The Best of Cambodia & Laos

Rouge leaders will be prompted to start
telling the truth.
This particular episode in the Cambodian
collective nightmare was ended in
1979. Pol Pot and his gruesome henchmen
had been increasingly attacking the
old enemy and their former sponsors, the
Vietnamese. The North Vietnamese had
won their war as the Khmer Rouge had
won their own at roughly the same time.
By 1978, Pol Pot was sending Khmer
Rouge soldiers into South Vietnam where,
not content with murdering Cambodian
innocents, they perpetrated massacres of
Vietnamese villagers. The Vietnamese had
had enough and invaded Cambodia, successfully
evicting the Khmer Rouge in a
blitzkrieg. This may have ended one episode
of horror, but the nightmare was
certainly not ended.
A VICTIM OF THE COLD
WAR: THE ’80S
Cambodia was to suffer 2 more decades of
war and suffering, a hopeless pawn in
Cold War politics. Vietnam may have gotten
rid of a regime where inhumanity was
honed to a fine art, but in the mind-set of
America and its allies this masked an
uncomfortable reality. The Vietnamese
were pro-Soviet Communists and their
invasion of Cambodia marked a major
extension of Soviet power. What to do?
The answer that the U.S. came up with
was to arm and support the Khmer Rouge
in the full knowledge of what this movement
had done to its own people.
The Khmer Rouge continued to fight
under the not very convincing guise of a
royalist alliance, with Sihanouk continuing
to provide the endorsement (this
despite the fact that the Khmer Rouge had
confined him and come close to killing
him during their rule). They carried Chinese
guns largely paid for with American
money, but they carried on killing Cambodian
people in huge numbers. Historians
ask themselves how this could have
happened. Who should now be on trial?
The answers remain complex and certainly
have little to do with justice.
The Vietnamese installed a pliant, puppet
government in Phnom Penh consisting
mainly of former Eastern Zone Khmer
Rouge rebel defectors headed at first by
Heng Samrin (a man who remains justifiably
popular even among his political
opponents) and then Hun Sen. The war
continued and there was a massive exodus
of refugees to both Thailand and Vietnam,
and as the rice fields went untended people
began to starve on a massive scale.
Huge permanent refugee camps came into
existence in Thailand as the agendas of
outside players were forced upon a people
for whom war had become the neverending
and tragic norm.
Amazingly, the UN still recognized the
Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government
of Cambodia, and it was a Khmer
Rouge representative who held the Cambodian
seat at the UN. The war sputtered
on through the ’80s, the refugee camps
became cities, and all this only diminished
with the advent of Perestroika in Russia,
the collapse of Soviet support for satellite
states, and Vietnamese withdrawal from
Cambodia in 1989. There was no longer
an imperative for the West to support the
Khmer Rouge and they were left only with
Chinese support. The government of Hun
Sen was forced to look to the outside
world now that their Soviet and Vietnamese
patrons had quit the scene. The Khmer
Rouge adapted their game but not their
capacity for the murder of their own people.
They continued to plant mines (as did
the Vietnamese-backed government
forces) around the mountains and forest
areas where they continued to hold sway
and launch new offensives every year.
UN INTERVENTION
With the Cold War imperative gone, diplomatic
efforts to put a stop to the fighting
started to become effective in 1990 with
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CAMBODIA IN DEPTH 2
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