Rise of the Brao is a gripping account of ethnic minority participation in revolutionary movement politics in Cambodia and in the process of national reconstruction that took place there with the backing of Vietnam following the ouster of the Khmer Rouge in 1979. At the heart of the story that Ian Baird tells is the Brao ethnic minority, one of several distinct ethnic and linguistic groups of upland rice farmers inhabiting Cambodia's hilly northeast borderland with Laos and Vietnam. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, communist and anticolonial revolutionary activity in this zone involved a dizzying array of political parties, armies, and leaders. The northeast would eventually serve as a stronghold of Khmer Rouge leaders Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, but, as Baird points out, the region's revolutionary movements were divided into factions from the start. Some, including many Brao leaders, allied themselves with Vietnamese communists, while other highlanders found themselves in the camp of Cambodia's own Khmer Rouge. Many sought to avoid politics and armed conflict altogether, a position that became increasingly untenable as the decades wore on.
Beginning in the 1950s, several Brao leaders joined the anticolonial resistance movements known as the Khmer Issarak. As the struggle deepened, these leaders traveled on foot to North Vietnam, where they received military training and political instruction from Vietnamese communists. Labeled “Khmer Hanoi,” it would be fifteen years before these operatives returned to Cambodia to join the Cambodian revolution. Gradually becoming disaffected by the extreme policies of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, the Brao returnees enjoined thousands of ethnic minority residents of northeast Cambodia to flee to Laos and Vietnam prior to the Khmer Rouge capture of Phnom Penh in 1975.
When the communist state of Democratic Kampuchea took an increasingly bellicose stance against its larger and more powerful neighbor, the newly reunited Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Vietnamese political and military leaders orchestrated a decisive intervention to force out the Khmer Rouge, and called on the expatriate Brao to join the effort. Deemed a liberation or an invasion, depending on one's political sympathies, the result was the establishment in 1979 of the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), the Vietnamese client state that maintained power for a decade. Many of the political leaders installed by the Vietnamese retain their hold on political power in Cambodia today.
What Baird brings to this story is a focus on the role played by the Brao returnees, who took on positions of power in the Vietnam-backed government that were formerly unknown to members of Cambodia's ethnic minorities under previous regimes. Baird describes what came next as a “golden age” for the Brao, by which he means that Brao leaders occupied significant roles in government during the PRK period and afterward. The notion that a highland ethnic minority might count as its “golden age” a political moment when its leaders found themselves occupying high ranks in the national government sits uneasily with, and also challenges, the dominant historiography of the region's highlanders. Highlander political ambitions have most often been separatist, as in the case of the FULRO (Front unifié de lutte des races opprimées in French) movement. But overwhelmingly, highlanders have been portrayed as seeking to escape the impositions of the lowland states that sought to tax, conscript and enslave them. These antistate tendencies predominated well into the twentieth century, even as historical events increasingly placed the hilly borderland at the center of national and international conflict. While elite Brao leaders may have found their proximity to state power useful, many others in the highlands surely remained dubious of the increasing presence of the state in their lives.
Baird's perspective on these events and his ability to recount this history both hinge on the access he had to the key actors in this drama. The detailed account he provides is the result of patient, careful, and painstaking research, an effort that shows through on every page of the book. Of the Brao leaders who rose to prominence in this period, the most important was Bou Thang, who became a member of the Central Committee and later the Politburo of the Vietnam-backed national communist party; he was later elected to the National Assembly and became minister of defense of the PRK in 1981. Others include Bun Mi, an early and influential participant in revolutionary activity in the northeast; Soy Keo, who, like Bou Thang, also received training in Vietnam in the 1960s and likewise served in the National Assembly and became a member of the Party Central Committee; and Kham Chan, a former Khmer Rouge militant who fled to Vietnam, took on a role in the ouster of the Pol Pot regime, and then served in a senior role in the Ministry of Defense in Phnom Penh during the PRK government.
It is through extensive interviews with these and numerous other leaders from this generation, along with careful attention to existing historical accounts (among them a memoir published by Bou Thang), that Baird has pieced together this detailed account, one lively with tales of double-crossings and harrowing escapes, even as it handles a complex set of historical events comprehensively. Indeed, if one were to raise a small quibble with an otherwise well-executed account, it might relate to the extent to which the story told in Rise of the Brao echoes official narratives of the “liberation” of Cambodia touted by those in power today. Those official narratives, though, are not nearly so candid regarding the heavy-handed role Vietnam played in establishing the contemporary political order in the country. Baird is careful to present opposing and divergent views and interpretations, but in many cases it is the political leaders who rose to the fore during the “golden age” of the Brao who provide the most insightful readings of this history, and the stories they are able to tell are convenient to their own readings of that history and its significance.
Books like Rise of the Brao do not come along all that often. It is unique in the level of detail and insight it provides into a long-overlooked dimension of one of the twentieth century's most significant conflicts. It raises important questions about the roles played by the region's ethnic minorities in these struggles. And it answers many of those questions in detail through a fine-grained account made possible by years of painstaking research.
