When I was in Siem Reap I visited the War Museum (www.warmuseumcambodia.com) there. It's a small open air museum with a collection of the weaponry, military vehicles, bombs and mines the Khmer Rouge used during their reign and insurgency. What makes this museum really intriguing are its guides. Some ex Khmer Rouge soldiers, victims of the Khmer Rouge and some younger people. I had a pretty young guide who made extraordinary claims some I find very hard to believe. I hope that some of you with much better information can shed some light on the following allegations:
In the 1950s Vietnam stole about 30.000 children from Cambodia (villages and cities alike). Indoctrinated them to kill and brought them back into the Khmer Rouge when Pol Pot began his march on Phnom Penh.
When the Vietnamese liberated Cambodia in 1978 its soldiers raped a lot of Cambodian girls. Families apparently changed the looks of girls to make them look like boys or ugly so that they would be spared.
The Vietnamese were also setting up land mines along the limits of their controlled territory.
The decapitated Buddha images in Angkor were not caused by the Khmer Rouge (in order to purge all religious symbols) but by the Vietnamese army
I think you get the idea. He seemed viciously Anti-Vietnamese. But is there there any substance to these claims.
The details about decapitated Buddhas is a myth. The others have some historical basis, but are exaggerated and embellished. Where did they come from?
As you’ve picked up, there is considerable Khmer hostility toward the Vietnamese. Several factors influence that sentiment. First, Cambodian governments have long taught students how over the past five hundred years the Vietnamese empire expanded south and occupied lands that were part of the Khmer empire and where the majority of people were Khmer. What came to be Cochinchina was formerly a Khmer area. C. 1800 there were more Khmer and Chinese speakers in this area than Vietnamese. Right now, the Cambodian government is declaring Vietnamese border provinces should be returned to Cambodia.
Subsequently, under French colonialism the administration used vast numbers of Vietnamese bureaucrats in Cambodia and Laos. The ‘indigenous’ elite was thus dominated by Vietnamese, and many ethnic Vietnamese came to live in Cambodia.
When WWII ended, repressed hostility erupted into violence errupted between Vietnamese and Khmer. A significant number of atrocities were committed by both groups. That hosilitity lingered and occasionally erupted again, as in the early 1970s when the Lon Nol regime stoked anti-Vietnamese sentiment and helped create the conditions for killing of urban Vietnamese.
But, at the same time the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was allying with Khmer Krom (ethnic Khmer living in Vietnam) to build the Khmer Issarak revolutionary organization in Cambodia and a communist party, the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party. Both were highly controlled by DRV personnel, though their membership was Khmer. Certainly the Vietnamese pushed their brand of ideology and politics into the education of these soldiers and cadres.
But during the Second Indochina War, after 1954, Pol Pot/Saloth Sar created a communist party not subordinated to Vietnam. The Khmer Rouge would work with the Vietnamese communists, but saw them as opponents. In 1970, when the DRV/North Vietnam forces moved further into Cambodia — where they operated the Ho Chi Minh trail and their rear-base — the first instances of Khmer Rouge-DRV violence occurred, as the latter tried to maintain control of their much stronger Vietnamese allies. Add to this, Khmer highly subordinated to the DRV from the pre-1954 era returned from Vietnam, like Son Ngoc Minh, who were rivals for power. For the Khmer Rouge, Vietnamese aid semed more like a return to their precolonial and colonial subordination to Vietnamese. A key part of the Khmer Rouge agenda was anti-Vietnamese rhetoric and actions, including cross-border raids that led to the Third Indochina War.
When the DRV (after 1976 renamed the Socialist Republic of Vietnam/ SRV) invaded Cambodia to end the raids and destroy the Khmer Rouge, the fighting was intense. There were reports, for example here, of ‘war crimes’ type behavior, though this was more a ruthless fight against the government personnel, not the civilian population. It’s impossible to say with much certainty on the extent, since the SRV government’s records are not open.
The Khmer Rouge remnants and civilians fleeing the SRV crossed into Thailand. The SRV forces set up vast minefields along the Cambodian-Thai border to prevent them from returning and harassing the occupation government. The Thai government’s treatment of the Khmer could be inhumane. There were incidents where they pushed refugees back to the border and forced them into Cambodia, into the mine fields. But the Khmer Rouge remnants also forced people to infiltrate back into Vietnam to assist the insurgency, and thus cross over the minefields.
Shawn McHale, "Ethnicity, Violence, and Khmer-Vietnamese Relations: The Significance of the Lower Mekong Delta, 1757–1954" Journal of Asian Studies 72.2 (2013).
Westad & Quinn-Judge, The Third Indochina War: Conflict Between China, Vietnam and Cambodia, 1972-79 (Routledge, 2006)