Cambodian Civil War
The Cambodian Civil War (Khmer: សង្គ្រាមស៊ីវិលកម្ពុជា, UNGEGN: Sângkréam Sivĭl Kâmpŭchéa) was a civil war in Cambodia fought between the forces of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (known as the Khmer Rouge, supported by North Vietnam and the Viet Cong) against the government forces of the Kingdom of Cambodia and, after October 1970, the Khmer Republic, which had succeeded the kingdom (both supported by the United States and South Vietnam).
The struggle was complicated by the influence and actions of the allies of the two warring sides. North Vietnam's People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) involvement was designed to protect its Base Areas and sanctuaries in eastern Cambodia, without which it would have been harder to pursue its military effort in South Vietnam. Their presence was at first tolerated by Prince Sihanouk, the Cambodian head of state, but domestic resistance combined with China and North Vietnam continuing to provide aid to the anti-government Khmer Rouge alarmed Sihanouk and caused him to go to Moscow to request the Soviets rein in the behavior of North Vietnam.[6] The deposition of Sihanouk by the Cambodian National Assembly in March 1970, following wide scale protests in the capital against the presence of PAVN troops in the country, put a pro-American government in power (later declared the Khmer Republic) which demanded that the PAVN leave Cambodia. The PAVN refused and, at the request of the Khmer Rouge, promptly invaded Cambodia in force.
Between March and June 1970, the North Vietnamese captured most of the northeastern third of the country in engagements with the Cambodian army. The North Vietnamese turned over some of their conquests and provided other assistance to the Khmer Rouge, thus empowering what was at the time a small guerrilla movement.[7] The Cambodian government hastened to expand its army to combat the North Vietnamese and the growing power of the Khmer Rouge.[8]
The U.S. was motivated by the desire to buy time for its withdrawal from Southeast Asia, to protect its ally in South Vietnam, and to prevent the spread of communism to Cambodia. American and both South and North Vietnamese forces directly participated (at one time or another) in the fighting. The U.S. assisted the central government with massive U.S. aerial bombing campaigns and direct material and financial aid, while the North Vietnamese kept soldiers on the lands that they had previously occupied and occasionally engaged the Khmer Republic army in ground combat.
After five years of savage fighting, the Republican government was defeated on 17 April 1975 when the victorious Khmer Rouge proclaimed the establishment of Democratic Kampuchea. The war caused a refugee crisis in Cambodia with two million people—more than 25 percent of the population—displaced from rural areas into the cities, especially Phnom Penh which grew from about 600,000 in 1970 to an estimated population of nearly 2 million by 1975.
Children were often being persuaded or forced to commit atrocities during the war.[9] The Cambodian government estimated that more than 20 percent of the property in the country had been destroyed during the war.[10] In total, an estimated 275,000–310,000 people were killed as a result of the war.
The conflict was part of the Second Indochina War (1955–1975) which also consumed the neighboring Laos, South Vietnam, and North Vietnam individually referred to as the Laotian Civil War and the Vietnam War respectively. The Cambodian civil war led to the Cambodian genocide, one of the bloodiest in history.
Widening war (1970–1971)[edit]
North Vietnamese offensive in Cambodia[edit]
In the wake of the coup, Lon Nol did not immediately launch Cambodia into war. He appealed to the international community and to the United Nations in an attempt to gain support for the new government and condemned violations of Cambodia's neutrality "by foreign forces, whatever camp they come from."[73] His hope for continued neutralism availed him no more than it had Sihanouk.
On 29 March 1970, the North Vietnamese had taken matters into their own hands and launched an offensive against the now renamed Forces Armées Nationales Khmères or FANK (Khmer National Armed Forces) with documents uncovered from the Soviet archives revealing that the offensive was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge following negotiations with Nuon Chea.[8] The North Vietnamese overran most of northeastern Cambodia by June 1970.[7]
The North Vietnamese invasion completely changed the course of the civil war. Cambodia's army was mauled, lands containing nearly half of the Cambodian population were conquered and handed over to the Khmer Rouge and North Vietnam now took an active role in supplying and training the Khmer Rouge. All of this resulted in the Cambodian government being greatly weakened and the insurgents multiplying several fold in size over the course of a few weeks. As noted in the official Vietnamese war history, "our troops helped our Cambodian friends to completely liberate five provinces with a total population of three million people... our troops also helped our Cambodian friends train cadre and expand their armed forces. In just two months the armed forces of our Cambodian allies grew from ten guerrilla teams to nine battalions and 80 companies of full-time troops with a total strength of 20,000 soldiers, plus hundreds of guerrilla squads and platoons in the villages."[74]
On 29 April 1970, South Vietnamese and U.S. units unleashed a limited, multi-pronged Cambodian Campaign that Washington hoped would solve three problems: First, it would provide a shield for the American withdrawal from Vietnam (by destroying the PAVN logistical system and killing enemy troops) in Cambodia; second, it would provide a test for the policy of Vietnamization; third, it would serve as a signal to Hanoi that Nixon meant business.[75] Despite Nixon's appreciation of Lon Nol's position, the Cambodian leader was not even informed in advance of the decision to send troops into his country. He learned about it only after it had begun from the head of the U.S. mission, who had himself learned about it from a radio broadcast.[76]
Extensive logistical installations and large amounts of supplies were found and destroyed, but as reporting from the American command in Saigon disclosed, still larger amounts of military material had already been moved further from the border to shelter it from the incursion into Cambodia by the U.S. and South Vietnam.[77]
One month prior, the North Vietnamese had launched an offensive (Campaign X) of its own against FANK forces at the request of the Khmer Rouge[78] and in order to protect and expand their Base Areas and logistical system.[79] By June, three months after the removal of Sihanouk, they had swept government forces from the entire northeastern third of the country. After defeating those forces, the North Vietnamese turned the newly won territories over to the local insurgents. The Khmer Rouge also established "liberated" areas in the south and the southwestern parts of the country, where they operated independently of the North Vietnamese.[29]
Opposing sides[edit]
As combat operations quickly revealed, the two sides were badly mismatched. FANK, whose ranks had been increased by thousands of young urban Cambodians who had flocked to join it in the months following the removal of Sihanouk, had expanded well beyond its capacity to absorb the new men.[80] Later, given the press of tactical operations and the need to replace combat casualties, there was insufficient time to impart needed skills to individuals or to units, and lack of training remained the bane of FANK's existence until its collapse.[81]
During the period 1974–1975, FANK forces officially grew from 100,000 to approximately 250,000 men, but probably only numbered around 180,000 due to payroll padding by their officers and due to desertions.[82]
U.S. military aid (ammunition, supplies, and equipment) was funneled to FANK through the Military Equipment Delivery Team, Cambodia (MEDTC). Authorized a total of 113 officers and men, the team arrived in Phnom Penh in 1971,[83] under the overall command of CINCPAC Admiral John S. McCain Jr.[84] The attitude of the Nixon administration could be summed up by the advice given by Henry Kissinger to the first head of the liaison team, Colonel Jonathan Ladd: "Don't think of victory; just keep it alive."[85] Nevertheless, McCain constantly petitioned the Pentagon for more arms, equipment, and staff for what he proprietarily viewed as "my war".[86]
There were other problems. The officer corps of FANK was generally corrupt and greedy.[87] The inclusion of "ghost" soldiers allowed massive payroll padding; ration allowances were kept by the officers while their men starved; and the sale of arms and ammunition on the black market (or to the enemy) was commonplace.[88][89] Worse, the tactical ineptitude among FANK officers was as common as their greed.[90] Lon Nol frequently bypassed the general staff and directed operations down to battalion-level while also forbidding any real coordination between the army, navy and air force.[91]
The common soldiers fought bravely at first, but they were saddled with low pay (with which they had to purchase their own food and medical care), ammunition shortages, and mixed equipment. Due to the pay system, there were no allotments for their families, who were, therefore, forced to follow their husbands/sons into the battle zones. These problems (exacerbated by continuously declining morale) only increased over time.[87]
At the beginning of 1974, the Cambodian army inventory included 241,630 rifles, 7,079 machine guns, 2,726 mortars, 20,481 grenade launchers, 304 recoilless rifles, 289 howitzers, 202 APCs, and 4,316 trucks. The Khmer Navy had 171 vessels; the Khmer Air Force had 211 aircraft, including 64 North American T-28s, 14 Douglas AC-47 gunships and 44 helicopters. American Embassy military personnel – who were only supposed to coordinate the arms aid program – sometimes found themselves involved in prohibited advisory and combat tasks.
When PAVN forces were supplanted, it was by the tough, rigidly indoctrinated peasant army of the Khmer Rouge with its core of seasoned leaders, who now received the full support of Hanoi. Khmer Rouge forces, which had been reorganized at an Indochinese summit held in Guangzhou, China in April 1970, would grow from 12 to 15,000 in 1970 to 35–40,000 by 1972, when the so-called "Khmerization" of the conflict took place and combat operations against the Republic were handed over completely to the insurgents.[92]
The development of these forces took place in three stages. 1970 to 1972 was a period of organization and recruitment, during which Khmer Rouge units served as auxiliaries to the PAVN. From 1972 to mid-1974, the insurgents formed units of battalion and regimental size. It was during this period that the Khmer Rouge began to break away from Sihanouk and his supporters and the collectivization of agriculture was begun in the "liberated" areas. Division-sized units were being fielded by 1974–1975, when the party was on its own and began the radical transformation of the country.[93]
With the fall of Sihanouk, Hanoi became alarmed at the prospect of a pro-Western regime that might allow the Americans to establish a military presence on their western flank. To prevent that from happening, they began transferring their military installations away from the border regions to locations deeper within Cambodian territory. A new command center was established at the city of Kratié and the timing of the move was propitious. President Nixon was of the opinion that:
Causes of death[edit]
Of 240,000 Khmer–Cambodian deaths during the war, French demographer Marek Sliwinski attributes 46.3% to firearms, 31.7% to assassinations (a tactic primarily used by the Khmer Rouge), 17.1% to (mainly U.S.) bombing, and 4.9% to accidents. An additional 70,000 Cambodians of Vietnamese descent were massacred with the complicity of Lon Nol's government during the war.[5]
War crimes[edit]
Atrocities[edit]
In the Cambodian Civil War, Khmer Rouge insurgents reportedly committed atrocities during the war. These include the murder of civilians and POWs by slowly sawing off their heads part by part each day,[127] the destruction of Buddhist wats and the killing of monks,[128] attacks on refugee camps involving the deliberate murder of babies and bomb threats against foreign aid workers,[129] the abduction and assassination of journalists,[130] and the shelling of Phnom Penh for more than a year.[131] Journalist accounts stated that the Khmer Rouge shelling "tortured the capital almost continuously", inflicting "random death and mutilation" on 2 million trapped civilians.[132]
The Khmer Rouge forcibly evacuated the entire city after taking it, in what has been described as a death march: François Ponchaud wrote: "I shall never forget one cripple who had neither hands nor feet, writhing along the ground like a severed worm, or a weeping father carrying his ten-year-old daughter wrapped in a sheet tied around his neck like a sling, or the man with his foot dangling at the end of a leg to which it was attached by nothing but skin";[133] John Swain recalled that the Khmer Rouge were "tipping out patients from the hospitals like garbage into the streets ... In five years of war, this is the greatest caravan of human misery I have seen."[134]
Use of children[edit]
The Khmer Rouge exploited thousands of desensitized, conscripted children in their early teens to commit mass murder and other atrocities during the genocide.[9] The indoctrinated children were taught to follow any order without hesitation.[9] During its guerrilla war after it was deposed, the Khmer Rouge continued to use children widely until at least 1998.[135] During this period, the children were deployed mainly in unpaid support roles, such as ammunition-carriers, and also as combatants.[135]