dark_light said:
Something most people don't realise about Cambodia is:
The CIA overthrows Prince Sahounek, who is highly popular among Cambodians for keeping them out of the Vietnam War. He is replaced by CIA puppet Lon Nol, who immediately throws Cambodian troops into battle. This unpopular move strengthens once minor opposition parties like the Khmer Rouge, which achieves power in 1975 and massacres millions of its own people.
Cambodia was SAVED BY COMMUNISTS, The Vietnamese army!
Au contraire. It's widely known amonsgst people who are interested in SE Asian history that the American carpet bombing lead to massive peasant support for the Khmer Rouge and then that the Vietnamese invasion in 1979 liberated them.
Two things that you didn't mention though. One: The Vietnamese invasion was pre-empted by the Khmer Rouge army invading Vietnam after a series of border disputes, shoot outs and a political meltdown over that issue (and issue two below). It wasn't liberation of the people that the Vietnamese were originally invading for. It was liberation of the government so they could install a puppet government of their own design and backing. The truth about the Khmer Rouge massacres and extreme social engineering only came out
after the invasion. No news ever came out of Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge rule. Not until near the end when a few journalists and refugees escaped and even then the world was unaware of the extreme scale of the crisis.
Two: The Khmer Rouge had Chinese backing and Vietname had Soviet backing so there was a dispute along ideological lines at the heart of the conflict. The difference being the Chinese Maoist Peasant based Communism against the Marxist-Leninist Urban based Communism of the Soviets. Indeed when Vietnam invaded Cambodia (or Kampuchea as it was then), China invaded the north of Vietnam in a limited punitive invasion. They then withdrew after occupying a small localised area on the Vietnamese side of the border for a short time. Once they felt that the Hanoi government got the point.