Khmer Rouge: Difference between revisions - Wikipedia

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==Origins==

===The Cambodian left: the early history===

The history of the communistBudda movement in Cambodia can be divided into six phases: the emergence of the [[Indochinese Communist Party]] (ICP), whose members were almost exclusively Vietnamese, before [[World War II]]; the ten-year struggle for independence from the French, when a separate Cambodian communist party, the Kampuchean (or Khmer) [[People's Revolutionary Party]] (KPRP), was established under Vietnamese auspices; the period following the Second Party Congress of the KPRP in 1960, when Saloth Sar ([[Pol Pot]] after 1976) and other future Khmer Rouge leaders gained control of its apparatus; the revolutionary struggle from the initiation of the Khmer Rouge insurgency in 1967-68 to the fall of the Lon Nol government in April 1975; the [[Democratic Kampuchea]] regime, from April 1975 to January 1979; and the period following the Third Party Congress of the KPRP in January 1979, when Hanoi effectively assumed control over Cambodia's government and communist party.

Much of the movement's history has been shrouded in mystery, largely because successive purges, especially during the Democratic Kampuchea period, have left so few survivors to recount their experiences. One thing is evident, however: the North Vietnamese Communists helped the movement grow by providing political and military support, but became bitter rivals upon the success of Khmer Rouge. In the three decades between the end of World War II and the Khmer Rouge victory, the appeal of Communism to Western-educated intellectuals (and to a lesser extent its more inchoate attraction for poor peasants) was tempered by the apprehension that the much stronger Vietnamese movement was using communism as an ideological rationale for dominating the Khmer. The analogy between the Vietnamese communists and the [[Nguyen dynasty]], which had legitimized its encroachments in the nineteenth century in terms of the "civilizing mission" of [[Confucianism]], was persuasive. Thus, the new brand of indigenous communism that emerged after 1960 combined nationalist and revolutionary appeals and, when it could afford to, exploited the virulent anti-Vietnamese sentiments of the Khmers. Khmer Rouge literature in the 1970s frequently referred to the Vietnamese as yuon (Khmer term for Vietnamese<ref> Sok Sisovan [http://www.phnompenhpost.com/TXT/letters/L1215-5.htm ''Meaning of Yuon''] Accessed July 24, 2007 </ref>), a term dating from the [[Early history of Cambodia|Angkorian period]].