14.3 (Fall 1990) Cambodia

During the Pol period from 1975 to 1979, Cambodia was subjected to probably the world's most radical political, social, and the outside world, its cities were emptied its economy was militarized, its Buddhist religion and folk culture were destroyed, and more than 1 million of its 8 million people were starved and massacred while foreign and minority languages were banned and all neighboring countries attacked.

After 1955 a clear deterioration began in the conditions of production for small farmers in the Cambodian countryside. Increasing monetarization of the rural economy, combined with extortionate interest rates, pushed small peasants off their insufficient land. At the same time, the process of social differentiation accelerated, particularly as some people accumulated small herds of oxen.

Angkor, the great medieval city located near the Tonlé Sap (the "Great Lake") in northwestern Cambodia, was abandoned by Khmer rulers in the fifteenth century in an effort to find a capital that could be more easily defended against the expansionistic Thais. In the ensuing centuring - called the first "dark age" of Khmer history (the second being that instituted by the Khmer Rouge under Pol pot) - Angkor become a ruin, destroyed as much by the inexorable expansion of nature as by the destructive acts of humans.

Cambodia has not known peace since well before the United States' withdrawal from Saigon on 30 April 1975. With each palace coup, and even with the arrival of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975, many Cambodians believed that finally the wars were at an end. They welcomed Pol Pot's soldiers with hope for the future.

But the war did not end with Pol Pot's arrival, nor with Vietnam's liberation of Phnom Penh in January 1979 from the horrors of his regime. Nor has it ended with Vietnam's withdrawal in September 1989.