The Cambodia Coup (Part 1 of 2)
(This is the first of a two-part series on the elections in Cambodia. This article focuses on the history behind the elections. Part two is an interview with an American lawyer who was in Cambodia during the July 1997 coup.)
Cambodia gained its independence from France in 1953, after years under colonial rule, and immediately was thrust into the middle of a war. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia's leader, had to balance his nation between the American and Communist influences in the region without making enemies on either side, since Cambodia was not strong enough to resist either force. The North Vietnamese army, almost 200,000 strong, started launching raids from within Cambodian territory, and Sihanouk's army -- about a tenth as large and even less strong -- could not stop them.
In the late 1960s, America became fed up with what they perceived as Cambodian cooperation with the NVA, so President Nixon approved bombing raids inside Cambodia. These raids, as destructive to the Cambodian countryside as they were ineffective in stopping the NVA, were kept secret.
Sihanouk, the man who promised he could handle both the Vietnamese and the Americans, failed in both respects, and fell out of favor with the Cambodian public. A year after the first American bombings, he was overthrown in absentia by a force led by Lon Nol. The Americans, knowing that Lon Nol favored the US raids to rid Cambodia of the Vietnamese, accepted the new regime. Sihanouk joined with his old enemies, the Khmer Rouge, vowing to take back the throne.
Unsurprisingly, Lon Nol did no better sandwiched in between the powers than Sihanouk did. Plus, he was far more corrupt. The Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot and using Sihanouk as a figurehead leader, staged a coup and overthrew Lon Nol, who surrendered unconditionally -- at gunpoint -- on April 17, 1975.
Declaring an end to history, Pol Pot "reset" his nation's calendar to the year zero. He murdered any possible threat to his Communist rule: former political and military leaders, intellectuals and professors, high-ranking businessmen, foreign-born laborers, and anybody else he felt like killing. He cleared out the towns, revoked all currency, and erased the market.
Pol Pot enacted agricultural policies similar the ones that caused thirty million Chinese to starve to death during the Great Leap Forward. Nobody skilled enough to stop it was still alive. In total, in a nation of only eight million, over one million people were executed, worked to death, or starved to death.
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