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Cambodia was a French protectorate
under the nominal control of a king from 1863 until 1953, when France granted
Cambodia its independence. At the same time, Communist forces known as the Viet
Minh were engaged in an independence struggle against France in neighboring
Vietnam; the Viet Minh, which had recruited an army of Cambodian allies in
common cause against French colonialism, defeated France in 1954. Although
Cambodian guerrilla forces and the Viet Minh controlled much of Cambodia by
1954, the Geneva Conference, which marked the end of the war in 1954, left
Cambodia in the hands of its monarch, Norodom Sihanouk.
As political
factionalism grew in Cambodia, Nordom Sihanouk began to crack down on his
opponents, including Communists. The Communists fell into two groups:
Vietnamese-trained veterans of the independence struggle, including former
Buddhist monks and their peasant followers; and younger urban radicals such as
Pol Pot. While the former were major targets of Sihanouk’s repression, Pol Pot
and his followers were left largely untouched because of their privileged
backgrounds and French education. This group gradually assumed leadership of the
Communist movement. After Pol Pot became secretary general of the Workers’ Party
of Kâmpŭchéa (later renamed the Communist Party of Kâmpŭchéa, or CPK) in 1963,
the party made a concerted effort to seize control of Cambodia.
By 1966, the
American escalation of the war in neighboring Vietnam began to have a
destabilizing effect on Cambodia. North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front
(NLF) forces, made up of Vietnamese Communist guerrillas, established logistical
bases and supply routes in Cambodia. While King Norodom Sihanouk attempted to
keep Cambodia out of the Vietnam War, his political repression increasingly
drove veterans of Cambodia’s anti-French struggle back into dissidence, where
Pol Pot’s CPK drew them into its plans for rebellion. The CPK launched a revolt
against Sihanouk in 1967. Norodom Sihanouk termed the rebels Khmer Rouge
(French for "Red Khmers"), so-called after Cambodia’s predominant ethnic group,
the Khmers. Communist insurgency campaigns continued until the Khmer Rouge took
control of the government in 1975.
In 1969, embroiled
in Vietnam, the United States began a secret B-52 bombardment of Cambodia in an
effort to knock out strongholds of the North Vietnamese and NLF. A year later
Norodom Sihanouk was overthrown by U.S.-backed General Lon Nol. The Vietnam War
spilled across the border, and the conflict tore Cambodia apart for five years.
During the secret bombing American planes dropped 490,000 metric tons (540,000
tons) of bombs, killing about 100,000 Khmer peasants by August 1973, when the
bombardment ended (see Secret Bombing of Cambodia). Meanwhile, the Khmer
Rouge, aided by Norodom Sihanouk and the North Vietnamese, who did not want a
pro-U.S. Cambodian government, battled Lon Nol’s government for control of
Cambodia.
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