Cambodia Secret History - Mr Pen Sovanh

School of Vice: Hanoi deliberately adopted the colonial era hats worn by soldiers, administrators and enforcers of major European colonial powers in the 18th, 19th and the first half the 20th centuries partly to resemble - ostensibly - the traditional conical hats worn by the Vietnamese peasants, but more curiously, perhaps, to reverse and internalise the psychological effect of Vietnam's own colonial experience which most Vietnamese leaders, particularly, Ho Chi Minh, Vo Nguyen Giap, Le Duc Tho etc. vehemently loathed, condemned and devoted their lives to ending. Most fittingly the hats denote Hanoi's colonial ambition and oppression over the Indochinese peoples - including ordinary Vietnamese themselves - today and since the close of the European colonial rule in the 1950s.  

Note: Vietnam is known to have kidnapped hundreds of Cambodian minors around the time Mr Pen Sovann was a child, and most of whom - Sovann himself included - would eventually be repatriated to their 'homeland' having acclimatised themselves to the Vietnamese culture and mindset as well as Vietnamese party political norms. These "Khmer-Vietminhs" would rule over a country on Vietnam's behalf [a people that had traditionally rebelled against outright foreign control and political domination] alongside those ethnic Vietnamese who had resided in Cambodia and had assimilated into Cambodian life over the decades and centuries before.

Through these calculations, Hanoi hopes to eschew some of the over aggressive, zealous approaches of the French colonialists, their own Annamese ancestors in the 19th century, and also the excesses of some of Cambodia's home-grown ruling autocrats - as recent as Sihanouk, Lon Nol and Pol Pot - that had been the principal contributing factors in their historical downfalls.