![]() Ironically, the Maoist doctrine proved unsuccessful in the face of the zealousness of the Khmer Rouge’s secret police, which learned of the subversive elements and crushed them.īy this point, the conflict increasingly was drawn into the dysfunctional relations between Communist states. Hanoi then tried to unseat the Khmer Rouge regime using its own Maoist ‘People’s War’ doctrine, by organizing a rural insurrection amongst sympathetic elements of the population. However, though the Khmer Rouge’s forces were steam-rolled in combat, the Khmer to escalate hostilities even further with more cross brutal cross-border raids, peaking with the merciless slaughter of 3,157 villagers at Ba Chúc in April 1978, leaving only two survivors. Hanoi finally responded to the attacks in December 1977 with a punitive multi-division invasion supported by air power. But the Khmer Rouge felt that Vietnamese border towns as belonging historically into the Khmer-and it asserted its claims with habitual violence, dispatching troops on cross-border raids that massacred thousands of Vietnamese civilians. Still, Communist Cambodia and Vietnam remained officially friends at first, and continued diplomatic outreach even while their troops clashed violently over border towns and outlying islands. Increasingly, the Cambodian Communists turned to China for support, which furnished Kampuchea with economic and military aid. As early 1974, the Khmer Rouge began purging Vietnamese-trained members from its ranks and skirmishing with Vietnamese troops. The Khmer Rouge’s ultra-nationalism made them violently suspicious of the Vietnamese Communists, even though the Khmer Rouge’s conquest of Cambodia had only been possible with Hanoi’s support.
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