In 1955, Sihanouk abdicated in favour of his father in order to be elected
Prime Minister. Upon his father's death in 1960, Sihanouk again became head of
state, taking the title of Prince. As the Vietnam War progressed, Sihanouk
adopted an official policy of neutrality in the Cold War until Cambodians began
to take sides, and ousted in 1970 by a military coup led by Prime Minister
General Lon Nol and Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak, while on a trip abroad. From
Beijing, Sihanouk realigned himself with the communist Khmer Rouge rebels who
had been slowly gaining territory in the remote mountain regions and urged his
followers to help in overthrowing the pro-United States government of Lon Nol,
hastening the onset of civil war.
In the years since the Vietnam War, something of a consensus has emerged on the
extent of US involvement in Cambodia. The details are controversial, but the
narrative begins on March 18, 1969, when the United States launched the Menu
campaign. The joint US-South Vietnam ground offensive followed. For the next
three years, the United States continued with air strikes under Nixon's orders,
hitting deep inside Cambodia's borders, first to root out the Viet Cong
(VC)/North Vietnam Army (NVA) and later to protect the Lon Nol regime from
growing numbers of Cambodian Communist forces. Congress cut funding for the war
and imposed an end to the bombing on August 15, 1973, amid calls for Nixon's
impeachment for his deceit in escalating the campaign. Operation Menu, a series
of secret B-52 bombing raids by the United States on alleged Viet Cong bases
and supply routes inside Cambodia, was acknowledged after Lon Nol assumed
power; U.S. forces briefly invaded
Cambodia in a further effort to disrupt the Viet Cong. The bombing continued
and, as the Cambodian communists began gaining ground, eventually included
strikes on suspected Khmer Rouge sites until halted in 1973.
Some two million Cambodians were made refugees by the bombing and fighting and
fled to Phnom Penh. Estimates of the number of Cambodians killed during the
bombing campaigns vary widely. Views of the effects of the bombing also vary
widely. The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of
Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging
the city. Journalist William Shawcross and Cambodia specialists Milton Osborne,
David P. Chandler and Ben Kiernan argued that the bombing drove peasants to
join the Khmer Rouge. Chandler writes that the bombing provided "the
psychological ingredients of a violent, vengeful and unrelenting social
revolution." Cambodia specialist Craig Etcheson argued that it is "untenable"
to assert that the Khmer Rouge would not have won but for US intervention, and
that while the bombing did help Khmer Rouge recruitment, they "would have won
anyway."
As the war ended, a draft US AID report observed that the country faced famine
in 1975, with 75% of its draft animals destroyed by the war, and that rice
planting for the next harvest would have to be done "by the hard labor of
seriously malnourished people." The report predicted that without large-scale
external food and equipment assistance there will be widespread starvation
between now and next February... Slave labor and starvation rations for half
the nation's people (probably heaviest among those who supported the republic)
will be a cruel necessity for this year, and general deprivation and suffering
will stretch over the next two or three years before Cambodia can get back to
rice self-sufficiency.
The Khmer Rouge reached Phnom Penh and took power in 1975, changing the
official name of the country to Democratic Kampuchea, led by Pol Pot. The
Regime, heavily influenced and backed by China, immediately evacuated the
cities and sent the entire population on forced marches to rural work projects.
They attempted to rebuild the country's agriculture on the model of the 11th
century. They discarded Western medicine, destroyed temples, libraries, and
anything considered western. Any person with trained skills, doctors, lawyers,
teachers, were especially targeted. With that result, hundreds of thousands
died from starvation and disease there were almost no drugs in the country.
Estimates vary as to how many people were killed by the Khmer Rouge regime,
ranging from approximately one to three million. This era has given rise to the
term Killing Fields, and the prison Tuol Sleng became as notorious as Auschwitz
in the history of mass killing. Hundreds of thousands more fled across the
border into neighbouring Thailand.
In November 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia to stop Khmer Rouge incursions
across the border and the genocide in Cambodia. Violent occupation and warfare
between the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge holdouts continued throughout the 1980s.
Peace efforts began in Paris in 1989, culminating two years later in October
1991 in a comprehensive peace settlement. The United Nations was given a
mandate to enforce a ceasefire, and deal with refugees and disarmament.
After the brutality of the 1970s and the 1980s, and the destruction of the
cultural, economic, social and political life of Cambodia, it is only in recent
years that reconstruction efforts have begun and some political stability has
finally returned to Cambodia. The stability established following the conflict
was shaken in 1997 during a coup d'état, but has otherwise remained in place.
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