Khmer_Rouge_Speech

The Khmer Rouge Cambodia is a small nation that lies in South-East Asia and borders Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. For centuries it lay dormant from the outside world where European countries scrambled the globe for an empire whereas it remained highly underdeveloped with its people’s lives revolving around agriculture working as farmers cultivating rice and fishing from the many river systems, and without a modern well equipped army the country lay open for colonization with no resistance. In 1863 Cambodia fell under French colonisation and influence when it became incorporated into French Indochina. French Colonists oppressed and discriminated against the people, exploited the nation of its resources and as the French got significantly wealthy they left the Cambodians in poverty, which lead to much hatred against French colonists and western ways. When the French left after the first Indochina war, Cambodia was involved in many prevailing events in the ensuing years in the Indochinese region such as the second Indochina war and the Vietnam War in which these resulted in great instability within the country and eventually lead to the rise of one of the most infamous political parties in modern history-the Khmer Rouge The Khmer Rouge started as an underground communist movement named the Indochinese Communist Party in 1951, which consisted of three separate parties, these being Lao, Vietnamese and Cambodian, with the Cambodian party being called ‘The Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party’. This party was soon joined, in 1953 by Saloth Sar, commonly known as Pol Pot-the man who was to be the future leader of the Khmer Rouge. In the years following he rose through the ranks of the party with his Marxist and Maoist ideologies proving popular with other members. The party was subject to much persecution and suppression by Prince Sihanouk, with many members being arrested, harassed and even assassinated. When the leader of the party Ton Samouth was assassinated in July of 1962, Pol Pot was elected to replace him, and he thereby became the leader of the Communist Party. So as to avoid any more losses they changed the name to the Communist Party of Kampuchea and in July of 1963 Pol Pot and the central committee fled Phnom Penh for the isolated Province of Ratanakiri in north east Cambodia. This region was home to tribal groups who were treated harshly by Sihanouk and his government where they were forced into resettlement and forced assimilation, which made them willing recruits for a guerrilla struggle. In 1965 Prince Sihanouk negotiated a deal with North Vietnam and China in relation to their war against South Vietnam. The deal allowed North Vietnam and China to have their troops build permanent military facilities on Cambodian soil, and Cambodia opened its ports to shipments of military supplies from China and the Soviet Union to North Vietnam, in exchange for these concessions, large sums of money passed through the Cambodia elite. While Sihanouk told his citizens that Cambodia was neutral in the Vietnam War, he had in effect brought Cambodia directly into the Vietnam conflict. Having created their own armed forces, the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea, the party led an armed struggle against the government in 1967, where they made several small scale attempts at insurgency which were met with little success. The following year they led an insurgency on a national level across Cambodia, where their forces received support in the form of shelter and weapons from North Vietnam, which gave them an advantage over the Royal Cambodian Army who were insufficient and poorly motivated and unable to effectively counter Khmer attacks. During March of 1970 Defence Minister Lon Nol and other rightist Cambodian politicians were becoming increasingly frustrated with Prince Sihanouk. The basis for this was that they felt Sihanouk’s policy of tolerance with the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese armies within Cambodian borders was unacceptable, and they were frightened at the prospect of Cambodia becoming a Communist state because of Sihanouk’s increasing closer relations with North Vietnam and China. The government waited until Sihanouk was out of the country touring Europe, the Soviet Union and China and then the government, under direction from Prime Minister In Tam held the debate within the National Assembly, and all but one politician voted unanimously to remove Sihanouk. Hearing the news of the coup from Beijing, Sihanouk, out of anger and revenge allied himself with the Khmer Rouge, and via radio called for an uprising against the new government. The popular support for Prince Sihanouk in rural areas across the country, allowed the Khmer Rouge to extend its power and influence throughout the nation. The Khmer Rouge seized this opportunity and offered their support for the Prince, thereby gaining the support of the peasants who thought they were fighting for the restoration of Prince Sihanouk. This was to be the beginning of a full-scale civil war in Cambodia. That same year, the U.S. invaded Cambodia with the aim of expelling the North Vietnamese from their border encampments. The subsequent bombing in the invasion led to the deaths of thousands of innocent Cambodian civilians. In resentment of the American invasion many Cambodians sent their children off to fight for the Khmer Rouge. Apart from greatly increasing in numbers and force the Khmer Rouge allied themselves North Vietnamese troops as the American invasion in fact drove the North Vietnamese deeper into Cambodia where they simply allied themselves with the Khmer Rouge. The American bombing campaign which had begun in 1969, that targeted North Vietnamese encampments in eastern Cambodia, resulted in deaths of some 150,000 Cambodian peasants by the time they ended in 1973, leading many Cambodians who resented or had lost family members in the bombings to join the Khmer Rouge out of resentment, in that they felt that the new government headed by Lon Nol wasn’t doing enough for Cambodia and wasn’t capable of protewcting its people, and so the Cambodian people began to feel that they needed a newer and stronger government, and the government they saw fit as being capable of protecting its people was that of the Khmer Rouge. From 1972 onwards the party began the difficult operation of working to cut all lines of communication off from Phnom Penh to effectively isolate the government from the rest of Cambodia and from the Indochinese region by cutting all overland communications with its ally South Vietnam. This in effect would lead to the isolation and fragmentation of Government forces as they were unable to lend one another mutual support, and the Khmer Rouge could then, out of dividing and conquering eliminate government forces very easily, and this would be the beginning of the Khmer Rouge paving their way to capturing the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. In January 1973 the Paris Peace Accords resulted in U.S troops withdrawing from Vietnam and Cambodia, and U.S Congress refused to continue funding for the American bombing campaign and refused to supply Cambodia with vital military aid. Lon Nol would have to defend himself. This decision by U.S congress, in effect, left the door wide open for the Khmer Rouge as they now had no major opposition, and they now received greater support from North Vietnam and China than ever before and about 85 percent of Cambodian territory was in the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Burdened with heavy casualties, low recruitment and desertions in the Army; the Cambodian Government was left with no other option but to introduce conscription in March of 1973 as there forces suffered heavy casualties against the stronger, better equipped Khmer Rouge. In April Khmer forces launched an offensive that brought them into the outer suburbs of Phnom Penh, however intense U.S bombing saw them retreat back into the country side. By late 1974, the party’s tactics of isolating Phnom Penh and of dividing and conquering government forces had proved successful, and the Khmer Rouge now lay on the outskirts of Phnom Penh making preparations for their final attack. On New Year’s Day of January 1975 the Khmer Rouge launched their final assault on the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. The cities last troop regiment began to fall apart as they lay deprived of supplies, support and adequate leadership. The Khmer Rouge remained strengthened by a steady flow of supplies from Hanoi, and now pushed into the outer suburbs of Phnom Penh. By March it was evident that the city would fall into the hands of the Khmer Rouge, and the U.S began the evacuation of its Embassy diplomats, along with various Cambodian government officials. Five days later on the 17th of April 1975, the last solid defences of the city were overcome and 40,000 Khmer Rouge troops marched unopposed into the besieged capital of Phnom Penh; the civil war was finally over. Residents of the city celebrated with joy that peace rained throughout the nation, but this joy would soon end as the Khmer Rouge began to forcibly empty the city and drive the population to the country side where they would begin the implementation of their merciless doctrines, and Cambodia would be the birth place of one of the worst genocides of the 20th century, with the deaths of more than two million civilians. Year Zero had begun. By Jackson Neaves