by Peter Church
Simultaneously, Democratic supporters found themselves facing violent intimidation from Sihanouk's security forces. Voting procedures at the elections were flagrantly fixed. It is debatable who would have won free and fair elections—Sihanouk the national hero and now apparently a political progressive, or the Democrats—but, in the event, Sihanouk's Sangkum won every seat in the Assembly. After continuing harassment, the Democratic Party dissolved in 1957. Sihanouk, though technically no longer king, now truly seemed to be monarch of all he surveyed.
For over a decade after 1955 he continued to show great adroitness and energy. He personally oversaw all facets of government, controlled news and information, and regularly addressed the people. His rhetoric of “Buddhist Socialism,” coming from the lips of a man who retained the aura of a semi‐divine king, seemed to offer something for everyone. He bemused his critics of both the left and the right, leaving them unsure where he, or they, stood. Sihanouk enjoyed surprising people with sudden switches of policy, though whether these switches arose from calculation or whim was never clear. The sole constant of his rule was intolerance of opposition. Hundreds of dissidents “disappeared” during this period.
Stifling the discord which undoubtedly would have appeared in a more open political system was Sihanouk's main, if dubious, domestic achievement. He gave Cambodia a kind of peace, which, in later years, many Cambodians would remember fondly. Another domestic achievement was the expansion of education, on which Sihanouk spent as much as 20 percent of the national budget. Large numbers of secondary‐ and tertiary‐educated young people emerged. Crucially, however, Sihanouk was uninterested in economic matters, and under him the Cambodian economy, after initial growth, went into decline. The combination of stifled political life, an expanding educated class (many of whom were unemployed or underemployed), and a decaying economy would prove disastrous for Sihanouk and Cambodia's domestic peace.
Looming over that peace was the resumed conflict in neighbouring Vietnam. Sihanouk was anxious to save his country from involvement in the conflict, but he also wanted to position Cambodia and himself to be on good terms with the victor. To these ends he proclaimed Cambodia's neutrality but judged it expedient to tilt to the left in foreign and domestic policy. In 1963, he rejected US aid and nationalised Cambodia's banks and import–export trade in the name of socialism. In 1965, he broke off diplomatic relations with the United States. Secretly, meanwhile, he accepted the use of Cambodian territory by North Vietnamese forces and the southern Vietnamese NLF insurgents in their fight against the US‐backed Saigon regime. Openly, he established cordial relations with China, perhaps hoping that China might restrain any larger Vietnamese designs on Cambodia.
The rejection of US aid reduced Cambodia's income significantly and disgruntled Cambodia's conservatives, particularly in the military. Nationalisation disgruntled the business elite, heightened inefficiency and corruption, and led to hard times for the people. Sihanouk's toleration of Vietnamese forces on Cambodian soil (who received supplies via the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville) disturbed patriotic Cambodian sentiment.
Around 1966 Sihanouk seems to have tired of his political juggling. His hands‐on control diminished and the power of the conservative forces in Sangkum and his administration increased. There was growing popular disillusionment with Sihanouk's policies and style, at least in urban areas. The countryside presented a mixed picture; Sihanouk's reputation remained high with many rural people, but in remoter areas a small but revivified communist insurgency was gaining ground. In 1967–68, government forces brutally crushed a peasant revolt in the north‐west to which the communists had given leadership. (The revolt was caused by government seizures of rice at low prices under Sihanouk's nationalisation policies.)
In 1969, Sihanouk cautiously reopened diplomatic relations with the United States, but this now seemed more a sign of indecisiveness than of his old political skills. In March 1970, while Sihanouk was overseas, the predominantly conservative National Assembly withdrew confidence in Sihanouk as head of state. The principal force behind the move was Sihanouk's cousin and deputy prime minister Sisowath Sirik Matak. Sihanouk's prime minister and longtime associate, Lon Nol, went along with the move, and became head of the new government of the “Khmer Republic” declared in October 1970.
WAR AND REVOLUTION, 1970–1975
The coup against Sihanouk polarised the population. The Lon Nol government initially enjoyed significant support, but Sihanouk rallied antigovernment opinion. In late March 1970, he broadcast from Beijing, appealing to people to “engage in guerilla warfare in the jungles against our enemies.” The main beneficiaries of his appeal were the communist insurgents, who now enjoyed Sihanouk's blessing and prestige. Moving swiftly to capitalise on their windfall, by 1972 the communists had effectively ranged the countryside against Phnom Penh and other urban areas. Meanwhile, the Lon Nol government proved tragically inept. A series of drives by government forces against the Vietnamese forces in Cambodia in 1970–71 were repulsed with massive casualties, permanently weakening the government's military capabilities. Ironically, the Vietnamese would withdraw from Cambodia voluntarily in early 1973.
The United States backed the Lon Nol government, but resumed US aid served mainly to foster gross corruption in the administration and the military. Lon Nol suffered a stroke in 1971 and failed thereafter to give strong leadership to his factionalised and increasingly demoralised power base. US bombing of the countryside—massive in intensity and appallingly destructive—probably slowed the communist‐led advance on Phnom Penh but also drove many of the population to support the insurgency and to regard the US‐aligned urban areas with bitter hatred.
In the United States, dwindling confidence in President Nixon and growing opposition to his handling of the Indochina conflict led the US Congress to end the bombing of Cambodia. Thereafter it was a matter of time before the Lon Nol regime collapsed. The insurgents took Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975.
“DEMOCRATIC KAMPUCHEA”: KHMER ROUGE GOVERNMENT, 1975–1979
The name “Khmer Rouge” (strictly “Khmers Rouges”—red Khmers) was popularised by Sihanouk in the 1960s as a term for leftist antigovernment forces in the countryside. It has remained the name in general use for the forces who took power in 1975, set up a state they called “Democratic Kampuchea,” and who, after their overthrow in 1979, resumed rural‐based insurgency. In April 1975, however, these forces called themselves angkar padevat (“revolutionary organization”). Their communist leadership was not made explicit until September 1977, when the existence of the CPK (Communist Party of Kampuchea) was announced.
The CPK had been set up in 1968 to resume the insurgency tactics abandoned by the former Khmer People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP) in 1954. In the intervening years the KPRP, based in Vietnam, had continued underground recruitment in Cambodia. Its most famous recruit in retrospect was a young middle‐class, Paris‐educated schoolteacher, Saloth Sar, who would take the name Pol Pot and rise to leadership of the CPK.
Under Pol Pot the CPK devised a ferociously radical programme of reform for Cambodia. In April 1975, the country was sealed off from the outside world. Phnom Penh and other urban centres were forcefully evacuated and left mostly to decay. All Cambodians were to become farmers under the direction of the angkar padevat. Markets, private trade, and the use of money were abolished. Professional activity ceased. Books were forbidden and education was abandoned—except for propaganda sessions. Religion was proscribed and the sangha dispersed; many former places of worship were levelled. Angkar dictated people's movements, activities, food allowances, and dress. Former upper‐ and middle‐class people, former government employees, most professionals, and most educated people were treated as expendable labour in the countryside. Many died.
Pol Pot's government glorified ancient Angkor but otherwise almost wholly repudiated Cambodia's past. A totally new “Kampuchea” was going to be built, starting in 1975—“Year Zero.” The origins of this apocalyptic pr
ogramme have been much debated by commentators. Influences on the CPK leadership may have included extreme left‐wing theories fashionable in France in the 1950s and 1960s and Mao's “Great Leap Forward” and “Cultural Revolution” in China. But “Pol Potism” was distinctively Cambodian in making popular resentment of Cambodia's humiliating national history the main driving force of revolution. The revolution's enemies were not only the class enemies defined by Marx but any foreign peoples who had degraded Cambodia—led by the Vietnamese, Thais, and Americans—and any Cambodians who had colluded with them, which to the CPK meant all city folk. The brutal simplicity of these doctrines, and the vision of building a new Khmer society untainted by foreigners and the old elite, appealed particularly to youth. The lower echelons of angkar were mainly made up of young people, many still teenagers.
The consequences of the CPK's programme were catastrophic. Conditions of life varied from province to province, but hardship was severe to extreme everywhere. While an estimated 500,000 Cambodians had died during the 1970–75 war, over one million more would die under Khmer Rouge rule, from brutality and callousness, mismanagement, malnutrition, disease, and the virtual abolition of medical services.
The CPK leadership's particular hatred of the Vietnamese had several consequences. First, the party began to repudiate its Vietnamese‐sponsored background. The repudiation turned into a purge of CPK cadres and members who had been trained in Vietnam or who were thought to sympathise with Vietnam's communist government. Tens of thousands died, often after brutal torture, though some escaped to Vietnam. Second, Cambodian forces staged repeated incursions into Vietnam, seeking redefinition of the Viet–Cambodian border. Third, Viet–Cambodian relations came to mirror the great split in the communist world—while Vietnam was closely aligned with the USSR, Cambodia moved under the protection of China.
Vietnam staged a warning offensive into Cambodia in late 1977, but subsequently withdrew its troops, massing them along the border. Provocation continued, however, and on Christmas Day 1978 the Vietnamese again invaded. Khmer Rouge forces collapsed before them and the Vietnamese entered a ghostly Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979. Soon Vietnamese forces in Cambodia would number 250,000. They failed, however, to capture Pol Pot or his close colleagues.
CAMBODIA A “VIETNAMESE PROTECTORATE,” 1979–1991
Though initially welcomed by most Cambodians, the Vietnamese were aware of the centuries‐old fear of Vietnam in the country. They also knew that their invasion of a sovereign nation, however repellent its government, could bring international condemnation. Thus, they rapidly established the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) under a government headed by Cambodians, mostly former CPK members who had fled the party's purges. These included Heng Samrin, head of state, and Hun Sen, who would become premier in 1985. Although another one‐party state, the new government was relatively laissez faire in the economic and social fields, dismantling the Khmer Rouge's collective farming and restoring the use of money and private trade.
Cambodian society was by now utterly destabilised. Before traditional farming could be restored, Cambodia suffered terrible famine. Only by the mid‐1980s would the traditional subsistence economy regain equilibrium and the shops and markets of the towns return to precarious life. Meanwhile the PRK, like Vietnam, became an international pariah, supported only by the Soviet bloc and some neutral nations such as India. The United States, China, Thailand, and the other ASEAN nations led international condemnation of the Vietnamese presence in Cambodia and of the PRK puppet government. Denied legitimacy, the PRK was also denied much international economic aid and trade.
The pawns in this standoff, apart from the general Cambodian population, were hundreds of thousands of Cambodian refugees camped along the Thai–Cambodian border, who had fled war, famine, the Khmer Rouge, or the Vietnamese occupation. Working amongst them were two Cambodian political organisations—the Khmer Rouge and the KPNLF (Khmer People's National Liberation Front), a non‐communist, anti‐Vietnamese body headed by Son Sann, a former prime minister. The Khmer Rouge enjoyed the staunch backing of China, then also at loggerheads with Vietnam, and received Chinese military aid funneled through Thailand. Despite its grotesque record, the Khmer Rouge also enjoyed international prestige as Cambodia's “legitimate” government, holding Cambodia's seat at the United Nations. Inside Cambodia the Khmer Rouge maintained a shadowy guerilla presence, despite every effort by Vietnamese and PRK forces to eliminate it.
In the early 1980s, Sihanouk and his son, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, also established an anti‐PRK organisation, FUNCINPEC (the French acronym for National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful, and Co‐operative Cambodia). Sihanouk had survived the years of Khmer Rouge government under virtual house arrest (he lost 14 children and grandchildren in those years) and was at this point based in Beijing or, sometimes in North Korea. In mid‐1982 a shaky coalition was brokered between the three Cambodian anti‐PRK organisations. The Khmer Rouge announced the abolition of the CPK and claimed to be abandoning its former policies. Few believed this.
The international impasse continued through the 1980s. In 1989, Vietnam withdrew its troops from Cambodia, partly because the PRK government now appeared self‐sustaining but mainly because of Vietnam's loss of Soviet aid following the collapse of the USSR. In Cambodia, in 1990, the PRK transformed itself into the SOC (State of Cambodia), which effectively committed itself to a private‐enterprise economy, as Vietnam and China were doing. The SOC government also became active in restoring Cambodian Buddhism.
The ending of the Cold War and the changing economic goals of China and Vietnam opened the possibility of ending the standoff over Cambodia. After much diplomacy in which Australia played a key role, 20 nations convened in Paris in October 1991. The conference persuaded the SOC government and the three opposition organizations to form a coalition administration pending national elections under United Nations supervision. The inclusion of the Khmer Rouge in this arrangement shocked many people, inside and outside Cambodia, but the move has been defended as the only means of breaking the deadlock, given China's inability to abandon the Khmer Rouge without losing international face. The assumption of responsibility for Cambodia by the UN and the promised elections gave China the chance to discard its ties with the Khmer Rouge.
UNTAC, THE 1993 ELECTIONS, AND THE ROYAL GOVERNMENT OF CAMBODIA
The United Nations established UNTAC (United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia), which came to consist of 22,000 personnel, two‐thirds of them military, from a number of nations. UNTAC's main tasks were to disarm the forces of all four Cambodian factions, repatriate the refugees, monitor the coalition administration of the country (in practice the SOC administration and security apparatus retained great power), and prepare the planned elections. UNTAC's achievements were mixed. The refugees were repatriated but the disarmament process collapsed in May 1992 when the Khmer Rouge, and then SOC, refused to participate. UNTAC also failed to deal with charges that the SOC security forces were using violence against their coalition partners, especially Sihanouk's FUNCINPEC. Sihanouk himself played an unnerving role in this period, appearing in Cambodia to warm popular acclaim but disappearing back to Beijing or Pyongyang with expressions of displeasure and foreboding.
UNTAC won plaudits, however, for its handling of the elections in May 1993. Nearly 90 percent of enrolled voters (close to five million people) went to the polls, despite threats of Khmer Rouge violence. The Khmer Rouge had decided to boycott the elections, presumably fearing a dismal rebuff from the people. FUNCINPEC candidates won 58 of the available 120 assembly seats. Candidates from the former SOC government contested the election as the CPP (Cambodian People's Party) and won 51 seats. Son Sann's group, now the BLDP (Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party), took ten seats and a minor party took the one remaining seat.
Elements of the CPP disputed these results but others manoeuvred to retain a prominent role in government—a role they were virtually guaranteed anyway, give
n CPP's strength in the bureaucracy, military, and police. The following months of deal‐making seemed to many observers to decline into a scramble by all parties for the perks of office, a scramble complicated by factionalism within each of the parties. Two months after the election an interim coalition administration was formed, which, in September, became the Royal Government of Cambodia—in the same month, the Assembly recognized Sihanouk as Cambodia's King once more. Heading the coalition government were Prince Norodom Ranariddh (FUNCINPEC) as “first” prime minister and Hun Sen (CPP) as “second” prime minister. Similar balances had been constructed throughout the ministry. King Sihanouk—technically now a constitutional monarch presiding over a pluralistic, democratic political system—continued to intervene in policy making, despite reports that he was now ill with cancer. Some felt his meddling was destabilising while others saw it as constructive attempts to balance the antagonistic forces grouped within the government.
CAMBODIA IN THE 21ST CENTURY
The coalition between Hun Sen and Ranariddh—fragile and acrimonious at the best of times—ruptured in 1997 following a violent power struggle that saw the latter forced to flee into temporary exile overseas. Following threats by foreign donors to withdraw aid and calls for reconciliation by King Sihanouk, Hun Sen and his CPP agreed to hold fresh elections in July 1998. These were marred by violence and accusations of vote‐buying, and resulted in an easy victory for the CPP. Opposition leaders Ranariddh and Sam Rainsy (of the Sam Rainsy Party, formerly the Khmer Nation Party) dismissed the result as a fraud. However, their capacity to do anything about it was circumscribed by Hun Sen's control of the government and military as well as the official media. In addition, foreign observers reported that although the CPP had marshalled these forces during the election to influence otherwise‐apathetic villagers in a way its opponents could not match, the poll was generally free and fair nonetheless, and the result an accurate reflection of the majority's wishes. Such was Hun Sen's dominance in the subsequent years that his party defeated the opposition to claim 47 percent of all votes cast during general elections in July 2003. FUNCINPEC (which gained 21 percent) and the Sam Rainsy Party (SRP, which gained 22 percent) immediately claimed that the ballot was not free and fair and demanded that Hun Sen step down. Since the CPP had failed to obtain a two‐thirds majority of National Assembly seats, which would have enabled it to form a single‐party government, it was forced to negotiate. It was not until June 2004 that it was able to reach an agreement with FUNCINPEC. In general elections in July 2008, the CPP won a convincing victory with 58 percent of the vote, entitling Hun Sen's party to 90 seats in the 123‐seat National Assembly. This compared with SRP's 22 percent (26 seats) and other parties, including FUNCINPEC, gaining only 20 percent (7 seats). During the 2013 elections, Hun Sen and the CPP won 68 seats of the 123‐seat parliament while the SRP, led by Sam Rainsy, who returned from exile, won 55 seats. This was an increase of 29 seats from the last election in 2008. As a result, CPP lost the two‐thirds majority which had enabled it to rewrite the constitution. Minor parties, including the once‐formidable FUNCINPEC, were obliterated.