History of Cambodia
The good, the bad and the
ugly is a simple way to sum up Cambodian history. Things were good in the early
years, culminating in the vast Angkor empire, unrivalled in the region during
four centuries of dominance. Then the bad set in, from the 13th century, as
ascendant neighbours steadily chipped away at Cambodian territory. In the 20th
century it turned downright ugly, as a brutal civil war culminated in the
genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge (1975–79), from which Cambodia is still
recovering.
The origin of the Khmers
Cambodia came into being, so
the legend says, through the union of a princess and a foreigner. The foreigner
was an Indian Brahman named Kaundinya and the princess was the daughter of a
dragon king who ruled over a watery land. One day, as Kaundinya sailed by, the
princess paddled out in a boat to greet him. Kaundinya shot an arrow from his
magic bow into her boat, causing the fearful princess to agree to marriage. In
need of a dowry, her father drank up the waters of his land and presented them
to Kaundinya to rule over. The new kingdom was named Kambuja. Like many
legends, this one is historically opaque, but it does say something about the
cultural forces that brought Cambodia into existence, in particular its
relationship with its great subcontinental neighbour, India. Cambodia’s
religious, royal and written traditions stemmed from India and began to
coalesce as a cultural entity in their own right between the 1st and 5th
centuries.
Very little is known about
prehistoric Cambodia. Much of the southeast was a vast, shallow gulf that was
progressively silted up by the mouths of the Mekong, leaving pancake-flat,
mineral-rich land ideal for farming. Evidence of cave-dwellers has been found
in the northwest of Cambodia. Carbon dating on ceramic pots found in the area
shows that they were made around 4200 BC, but it is hard to say whether there
is a direct relationship between these cave-dwelling pot makers and
contemporary Khmers. Examinations of bones dating back to around 1500 BC,
however, suggest that the people living in Cambodia at that time resembled the
Cambodians of today. Early Chinese records report that the Cambodians were
‘ugly’ and ‘dark’ and went about naked. However, a healthy dose of scepticism
is always required when reading the culturally chauvinistic reports of imperial
China concerning its ‘barbarian’ neighbours.
The early Cambodian kingdoms
Cambodian might didn’t begin
and end with Angkor. There were a number of powerful kingdoms present in this
area before the 9th century.
From the 1st century, the
Indianisation of Cambodia occurred through trading settlements that sprang up
on the coastline of what is now southern Vietnam, but was then inhabited by the
Khmers. These settlements were important ports of call for boats following the
trading route from the Bay of Bengal to the southern provinces of China. The
largest of these nascent kingdoms was known as Funan by the Chinese, and may
have existed across an area between Ba Phnom in Prey Veng Province, a site only
worth visiting for the archaeologically obsessed today, and Oc-Eo in Kien Giang
Province in southern Vietnam. Funan would have been a contemporary of Champasak
in southern Laos (then known as Kuruksetra) and other lesser fiefdoms in the
region.
Funan is a Chinese name, and
it may be a transliteration of the ancient Khmer word bnam (mountain). Although
very little is known about Funan, much has been made of its importance as an
early Southeast Asian centre of power.
It is most likely that
between the 1st and 8th centuries, Cambodia was a collection of small states,
each with its own elites that often strategically intermarried and often went
to war with one another. Funan was no doubt one of these states, and as a major
sea port would have been pivotal in the transmission of Indian culture into the
interior of Cambodia.
The little that historians do
know about Funan has mostly been gleaned from Chinese sources. These report
that Funan-period Cambodia (1st to 6th centuries AD) embraced the worship of
the Hindu deities Shiva and Vishnu and, at the same time, Buddhism. The linga
(phallic totem) appears to have been the focus of ritual and an emblem of
kingly might, a feature that was to evolve further in the Angkorian cult of the
god-king. The people practised primitive irrigation, which enabled successful
cultivation of rice, and traded raw commodities such as spices with China and
India.
From the 6th century,
Cambodia’s population gradually concentrated along the Mekong and Tonlé Sap
Rivers, where the majority remains today. The move may have been related to the
development of wet-rice agriculture. From the 6th to 8th centuries it was
likely that Cambodia was a collection of competing kingdoms, ruled by
autocratic kings who legitimised their absolute rule through hierarchical caste
concepts borrowed from India.
This era is generally
referred to as the Chenla period. Again, like Funan, it is a Chinese term and
there is little to support the idea that Chenla was a unified kingdom that held
sway over all of Cambodia. Indeed, the Chinese themselves referred to ‘water
Chenla’ and ‘land Chenla’. Water Chenla was located around Angkor Borei and the
temple mount of Phnom Da, near the present-day provincial capital of Takeo, and
land Chenla in the upper reaches of the Mekong River and east of Tonlé Sap
Lake, around Sambor Prei Kuk, an essential stop on a chronological jaunt
through Cambodia’s history.
The rise of the Angkor Empire
Gradually the Cambodian
region was becoming more cohesive. Before long the fractured kingdoms of
Cambodia would merge to become the greatest empire in Southeast Asia.
A popular place of pilgrimage
for Khmers today, the sacred mountain of Phnom Kulen, to the northeast of
Angkor, is home to an inscription that tells of Jayavarman II (r 802–50)
proclaiming himself a ‘universal monarch’, or devaraja (god-king) in 802. It is
believed that he may have resided in the Buddhist Shailendras’ court in Java as
a young man. Upon his return to Cambodia he instigated an uprising against
Javanese control over the southern lands of Cambodia. Jayavarman II then set
out to bring the country under his control through alliances and conquests, the
first monarch to rule most of what we call Cambodia today.
Jayavarman II was the first
of a long succession of kings who presided over the rise and fall of the
greatest empire mainland Southeast Asia has ever seen, one that was to bequeath
the stunning legacy of Angkor. The key to the meteoric rise of Angkor was a
mastery of water and an elaborate hydraulic system that allowed the ancient Khmers
to tame the elements. The first records of the massive irrigation works that
supported the population of Angkor date to the reign of Indravarman I (r
877–89) who built the baray (reservoir) of Indratataka. His rule also marks the
flourishing of Angkorian art, with the building of temples in the Roluos area,
notably Bakong. By the turn of the 11th century the kingdom of Angkor was
losing control of its territories. Suryavarman I (r 1002–49), a usurper, moved
into the power vacuum and, like Jayavarman II two centuries before, reunified
the kingdom through war and alliances, stretching the frontiers of the empire.
A pattern was beginning to emerge, and is repeated throughout the Angkorian
period: dislocation and turmoil, followed by reunification and further
expansion under a powerful king. Architecturally, the most productive periods
occurred after times of turmoil, indicating that newly incumbent monarchs felt
the need to celebrate, even legitimise their rule with massive building
projects.By 1066 Angkor was again riven by conflict, becoming the focus of
rival bids for power. It was not until the accession of Suryavarman II (r
1112–52) that the kingdom was again unified. Suryavarman II embarked on another
phase of expansion, waging costly wars in Vietnam and the region of central
Vietnam known as Champa. Suryavarman II is immortalised as the king who, in his
devotion to the Hindu deity Vishnu, commissioned the majestic temple of Angkor
Wat. For an insight into events in this epoch, see the bas-reliefs on the southwest
corridor of Angkor Wat, which depict the reign of Suryavarman II.
Suryavarman II had brought
Champa to heel and reduced it to vassal status, but the Chams struck back in
1177 with a naval expedition up the Mekong and into Tonlé Sap Lake. They took
the city of Angkor by surprise and put King Dharanindravarman II to death. The
following year a cousin of Suryavarman II rallied the Khmer troops and defeated
the Chams in another naval battle. The new leader was crowned Jayavarman VII in
1181.
A devout follower of Mahayana
Buddhism, Jayavarman VII (r 1181–1219) built the city of Angkor Thom and many
other massive monuments. Indeed, many of the temples visited around Angkor
today were constructed during Jayavarman VII’s reign. However, Jayavarman VII
is a figure of many contradictions. The bas-reliefs of the Bayon depict him
presiding over battles of terrible ferocity, while statues of the king depict a
meditative, otherworldly aspect. His programme of temple construction and other
public works was carried out in great haste, no doubt bringing enormous
hardship to the labourers who provided the muscle, and thus accelerating the
decline of the empire. He was partly driven by a desire to legitimise his rule,
as there may have been other contenders closer to the royal bloodline, and
partly by the need to introduce a new religion to a population predominantly
Hindu in faith. However, in many ways he was also Cambodia’s first socialist
leader, proclaiming the population equal, abolishing castes and embarking on a
programme of school, hospital and road building.
Decline & fall of Angkor
Angkor was the epicentre of
an incredible empire that held sway over much of the Mekong region, but like
all empires, the sun was to eventually set.
A number of scholars have
argued that decline was already on the horizon at the time Angkor Wat was
built, when the Angkorian empire was at the height of its remarkable
productivity. There are indications that the irrigation network was overworked
and slowly starting to silt up due to the massive deforestation that had taken
place in the heavily populated areas to the north and east of Angkor. Massive
construction projects such as Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom no doubt put an
enormous strain on the royal coffers and on thousands of slaves and common
people who subsidised them in hard labour and taxes. Following the reign of
Jayavarman VII, temple construction effectively ground to a halt, in large part
because Jayavarman VII’s public works quarried local sandstone into oblivion
and had left the population exhausted.
Another challenge for the
later kings was religious conflict and internecine rivalries. The state
religion changed back and forth several times during the twilight years of the
empire, and kings spent more time engaged in iconoclasm, defacing the temples
of their predecessors, than building monuments to their own achievements. From
time to time this boiled over into civil war.
Angkor was losing control
over the peripheries of its empire. At the same time, the Thais were ascendant,
having migrated south from Yunnan to escape Kublai Khan and his Mongol hordes.
The Thais, first from Sukothai, later Ayuthaya, grew in strength and made
repeated incursions into Angkor before finally sacking the city in 1431 and
making off with thousands of intellectuals, artisans and dancers from the royal
court. During this period, perhaps drawn by the opportunities for sea trade
with China and fearful of the increasingly bellicose Thais, the Khmer elite
began to migrate to the Phnom Penh area. The capital shifted several times over
the centuries but eventually settled in present day Phnom Penh.
From 1600 until the arrival
of the French in 1863, Cambodia was ruled by a series of weak kings beset by
dynastic rivalries. In the face of such intrigue, they sought the protection –
granted, of course, at a price – of either Thailand or Vietnam. In the 17th
century, the Nguyen lords of southern Vietnam came to the rescue of the
Cambodian king in return for settlement rights in the Mekong Delta region. The
Khmers still refer to this region as Kampuchea Krom (Lower Cambodia), even
though it is well and truly populated by the Vietnamese today.
In the west, the Thais
controlled the provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap from 1794 and held much
influence over the Cambodian royal family. Indeed, one king was crowned in
Bangkok and placed on the throne at Udong with the help of the Thai army. That
Cambodia survived through the 18th century as a distinct entity is due to the
preoccupations of its neighbours: while the Thais were expending their energy
and resources in fighting the Burmese, the Vietnamese were wholly absorbed by
internal strife. The pattern continued for more than two centuries, the carcass
of Cambodia pulled back and forth between two powerful tigers.
The French in Cambodia
The era of yo-yoing between
Thai and Vietnamese masters came to a close in 1864, when French gunboats
intimidated King Norodom I (r 1860–1904) into signing a treaty of protectorate.
Ironically, it really was a protectorate, as Cambodia was in danger of going
the way of Champa and vanishing from the map. French control of Cambodia
developed as a sideshow to their interests in Vietnam, uncannily similar to the
American experience a century later, and initially involved little direct interference
in Cambodia’s affairs. The French presence also helped keep Norodom on the
throne despite the ambitions of his rebellious half-brothers.
By the 1870s French officials
in Cambodia began pressing for greater control over internal affairs. In 1884
Norodom was forced into signing a treaty that turned his country into a virtual
colony, sparking a two-year rebellion that constituted the only major uprising
in Cambodia until WWII. The rebellion only ended when the king was persuaded to
call upon the rebel fighters to lay down their weapons in exchange for a return
to the status quo.
During the following decades
senior Cambodian officials opened the door to direct French control over the
day-to-day administration of the country, as they saw certain advantages in
acquiescing to French power. The French maintained Norodom’s court in a splendour
unseen since the heyday of Angkor, helping to enhance the symbolic position of
the monarchy. In 1907 the French were able to pressure Thailand into returning
the northwest provinces of Battambang, Siem Reap and Sisophon in return for
concessions of Lao territory to the Thais. This meant Angkor came under
Cambodian control for the first time in more than a century.
King Norodom I was succeeded
by King Sisowath (r 1904–27), who was succeeded by King Monivong (r 1927–41).
Upon King Monivong’s death, the French governor general of Japanese-occupied
Indochina, Admiral Jean Decoux, placed 19-year-old Prince Norodom Sihanouk on
the Cambodian throne. The French authorities assumed young Sihanouk would prove
pliable, but this proved to be a major miscalculation.
During WWII, Japanese forces
occupied much of Asia, and Cambodia was no exception. However, with many in
France collaborating with the occupying Germans, the Japanese were happy to let
their new French allies control affairs in Cambodia. The price was conceding to
Thailand (a Japanese ally of sorts) much of Battambang and Siem Reap Provinces
once again, areas that weren’t returned until 1947. However, with the fall of
Paris in 1944 and French policy in disarray, the Japanese were forced to take
direct control of the territory by early 1945. After WWII, the French returned,
making Cambodia an autonomous state within the French Union, but retaining de
facto control. The immediate postwar years were marked by strife among the
country’s various political factions, a situation made more unstable by the
Franco-Viet Minh War then raging in Vietnam and Laos, which spilled over into
Cambodia. The Vietnamese, as they were also to do 20 years later in the war
against Lon Nol and the Americans, trained and fought with bands of Khmer
Issarak (Free Khmer) against the French authorities.
The Sihanouk years
The post-independence period
was one of peace and great prosperity, Cambodia’s golden years, a time of
creativity and optimism. Phnom Penh grew in size and stature, the temples of
Angkor were the leading tourist destination in Southeast Asia and Sihanouk
played host to a succession of influential leaders from across the globe.
However, dark clouds were circling, as the American war in Vietnam became a
black hole, sucking in neighbouring countries.
In late 1952 King Sihanouk
dissolved the fledgling parliament, declared martial law and embarked on his
‘royal crusade’: his travelling campaign to drum up international support for
his country’s independence. Independence was proclaimed on 9 November 1953 and
recognised by the Geneva Conference of May 1954, which ended French control of
Indochina. In 1955, Sihanouk abdicated, afraid of being marginalised amid the
pomp of royal ceremony. The ‘royal crusader’ became ‘citizen Sihanouk’. He
vowed never again to return to the throne. Meanwhile his father became king. It
was a masterstroke that offered Sihanouk both royal authority and supreme
political power. His newly established party, Sangkum Reastr Niyum (People’s
Socialist Community), won every seat in parliament in the September 1955
elections and Sihanouk was to dominate Cambodian politics for the next 15
years.
Although he feared the
Vietnamese communists, Sihanouk considered South Vietnam and Thailand, both
allies of the mistrusted USA, the greatest threats to Cambodia’s security, even
survival. In an attempt to fend off these many dangers, he declared Cambodia
neutral and refused to accept further US aid, which had accounted for a
substantial chunk of the country’s military budget. He also nationalised many
industries, including the rice trade. In 1965 Sihanouk, convinced that the USA
had been plotting against him and his family, broke diplomatic relations with
Washington and veered towards the North Vietnamese and China. In addition, he
agreed to let the communists use Cambodian territory in their battle against
South Vietnam and the USA. Sihanouk was taking sides, a dangerous position in a
volatile region.
These moves and his socialist
economic policies alienated conservative elements in Cambodian society,
including the army brass and the urban elite. At the same time, left-wing
Cambodians, many of them educated abroad, deeply resented his domestic
policies, which stifled political debate. Compounding Sihanouk’s problems was
the fact that all classes were fed up with the pervasive corruption in
government ranks, some of it uncomfortably close to the royal family. Although
most peasants revered Sihanouk as a semidivine figure, in 1967 a rural-based
rebellion broke out in Samlot, Battambang, leading him to conclude that the
greatest threat to his regime came from the left. Bowing to pressure from the
army, he implemented a policy of harsh repression against left-wingers.
By 1969 the conflict between
the army and leftist rebels had become more serious, as the Vietnamese sought
sanctuary deeper in Cambodia. Sihanouk’s political position had also decidedly
deteriorated – due in no small part to his obsession with film-making, which
was leading him to neglect affairs of state. In March 1970, while Sihanouk was
on a trip to France, General Lon Nol and Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak,
Sihanouk’s cousin, deposed him as chief of state, apparently with tacit US
consent. Sihanouk took up residence in Beijing, where he set up a
government-in-exile in alliance with an indigenous Cambodian revolutionary
movement that Sihanouk had nicknamed the Khmer Rouge. This was a definitive
moment in contemporary Cambodian history, as the Khmer Rouge exploited its
partnership with Sihanouk to draw new recruits into their small organisation.
Talk to many former Khmer Rouge fighters and they all say that they ‘went to
the hills’ (a euphemism for joining the Khmer Rouge) to fight for their king
and knew nothing of Mao or Marxism.
The Khmer Rouge revolution
The lines were drawn for a
bloody era of civil war. Sihanouk was condemned to death in absentia, an
excessive move on the part of the new government that effectively ruled out any
hint of compromise for the next five years. Lon Nol gave communist Vietnamese forces
an ultimatum to withdraw their forces within one week, which amounted to a
virtual declaration of war, as no Vietnamese fighters wanted to return to the
homeland to face the Americans.
On 30 April 1970, US and
South Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia in an effort to flush out thousands of
Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops who were using Cambodian bases in their
war to overthrow the South Vietnamese government. As a result of the invasion,
the Vietnamese communists withdrew deeper into Cambodia, further destabilising
the Lon Nol government. Cambodia’s tiny army never stood a chance and within
the space of a few months, Vietnamese forces and their Khmer Rouge allies
overran almost half the country. The ultimate humiliation came in July 1970
when the Vietnamese occupied the temples of Angkor.
In 1969 the USA had begun a
secret programme of bombing suspected communist base camps in Cambodia. For the
next four years, until bombing was halted by the US Congress in August 1973,
huge areas of the eastern half of the country were carpet-bombed by US B-52s,
killing what is believed to be many thousands of civilians and turning hundreds
of thousands more into refugees. Undoubtedly, the bombing campaign helped the
Khmer Rouge in their recruitment drive, as more and more peasants were losing
family members to the aerial assaults. While the final, heaviest bombing in the
first half of 1973 may have saved Phnom Penh from a premature fall, its
ferocity also helped to harden the attitude of many Khmer Rouge cadres and may
have contributed to the later brutality that characterised their rule.
Savage fighting engulfed the
country, bringing misery to millions of Cambodians; many fled rural areas for
the relative safety of Phnom Penh and provincial capitals. Between 1970 and
1975 several hundred thousand people died in the fighting. During these years
the Khmer Rouge came to play a dominant role in trying to overthrow the Lon Nol
regime, strengthened by the support of the Vietnamese, although the Khmer Rouge
leadership would vehemently deny this from 1975 onwards.
The leadership of the Khmer
Rouge, including Paris-educated Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, had fled into the
countryside in the 1960s to escape the summary justice then being meted out to
suspected leftists by Sihanouk’s security forces. They consolidated control
over the movement and began to move against opponents before they took Phnom
Penh. Many of the Vietnamese-trained Cambodian communists who had been based in
Hanoi since the 1954 Geneva Accords returned down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to join
their ‘allies’ in the Khmer Rouge in 1973. Many were dead by 1975, executed on
orders of the anti-Vietnamese Pol Pot faction. Likewise, many moderate Sihanouk
supporters who had joined the Khmer Rouge as a show of loyalty to their fallen
leader rather than a show of ideology to the radicals were victims of purges
before the regime took power. This set a precedent for internal purges and mass
executions that were to eventually bring the downfall of the Khmer Rouge.
It didn’t take long for the
Lon Nol government to become very unpopular as a result of unprecedented greed
and corruption in its ranks. As the USA bankrolled the war, government and
military personnel found lucrative means to make a fortune, such as inventing
‘phantom soldiers’ and pocketing their pay, or selling weapons to the enemy.
Lon Nol was widely perceived as an ineffectual leader, obsessed by
superstition, fortune tellers and mystical crusades. This perception increased
with his stroke in March 1971 and for the next four years his grip on reality
seemed to weaken as his brother Lon Non’s power grew.
Despite massive US military
and economic aid, Lon Nol never succeeded in gaining the initiative against the
Khmer Rouge. Large parts of the countryside fell to the rebels and many
provincial capitals were cut off from Phnom Penh. Lon Nol fled the country in
early April 1975, leaving Sirik Matak in charge, who refused evacuation to the
end. ‘I cannot alas leave in such a cowardly fashion…I have committed only one
mistake, that of believing in you, the Americans’ were the words Sirik Matak
poignantly penned to US ambassador John Gunther Dean. On 17 April 1975 – two
weeks before the fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) – Phnom Penh surrendered
to the Khmer Rouge.
Descent into civil war
Upon taking Phnom Penh, the
Khmer Rouge implemented one of the most radical and brutal restructurings of a
society ever attempted; its goal was a pure revolution, untainted by those that
had gone before, to transform Cambodia into a peasant-dominated agrarian
cooperative. Within days of coming to power the entire population of Phnom Penh
and provincial towns, including the sick, elderly and infirm, was forced to
march into the countryside and work as slaves for 12 to 15 hours a day.
Disobedience of any sort often brought immediate execution. The advent of Khmer
Rouge rule was proclaimed Year Zero. Currency was abolished and postal services
were halted. The country cut itself off from the outside world.
In the eyes of Pol Pot, the
Khmer Rouge was not a unified movement, but a series of factions that needed to
be cleansed. This process had already begun with attacks on Vietnamese-trained
Khmer Rouge and Sihanouk’s supporters, but Pol Pot’s initial fury upon seizing
power was directed against the former regime. All of the senior government and
military figures who had been associated with Lon Nol were executed within days
of the takeover. Then the centre shifted its attention to the outer regions,
which had been separated into geographic zones. The loyalist Southwestern Zone
forces under the control of one-legged general Ta Mok were sent into region
after region to purify the population, and thousands perished.
The cleansing reached
grotesque heights in the final and bloodiest purge against the powerful and
independent Eastern Zone. Generally considered more moderate than other Khmer
Rouge factions, the Eastern Zone was ideologically, as well as geographically,
closer to Vietnam. The Pol Pot faction consolidated the rest of the country
before moving against the east from 1977 onwards. Hundreds of leaders were
executed before open rebellion broke out, sparking a civil war in the east.
Many Eastern Zone leaders fled to Vietnam, forming the nucleus of the
government installed by the Vietnamese in January 1979. The people were
defenceless and distrusted – ‘Cambodian bodies with Vietnamese minds’ or
‘duck’s arses with chicken’s heads’ – and were deported to the northwest with
new, blue kramas (scarves). Had it not been for the Vietnamese invasion, all
would have perished, as the blue krama was a secret party sign indicating an
eastern enemy of the revolution.
It is still not known exactly
how many Cambodians died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge during the three
years, eight months and 20 days of their rule. The Vietnamese claimed three
million deaths, while foreign experts long considered the number closer to one
million. Yale University researchers undertaking ongoing investigations
estimated that the figure was close to two million.
Hundreds of thousands of
people were executed by the Khmer Rouge leadership, while hundreds of thousands
more died of famine and disease. Meals consisted of little more than watery
rice porridge twice a day, meant to sustain men, women and children through a
back-breaking day in the fields. Disease stalked the work camps, malaria and
dysentery striking down whole families; death was a relief for many from the
horrors of life. Some zones were better than others, some leaders fairer than
others, but life for the majority was one of unending misery and suffering in
this ‘prison without walls’.
As the centre eliminated more
and more moderates, Angkar (the organisation) became the only family people
needed and those who did not agree were sought out and destroyed. The Khmer
Rouge detached the Cambodian people from all they held dear: their families,
their food, their fields and their faith. Even the peasants who had supported
the revolution could no longer blindly follow such madness. Nobody cared for
the Khmer Rouge by 1978, but nobody had an ounce of strength to do anything
about it…except the Vietnamese.
Enter the Vietnamese
Relations between Cambodia
and Vietnam have historically been tense, as the Vietnamese have slowly but
steadily expanded southwards, encroaching on Cambodian territory. Despite the
fact the two communist parties had fought together as brothers-in-arms, old
tensions soon came to the fore.
From 1976 to 1978, the Khmer
Rouge instigated a series of border clashes with Vietnam, and claimed the
Mekong Delta, once part of the Khmer empire. Incursions into Vietnamese border
provinces left hundreds of Vietnamese civilians dead. On 25 December 1978
Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia, toppling the Pol Pot
government two weeks later. As Vietnamese tanks neared Phnom Penh, the Khmer
Rouge fled westward with as many civilians as it could seize, taking refuge in
the jungles and mountains along the Thai border. The Vietnamese installed a new
government led by several former Khmer Rouge officers, including current Prime
Minister Hun Sen, who had defected to Vietnam in 1977. The Khmer Rouge’s
patrons, the Chinese communists, launched a massive reprisal raid across
Vietnam’s northernmost border in early 1979 in an attempt to buy their allies
time. It failed, and after 17 days the Chinese withdrew, their fingers badly
burnt by their Vietnamese enemies. The Vietnamese then staged a show trial in
which Pol Pot and Ieng Sary were condemned to death for their genocidal acts.
A traumatised population took
to the road in search of surviving family members. Millions had been uprooted
and had to walk hundreds of kilometres across the country. Rice stocks were
destroyed, the harvest left to wither and little rice planted, sowing the seeds
for a widespread famine in 1979 and 1980.
As the conflict in Cambodia
raged, Sihanouk agreed, under pressure from China, to head a military and political
front opposed to the Phnom Penh government. The Sihanouk-led resistance
coalition brought together – on paper, at least – Funcinpec (the French acronym
for the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and
Cooperative Cambodia), which comprised a royalist group loyal to Sihanouk; the
Khmer People’s National Liberation Front, a noncommunist grouping formed by
former prime minister Son Sann; and the Khmer Rouge, officially known as the
Party of Democratic Kampuchea and by far the most powerful of the three. The
heinous crimes of the Khmer Rouge were swept aside to ensure a compromise that
suited the great powers.
During the mid-1980s the
British government dispatched the Special Air Service (SAS) to a Malaysian
jungle camp to train guerrilla fighters in land mine–laying techniques.
Although officially assisting the smaller factions, it is certain the Khmer
Rouge benefited from this experience. It then used these new-found skills to
intimidate and terrorise the Cambodian people. The USA gave more than US$15
million a year in aid to the noncommunist factions of the Khmer Rouge-dominated
coalition.
For much of the 1980s
Cambodia remained closed to the Western world, save for the presence of some
humanitarian aid groups. Government policy was effectively under the control of
the Vietnamese, so Cambodia found itself very much in the Eastern-bloc camp.
The economy was in tatters for much of this period, as Cambodia, like Vietnam,
suffered from the effects of a US-sponsored embargo.
In 1984 the Vietnamese
overran all the major rebel camps inside Cambodia, forcing the Khmer Rouge and
its allies to retreat into Thailand. From this time the Khmer Rouge and its
allies engaged in guerrilla warfare aimed at demoralising their opponents.
Tactics used by the Khmer Rouge included shelling government-controlled
garrison towns, planting thousands of mines in rural areas, attacking road
transport, blowing up bridges, kidnapping village chiefs and targeting
civilians. The Khmer Rouge also forced thousands of men, women and children
living in the refugee camps it controlled to work as porters, ferrying
ammunition and other supplies into Cambodia across heavily mined sections of
the border. The Vietnamese for their part laid the world’s longest minefield,
known as K-5 and stretching from the Gulf of Thailand to the Lao border, in an
attempt to seal out the guerrillas. They also sent Cambodians into the forests
to cut down trees on remote sections of road to prevent ambushes. Thousands
died of disease and from injuries sustained from land mines. The Khmer Rouge
was no longer in power, but for many the 1980s was almost as tough as the
1970s, one long struggle to survive.
The Un comes to town
As the Cold War came to a
close, peace began to break out all over the globe, and Cambodia was not immune
to the new spirit of reconciliation. In September 1989 Vietnam, its economy in
tatters and eager to end its international isolation, announced the withdrawal
of all of its troops from Cambodia. With the Vietnamese gone, the opposition
coalition, still dominated by the Khmer Rouge, launched a series of
offensives, forcing the now-vulnerable government to the negotiating table.
Diplomatic efforts to end the
civil war began to bear fruit in September 1990, when a peace plan was accepted
by both the Phnom Penh government and the three factions of the resistance
coalition. According to the plan, the Supreme National Council (SNC), a
coalition of all factions, would be formed under the presidency of Sihanouk.
Meanwhile the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (Untac) would supervise the
administration of the country for two years with the goal of free and fair
elections.
Untac undoubtedly achieved
some successes, but for all of these, it is the failures that were to cost
Cambodia dearly in the ‘democratic’ era. Untac was successful in pushing
through many international human-rights covenants; it opened the door to a
significant number of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) who have helped
build civil society; and, most importantly, on 25 May 1993, elections were held
with an 89.6% turnout. However, the results were far from decisive. Funcinpec,
led by Prince Norodom Ranariddh, took 58 seats in the National Assembly, while
the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), which represented the previous communist
government, took 51 seats. The CPP had lost the election, but senior leaders
threatened a secession of the eastern provinces of the country. As a result,
Cambodia ended up with two prime ministers: Norodom Ranariddh as first prime
minister, and Hun Sen as second prime minister.
Even today, Untac is heralded
as one of the UN’s success stories. The other perspective is that it was an
ill-conceived and poorly executed peace because so many of the powers involved
in brokering the deal had their own agendas to advance. To many Cambodians, it
must have seemed a cruel joke that the Khmer Rouge was allowed to play a part
in the process.
The UN’s disarmament
programme took weapons away from rural militias who for so long provided the
backbone of the government’s provincial defence network against the Khmer
Rouge. This left communities throughout the country vulnerable to attack, while
the Khmer Rouge used the veil of legitimacy conferred upon it by the peace
process to re-establish a guerrilla network throughout Cambodia. By 1994, when
it was finally outlawed by the government, the Khmer Rouge was probably a
greater threat to the stability of Cambodia than at any time since 1979.
Untac’s main goals had been
to ‘restore and maintain peace’ and ‘promote national reconciliation’ and in
the short term it achieved neither. It did oversee free and fair elections, but
these were later annulled by the actions of Cambodia’s politicians. Little was
done during the UN period to try to dismantle the communist apparatus of state
set up by the CPP, a well-oiled machine that continues to ensure that former
communists control the civil service, judiciary, army and police today.
The slow birth of peace
When the Vietnamese toppled
the Pol Pot government in 1979, the Khmer Rouge disappeared into the jungle.
The guerrillas eventually boycotted the 1993 elections and later rejected peace
talks aimed at creating a ceasefire. The defection of some 2000 troops from the
Khmer Rouge army in the months after the elections offered some hope that the
long-running insurrection would fizzle out. However, government-sponsored
amnesty programmes initially turned out to be ill-conceived: the policy of
reconscripting Khmer Rouge troops and forcing them to fight their former
comrades provided little incentive to desert.
In 1994 the Khmer Rouge
resorted to a new tactic of targeting tourists, with horrendous results for a
number of foreigners in Cambodia. During 1994 three people were taken from a
taxi on the road to Sihanoukville and subsequently shot. A few months later
another three foreigners were seized from a train bound for Sihanoukville and
in the ransom drama that followed they were executed as the army closed in.
The government changed course
during the mid-1990s, opting for more carrot and less stick in a bid to end the
war. The breakthrough came in 1996 when Ieng Sary, Brother No 3 in the Khmer
Rouge hierarchy and foreign minister during its rule, was denounced by Pol Pot
for corruption. He subsequently led a mass defection of fighters and their
dependants from the Pailin area, and this effectively sealed the fate of the
remaining Khmer Rouge. Pailin, rich in gems and timber, had long been the
economic crutch which kept the Khmer Rouge hobbling along. The severing of this
income, coupled with the fact that government forces now had only one front on
which to concentrate their resources, suggested the days of civil war were
numbered.
By 1997 cracks were appearing
in the coalition and the fledgling democracy once again found itself under
siege. But it was the Khmer Rouge that again grabbed the headlines. Pol Pot
ordered the execution of Son Sen, defence minister during the Khmer Rouge regime,
and many of his family members. This provoked a putsch within the Khmer Rouge
leadership, and the one-legged hardline general Ta Mok seized control, putting
Pol Pot on ‘trial’. Rumours flew about Phnom Penh that Pol Pot would be brought
there to face international justice, but events dramatically shifted back to
the capital.
A lengthy courting period
ensued in which both Funcinpec and the CPP attempted to win the trust of the
remaining Khmer Rouge hard-liners in northern Cambodia. Ranariddh was close to
forging a deal with the jungle fighters and was keen to get it sewn up before
Cambodia’s accession to Asean, as nothing would provide a better entry fanfare
than the ending of Cambodia’s long civil war. He was outflanked and
subsequently outgunned by Second Prime Minister Hun Sen. On 5 July 1997
fighting again erupted on the streets of Phnom Penh as troops loyal to the CPP
clashed with those loyal to Funcinpec. The heaviest exchanges were around the
airport and key government buildings, but before long the dust had settled and
the CPP once again controlled Cambodia. The strongman had finally flexed his
muscles and there was no doubt as to which party was running the show.
Following the coup, the
remnants of Funcinpec forces on the Thai border around O Smach formed an
alliance with the last of the Khmer Rouge under Ta Mok’s control. The fighting
may have ended, but the deaths did not stop there: several prominent Funcinpec
politicians and military leaders were victims of extrajudicial executions, and
even today no-one has been brought to justice for these crimes. Many of
Funcinpec’s leading politicians fled abroad, while the senior generals led the
resistance struggle on the ground.
As 1998 began, the CPP
announced an all-out offensive against its enemies in the north. By April it
was closing in on the Khmer Rouge strongholds of Anlong Veng and Preah Vihear,
and amid this heavy fighting Pol Pot evaded justice by dying a sorry death on
15 April in the Khmer Rouge’s captivity. The fall of Anlong Veng in April was
followed by the fall of Preah Vihear in May, and the big three, Ta Mok, Khieu
Samphan and Nuon Chea, were forced to flee into the jungle near the Thai border
with their remaining troops.
The 1998 election result
reinforced the reality that the CPP was now the dominant force in the Cambodian
political system and on 25 December Hun Sen received the Christmas present he
had been waiting for: Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea were defecting to the
government side. The international community began to pile on the pressure for
the establishment of some sort of war-crimes tribunal to try the remaining
Khmer Rouge leadership. After lengthy negotiations, agreement was finally
reached on the composition of a court to try the surviving leaders of the Khmer
Rouge. The CPP was suspicious of a UN-administered trial as the UN had sided
with the Khmer Rouge–dominated coalition against the government in Phnom Penh
and the ruling party wanted a major say in who was to be tried for what. The UN
for its part doubted that the judiciary in Cambodia was sophisticated or
impartial enough to fairly oversee such a major trial. A compromise solution –
a mixed tribunal of three international and four Cambodian judges requiring a
super majority of two plus three for a verdict – was eventually agreed upon.
Early 2002 saw Cambodia’s
first ever local elections to select village and commune level representatives,
an important step in bringing grassroots democracy to the country. Despite
national elections since 1993, the CPP continued to monopolise political power
at local and regional levels and only with commune elections would this grip be
loosened. The national elections of July 2003 saw a shift in the balance of
power, as the CPP consolidated their grip on Cambodia and the Sam Rainsy Party
overhauled Funcinpec as the second party. After nearly a year of negotiating,
Funcinpec ditched the Sam Rainsy Party once again and put their heads in the
trough with the CPP for another term.
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