THE KHMER PEOPLE were among the first in Southeast Asia to adopt
religious ideas and political institutions from India and to establish
centralized kingdoms encompassing large territories. The earliest known
kingdom in the area, Funan, flourished from around the first to the
sixth century A.D. It was succeeded by Chenla, which controlled large
areas of modern Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand (known as Siam
until 1939). The golden age of Khmer civilization, however, was the
period from the ninth to the thirteenth century, when the kingdom of
Kambuja, which gave Kampuchea, or Cambodia, its name, ruled large
territories from its capital in the region of Angkor in western
Cambodia.
Under Jayavarman VII (1181-ca. 1218), Kambuja reached its zenith of
political power and cultural creativity. Following Jayavarman VII's
death, Kambuja experienced gradual decline. Important factors were the
aggressiveness of neighboring peoples (especially the Thai, or Siamese),
chronic interdynastic strife, and the gradual deterioration of the
complex irrigation system that had ensured rice surpluses. The Angkorian
monarchy survived until 1431, when the Thai captured Angkor Thom and the
Cambodian king fled to the southern part of his country.
The fifteenth to the nineteenth century was a period of continued
decline and territorial loss. Cambodia enjoyed a brief period of
prosperity during the sixteenth century because its kings, who built
their capitals in the region southeast of the Tonle Sap (Great Lake)
along the Mekong River, promoted trade with other parts of Asia. This
was the period when Spanish and Portuguese adventurers and missionaries
first visited the country. But the Thai conquest of the new capital at
Lovek in 1594 marked a downturn in the country's fortunes and Cambodia
became a pawn in power struggles between its two increasingly powerful
neighbors, Siam and Vietnam. Vietnam's settlement of the Mekong Delta
led to its annexation of that area at the end of the seventeenth
century. Cambodia thereby lost some of its richest territory and was cut
off from the sea. Such foreign encroachments continued through the first
half of the nineteenth century because Vietnam was determined to absorb
Khmer land and to force the inhabitants to accept Vietnamese culture.
Such imperialistic policies created in the Khmer an abiding suspicion of
their eastern neighbors that flared into violent confrontation after the
Khmer Rouge established its regime in 1975.
In 1863 King Norodom signed an agreement with the French to establish
a protectorate over his kingdom. The country gradually came under French
colonial domination. During World War II, the Japanese allowed the
French government (based at Vichy) that collaborated with the Nazis the
Vichy French to continue administering Cambodia and the other
Indochinese territories, but they also fostered Khmer nationalism.
Cambodia enjoyed a brief period of independence in 1945 before Allied
troops restored French control. King Norodom Sihanouk, who had been
chosen by France to succeed King Monivong in 1941, rapidly assumed a
central political role as he sought to neutralize leftist and republican
opponents and attempted to negotiate acceptable terms for independence
from the French. Sihanouk's "royal crusade for independence"
resulted in grudging French acquiescence to his demands for a transfer
of sovereignty. A partial agreement was struck in October 1953. Sihanouk
then declared that independence had been achieved and returned in
triumph to Phnom Penh. The following year, as a result of the Geneva
Conference on Indochina, Cambodia was able to bring about the withdrawal
of the Viet Minh troops from its territory and to withstand any residual
impingement upon its sovereignty by external powers.
In order to play a more active role in national politics, Sihanouk
abdicated in 1955 and placed his father, Norodom Suramarit, on the
throne. Now only a prince, Sihanouk organized his own political
movement, the Popular Socialist Community, (Sangkum Reastr Niyum, or
Sangkum), which won all the seats in the National Assembly in the 1955
election. The Sangkum dominated the political scene until the late
1960s. Sihanouk's highly personal ruling style made him immensely
popular with the people, especially in rural villages. Although the
Sangkum was backed by conservative interests, Sihanouk included leftists
in his government, three of whom--Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon, and Hu
Nim--later became leaders of the Khmer Rouge. In 1963 he announced the
nationalization of banking, foreign trade, and insurance in a socialist
experiment that dried up foreign investment and alienated the right
wing. In foreign relations, Sihanouk pursued a policy of neutrality and
nonalignment. He accepted United States economic and military aid, but
he also promoted close relations with China and attempted to keep on
good terms with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). The
principal objectives of his foreign policy were to preserve Cambodia's
independence and to keep the country out of the widening conflict in
neighboring Vietnam. Relations with Washington grew stormy in the early
1960s. In 1963 the prince rejected further United States aid, and, two
years later, he severed diplomatic relations.
Both the domestic and the international situations had deteriorated
by the late 1960s. The increasingly powerful right wing challenged
Sihanouk's control of the political system. Peasant resentment over
harsh tax collection measures and the expropriation of land to build a
sugar refinery led to a violent revolt in 1967 in the northwestern
province of Batdambang (Battambang). The armed forces, commanded by
General Lon Nol (who was also prime minister), quelled the revolt, but a
communist-led insurgency spread throughout the country. The spillover of
the Second Indochina War (or Vietnam War) into the Cambodian border
areas also was becoming a serious problem. Apparently one factor in
Sihanouk's decision to reestablish relations with Washington in 1969 was
his fear of further incursions by the North Vietnamese and the Viet
Cong. In March 1970, however, he was overthrown by General Lon Nol and
other right-wing leaders, who seven months later abolished the monarchy
and established the Khmer Republic.
The Khmer Republic faced not only North Vietnamese and Viet Cong
combat units but also an effective, homegrown communist movement that
grew more lethal as time went on. The Cambodian communists, whom
Sihanouk had labeled Khmer Rouge, traced their movement back to the
struggle for independence and the creation in 1951, under Vietnamese
auspices, of the Kampuchean (or Khmer) People's Revolutionary Party
(KPRP). During the early 1960s, however, a group of Paris-trained
communist intellectuals, of whom the most important were Saloth Sar
(known as Pol Pot after 1976), Khieu Samphan, and Ieng Sary, seized
control of the party. They gradually purged or neutralized rivals whom
they considered too subservient to Vietnam. After the March 1970 coup d'�tat
that toppled Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge formed a united front with the
ousted leader, a move that won them the goodwill of peasants who were
still loyal to the prince.
Despite massive United States aid to the newly proclaimed Khmer
Republic and the bombing of North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge
installations and troop concentrations in the countryside, the Phnom
Penh regime rapidly lost most of the country's territory to the
communists. In January 1975 communist forces laid siege to Phnom Penh,
and in succeeding months they tightened the noose around the capital. On
April 1, 1975, President Lon Nol left the country. Sixteen days later
Khmer Rouge troops entered the city.
The forty-four months the Khmer Rouge were in power was a period of
unmitigated suffering for the Khmer people. Although the severity of
revolutionary policies varied from region to region because of
ideological differences and the personal inclinations of local leaders,
hundreds of thousands of people starved, died from disease, or were
executed. "New people" (the intelligentsia and those from the
cities--those new to the rural areas), being considered politically
unreliable, were special targets of terror and of a harsh, unremitting
regime of forced labor. In 1977 Pol Pot launched a bloody purge within
the communist ranks that accounted for many deaths. The slaughter of the
Vietnamese minority living in Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge's aggressive
incursions into Vietnam led to fighting with Vietnam in 1977 and 1978.
In December 1978, Vietnamese forces invaded the country. On January 7,
1979, they captured Phnom Penh and began to establish the People's
Republic of Kampuchea (PRK). The Khmer Rouge fled to isolated corners of
the country and resumed their guerrilla struggle, which continued in the
late 1980s.
Cambodia - PREHISTORY AND EARLY KINGDOMS
At about the time that the ancient peoples of Western Europe were
absorbing the classical culture and institutions of the Mediterranean,
the peoples of mainland and insular Southeast Asia were responding to
the stimulus of a civilization that had arisen in northern India during
the previous millennium. The Britons, Gauls, and Iberians experienced
Mediterranean influences directly, through conquest by and incorporation
into the Roman Empire. In contrast, the Indianization of Southeast Asia
was a slower process than the Romanization of Europe because there was
no period of direct Indian rule and because land and sea barriers that
separated the region from the Indian subcontinent are considerable.
Nevertheless, Indian religion, political thought, literature, mythology,
and artistic motifs gradually became integral elements in local
Southeast Asian cultures. The caste system never was adopted, but
Indianization stimulated the rise of highly-organized, centralized
states.
Funan, the earliest of the Indianized states, generally is considered
by Cambodians to have been the first Khmer kingdom in the area. Founded
in the first century A.D., Funan was located on the lower reaches of the
Mekong River in the delta area. Its capital, Vyadhapura, probably was
located near the present-day town of Phumi Banam in Prey Veng Province.
The earliest historical reference to Funan is a Chinese description of a
mission that visited the country in the third century A.D. The name
Funan derives from the Chinese rendition of the old Khmer word bnam
(meaning mountain). What the Funanese called themselves, however, is not
known.
During this early period in Funan's history, the population was
probably concentrated in villages along the Mekong River and along the
Tonle Sab River below the Tonle Sap. Traffic and communications were
mostly waterborne on the rivers and their delta tributaries. The area
was a natural region for the development of an economy based on fishing
and rice cultivation. There is considerable evidence that the Funanese
economy depended on rice surpluses produced by an extensive inland
irrigation system. Maritime trade also played an extremely important
role in the development of Funan. The remains of what is believed to
have been the kingdom's main port, Oc Eo (now part of Vietnam), contain
Roman as well as Persian, Indian, and Greek artifacts.
By the fifth century A.D., the state exercised control over the lower
Mekong River area and the lands around the Tonle Sap. It also commanded
tribute from smaller states in the area now comprising northern
Cambodia, southern Laos, southern Thailand, and the northern portion of
the Malay Peninsula.
Indianization was fostered by increasing contact with the
subcontinent through the travels of merchants, diplomats, and learned
Brahmans (Hindus of the highest caste traditionally assigned to the
priesthood). Indian immigrants, believed to have arrived in the fourth
and the fifth centuries, accelerated the process. By the fifth century,
the elite culture was thoroughly Indianized. Court ceremony and the
structure of political institutions were based on Indian models. The
Sanskrit language was widely used; the laws of Manu, the Indian legal
code, were adopted; and an alphabet based on Indian writing systems was
introduced.
Funan reached its zenith in the fifth century A.D.. Beginning in the
early sixth century, civil wars and dynastic strife undermined Funan's
stability, making it relatively easy prey to incursions by hostile
neighbors. By the end of the seventh century, a northern neighbor, the
kingdom of Chenla, had reduced Funan to a vassal state.
Cambodia - The Successor State of Chenla
The Angkorian period lasted from the early ninth century to the early
fifteenth century A.D. In terms of cultural accomplishments and
political power, this was the golden age of Khmer civilization. The
great temple cities of the Angkorian region, located near the modern
town of Siemreab, are a lasting monument to the greatness of Jayavarman
II's successors. (Even the Khmer Rouge, who looked on most of their
country's past history and traditions with hostility, adopted a stylized
Angkorian temple for the flag of Democratic Kampuchea. A similar motif
is found in the flag of the PRK). The kingdom founded by Jayavarman II
also gave modern-day Cambodia, or Kampuchea, its name. During the early
ninth to the mid-fifteenth centuries, it was known as Kambuja,
originally the name of an early north Indian state, from which the
current forms of the name have been derived.
Possibly to put distance between himself and the seaborne Javanese,
Jayavarman II settled north of the Tonle Sap. He built several capitals
before establishing one, Hariharalaya, near the site where the Angkorian
complexes were built. Indravarman I (A.D. 877-89) extended Khmer control
as far west as the Korat Plateau in Thailand, and he ordered the
construction of a huge reservoir north of the capital to provide
irrigation for wet rice cultivation. His son, Yasovarman I (A.D.
889-900), built the Eastern Baray (reservoir or tank), evidence of which
remains to the present time. Its dikes, which may be seen today, are
more than 6 kilometers long and 1.6 kilometers wide. The elaborate
system of canals and reservoirs built under Indravarman I and his
successors were the key to Kambuja's prosperity for half a millennium.
By freeing cultivators from dependence on unreliable seasonal monsoons,
they made possible an early "green revolution" that provided
the country with large surpluses of rice. Kambuja's decline during the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries probably was hastened by the
deterioration of the irrigation system. Attacks by Thai and other
foreign peoples and the internal discord caused by dynastic rivalries
diverted human resources from the system's upkeep, and it gradually fell
into disrepair.
Suryavarman II (1113-50), one of the greatest Angkorian monarchs,
expanded his kingdom's territory in a series of successful wars against
the kingdom of Champa in central Vietnam, the kingdom of Nam Viet in
northern Vietnam, and the small Mon polities as far west as the
Irrawaddy River of Burma. He reduced to vassalage the Thai peoples who
had migrated into Southeast Asia from the Yunnan region of southern
China and established his suzerainty over the northern part of the Malay
Peninsula. His greatest achievement was the construction of the temple
city complex of Angkor Wat. The largest religious edifice in the world,
Angkor Wat is considered the greatest single architectural work in
Southeast Asia. Suryavarman II's reign was followed, however, by thirty
years of dynastic upheaval and an invasion by the neighboring Cham, who destroyed the city of Angkor in 1177.
The Cham ultimately were driven out and conquered by Jayavarman VII,
whose reign (1181-ca. 1218) marked the apogee of Kambuja's power. Unlike
his predecessors, who had adopted the cult of the Hindu god-king,
Jayavarman VII was a fervent patron of Mahayana Buddhism. Casting
himself as a bodhisattva, he embarked on a frenzy of building activity that
included the Angkor Thom complex and the Bayon, a remarkable temple
whose stone towers depict 216 faces of buddhas, gods, and kings. He also
built over 200 rest houses and hospitals throughout his kingdom. Like
the Roman emperors, he maintained a system of roads between his capital
and provincial towns. According to historian George Coed�s, "No
other Cambodian king can claim to have moved so much stone." Often,
quality suffered for the sake of size and rapid construction, as is
revealed in the intriguing but poorly constructed Bayon.
Carvings show that everyday Angkorian buildings were wooden
structures not much different from those found in Cambodia today. The
impressive stone buildings were not used as residences by members of the
royal family. Rather, they were the focus of Hindu or Buddhist cults
that celebrated the divinity, or buddhahood, of the monarch and his
family. Coed�s suggests that they had the dual function of both temple
and tomb. Typically, their dimensions reflected the structure of the
Hindu mythological universe. For example, five towers at the center of
the Angkor Wat complex represent the peaks of Mount Meru, the center of
the universe; an outer wall represents the mountains that ring the
world's edge; and a moat depicts the cosmic ocean. Like many other
ancient edifices, the monuments of the Angkorian region absorbed vast
reserves of resources and human labor and their purpose remains shrouded
in mystery.
Angkorian society was strictly hierarchical. The king, regarded as
divine, owned both the land and his subjects. Immediately below the
monarch and the royal family were the Brahman priesthood and a small
class of officials, who numbered about 4,000 in the tenth century. Next
were the commoners, who were burdened with heavy corv�e (forced labor)
duties. There was also a large slave class that, like the nameless
multitudes of ancient Egypt, built the enduring monuments.
After Jayavarman VII's death, Kambuja entered a long period of
decline that led to its eventual disintegration. The Thai were a growing
menace on the empire's western borders. The spread of Theravada
Buddhism, which came to Kambuja from Sri Lanka by way of the Mon
kingdoms, challenged the royal Hindu and Mahayana Buddhist cults.
Preaching austerity and the salvation of the individual through his or
own her efforts, Theravada Buddhism did not lend doctrinal support to a
society ruled by an opulent royal establishment maintained through the
virtual slavery of the masses.
In 1353 a Thai army captured Angkor. It was recaptured by the Khmer,
but wars continued and the capital was looted several times. During the
same period, Khmer territory north of the present Laotian border was
lost to the Lao kingdom of Lan Xang. In 1431 the Thai captured Angkor
Thom. Thereafter, the Angkorian region did not again encompass a royal
capital, except for a brief period in the third quarter of the sixteenth
century.
Cambodia - CAMBODIA'S STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL, 1432-1887
The more than four centuries that passed from the abandonment of
Angkor around the mid-fifteenth century to the establishment of a
protectorate under the French in 1863 are considered by historians to be
Cambodia's "dark ages," a period of economic, social, and
cultural stagnation when the kingdom's internal affairs came
increasingly under the control of its aggressive neighbors, the Thai and
the Vietnamese. By the mid-nineteenth century, Cambodia had become an
almost helpless pawn in the power struggles between Thailand and Vietnam
and probably would have been completely absorbed by one or the other if
France had not intervened, giving Cambodia a colonially dominated
"lease on life." Fear of racial and cultural extinction has
persisted as a major theme in modern Cambodian thought and helps to
explain the intense nationalism and xenophobia of the Khmer Rouge during
the 1970s. Establishment in 1979 of the People's Republic of Kampuchea,
a Vietnamese-dominated satellite state, can be seen as the culmination
of a process of Vietnamese encroachment that was already well under way
by the seventeenth century.
The process of internal decay and foreign encroachment was gradual
rather than precipitous and was hardly evident in the fifteenth century
when the Khmer were still powerful. Following the fall of Angkor Thom,
the Cambodian court abandoned the region north of the Tonle Sap, never
to return except for a brief interlude in the late sixteenth century. By
this time however, the Khmer penchant for monument building had ceased.
Older faiths such as Mahayana Buddhism and the Hindu cult of the
god-king had been supplanted by Theravada Buddhism, and the Cambodians
had become part of the same religious and cultural cosmos as the Thai.
This similarity did not prevent intermittent warfare between the two
kingdoms, however. During the sixteenth century Cambodian armies, taking
advantage of Thai troubles with the Burmese, invaded the Thai kingdom
several times.
In the meantime, following the abandonment of the Angkorian sites,
the Khmer established a new capital several hundred kilometers to the
southeast on the site of what is now Phnom Penh. This new center of
power was located at the confluence of the Mekong and the Tonle Sab
rivers. Thus, it controlled the river commerce of the Khmer heartland
and the Laotian kingdoms and had access, by way of the Mekong Delta, to
the international trade routes that linked the China coast, the South
China Sea, and the Indian Ocean. A new kind of state and society
emerged, more open to the outside world and more dependent on commerce
as a source of wealth than its inland predecessor. The growth of
maritime trade with China during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) provided
lucrative opportunities for members of the Cambodian elite who
controlled royal trading monopolies. The appearance of Europeans in the
region in the sixteenth century also stimulated commerce.
King Ang Chan (1516-66), one of the few great Khmer monarchs of the
post-Angkorian period, moved the capital from Phnom Penh to Lovek.
Portuguese and Spanish travelers who visited the city, located on the
banks of the Tonle Sab, a river north of Phnom Penh, described it as a
place of fabulous wealth. The products traded there included precious
stones, metals, silk and cotton, incense, ivory, lacquer, livestock
(including elephants), and rhinoceros horn (prized by the Chinese as a
rare and potent medicine). By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries, Lovek contained flourishing foreign trading communities of
Chinese, Indonesians, Malays, Japanese, Arabs, Spanish, and Portuguese.
They were joined later in the century by the English and the Dutch.
Because the representatives of practically all these nationalities
were pirates, adventurers, or traders, this was an era of stormy
cosmopolitanism. Hard-pressed by the Thai, King Sattha (1576-94)
surrounded himself with a personal guard of Spanish and Portuguese
mercenaries, and in 1593 asked the Spanish governor of the Philippines
for aid. Attracted by the prospects of establishing a Spanish
protectorate in Cambodia and of converting the monarch to Christianity,
the governor sent a force of 120 men, but Lovek had already fallen to
the Thai when they arrived the following year. The Spanish took
advantage of the extremely confused situation to place one of Sattha's
sons on the throne in 1597. Hopes of making the country a Spanish
dependency were dashed, however, when the Spaniards were massacred two
years later by an equally belligerent contingent of Malay mercenaries.
The Thai, however, had dealt a fatal blow to Cambodian independence
by capturing Lovek in 1594. With the posting of a Thai military governor
in the city, a degree of foreign political control was established over
the kingdom for the first time. Cambodian chronicles describe the fall
of Lovek as a catastrophe from which the nation never fully recovered.
Cambodia - Domination by Thailand and by Vietnam
More than their conquest of Angkor a century and a half earlier, the
Thai capture of Lovek marked the beginning of a decline in Cambodia's
fortunes. One possible reason for the decline was the labor drain
imposed by the Thai conquerors as they marched thousands of Khmer
peasants, skilled artisans, scholars, and members of the Buddhist clergy
back to their capital of Ayutthaya. This practice, common in the history
of Southeast Asia, crippled Cambodia's ability to recover a semblance of
its former greatness. A new Khmer capital was established at Odongk
(Udong), south of Lovek, but its monarchs could survive only by entering
into what amounted to vassal relationships with the Thai and with the
Vietnamese. In common parlance, Thailand became Cambodia's
"father" and Vietnam its "mother."
By the late fifteenth century, the Vietnamese--who, unlike other
Southeast Asian peoples, had patterned their culture and their
civilization on those of China--had defeated the oncepowerful kingdom of
Champa in central Vietnam. Thousands of Chams fled into Khmer territory.
By the early seventeenth century, the Vietnamese had reached the Mekong
Delta, which was inhabited by Khmer people. In 1620 the Khmer king Chey
Chettha II (1618-28) married a daughter of Sai Vuong, one of the Nguyen
lords (1558- 1778), who ruled southern Vietnam for most of the period of
the restored Le dynasty (1428-1788). Three years later, Chey Chettha
allowed the Vietnamese to establish a custom-house at Prey Nokor, near
what is now Ho Chi Minh City (until 1975, Saigon). By the end of the
seventeenth century, the region was under Vietnamese administrative
control, and Cambodia was cut off from access to the sea. Trade with the
outside world was possible only with Vietnamese permission.
There were periods in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries,
when Cambodia's neighbors were preoccupied with internal or external
strife, that afforded the beleaguered country a breathing spell. The
Vietnamese were involved in a lengthy civil war until 1674, but upon its
conclusion they promptly annexed sizable areas of contiguous Cambodian
territory in the region of the Mekong Delta. For the next one hundred
years they used the alleged mistreatment of Vietnamese colonists in the
delta as a pretext for their continued expansion. By the end of the
eighteenth century, they had extended their control to include the area
encompassed in the late 1980s by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam
(Vietnam).
Thailand, which might otherwise have been courted as an ally against
Vietnamese incursions in the eighteenth century, was itself involved in
a new conflict with Burma. In 1767 the Thai capital of Ayutthaya was
besieged and destroyed. The Thai quickly recovered, however, and soon
reasserted their dominion over Cambodia. The youthful Khmer king, Ang
Eng (1779-96), a refugee at the Thai court, was installed as monarch at
Odongk by Thai troops. At the same time, Thailand quietly annexed
Cambodia's three northernmost provinces. In addition, the local rulers
of the northwestern provinces of Batdambang and Siemreab (Siemreap)
became vassals of the Thai king, and these areas came under the Thai
sphere of influence.
A renewed struggle between Thailand and Vietnam for control of
Cambodia in the nineteenth century resulted in a period when Vietnamese
officials, working through a puppet Cambodian king, ruled the central
part of the country and attempted to force Cambodians to adopt
Vietnamese customs. Several rebellions against Vietnamese rule ensued.
The most important of these occurred in 1840 to 1841 and spread through
much of the country. After two years of fighting, Cambodia and its two
neighbors reached an accord that placed the country under the joint
suzerainty of Thailand and Vietnam. At the behest of both countries, a
new monarch, Ang Duong (1848-59), ascended the throne and brought a
decade of peace and relative independence to Cambodia.
In their arbitrary treatment of the Khmer population, the Thai and
the Vietnamese were virtually indistinguishable. The suffering and the
dislocation caused by war were comparable in many ways to similar
Cambodian experiences in the 1970s. But the Thai and the Vietnamese had
fundamentally different attitudes concerning their relationships with
Cambodia. The Thai shared with the Khmer a common religion, mythology,
literature, and culture. The Chakri kings at Bangkok wanted Cambodia's
loyalty and tribute, but they had no intention of challenging or
changing its people's values or way of life. The Vietnamese viewed the
Khmer people as barbarians to be civilized through exposure to
Vietnamese culture, and they regarded the fertile Khmer lands as
legitimate sites for colonization by settlers from Vietnam.
Cambodia - The French Protectorate
In stark contrast to neighboring Cochinchina and to the other
Vietnamese-populated territories of Indochina, Cambodia was relatively
quiescent politically during the first four decades of the twentieth
century. The carefully maintained fiction of royal rule was probably the
major factor. Khmer villagers, long inured to abuses of power, believed
that as long as a monarch occupied the throne "all was right with
the world." Low literacy rates, which the French were extremely
reluctant to improve, also insulated the great majority of the
population from the nationalist currents that were sweeping other parts
of Southeast Asia.
Nevertheless, national consciousness was emerging among the handful
of educated Khmer who composed the urban-based elite. Restoration of the
monuments at Angkor, which the historian David P. Chandler suggests was
France's most valuable legacy to the colony, awakened Cambodians' pride
in their culture and in their past achievements. Many of the new elite
were graduates of the Lyc�e Sisowath in Phnom Penh, where resentment of
the favored treatment given Vietnamese students resulted in a petition
to King Monivong during the 1930s. Significantly, the most articulate of
the early nationalists, were Khmer Krom --members of the Cambodian minority who lived in Cochinchina. In
1936 Son Ngoc Thanh and another Khmer Krom named Pach Chhoeun, began
publishing Nagaravatta (Angkor Wat), the first Khmerlanguage
newspaper. In its editorials, Nagaravatta mildly condemned
French colonial policies, the prevalence of usury in the rural areas,
foreign domination of the economy, and the lack of opportunities for
educated Khmer. Much of the paper's journalistic wrath was directed
toward the Vietnamese for their past exploitation of Cambodia and for
their contemporary monopolization of civil service and of professional
positions.
The Khmer were fortunate in escaping the suffering endured by most
other Southeast Asian peoples during World War II. After the
establishment of the Vichy regime in France in 1940, Japanese forces
moved into Vietnam and displaced French authority. In mid1941 , they
entered Cambodia but allowed Vichy French colonial officials to remain
at their administrative posts. The pro-Japanese regime in Thailand,
headed by Prime Minister Field Marshal Luang Plaek Phibunsonggram,
requested assurances from the Vicky regime that, in the event of an
interruption of French sovereignty, Cambodian and Laotian territories
formerly belong to Thailand would be returned to Bangkoh's authority.
The request was rejected. In January 1941, a Thai force invaded
Cambodia. The land fighting was indecisive, but the Vichy French
defeated the Thai navy in an engagement in the Gulf of Thailand. At this point, Tokyo intervened and
compelled the French authorities to agree to a treaty ceding the
province of Batdambang and part of the province of Siemreab to Thailand
in exchange for a small compensation. The Cambodians were allowed to
retain Angkor. Thai aggression, however, had minimal impact on the lives
of most Cambodians outside the northwestern region.
King Monivong died in April 1941. Although his son, Prince Monireth,
had been considered the heir apparent, the French chose instead Norodom
Sihanouk, the great grandson of King Norodom. Sihanouk was an ideal
candidate from their point of view because of his youth (he was nineteen
years old), his lack of experience, and his pliability.
Japanese calls of "Asia for the Asiatics" found a receptive
audience among Cambodian nationalists, although Tokyo's policy in
Indochina was to leave the colonial government nominally in charge. When
a prominent, politically active Buddhist monk, Hem Chieu, was arrested
and unceremoniously defrocked by the French authorities in July 1942,
the editors of Nagaravatta led a demonstration demanding his
release. They as well as other nationalists apparently overestimated the
Japanese willingness to back them, for the Vichy authorities quickly
arrested the demonstrators and gave Pach Chhoeun, one of the Nagaravatta
editors, a life sentence. The other editor, Son Ngoc Thanh, escaped from
Phnom Penh and turned up the following year in Tokyo.
In a desperate effort to enlist local support in the final months of
the war, the Japanese dissolved the French colonial administration on
March 9, 1945, and urged Cambodia to declare its independence within the
Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Four days later, King Sihanouk
decreed an independent Kampuchea (the original Khmer pronunciation of
Cambodia). Son Ngoc Thanh returned from Tokyo in May, and he was
appointed foreign minister. On August 15, 1945, the day Japan
surrendered, a new government was established with Son Ngoc Thanh acting
as prime minister. When an Allied force occupied Phnom Penh in October,
Thanh was arrested for collaboration with the Japanese and was sent into
exile in France to remain under house arrest. Some of his supporters
went to northwestern Cambodia, then still under Thai control, where they
banded together as one faction in the Khmer Issarak movement, originally
formed with Thai encouragement in the 1940s.
Cambodia - The Struggle for Independence
Cambodia's situation at the end of the war was chaotic. The Free
French, under General Charles de Gaulle, were determined to recover
Indochina, though they offered Cambodia and the other Inchochinese
protectorates a carefully circumscribed measure of self-government.
Convinced that they had a "civilizing mission," they
envisioned Indochina's participation in a French Union of former
colonies that shared the common experience of French culture. Neither
the urban professional elites nor the common people, however, were
attracted by this arrangement. For Cambodians of practically all walks
of life, the brief period of independence, from March to October of
1945, was an invigorating breath of fresh air. The lassitude of the
Khmer was a thing of the past.
In Phnom Penh, Sihanouk, acting as head of state, was placed in the
extremely delicate position of negotiating with the French for full
independence while trying to neutralize party politicians and supporters
of the Khmer Issarak and Viet Minh who considered him a French
collaborator. During the tumultuous period between 1946 and 1953,
Sihanouk displayed the remarkable aptitude for political survival that
sustained him before and after his fall from power in March 1970. The
Khmer Issarak was an extremely heterogeneous guerrilla movement,
operating in the border areas. The group included indigenous leftists,
Vietnamese leftists, antimonarchical nationalists (Khmer Serei) loyal to Son Ngoc Thanh, and plain bandits taking advantage of
the chaos to terrorize villagers. Though their fortunes rose and fell
during the immediate postwar period (a major blow was the overthrow of a
friendly leftist government in Bangkok in 1947), by 1954 the Khmer
Issarak operating with the Viet Minh by some estimates controlled as
much as 50 percent of Cambodia's territory.
In 1946 the French allowed the Cambodians to form political parties
and to hold elections for a Consultative Assembly that would advise the
monarch on drafting the country's constitution. The two major parties
were both headed by royal princes. The Democratic Party, led by Prince
Sisowath Yuthevong, espoused immediate independence, democratic reforms,
and parliamentary government. Its supporters were teachers, civil
servants, politically active members of the Buddhist priesthood, and
others whose opinions had been greatly influenced by the nationalistic
appeals of Nagaravatta before it was closed down by the French
in 1942. Many Democrats sympathized with the violent methods of the
Khmer Issarak. The Liberal Party, led by Prince Norodom Norindeth,
represented the interests of the old rural elites, including large
landowners. They preferred continuing some form of the colonial
relationship with France, and advocated gradual democratic reform. In
the Consultative Assembly election held in September 1946, the Democrats
won fifty out of sixty-seven seats.
With a solid majority in the assembly, the Democrats drafted a
constitution modeled on that of the French Fourth Republic. Power was
concentrated in the hands of a popularly elected National Assembly. The
king reluctantly proclaimed the new constitution on May 6, 1947. While
it recognized him as the "spiritual head of the state," it
reduced him to the status of a constitutional monarch, and it left
unclear the extent to which he could play an active role in the politics
of the nation. Sihanouk would turn this ambiguity to his advantage in
later years, however.
In the December 1947 elections for the National Assembly, the
Democrats again won a large majority. Despite this, dissension within
the party was rampant. Its founder, Prince Yuthevong, had died and no
clear leader had emerged to succeed him. During the period 1948 to 1949,
the Democrats appeared united only in their opposition to legislation
sponsored by the king or his appointees. A major issue was the king's
receptivity to independence within the French Union, proposed in a draft
treaty offered by the French in late 1948. Following dissolution of the
National Assembly in September 1949, agreement on the pact was reached
through an exchange of letters between King Sihanouk and the French
government. It went into effect two months later, though National
Assembly ratification of the treaty was never secured.
The treaty granted Cambodia what Sihanouk called "fifty percent
independence": by it, the colonial relationship was formally ended,
and the Cambodians were given control of most administrative functions.
Cambodian armed forces were granted freedom of action within a
self-governing autonomous zone comprising Batdambang and Siemreab
provinces, which had been recovered from Thailand after World War II,
but which the French, hard-pressed elsewhere, did not have the resources
to control. Cambodia was still required to coordinate foreign policy
matters with the High Council of the French Union, however, and France
retained a significant measure of control over the judicial system,
finances, and customs. Control of wartime military operations outside
the autonomous zone remained in French hands. France was also permitted
to maintain military bases on Cambodian territory. In 1950 Cambodia was
accorded diplomatic recognition by the United States and by most
noncommunist powers, but in Asia only Thailand and the Republic of Korea
(South Korea) extended recognition.
The Democrats won a majority in the second National Assembly election
in September 1951, and they continued their policy of opposing the king
on practically all fronts. In an effort to win greater popular approval,
Sihanouk asked the French to release nationalist Son Ngoc Thanh from
exile and to allow him to return to his country. He made a triumphant
entry into Phnom Penh on October 29, 1951. It was not long, however,
before he began demanding withdrawal of French troops from Cambodia. He
reiterated this demand in early 1952 in Khmer Krok (Khmer
Awake!) a weekly newspaper that he had founded. The newspaper was forced
to cease publication in March, and Son Ngoc Thanh fled the capital with
a few armed followers to join the Khmer Issarak. Branded alternately a
communist and an agent of the United States Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) by Sihanouk, he remained in exile until Lon Nol established the
Khmer Republic in 1970.
In June 1952, Sihanouk announced the dismissal of his cabinet,
suspended the constitution, and assumed control of the government as
prime minister. Then, without clear constitutional sanction, he
dissolved the National Assembly and proclaimed martial law in January
1953. Sihanouk exercised direct rule for almost three years, from June
1952 until February 1955. After dissolution of the assembly, he created
an Advisory Council to supplant the legislature and appointed his
father, Norodom Suramarit, as regent.
In March 1953, Sihanouk went to France. Ostensibly, he was traveling
for his health; actually, he was mounting an intensive campaign to
persuade the French to grant complete independence. The climate of
opinion in Cambodia at the time was such that if he did not achieve full
independence quickly, the people were likely to turn to Son Ngoc Thanh
and the Khmer Issarak, who were fully committed to attaining that goal.
At meetings with the French president and with other high officials, the
French suggested that Sihanouk was unduly "alarmist" about
internal political conditions. The French also made the thinly veiled
threat that, if he continued to be uncooperative, they might replace
him. The trip appeared to be a failure, but on his way home by way of
the United States, Canada, and Japan, Sihanouk publicized Cambodia's
plight in the media.
To further dramatize his "royal crusade for independence,"
Sihanouk, declaring that he would not return until the French gave
assurances that full independence would be granted, left Phnom Penh in
June to go into self-imposed exile in Thailand. Unwelcome in Bangkok, he
moved to his royal villa near the ruins of Angkor in Siemreab Province.
Siemreab, part of the autonomous military zone established in 1949, was
commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Lon Nol, formerly a right-wing
politician who was becoming a prominent, and in time would be an
indispensable, Sihanouk ally within the military. From his Siemreab
base, the king and Lon Nol contemplated plans for resistance if the
French did not meet their terms.
Sihanouk was making a high-stakes gamble, for the French could easily
have replaced him with a more pliable monarch; however, the military
situation was deteriorating throughout Indochina, and the French
government, on July 3, 1953, declared itself ready to grant full
independence to the three states of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos.
Sihanouk insisted on his own terms, which included full control of
national defense, the police, the courts, and financial matters. The
French yielded: the police and the judiciary were transferred to
Cambodian control at the end of August, and in October the country
assumed full command of its military forces. King Sihanouk, now a hero
in the eyes of his people, returned to Phnom Penh in triumph, and
independence day was celebrated on November 9, 1953. Control of residual
matters affecting sovereignty, such as financial and budgetary affairs,
passed to the new Cambodian state in 1954.
Cambodia - CAMBODIA UNDER SIHANOUK, 1954-70
The Geneva agreement also stipulated that general elections should be
held in Cambodia during 1955 and that the International Control
Commission should monitor them to ensure fairness. Sihanouk was more
determined than ever to defeat the Democrats (who, on the basis of their
past record, were expected to win the election). The king attempted
unsuccessfully to have the constitution amended. On March 2, 1955, he
announced his abdication in favor of his father, Norodom Suramarit.
Assuming the title of samdech (prince), Sihanouk explained that
this action was necessary in order to give him a free hand to engage in
politics.
To challenge the Democrats, Prince Sihanouk established his own
political machine, the oddly named Sangkum Reastr Niyum (Popular
Socialist Community), commonly referred to as the Sangkum. The name is
odd because its most important components were right-wing parties that
were virulently anticommunist. The Sangkum's emergence in early 1955
unified most right-wing groups under the prince's auspices. In the
September election, Sihanouk's new party decisively defeated the
Democrats, the Khmer Independence Party of Son Ngoc Thanh, and the
leftist Pracheachon (Citizens') Party, winning 83 percent of the vote
and all of the seats in the National Assembly.
Khmer nationalism, loyalty to the monarch, struggle against injustice
and corruption, and protection of the Buddhist religion were major
themes in Sangkum ideology. The party adopted a particularly
conservative interpretation of Buddhism, common in the Theravada
countries of Southeast Asia, that the social and economic inequalities
among people were legitimate because of the workings of karma. For the poorer classes, virtuous and obedient conduct opened
up the possibility of being born into a higher station in a future life.
The appeal to religion won the allegiance of the country's many Buddhist
priests, who were a particularly influential group in rural villages.
As the 1960s began, organized political opposition to Sihanouk and
the Sangkum virtually had disappeared. According to Vickery, the
Democratic Party disbanded in 1957 after its leaders--who had been
beaten by soldiers--requested the privilege of joining the Sangkum.
Despite its defense of the status quo, especially the interests of
rural elites, the Sangkum was not an exclusively right-wing
organization. Sihanouk included a number of leftists in his party and
government. Among these were future leaders of the Khmer Rouge. Hu Nim
and Hou Yuon served in several ministries between 1958 and 1963, and
Khieu Samphan served briefly as secretary of state for commerce in 1963.
Sihanouk's attitude toward the left was paradoxical. He often
declared that if he had not been a prince, he would have become a
revolutionary. Sihanouk's chronic suspicion of United States intentions
in the region, his perception of revolutionary China as Cambodia's most
valuable ally, his respect for such prominent and capable leftists as
Hou, Hu, and Khieu, and his vague notions of "royal socialism"
all impelled him to experiment with socialist policies. In 1963 the
prince announced the nationalization of banking, foreign trade, and
insurance as a means of reducing foreign control of the economy. In 1964
a state trading company, the National Export-Import Corporation, was
established to handle foreign commerce. The declared purposes of
nationalization were to give Khmer nationals, rather than Chinese or
Vietnamese, a greater role in the nation's trade, to eliminate middlemen
and to conserve foreign exchange through the limiting of unnecessary
luxury imports. As a result of this policy, foreign investment quickly
disappeared, and a kind of "crony socialism" emerged somewhat
similar to the "crony capitalism" that evolved in the
Philippines under President Ferdinand Marcos. Lucrative state monopolies
were parceled out to Sihanouk's most loyal retainers, who
"milked" them for cash.
Sihanouk was headed steadily for a collision with the right. To
counter charges of one-man rule, the prince declared that he would
relinquish control of candidate selection and would permit more than one
Sangkum candidate to run for each seat in the September 1966 National
Assembly election. The returns showed a surprising upsurge in the
conservative vote at the expense of more moderate and left-wing
elements, although Hou, Hu, and Khieu were reelected by their
constituencies. General Lon Nol became prime minister.
Out of concern that the right wing might cause an irreparable split
within the Sangkum and might challenge his domination of the political
system, Sihanouk set up a "counter government" (like the
British "shadow cabinet") packed with his most loyal personal
followers and with leading leftists, hoping that it would exert a
restraining influence on Lon Nol. Leftists accused the general of being
groomed by Western intelligence agencies to lead a bloody anticommunist
coup d'�tat similar to that of General Soeharto in Indonesia. Injured
in an automobile accident, Lon Nol resigned in April 1967. Sihanouk
replaced him with a trusted centrist, Son Sann. This was the
twenty-third successive Sangkum cabinet and government to have been
appointed by Sihanouk since the party was formed in 1955.
Cambodia - Nonaligned Foreign Policy
Sihanouk's nonaligned foreign policy, which emerged in the months
following the Geneva Conference, cannot be understood without reference
to Cambodia's past history of foreign subjugation and its very uncertain
prospects for survival as the war between North Vietnam and South
Vietnam intensified. Soon after the 1954 Geneva Conference, Sihanouk
expressed some interest in integrating Cambodia into the framework of
the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), which included Cambodia,
Laos, and South Vietnam within the "treaty area," although
none of these states was a signatory. But meetings in late 1954 with
India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Burma's Premier U Nu made
him receptive to the appeal of nonalignment. Moreover, the prince was
somewhat uneasy about a United States-dominated alliance that included
one old enemy, Thailand, and encompassed another, South Vietnam, each of
which offered sanctuary to anti-Sihanouk dissidents.
At the Bandung Conference in April 1955, Sihanouk held private
meetings with Premier Zhou Enlai of China and Foreign Minister Pham Van
Dong of North Vietnam. Both assured him that their countries would
respect Cambodia's independence and territorial integrity. His
experience with the French, first as a client, then as the
self-proclaimed leader of the "royal crusade for
independence," apparently led him to conclude that the United
States, like France, would eventually be forced to leave Southeast Asia.
From this perspective, the Western presence in Indochina was only a
temporary interruption of the dynamics of the region--continued
Vietnamese (and perhaps even Thai) expansion at Cambodia's expense.
Accommodation with North Vietnam and friendly ties with China during the
late 1950s and the 1960s were tactics designed to counteract these
dynamics. China accepted Sihanouk's overtures and became a valuable
counterweight to growing Vietnamese and Thai pressure on Cambodia.
Cambodia's relations with China were based on mutual interests.
Sihanouk hoped that China would restrain the Vietnamese and the Thai
from acting to Cambodia's detriment. The Chinese, in turn, viewed
Cambodia's nonalignment as vital in order to prevent the encirclement of
their country by the United States and its allies. When Premier Zhou
Enlai visited Phnom Penh in 1956, he asked the country's Chinese
minority, numbering about 300,000, to cooperate in Cambodia's
development, to stay out of politics, and to consider adopting Cambodian
citizenship. This gesture helped to resolve a sensitive issue--the
loyalty of Cambodian Chinese--that had troubled the relationship between
Phnom Penh and Beijing. In 1960 the two countries signed a Treaty of
Friendship and Nonaggression. After the Sino-Soviet rift Sihanouk's
ardent friendship with China contributed to generally cooler ties with
Moscow.
China was not the only large power to which Sihanouk looked for
patronage, however. Cambodia's quest for security and nation- building
assistance impelled the prince to search beyond Asia and to accept help
from all donors as long as there was no impingement upon his country's
sovereignty. With this end in mind, Sihanouk turned to the United States
in 1955 and negotiated a military aid agreement that secured funds and
equipment for the Royal Khmer Armed Forces (Forces Arm�es Royales
Khm�res--FARK).
A United States Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) was
established in Phnom Penh to supervise the delivery and the use of
equipment that began to arrive from the United States. By the early
1960s, aid from Washington constituted 30 percent of Cambodia's defense
budget and 14 percent of total budget inflows.
Relations with the United States, however, proved to be stormy.
United States officials both in Washington and in Phnom Penh frequently
underestimated the prince and considered him to be an erratic figure
with minimal understanding of the threat posed by Asian communism.
Sihanouk easily reciprocated this mistrust because several developments
aroused his suspicion of United States intentions toward his country.
One of these developments was the growing United States influence
within the Cambodian armed forces. The processing of equipment
deliveries and the training of Cambodian personnel had forged close ties
between United States military advisers and their Cambodian
counterparts. Military officers of both nations also shared
apprehensions about the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. Sihanouk
considered FARK to be Washington's most powerful constituency in his
country. The prince also feared that a number of high-ranking, rightist
FARK officers led by Lon Nol were becoming too powerful and that, by
association with these officers, United States influence in Cambodia was
becoming too deeply rooted.
A second development included the repetition of overflights by United
States and South Vietnamese military aircraft within Cambodian airspace
and border incursions by South Vietnamese troops in hot pursuit of Viet
Cong insurgents who crossed into Cambodian territory when military
pressure upon them became too sustained. As the early 1960s wore on,
this increasingly sensitive issue contributed to the deterioration of
relations between Phnom Penh and Washington.
A third development was Sihanouk's own belief that he had been
targeted by United States intelligence agencies for replacement by a
more pro-Western leader. Evidence to support this suspicion came to
light in 1959 when the government discovered a plot to overthrow
Sihanouk. The conspiracy involved several Khmer leaders suspected of
American connections. Among them were Sam Sary, a leader of right-wing
Khmer Serei troops in South Vietnam; Son Ngoc Thanh, the early
nationalist leader once exiled into Thailand; and Dap Chhuon, the
military governor of Siemreab Province. Another alleged plot involved
Dap Chuon's establishment of a "free" state that would have
included Siemreab Province and Kampong Thum (Kampong Thom) Province and
the southern areas of Laos that were controlled by the rightist Laotian
prince, Boun Oum.
These developments, magnified by Sihanouk's abiding suspicions,
eventually undermined Phnom Penh's relations with Washington. In
November 1963, the prince charged that the United States was continuing
to support the subversive activities of the Khmer Serei in Thailand and
in South Vietnam, and he announced the immediate termination of
Washington's aid program to Cambodia. Relations continued to
deteriorate, and the final break came in May 1965 amid increasing
indications of airspace violations by South Vietnamese and by United
States aircraft and of ground fighting between Army of the Republic of
Vietnam (ARVN) troops and Viet Cong insurgents in the Cambodian border
areas.
In the meantime, Cambodia's relations with North Vietnam and with
South Vietnam, as well as the rupture with Washington, reflected
Sihanouk's efforts to adjust to geopolitical realities in Southeast Asia
and to keep his country out of the escalating conflict in neighboring
South Vietnam. In the early to mid-1960s, this effort required a tilt
toward Hanoi because the government in Saigon tottered on the brink of
anarchy. In the cities, the administration of Ngo Dinh Diem and the
military regimes that succeeded it had become increasingly ineffectual
and unstable, while in the countryside the government forces were
steadily losing ground to the Hanoi-backed insurgents. To observers in
Phnom Penh, South Vietnam's short-term viability was seriously in doubt,
and this compelled a new tack in Cambodian foreign policy. First,
Cambodia severed diplomatic ties with Saigon in August 1963. The
following March, Sihanouk announced plans to establish diplomatic
relations with North Vietnam and to negotiate a border settlement
directly with Hanoi. These plans were not implemented quickly, however,
because the North Vietnamese told the prince that any problem concerning
Cambodia's border with South Vietnam would have to be negotiated
directly with the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam
(NFLSVN). Cambodia opened border talks with the front in mid-1966, and the
latter recognized the inviolability of Cambodia's borders a year later.
North Vietnam quickly followed suit. Cambodia was the first foreign
government to recognize the NFLSVN's Provisional Revolutionary
Government after it was established in June 1969. Sihanouk was the only
foreign head of state to attend the funeral of Ho Chi Minh, North
Vietnam's deceased leader, in Hanoi three months later.
In the late 1960s, while preserving relations with China and with
North Vietnam, Sihanouk sought to restore a measure of equilibrium by
improving Cambodia's ties with the West. This shift in course by the
prince represented another adjustment to prevailing conditions in
Southeast Asia. North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces were increasing
their use of sanctuaries in Cambodia, which also served as the southern
terminus of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, their logistical resupply route
originating in North Vietnam. Cambodian neutrality in the conflict thus
was eroding, and China, preoccupied with its Cultural Revolution, did
not intercede with Hanoi. On Cambodia's eastern border, South Vietnam,
surprisingly, had not collapsed, even in the face of the communist Tet
Offensive in 1968, and President Nguyen Van Thieu's government was
bringing a measure of stability to the war-ravaged country. As the
government in Phnom Penh began to feel keenly the loss of economic and
military aid from the United States, which had totaled about US$400
million between 1955 and 1963, it began to have second thoughts about
the rupture with Washington. The unavailability of American equipment
and spare parts was exacerbated by the poor quality and the small
numbers of Soviet, Chinese, and French substitutes.
In late 1967 and in early 1968, Sihanouk signaled that he would raise
no objection to hot pursuit of communist forces by South Vietnamese or
by United States troops into Cambodian territory. Washington, in the
meantime, accepted the recommendation of the United States Military
Assistance Command--Vietnam (MACV) and, beginning in March 1969, ordered
a series of airstrikes (dubbed the Menu series) against Cambodian
sanctuaries used by the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. Whether or
not these bombing missions were authorized aroused considerable
controversy, and assertions by the Nixon administration that Sihanouk
had "allowed" or even "encouraged" them were
disputed by critics such as British journalist William Shawcross. On a
diplomatic level, however, the Menu airstrikes did not impede bilateral
relations from moving forward. In April 1969, Nixon sent a note to the
prince affirming that the United States recognized and respected
"the sovereignty, neutrality and territorial integrity of the
Kingdom of Cambodia with its present frontiers." Shortly
thereafter, in June 1969, full diplomatic relations were restored
between Phnom Penh and Washington.
Cambodia - The Cambodian Left: The Early Phases
The history of the communist movement in Cambodia can be divided into
six phases: the emergence of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP),
whose members were almost exclusively Vietnamese, before World War II;
the ten-year struggle for independence from the French, when a separate
Cambodian communist party, the Kampuchean (or Khmer) People's
Revolutionary Party (KPRP), was established under Vietnamese auspices;
the period following the Second Party Congress of the KPRP in 1960, when
Saloth Sar (Pol Pot after 1976) and other future Khmer Rouge leaders
gained control of its apparatus; the revolutionary struggle from the
initiation of the Khmer Rouge insurgency in 1967-68 to the fall of the
Lon Nol government in April 1975; the Democratic Kampuchea regime, from
April 1975 to January 1979; and the period following the Third Party
Congress of the KPRP in January 1979, when Hanoi effectively assumed
control over Cambodia's government and communist party.
Much of the movement's history has been shrouded in mystery, largely
because successive purges, especially during the Democratic Kampuchea
period, have left so few survivors to recount their experiences. One
thing is evident, however, the tension between Khmer and Vietnamese was
a major theme in the movement's development. In the three decades
between the end of World War II and the Khmer Rouge victory, the appeal
of communism to Westerneducated intellectuals (and to a lesser extent
its more inchoate attraction for poor peasants) was tempered by the
apprehension that the much stronger Vietnamese movement was using
communism as an ideological rationale for dominating the Khmer. The
analogy between the Vietnamese communists and the Nguyen dynasty, which
had legitimized its encroachments in the nineteenth century in terms of
the "civilizing mission" of Confucianism, was persuasive.
Thus, the new brand of indigenous communism that emerged after 1960
combined nationalist and revolutionary appeals and, when it could afford
to, exploited the virulent anti-Vietnamese sentiments of the Khmers.
Khmer Rouge literature in the 1970s frequently referred to the
Vietnamese as yuon (barbarian), a term dating from the
Angkorian period.
In 1930 Ho Chi Minh founded the Vietnamese Communist Party by
unifying three smaller communist movements that had emerged in Tonkin,
in Annam, and in Cochinchina during the late 1920s. The name was changed
almost immediately to the ICP, ostensibly to include revolutionaries
from Cambodia and Laos. Almost without exception, however, all the
earliest party members were Vietnamese. By the end of World War II, a
handful of Cambodians had joined its ranks, but their influence on the
Indochinese communist movement and on developments within Cambodia was
negligible.
Viet Minh units occasionally made forays into Cambodia bases during
their war against the French, and, in conjunction with the leftist
government that ruled Thailand until 1947, the Viet Minh encouraged the
formation of armed, left-wing Khmer Issarak bands. On April 17, 1950
(twenty-five years to the day before the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom
Penh), the first nationwide congress of the Khmer Issarak groups
convened, and the United Issarak Front was established. Its leader was
Son Ngoc Minh (possibly a brother of the nationalist Son Ngoc Thanh),
and a third of its leadership consisted of members of the ICP. According
to the historian David P. Chandler, the leftist Issarak groups, aided by
the Viet Minh, occupied a sixth of Cambodia's territory by 1952; and, on
the eve of the Geneva Conference, they controlled as much as one half of
the country.
In 1951 the ICP was reorganized into three national units--the
Vietnam Workers' Party, the Lao Itsala, and the KPRP. According to a
document issued after the reorganization, the Vietnam Workers' Party
would continue to "supervise" the smaller Laotian and
Cambodian movements. Most KPRP leaders and rank-and-file seem to have
been either Khmer Krom, or ethnic Vietnamese living in Cambodia. The
party's appeal to indigenous Khmers appears to have been minimal.
According to Democratic Kampuchea's version of party history, the
Viet Minh's failure to negotiate a political role for the KPRP at the
1954 Geneva Conference represented a betrayal of the Cambodian movement,
which still controlled large areas of the countryside and which
commanded at least 5,000 armed men. Following the conference, about
1,000 members of the KPRP, including Son Ngoc Minh, made a "Long
March" into North Vietnam, where they remained in exile. In late
1954, those who stayed in Cambodia founded a legal political party, the
Pracheachon Party, which participated in the 1955 and the 1958 National
Assembly elections. In the September 1955 election, it won about 4
percent of the vote but did not secure a seat in the legislature.
Members of the Pracheachon were subject to constant harassment and to
arrests because the party remained outside Sihanouk's Sangkum.
Government attacks prevented it from participating in the 1962 election
and drove it underground. Sihanouk habitually labeled local leftists the
Khmer Rouge, a term that later came to signify the party and the state
headed by Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan, and their associates.
During the mid-1950s, KPRP factions, the "urban committee"
(headed by Tou Samouth), and the "rural committee" (headed by
Sieu Heng), emerged. In very general terms, these groups espoused
divergent revolutionary lines. The prevalent "urban" line,
endorsed by North Vietnam, recognized that Sihanouk, by virtue of his
success in winning independence from the French, was a genuine national
leader whose neutralism and deep distrust of the United States made him
a valuable asset in Hanoi's struggle to "liberate" South
Vietnam. Champions of this line hoped that the prince could be persuaded
to distance himself from the right wing and to adopt leftist policies.
The other line, supported for the most part by rural cadres who were
familiar with the harsh realities of the countryside, advocated an
immediate struggle to overthrow the "feudalist" Sihanouk. In
1959 Sieu Heng defected to the government and provided the security
forces with information that enabled them to destroy as much as 90
percent of the party's rural apparatus. Although communist networks in
Phnom Penh and in other towns under Tou Samouth's jurisdiction fared
better, only a few hundred communists remained active in the country by
1960.
Cambodia - The Paris Student Group
During the 1950s, Khmer students in Paris organized their own
communist movement, which had little, if any, connection to the
hard-pressed party in their homeland. From their ranks came the men and
women who returned home and took command of the party apparatus during
the 1960s, led an effective insurgency against Sihanouk and Lon Nol from
1968 until 1975, and established the regime of Democratic Kampuchea.
Pol Pot, who rose to the leadership of the communist movement in the
1960s, was born in 1928 (some sources say in 1925) in Kampong Thum
Province, north of Phnom Penh. He attended a technical high school in
the capital and then went to Paris in 1949 to study radio electronics
(other sources say he attended a school for printers and typesetters and
also studied civil engineering). Described by one source as a
"determined, rather plodding organizer," he failed to obtain a
degree, but, according to the Jesuit priest, Father Fran�ois Ponchaud,
he acquired a taste for the classics of French literature as well as for
the writings of Marx.
Another member of the Paris student group was Ieng Sary. He was a
Chinese-Khmer born in 1930 in South Vietnam. He attended the elite Lyc�e
Sisowath in Phnom Penh before beginning courses in commerce and politics
at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in France. Khieu Samphan, considered
"one of the most brilliant intellects of his generation," was
born in 1931 and specialized in economics and politics during his time
in Paris. In talent he was rivaled by Hou Yuon, born in 1930, who was
described as being "of truly astounding physical and intellectual
strength," and who studied economics and law. Son Sen, born in
1930, studied education and literature; Hu Nim, born in 1932, studied
law.
These men were perhaps the most educated leaders in the history of
Asian communism. Two of them, Khieu Samphan and Hou Yuon, earned
doctorates from the University of Paris; Hu Nim obtained his degree from
the University of Phnom Penh in 1965. In retrospect, it seems enigmatic
that these talented members of the elite, sent to France on government
scholarships, could launch the bloodiest and most radical revolution in
modern Asian history. Most came from landowner or civil servant
families. Pol Pot and Hou Yuon may have been related to the royal
family. An older sister of Pol Pot had been a concubine at the court of
King Monivong. Three of the Paris group forged a bond that survived
years of revolutionary struggle and intraparty strife, Pol Pot and Ieng
Sary married Khieu Ponnary and Khieu Thirith (also known as Ieng
Thirith), purportedly relatives of Khieu Samphan. These two
well-educated women also played a central role in the regime of
Democratic Kampuchea.
The intellectual ferment of Paris must have been a dizzying
experience for young Khmers fresh from Phnom Penh or the provinces. A
number sought refuge in the dogma of orthodox Marxism-Leninism. At some
time between 1949 and 1951, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary joined the French
Communist Party, the most tightly disciplined and Stalinist of Western
Europe's communist movements. In 1951 the two men went to East Berlin to
participate in a youth festival. This experience is considered to have
been a turning point in their ideological development. Meeting with
Khmers who were fighting with the Viet Minh (and whom they subsequently
judged to be too subservient to the Vietnamese), they became convinced
that only a tightly disciplined party organization and a readiness for
armed struggle could achieve revolution. They transformed the Khmer
Students' Association (KSA), to which most of the 200 or so Khmer
students in Paris belonged, into a platform for nationalist and leftist
ideas. In 1952 Pol Pot, Hou Yuon, Ieng Sary, and other leftists gained
notoriety by sending an open letter to Sihanouk calling him the
"strangler of infant democracy." A year later, the French
authorities closed down the KSA. In 1956, however, Hou Yuon and Khieu
Samphan helped to establish a new Marxist-oriented group, the Khmer
Students' Union.
The doctoral dissertations written by Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphan
express basic themes that were later to become the cornerstones of the
policy adopted by Democratic Kampuchea. The central role of the peasants
in national development was espoused by Hou Yuon in his 1955 thesis,
"The Cambodian Peasants and Their Prospects for
Modernization," which challenged the conventional view that
urbanization and industrialization are necessary precursors of
development. The major argument in Khieu Samphan's 1959 thesis,
"Cambodia's Economy and Industrial Development," was that the
country had to become self-reliant and had to end its economic
dependency on the developed world. In its general contours, Khieu's work
reflected the influence of a branch of the "dependency theory"
school, which blamed lack of development in the Third World on the
economic domination of the industrialized nations.
Cambodia - The KPRP Second Congress
After returning to Cambodia in 1953, Pol Pot threw himself into party
work first in Kampong Cham Province (Kompong Cham) and then in Phnom
Penh under Tou Samouth's "urban committee." His comrades, Ieng
Sary and Hou Yuon, became teachers at a new private high school, the Lyc�e
Kambuboth, which Hou Yuon helped to establish. Khieu Samphan returned
from Paris in 1959, taught as a member of the law faculty of the
University of Phnom Penh, and started a left-wing, French-language
publication, L'Observateur. The paper soon acquired a
reputation in Phnom Penh's small academic circle. The following year,
the government closed the paper, and Sihanouk's police publicly
humiliated Khieu by undressing and photographing him in public--as
Shawcross notes, "not the sort of humiliation that men forgive or
forget." Yet the experience did not prevent Khieu from advocating
cooperation with Sihanouk in order to promote a united front against
United States activities in South Vietnam. As mentioned, Khieu Samphan,
Hou Yuon, and Hu Nim tried to "work through the system" by
joining the Sangkum and by accepting posts in the prince's government.
Hardliners like Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, and Son Sen advocated resistance.
In late September, 1960, twenty-one leaders of the KPRP held a secret
congress in a vacant room of the Phnom Penh railroad station. This
pivotal event remains shrouded in mystery because its outcome has become
an object of contention (and considerable historical rewriting) between
pro-Vietnamese and anti-Vietnamese Khmer communist factions. The
question of cooperation with, or resistance to, Sihanouk was thoroughly
discussed. Tou Samouth, who advocated a policy of cooperation, was
elected general secretary of the KPRP that was renamed the Workers'
Party of Kampuchea (WPK). His ally, Nuon Chea (also known as Long Reth),
became deputy general secretary; however, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary were
named to the Political Bureau to occupy the third and the fifth highest
positions in the renamed party's hierarchy. The name change is
significant. By calling itself a workers' party, the Cambodian movement
claimed equal status with the Vietnam Workers' Party. The pro-Vietnamese
regime of the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) implied in the 1980s
that the September 1960 meeting was nothing more than the second
congress of the KPRP.
On July 20, 1962, Tou Samouth disappeared. He may have been the
victim of Sihanouk's police, but some observers suggest that Pol Pot,
who had built up a strong faction within the party, had him eliminated.
In February 1963, at the WPK's second congress, Pol Pot was chosen to
succeed Tou Samouth as the party's general secretary. Tou's allies, Nuon
Chea and Keo Meas, were removed from the Central Committee and replaced
by Son Sen and Vorn Vet. From then on, Pol Pot and loyal comrades from
his Paris student days controlled the party center, edging out older
veterans whom they considered excessively pro-Vietnamese.
In July 1963, Pol Pot and most of the central committee left Phnom
Penh to establish an insurgent base in Rotanokiri (Ratanakiri) Province
in the northeast. This is a region inhabited by tribal minorities, the
Khmer Loeu, whose rough treatment (including resettlement and forced
assimilation) at the hands of the central government made them willing
recruits for a guerrilla struggle. In 1965 Pol Pot made a visit of
several months duration to North Vietnam and China. He probably received
some training in China, which must have enhanced his prestige when he
returned to the WPK's liberated areas. Despite friendly relations
between Sihanouk and the Chinese, the latter kept Pol Pot's visit a
secret from Sihanouk. In September 1966, the party changed its name a
second time, to the Kampuchean (or Khmer) Communist Party (KCP).
Adopting the label "communist" suggested that the Cambodian
movement was more advanced than Vietnam's (which was merely a
"workers' party"), and was on the same level as China's.
Cambodia - INSURRECTION AND WAR, 1967-75
Sihanouk was away on a trip to Moscow and Beijing when General Lon
Nol launched a successful coup d'�tat. On the morning of March 18,
1970, the National Assembly was hastily convened, and voted unanimously
to depose Sihanouk as head of state. Lon Nol, who had been serving as
prime minister, was granted emergency powers. Sirik Matak, an
ultraconservative royal prince who in 1941 had been passed over by the
French in favor of his cousin Norodom Sihanouk as king, retained his
post as deputy prime minister. The new government emphasized that the
transfer of power had been totally legal and constitutional, and it
received the recognition of most foreign governments.
Most middle-class and educated Khmers in Phnom Penh had grown weary
of Sihanouk and apparently welcomed the change of government. But he was
still popular in the villages. Days after the coup, the prince, now in
Beijing, broadcast an appeal to the people to resist the usurpers.
Demonstrations and riots occurred throughout the country. In one
incident on March 29, an estimated 40,000 peasants began a march on the
capital to demand Sihanouk's reinstatement. They were dispersed, with
many casualties, by contingents of the armed forces and the Khmer Serei.
From Beijing, Sihanouk proclaimed his intention to create a National
United Front of Kampuchea (Front Uni National du Kampuch�a, FUNK). In the prince's words, this front would embrace "all Khmer
both inside and outside the country-- including the faithful, religious
people, military men, civilians, and men and women who cherish the
ideals of independence, democracy, neutrality, progressivism, socialism,
Buddhism, nationalism, territorial integrity, and
anti-imperialism." A coalition, brokered by the Chinese, was
hastily formed between the prince and the KCP. On May 5, 1970, the
actual establishment of FUNK and of the Royal Government of National
Union of Kampuchea (Gouvernement Royal d'Union Nationale du Kampuch�a,
GRUNK,
were announced. Sihanouk assumed the post of GRUNK head of state,
appointing Penn Nouth, one of his most loyal supporters, as prime
minister. Khieu Samphan was designated deputy prime minister, minister
of defense, and commander in chief of the GRUNK armed forces (though
actual military operations were directed by Pol Pot). Hu Nim became
minister of information, and Hou Yuon assumed multiple responsibilities
as minister of interior, communal reforms, and cooperatives. GRUNK
claimed that it was not a government-in-exile because Khieu Samphan and
the insurgents remained inside Cambodia.
For Sihanouk and the KCP, this was an extremely useful marriage of
convenience. Peasants, motivated by loyalty to the monarchy, rallied to
the FUNK cause. The appeal of the Sihanouk-KCP coalition grew immensely
after October 9, 1970, when Lon Nol abolished the monarchy and
redesignated Cambodia as the Khmer Republic. The concept of a republic
was not popular with most villagers, who had grown up with the idea that
something was seriously awry in a Cambodia without a monarch.
GRUNK operated on two tiers. Sihanouk and his loyalists remained in
Beijing, although the prince did make a visit to the "liberated
areas" of Cambodia, including Angkor Wat, in March 1973. The KCP
commanded the insurgency within the country. Gradually, the prince was
deprived of everything but a passive, figurehead role in the coalition.
The KCP told people inside Cambodia that expressions of support for
Sihanouk would result in their liquidation, and when the prince appeared
in public overseas to publicize the GRUNK cause, he was treated with
almost open contempt by Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan. In June 1973, the
prince told the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci that when "they
[the Khmer Rouge] no longer need me, they will spit me out like a cherry
pit!" By the end of that year, Sihanouk loyalists had been purged
from all of GRUNK's ministries.
Cambodia - The Widening War
The 1970 coup d'�tat that toppled Sihanouk dragged Cambodia into the
vortex of a wider war. The escalating conflict pitted government troops,
now renamed the Khmer National Armed Forces (Forces Arm�es Nationales
Khm�res, FANK), initially against the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, and
subsequently against the old RAK, now revitalized and renamed the
Cambodian People's National Liberation Armed Forces (CPNLAF).
As combat operations quickly disclosed, the two sides were
mismatched. The inequality lay not so much in sheer numbers. Thousands
of young urban Cambodians flocked to join FANK in the months following
the coup and, throughout its five-year life, the republican government
forces held a numerical edge over their opponents, the padded payrolls
and the phantom units reported in the press notwithstanding. Instead,
FANK was outclassed in training and leadership. With the surge of
recruits, the government forces expanded beyond their capacity to absorb
the new inductees. Later, given the press of tactical operations and the
need to replace combat casualties, there was insufficient time to impart
needed skills to individuals or to units, and lack of training remained
the bane of FANK's existence until its collapse. While individual
soldiers and some government units fought bravely, their leaders-- with
notable exceptions--were both corrupt and incompetent. Arrayed against
an armed force of such limited capability was arguably the best light
infantry in the world at the time--the North Vietnamese and the Viet
Cong. And when there forces were supplanted, it was by the tough,
rigidly indoctrinated peasant army of the CPNLAF with its core of Khmer
Rouge leaders.
With the fall of Sihanouk, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong
became alarmed at the prospect of a pro-Western regime that might allow
the United States to establish a military presence on their western
flank. To prevent this from happening, they began transferring their
military installations away from the border area to locations deeper
within Cambodian territory. A new command center was established at the
city of Kracheh (Krati�). On April 29, 1970, South Vietnamese and
United States units unleashed a multi-pronged offensive into Cambodia to
destroy the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), the headquarters
for North Vietnamese and Viet Cong combat operations in South Vietnam.
Extensive logistical installations and large amounts of supplies were
found and destroyed, but as reporting from the United States MACV
subsequently disclosed, still larger amounts of material already had
been moved deeper into Cambodia.
The North Vietnamese army turned on the republican government forces,
and by June 1970, three months after the coup, they and the CPNLAF had
swept FANK from the entire northeastern third of the country. After
defeating the government forces, they turned newly won territories over
to the local insurgents. The Khmer Rouge also established
"liberated areas" in the south and the southwestern parts of
the country, where they operated independently of the Vietnamese. The
KCP's debt to the North Vietnamese after March 1970 was one that Pol Pot
was loath to acknowledge; however, it is clear that without North
Vietnamese and Viet Cong assistance, the revolutionary struggle would
have dragged on much longer than it did.
United States bombing of enemy troop dispositions in Cambodia--
particularly in the summer of 1973, when intense aerial bombardment
(known as Arclight) was used to halt a Khmer Rouge assault on Phnom
Penh--bought time for the Lon Nol government, but did not stem the
momentum of the communist forces. United States official documents give
a figure of 79,959 sorties by B-52 and F-111 aircraft over the country,
during which a total of 539,129 tons of ordnance were dropped, about 350
percent of the tonnage (153,000 tons) dropped on Japan during World War
II. Many of the bombs that fell in Cambodia struck relatively
uninhabited mountain or forest regions; however, as declassified United
States Air Force maps show, others fell over some of the most densely
inhabited areas of the country, such as Siemreab Province, Kampong
Chhnang Province, and the countryside around Phnom Penh. Deaths from the
bombing are extremely difficult to estimate, and figures range from a
low of 30,000 to a high of 500,000. Whatever the real extent of the
casualties, the Arclight missions over Cambodia, which were halted in
August 15, 1973, by the United States Congress, delivered shattering
blows to the structure of life in many of the country's villages, and,
according to some critics, drove the Cambodian people into the arms of
the Khmer Rouge.
The bombing was by far the most controversial aspect of the United
States presence in Cambodia. In his book Sideshow, William
Shawcross provides a vivid image of the hellish conditions, especially
in the months of January to August 1973, when the Arclight sorties were
most intense. He claims that the bombing contributed to the forging of a
brutal and singlemindedly fanatical Khmer Rouge movement. However, his
arguments have been disputed by several United States
officials--including the former ambassador to Cambodia, Emory C. Swank,
and the former Air Force commander in Thailand, General John W. Vogt--in
an appendix to the second volume of the memoirs of then Secretary of
State, Henry Kissinger.
From the Khmer Rouge perspective, however, the severity of the
bombings was matched by the treachery of the North Vietnamese. The
Cambodian communists had refused to take part in the Paris peace talks.
When North Vietnam and the United States signed the Paris Peace Accords
on January 27, 1973, bombing missions over Vietnam and Laos were
terminated. The fighter bombers and other aircraft thus released were
diverted to strike Khmer Rouge positions in Cambodia.
Cambodia - Early Khmer Rouge Atrocities
Mid-April is the beginning of the Cambodian new year, the year's most
festive celebration. For many Cambodians, the fall of Phnom Penh
promised both a new year and a new era of peace. The people of Phnom
Penh and of other cities waited in anticipation for the appearance of
their new rulers. The troops who entered the capital on April 17 were
mostly grim-faced youths clad in black with the checkered scarves that
had become the uniform of the movement. Their unsmiling demeanor quickly
dispelled popular enthusiasm. People began to realize that, in the eyes
of the victors, the war was not over; it was just beginning, and the
people were the new enemy. According to Father Ponchaud, as the sense of
consternation and dread grew, it seemed that "a slab of lead had
fallen on the city."
Evacuation of Phnom Penh began immediately.The black-clad troops told
the residents that they would move only about "two or three
kilometers" outside the city and would return in "two or three
days." Other witnesses report being told that the evacuation was
because of the threat of an American bombing and that they did not have
to lock their houses since the Khmer Rouge would "take care of
everything" until they returned. The roads out of the city were
clogged with evacuees. Phnom Penh--the population of which, numbering
2.5 million people, included as many as 1.5 million wartime refugees
living with relatives or in shantytowns around the urban center--was
soon emptied. Similar evacuations occurred at Batdambang, Kampong Cham,
Siemreab, Kampong Thum, and the country's other towns and cities.
There were no exceptions to the evacuation. Even Phnom Penh's
hospitals were emptied of their patients. The Khmer Rouge provided
transportation for some of the aged and the disabled, and they set up
stockpiles of food outside the city for the refugees; however, the
supplies were inadequate to sustain the hundreds of thousands of people
on the road. Even seriously injured hospital patients, many without any
means of conveyance, were summarily forced to leave regardless of their
condition. According to Khieu Samphan, the evacuation of Phnom Penh's
famished and disease-racked population resulted in 2,000 to 3,000
deaths, which is probably an understatement. The foreign community,
about 800 persons, was quarantined in the French embassy compound, and
by the end of the month the foreigners were taken by truck to the Thai
border. Khmer women who were married to foreigners were allowed to
accompany their husbands, but Khmer men were not permitted to leave with
their foreign wives.
Promises that urban residents forced into the countryside would be
allowed to return home were never kept. Instead, the town dwellers,
regarded as politically unreliable "new people," were put to
work in forced labor battalions throughout the country. One refugee, for
example, recalled that her family was sent to the region around Moung
Roessei in Batdambang Province to clear land and grow rice.
Aside from the alleged threat of United States air strikes, the Khmer
Rouge justified the evacuations in terms of the impossibility of
transporting sufficient food to feed an urban population of between 2
and 3 million people. Lack of adequate transportation meant that,
instead of bringing food to the people (tons of it lay in storehouses in
the port city of Kampong Saom, according to Father Ponchaud), the people
had to be brought to (and had to grow) the food. But there were other,
more basic motivations. The Khmer Rouge was determined to turn the
country into a nation of peasants in which the corruption and parasitism
of city life would be completely uprooted. In addition, Pol Pot wanted
to break up the "enemy spy organizations" that allegedly were
based in the urban areas. Finally, it seems that Pol Pot and his
hard-line associates on the KCP Political Bureau used the forced
evacuations to gain control of the city's population and to weaken the
position of their factional rivals within the communist party. Had Phnom
Penh been controlled by one of the more moderate communist leaders, the
exodus might not have taken place when it did.
The regime immediately seized and executed as many Khmer Republic
civil servants, police, and military officers as it could find. Evacuees
who had been associated with the Lon Nol government had to feign peasant
or working-class backgrounds to avoid certain death. One refugee wrote
that she and her family, who came from the middle or upper middle class,
dyed their city clothes black (like those of peasants) to help them
escape detection. In one incident, soon after the fall of Phnom Penh,
more than 300 former military officers were told to put on their dress
uniforms in order to "meet Sihanouk." Instead, they were taken
to a jungle clearing in Batdambang Province and were machine-gunned or
clubbed to death. The wives and the children of people with government
backgrounds were also killed, apparently to eliminate people who might
harbor feelings of revenge toward the regime.
According to refugee accounts, the rate of killing had decreased by
the summer of 1975. Some civil servants and educated people were sent to
"reeducation centers" and, if they showed "genuine"
contrition, were put in forced labor battalions. There were new
killings, however, in late 1975 and in early 1976. Many of the victims
were educated people, such as schoolteachers. During the entire
Democratic Kampuchea period from 1975 to 1978, cadres exercised the
power of life and death, especially over "new people," for
whom threats of being struck with a pickax or an ax handle and of being
"put in a plastic bag" were a part of everyday life. In order
to save ammunition, firearms were rarely used. People were murdered for
not working hard, for complaining about living conditions, for
collecting or stealing food for their own use, for wearing jewelry, for
having sexual relations, for grieving over the loss of relatives or
friends, or for expressing religious sentiments. Sick people were often
eliminated. The killings often, if not usually, occurred without any
kind of trial, and they continued, uninterrupted, until the 1979
Vietnamese invasion. People who displeased the Angkar, or its local
representatives, customarily received a formal warning (kosang)
to mend their ways. More than two warnings resulted in being given an
"invitation," which meant certain death. In 1977 and 1978 the
violence reached a climax as the revolutionaries turned against each
other in bloody purges.
Cambodia - Revolutionary Terror
The social transformation wrought by the Khmer Rouge, first, in the
areas that they occupied during the war with Lon Nol and, then, in
varying degrees, throughout the country, was far more radical than
anything attempted by the Russian, Chinese, or Vietnamese revolutions.
According to Pol Pot, five classes existed in prerevolutionary Cambodia
-- peasants, workers, bourgeoisie, capitalists, and feudalists.
Postrevolutionary society, as defined by the 1976 Constitution of
Democratic Kampuchea, consisted of workers, peasants, and "all
other Kampuchean working people." No allowance was made for a
transitional stage such as China's "New Democracy" in which
"patriotic" landlord or bourgeois elements were permitted to
play a role in socialist construction. Sihanouk writes that in 1975 he,
Khieu Samphan, and Khieu Thirith went to visit Zhou Enlai, who was
gravely ill. Zhou warned them not to attempt to achieve communism
suddenly by one "great leap forward" without intermediate
steps, as China had done with disastrous results in the late 1950s.
Khieu Samphan and Khieu Thirith "just smiled an incredulous and
superior smile." Khieu Samphan and Son Sen later boasted to
Sihanouk that "we will be the first nation to create a completely
communist society without wasting time on intermediate steps."
Although conditions varied from region to region, a situation that
was, in part, a reflection of factional divisions that still existed
within the KCP during the 1970s, the testimony of refugees reveals that
the most salient social division was between the politically suspect
"new people," those driven out of the towns after the
communist victory, and the more reliable "old people," the
poor and lower middle-class peasants who had remained in the
countryside. Despite the ideological commitment to radical equality, KCP
members and the armed forces constituted a clearly recognizable elite.
The working class was a negligible factor because of the evacuation of
the urban areas and the idling of most of the country's few factories.
The one important working class group in prerevolutionary
Cambodia--laborers on large rubber plantations--traditionally had
consisted mostly of Vietnamese emigrants and thus was politically
suspect.
The number of people, including refugees, living in the urban areas,
on the eve of the communist victory probably was somewhat more than 3
million, in a wartime population that has been estimated at between 5.7
and 7.3 million. As mentioned, despite their rural origins, the refugees
were considered "new people"-- that is, people unsympathetic
to Democratic Kampuchea. Some doubtless passed as "old people"
after returning to their native villages, but the Khmer Rouge seem to
have been extremely vigilant in recording and keeping track of the
movements of families and of individuals. The lowest unit of social
control, the krom (group), consisted of ten to fifteen nuclear
families whose activities were closely supervised by a three-person
committee. The committee chairman was selected by the KCP. This grass
roots leadership was required to note the social origin of each family
under its jurisdiction and to report it to persons higher up in the
Angkar hierarchy. The number of "new people" may initially
have been as high as 2.5 million.
The "new people" were treated as slave laborers. They were
constantly moved, were forced to do the hardest physical labor, and
worked in the most inhospitable, fever-ridden parts of the country, such
as forests, upland areas, and swamps. "New people" were
segregated from "old people," enjoyed little or no privacy,
and received the smallest rice rations. When the country experienced
food shortages in 1977, the "new people" suffered the most.
The medical care available to them was primitive or nonexistent.
Families often were separated because people were divided into work
brigades according to age and sex and sent to different parts of the
country. "New people" were subjected to unending political
indoctrination and could be executed without trial. The creation of what
amounted to a slave class suggests continuity between the Cambodian
revolution and the country's ancient history. Like the Khmer Rouge
leadership, the god-kings of Angkor had commanded armies of slaves. Pol
Pot boasted in 1977 that "if our people can make Angkor, they can
make anything."
The situation of the "old people" under Khmer Rouge rule
was more ambiguous. Refugee interviews reveal cases in which villagers
were treated as harshly as the "new people," enduring forced
labor, indoctrination, the separation of children from parents, and
executions; however, they were generally allowed to remain in their
native villages. Because of their age-old resentment of the urban and
rural elites, many of the poorest peasants probably were sympathetic to
Khmer Rouge goals. In the early 1980s, visiting Western journalists
found that the issue of peasant support for the Khmer Rouge was an
extremely sensitive subject that officials of the People's Republic of
Kampuchea had little inclination to discuss.
On the basis of interviews with refugees from different parts of the
country as well as other sources, Vickery has argued that there was a
wide regional variation in the severity of policies adopted by local
Khmer Rouge authorities. Ideology had something to do with the
differences, but the availability of food, the level of local
development, and the personal qualities of cadres also were important
factors. The greatest number of deaths occurred in undeveloped
districts, where "new people" were sent to clear land. While
conditions were hellish in some localities, they apparently were
tolerable in others. Vickery describes the Eastern Zone, which was
dominated by pro-Vietnamese cadres, as one in which the extreme policies
of the Pol Pot leadership were not adopted (at least until 1978, when
the Eastern leadership was liquidated in a bloody purge). Executions
were few, "old people" and "new people" were treated
largely the same, and food was made available to the entire population.
Although the Southwestern Zone was one original center of power of the
Khmer Rouge, and cadres administered it with strict discipline, random
executions were relatively rare, and "new people" were not
persecuted if they had a cooperative attitude. In the Western Zone and
in the Northwestern Zone, conditions were harsh. Starvation was
widespread in the latter zone because cadres sent rice to Phnom Penh
rather than distributed it to the local population. In the Northern Zone
and in the Central Zone, there seem to have been more executions than
there were victims of starvation. Little reliable information emerged on
conditions in the Northeastern Zone, one of the most isolated parts of
Cambodia.
On the surface, society in Democratic Kampuchea was strictly
egalitarian. The Khmer language, like many in Southeast Asia, has a
complex system of usages to define speakers' rank and social status.
These usages were abandoned. People were encouraged to call each other
"friend," or "comrade" (in Khmer, mit or met),
and to avoid traditional signs of deference such as bowing or folding
the hands in salutation. Language was transformed in other ways. The
Khmer Rouge invented new terms. People were told they must
"forge" (lot dam) a new revolutionary
character, that they were the "instruments" (opokar)
of the Angkar, and that nostalgia for prerevolutionary times (cchoeu
sttak aram, or "memory sickness") could result in their
receiving Angkar's "invitation."
As in other revolutionary states, however, some people were
"more equal" than others. Members and candidate members of the
KCP, local-level leaders of poor peasant background who collaborated
with the Angkar, and members of the armed forces had a higher standard
of living than the rest of the population. Refugees agree that, even
during times of severe food shortage, members of the grass-roots elite
had adequate, if not luxurious, supplies of food. One refugee wrote that
"pretty new bamboo houses" were built for Khmer Rouge cadres
along the river in Phnom Penh. According to Craig Etcheson, an authority
on Democratic Kampuchea, members of the revolutionary army lived in
self-contained colonies, and they had a "distinctive warrior-caste
ethos." Armed forces units personally loyal to Pol Pot, known as
the "Unconditional Divisions," were a privileged group within
the military.
Given the severity of their revolutionary ideology, it is surprising
that the highest ranks of the Khmer Rouge leadership exhibited a talent
for cronyism that matched that of the Sihanouk- era elite. Pol Pot's
wife, Khieu Ponnary, was head of the Association of Democratic Khmer
Women and her younger sister, Khieu Thirith, served as minister of
social action. These two women are considered among the half-dozen most
powerful personalities in Democratic Kampuchea. Son Sen's wife, Yun Yat,
served as minister for culture, education and learning. Several of Pol
Pot's nephews and nieces were given jobs in the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs. One of Ieng Sary's daughters was appointed head of the Calmette
Hospital although she had not graduated from secondary school. A niece
of Ieng Sary was given a job as English translator for Radio Phnom Penh
although her fluency in the language was extremely limited. Family ties
were important, both because of the culture and because of the
leadership's intense secretiveness and distrust of outsiders, especially
of pro-Vietnamese communists. Greed was also a motive. Different
ministries, such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of
Industry, were controlled and exploited by powerful Khmer Rouge
families. Administering the diplomatic corps was regarded as an
especially profitable fiefdom.
Religious and Minority Communities
Article 20 of the 1976 Constitution of Democratic Kampuchea
guaranteed religious freedom, but it also declared that "all
reactionary religions that are detrimental to Democratic Kampuchea and
the Kampuchean People are strictly forbidden." About 85 percent of
the population follows the Theravada school of Buddhism. Before 1975 the
Khmer Rouge tolerated the activities of the community of Buddhist monks,
or sangha, in the liberated areas in order to win popular
support. This changed abruptly after the fall of Phnom Penh. The
country's 40,000 to 60,000 Buddhist monks, regarded by the regime as
social parasites, were defrocked and forced into labor brigades. Many
monks were executed; temples and pagodas were destroyed or turned into
storehouses or jails. Images of the Buddha were defaced and dumped into
rivers and lakes. People who were discovered praying or expressing
religious sentiments in other ways were often killed. The Christian and
Muslim communities also were persecuted. The Roman Catholic cathedral of
Phnom Penh was completely razed. The Khmer Rouge forced Muslims to eat
pork, which they regard as an abomination. Many of those who refused
were killed. Christian clergy and Muslim leaders were executed.
The Khmer Rouge's treatment of minorities seems to have varied from
group to group. The Vietnamese endured the greatest suffering. Tens of
thousands were murdered in regime-organized massacres. Most of the
survivors fled to Vietnam. The Cham, a Muslim minority who are the
descendants of migrants from the old state of Champa, were forced to
adopt the Khmer language and customs. Their communities, which
traditionally had existed apart from Khmer villages, were broken up.
Forty thousand Cham were killed in two districts of Kampong Cham
Province alone. Thai minorities living near the Thai border also were
persecuted.
Despite the fact that Chinese and Sino-Khmers had dominated the
Cambodian economy for centuries and could be considered exploiters of
the peasantry, the Khmer Rouge apparently did not single them out for
harsh treatment. The war drove most rural Chinese into the cities, and
after the forced evacuations they and their urban compatriots were
regarded as "new people." They shared the same hardships as
Khmers, however. Phnom Penh's close relationship with China was probably
a factor in the regime's reluctance to persecute them openly.
In the late 1980s, little was known of Khmer Rouge policies toward
the tribal peoples of the northeast, the Khmer Loeu. Pol Pot established
an insurgent base in the tribal areas of Rotanokiri Province in the
early 1960s, and he may have had a substantial Khmer Loeu following.
Predominately animist peoples with few ties to the Buddhist culture of
the lowland Khmers, the Khmer Loeu had resented Sihanouk's attempts to
"civilize" them. Cambodia expert Serge Thion notes that
marriage to a tribal person was considered "final proof of
unconditional loyalty to the party." Khieu Samphan may have been
married to a tribal woman.
Education and Health
Like the radical exponents of the Cultural Revolution in China during
the 1960s, the Khmer Rouge regarded traditional education with unalloyed
hostility. After the fall of Phnom Penh, they executed thousands of
teachers. Those who had been educators prior to 1975 survived by hiding
their identities. Aside from teaching basic mathematical skills and
literacy, the major goal of the new educational system was to instill
revolutionary values in the young. For a regime at war with most of
Cambodia's traditional values, this meant that it was necessary to
create a gap between the values of the young and the values of the
nonrevolutionary old.
In a manner reminiscent of George Orwell's 1984, the regime
recruited children to spy on adults. The pliancy of the younger
generation made them, in the Angkar's words, the "dictatorial
instrument of the party." In 1962 the communists had created a
special secret organization, the Alliance of Democratic Khmer Youth,
that, in the early 1970s, changed its name to the Alliance of Communist
Youth of Kampuchea. Pol Pot considered Alliance alumni as his most loyal
and reliable supporters, and used them to gain control of the central
and of the regional KCP apparatus. The powerful Khieu Thirith, minister
of social action, was responsible for directing the youth movement.
Hardened young cadres, many little more than twelve years of age,
were enthusiastic accomplices in some of the regime's worst atrocities.
Sihanouk, who was kept under virtual house arrest in Phnom Penh between
1976 and 1978, wrote in War and Hope that his youthful guards,
having been separated from their families and given a thorough
indoctrination, were encouraged to play cruel games involving the
torture of animals. Having lost parents, siblings, and friends in the
war and lacking the Buddhist values of their elders, the Khmer Rouge
youth also lacked the inhibitions that would have dampened their zeal
for revolutionary terror.
Health facilities in the years 1975 to 1978 were abysmally poor. Many
physicians either were executed or were prohibited from practicing. It
appears that the party and the armed forces elite had access to Western
medicine and to a system of hospitals that offered reasonable treatment
but ordinary people, especially "new people," were expected to
use traditional plant and herbal remedies that usually were ineffective.
Some bartered their rice rations and personal possessions to obtain
aspirin and other simple drugs.
The Economy
In its general contours, Democratic Kampuchea's economic policy was
similar to, and possibly inspired by, China's radical Great Leap Forward
that carried out immediate collectivization of the Chinese countryside
in 1958. During the early 1970s, the Khmer Rouge established
"mutual assistance groups" in the areas they occupied. After
1973 these were organized into "low-level cooperatives" in
which land and agricultural implements were lent by peasants to the
community but remained their private property. "High-level
cooperatives," in which private property was abolished and the
harvest became the collective property of the peasants, appeared in
1974. "Communities," introduced in early 1976, were a more
advanced form of high-level cooperative in which communal dining was
instituted. State-owned farms also were established.
Far more than had the Chinese communists, the Khmer Rouge
relentlessly pursued the ideal of economic self-sufficiency, in their
case the version that Khieu Samphan had outlined in his 1959 doctoral
dissertation. Extreme measures were taken. Currency was abolished, and
domestic trade or commerce could be conducted only through barter. Rice,
measured in tins, became the most important medium of exchange, although
people also bartered gold, jewelry, and other personal possessions.
Foreign trade was almost completely halted, though there was a limited
revival in late 1976 and early 1977. China was the most important
trading partner, but commerce amounting to a few million dollars was
also conducted with France, with Britain, and with the United States
through a Hong Kong intermediary.
From the Khmer Rouge perspective, the country was free of foreign
economic domination for the first time in its 2,000-year history. By
mobilizing the people into work brigades organized in a military
fashion, the Khmer Rouge hoped to unleash the masses' productive forces.
There was an "Angkorian" component to economic policy. That
ancient kingdom had grown rich and powerful because it controlled
extensive irrigation systems that produced surpluses of rice.
Agriculture in modern Cambodia depended, for the most part, on seasonal
rains. By building a nationwide system of irrigation canals, dams, and
reservoirs, the leadership believed it would be possible to produce rice
on a year-round basis. It was the "new people" who suffered
and sacrificed the most to complete these ambitious projects.
Although the Khmer Rouge implemented an "agriculture first"
policy in order to achieve self-sufficiency, they were not, as some
observers have argued, "back-to-nature" primitivists. Although
the 1970-75 war and the evacuation of the cities had destroyed or idled
most industry, small contingents of workers were allowed to return to
the urban areas to reopen some plants. Like their Chinese counterparts,
the Cambodian communists had great faith in the inventive power and the
technical aptitude of the masses, and they constantly published reports
of peasants' adapting old mechanical parts to new uses. Much as the
Chinese had attempted unsuccessfully to build a new steel industry based
on backyard furnaces during the Great Leap Forward, the Khmer Rouge
sought to move industry to the countryside. Significantly, the seal of
Democratic Kampuchea displayed not only sheaves of rice and irrigation
sluices, but also a factory with smokestacks.
Cambodia - Politics under the Khmer Rouge
The communists had exercised real power behind the facade, since its
establishment in 1970, of the Royal Government of National Union of
Kampuchea, (Governement Royal d'Union Nationale du Kampuch�a--GRUNK).
It remained formally in control of the country until the proclamation of
the Constitution of Democratic Kampuchea on January 5, 1976. Three
months later, on April 2, Sihanouk resigned as head of state. Sihanouk
remained under comfortable, but insecure, house arrest in Phnom Penh,
until he departed for China on the last flight before Vietnamese forces
captured the city on January 7, 1979.
Khieu Samphan described the 1976 Constitution as "not the result
of any research on foreign documents, nor...the fruit of any research by
scholars. In fact the people--workers, peasants, and Revolutionary
Army--wrote the Constitution with their own hands." It was a brief
document of sixteen chapters and twenty-one articles that defined the
character of the state; the goals of economic, social and cultural
policies; and the basic tenets of foreign policy. The "rights and
duties of the individual" were briefly defined in Article 12. They
included none of what are commonly regarded as guarantees of political
human rights except the statement that "men and women are equal in
every respect." The document declared, however, that "all
workers" and "all peasants" were "masters" of
their factories and fields. An assertion that "there is absolutely
no unemployment in Democratic Kampuchea" rings true in light of the
regime's massive use of forced labor.
The Constitution defined Democratic Kampuchea's foreign policy
principles in Article 21, the document's longest, in terms of
"independence, peace, neutrality, and nonalignment." It
pledged the country's support to anti-imperialist struggles in the Third
World. In light of the regime's aggressive attacks against Vietnamese,
Thai, and Lao territory during 1977 and 1978, the promise to
"maintain close and friendly relations with all countries sharing a
common border" bore little resemblance to reality.
Governmental institutions were outlined very briefly in the
Constitution. The legislature, the Kampuchean People's Representative
Assembly (KPRA), contained 250 members "representing workers,
peasants, and other working people and the Kampuchean Revolutionary
army." One hundred and fifty KPRA seats were allocated for peasant
representatives; fifty, for the armed forces; and fifty, for worker and
other representatives. The legislature was to be popularly elected for a
five-year term. Its first and only election was held on March 20, 1976.
"New people" apparently were not allowed to participate.
The executive branch of government also was chosen by the KPRA. It
consisted of a state presidium "responsible for representing the
state of Democratic Kampuchea inside and outside the country." It
served for a five-year term, and its president was head of state. Khieu
Samphan was the first and only person to serve in this office, which he
assumed after Sihanouk's resignation. The judicial system was composed
of "people's courts," the judges for which were appointed by
the KPRA, as was the executive branch.
The Constitution did not mention regional or local government
institutions. After assuming power, the Khmer Rouge abolished the old
provinces (khet) and replaced them with seven zones; the
Northern Zone, Northeastern Zone, Northwestern Zone, Central Zone,
Eastern Zone, Western Zone, and Southwestern Zone. There were also two
other regional-level units: the Kracheh Special Region Number 505 and,
until 1977, the Siemreab Special Region Number 106. The zones were
divided into damban (regions) that were given numbers. Number
One, appropriately, encompassed the Samlot region of the Northwestern
Zone (including Batdambang Province), where the insurrection against
Sihanouk had erupted in early 1967. With this exception, the damban
appear to have been numbered arbitrarily.
The damban were divided into srok (districts), khum
(subdistricts), and phum (villages), the latter usually
containing several hundred people. This pattern was roughly similar to
that which existed under Sihanouk and the Khmer Republic, but
inhabitants of the villages were organized into krom (groups)
composed of ten to fifteen families. On each level, administration was
directed by a three-person committee (kanak, or kena).
KCP members occupied committee posts at the higher levels. Subdistrict
and village committees were often staffed by local poor peasants, and,
very rarely, by "new people." Cooperatives (sahakor),
similar in jurisdictional area to the khum, assumed local
government responsibilities in some areas.
Cambodia - An Elusive Party
To most people inside and outside Democratic Kampuchea, the communist
party was known simply as the Angkar Loeu. The party's commitment to
revolution was expressed in the terminology of the 1976 Constitution,
but no mention was made of a specifically Marxist-Leninist ideology. The
KCP's real leaders and identity were kept closely guarded secrets from
non-members until 1977. Head of state Khieu Samphan was a
front--Sihanouk describes him as a "bit player"--for the most
important leader, Saloth Sar, whose appearances and speeches were not
publicized in the official media. Under the name Pol Pot, Saloth Sar was
elected to a seat in the KPRA in March 1976 as a representative of
rubber plantation workers, and he became Democratic Kampuchea's prime
minister the following month.
The histories of most revolutionary movements contain a clandestine
theme, but rarely have any approached the near-paranoia of the Cambodian
communists. In part, this reflected the profound distrust with which Pol
Pot and his associates regarded people outside their small, closed
circle that had begun its association in Paris in the 1950s. Also, there
may have been an unwillingness to risk the support of a
still-conservative peasantry by publicly embracing Marxism-Leninism. The
most important reason for the obsession with secrecy, however, was
intraparty strife--the KCP's continuing failure to resolve factional
differences and to achieve consensus on its mission and policies. Even
more than the future, however, the past was a focus of bitter
controversy: how much should the KCP acknowledge its debt to the
Vietnamese communists?
On September 18, in a speech mourning the death of Mao Zedong, Pol
Pot announced that the Angkar was "Marxist-Leninist" and that
it enjoyed "fraternal relations" with the Chinese Communist
Party. But it was not until a year later, in September 1977, that Pol
Pot revealed the existence of the KCP and its history in a five-hour
recorded radio speech. He stated that the KCP was seventeen years old
and that its founding date had been September 30, 1960. He noted that
the KCP's decision to disclose its real identity had been encouraged by
"foreign friends" (the Chinese) who wanted the KCP to take
credit for the revolutionary victory.
Pol Pot's mention of the September 1960 founding date was extremely
significant. Within the party ranks, September 30, 1951, traditionally
had been recognized as its founding date. This was the day when the
Kampuchean (or Khmer) People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP) was
established following the reorganization of the Indochinese Communist
Party (ICP). The September 1960 meeting had been considered the KPRP's
second congress, but in the September-October 1976 edition of the
party's official journal, Tung Padevat (Revolutionary Flag),
the date of birth of the KPRP was given as September 30, 1960. Tung
Padevat declared that the new founding date was adopted because
"we must arrange the history of the party into something clean and
perfect, in line with our policies of independence and selfmastery
." Pol Pot's speech a year later gave official sanction to this
view.
Another party journal, Tung Kraham (Red Flag), mentioned the
traditional founding date, September 30, 1951, in its September 1976
issue. The argument over the birth date reflected deep factional
divisions within the KCP. Backers of the 1951 birth date, if not
pro-Vietnamese, were at least willing to recognize their movement's past
dependence on Vietnamese support. Pol Pot and his associates adopted the
1960 birthday to emphasize the party's Cambodian identity and to
distance it from any association with the Vietnamese communists. The
party's official history, or "Black Book," published
in 1978 after pro-Vietnamese elements had been liquidated, stated that
the KCP had severed fraternal party relations with the Vietnam Workers'
Party as early as 1973.
Intraparty Conflict
On the eve of its 1975 victory against the Lon Nol forces, the KCP
was, in terms of personnel, ideological viewpoints, and factional
loyalties, quite heterogeneous. Etcheson, in The Rise and Demise of
Democratic Kampuchea, identifies six factions: the Pol Pot group
(members of which he labels "Stalinists"); internationalists
(pro-Vietnamese elements who were based in Hanoi after 1954, and who
returned to the country when the FUNK united front was declared in
1970); veterans of the leftist Khmer Issarak (who remained in the
country after 1954, mostly in the southern and in western parts of the
country); veterans of the Pracheachon Party founded in 1954 (which had
contested Sihanouk's Sangkum openly until being driven underground in
the 1960s); pro-Chinese or Maoist elements (including Paris-group
intellectuals Hou Yuon and Hu Nim); and the pro-Sihanouk Khmer Rumdo. Ben Kiernan, another analyst of Cambodia, identifies three
factions: the Pol Pot faction, the pro-Vietnamese communists, and the
adherents of the Chinese Cultural Revolution model. The roles of
ideology and of conflicting party lines in factional struggles, however,
should not be overemphasized. Behind doctrinal differences lay the
dynamics of personal rivalry and the strong sense of patron-client
loyalty that has always characterized Cambodian politics.
Although the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea (RAK) was
"reestablished" in July 1975 to bring all Khmer Rouge units
formally under central authority, real control of regional armed forces
remained in the hands of the zone party committee heads. The most
important center of regional resistance to the Pol Potdominated party
center was the Eastern Zone, comprising part or all of the old provinces
of Prey Veng, Svay Rieng, Kandal, and Kampong Cham that adjoined
Vietnam. Its leader was So Phim, a proVietnamese internationalist.
Differences between the Eastern Zone revolutionaries and the other
Khmer Rouge were readily apparent by 1975. While the uniforms of Pol Pot
loyalists and their allies were black, the uniforms of the Eastern Zone
were a distinctive green. In addition, cadre behavior toward the
civilian population in the Eastern Zone was generally exemplary. It
seems that some of the Eastern cadres were sympathetic to Sihanouk;
refugee Molyda Szymusiak wrote that during the evacuation of Phnom Penh,
a "Sihanouk Khmer" soldier advised her relatives (who were
distantly related to the royal family) to accompany him to Prey Veng
Province on Cambodia's southern border.
At least two coups d'�tat against the center were attempted--in July
and in September, 1975. The latter incident involved Eastern Zone
troops. After April 1975, Hou Yuon, one of the original Paris group,
disappeared. His colleague, Hu Nim, who was tortured and killed in the
Tuol Sleng detention center in 1977, indicated in his confession that
Hou Yuon had been liquidated for opposing the extremism of the center's
policies.
Pol Pot loyalists occupied most of the important positions in the new
government that was formed after the March 20, 1976, elections; however,
Vorn Vet, a pro-Vietnamese leader, was appointed second vice premier
with responsibility over six ministry-level economic committees, and he
also headed the special Phnom Penh capital zone. So Phim, a longtime
rival of Pol Pot within the communist movement, was first vice president
of the presidium and a member of the KCP Political Bureau. (The second
vice president, Nhim Ros, was a Pol Pot loyalist who commanded the
Northwestern Zone.) The year 1976 appears to have been a time initially
of retreat for the faction led by Pol Pot. Many communists were
alienated by his authoritarian behavior. Article 4 of the Constitution,
"Democratic Kampuchea applies the collective principle in
leadership and in work," apparently reflects this opinion. In
relation to what had gone before and what was to come, policies during
1976 were moderate. The terror eased. Relations with Hanoi were placed
on a friendlier footing. Trade and diplomatic relations were expanded.
On September 27, 1976, Pol Pot resigned as premier "for reasons
of health." Nuon Chea, the pro-Vietnamese deputy premier, became
acting premier. Little is known of the intense factional maneuvering
that was occurring at this time, but by late October 1976, Pol Pot had
regained his post. On October 22, his comeback was confirmed with his
issuance of a statement in his capacity as prime minister condemning
China's "counterrevolutionary Gang of Four," who had been
arrested in Beijing on October 6.
The influence of China on Democratic Kampuchea's internal politics
apparently was a crucial, though little understood, factor in Pol Pot's
defeat of his pro-Vietnamese rivals. Etcheson and Kiernan have
suggested, in separate articles, that radicals in the Chinese Communist
Party may have backed pro-Vietnamese Internationalist elements in the
KCP in 1976 because they were interested in preserving good relations
with Hanoi. The fall of the radicals in October 1976, a month after Mao
Zedong's death, brought in the moderates, led by Deng Xiaoping. As the
subsequent break between Beijing and Hanoi shows, Deng was inclined to
regard Vietnam as an agent of Soviet "hegemonism." Chinese
support of the Pol Pot faction may have been a crucial element in its
ability to triumph over the pro-Vietnamese communists in the fall of
1976. From an ideological standpoint, the pragmatic Deng Xiaoping and
the ultra-radical Pol Pot were polar opposites, but from the
geopolitical perspective, the post-Mao Zedong leadership recognized the
value of having a well-armed Cambodian thorn in the side of Vietnam.
Immediately after making his September 27, 1977, speech revealing the
KCP's existence, Pol Pot, accompanied by Ieng Sary and Vorn Vet, visited
Beijing, where he acknowledged the importance of Maoist thought to the
Cambodian revolution. In early 1978, the Chinese sent substantial
military aid, which included armor, artillery, and antitank guns.
The Purge
In 1975 Pol Pot concluded an alliance with the party head of the
Southwestern Zone, Ta Mok, who was a Khmer Issarak veteran and, like Pol
Pot, was strongly anti-Vietnamese. During 1977 and 1978, Ta Mok provided
the backing that enabled Pol Pot to liquidate the opposition within the
KCP and to initiate new terrorism against the local population. In
February 1977, Southwestern cadres went into the Eastern, Northern, and
Western zones to purge local Khmer Rouge. Four months later, the same
process was begun in the Northwestern Zone. The purges intensified
following an abortive coup d'�tat in August.
After the fall of the capital, Ta Mok's lieutenant, a former high
school teacher who assumed the name Mit (Comrade) Deuch, became head of
the secret police, and established the Tuol Sleng interrogation and
detention center on the site of a former Phnom Penh high school. In the
1975 to 1976 period, Tuol Sleng's meticulous records show that 2,404
"antiparty elements" were tortured and executed. The terror
escalated in 1977, when the number of victims rose to 6,330. In the
first six months of 1978, records show that 5,765 people were killed;
records for the latter half of that year have not been discovered. The
victims who passed through Tuol Sleng from mid-1975 to January 1979
numbered about 20,000. Among those who met death in the infamous prison
were Paris alumni Hu Nim and (presumably) Hou Yuon. Similar centers were
set up throughout the country (Tuol Sleng's code designation, S-21,
suggests that at least twenty other similar sites had been established).
Molyda Szymusiak writes that a new wave of terror began in the
Batdambang region after cadres arrived from the south. The Sala Som
Niat, a school for political education was converted into an
extermination center where local communists were tortured and executed.
The pattern in these centers was much the same: victims were tortured,
forced to write often absurd confessions, and then killed. A young
British teacher, captured in a yacht off the Cambodian coast, confessed
at Tuol Sleng that he had been recruited by the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) of the United States when he was twelve years old; he was
subsequently murdered. Hu Nim was forced to confess that he had become a
CIA agent in 1957.
The Eastern Zone apparently remained largely unaffected by the purge
until May 1978, when So Phim led a revolt that provoked massive
retaliation by Pol Pot and his Southwestern henchmen. In the bloodiest
purge of the entire 1975 to 1978 period, as many as 100,000 people in
the Eastern Zone--labeled people with "Khmer bodies but Vietnamese
minds"--were liquidated or were deported to face certain death in
other parts of the country. Most of the victims were political cadres,
"new people," and Vietnamese or part-Vietnamese residents. So
Phim reportedly committed suicide as he faced capture. Some of his
subordinates, including Heng Samrin, the leader of the PRK after 1979,
fled to Vietnam.
Cambodia - The Fall of Democratic Kampuchea
Immediately following the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975, there were
skirmishes between their troops and Vietnamese forces. A number of
incidents occurred in May 1975. The Cambodians launched attacks on the
Vietnamese islands of Phu Quoc and Tho Chu and intruded into Vietnamese
border provinces. In late May, at about the same time that the United
States launched an air strike against the oil refinery at Kampong Saom,
following the Mayaguez incident, Vietnamese forces seized the
Cambodian island of Poulo Wai. The following month, Pol Pot and Ieng
Sary visited Hanoi. They proposed a friendship treaty between the two
countries, an idea that met with a cool reception from Vietnam's
leaders. Although the Vietnamese evacuated Poulo Wai in August,
incidents continued along Cambodian's northeastern border. At the
instigation of the Phnom Penh regime, thousands of Vietnamese also were
driven out of Cambodia.
Relations between Cambodia and Vietnam improved in 1976, in part
because of Pol Pot's preoccupation with intraparty challenges. In May
Cambodian and Vietnamese representatives met in Phnom Penh in order to
establish a commission to resolve border disagreements. The Vietnamese,
however, refused to recognize the Br�vi� Line--the colonial-era
demarcation of maritime borders between the two countries--and the
negotiations broke down. In late September, however, a few days before
Pol Pot was forced to resign as prime minister, air links were
established between Phnom Penh and Hanoi.
With Pol Pot back in the forefront of the regime in 1977, the
situation rapidly deteriorated. Incidents escalated along all of
Cambodia's borders. Khmer Rouge forces attacked villages in the border
areas of Thailand near Aranyaprathet. Brutal murders of Thai villagers,
including women and children, were the first widely reported concrete
evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities. There were also incidents along the
Laotian border. At approximately the same time, villages in Vietnam's
border areas underwent renewed attacks. In turn, Vietnam launched air
strikes against Cambodia. In September, border fighting resulted in as
many as 1,000 Vietnamese civilian casualties. The following month, the
Vietnamese counterattacked in a campaign involving a force of 20,000
personnel. Vietnamese defense minister General Vo Nguyen Giap
underestimated the tenacity of the Khmer Rouge, however, and was obliged
to commit an additional 58,000 reinforcements in December. On January 6,
1978, Giap's forces began an orderly withdrawal from Cambodian
territory. The Vietnamese apparently believed they had "taught a
lesson" to the Cambodians, but Pol Pot proclaimed this a
"victory" even greater than that of April 17, 1975.
Faced with growing Khmer Rouge belligerence, the Vietnamese
leadership decided in early 1978 to support internal resistance to the
Pol Pot regime, with the result that the Eastern Zone became a focus of
insurrection. War hysteria reached bizarre levels within Democratic
Kampuchea. In May 1978, on the eve of So Phim's Eastern Zone uprising,
Radio Phnom Penh declared that if each Cambodian soldier killed thirty
Vietnamese, only 2 million troops would be needed to eliminate the
entire Vietnamese population of 50 million. It appears that the
leadership in Phnom Penh was seized with immense territorial ambitions,
i.e., to recover the Mekong Delta region, which they regarded as Khmer
territory.
Massacres of ethnic Vietnamese and of their sympathizers by the Khmer
Rouge intensified in the Eastern Zone after the May revolt. In November,
Vorn Vet led an unsuccessful coup d'�tat. There were now tens of
thousands of Cambodian and Vietnamese exiles on Vietnamese territory. On
December 3, 1978, Radio Hanoi announced the formation of the Kampuchean
(or Khmer) National United Front for National Salvation (KNUFNS). This
was a heterogeneous group of communist and noncommunist exiles who
shared an antipathy to the Pol Pot regime and a virtually total
dependence on Vietnamese backing and protection. The KNUFNS provided the
semblance, if not the reality, of legitimacy for Vietnam's invasion of
Democratic Kampuchea and for its subsequent establishment of a satellite
regime in Phnom Penh.
In the meantime, as 1978 wore on, Cambodian bellicosity in the border
areas surpassed Hanoi's threshold of tolerance. Vietnamese policy makers
opted for a military solution and, on December 22, Vietnam launched its
offensive with the intent of overthrowing Democratic Kampuchea. An
invasion force of 120,000, consisting of combined armor and infantry
units with strong artillery support, drove west into the level
countryside of Cambodia's southeastern provinces. After a seventeen-day
blitzkrieg, Phnom Penh fell to the advancing Vietnamese on January 7,
1979. From new redoubts in the mountain and jungle fastness of
Cambodia's periphery, Pol Pot and other Khmer Rouge leaders regrouped
their units, issued a new call to arms, and reignited a stubborn
insurgency against the regime in power as they had done in the late
1960s. For the moment, however, the Vietnamese invasion had accomplished
its purpose of deposing an unlamented and particularly loathsome
dictatorship. A new administration under the mentorship of Hanoi was
quickly established, and it set about competing, both domestically and
internationally, with the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of
Cambodia. Peace still eluded the war-ravaged nation, however, and
although the insurgency set in motion by the Khmer Rouge proved unable
to topple the new Vietnamese-backed regime in Phnom Penh, it did
nonetheless keep the country in a permanent state of insecurity. The
fledgling Khmer administration, weak and lacking in manpower and in
resources, was propped up by a substantial Vietnamese military force and
civilian advisory effort. As events in the 1980s progressed, the main
preoccupations of the new regime were survival, restoring the economy,
and combating the Khmer Rouge insurgency by military and by political
means. The fostering of activity to meet these imperatives and the
building of institutions are described in subsequent chapters.
