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and lobbying for the withdrawal of assistance from the Thai border camps. Sir Robert
Jackson, the UN representative in charge of coordinating the relief effort, remarked in
1980 that “no humanitarian operation in this century has been so totally and continuously
influenced by political factors.” 16
The upshot was that international relief efforts were concentrated in the refugee camps
along the Thai frontier, now home to some 300,000 refugees. Scattered in a long arc along
the border, the camps were hotbeds of fear, starvation, and ennui, menaced by bandits,
thugs, and remnants of the DK regime. The first large-scale aid shipments reached the
area in October 1979. In the lawless atmosphere of the border, the influx of aid provided
easy pickings for the Khmer Rouge, who were soon running their own regimented camps
and appropriating aid supplies for their own use. Conditions in the DK camps recalled the
strict discipline of the Pol Pot years. Belgian journalist Jacques Bekaert recalled a “totally
different atmosphere” than in the other camps. “We were constantly being watched and
we never knew whether people were telling us what they thought, or what they were told
to say,” he recalled. 17 Though many lives were undoubtedly saved by the aid effort on
the border, it also helped rehabilitate the Khmer Rouge, bolstering its capacity to fight the
PRK and giving it access to a population base and a ready pool of recruits.
Other resistance groups soon surfaced in the Thai border camps. Arriving in February
1979 was Son Sann, an ex-president of the Cambodian National Bank who had served
briefly as prime minister under Sihanouk. Then in his seventies, Son Sann had spent the
DK years in Paris, heading an organization of Cambodian exiles. On October 9, in the
jungles along the Thai border, Son Sann announced the founding of the Khmer People's
National Liberation Front (KPNLF), which united a raft of Lon Nol-era figures and ob-
scure anticommunist rebel groups opposing the Vietnamese occupation. 18 Meanwhile
Prince Sihanouk, who had rebuffed an earlier request to head the KPNLF, assembled a
rival group of exiles under his own banner. The National United Front for an Independent,
Neutral, Peaceful and Co-operative Cambodia (known almost universally by its French
acronym, Funcinpec) was founded in Paris in February 1981, and took as its guiding
star the legacy and principles of the Sangkum regime. All three factions—the Khmer
Rouge, the KPNLF, and Funcinpec—received military aid from China. Funcinpec and the
KPNLF also received arms and economic support from the US.
As detailed reports of Khmer Rouge atrocities began to circulate in the West, the Kh-
mer Rouge gave themselves a political makeover. The architects of Cambodia's commun-
ist nightmare were now more “Khmer” than “Rouge.” In December 1981, Pol Pot offi-
cially disbanded the Communist Party of Kampuchea and started referring to his faction
as the Party of Democratic Kampuchea (PDK), which proclaimed its embrace of “capit-
alism,” and exchanged its Maoist-inspired doctrine for an extreme strain of Cambodian
nationalism focused on excoriation of the Vietnamese. In 1980 Khieu Samphan admitted
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