THE KHMER ROUGE IN A COLD WAR CONTEXT

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Genocide Education in Cambodia
The Teaching of "A History of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979)"
University Lecturer Training
Phnom Penh, July 25, 2011

THE KHMER ROUGE IN A COLD WAR CONTEXT
by David Chandler
Via Cambodia Watch

It's always a pleasure and an honour for me to talk to Cambodians about your
history, even when it's a part of your history that is full of brutality and sadness.
Today I want to place the Khmer Rouge movement--and Cambodian history
before and since -- inside a wider historical context than its brief time in power. I will
be emphasizing the context of the Cold War, and how the pressures of the Cold War
helped the Khmer Rouge to come to power and to remain relatively powerful until
the 1990s.
The Cold War probably seems pretty faraway to you these days. After all, it
came to an end over twenty years ago. Nonetheless, it was a crucial element in world
history for almost fifty years beginning in 1946 and ending in the early 1990s.
Cambodia was swept into the Cold War and the Khmer Rouge would never have
come to power without it, but most non-Communist Cambodians had no desire to
be on either side of the conflict, that is to say, they didn't want to be on the of the so
called Free World, led by the United States, or on the side of the Sino-Soviet Bloc led
by China and the Soviet Union.
In the late 1960s, when the North Vietnamese secretly stationed troops on
Cambodian soil, and when the United States began to bomb Vietnamese supply lines
inside the country, Cambodia was forced into the Cold War. Under Lon Nol,
Cambodia was forced into the Free World. Under Pol Pot and the PRK, it fell first
under Chinese and later under Soviet-Vietnamese influence. Cambodia escaped from
the Cold War when it ended in 1989-1990.I will be talking about that period as it
affected Cambodian history, and how it relates specifically to the Khmer Rouge, so as
to place Cambodian history inside a larger context.
Another way of putting Cambodian history into a global context is to ask: Did
the Khmer Rouge and Democratic Kampuchea have to happen? Was the Khmer
Rouge's rise to power, because of international factors, in some way "inevitable"? I
think not, but I will argue today that its rise to power was made more likely by
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external events, starting in March 1945, and by the Cold war after that than by
anything else.
Historians sometimes play the game of imagining alternative histories, asking
what might have happened had certain events not occurred. What would have
happened, for instance, if Napoleon had won at Waterloo, or if US President John
Kennedy had not been shot?
Before I go on to discuss the relationship between the Khmer Rouge and the
Cold War I want to ask one of these "what if" questions: what would have happened
in Cambodian history if the Japanese had not given power to local authorities in
Indo-China on March 9, 1945?
This half-forgotten event, which took place a year or so before the Cold War
began, was extremely important for the states of French Indo-China. Cambodia was
one of these, and I believe that The Khmer Rouge might never have come to power
had the events of March 9, 1945 and the next six months not occurred. The Cold War
began a few months later, so the picture is complicated, but March 9 marked a
crucial turning point in the history of the region.
The events of March 1945 in turn, depended on a sequence of previous
events. These included the Japanese occupation of Indo-China, beginning in 1941,
France's humiliating defeat by Germany in 1940 and the organizational skills and
political energy of the Indo-China Communist Party (ICP) founded by Ho Chi Minh in
1930.
The ICP was a secret, highly organized, idealistic and illegal party, whose
objectives were to remove the French from power and impose a Marxist- Leninist
regime on what the ICP called the feudal states of Indo-China. In March 1945, many
of the Party's leaders has been imprisoned by the French while the Party's leader, Ho
Chi Minh and his poorly armed followers were bottled up in the mountains of North
Vietnam. The chances of their seizing power at that point seemed very poor. After
March 9, the fortunes of the ICP changed dramatically and what the Party did had a
strong influence on later Cambodian history,
But first, I need to provide a little background
In 1940, after France had been defeated by Germany, the French were
powerless to resist Japanese military expansion into French Indo-China, and its
officials on the spot chose not to do so -- in contrast later on, to the British in Burma
and Malaya, the Americans in the Philippines and the Dutch in Indonesia. With
Japanese permission, French authorities remained in command of the day-to-day
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administration in Indo-China even though Japanese forces were stationed on French
Indo-Chinese soil.
In early 1941, following a brief war between Thailand and France where
France had been defeated on land and the Thai had been defeated at sea; the
Japanese arbitrated a peace treaty between the two countries that was advantageous
to the Thai. The provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap (but not the ruins of
Angkor), as well as parts of Laos, were taken over by the Thai.
For the next four years the French and the Japanese lived in a fragile,
uncomfortable alliance that was humiliating to the French. By the end of 1944, it was
probably clear to the Japanese that they were going to lose the war. In France,
meanwhile, the newly established government of Charles de Gaulle wanted to take
part in the Pacific War, without having any troops to send into the region, and
established a secret, ineffective resistance movement in Indo-China. The Japanese
were aware of these developments. They also feared an Allied invasion, and, as
proud Asian nationalists they hated the idea of Europeans coming back to restore
colonialism. The Japanese followed a policy of "Asia for Asians" which attracted
support among local people throughout the region, although in French Indo-China,
where the French had repressed nationalists, and especially the ICP, the party that
the French viewed as a genuine threat, nationalism was still relatively weak, and
political parties did not exist. There were none in Cambodia before 1946.
On March 9, 1945, the Japanese authorities took the French completely by
surprise. They staged a coup de force, imprisoning French officials and military
personnel. They advise each of the region's local leaders (the Vietnamese emperor,
the King of Laos and 23 year old King Norodom Sihanouk) to declare independence.
Over the next few months, the Japanese released all of the political prisoners--
many of them members of the ICP- from colonial prisons. Most of these
revolutionaries quickly took up political struggle, especially in northern Vietnam,
without any fear of being arrested.
At this time, ICP guerrillas, no longer threatened by French military forces,
moved out of their mountain hiding places along the Chinese border and peacefully
took control of large stretches of northern Vietnam. The Japanese did nothing to
prevent this and in September 1945, after the Japanese had formally surrendered to
the Allies in Japan and while French forces Indo-China were still interned, the Ho Chi
Minh declared at a mass meeting in Hanoi that Vietnam was now truly independent,
and not independent as a gift of the Japanese. The regime that had been
established by the Vietnamese emperor, Bao Dai, resigned almost immediately.
Arming themselves with Japanese weapons, the new, ICP-dominated regime was
prepared to negotiate with the French from a position of strength.
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In Cambodia, the situation in the months after the Japanese coup de force was
less clear. No political party existed that could declare complete independence, and
King Sihanouk, then only twenty-three years old, was not prepared to take such a
drastic step on his own. Instead the patriot Son Ngoc Thanh, the Japanese-installed
prime minister, tried for a time to maintain Cambodia's fragile independence,
without funds or weapons, He was unable to do so. The French returned in force to
southern Vietnam in October 1945 and released the officials and military personnel
who had been interned by the Japanese. They swiftly arrested Son Ngoc Thanh.
Sihanouk, perhaps reluctantly, perhaps not, welcomed the French return,
If the Japanese had not staged the March 9 1945 coup, the French would have
remained in control of Indo-China until the end of World War II. If this had been the
case, Vietnam could never have declared its independence so forcibly and the
Cambodian independence movement (to say nothing of the Khmer Rouge) would
have taken more time to develop. It's also possible and that other, non-Communist
roads to independence might have opened up.
But of course the March 9 coup did occur, and the events that followed from
it were almost, but not quite, inevitable.
At the end of 1945 the French knew that they had to make concessions in
Indo-China, at least for the time being, when they had so few troops on the ground.
Many Cambodians --including King Sihanouk-- had enjoyed a brief a taste of
independence, however, and sensed, after March 9, that the French were not as
invulnerable as they had always seemed to be. The seeds of independence had been
planted. Faced with this new situation, France negotiated cautiously with Cambodia
for a new relationship between the two countries.
In early 1946, the French agreed to allow political parties to form in Cambodia,
a constitution (Cambodia's first) to be written, and a National Assembly to be
elected. The mildly anti-French Democrat Party, formed at the time, won elections in
1946 and 1947l this momentum distressed the French, even though the Democrats
had no real power. The French were in charge of all expenditures in the kingdom,
after all, and the Democrats had no guns.
The new constitution was modelled on the French constitution (the only one
Cambodians had ever seen) and allowed for a relatively weak chief of state and a
supposedly powerful national assembly but all real power remained in French hands,
French. In 1945-1949, Cambodia was still very far from independence and the French
faced very little armed opposition. King Sihanouk, although powerless, did not feel
threatened by these arrangements, primarily because he enjoyed string French
support.
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In another development, toward the end of World War II Thailand, whose
leaders had always opposed to the French protectorate, sheltered some Cambodian
nationalists and had sponsored a non-Communist Cambodian independence
movement known as the Khmer Issarak. The movement was small, without
leadership, and lacked weapons--unlike the Communists in northern Vietnam. The
movement couldn't associate itself with the new; Democrat- dominated government
in Phnom Penh whose leaders hoped to achieve independence more gradually and
without armed struggle. In any case, over the next few years its Thai patrons
abandoned the movement and many if its members especially in eastern Cambodia
joined the ICP-led resistance to the French.
In the meantime, the Cold War had begun, Soon after World War II;
Communist parties supported by the Soviet Union had seized power in several
countries in Eastern Europe, and threatened to come to power in parts of Western
Europe as well. The French Communist party was the largest and most powerful in
the region. The United States, calling itself the leader of the Free World, was fearful
of a Communist victory in France, and viewed the Cold War as a global confrontation
between good and evil. Their almost religious reading of the situation seemed to be
justified when the Communists seized power in China in 1949 and when this action
was followed, in June 1950, by a Communist invasion of southern Korea.
The Communist victory in China soon changed the character of the First Indo
China War, which had broken out between the French and resistance movements
throughout Indo-China, and especially in northern Vietnam, at the end of 1946. For
several years the French had the military advantage, but after 1949 China increasingly
provided shelter, weapons and support for the Vietnamese resistance. In 1950 the
Vietnamese began to stage and win set battles against the French.
In 1949, in the context of these developments, the French were able to
convince US officials that the First Indo-China War was not primarily a war of colonial
oppression but was a crucial part of the global war against Communism. The United
States, angered at what they called the "loss" of China agreed to provide extensive
military aid to the French, but only through the Indo-Chinese states. At the end of
1949, the French agreed, and granted what Sihanouk later called "50%
independence" to Cambodia, Laos, and the components of Vietnam. Genuine power
over finance, defence and foreign affairs remained in the hands of the French.
With hindsight an important aspect of these arrangements, unnoticed at the
time, was that the Cambodian Ministry of Education came under local control, and
the moderately anti-French Democrat Party was able to prepare the lists of students
who would be sent on scholarships to France. The pro-Democrat students named in
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1949-1952 included Pol Pot, Son Sen, Ieng Sary, and Khieu Samphan, who all became
members if the French Communist Party, as well as many others who never did so.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, along the eastern border of Cambodia,
Vietnamese Communist guerrillas or Viet Minh recruited many young Khmer to help
them in what they saw as an Indo-Chinese struggle -- rather than a purely
Cambodian one -- against the French. In 1951, just as the war began to go badly for
the French the Vietnamese helped to found the Khmer People's Revolutionary Party
(KPRP). Its leaders were Khmer who were fluent in Vietnamese.
Thus, if we consider the students in Paris as genuine patriots anxious to
remove the French from power (even though they later did many murderous things!)
We can see that by the early 1950s there were three Cambodian streams of
opposition to France. One of these, which were controlled by Vietnam, was
concentrated in the eastern part of the country, and drew its support largely from
poor peasants. A second stream, which became important later, was among
Communist students in France, and ironically was more nationalistic, and more anti-
Vietnamese, than the Cambodians who were actually fighting the French. The third,
more peaceable stream included the Democrats in Cambodia and others, including
King Sihanouk who wanted to gain independence from France without resorting to
armed struggle. The first two streams--the one supported by Vietnam and the one
containing Cambodians who had become Communists in France- were intimately
linked to the Cold War. The third one was not--or can we say: not yet? If we notice
that there was no royalist nationalist "stream" before 1955, yet, we can see the
ancestors of the four political groupings that emerged from the Paris Agreements of
1991.
Most of the fighting in the First Indo-China war took place in northern
Vietnam, so the supporters of the KPRP gained little combat experience. However
many if them received political training from Vietnamese- trained cadre who
convinced them that a Communist state would be preferable to a royal one. The
Communist students in France agreed, but hoped that such a state would be
independent of Vietnamese control. Both strands of resistance had responded to
foreign influences -- from the ICP in Indo China and from the French Communist
Party in France. The more peaceable strand responded to conditions inside
Cambodia, and had not yet been affected by the Cold War--except by the fact that
the Cold War had made the French give the Democrats more power in 1949.
As the war went badly for the French, and as the Democrats consolidated their
political power in Phnom Penh, King Sihanouk boldly decided to strike out on his
own. In 1952-3 his vigorous, well-orchestrated and beautifully timed royal crusade
for independence led the French to grant independence to Cambodia at the end of
1953, and led many Cambodians to believe that the King had achieved this result
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single-handed. In a sense these people were correct for France would never have
negotiated Cambodia's independence with the Democrats, whom they distrusted, or
with the Vietnamese-dominated KPRP.
In the summer of 1954, after the battle of Dienbienphu, the First Indo China
war ended as a humiliating defeat for the French. Because non-Communist leaders
in Vietnam and Laos had not been able to wrest freedom from France, however, they
had far less leverage than the Cambodian delegation enjoyed at the Geneva
Conference convened to end the war. The Cambodian delegation was able to press
for many concessions from France and the Vietnamese Communists at Geneva. These
concessions served Cambodia well for the next fifteen years.
In the aftermath of the French defeat, the United Sates established a regional
anti- Communist alliance, called SEATO that the Americans hoped would prevent
further Communist victories in the region. Unfortunately for the United States only
two Southeast Asian countries, Thailand and the Philippines, joined the alliance.
In 1955, King Sihanouk riding a wave of = popularity in Cambodia, attended
the conference of supposedly non-aligned nations at Bandung in Indonesia where he
befriended the Chinese leader Zhou En Lai, India's Nehru, Indonesia's Sukarno and
other world leaders. He quickly became convinced that a non-aligned foreign policy
that would remove Cambodia from the playing an active role in Cold War -would
benefit his country far more than an alliance either with the so called Free World or
with the Soviet Bloc.
For as long as Sihanouk was in power, he happily accepted foreign aid from
as many countries as offered it--although he rejected aid from the United States after
1963. Domestically he was especially harsh with opponents on the left. As a result,
and the Cambodian Communist movement, as we shall see, remained small and
fractured for many years. By making friends with powers on both sides of the Cold
War and accepting assistance form them, Sihanouk and Cambodia, ironically, were
beneficiaries of the Cold War, before they became its victims.
Sihanouk was able to put his ideas to work later in 1955 when he abdicated
the throne and formed a political movement, the Sangkum Reastr Niyum. Sangkum
candidates, hand-picked by the Prince, swept the elections for the National Assembly
in 1955.The buoyant and energetic ex-monarch became a politically effective head of
state.
I believe that Sihanouk's neutral policy, and his attempt to stand aside from
the Cold War, made sense for Cambodia, as long as participants in the Cold War,
including North Vietnam and the United States, left Cambodia alone. Sihanouk's
neutrality depended on the good will of larger, more belligerent powers. When,
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starting in the mid 1960s it was in the interests of these powers to ignore or override
Cambodian neutrality, time began to run out for the Prince and for the Khmer. In the
meantime, it is hard to see what other choices Sihanouk could have made. An
alliance with the United States, and with his hostile neighbours South Vietnam and
Thailand, would certainly have accelerated Cambodia's participation in the Second
Indo-China War. See would an open alliance with North Vietnam.
On the other hand, while Sihanouk always tried his best to extricate
Cambodia from the Cold War, it eventually overwhelmed his country, and I would
argue that without the Second Indo-China War (1959-1975) the Khmer Rouge would
never have come to power. It's also unlikely that Sihanouk would have been
deposed.
To give you some idea of the outside forces at play in Cambodia in the early
1960s, when the kingdom was an "island if peace" and when Sihanouk was
immensely popular, I'll insert a personal note at this point,
I first became interested in Cambodia 52 years ago, in 1959, when I
volunteered for Khmer language training in Washington DC. I was then a low ranking
member of the American diplomatic service. I thought Cambodia would be an
interesting place to work, and it certainly was.
When I worked in the American Embassy in Phnom Penh, between 1960 and
1962, American policy toward Cambodia was based on the Cold War; which is to say
on attempting to arrest the progress of Communism throughout the world and
specifically in Southeast Asia. A country, the Americans declared, was either for us, or
against us. Cambodia was confusing, because it was neither!
The Second Indo China War has not begun in earnest, but the United States
felt that it had to hold the line against Communism in South Vietnam, and to do so it
preferred its Cold War allies in Saigon and Bangkok to the independent -minded and
therefore unreliable Prince Sihanouk in Phnom Penh. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the
Prince was not fond the United States, largely because the pro-American regimes in
Saigon and Bangkok both wanted to remove him forcibly from power and also
because the only Western country he had ever liked, or made an effort to understand
was France,
Outside of the Cold War framework, the years when I worked in Phnom Penh -
-although I had no effect in anything that was happening there--were good years for
Cambodia. They probably marked the high point of Sihanouk's popularity. Cambodia
seemed to many people, myself included, to be a genuine 'island of peace" in an
increasingly disorderly world, and the possibility that the Prince would be removed
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from power either by a pro- American coup or by a Communist revolution were so
remote as to be unimaginable.
But since both of these events happened in the 1970s we need to turn our
attention back to the Khmer Rouge, about whom almost nothing was known in the
years when I was working in Phnom Penh.
The last we saw of Pol Pot was in 1952, when he was joining the Communist
Party in Paris. He came back to Cambodia in 1953, after failing all of his examinations,
and spent a brief time in the Vietnamese-dominated resistance, where he was
accepted as a member of the ICP and worked closely with a Cambodian KPRP cadre
named Tou Samouth. Because Pol Pot came home sooner than his Communist
colleagues in France, he gained an important foothold in the Cambodian Communist
movement, especially because of his close association with Tou Samouth.
In the late 1950s, Pol Pot married a fellow radical nationalist named Khieu Ponnary
and began to teach in a private school, while secretly carrying out Communist Party
work. The Party in those days was small, disorganized, poorly financed, and harassed
by Sihanouk's police.
Most of the men and women who had fought alongside the Vietnamese in the
First Indo - China War resumed their lives after Cambodia gained its independence.
The Cambodian Communist movement became, for the first time, largely an urban
phenomenon, cut off from the countryside and from the movement's rural
supporters. North Vietnam was not yet willing to sponsor armed struggle in South
Vietnam and had not yet reactivated its old networks inside Cambodia. For local
Communists in South Vietnam and Cambodia the 1950s and early 1960s were a
dangerous, disillusioning period that coincided in Cambodia, as we have seen, with a
high tide of Sihanouk's popularity, skill and self-confidence as chief of state. By
repressing Communists in Cambodia and making friends with China, the Prince was
sure he could keep Cambodia from being taken over by the Cimi8nists and also out
of the war in Vietnam,
To be fair to the Prince, he could not foresee the ferocity of the Second Indo-
China War which more than anything else ended his years in power and led in 1975
to the victory of the Khmer Rouge.
Although Pol Pot and most of his colleagues in the clandestine Communist
leadership managed to escape the attention of Sihanouk's police, they were shaken
when Tou Samouth the secretary of the party disappeared in 1962 and was
presumed to have been killed. Pol Pot took his place and in the following year and
fearing arrest, took refuge, with several associates in a Vietnamese Communist
military base near Memot on the border with Vietnam. He stayed there for two
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years. Surprisingly, perhaps he never gave up hope. In 1965 he was summoned to
Hanoi for consultations. Probably connected with the intensifying conflict in South
Vietnam. He travelled north for several months, largely on foot, happy that the North
Vietnamese had recognized him as secretary of the Cambodian party, and looking
forward to sharing his revolutionary ideas with his opposite numbers in Hanoi.
In fact the North Vietnamese authorities had little interest in the ideas of the
Cambodian party. Instead, were eager to reinstate Cambodian co-operation for their
military efforts and to protect their supply routes that ran through "neutral" Laos and
Cambodia into the battlefields of South Vietnam. In other words, they wanted to
re0estabkish the alliance they had forged with rural Cambodians in the First Indo-
China War.
By this time, Sihanouk had broken relations with the United States and had
made friendly gestures toward the Communist Vietnamese, whom he believed were
going to be victorious in South Vietnam. Like Pol Pot, and much less willingly, he was
being drawn inexorably into the battlefields of the Cold War.
Over the years, with his fellow Communists, Pol Pot had developed an
ambitious and radical revolutionary program for their Party. Among other things the
program involved inaugurating armed struggle against Sihanouk and destroying
what the Communists saw as the "feudal" and oppressive character of Khmer society.
When Pol Pot reached Hanoi, he presented the program his opposite number,
the secretary of the Vietnamese Workers' Party, Le Duan, who told him bluntly that
the Cambodian program was unsatisfactory because it ignored the international
aspects and obligations of Communism in general and the Cambodian revolution in
particular. The program ignored the Communists' alliance with North Vietnam. Le
Duan told Pol Pot to subordinate his party and its program to Vietnamese priorities,
and to delay armed struggle until the North Vietnamese had defeated South Vietnam
and United States. Although he may not have mentioned the issue to Pol Pot, Duan
probably also wanted to protect the secret agreements that the Vietnamese
Communists had recently reached with Sihanouk, whereby they were allowed to
station troops inside Cambodia and move supplies through the kingdom in exchange
for causing no harm to the population and agreeing to honour Cambodia's frontiers.
Pol Pot's reaction to Le Duan's criticism is not recorded, but his sense of humiliation
and resentment is easy to imagine.
To be fair to Sihanouk, there is no way he could have refused the Vietnamese
demands, and he probably believed that by entering into these secret arrangements
before American power in the region became too overwhelming he would be able to
keep Cambodia out of the war and to benefit from Vietnamese friendship after the
Communists had won.
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In early 1966 Pol Pot travelled from Hanoi to China, which was then on the eve
of the Cultural Revolution. Officials there told him that China supported revolutions
throughout the world that did not emphasize international socialist aspects and
obligations, but responded instead to conditions inside each individual country. In
other words, China seemed to support revolutions like the one that Pol Pot had in
mind. Because China was still formally allied to Sihanouk, however, Pol Pot's visit was
kept secret and the officials who met him had to be discreet. They could hardly offer
him the same levels of friendship and armed support as they did in the 1970s.
Nonetheless, Pol Pot probably saw that there would be greater advantages for
him and for his radical idea of revolution, when the circumstances allowed, to be
allied with China than to remain subordinate to Vietnam. When he returned home,
he established his headquarters in the north-eastern part of the country, where he
still enjoyed the protection of Vietnamese Communist troops but no longer lived
under day-to-day Vietnamese supervision. Over the next two years (1966-1968) he
gathered support and refined his program. At the same time, he and his colleagues
did not yet feel confident enough to inaugurate armed struggle, at least without
Vietnamese approval and assistance, on the surface at least it looked as if the Khmer
Rouge remained obedient to Vietnam.
In this same period, the political landscape in Cambodia was changing, to
Sihanouk's disadvantage. For many reasons, governing Cambodia more or less
single-handed was becoming increasingly difficult for Sihanouk. The economy was
faltering. Cambodia was isolated from the region, and members of the Cambodian
elite, especially in Phnom Penh, were becoming impatient with Sihanouk's highly
personal style of rule. Next door, the fighting threatened to spill over into Cambodia
and some members of the elite and officers in the army, including General Lon Nol.,
were unhappy with the way that Sihanouk seemed to favour Communist countries
over the United States.
In the National Assembly elections in 1966 all the candidates, as usual, were
members of the Sangkum. However the elections were the first ones since
independence for which Sihanouk had not handpicked the candidates. As a result
the ones who took office after the election owed nothing to the Prince, and in some
cases ran without his support. As evidence of Sihanouk's growing unpopularity
among the elite, for example, some members of the Assembly whom Sihanouk
disliked, including the Communists Khieu Samphan and Hu Nim and the pro-
Western ex-Democrat, Douc Rays, regained their seats with increased majorities.
Always adept at assessing his position, but incapable of leaving the scene, Sihanouk
began to lose confidence in 1967 and spent more and more of his time making films.
In February 1968, as Vietnamese troops poured out of their Cambodian
sanctuaries to take part in the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge
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inaugurated armed struggle by capturing a police station and its weapons in rural
Battambang. Over the next year scattered skirmishes took place in the Cambodian
countryside between Khmer Rouge guerrillas and the Cambodian army. The
development alarmed Prince Sihanouk, who knew he had already lost the confidence
of the urban elite. He had always assumed that the "Khmer Rouge" as he called
them, were subordinate to the Vietnamese, who now seemed to be betraying their
secret alliance with him by unleashing their "puppets."
Edging away from his former policies the Prince reinstated diplomatic
relations with the United States, secretly allowed the Americans to bomb the Ho Chi
Minh Trail and appointed the conservative anti-Communist Lon Nol, as the new
prime minister. In 1969, in an effort keep his Cold War account balanced, Sihanouk
was the only chief of state to attend Chi Minh's funeral in Hanoi.
These sensible moves came too late to avert disaster, but it is impossible to imagine
a scenario in which Cambodia, under Sihanouk or anyone else could have opted out
of the Second Indo-China War or, more widely the Cold War in which it had no
genuine interest. Cambodians didn't want to be part of the Free World or part of the
Communist Bloc, Understandably they wanted to be Cambodians living lives that
made sense to them.
Instead we can say that Cambodia was crushed by the forces released by the
Cold War, and also that it has revived not only thanks to the resilience common
sense and energy if its people but also because the Cold War came to an end.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Richard Nixon, a Cold War figure par
excellence, had come to office as President. He pledged to end the Second Indo-
China War in what he thought would be an honourable way. While he continued
the negotiations with the North Vietnamese that had been opened under President
Lyndon Johnson, he also believed, for reasons that remain obscure, that Cambodia
was in some sense the "key" to America's future strategy in Indo-China. This
miscalculation had disastrous long-term effects.
In March 1970, while he was travelling in Europe, Prince Sihanouk was \voted
out of office as Cambodia's chief of state by the National Assembly. The coup was
the climax of a long history of disaffection with the Prince on the part of Cambodia's
urban elite. The coup quickly met with approval from the United States, which was
eager to have an ally at this stage in the Second Indo-China War. I don't think it
occurred to anyone in the United States that such an alliance would be ruinous for
Cambodia, because your country was a chess piece, not a chess player in the Cold
War, and the United States walked away from it when the game was lost.
Genocide Education in Cambodia: DC-CAM's THE KHMER ROUGE IN A COLD WAR CONTEXT
by DAVID CHANDLER 13 | P a g e
In effect, = the coup was a death warrant for Cambodia as an "island of peace"
and Prime Minster Lon Nol's request soon afterwards that all Vietnamese troops
leave Cambodia immediately was hopelessly naïve. The Vietnamese troops were
there, as they had been since 1964, to "liberate" South Vietnam. D as a nation and its
interests as a nation were of no concern to them.
The blame for what happened from then on (as far as the Cambodian people
are concerned) can be shared by the North Vietnamese, the United States, the Khmer
Republic and the Khmer Rouge but the war that was set in motion by the coup also
depended to a large extent on the decisions that Sihanouk made when, after hearing
of the coup in Moscow, he sought refuge in Beijing and decided to declare war in the
new regime in Phnom Penh.
Almost as soon as his plane landed, Sihanouk's old friend Zhou Enlai, the
Chinese prime minister, promised to return the Prince to power. The North
Vietnamese Prime Minister, Pham van Dong, soon seconded the promise, which was
visiting Beijing, and Political backing from China and open-ended military support
from North Vietnam were very pleasing to Sihanouk. The new alliance also
legitimised the Khmer Rouge, who now had access to Vietnamese weapons and
military training. They also capitalized on the "treason" of the coup to claim, in the
Cambodian countryside, that they were devoted to Sihanouk and wanted to restore
him as chief of state. This propaganda gained them thousands of recruits and
international support in anti-American circles.
For the next five years Cambodia was a battlefield in the second Indo-China
War-- precisely the fate that Sihanouk, fully aware of Cambodia's military weakness,
had tried so hard to avoid during his years in power. I 1970-1972 the Khmer Rouge
forces benefited enormously from Vietnamese weapons training and support.
Meanwhile, North Vietnamese forces were able to inflict stinging defeats on Lon
Nol's poorly trained and poorly led forces.
What would have happened if Sihanouk had not entered into what turned out
to be such an unholy alliance? The war between the Lon Nol regime and the North
Vietnamese would certainly have continued and intensified and US involvement was
unavoidable. In fact, sad to say, once the machinery if war had set in motion, nothing
Sihanouk did or might have done made any difference. Cambodia slipped out of his
hands--once he placed the country in other peoples' hands-- and fell into the Cold
War.
The Khmer Rouge, when they came to power, wanted to present them as a
purely Cambodian revolution, owing nothing to foreign help or inspiration. In doing
so, the Khmer Rouge leaders denied their long associations with Vietnam and their
developing alliance with China. They to place themselves in a global context,
Genocide Education in Cambodia: DC-CAM's THE KHMER ROUGE IN A COLD WAR CONTEXT
by DAVID CHANDLER 14 | P a g e
although for the next three years it became clear that China saw the Khmer Rouge as
a counter-weight to the pro-Soviet regime that had taken power in Vietnam in
1975.Once again Cambodia, without wanting to do so, had become a pawn on the
Cold War chessboard.
China encouraged the Khmer Rouge to be hostile to Vietnam, but never
provided troops or air support once war broke out between Cambodia and Vietnam.
After 1979, China and the United States, allied against the Soviet Union,
continued to support the Khmer Rouge membership in the UN --the only
government in exile to be so honoured. Meanwhile, the new, Vietnamese regime in
Phnom Penh received very little foreign assistance and as a result recovered slowly
from the damage inflicted by the civil war and by the traumas of the Khmer Rouge
period.
Cambodia didn't emerge from the Cold War until the Cold War ended in
1989-90, over twenty years ago. Norodom Sihanouk did his best to keep Cambodia
removed from the Cold War. First the North Vietnamese, and then the United States,
did not allow this to happen. Later on, Lon Nol and Pol Pot, participants in the Cold
War, thought that their alliances with the United States and China would be
sufficiently powerful to prevent defeat. The alliances were nit, and two successive
regimes were removed from power against their will. The PRK, see] n from the
perspectives of the Cold War was treated as satellite of the Soviet Union rather than
as a country that needed foreign support and membership in the UN.
Speaking in 2011, I see no virtues stemming to Cambodia from the Cold War, which
was enormously expensive in terms of human lives, expenditures, and physical
destruction. A renewal of these antagonisms, on a global scale, is difficult to imagine,
but if there are lessons for Cambodia to learn from the Cold War one lesson would
be not to become too closely allied with any single country, for fear of having to
serve that country's national interests, rather than to serve the interests of the
Cambodian people. In terms of the damage and entanglements brought to
Cambodia by the Cold War, none of Cambodian history before 1990 is worth
repeating, but it is equally important for u not forget it, any more than we should
ever forget the dark history of the Khmer Rouge regime, that is so ably set out in
the volume we will be discussing and studying overt the next few days and weeks.
Thanks very much
David Chandler is Professor Emeritus of history at Monash University. Dr. Chandler is
a renowned historian of Cambodia, whose published works include The Tragedy of
Cambodian History: Politics, War, and Revolution since 1945, Brother Number One: A
Genocide Education in Cambodia: DC-CAM's THE KHMER ROUGE IN A COLD WAR CONTEXT
by DAVID CHANDLER 15 | P a g e
Political Biography of Pol Pot, and Voices from S-21. He was DC-Cam's lead advisor on
the development of the textbook.