Although Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge didn’t come to power until the mid-1970s, the roots of their takeover can be traced to the 1960s, when a communist insurgency first became active in Cambodia, which was then ruled by a monarch.Throughout the 1960s, the Khmer Rouge operated as the armed wing of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, the name the party used for Cambodia. [5] However, during the colonial rule of French Indochina, which would later come to include Vietnam, French authorities imported Vietnamese laborers to Cambodia, where the growing minority came to dominate businesses and water resources in the country. On 16 December 1977, the PAVN divisions, with support from elements of the Vietnam People's Air Force, crossed the border along several axes with the objective of forcing the Kampuchean Government to negotiate. [152], The reaction to the war in Cambodia also varied across the world. Cambodia remained heavily embroiled in the North-South Vietnam War into the 1970s. However, the CPP leadership refused to accept defeat, and they announced that the eastern provinces of Cambodia, where most of the CPP's votes were drawn from, would secede from Cambodia. (n.d.). [124] Despite outward signs of improvement in Vietnam's diplomatic relations with China, Vietnamese leaders were reluctant to endorse any peace plan which could weaken their client government in Phnom Penh. On 17 September 1990, General Võ Nguyên Giáp also made a trip to China and thanked the Chinese Government for its past assistance. [52] On 6 January 1978, PAVN divisions were only 38 km (24 mi) from Phnom Penh, but the Vietnamese Government decided to withdraw its forces from Kampuchea because they had failed to achieve Vietnam's political objective. [53] In reality, Kampuchean leaders simply ignored the condition of the population in their own country and Vietnam; the Vietnamese, though poor, were in good physical condition, while Kampuchea's population was physically and mentally exhausted from years of hard labour, starvation and disease. [40] The socialist revolution held very little popular appeal, which led Pol Pot and his cadres to use ultra-nationalist sentiment, repressive and murderous rule, and propaganda aimed at demonising the Vietnamese to maintain control. Meanwhile, Son Sann demanded that the KPNLF be the lead organization within the proposed alliance, and the leaders of the Khmer Rouge "most compromised" by the atrocities in Kampuchea be exiled to China. Nonetheless, the KPNLF continued to operate in small groups, harassing the Vietnamese and their Kampuchean allies using guerrilla tactics. Levinson, David, and Karen Christensen, eds. In 1965, Cambodia officially cut ties with the U.S., as Prince Sihanouk, the country’s head of state, tried, in his words, to maintain the country’s neutrality regarding the war in Vietnam. Thayer, 10, SIPRI Yearbook: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In September 1977, KRA artillery struck several Vietnamese villages along the border, and six villages in Đồng Tháp Province were overrun by Kampuchean infantry. [86] In May 1982, with the urging of Sihanouk, Son Sann decided to form a coalition government with the Khmer Rouge. The country is bordered by the Gulf of Thailand to the southwest, Cambodia and Laos to the west, and China to the north. In accordance with the 1954 Geneva Accords negotiating the end of the French domination, newly created communist North Vietnam pulled all of its Viet Minh soldiers and cadres out of Cambodia; however, since the KPRP was staffed primarily by ethnic Vietnamese or Cambodians under its tutelage, approximately 5,000 communist cadres went with them. The Chinese subsequently withdrew their forces. [3], After the Cambodian–Dutch War, a Buddhist Cambodian king who had converted to Islam was ousted and arrested by the Vietnamese Nguyen lords after Ibrahim's brothers, who remained Buddhists, requested Vietnamese help to restore Buddhism to Cambodia by removing him from the throne. However, the events that followed the invasion showed that they had severely miscalculated international sympathies toward their cause. When the Khmer Rouge government was removed from power in January 1979, the Kampuchean people hoped that peace and liberty would return to their country. [110], In March 1992, the start of the UNTAC mission in Cambodia was marked by the arrival of 22,000 UN peacekeepers, which included troops from 22 countries, 6,000 officials, 3,500 police and 1,700 civilian employees and electoral volunteers. The KPNLF operated from several refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border, where it controlled thousands of civilians. 1)". At the same time, the Western powers and the member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) also voiced strong condemnation of Vietnam's use of force to remove the Khmer Rouge government. Both nations have opened and developed cross-border trade and sought to relax visa regulations to that end. [43], Nine days later, on 10 May 1975, the KRA continued its incursion by capturing the Thổ Chu Islands, where it executed 500 Vietnamese civilians. Vietnamese sources generally offer contradictory figures, but Vietnamese General Tran Cong Man stated that at "least 15,000 soldiers died and another 30,000 were wounded in the ten-year long Cambodian campaign"—so the figures do not include the casualties from the period between 1975 and 1979. Corbera, Esteve; Schroeder, Heike (2011). Small-scale fighting continued between the two countries throughout 1978, as China tried to mediate peace talks between the two sides. The Vietnamese received Cambodian land from the French which caused more hostile feeling towards the Vietnamese. (2013). Raison, Robert John; Brown, Alan Gordon; Flinn, David W. (2001). [55], In order to purge the Eastern Military Zone of those he perceived to have been contaminated by the Vietnamese, Pol Pot ordered military units from the Southwest Zone to move into eastern Kampuchea and eliminate the "hidden traitors". Then in December 1976, the Kampuchean Revolutionary Organisation sent greetings to the Vietnamese Communist Party during their Fourth Congress. The countries have shared a land border for the last 1,000 years and share more recent historical links through being part of the French colonial empire. [103], Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach urged all parties involved to separate Kampuchean problems into internal and external aspects. The sovereign state of Cambodia has a population of over 15 million. [101], On 14 January 1985, Hun Sen was appointed Prime Minister of the People's Republic of Kampuchea and began peace talks with the factions of the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea. [57], On 21 December 1978, Kampuchea's new-found strength was tested when a Vietnamese offensive, consisting of two divisions, crossed the border and moved towards the town of Kratie, while other support divisions were deployed along local routes to cut off the logistical tail of Kampuchean units. Additionally, there were between 10,000 and 20,000 Chinese advisers in both military and civilian capacities, providing their support to the Khmer Rouge government. On 26 February 1990, following the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops, the Third Jakarta Informal Meeting was held, at which the Supreme National Council was established to safeguard Cambodian sovereignty. [97], To reengage with the international community, and to deal with the economic challenges brought by the changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Vietnamese leaders decided to embark on a series of reforms. During the Vietnam War, Vietnamese and Cambodian communists had formed an alliance to fight U.S.-backed governments in their respective countries. [51] On 31 December 1977, Khieu Sampham declared that the Kampuchean Government would "temporarily" sever diplomatic relations with Vietnam until the Vietnamese military withdrew from the "sacred territory of Democratic Kampuchea". In previous years, China had only provided the KRA with a limited quantities of arms and ammunition, but as relations with Vietnam worsened in 1978, Beijing established additional supply routes through Kampuchea and increased the volume of military hardware which travelled down each route. [68] By January 1980, 29 countries had established diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of Kampuchea, yet nearly 80 countries still recognised the legitimacy of the deposed Democratic Kampuchea. By that stage in the conflict, most surviving leaders of the Eastern Military Zone had escaped into Vietnam, where they assembled at various secret camps with the purpose of forming a Vietnamese-backed "liberation army" to fight against the Khmer Rouge government.