NADK was formed in December 1979 in order to replace the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea.[1] NADK forces consisted mainly of former RAK troops – large numbers of whom had escaped the 1978 to 1979 Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. It included as well as conscripts coerced into submission during the RAK retreat and new volunteers or recruits either pressed into service during in-country raids or drawn from among refugee groups. The New York Times reported in June 1987 that "the Khmer Rouge army is believed to be having some success in its recruitment, not only among the refugees in its camps but within the Vietnamese controlled People's Republic of Kampuchea." The NADK did not make personnel figures public, but estimates by military observers and by journalists generally ranged between 40,000 and 50,000 combatants in the 1980s.[citation needed]
In 1987 the opinion that the NADK was "the only effective fighting force" opposing the Vietnamese was more often expressed by Western observers. In an interview published in the United States in May 1987, prince Norodom Sihanouk reportedly said, "without the Khmer Rouge, we have no credibility on the battlefield... [they are]... the only credible military force."[citation needed]
During the 1980s, the Khmer Rouge leadership, composed of party cadres who doubled as military commanders, remained fairly constant. Pol Pot retained an ambiguous but presumably prominent position in the hierarchy, although he was nominally replaced as commander in chief of the NADK by Son Sen, who like Pol Pot had also been a student in Paris and who had gone underground with him in 1963. There were reports of factions in the NADK, such as one loyal to Khieu Samphan, prime minister of the defunct regime of Democratic Kampuchea, and his deputy Ieng Sary, and another identified with Pol Pot and Ta Mok (the Southwestern Zone commander who conducted extensive purges of party ranks in Cambodia in 1977 to 1978). Although led by party and military veterans, the NADK combatants in 1987 were reportedly "less experienced, less motivated, and younger" than those the Vietnamese had faced in previous encounters. Nevertheless, the new Khmer Rouge recruits still were "hardy and lower class," and tougher than the non-communist combatants.
During forays into Cambodia, NADK units employed terror tactics against Khmer civilians, including murder and destruction of economic resources. Such success as they achieved in recruiting was apparently owed to traditional Cambodian hatred of the Vietnamese invader, although there were reports that some of the peasantry would have preferred to endure a continued Vietnamese occupation rather than to suffer a return to Khmer Rouge rule.
During this time the Khmer Rouge divided the country into four military zones that functioned virtually autonomously under their respective commanders. Within these four zones, three areas—the provinces around the Tonle Sap, the western border of Cambodia, and the remainder of the country—were sites of NADK tactical operations. It was the first area, the heartland of Cambodia, that the NADK viewed as the "Achilles' heel of the Vietnamese enemy," where NADK military efforts were concentrated.
NADK units managed to keep the main routes linking Phnom Penh to western Cambodia "in a permanent state of insecurity," according to a senior Vietnamese military observer; traffic to and from the seaport of Kampong Saom was obliged to move in convoys. Both highways and railroads from the capital were interdicted intermittently because of guerrilla activity. Officials in Phnom Penh told a Western correspondent in 1987 that the Khmer Rouge were then operating in small insurgent groups inside Cambodia in a battle for the villages, rather than fighting from the Thai border area, as had been the case prior to the 1984 to 1985 Vietnamese dry-season offensive. In carrying the war to the countryside, the NADK demonstrated that it had gone on the strategic defensive, that is, that it would adhere to a doctrine of guerrilla warfare until the balance of forces was about equal. If this parity were to be achieved, NADK strategists presumably would then switch to offensive operations.
In carrying on its protracted insurgency, the NADK received the bulk of its military equipment and financing from China, which had supported the previous regime of Democratic Kampuchea. One pro-Beijing source put the level of Chinese aid to the NADK at US$1 million a month. Another source, although it did not give a breakdown, set the total level of Chinese assistance, to all the resistance factions, at somewhere between US$60 million and US$100 million a year.
The Chinese weaponry observed in the possession of NADK combatants included Type 56 assault rifles, RPD light machine guns, Type 69 RPG launchers, recoilless rifles, and anti-personnel mines. NADK guerrillas usually were seen garbed in dark green Chinese fatigues and soft "Mao caps" without insignia. No markings or patches were evident on guerrilla uniforms, although the NADK had promulgated a hierarchy of ranks with distinctive insignias in 1981.
To keep troops and supplies moving into the combat zone, the NADK, according to Vietnamese sources, followed two infiltration routes. One of them ran south from Thailand through the Dangrek Escarpment into Cambodia. The second ran north from Trat, a minor Thai seaport that may have been an unloading point for Chinese supplies for the Khmer Rouge. In spite of substantial Chinese material assistance, however, the NADK could not maintain the logistical supply line needed to conduct a sustained military campaign.[2]
NADK continued fighting Cambodian government forces into the late 1990s.[3]
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.
Pol Pot was a Cambodian revolutionary and politician who was the dictator of communist Cambodia from 1976 until his overthrow in 1979. He oversaw mass atrocities and is widely believed to be one of the most brutal despots in modern world history. Ideologically a Maoist and a Khmer ethnonationalist, Pot was a leader of Cambodia's Communist movement, known as the Khmer Rouge, from 1963 to 1997. He served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea from 1963 to 1981, during which Cambodia was converted into a one-party state. Between 1975 and 1979, Pot perpetrated the Cambodian genocide, in which an estimated 1.5–2 million people died—approximately one-quarter of the country's pre-genocide population. In December 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia to remove the Khmer Rouge from power. Within two weeks, Vietnamese forces occupied most of the country, ending the genocide and establishing a new Cambodian government, with the Khmer Rouge restricted to the rural hinterlands in the western part of the country.
Ta Mok, also known as Nguon Kang, was a Cambodian military chief and soldier who was a senior figure in the Khmer Rouge and the leader of the national army of Democratic Kampuchea. He was also known as "Brother Number Five" or "the Butcher". He was captured along the Thailand-Cambodia border in March 1999 by Cambodian government forces while on the run with a small band of followers and was held in government custody until his death in 2006 while awaiting his war crime trial.
The Kingdom of Cambodia, also known as the First Kingdom of Cambodia, and commonly referred to as the Sangkum period, refers to Norodom Sihanouk's first administration of Cambodia, lasting from the country's independence from France in 1953 to a military coup d'état in 1970. Sihanouk continues to be one of the most controversial figures in Southeast Asia's turbulent and often tragic postwar history. From 1955 until 1970, Sihanouk's Sangkum was the sole legal party in Cambodia.
The Cambodian Civil War was a civil war in Cambodia fought between the forces of the Communist Party of Kampuchea against the government forces of the Kingdom of Cambodia and, after October 1970, the Khmer Republic, which had succeeded the kingdom after a coup.
Son Sen, alias Comrade Khieu (សមមិត្តខៀវ) or "Brother Number 89", was a Cambodian Communist politician and soldier. A member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea/Party of Democratic Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge, from 1974 to 1992, Sen oversaw the Party's security apparatus, including the Santebal secret police and the notorious security prison S-21 at Tuol Sleng.
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.
Nuon Chea, also known as Long Bunruot or Rungloet Laodi, was a Cambodian communist politician and revolutionary who was the chief ideologist of the Khmer Rouge. He also briefly served as acting Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea. He was commonly known as "Brother Number Two", as he was second-in-command to Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, General Secretary of the Party, during the Cambodian genocide of 1975–1979. In 2014, Nuon Chea received a life sentence for crimes against humanity, alongside another top-tier Khmer Rouge leader, Khieu Samphan, and a further trial convicted him of genocide in 2018. These life sentences were merged into a single life sentence by the Trial Chamber on 16 November 2018. He died while serving his sentence in 2019.
The Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Armed Forces (KPRAF), also the Khmer People's Revolutionary Armed Forces were the armed forces of the People's Republic of Kampuchea, the de facto government of Cambodia 1979–1990. It was formed with military assistance from Vietnam, which furbished the fledgling armed forces with equipment and training, with the initial task of countering the sustained guerrilla campaign being waged by the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea.
Democratic Kampuchea was the official name of the Cambodian state from 1976 to 1979, under the government 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 earliest traces of armed conflict in the territory that constitutes modern Cambodia date to the Iron Age settlement of Phum Snay in north-western Cambodia.
The Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea was the military of Democratic Kampuchea.
The Royal Government of National Union of Kampuchea was a government-in-exile of Cambodia, based in Beijing and Hong Kong, that was in existence between 1970 and 1976, and was briefly in control of the country starting from 1975.
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 genocide was the systematic persecution and killing of Cambodian citizens by the Khmer Rouge under the leadership of Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea, Pol Pot. It resulted in the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people from 1975 to 1979, nearly 25% of Cambodia's population in 1975.
Khmer nationalism is a form of nationalism found in Cambodia, that asserts that Khmers (Cambodians) are a nation and promotes the cultural unity of the Khmer (Cambodian) race.
Eastern Zone massacres refers to killings perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in the Eastern Region of Democratic Kampuchea in 1978 during the Cambodian genocide. They differ from the persecutions and killings of professionals, intellectuals, and ethnic minorities which the Khmer Rouge perpetrated in the rest of the country because the killings were result of a purge that occurred within the Khmer Rouge's ranks.
So Phim was a leader of the Khmer Issarak movement, the third-rank official of the Permanent Bureau and of the Military Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, deputy head of the People's National Liberation Armed Forces of Kampuchea, and secretary of East Zone of the Democratic Kampuchea of the Khmer Rouge, until he refused to apply the Cambodian genocide designed by Pol Pot and his comrades, a refusal that led to his own suicide in June 1978.
The Cambodian conflict, also known as the Khmer Rouge insurgency, was an armed conflict that began in 1979 when the Khmer Rouge government of Democratic Kampuchea was deposed during the Cambodian-Vietnamese War. The war concluded in 1999 when remaining Khmer Rouge forces surrendered. Between 1979 and the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements, it was fought between the Vietnam-supported People's Republic of Kampuchea and an opposing coalition. After 1991, the unrecognized Khmer Rouge government and insurgent forces continued to fight against the new government of Cambodia from remote areas until their defeat in 1999.
References
↑ Daniel Bultmann (2015) 'Inside Cambodian Insurgency. A Sociological Perspective on Civil Wars and Conflict', Ashgate: Burlington, VT/Farnham, UK, ISBN9781472443076.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
Party of Democratic Kampuchea 
China 
Thailand (alleged)
People's Republic of Kampuchea (1979–1989)
State of Cambodia (1989–1992)
Kingdom of Cambodia (from 1993)
Vietnam 
