Phnom Penh, Cambodia – Forty years ago on Monday, Vietnamese tanks rolled through Phnom Penh, a city that had been a near ghost town during the genocidal Khmer Rouge, to signal the overthrow of the regime of Pol Pot, the ultra-communists’ leader who managed to escape in a jeep at the last minute.
It was the end of three years, eight months and 20 days of terror that had resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians.
Large celebrations will take place at the Cambodian capital’s Olympic Stadium on Monday to mark “Victory Over Genocide Day”. Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander who defected and helped overthrow them, is expected to deliver a speech lauding January 7 as the moment the country was saved from Pol Pot’s murderous clutches.
But while on the surface the overthrow of one of the 20th century’s most brutal regimes should be a reason to celebrate, Cambodian politics are not as straightforward.
The invasion had been in response to ruthless cross-border killings by the Khmer Rouge in Vietnam. Vietnamese forces, who were assisted by a far smaller group of former Khmer Rouge defectors, overthrew the Pol Pot regime with relative ease, although the civil war trudged on for another two decades.
But rather than see the day as a liberation, the ruling party’s detractors, including Sam Rainsy, the exiled acting leader of the dissolved opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), have branded January 7 as the start of an occupation by an historic enemy.
Vietnamese forces did not leave Cambodian soil until 1989 and during that period installed Hun Sen as prime minister, a position he has retained since 1985.
“Whatever they might say in private, the country has virtually no political figure who acts and speaks independently of these two views,” reads the 2017 paper “Moving Beyond The January 7 Narratives” by the Future Forum think-tank.
“Even today, Cambodian politicians, from Prime Minister Hun Sen and opposition leader Sam Rainsy on down, spend much of their energy fighting an old civil war which has little relevance to the problems facing most of Cambodia’s 15 million people.”
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Government spokesperson Phay Siphan credits January 7 with saving his life.
“Without Vietnam, I was about to get killed right away because I was in jail already. At that time I told them I was a student, they put almost everybody in jail,” Siphan said.
Siphan said Sam Rainsy, who has long taunted Hun Sen with accusations of being a Vietnamese puppet, had no understanding of the importance of January 7 due to not living under the Pol Pot regime.
“Sam Rainsy was living abroad; they never came across the suffering from the killings of the Khmer Rouge. They don’t care,” he said, pointing out that prominent opposition figures allied themselves…
