Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
across the Pochentong tarmac four days after the fall of Phnom Penh, Hun Sen stepped
onto a new battlefield—politics.
Returning to Phnom Penh in January 1979, the PRK leaders and their Vietnamese allies
confronted a new Year Zero. Most of the country's physical infrastructure—along with
much of its skilled workforce—had been severely damaged or destroyed, and the social
system faced collapse. The education, health, and judicial systems had been eradicated.
In the countryside, agricultural production had regressed half a century under the Khmer
Rouge's crash-collectivization program, and rice fields lay fallow as disoriented Cambod-
ians, suddenly freed from the bondage of the communal worksites, wandered the coun-
tryside in search of their original homes and lost relatives. Red Cross and UNICEF of-
ficials estimated that just 5 percent of the country's fields remained under cultivation in
July 1979, and famine threatened. 9 A new economy and system of administration had to
be built from scratch and the newly installed “government” immediately set out to as-
semble the few qualified individuals who could be found. “We enlisted anybody who
could read and write,” recalled one government official. “In that way, somehow we man-
aged to get a government together.” 10
For the PRK, liberation from Khmer Rouge rule meant a second revolution, a more
“authentic” form of socialism constructed along Vietnamese lines. The ruling Kam-
puchean People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP), officially unveiled in 1981, claimed to
represent the “true” lineage of Cambodian communism. It adopted both the name and
history of Cambodia's first communist party, founded by the Vietnamese in 1951, and
continued to extoll April 17, 1975 as a shining victory that had been hijacked almost im-
mediately by Pol Pot and his “genocidal clique.” Launching the KUFNS on December 2,
1978, Heng Samrin promised that DK's most hated policies would be abolished. “Every-
where,” Samrin said, “our people have witnessed massacres, more atrocious, more bar-
barous, than those committed in the Dark Ages or perpetuated by the Hitlerite fascists.” 11
PRK rule was benign next to the hecatomb of the Pol Pot years, but the regime re-
mained staunchly communist. When the schools reopened, portraits of Heng Samrin,
Stalin, and Ho Chi Minh were hung from classroom walls and government workers were
subjected to tedious political education sessions. More problematic from the perspective
of many Cambodians was the regime's near-total reliance on Vietnam. Until 1989 the re-
gime was propped up by a Vietnamese occupation force of more than 100,000, and as-
sisted by a separate corps of Vietnamese advisors posted in every ministry and party of-
fice. To oversee this shadow administration, Hanoi appointed Le Duc Tho, the communist
éminence grise most famous for helping negotiate the 1973 Paris Peace Accord with the
United States, and then, when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with Henry
Kissinger, for turning it down.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search