Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Descent into Civil War
The lines were drawn for a bloody era of civil war. Sihanouk was condemned to death in
absentia, a harsh move on the part of the new government that effectively ruled out any hint
of compromise for the next five years. Lon Nol gave communist Vietnamese forces an ulti-
matum to withdraw their units within one week, which amounted to a declaration of war, as
the Vietnamese did not want to return to the homeland to face the Americans.
On 30 April 1970, US and South Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia in an effort to
flush out thousands of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops who were using Cambodian
bases in their war to overthrow the South Vietnamese government. As a result of the inva-
sion, the Vietnamese communists withdrew deeper into Cambodia, further destabilising the
Lon Nol government. Cambodia's tiny army never stood a chance and within the space of a
few months, Vietnamese forces and their Khmer Rouge allies overran almost half the coun-
try. The ultimate humiliation came in July 1970 when the Vietnamese occupied the temples
of Angkor.
In 1969 the USA launched Operation Menu, the secret bombing of suspected communist
base camps in Cambodia. For the next four years, until bombing was halted by the US Con-
gress in August 1973, huge areas of the eastern half of the country were carpet bombed by
US B-52s, killing what is believed to be many thousands of civilians and turning hundreds
of thousands more into refugees. Undoubtedly, the bombing campaign helped the Khmer
Rouge in their recruitment drive, as more and more peasants were losing family members
to the aerial assaults. While the final, heaviest bombing in the first half of 1973 may have
saved Phnom Penh from a premature fall, its ferocity also helped to harden the attitude of
many Khmer Rouge cadres and may have contributed to the later brutality that character-
ised their rule.
Savage fighting engulfed the country, bringing misery to millions of Cambodians; many
fled rural areas for the relative safety of Phnom Penh and provincial capitals. Between
1970 and 1975, several hundred thousand people died in the fighting. During these years,
the Khmer Rouge came to play a dominant role in trying to overthrow the Lon Nol regime,
strengthened by the support of the Vietnamese, although the Khmer Rouge leadership
would vehemently deny this from 1975 onwards.
The leadership of the Khmer Rouge, including Paris-educated Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, had
fled into the countryside in the 1960s to escape the summary justice then being meted out
to suspected leftists by Sihanouk's security forces. They consolidated control over the
movement and began to move against opponents before they took Phnom Penh. Many of
