Leadership
The KKF's board of directors consists of a chairman, president, vice-president, chief of administration, senior council, representatives council, secretary, treasurer, director of planning, director of information, director of women, director of youth, director of education, and director of religious affairs. The board of directors is democratically elected every four years by members from around the world, including Australia, Cambodia, Canada, France, Italy, New Zealand, and the United States.
The president leads the executive committee and is responsible for the daily operations of the federation. KKF is also led by presidents of regional, continental, and local chapters.
The Khmer Rouge is the name that was popularly given to members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) and by extension to the Democratic Kampuchea through which the CPK ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The name was coined in the 1960s by Norodom Sihanouk to describe his country's heterogeneous, communist-led dissidents, with whom he allied after the 1970 Cambodian coup d'état.
The Montagnard Foundation, Inc. is a political organization whose mission is to protect the rights of the Montagnard/Degar peoples of Vietnam, who belong to over thirty indigenous ethnic groups in the Central Highlands. It is a non-profit organization, founded in 1990 and based in South Carolina in the United States designated as a Militant group by Vietnam. The Montagnard Foundation has spoken out against Vietnam's policies that affected the Montagnards. The organization was designated as a separatist group by the Vietnamese government.
The Cambodian–Vietnamese War was an armed conflict between Democratic Kampuchea, controlled by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The war began with repeated attacks by the Kampuchea Revolutionary Army on the southwestern border of Vietnam, particularly the Ba Chúc massacre which resulted in the deaths of over 3,000 Vietnamese civilians. On 23 December 1978, 10 out of 19 of the Khmer Rouge's military divisions opened fire along the border with Vietnam with the goal of invading the Vietnamese provinces of Đồng Tháp, An Giang and Kiên Giang. On 25 December 1978, Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Kampuchea, occupying the country in two weeks and removing the government of the Communist Party of Kampuchea from power. In doing so, Vietnam put an ultimate stop to the Cambodian genocide, which had most likely killed between 1.2 million and 2.8 million people — or between 13 and 30 percent of the country’s population. On 7 January 1979, the Vietnamese captured Phnom Penh, which forced Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to retreat back into the jungle near the border with Thailand.
The Khmer Krom are ethnically Khmer people living in or from the Mekong Delta, the south western part of Vietnam known in Khmer as Kampuchea Krom. The Khmer Krom people are considered an the indigenous people of parts of Southern Vietnam and have the oldest extant recorded history of inhabiting in the region. In Vietnam, they are recognized as one of Vietnam's fifty-three ethnic minorities.
Human rights in Vietnam are among the poorest in the world, as considered by various domestic and international academics, dissidents and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Amnesty International (AI), Human Rights Watch (HRW), and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
The Khmer Serei were an anti-communist and anti-monarchist guerrilla force founded by Cambodian nationalist Son Ngoc Thanh. In 1959, he published 'The Manifesto of the Khmer Serei' claiming that Sihanouk was supporting the 'communization' of Kampuchea. In the 1960s, the Khmer Serei were growing in numbers, hoping to become a major political and fighting force.
Sơn Ngọc Thành was a Cambodian nationalist and republican politician, with a long history as a rebel leader and a government minister.
Chan Sy, also spelt Chan Si, was a Cambodian politician who served as the Prime Minister of the People's Republic of Kampuchea from 1982 until his death in 1984.
Democratic Kampuchea was the official name of the Cambodian state from 1976 to 1979, under the totalitarian dictatorship of Pol Pot and the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), commonly known as the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge's capture of the capital Phnom Penh in 1975 effectively ended the United States-backed Khmer Republic of Lon Nol.
The People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) was a partially recognised state in Southeast Asia which existed from 1979 to 1989. It was a satellite state of Vietnam, founded in Cambodia by the Vietnamese-backed Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation, a group of Cambodian communists who were dissatisfied with the Khmer Rouge due to its oppressive rule and defected from it after the overthrow of Democratic Kampuchea, Pol Pot's government. Brought about by an invasion from Vietnam, which routed the Khmer Rouge armies, it had Vietnam and the Soviet Union as its main allies.
The Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation, often simply referred to as Salvation Front, was the nucleus of a new Cambodian regime that would topple the Khmer Rouge and later establish the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK).
The United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races was an organization whose objective was autonomy for various indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities in South Vietnam, including the Montagnards in the Central Highlands, the Chams in Central Vietnam, and the Khmer Krom in Southern Vietnam. Initially a political movement, after 1969 it evolved into a fragmented guerrilla group that carried on simultaneous insurgencies against the governments of South Vietnam under President Nguyen Van Thieu and North Vietnam of Ho Chi Minh. Opposed to all forms of Vietnamese rule, FULRO fought against both sides in the Vietnam War against the Soviet-aligned North and the American-aligned South at the same time. FULRO's primary supporter during the 1960s and early 1970s conflict in Southeast Asia was Cambodia, with some aid sent by the People's Republic of China during the period of the Third Indochina War.
Cambodia–Vietnam relations take place in the form of bilateral relations between the Kingdom of Cambodia and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The countries have shared a land border for the last 1,000 years and share more recent historical links through being part of the French colonial empire. Both countries are members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Kampuchea Krom is the region variously known as Southern Vietnam, Nam Bo, and the former French Cochinchina. Bordering present-day Cambodia, the region is positioned in Cambodian irredentist narratives as a "once-integral part of the Khmer kingdom that was colonised by France as Cochinchina in the mid-nineteenth century and then ceded to Vietnam in June 1949". This narrative persists despite historical cessations to the ruling Nguyễn Lords of the period, with the latest one occurring in 1770. In the present day, the region roughly corresponds to the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam.
General elections were held in Cambodia on 1 May 1981 and marked the establishment of the new, Vietnamese-backed, state of the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK). The Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party was the only party to contest the election, and won all 117 seats. Voter turnout was reported to be 97.8%.
The Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), also known as the Khmer Communist Party, was a communist party in Cambodia. Its leader was Pol Pot, and its members were generally known as the Khmer Rouge. Originally founded in 1951, the party was split into pro-Chinese and pro-Soviet factions as a result of the Sino–Soviet split with the former being the Pol Pot faction, and the latter adopting a more revisionist approach to Marxism. As such, it claimed that 30 September 1960 was its founding date; it was named the Workers' Party of Kampuchea before it was renamed the Communist Party in 1966.
The Cambodian humanitarian crisis from 1969 to 1993 consisted of a series of related events which resulted in the death, displacement, or resettlement abroad of millions of Cambodians.
Son Kuy or Chavay Kuy, also known as Oknha Son Kuy, was the governor of the Khmer province of Trapeang. He was beheaded by Emperor Thiệu Trị of the Nguyễn dynasty in 1841, in exchange for preserving the cultural tradition for the Khmer Krom. Nowadays, the figure of Chavay Kuy has become a rallying call and a symbol of the separatist intent of the current Khmer Krom.
The United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races waged a nearly three decade long insurgency against the governments of North and South Vietnam, and later the unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The FULRO insurgents represented the interests of indigenous Muslim and Hindu Cham, Montagnards, and Buddhist Khmer Krom against the ethnic Kinh Vietnamese. They were supported and equipped by China and Cambodia according to those countries' interests in the Indochina Wars.
The native inhabitants of the Central Highlands of Vietnam are known as the Montagnard. The Vietnamese conquered the Central Highlands during their "march to the south". Ethnic Vietnamese (Kinh) people now outnumber the indigenous Degars after state-sponsored colonization directed by both the government of South Vietnam and the current Communist government of unified Vietnam. The Montagnards have engaged in conflicts with the Vietnamese, from the anti-Communist South Vietnamese government, the Viet Cong, to the Communist government of unified Vietnam. There are contrasting views on this issue, as the constitution of the government of Vietnam states "Article 36 of the Constitution, the state invests heavily in education and supports various preferential programmes for ethnic minorities, like ethnic minority boarding schools, lower entry requirements and quota for minorities." Both the initial 1945 constitution and the revised 1992 constitution of North Vietnam and the successor state the Socialist Republic of Vietnam stated that all minority groups in Vietnam have the right to maintain their mother tongues in their schooling as well as to use their languages to preserve their ethnic cultures and values, although the degree of enforcement remains ongoingly debated due to complicated nature.
