Archive of FULRO Colonel Kosem to Shed New Light on Insurgency [VOA]

[ndlr] Signalement d’un article présentant un fonds d’archives d’un chef militaire cambodgien qui pourrait permettre de mieux comprendre l’histoire du FULRO, le mouvement insurrectionnel montagnard des hauts-plateaux du Viêt-Nam. Article de Aun Chhengpor et Nov Povleakhena pour VOA Khmer.

Les Kosem was involved in the now-defunct United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races, better known by its acronym, FULRO.

On an overcast afternoon last week, rain lashed the roofs of the modest villas of Phnom Penh’s well-to-do Boeung Keng Kang neighborhood.

At one house, decorated with antiques and handmade wooden furniture, portraits of a smiling man in a paratrooper’s uniform is on display.

The man was Les Kosem, born an ethnic Cham in the 1920s, who later rose to become one of Cambodia’s highest-ranking generals during the Second Indochina War.

His complicated relationship with the resistance movements of the highland peoples of Vietnam, the Cham in Cambodia and Khmer in the Mekong region, made him one of the most controversial of Cambodia’s decorated military leaders over the years leading up to the Khmer Rouge takeover in 1975.

Kosem was involved in the now-defunct United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races, better known by its acronym, FULRO. The group sought greater autonomy for the Cham Muslims and Hindus of Cambodia, for the Khmer people living to the south in modern-day Vietnam, and for the Montagnard hill people.

Lire la suite : VOA, 12/05/2018.

Illustration “à la une” :  Le colonel Les Kosem en uniforme, non datée, offerte au Centre de documentation des archives cambodgiennes par son épouse © Les Kosem Collection/Documentation Center of Cambodia Archives.


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
indomemoires (16 octobre 2018). Archive of FULRO Colonel Kosem to Shed New Light on Insurgency [VOA]. Mémoires d'Indochine. Consulté le 21 avril 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/q5yz