The Best of Cambodia & Laos

keep Cambodia neutral in the conflict raging
in Vietnam. He feared the North
Vietnamese Communists who had always
taken a fairly patronizing and threatening
view of Cambodia. He also deeply distrusted
the Americans, breaking diplomatic
ties in 1965 in the belief that
Washington was plotting his removal. He
might well have had cause.
He was, however, shortly to fall off the
tightrope. In tilting toward Ho Chi Minh,
Sihanouk allowed North Vietnamese
forces to use Cambodia as a base and for
transit. He didn’t really have much choice.
The Hanoi-based Communists had
enough military power to do what they
wanted. Sihanouk’s rule became increasingly
brutal as dissent grew. Opponents
“disappeared.” The right-wing forces
gained more and more power. The army
grew resentful and rebellious. The nascent
left wing felt pushed to ever greater
extremes as the ravages of a corrupt regime
seemed to become ever more totalitarian.
Cambodia was sliding toward an abyss.
Rebellion broke out in Samlot in the
remote western jungles near the Thai border
in 1967, and it was brutally suppressed.
Photographs still exist of Royalist
soldiers brandishing the severed heads of
vanquished rebels. At this point, Sihanouk
went for the left wingers and even moderate
leftists, and fled to the jungle to organize
resistance.
THE SPIRAL OF WAR
Things came to a head in 1970. While
Sihanouk was at a conference in France, an
American-sponsored coup deposed him.
Defense minister Lon Nol took power, a
move that had terrible reverberations. An
occultist right-wing “Buddhist,” he was in
many ways a mirror of his nemesis, Pol
Pot. Like Pol Pot, he was a plodder professionally.
He had reached his exalted position
through being Sihanouk’s enforcer
and hatchet man as head of the army, yet
as a soldier and tactician he was to prove
disastrous, breaking his own army with
bizarre campaign strategies that went
against all the rules of good generalship.
Like Pol Pot, he was also a deranged xenophobe,
particularly against the Vietnamese.
He had Vietnamese living in
Cambodia massacred on a fairly industrial
scale, even though his sponsor at this time
was largely the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese
government.
Sihanouk went to Beijing. Up to this
time there had been a tacit agreement with
Hanoi that in return for Cambodia not
supporting America, North Vietnam
would not actively sponsor the increasingly
radical Cambodian left. That agreement
was now in shreds and the group
that Sihanouk had derided as the “Khmer
Rouge” (Red Khmers) became the recipients
of massive infusions of military aid
and support from Hanoi and China, Sihanouk’s
previous allies. Effectively, a beast
was let off the leash. No one could have
guessed the intentions of Pol Pot and his
accomplices. The horror to come was
unprecedented in the wars of Indochina.
In April 1970, South Vietnamese and
American forces invaded Cambodia to
root out North Vietnamese forces. Yet the
North Vietnamese just retreated farther
inside Cambodia. The North Vietnamese
and the Khmer Rouge acolytes soon controlled
vast areas of the countryside. In
these “liberated zones,” there was a total
disregard for human life as the Khmer
Rouge started to implement their horrific
ideology. These were dark portents for the
future.
Just before Sihanouk’s overthrow, the
U.S. had begun a secret campaign of bombing
Cambodia and Laos to try and interdict
the NVA and Viet Cong on the Ho Chi
Minh trail and destroy their Cambodian
bases. It failed to do either. What it did do
was kill thousands upon thousands of innocent
villagers and send their relatives rushing
to join the fight against the American
aggressor or scramble for refuge in Phnom
Penh—a city that was increasingly bloated
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CAMBODIA IN DEPTH 2
LOOKING BACK