POL POT AND THE CAMBODIAN INCURSION, 1970–1979 term paper

Pol Pot (1925?–1998), one of the most brutal killers of the twentieth century, was born in French-ruled Cambodia. He joined the Cambodian Communist Party in 1946 and was a frequent critic of Cambodia’s president, Norodom Sihanouk. In 1963 Pol Pot took refuge in the jungles of northwest Cambodia, where he and his Khmer Rouge guerrillas fought against the Cambodian government. With the entry in 1957 of the United States into the Second Indochina War in neighboring Vietnam, however, the Khmer Rouge guerrillas became more active. Though officially neutral in the Vietnam conflict, Norodom Sihanouk permitted North Vietnam to supply the VietCong (National Liberation Front or NLF) via the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Throughout the 1960s the United States urged Sihanouk to be more aggressive in policing his borders. In 1969 the Nixon administration ordered sustained, heavy bombing of NLF targets in Cambodia. In March 1970, in a carefully planned coup, the United States assisted Lon Nol, former defense minister and premier of Cambodia, in ousting Norodom Sihanouk from power. On 30 April 1970, President Nixon announced that U.S. forces were invading Cambodia to destroy North Vietnamese and NLF targets and thereby shorten the war in Vietnam. This Cambodian incursion, though lasting only two months, had two immediate effects. First, the American antiwar movement exploded: student demonstrations at Kent State University resulted in four deaths, and two students were killed at Jackson State University. A second consequence of the incursion was the dramatic growth of the Khmer Rouge insurgency. Lon Nol was increasingly portrayed in Cambodia as an American puppet and a close ally of Cambodia’s traditional enemy, Vietnam. Quickly Pol Pot’s insurgency grew strong enough so that by 1975 his Khmer Rouge captured the city of Phnom Penh and began the systematic killing of Cambodians deemed “enemies of the people.” Between 1975 and 1979 over 1 million Cambodians, out of a population of 7 million, were executed in the Khmer Rouge killing fields by Pol Pot’s forces. This genocide, one of the most horrific of the twentieth century, could not have come about without the American incursion. Ironically, Pol Pot’s genocide ended in 1979 when Vietnam invaded Cambodia and forced Pol Pot again to seek refuge deep in the jungles of northwestern Cambodia, where he remained until his death in April 1998.
Suggestions for Term Papers
1. Some scholars see the Cambodian incursion as an example of the influence of President Nixon’s national security adviser (later Secretary of State), Dr. Henry Kissinger. Write a paper on the part played by Kissinger in this decision.
2. View The Killing Fields (see Suggested Sources) and compare its portrayal of the Cambodian genocide with “The Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project” (see Suggested Sources). 3. Should the United States have intervened to stop Pol Pot from practicing genocide in Cambodia? Review the evidence on the response of the United States to events in Cambodia and take a position. Provide reasons for your position.
4. Shortly before he died, Pol Pot gave one of his rare interviews. Read Nate Thayer’s “Day of Reckoning” (see Suggested Sources) and compare Pol Pot’s reflections on his governance of Cambodia with the documentation contained in “The Yale Cambodian Genocide Project” (see Suggested Sources).
5. Compare and contrast Pol Pot’s genocide with the Holocaust and/or genocide in Rwanda. (See entries #34 and #95.)
6. Investigate the events at Kent State and Jackson State universities in 1970. Write a paper comparing them and analyzing why the events at Kent State received far more attention than those at Jackson State. Begin with Campus Wars by Kenneth J. Heineman (see Suggested Sources).

Research Suggestions

In addition to the boldfaced items, look under the entries for “The Holocaust, 1941–1945” (#34), “Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese War Against the French, 1946–1954” (#41), “The 1968 Tet Offensive” (#68), “The Dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s” (#93), and “Genocide in Rwanda, 1994” (#95). Search under Geneva Conference (1954), Vietnam War, Henry Kissinger, and Richard Nixon.

SUGGESTED SOURCES

Primary Sources

Pran, Dith, Ben Kiernan, and Kim DePaul. Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Graphic eyewitness accounts by the children who survived the Khmer Rouge genocide.

Thayer, Nate. “Day of Reckoning.” Far Eastern Economic Review 60, no. 44 (30 October 1997): 14–23. The last interview given by Pol Pot is a chilling insight into his genocide.

Secondary Sources

Chandler, David P. The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War, and Revolution since 1945. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. A reliable starting point for understanding modern Cambodia. Heineman, Kenneth J. Campus Wars: The Peace Movement of American State Universities in the Vietnam Era. New York: New York University Press, 1993. The starting point for research on campus protests. Good bibliographical leads on the Kent State and Jackson State protests.

Kiernan, Ben. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Ben Kiernan, who founded the Yale Cambodian Genocide Project, is a leading authority on Pol Pot’s genocide.

The Killing Fields [videorecording]. Burbank, Calif.: Warner Home Video, 1985. A vivid account of Dith Pran’s harrowing experiences in the killing fields of Cambodia. Based on the book by Sydney Schanberg (see below).

Schanberg, Sydney. The Death and Life of Dith Pran. New York: Viking, 1985. Schanberg’s powerful report of how his friend and translator Dith Pran survived in the Cambodian killing fields.

Shawcross, William. Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. A highly critical account of the Cambodian incursion.

World Wide Web

“Department of History Map Library.” http://www.dean.usma.edu/history/dhistorymaps//MapsHome.htm. Click on “Atlases” for United States Military Academy (West Point) maps of the war in Cambodia.

“The Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project.” http://www.dithpran.org/goal.htm. Contains a range of material on Cambodia’s killing fields.

“The National Security Archive.” http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv. Documentation on Cambodia.

“The Yale Cambodian Genocide Project.” http://www.yale.edu/cgp. Founded by Ben Kiernan, this is the most extensive and accessible collection of primary sources available.