Every year, the Indigenous Khmer-Krom Peoples in Mekong Delta
organize the Ork Ombok Festival to worship the moon on the 15th of the
10th lunar month. It is the time that the Khmer-Krom starts harvesting
their rice. During this time, the Khmer-Krom people also celebrate the
Pronang Touk Ngo (Boat Racing) Festival, to commemorate their ancestor’s
navy troops that won the battles against their enemy to protect their
homeland.
In recent years, the Vietnamese government has exploited the Boat
Racing Festival to attract tourists. The Vietnamese government makes
lots of profits from providing the tourist services and advertisement.
The Khmer-Krom paddlers don’t gain a penny from those profits, except
the winning teams may get some awards.
From November 8-11, 2011, Vietnam organized the 2nd Rice Festival in
Khleang (Soc Trang) province at the same time with the Khmer-Krom Boat
Racing Festival and pretends to calling it as a coincident. The
Khmer-Krom people are not happy because the Boat Racing Festival is
their Cultural Festival participating and organizing by their own
Khmer-Krom. Unfortunately, it is now completely under controlled,
organized, and marginalized by the Vietnamese government to serve its
propaganda policies and benefits.
Most of the Khmer-Krom people are farmers. They help producing rice
to make Vietnam becoming the 2nd country of the world in exporting rice.
Unfortunately, the world does not know that some of the Khmer-Krom
farmers do not have rice to eat. They are the poorest of the poor people
in Mekong Delta.
In Vietnam, the Vietnamese government’s rice export companies control
the rice price. They lower the rice price in the harvest season. The
Khmer-Krom farmers have no choice to sell their rice below the market
price in order to have money to pay for their debt that they borrow
money to buy fertilizers and for other expenses. After selling all their
rice, some Khmer-Krom farmers do not have enough money to pay for their
debt and end up selling their farmlands to the Vietnamese. As landless
farmers, they live in poverty.
The tourists attended the Vietnam 2nd Rice Festival do not know that
the Rice that Vietnam exports are produced by the Khmer-Krom’s tears and
sweats. Many rosy pictures have been painted over the suffering of the
Khmer-Krom, but the world has been misled and the Khmer-Krom people are
suffering terribly as today. Published by: khmerkrom.net
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