Cambodia - RPK Overprints
 

Cambodia’s ‘RPK’ Overprints of 1979-80

by Graham Shaw

What do you do if your society has just emerged from more than three
years of genocide and you are trying to reestablish a functioning
administration, including a postal service? This was the issue facing
those staff of the forerunner of today’s Ministry of Posts and
Telecommunications (MPTC) in Cambodia who survived the murderous Khmer
Rouge regime of 1975 to late-1978.

Human, material and financial resources were extremely scarce for
several years after the fall of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. It was
only in April 1980 that postage stamps of the new régime were made
available for public use in what was then called the People’s Republic
of Kampuchea (PRK), or ‘Republique Populaire Kampuchea’ – RPK – to use
its French-language acronym.

The staff of the forerunner to the modern day MPTC had to find a way
of operating a postal service between the fall of the Khmer Rouge in
December 1978 and the commencement of formal RPK stamp issues in April
1980 and, consequently, decided to use the stamps of previous regimes
that were available and to overprint them manually with ‘RPK’, as
shown in the following examples:

http://articles.cambodiastamps.com/resources/RPK01.jpg

The stamps shown above are the only known examples of a set issued on
December 11, 1971 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of UNICEF (Scott
269-270; SG 309-310; Mi 312-313) with the manual handstamp of ‘RPK’
added and the double black line cancelling ‘Republique Khmere’ on each
of the stamps.

Such an approach would have saved time and resources whilst also
allowing postal activities to take place and, from a more political
perspective, affirm the commencement of the new régime that had
considerable backing from Vietnam and some other Soviet-backed
countries, including the USSR.

At least one senior official of the modern-day MPTC who was working at
the central post office immediately after the fall of the Khmer Rouge
régime has confirmed that the RPK overprint was used for postal
communications within Cambodia and for items sent abroad. However, as
many collectors know, there are virtually no examples of such items of
mail in existence.

http://articles.cambodiastamps.com/r...6_RPK02-03.jpg

The Stanley Gibbons (SG) catalogue states the following with regards
to such overprints:

“Various stamps of the previous regimes exist overprinted “RPK”. These
were sold in Phnom Penh, mainly on covers cancelled with datestamps
between 15 August 1979 and 22 June 1981. It is believed they were not
available for postal use” (Source: Stanley Gibbons Stamp Catalogue,
Part 21, South-East Asia, 4th Edition, p54).

From personal e-mail communications with SG, it is apparent that they
are simply following the entry made by the Michel catalogue that
provides much more text on this period in contemporary Cambodian
postal history.

However, Michel provides more guidance to the collector as to which
stamps of previous Cambodian régimes are known to have had the RPK
overprinted added (Source: Michel, South and Southeast Asia, 2003,
p564). The following is a list of known RPK overprints based on Michel
plus others that I have identified to-date.

It would be interesting to know from readers of this article if they
have knowledge of any RPK overprints in addition to those listed in
the following table; if so, please let me know at
preferably with a scan of the individual
stamp(s) if possible.

http://articles.cambodiastamps.com/r...51_RPKTab1.jpg