Hun Sen's Cambodia. By Sebastian Strangio

Abstract

In the 1960s, Cambodian head of state Prince Norodom Sihanouk unsuccessfully sought to distance his kingdom from the bloodletting of neighbouring states. Hard-pressed to enforce strict neutrality and inclined to believe that the United States would eventually quit the region anyhow, he edged strategically leftward, casting an ever more complicit eye on the growing number of Vietnamese combatants who sheltered and resupplied on Cambodian soil. American military planners responded in kind, targeting communist bases for cross-border raids and, in due course, backing a putsch that ousted Sihanouk, all but ending the authority of the Cambodian state. A very uncivil war followed. With stunning speed, troops of the newly proclaimed Khmer Republic lost the countryside to an expanding communist force, despite (or quite possibly because of) a relentless American air assault on rebel positions that constituted one of the heaviest aerial bombardments in the history of warfare. A victorious Khmer Rouge then declared the establishment of Democratic Kampuchea and began emptying its cities and forests of myriad enemies, hundreds of thousands of whom were put to death over the next three and a half years. The purge was still under way when Vietnamese troops intervened, occupying (or arguably liberating) the country and establishing a puppet administration led by a group of Khmer Rouge defectors. The struggle did not end there: deposed Khmer factions of all stripes regrouped on the border and, with liberal doses of economic and military aid from China and the United States, fought each other and the Vietnamese for the better part of the next decade. Indeed, by the time peace talks bore fruit in the late 1980s, Cambodians had been killing each other for some 20 years and roughly a quarter of the population, some 2 million people, had died for no particular end.