Conflict Comes to Cambodia
The push for a communist revolution in Cambodia was largely connected and facilitated by the broader geopolitics of the Cold War. As with many former colonial states, Cambodia functioned as a proxy for the ideological struggle between, on the one hand, the United States of America (USA) and its ‘western' allies and, on the other hand, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the People's Republic of China (PRC), and their ‘eastern' allies.
Across the Indochina peninsula, various revolutionary movements - including both ‘Marxist' and non-Marxist factions - had long sought to liberate their homelands from French colonial rule. These efforts intensified in the years immediately following World War II, leading to the First Indochina War (1946-54).[880] For those individuals informed especially by Soviet ideology, including members of the Vietnamese Communist Party, successful liberation could only be achieved if all of Indochina was liberated. This meant in practice that victory in Vietnam was dependent upon victory in both Cambodia and Laos. Consequently, in 1951 the Khmer People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP) was founded. The precursor to the CPK, this organisation was heavily influenced directly by the Vietnamese communists, and indirectly by the USSR and PRC.In general, there was never a singular communist movement in Cambodia, but instead various factions that over the years ebbed and flowed as a result of external influences and internal dissent. Moreover, other social movements not aligned with communism came and went. Broadly speaking, Cambodian revolutionaries were motivated to a greater or lesser extent by three factors. First and most pressing, most if not all revolutionaries sought an independent, sovereign state, free from French colonial rule. A second motivating factor was a sense of widespread exploitation and oppression resultant in large part from perceived inequalities in land ownership.
This was an argument made most vehemently by those revolutionaries influenced by Marxism. A final and very much minority cause was anti-monarchical, that is, an argument to overthrow the long-standing prince, Norodom Sihanouk.In 1953 Cambodia - unlike Vietnam - was granted independence by the French. Thus, whereas Vietnamese revolutionaries continued to wage their anti-colonial war, this objective in Cambodia became moot. As David Chandler explains, most Cambodians ‘were reluctant to become involved in rebellious politics after Cambodia's independence had been won'. Stalwart communists, however, redirected their efforts, in part as a revolution against the monarchy of the reigning prince and, increasingly, as an anti-imperial revolution against the USA. This latter cause increased in importance as the USA gradually replaced France as the dominant foreign power in Indochina.
America's overt military involvement in Vietnam was gradual and haphazard, reflecting an ignorance and uncertainty over objective, policy and strategy. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV; i.e., North Vietnam) posed no military threat to the United States. However, convinced that the fall of Vietnam to communism would lead to the loss of all of South-East Asia, a succession of American presidents - from Dwight Eisenhower to Richard Nixon - came to believe that the establishment of a sovereign and non-communist state in southern Vietnam[881] was imperative. Indeed, Vietnam, itself standing for all of South-East Asia, became a ‘surrogate space', as both the country and the war became symbols of American geopolitical policy.[882]
Sustained aerial bombing campaigns against North Vietnam began in mid February 1965. Repeated sorties, however, failed to deliver the expected results and, consequently, American tacticians gradually expanded both the list of ‘acceptable' targets and the frequency of air-strikes. Consequently, sorties against the North increased from 25,000 in 1965, to 79,000 in 1966, and to 108,000 in 1967; bomb tonnage increased from 63,000 to 136,000 to 226,000 over the same period.
However, the DRV remained steadfast in the face of America's bombing campaign. This led to the gradual expansion of American ground forces, as the war continued to intensify in scale and scope. Not surprisingly, casualty rates in the growing conflict also rapidly spiked upward. Vietnamese civilian and military casualties nearly doubled from 13,000 in 1965 to approximately 24,000 in 1966.[883]Throughout the 1960s the conflict between the United States and North Vietnam expanded geographically. As early as 1959 the National Liberation Front (NLF; also known as Viet Cong) and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) began to use networks of trails in Laos and Cambodia as transit routes and sanctuaries from US bombing. These networks - what came to be known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail along the border with Laos and Cambodia, and the Sihanouk Trail within Cambodia - had been used by the Viet Minh during the First Indochina War to maintain north-south communication over hilly and densely forested terrain. Seeking to deprive its enemies of this strategic advantage, as early as 1965 US military leadership authorised bomber pilots to strike targets within Cambodia, an ostensibly neutral party to the conflict between the USA and the DRV. Between March 1969 and May 1970, the US Strategic Air Command conducted Operation Menu, a covert bombing campaign in eastern Cambodia intended to deprive Viet Cong forces of sanctuary and disrupt the flow of material and communication. Operation Menu was followed by Operation Freedom Deal, which ran until
August 1973. By the time all air campaigns were halted in late 1973, American B-52S had dropped over 260,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia - a figure that does not include the tonnage dropped by other American fighter planes.[884] [885] [886]
A defining moment in the growth of the Communist Party in Cambodia occurred in March 1970. While travelling to France, Sihanouk had entrusted his government to army general and prime minister Lon Nol and his proWestern deputy prime minister, Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak.
In Sihanouk's absence, Lon Nol and Sirik Matak launched attacks on the Vietnamese communist positions, organised anti-Vietnamese demonstrations, and reestablished ties with various non-communist groups. Sihanouk, upon learning of these actions, condemned both Lon Nol and Sirik Matak. In response, Sirik Matak pressured Lon Nol to depose Sihanouk and, on 18 March 1970, the National Assembly voted 89-3 to remove Sihanouk from power. 11Following the coup, Sihanouk was persuaded by the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai to form a military alliance with the Vietnamese and Cambodian communists and to lead a government-in-exile.12 Consequently, Sihanouk issued an appeal to the Cambodian people whereupon Royalist supporters would join the Khmer Rouge in a unified effort to defeat the Lon Nol government. The Khmer Rouge, for their part, continued to hold Sihanouk responsible for the war in Cambodia, but well understood his popularity. Accordingly, the coup was widely used for propaganda and recruitment purposes.
The alliance of Sihanouk with the CPK, coupled with the sustained and indiscriminate air campaign waged by the United States, contributed to the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Whereas in 1970 Khmer Rouge forces were described as ‘marginal', with perhaps only 4,000 members, by 1972 these forces were estimated to have grown to more than 20,000. Indeed, some US officials presented figures between 35,000 and 50,000, with some CIA estimates placing Khmer Rouge forces at over 150,000.[887] As one villager who joined the communist forces in 1970 recalls:
I saw them [the bombs] being dropped at Andaung Pring [village]... The bombs came tumbling down in a big clump... right onto Andaung Pring, and that time villagers were killed in amazing numbers... The bombs fell in the village, setting fire to people's houses and killing them... sometimes they didn't even have the time to get down out of their houses... The bombing was massive and devastating, and they just kept bombing more and more massively, so massively you couldn't believe it, so that it engulfed the forests, engulfed the forests with bombs, with devastation.[888]
From 1973 onward the CPK and its military wing, the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea, progressively ‘liberated' Cambodia from Lon Nol's Republican forces. When victory was achieved on 17 April 1975, however, it was not because of the military or strategic superiority of the Khmer Rouge. Ben Kiernan is blunt in his assessment: ‘Pol Pot's revolution would not have won power without [the] US economic and military destabilization of Cambodia.'[889] To this we must add the geopolitical machinations of the DRV, the PRC and the USSR, among many others.