Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
rubber plantation east of Snuol, a few kilometers from the Vietnamese border, Cambod-
ian rebels and their Vietnamese overseers announced the formation of the Kampuchean
United Front for National Salvation (KUFNS, or the Front), which denounced the “bar-
barous policy of the Pol Pol-Ieng Sary gang” and promised to drive it from power.
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The invasion was launched on Christmas Day 1978. More than 100,000 battle-
hardened Vietnamese troops, accompanied by 20,000 rebels from the KUFNS, poured
across the border into DK. Despite Pol Pot's prediction of a quick victory, the regime
imploded with surprising speed. The Cambodian population, starved and weakened by
nearly four years of revolution, gratefully welcomed its liberation. Freed from his work-
site in Battambang, Kassie Neou remembered running down to the highway to kneel in
supplication as the Soviet-built T54 tanks rumbled past. The Khmer Rouge “disappeared
overnight. Even the village chief, his whole family. It was a liberation.”
Pol Pot and the DK leadership fled west toward the Thai border, leaving homes, of-
fices, and many government archives intact. On January 6, Sihanouk and his wife Mo-
nique were released from house arrest and flown out of the country aboard a Chinese
Boeing 707, bound via Beijing for New York and the United Nations. Accompanying
them were about a hundred Chinese diplomats and advisors, a troupe of Chinese acrobats,
and two Khmer Rouge “minders” who kept a close eye on the prince as he prepared to
denounce Vietnam's invasion to the world.
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Vietnamese advance units entered Phnom Penh the next morning, driving unimpeded
into the empty city center. Shortly after noon, rebel radio announced the collapse of “the
mare of Democratic Kampuchea was over. The insurgents' flag—a gold, five-towered
silhouette of Angkor Wat on a red field—flew over the capital. But the new war for Cam-
bodia had only just begun.
