Civil War, Genocide and CEDORECK
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Chapter 2 Civil War, Genocide and CEDORECK By 1965, the spillover effect of the U.S. ‘Vietnam War’ on Cambodia was unmistakable. One year earlier, Sihanouk broke off diplomatic relations with the United States. He allied himself with the North Vietnamese, allowing the communist guerillas to set up bases in Cambodia. It was around this time that Cambodian insurgents known as the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) began to consolidate their power along the border with Vietnam. Sihanouk called them the Khmer Rouge. Despite a marked reverse in his political ori- entations in favor of the right, Sihanouk was deposed by a coup d’état by his prime minister in April 1970, paving the way for the institution of the Khmer Republic. The event, at least symbolically, marks the turning point when the country began to descend into internal political chaos. The new decade and the deposition of Sihanouk launched a spiral of political upheavals and the effective dislocation of Cambodia as a country, worse, as a society. Tensions had been high for some time with Sihanouk increasingly caught in a vainglori- ous attempt at self-legitimation while the war that was raging in neighboring Vietnam and Laos had already spilled over into Cambodian soil. The conflict eventually brought down the regime and with it the whole nation in a whirl- pool of destruction and death. 1 The Khmer Republic (1970–1975) The short-lived Khmer Republic that followed Sihanouk’s demise was almost immediately engulfed in civil war. The regime was right wing in inspiration, pro-American, and staunchly anti-Vietnamese. Its anti-communist attitude aggravated an openly racist stance particularly vis-à-vis the ethnic Vietnamese community living in the country. The new regime led pogroms against Vietnamese in the capital and other major city centers. Meanwhile, encour- aged by the United States, the new head of state Marshal Lon Nol launched a series of offensives against the North Vietnamese armed forces in Cambodia. These attempts proved disastrous. The inexperienced Cambodian army suf- fered heavy losses. At first, many Cambodians in the cities supported the new regime for what they hoped would inaugurate a less arbitrary and infantilizing model of gov- ernance than Sihanouk’s. By contrast, rural Cambodians continued to harbor © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004437357_005 40 Chapter 2 support for the Prince. An increasing number of them eventually joined the communist guerilla, particularly once they knew that Sihanouk had rallied it. Lon Nol soon found himself controlling only the capital city and several provincial capitals while their peripheries became unstable. Even as Lon Nol felt order and stability slipping away, the “Marshall head of state” imple- mented a policy of ‘Cambodianization’ aimed at uprooting the monarchical tradition while simultaneously promoting Cambodian nationalism. Not unlike Sihanouk’s emphasis on ‘Buddhist Socialism’ but with a racialist undertone that prefigured the Khmer Rouge, Lon Nol’s policy of ‘Neo-Khmerism’ drew on the glorious past of the Cambodian nation. A new form of ethnicity-based ultra-nationalist republicanism rooted in the worship of a mythical ‘Khmer race’ permeated political and social life. Once again, the state was to be the sole provider of a collective official ideology as it tried to control all modes of educational and cultural production. Increasingly, the republican regime became caught in a deadly spiral of “despondency, rivalry, factionalism, and corruption”, a trend that inevitably led to defeat.1 The Republic totally depended on U.S. military support cou- pled with ‘economic assistance’. Immediately after Sihanouk’s overthrow, the U.S. targeted eastern Cambodia for one of the most destructive bombing cam- paigns ever unleashed in an attempt to stamp out the Communist guerillas. Over a hundred thousand tons of bombs fell on the Cambodian countryside killing an estimated six hundred thousand Cambodians – nearly ten percent of the population – and leaving nearly two million people as internal refugees.2 If it temporarily halted the activities of the Communists, the campaign, which lasted until August 1973, largely contributed to hardening the will of those who survived while it also enabled them to recruit large numbers of incensed peasants.3 In April 1975, the communist forces finally converged on Phnom Penh. The Republic’s army disintegrated. Upon seizing the capital, the Khmer Rouge executed the regime’s leaders and Lon Nol fled into exile.4 As far as public print and media culture were concerned, the short period of the Khmer Republic was initially characterized by a real outburst of initia- tives, especially advantageous to the press. This trend was at first encouraged by the new regime as a reaction to the propaganda of the Sihanouk regime. Yet, this embracing of political modernity – with the introduction of television 1 Ayres (2000). Anatomy of a Crisis, p. 67. 2 Kiljunen, Kimmo (ed.) (1994). Kampuchea: Decade of the Genocide: Report of a Finnish Enquiry Commission. London: Zed Books, pp. 5–6. 3 Chandler (2008). History of Cambodia, p. 252. 4 “The last four years of the Khmer Republic were violent and melancholy.” In Chandler (2008). Ibid., p. 252..