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On January 7, 1979, an event of historic importance took place on the Indochina Peninsula—the downfall of reactionary pro-Peking Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime under a victorious popular uprising. The revolution put an end to the mediaeval nightmare, terrible sufferings and calamities inflicted upon the Kampuchean people by this clique, and opened up new prospects for the country to build a new life, for progress, democracy and peace.

p Kampuchea, one of the most ancient countries in SouthEast Asia was forced by the French colonialists to sign a protectorate treaty in 1863.

p The 1954 Geneva agreements on Indochina, which formalised the joint victory of the peoples of Indochina in the war of resistance against the French colonialists, guaranteed the country’s independence. In the years of peace that followed, Cambodia, as it was then called, developed as a free and independent nation. The Soviet Union and other socialist states accorded her diplomatic recognition and declared their respect for the policy of neutrality proclaimed by the country, for her independence and territorial integrity.

p In the 1960s, when the American imperialists initiated their armed aggression against southern Vietnam and Laos, Kampuchea did everything to avoid being drawn by the United States into the escalating military conflict. The American military regarded neutral Kampuchea as a “break” in the chain of 6 American military bases that was then being set up in large parts of Indochina. On March 18, 1970, rightist Kampuchea!! politicians, helped by CIA agents, engineered a coup in Pnom Penh.

p The United States’ open interference in Kampuchean affairs caused wide-spread popular indignation in the country. The Kampuchea United Front, formed in May 1970 by patriotic forces led the people in their armed struggle against the American interventionists and their henchmen.

p Of major importance for this struggle’s success was the solidarity of the national and patriotic forces of Vietnam, Laos, and Kampuchea, a solidarity the aggressors and their associates could not shake. The victory of the Vietnamese people, formalised in the Paris Agreement of 1973, did much to help the national patriotic forces strengthen their position in Indochina. In April 1975, the Kampuchean people scored a glorious victory in their heroic struggle. The pro-American puppet regime was toppled, and all power passed into the hands of the Kampuchea United Front.

p Kampuchea could now build a new and peaceful life. In fact, however, events took a disastrous turn for her people. The political power in the country was usurped by the reactionary Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique, supported by Peking, which betrayed the revolutionary cause. Now an obedient tool of the Chinese rulers’ great-power hegemonism, the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime zealously began to implement anti-popular reactionary Maoist precepts in both Kampuchean domestic and foreign policy and inflicted untold sufferings upon the Kampuchean people.

p In their efforts to copy the Chinese “cultural revolution”, the new rulers of Kampuchea meted out mass reprisals against the country’s true patriots. They were particularly ruthless in their persecution of intellectuals, students, office employees and Buddhist priests, many of whom were killed. Entire ethnic and religious groups faced extermination. The Peking puppets in Kampuchea carried out a wide-spread policy of genocide against their own people, on a scale unprecedented in the country. During the 1970-1975 war, 600 thousand Cambodians lost their lives, whereas the forty-four months of Pol Pot-Ieng 7 Sary rule wiped out about three million people. Many of them were executed, while others starved to death or died from disease.

p The regime’s socio-economic policy bore the stamp of mediaeval barbarity. Virtually the entire urban population was herded into the countryside, where they and local residents were banded into Chinese-style “communes” and “labour teams”, a new kind of concentration camp. The Kampucheans were divided into castes and groups according to their loyalty to the regime. All forms of property were abolished. Money was taken out of circulation and trade reduced to barter. All schools and cinemas were shut down; there was no television. The only “mass medium" in Kampuchea was a poor substitute for a newspaper, a sheet carrying hardly any information. The population was completely cut off from the outside world.

p There have been but few cases in history when a government, trying to impose a particular socio-political regime on its people, has gone so much against the needs of developing productive forces and so openly flouted the most elementary principles of justice and common sense. “Kampuchea was ruled by a pro-Peking regime, modelled on the Chinese political system, and the mass extermination of people in Kampuchea is nothing but a Chinese-style ’cultural revolution’ in action outside China,” said Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet.

p In Kampuchea, one of the main precepts of Maoism, that “villages surround the town”, was implemented with particular zeal. After ravaging cities and turning them into ghost towns, after herding all the population into “communes”, the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique turned the country into one huge “agricultural community" where, for almost four years, the Peking henchmen plied their despotic cudgel to the lives of individual citizens, social groups and classes.

p “The rifle brings political power" is another Maoist precept. The total militarisation of the country and the establishment of a barrack-style regime were the backbone of the tyranny imposed by Pol Pot and Ieng Sary.

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p Every generation of Chinese people must go through a “cultural revolution" of its own, the Peking leaders have said, but the Kampuchean version of the “cultural revolution" surpassed all known patterns of evil. All political dissidents were exterminated, the educational system and the “heritage of the past" were wiped out. Ancient cultural monuments were destroyed, scientific works, educational aids and art publications were all consumed in the flames of bon-fires. All these methods were tested long ago by the Maoists in China, but in Kampuchea they assumed a particularly evil character.

p Just like in China, the Pol Pot supporters of the “cultural revolution" directed their main blow against their country’s Communist party, disrupting its activities and replacing the democratic leadership of the party with a terrorist dictatorship headed by the notorious Angka Loeu, which sent millions of Kampucheans to their death.

p Kampuchea took its “great leap" in the form of a drive under the slogan “If we have rice, we have everything!”, a campaign that plunged the country’s economy into chaos and threw it back several decades.

p Pol Pot’s supporters were particularly anxious to copy their Peking masters’ foreign policy. Right from its inception, the regime headed by China’s henchmen spearheaded its policy against the historical ties binding the peoples of Indochina, ties that had been born of their long common struggle against foreign domination. The regime unleashed an anti-Vietnam hysteria and laid absurd claims to Vietnamese territory, “right up to Saigon itself”. The Pol Pot troops tried to capture some Vietnamese islands, raided villages across the Vietnamese border, and finally unleashed a border war against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The stage directors of that war were 20 thousand Chinese advisers. China sent massive “aid” to Kampuchea: aircraft, tanks, heavy artillery, and fire arms. Peking also helped Kampuchea organise more than 20 divisions, an inordinately large force for a country of that size.

p Provocations were instigated not only against Vietnam, but also against other countries bordering on Kampuchea. Thus the Chinese leaders used Kampuchea as a tool for 9 implementing their great-power expansionist designs directed against the peoples of South-East Asia.

p Pol Pot’s Kampuchea demonstrated to the whole world the monstrous nature of the regime forced upon her by Peking, a political model based on mass annihilation of people, the trampling of the most elementary human rights, and the most absurd socio-economic experiments. On the international scene it was a policy of rabid nationalism and xenophobia. The people of the country would obviously not tolerate this police regime for long nor put up with the endless reprisals exercised by its leaders. An explosion was inevitable, and it finally came.

p Right from the start the Kampuchean people strongly resisted the policy pursued by the Peking-style regime. In early December, 1978, at the convention of people’s representatives held in one liberated area in the country, the delegates set up the Kampuchea United Front for National Salvation (the KUFNS). The convention adopted a declaration for the Front calling on the entire nation to rise up in order to topple the reactionary dictatorial regime, and to set up a truly people’s democratic system in Kampuchea.

p This declaration met with the widest response among all segments of the Kampuchean population, who saw it as the way towards the long-awaited liberation from the nightmares of tyranny and mediaeval barbarity. At the end of December, 1978, the revolutionary armed forces launched a nation-wide onslaught against the regime. On January 7, 1979, the red banner of the Kampuchea United Front for National Salvation, bearing five golden turrets (symbolising the ancient Khmer temple of Angkor-Wat), was raised over Pnom Penh. The reactionary regime of Pol Pot-Ieng Sary had fallen to be replaced by the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, proclaimed on January 11.

p In its manifesto, the People’s Revolutionary Council (the interim government of the new Kampuchea) declared the principal goals of the Kampuchean people’s just struggle: to build a peaceable, independent, and non-aligned Kampuchea, a society developing on democratic principles towards socialism. Urgent measures were taken to democratise all aspects of socio-political affairs, to establish a truly democratic 10 government elected by popular vote. The Council abolished the antinational laws promulgated by the Pol Pot regime, guaranteed democratic freedoms, freedom of worship, the right to work, to rest and to an education. The Council also proclaimed all citizens be equal and respect for their dignity and personality. The people of Kampuchea enthusiastically greeted these changes that had taken place in their ancient and beautiful land.

p By toppling the anti-popular clique, the Kampuchean people made an invaluable contribution to the general improvement of the political climate in South-East Asia, to the cause of peace and security in this part of the world. The People’s Revolutionary Council declared that the new Kampuchea would build her relations with all other countries on the principles of peaceful coexistence, would strengthen her solidarity with the socialist states, with the newly independent countries and with the national liberation movements, and would promote the non-aligned movement.

p The progressive public of the world greeted the victory of the Kampuchean people with joy. The Soviet Union, which had always supported the just cause of the Kampuchean patriots, was among the first countries to recognise the People’s Revolutionary Council of Kampuchea as the sole legitimate government of the country, as spokesman for the Kampuchean people. In their message to Heng Samrin, Chairman of the People’s Revolutionary Council, Chairman of the Central Committee of the United Front for National Salvation of Kampuchea, Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin, stressed: “The Soviet Union will continue to develop and strengthen the traditional relations of friendship and co-operation between our two countries, and will help the Kampuchean people in their efforts to build a peaceful, independent, democratic, non-aligned and socialist Kampuchea.”

E. Kobelev