Khmer Krom Separatist movements When was the separatist movement? Headed by a Khmer Krom Buddhist monk, Samouk Sen, the group was nicknamed the "White Scarves" ( what was special about them? allied itself with FULRO against South Vietnam. was this helpful? The "White Scarves" arrived in Kiri Vong District in 1976, making overture to the Khmer Rouge Are there any other interesting aspects about this article? Subsequent orders from the Khmer Rouge leadership however had Samouk Sen arrested, taken to Phnom Penh, tortured, and killed. were any others killed? His force of 67 Khmer Krom fighters were all massacred. why were they killed? During the following months, some 2,000 "White Scarves" fighters crossing into Kampuchea were systematically killed by the Khmer Rouge.
what was the result of the massacre?
what was the result of the 67 Khmer Krom fighters  massacre?
Khmer nationalist Son Ngoc Thanh (1908-77) was a Khmer krom, born in Tra Vinh, Vietnam. Thanh was active in the independence movement for Cambodia. With Japanese support he became the prime minister of Cambodia in March 1945 but was then quickly ousted with the return of the French later that year. Widely supported by the Khmer Krom during the First Indochina War, Thanh's role faded in Vietnam after 1954 as he became more embroiled with politics in Cambodia proper, forming an opposition movement against Prince Sihanouk.  During the Vietnam War and direct American involvement between 1964 and 1974, the Khmer Krom were recruited by the United States Armed Forces to serve in MIKE Force. The force fought on the side of South Vietnam against the Viet Cong but in time the militia regrouped as the "Front for the Struggle of Kampuchea Krom" (French: Front de Lutte du Kampuchea Krom). Headed by a Khmer Krom Buddhist monk, Samouk Sen, the group was nicknamed the "White Scarves" (Khmer: Kangsaing Sar; Vietnamese: Can Sen So) and allied itself with FULRO against South Vietnam. FULRO was an alliance of Khmer Krom, Montagnard, and Cham groups.  The anti-Communist prime minister of the Khmer Republic (1970 - 1975) Lon Nol planned to recapture the Mekong Delta from South Vietnam.  After the Fall of Saigon in 1975 and the Communist take-over of all of Vietnam, the Kampuchea Krom militia found itself embattled with People's Army of Vietnam. Many of the fighters fled to Khmer Rouge-controlled Democratic Kampuchea hoping to find a safe haven to launch their operations inside Vietnam. The "White Scarves" arrived in Kiri Vong District in 1976, making overture to the Khmer Rouge and appealing to the leader Khieu Samphan directly for assistance. The force was disarmed and welcomed initially. Subsequent orders from the Khmer Rouge leadership however had Samouk Sen arrested, taken to Phnom Penh, tortured, and killed. His force of 67 Khmer Krom fighters were all massacred. During the following months, some 2,000 "White Scarves" fighters crossing into Kampuchea were systematically killed by the Khmer Rouge.  In the late 1970s, the Kampuchean Revolutionary Army attacked Vietnam in an attempt to reconquer the areas which were formerly part of the Khmer Empire, but this military adventure was a total disaster and precipitated the invasion of Democratic Kampuchea by the People's Army of Vietnam and subsequent downfall of the Khmer Rouge, with Vietnam occupying Kampuchea. CANNOTANSWER
the Kampuchean Revolutionary Army attacked Vietnam in an attempt to reconquer the areas which were formerly part of the Khmer Empire,
The Khmer Krom (, , , lit. 'Lower Khmers' or 'Southern Khmers'; ) are ethnically Khmer people living in or from the region of Tây Nam Bộ, the south western part of Vietnam. In Vietnam, they are recognized as one of Vietnam's fifty-three ethnic minorities:  and  (both literally meaning 'Khmer People').

In Khmer, Krom (, ) means 'low' or 'below'. It is added to differentiate from the Khmers in Cambodia. Most Khmer Krom live in Tây Nam Bộ, the southern lowland region of historical Cambodia covering an area of  around modern day Ho Chi Minh City and the Mekong Delta, which used to be the southeasternmost territory of the Khmer Empire until its incorporation into Vietnam under the Nguyễn lords in the early 18th century. This marks the final stage of the Vietnamese "March to the South" (Nam tiến).

Khmer Krom people have been members of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO) since 15 July, 2001.

According to the US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) "the Khmer Krom people face serious restrictions of freedom of expression, assembly, association, information, and movement".

Demographics
The majority of Khmer Krom live in Southern Vietnam. According to Vietnamese government figures (2009 census), there are 1,260,640 Khmer Krom in Vietnam. Other estimates vary considerably, with at least 7 million (consistent with the data from Khmer Kampuchea-Krom Federation) to over ten million, reported in Taylor (2014) in his The Khmer lands of Vietnam.

A significant number of Khmer Krom also fled to Cambodia, estimated at 1.2 million by one source.

In other parts of the world, there are approximately 40,000 Khmer Krom emigrants notably in the USA (30,000), France (3,000), Australia (1,000), Canada (500). Khmer Krom emigrant communities in the US are located near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and in Washington state.

Origins

The Khmer Krom identify ethnically with the Khmer people who constitute a distinct people at least since the late eighth century and the foundation of the Khmer Empire by Jayavarman II in 802 C.E. They retain deep linguistic, religious, customary and cultural links to Cambodia proper. The Mekong Delta region constituted for more than 800 years an integral part of the empire and the subsequent kingdom. The region's economic center was the city of Prey Nokor, now Ho Chi Minh City.

History

Absorption of the Mekong Delta by Vietnam

In the 17th century a weakened Khmer state left the Mekong Delta poorly administered after repeated warfare with Siam. Concurrently Vietnamese refugees fleeing the Trịnh–Nguyễn War in Vietnam migrated into the area. In 1623 Cambodian king Chey Chettha II (1618–1628) officially sanctioned the Vietnamese immigrants to operate a custom house at Prey Nokor, then a small fishing village. The settlement steadily grew soon becoming a major regional port, attracting even more settlers.

In 1698 the Nguyễn Lords of Huế commissioned Nguyễn Hữu Cảnh, a Vietnamese noble to organize the territory along Vietnamese administrative lines, thus by de facto detaching it from the Kingdom of Cambodia and incorporating it into Vietnam.

With the loss of the port of Prey Nokor, then renamed Sài Gòn, Cambodia's control of the area grew increasingly tenuous while increasing waves of Vietnamese settlers to the Delta isolated the Khmer of the Mekong Delta from the Cambodian kingdom. By 1757 the Vietnamese had absorbed the provinces of Psar Dèk (renamed Sa Đéc in Vietnamese) on the Mekong itself, and Moat Chrouk (Vietnamized to Châu Đốc) on the Bassac River.

Minh Mạng enacted assimilation policies upon the Khmer such as forcing them to adopt Sino-Vietnamese surnames, culture, and clothing. Minh Mang sinicized ethnic minorities including the Cambodians, in line with Confucianism as he diffused Vietnamese culture with China's Han civilization using the term Han people 漢人 for the Vietnamese. Minh Mang declared that "We must hope that their barbarian habits will be subconsciously dissipated, and that they will daily become more infected by Han [Sino-Vietnamese] customs." These policies were directed at the Khmer and hill tribes.

Separatist movements
Khmer nationalist Son Ngoc Thanh (1908–77) was a Khmer krom, born in Trà Vinh, Vietnam. Thanh was active in the independence movement for Cambodia. With Japanese support he became the prime minister of Cambodia in March 1945 but was then quickly ousted with the return of the French later that year. Widely supported by the Khmer Krom during the First Indochina War, Thanh's role faded in Vietnam after 1954 as he became more embroiled with politics in Cambodia proper, forming an opposition movement against Prince Sihanouk.

During the Vietnam War and direct American involvement between 1964 and 1974, the Khmer Krom were recruited by the United States Armed Forces to serve in MIKE Force. The force fought on the side of South Vietnam against the Viet Cong but in time the militia regrouped as the "Front for the Struggle of Kampuchea Krom" (). Headed by a Khmer Krom Buddhist monk, Samouk Sen, the group was nicknamed the "White Scarves" (; ) and allied itself with FULRO against South Vietnam. FULRO was an alliance of Khmer Krom, Montagnard, and Cham groups.

The anti-Communist prime minister of the Khmer Republic (1970 - 1975) Lon Nol planned to recapture the Mekong Delta from South Vietnam.

After the Fall of Saigon in 1975 and the Communist take-over of all of Vietnam, the Kampuchea Krom militia found itself embattled with People's Army of Vietnam. Many of the fighters fled to Khmer Rouge-controlled Democratic Kampuchea hoping to find a safe haven to launch their operations inside Vietnam. The "White Scarves" arrived in Kiri Vong District in 1976, making overture to the Khmer Rouge and appealing to the leader Khieu Samphan directly for assistance. The force was disarmed and welcomed initially. Subsequent orders from the Khmer Rouge leadership however had Samouk Sen arrested, taken to Phnom Penh, tortured, and killed. His force of 67 Khmer Krom fighters were all massacred. During the following months, some 2,000 "White Scarves" fighters crossing into Kampuchea were systematically killed by the Khmer Rouge.

In the late 1970s, the Kampuchean Revolutionary Army attacked Vietnam in an attempt to reconquer the areas which were formerly part of the Khmer Empire, but this military adventure was a total disaster and precipitated the invasion of Democratic Kampuchea by the People's Army of Vietnam and subsequent downfall of the Khmer Rouge, with Vietnam occupying Kampuchea.

Human rights

Many independent NGOs report that the human rights of the Khmer Krom are being violated by the Vietnamese government. Khmer Krom are reportedly forced to adopt Vietnamese family names and speak the Vietnamese language. As well, the Vietnamese government has cracked down on non violent demonstrations by the Khmer Krom.

Unlike some other minority people groups in Vietnam, the Khmer Krom are largely unknown by the Western world, despite efforts by associations of exiled Khmer Krom such as the Khmers Kampuchea-Krom Federation to publicize their plight with the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation. No Western government has yet raised the matter of the Khmer Krom's human rights with the Vietnamese government.

The "Human Rights Council Universal Periodic Review Working Group" was visited by the Khmer Kampuchea Krom Federation.

Notable people

Chau Sen Cocsal Chhum, Prime Minister of Cambodia (1962) 
Ieng Sary, Khmer Rouge member and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Democratic Kampuchea
Son Ngoc Minh, co-founder of the Communist Party of Kampuchea 
Son Ngoc Thanh, Prime Minister of Cambodia (1945) and the Khmer Republic (1972) 
Son Sen, Khmer Rouge member and Minister of National Defence of Democratic Kampuchea 
Tou Samouth, co-founder and General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (1951–1962)

See also
 Kampuchea Krom
 Khmer people
 History of Cambodia
 Cochinchina

References

External links

 Khmers Kampuchea-Krom Federation (KKF)
 Khmer Krom news and information network
 Khmer Krom news and information in Khmer language
 Khmer Krom: A Royal Solution for a Nationalist Vietnam reported by Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation
  Video clips of Rebecca Sommer's film "Eliminated without Bleeding" documenting human rights violation claims of the Khmer Krom in Vietnam
 March 2007- Article on religious oppression by Vietnam

Ethnic groups in Cambodia
Ethnic groups in Vietnam
Ethnic minorities

Indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia
Ethnic groups in Southeast Asia
Khmer people
History of Cambodia
A massacre is the killing of multiple individuals and is considered to be morally unacceptable, especially when perpetrated by a group of political actors against defenseless victims. The word is a loan of a French term for "butchery" or "carnage".

There is no objective definition of what constitutes a "massacre". Various international organisations have proposed  a formal definition of the term crimes against humanity, which would however include incidents of persecution or abuse that do not result in deaths. Conversely, a "massacre" is not necessarily a "crime against humanity". Other terms with overlapping scope include war crime, pogrom, mass killing, mass murder, and extrajudicial killing.

Etymology 

The modern definition of massacre as "indiscriminate slaughter, carnage", and the subsequent verb of this form, derive from late 16th century Middle French, evolved from Middle French "macacre, macecle" meaning "slaughterhouse, butchery". Further origins are dubious, though may be related to Latin macellum "provisions store, butcher shop".

The Middle French word macecre "butchery, carnage" is first recorded in the late 11th century. Its primary use remained the context of animal slaughter (in hunting terminology referring to the head of a stag) well into the 18th century.
The use of macecre "butchery" of the mass killing of people dates to the 12th century, implying people being "slaughtered like animals".
The term did not necessarily imply a multitude of victims, e.g. Fénelon in Dialogue des Morts (1712) uses l'horride massacre de Blois ("the horrid massacre at [the chateau of] Blois") of the assassination of Henry I, Duke of Guise (1588), while Boileau, Satires XI (1698) has L'Europe fut un champ de massacre et d'horreur "Europe was a field of massacre and horror" of the European wars of religion.

The French word was loaned into English in the 1580s, specifically in the sense "indiscriminate slaughter of a large number of people".
It is used in reference to St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in The Massacre at Paris by Christopher Marlowe. The term is again used  in 1695 for the Sicilian Vespers of 1281, called "that famous Massacre of the French in Sicily" in the English translation of  De quattuor monarchiis by Johannes Sleidanus (1556),
translating illa memorabilis Gallorum clades per Siciliam, i.e. massacre is here used as the translation of Latin clades "hammering, breaking; destruction".
The term's use in historiography was popularized by Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1781–1789), who used e.g. "massacre of the Latins" of the killing of Roman Catholics in Constantinople in 1182. The Åbo Bloodbath has also been described as a kind of massacre, which was a mass punishment carried out on the Old Great Square in Turku on November 10, 1599, in which 14 opponents of the Duke Charles (later King Charles IX) in Finland were decapitated; in the Battle between Duke Charles and Sigismund, Duke Charles defeated King Sigismund's troops in the Battle of Stångebro in Sweden in 1598 and then made an expedition to Finland, where he defeated the resistance during the Cudgel War and executed the estates in Turku without consulting Finland's leading nobles.

An early use in the propagandistic portrayal of current events was the "Boston Massacre" of 1770, which was employed to build support for the American Revolution. A pamphlet with the title A short narrative of the horrid massacre in Boston, perpetrated in the evening of the fifth day of March, 1770, by soldiers of the 29th regiment was printed in Boston still in 1770.

The term massacre began to see inflationary use in journalism first half of the 20th century. By the 1970s, it could also be used purely metaphorically, 
of events that do not involve deaths, such as the Saturday Night Massacre—the dismissals and resignations of political appointees during Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal.

Definitions 

The term massacre, being a synonym of "butchery, carnage", is by nature hyperbolic or subjective, primarily used in partisan descriptions of events. 
There is no neutral definition of what constitutes a "massacre" although some authors using the term may lay down general "working definitions" of what they mean by the term.

Thus,  Robert Melson (1982) in the context of the "Hamidian massacres" used a "basic working definition" of "by massacre we shall mean the intentional killing by political actors of a significant number of relatively defenseless people... the motives for massacre need not be rational in order for the killings to be intentional... Mass killings can be carried out for various reasons, including a response to false rumors... political massacre... should be distinguished from criminal or pathological mass killings... as political bodies we of course include the state and its agencies, but also nonstate actors..."

Similarly, Levene (1999) attempts an objective classification of "massacres" throughout history, taking the term to refer to killings carried out by groups using overwhelming force against defenseless victims. He is excepting certain cases of mass executions, requiring that massacres  must have the quality of being morally unacceptable.

See also 

 Democide
 Disaster
 Ethnic cleansing
 Genocide
 Killing spree
 List of events named massacres
Mass killing
 Mass murder
 Pogrom
 Tragedy
 Tragedy (event)
 War crime

References

Notes

Citations

Sources

Further reading 

 
 

 

Killings by type Operation Marion was a domestic military operation by the South African Defence Force (SADF) during the 1980s. Afrikaner security was deemed to be closely linked to Zulu security.

Operation Marion thus became an important element of the Apartheid government of South Africa's response to the rising Umkhonto we Sizwe insurgency during the 1980s, where a Zulu militia was trained by SADF Special Forces at one of their many camps in the Caprivi Strip in 1985. The first group of Zulu militia from the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) were despatched to the Caprivi Strip from Durban by Hercules C-130 aircraft on 16 April 1986. 

On 20 January 1987 the first of the trained militia were used in what later became known as the KwaMakutha Massacre when 13 innocent people were killed as a result of flawed intelligence. In January 1988 Mangosuthu Buthelezi, leader of the IFP, again approached Chief of Staff Intelligence asking for additional training of his militia in order to swing the balance of power against the United Democratic Front (UDF) and Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) forces, then operating as a surrogate for the African National Congress (ANC) in areas of KwaZulu. This request was interpreted as being consistent with the Total National Strategy then in place, so the support was given. 

On 1 December 1988, a vigilante force from the IFP took over a place called Trust Feed, which had recently become a UDF centre of power. On 3 December, the Trust Feed Massacre took place, killing 11 and wounding 2 people.

The perpetrators were brought to trial and sentenced to 15 years in prison on 23 May 1992. One of the most high-impact activities allegedly arising from Operation Marion was the Boipatong massacre by Inkatha Freedom Party members, which left 43 dead on 17 June 1992. This single act became a turning point for the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) when Nelson Mandela withdrew the ANC as a result over claims of police involvement. The activities arising from Operation Marion became the subject of intense investigation by the Goldstone Commission of Enquiry. The Goldstone Commission appointed Peter Waddington to make an independent enquiry, which concluded there was no evidence of police collusion in the massacre.

Footnotes

Apartheid in South Africa
Military operations involving South Africa