The Khmer Republic’s mass persecution of the Vietnamese minority in Cambodia 1970–75

Abstract

Primarily drawing on archival documents at the Vietnamese National Archives No. 2 in Ho Chi Minh City, this chapter argues that the anti-Vietnamese nationalism articulated and interpolated by the Khmer Republic under Marshall Lon Nol’s leadership caused an extremely violent persecution of the Vietnamese minority in Cambodia in the early 1970s. The Lon Nol regime, enthusiastically backed by other nationalist leaders, intellectuals, and mass media, was willing to escalate its ethnic cleansing of the Vietnamese minority to the detriment of its alliance with the Republic of Vietnam, whose economic and military aid became the lifeline of the Khmer Republic. The Republic of Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu’s repeated appeal to the Nixon administration in 1970–1971 to stop Lon Nol’s racist pogrom of the Vietnamese residents in Cambodia fell on deaf ears in Washington as realpolitik – that is the Nixon administration’s support of the pro-US Lon Nol regime in the war against their common enemy, the Vietnamese communists, inside Cambodia – trumped any human rights concern in the remote Southeast Asian nation. On the contrary, anti-Vietnamese nationalism fueled by the Khmer Republic’s growing fear of the Vietnamese of all ideological leanings overshadowed the regime’s indispensible security reliance on South Vietnam.