given to chhmar later that year by his uncle who had been the one taping Khmer music from the radio.Footnote 47 Media scholar Scarlette Nhi Do contends that the low quality of videos on YouTube does not affect the way people perceive their cultural significance. What matters, she suggests, is the existence itself of these images since there seems to be no national interest in ‘preserving such history’.Footnote 48 Yet, I would argue that people react differently to (what appears as) a primary source than to a remediated one. Of course, the story itself is not enough to ensure that Soundbyte actually is a primary source, posted and shared for the first time. Here again, the ‘chain of custody’ would have to be more documented in order to ascertain the nature of the material. Nonetheless, the comments on Soundbyte show that viewers are aware of being in presence of an exceptional archival artefact. Sdanachkta18’s identification of the announcer as his brother adds to this feeling. Here, the affective and documentary sides converge, and this merging makes the piece even more outstanding.
Finding primary sources on YouTube is like looking for a needle in a haystack, but it happens (keeping the abovementioned caveat in mind). One example is Cambodia 1972, posted by US army veteran James David Phenicie.Footnote 49 The latter filmed it in 1972 on a Canon Super 8 mm during a mission in Cambodia and South Vietnam and digitally scanned it later for reproduction. Phenicie explains:
On April 18, 1972, I was assigned to fly a mission to Phnom Penh, Cambodia from my airbase in Vietnam to support the US Embassy in Cambodia. We flew several embassy personnel to a small village near Lake Tonle Sap, went to an area near Kompong Thom and picked up three NVA [North Vietnamese Army, NA] prisoners and returned to Phnom Penh. On the way back, we determined that we would run out of fuel before reaching the airport. Through gallant efforts of Cambodian officials, we found a small village which had a cache of Jet fuel hidden in a bunker in the event of an emergency. We used the four barrels for our two helicopters and safely returned to Phnom Penh.
Several viewers, many of whom are veterans and children of veterans, thank Phenicie for posting his film. Sarsithan5348 (a former helicopter pilot graduated from US Army Aviation School in Ozark, Alabama in the 1970s) says he likes ‘to see old footages to remind us [of] the old time’. He goes on to explain that ‘to escape Cambodia on April 18, 1975, I flew to Kompong Chhnang, over Tonle Sap, Siem Reap, Odor Mean Chhey and Surin, Thailand’. This catches the attention of sodsad1366 whose family story is connected to this event or this group of pilots: ‘Sithan [Sarsithan5348, NA] my late father used to talk a lot about “ah Hong and ah Say” back then—do you know anything about them?’ In response, Sarsithan5348 describes at length the last helicopter escapes from the Olympic Stadium in Phnom Penh on 18 April 1975. Kong Chhay Hong was the last one to leave, around 7am that day.Footnote 50
Cambodia 1972 is thus not only rare, traceable material. It comes with witness accounts and the collaborative effort of viewers to corroborate the footage by identifying the town where Phenicie made his emergency landing.Footnote 51 Other discussions and threads involve this type of spontaneous crowdsourcing. Let us take the video Phnom Penh early 1971 posted by Lim Soknarith.Footnote 52 It is described as ‘“Misunderstanding” results in clash between Cambodian and South Vietnamese troops’. This vague description does not say much about the footage, but khmerrepublic7188’s comment brings additional information: ‘I was there when the South Vietnamese army launched attack around Wat-Phnom. I remember around noon time that they launched “B79” everywhere in Wat-Phnom. Lycee-Decard [Lycée Descartes, NA] is my school.’ What we see at play in these attempts to identify people, sites or events is a double dynamic. On the one hand, first-hand knowledge authenticates the visual document. On the other hand, the video redeploys the personal recollection as a form of testimony supported by both visual evidence and the interaction of two, three or more witnesses.
Archival justice
This participatory dimension of knowledge production brings to the fore a further question, that of writing or rewriting history. For some users and viewers, YouTube channels and videos enable to fill in gaps in education about Cambodia’s recent history. This pedagogical function often presents the more militant side of historiographical justice—getting recognition for those who have been forgotten, erased even in historical narratives. The recurrent theme of paying tribute to the young men, the soldiers who fought for the Khmer Republic (and against communism) illustrates this belated redress. ‘My tears drop when watching this video clip. May their souls rest in peace in heaven. (Cambodian solider/military soldiers, and the people of Cambodian back then),’ PreahVihear writes.Footnote 53 ‘You should thank Khmer republic soldiers for their sacrificed,’ chhornseyhak1099 tells other viewers.Footnote 54 ‘I respect for real Khmer that had served our homeland that time may you rest peaceful above heaven pleased god took really great care all Cambodian troop heroes,’ declares milahan2861, whose father was a republican soldier.Footnote 55 Other viewers refer to their family. Rickyting5443 writes: ‘I miss my father watching this meaningful songs video with so many memories. He served his beloved country for all his life as a commanding officer… In 1975, he was a colonel convoy brigade stationed in Bek Chan.’Footnote 56 Or narunnly9331: ‘I have a lot of relatives who joined Khmer republic military.’Footnote 57
These comments show that historiographical justice is sometimes associated with transgenerational transmission, or lack thereof. It is of course difficult to guess, on the basis of public comments, the nature of the family interactions generated by the traumatic memory of the civil war. The topic of intergenerational transmission has been investigated more thoroughly in the Khmer Rouge context.Footnote 58 Nevertheless, drawing on both this literature and studies of South Vietnamese refugees in the United States;Footnote 59 one may suggest that watching videos on YouTube and posting comments makes possible for children of veterans or of soldiers killed during the civil war to fill holes in fragmented parental narratives, imagine the experience of their fathers, and perhaps recast them as war heroes and not losers. Similarly, YouTube possibly provides FANK veterans with a way to shine another, positive light on the Khmer Republic army, hence on their own role and actions, and communicate something different to their children amidst the complexities and frustrations of life in exile.
Scholars Thu-huong Nguyen-vo and Evyn Lê Espiritu-Gandhi make an interesting argument about the linkages between the ‘devaluation of the symbolic political currency’Footnote 60 of the Republic of Vietnam (as it failed to protect the country’s sovereignty due to American presence), the masculinist dimension of Vietnamese nationalism, and the attempt of South Vietnamese veterans to reclaim their position in it by emphasising the ‘traditional masculine markers of history’Footnote 61 associated with battles and heroic narratives.Footnote 62 It is tempting to project this argument onto the Khmer Republic. The re-heroisation of republican soldiers and officers by their peers, relatives, and unrelated individuals often goes with the re-evaluation of the Khmer Republic’s military performance during the war, and from there to apportioning responsibilities in Cambodia’s collapse. Since Lon Nol embodies the Khmer Republic, numerous comments revolve around him. They generally address his role as either saviour or traitor of the nation. While his leadership is praised by some viewers, his departure from Phnom Penh on 1 April 1975, resulting from multiple factors, is denounced by others as an abandonment of Cambodia, the evidence of his flawed patriotism.Footnote 63 ‘He left and ran away like a coward with his bills in his pocket,’ canonpekas1115 writes. ‘He left the same way you would have left if staying there meant a certain horrible death,’ tedmccarron replies.Footnote 64 Or heanvisalseyhak9487: ‘Lon Nol escaped and left his men behind.’Footnote 65
The video Khmer Republic Visak Bochea Festival 1973 comes with a heated exchange on the subject.Footnote 66 The clip shows the celebration of Buddha Day on 17 May at Preah Sakyamuni Chetei [shrine] in Phnom Penh. We can see the arrival to the tribune of monks and officials such as Sirik Matak and then Prime Minister In Tam by foot and of Lon Nol by car. Crowds are on the sides of the avenue, and watch the parade. ‘There is nowhere to show that [Lon Nol] is patriotic other than to serve his own interests and that of his brothers and sisters in America,’ claims BOSIBA. To which km2100 retorts: ‘How was that Lon Nol a traitor when he tried all he could to defend the country from falling into the hands of the communists?!!!!’ Whereas BOSIBA insists on the idea that the [18 March 1970] coup destroyed Cambodia, Monatio79 tries to find a more contextual explanation (Vietnam War), but still considers that ‘Lon Nol dragged [the country] into the war, the coup and more war.’Footnote 67 The discussion turns to the comparison of Lon Nol and Sihanouk’s roles in the Cambodian tragedy, with clear-cut positions from the viewers on the subject. For sethflippingrollins937, Sihanouk was ‘the real Traitor’. Sebastien6329 too thinks that ‘King Sihanouk betrayed his motherland and his people for his wife and Vietminh. He brought fire into Cambodia which lead to genocide of Pol Pot’. Similar comments come with the video Phnom Penh early 1975. Footnote 68 Vannakr25 claims that ‘Sihanourk I blamed the most’. Minhana1447 underlines ‘the king’s fault for getting involved around Vietnam war… if we just mind our own business, Khmer Rouge wouldn’t happen.’ ‘Exactly, if Cambodia stayed neutral or helped the U.S. like Thailand, khmer rough wouldn’t even happen,’ bb4251 approves. But moa1846 disagrees: ‘the king was trying to stay neutral. It worked out until Lon Nol decided to take over the King and the Chinese practically forced him to side with the Khmer Rouge.’
Digital corrective acts
Correcting history via YouTube also implies a radical reframing of events, more particularly events that reveal the darker aspects of the Khmer Republic. The detention and disappearance of ethnic Vietnamese residents in April 1970 is one of them. Large-scale, and possibly state-managed, demonstrations to protest the presence of Vietnamese communist forces on Cambodian soil began in March 1970. They culminated with the sacking and burning of the embassies of North Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam (Viet Cong) in Phnom Penh. Some demonstrators even turned against Vietnamese shops, houses and churches. The stalling of negotiations between the Cambodian and the North Vietnamese governments and the recall by Hanoi of its diplomats brought anti-Vietnamese sentiment to ‘high pitch’.Footnote 69 The demonstrations escalated beyond the control of the authorities and ended up in the killing of several hundred Vietnamese residents and, following Saigon’s intervention, the relocation of the Vietnamese community in South Vietnam.Footnote 70
The international press and humanitarian organisations denounced these acts of violence and the government’s lack of response to them. However, this episode has been forgotten since. It is thus interesting to see it resurface on YouTube. It appears in the third part of the 15-part series on the Khmer Republic posted by Tay Mow. This specific part focuses on the rounding up and killing of ethnic Vietnamese.Footnote 71 The clip is based on a French reportage, as indicated by the Institut National d’Audiovisuel (INA) logo that copyrights the images, but Tay Mow’s graphic inserts radically change the story. The reportage includes the testimony of a French(-speaking) eyewitness who describes the corpses of Vietnamese victims he saw floating on the Mekong. The man sits against the light to hide his identity. For Tay Mow, he is not a reliable informant but a ‘Vietnamese snitch’ [‘mouchard’ in French] speaking to a journalist (00:24). The following sequence shows several Vietnamese prisoners under the watch of soldiers in a Phnom Penh street. At some point, one of these soldiers comes to the cameraman and tries to stop him from filming. The prisoners are then escorted to a police truck. Taw Mow’s inserts describe these men as ‘secret spies from the North Vietnamese communists and the Viet Cong who had infiltrated our provinces and capital city and were known from our military intelligence’ (00:30). While one cannot exclude the presence of communist informers in the Vietnamese community in Phnom Penh, as suggested by Taw Mow, reports and journalistic accounts from that period make clear that most of the people who were killed or arrested during this episode of ethnic violence were just ordinary citizens that the government had the duty to protect but failed to.Footnote 72 It is fascinating to see how, 50 years later, this video’s narrative still echoes the governmental line of the time on the extent of Vietnamese infiltration in Cambodia and the necessity to act against the enemy.
The persistence of this narrative can be interpreted in many ways: a form of denial of what happened or a desire to keep the Khmer Republic pristine in the eyes of younger generations. Furthermore, it points to the need for a thorough discussion of the complexities of the proxy/international/civil war that was fought in Cambodia from 1970 to 1975. Last but not least, it begs the question how such a view connects to the expression of political opinions in the present. ‘Khmer Republic will be resuscitated. We’re not dead yet!!!’ writes invinoveritas6859. One may ask, together with Espiritu-Gandhi, what the purpose of resurrecting the ‘ghostly state’Footnote 73 in today’s context might be. It is an affective, cultural or political purpose? YouTube videos of the Khmer Republic can be more easily discussed through the affective and cultural prism (preserving a cultural identity in exile, mourning the dead, protecting the now defunct nation-state’s legacy). However, assessing their political dimension is a different story. It is easy to mistake the digital practices of posting and commenting with political action, and comments alone offer too little grasp to decide one way or the other.
Beyond archival activism?
Is the remembrance of the Khmer Republic only a ‘thing of the past’? If not, to what extent does it become instrumental in criticism of contemporary issues? In some cases, it offers a way to express dislike for the present-day Cambodian government.Footnote 74 ‘Lon Nol was the one who became the first president and try to hold on to power at any cost, much just like Hun Sen at the moment… they are unfit to ran the high office of the president … both their regime are known as the most corrupted in the history of the Cambodian state,’ BOSIBA claimsFootnote 75. Suryavarman6058 compares Lon Nol and Sihanouk, and deploring the latter’s blindness vis-à-vis Vietnam, adds: ‘ho chi mint ideology still continued to rearrange our people way of living and our future. The monarchy today are not our true Queen and Hun Sen are just their puppy.’Footnote 76 More ironically, mangmoeut3469 writes: ‘Cambodia nowadays is not the same as in the 70s, thanks to Samdech Decho Hun Sen’s massive developments and massive influx of Vietnamese into Cambodia.’Footnote 77 The Khmer Republic plays thus a multiplex role as an element of comparison in the criticism of former Prime Minister Hun Sen and the ruling Cambodian People’s Party. It also channels a persistent dislike of the Vietnamese. ‘Every day I see Vietnamese locusts. I hate them so much,’ (translation), says user-qi7dm8ur80, commenting on the footage of the March 1970 sacking of North Vietnam and Viet Cong embassies.Footnote 78 Yet, the lack of information on the positionality of YouTube users and viewers makes it challenging to go beyond superficial interpretation. What we see in clips of the Khmer Republic and their comments is a type of activism that revolves primarily around individual and collective narratives of the past. It may fit in what communication scholar Gilang Desti Parahito and anthropologist Vissia Ita Yulianto describe as the potential monumentality of YouTube, especially since physical spaces of remembrance are absent. Yet, while YouTube generates—like other social platforms—a new space for commemoration, the question whether this ‘de-territorialized environment’Footnote 79 enables the formation of memory beyond the nation-state remains open. The interaction between transnational and vernacular forms of memory, as far as this circumscribed analysis may suggest, tends to point to the sedimentation and strengthening of national, or even nationalist, views. As historian Paulo Drinot suggests with regards to the nineteenth century war between Bolivia and Peru, that the Cambodian 1970—1975 civil war as it materialises on YouTube clips and comments appears as a ‘constantly refought as a war of ideas’ about Cambodia’s past and the Khmer Republic.Footnote 80
To answer the further question whether (post)memory activism in the digital is part of a broader, present- or future-oriented type of political activism requires thus further social media research (including data triangulation, interviews and social network analysis). While, even at this embryonic stage, the study of online interactions gives insights into the ‘diasporic complex political subjectivity,’Footnote 81 the analysis gets more difficult when it comes to the political dimension of comments from Cambodian nationals. Do reactions to clips of the Khmer Republic go beyond clicktivism? To what extent can nostalgia be construed as a political message? When a (young) Cambodian writes ‘I miss the Republic,’ does this statement have any contentious meaning? Studies of online political activism in the Cambodian youth show how ‘active silence’ gestures (in photos), or specific terms may amount to political action, but it is complicated to track and identify these expressions in comments.Footnote 82 In this sense, the political dimension of postmemory is the most elusive part of this analysis of Khmer Republic videos on YouTube, even though one may assume it most probably plays only second fiddle to the cultural and affective dimensions of people’s archival activism on the platform. ‘There were few real lovers of the republic at the time,’ Harrisonphin1235 writes. ‘We will increase a lot in the future,’ Channsinhman3720 replies. ‘I expect something to happen in Cambodia in the future,’ Republicofkhmer-kampuchea concludes. It is hard to think of such an exchange as a call for revolution in Cambodia or an imagination of radically different future. Rather, this conversation points once more to people’s nostalgia for the Khmer Republic, a regime that once embodied dreams of change and even now remains for some an idealised version of Cambodia.
Conclusion
The paper discussed the effect of the digital on the remembrance of the Khmer Republic. It focused on remediated materials from the 1970–1975 period (mostly footage from news agencies that were reporting from Cambodia during the civil war) on YouTube and the discursive, affective and political articulations of memory and postmemory generated by these materials. It is important to situate YouTube within a tradition of exile cultural production that brings together nostalgia, quest for recognition and activism. In this sense, the digital is not different than the printed or other media that have long been used by diasporic communities eager to preserve the legacy of their vanished nations. As my analysis of a set of videos and their comments shows, the need to revisit the period, mourn the dead, and resist what is perceived as the erasure of the Khmer Republic’s achievements and sacrifices is strongly expressed on YouTube. However, it is perhaps within the context of the platform’s digital archive that the specificity of the relationship between the digital and memory/postmemory appears more clearly.
The shift from hard archive to hybrid archive (one is even tempted to speak of soft archive) sustains forms of archival activism that have the potential to change people’s connection with the past. The observation of practices of retrieving, appropriating and producing materials is thus a rich field of study, as we can see how these archival acts are entangled with the attempt to complete, redress and in the end repair a torn social, political or memorial fabric. The Khmer Republic remains to this day a neglected period, to the distress of so many people whose fate was attached to it and who have found little, if any space for sharing about their experience (outside of small communities such as veterans). For young Cambodians, it is not a well-known part of their history. One may see, then, the role the digital—in this case YouTube—may play to connect and help people who are looking for missing pieces and are ‘searching for a larger picture and trying to address a puzzling question’Footnote 83.
I also discussed the contribution of such a platform to critical archival practices, more specifically the generation of an expanded archive of the Khmer Republic, a much needed one considering the little material available through conventional collections. The shift to postscarcity in this context does not only bring new research conditions. It also offers new research perspectives by engaging with disciplines and methodologies that have hardly been used to date in the study of the republican regime. While postmemory is a novel line of inquiry with regard to the Khmer Republic, I also suggest that it be considered as a different type of research practice too. Postmemory’s digital instruments contribute to furthering critical archival work since they enable the acquisition of more, and more diverse, materials such old and new images and sounds, (snippets of) testimonies, names of witnesses and they also provide insights into the continuation of networks from that period into the present. Therefore, postmemory allows incorporating the reactivation of sources into research work itself, making thus the survivance of the Khmer Republic beyond the 1970s and beyond Cambodia an integral part of the historiography—still under construction—of the republican regime.
