Health

A weakened Khmer state after repeated warfare with Siam in the 17th century left the Mekong Delta poorly administered. Concurrently Vietnamese refugees fleeing the Trịnh–Nguyễn War in Vietnam pushed into the area. Cambodian king Chey Chettha II (1618–1628) in 1623 officially sanctioned the Vietnamese to operate a custom house at Prey Nokor, then a small fishing village. The settlement grew steadily as a major regional port, attracting even more settlers. The Nguyễn Lords of Huế in 1698 commissioned Nguyễn Hữu Cảnh, a Vietnamese noble, to organize the territory along Vietnamese administrative lines, thus by de facto detaching it from Cambodia and joining it to 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 their brethren in Cambodia proper. 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. On June 4th 1949, the French President, Vincent Auriol, signed the law granting Cochin-China to the Bao Dai government without consultation of the indigenous Khmer-Krom. Cambodia was then cut off from direct access to the South China Sea at that point. Left within the borders of Vietnam were large pockets of Khmer people, now known as the Khmer Krom. Separatist movements[edit] 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 US military to serve in MIKE Force.[5] 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.[6]

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Traditionally, the ruling Khmer majority has referred to all the highland groups as phnong, a name of one of the groups that has come to mean "savage" in Khmer, or samre, the name of another group that has developed the meaning "bumpkin" or "hick".[9] Both of these words are now considered pejorative. The colonial French administration designated the highland ethnicities of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam "Montagnards". The term "Khmer Loeu" was crafted by the Sangkum Reastr Niyum government of Sihanouk's Cambodia in the 1950s. In order the stress the unity, or "Cambodian-ness", of the various ethnic groups that inhabited its borders and promote a nationalist cohesiveness, the government classified citizens as one of three groups of "Khmer", Khmer Kandal, Khmer Islam and Khmer Loeu.[10] Khmer Kandal ("Central Khmer") referred to the ethnic Khmer majority. Khmer Islam was the name given to the ethnic Cham inhabiting the central plains of Cambodia. Khmer Loeu was coined as a catch-all term to include all of the indigenous minority ethnic groups, most of which reside in the remote highlands of northeast Cambodia.[11] The current government has used the term chuncheat daerm pheak tech (Khmer: ជនជាតិដើមភាគតិច, "original ethnic minority") in official documents while referring to ethnic Khmer as chuncheat daerm pheak chraern ("original ethnic majority"). However "Khmer Loeu" still remains the colloquial, and most common, designation for these groups. In the Khmer language, an alternative, though unrelated, use of the term "Khmer Loeu" is in reference to the Northern Khmer people.[12] Ethnic Khmers sometimes use a tripartite division to differentiate Khmers native to Thailand, Cambodia or Vietnam. Those native to Thailand are sometimes referred to as "Khmer Loeu" due to their location on the southern Khorat plateau relative to those native to Cambodia, "Khmer Kandal", while Khmer native to the lower Mekong Delta region of Vietnam are called Khmer Krom, "lower Khmer" or "southern Khmer". Geography and demographics[edit] Khmer Loeu form the majority population in Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri provinces, and they also are present in substantial numbers in Kratié Province and Stung Treng Province. Their total population in 1969 was estimated at 90,000 people. In 1971 the number of Khmer Loeu was estimated variously between 40,000 and 100,000 people. Population figures were unavailable in 1987, but the total probably was nearly 100,000 people. Culture[edit] Most Khmer Loeu live in scattered temporary villages that have only a few hundred inhabitants. These villages usually are governed by a council of local elders or by a village headman. The Khmer Loeu cultivate a wide variety of plants, but the main crop is dry or upland rice grown by the slash-and-burn method. Hunting, fishing, and gathering supplement the cultivated vegetable foods in the Khmer Loeu diet. Houses vary from huge multifamily longhouses to small single-family structures. They may be built close to the ground or on stilts.[5]

Breast cancer

The legendary founders of the kingdom of Kambuja are the Brahman priest Sage Kambu Swayambhuva and the Nāga princess Soma, or Mera as she is known in some versions of the founding myth. Their marriage is said to have given rise to the name Khmer. The Khmer people named their kingdom Kambuja, after a Kshatriya tribe of Iron Age India. The Kambuja tribe are believed by modern scholars to be an Iranian-speaking people, but links between the Kambuja tribe and the Kambuja kingdom at this stage of research are still unclear. Ancient myths, some going back to the earliest written records in Southeast Asia, relate that in prehistoric times Cambodia was underwater, and that only the highest mountaintops were above sea level, forming a scattered group of islands. The inhabitants of these islands were the reptilian race of the Nāga. Cambodia was created when an ancient Indian Brahmin priest married Princess Soma, a Naga princess, upon following an arrow in his dream that pointed in the direction of somewhere in Cambodia. As a dowry, the father of princess Soma drank the oceans, and the land that was revealed underneath became Cambodia, with the descendants of the priest and the princess the people known as the Khmer. This myth explains the phenomena of why the oldest Khmer wats, or temples, were always built on mountaintops, and why today mountains themselves are still revered as holy places.[11] Arrival in Southeast Asia[edit] The Khmers are one of the oldest ethnic groups in the area, having filtered into Southeast Asia around the same time as the Mon who settled further to the west and to whom the Khmer are ancestrally related. Most archaeologists and linguists, and other specialists like Sinologists and crop experts, believe they arrived no later than 2000 BCE (over four thousand years ago) bringing with them the practice of agriculture and in particular the cultivation of rice. This region is also one of the first places in the world to use bronze. They were the builders of the later Khmer Empire, which dominated Southeast Asia for six centuries beginning in 802 CE, and now form the mainstream of political, cultural, and economic Cambodia. The Khmers developed the first alphabet still in use in Southeast Asia which in turn gave birth to the later Thai and Lao scripts. The Khmers are considered by archaeologists and ethnologists to be indigenous to the contiguous regions of Northeast Thailand, southern Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam. That is to say the Khmer have historically been a lowland people who lived close to one of the tributaries of the Mekong River. The reason they migrated into Southeast Asia is not well understood, but scholars believe that Mon–Khmer were pushed down by invading Sino-Tibetans