The People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) was a partially recognised state in Southeast Asia which existed from 1979 to 1992. 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 PRK failed to secure United Nations endorsement due to the diplomatic intervention of China, the United Kingdom, the United States and the ASEAN countries. The Cambodian seat at the United Nations was held by the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, which was the Khmer Rouge in coalition with two non-communist guerrilla factions. However, the PRK was considered the de facto government of Cambodia between 1979 and 1992, albeit with limited international recognition outside of the Soviet Bloc.
Beginning in May 1989, the PRK restored the name "Cambodia" by renaming the country State of Cambodia (SOC) during the last four years of its existence in an attempt to attract international sympathy. However, it retained most of its leadership and one-party structure while undergoing a transition and eventually giving way to the restoration of the Kingdom of Cambodia. The PRK/SOC existed as a communist state from 1979 until 1991, the year in which the ruling single party abandoned its Marxist–Leninist ideology.
Under Vietnamese control, the PRK was established in the wake of the total destruction of the country's institutions, infrastructure and intelligentsia wreaked by Khmer Rouge rule.
Historical background
The PRK was established in January 1979 as a result of a process that began with Khmer Rouge belligerence.
Khmer Rouge directs its hostility against Vietnam
Initially, communist North Vietnam was a strong ally of the Khmer Rouge while it was fighting against Lon Nol's Khmer Republic during the 1970–1975 civil war. Only after the Khmer Rouge took power did the Vietnamese opinion of Kampuchea become negative, when on 1 May 1975 (the day after Saigon fell), Khmer Rouge soldiers raided the islands of Phu Quoc and Tho Chau, killing more than five hundred Vietnamese civilians; following the attack, the islands were swiftly recaptured by Vietnam. Even then, the first reactions of the Vietnamese were ambiguous, and it took Vietnam a long time to react with force, for the first impulse was to arrange matters diplomatically "within the family sphere".
Massacres of ethnic Vietnamese and of their sympathisers, as well as destruction of Vietnamese Catholic churches, by the Khmer Rouge took place sporadically in Cambodia under the Democratic Kampuchea regime, especially in the Eastern Zone after May 1978. By early 1978, the Vietnamese leadership decided to support internal resistance to Pol Pot and the Eastern Zone of Cambodia became a focus of insurrection. In the meantime, as 1978 wore on, Khmer Rouge bellicosity in the border areas surpassed Hanoi's threshold of tolerance. War hysteria against Vietnam reached bizarre levels within Democratic Kampuchea as Pol Pot tried to distract attention from bloody inner purges.
In May 1978, on the eve of So Phim's Eastern Zone uprising, Radio Phnom Penh declared that if each Cambodian soldier killed thirty Vietnamese, only 2 million troops would be needed to eliminate the entire Vietnamese population of 50 million. It appears that the leadership in Phnom Penh was seized with immense territorial ambitions, i.e., to recover Kampuchea Krom, a region in the Mekong Delta which they regarded as Khmer territory. In November, pro-Vietnamese Khmer Rouge leader Vorn Vet led an unsuccessful coup d'état and was subsequently arrested, tortured and executed. Incidents escalated along all of Cambodia's borders. There were now tens of thousands of Cambodian and Vietnamese exiles on Vietnamese territory, and even so Hanoi's response was half-hearted.
Salvation Front
The Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation (KUFNS or FUNSK) was an organisation that would be pivotal in overthrowing the Khmer Rouge and establishing the PRK/SOC state. The Salvation Front was a heterogeneous group of communist and non-communist exiles determined to fight against Pol Pot and rebuild Cambodia. Led by Heng Samrin and Pen Sovann, both Khmer Rouge defectors, the organization occupied a zone liberated from the Khmer Rouge after the purge of the Eastern Zone. The front's foundation was announced by Radio Hanoi on 3 December 1978.
Of the Salvation Front's 14 central committee members, the top two leaders —Heng Samrin, president, and Joran Pollie, vice-president— had been "former" Kampuchean Communist Party (KCP) officials; others were former Khmer Issarak as well as "Khmer Viet Minh" – members who had lived in exile in Vietnam. Ros Samay, secretary general of the KUFNS, was a former KCP "staff assistant" in a military unit.
The government of Democratic Kampuchea lost no time in denouncing the KUFNS as "a Vietnamese political organisation with a Khmer name", because several of its key members had been affiliated with the KCP. Despite being dependent on Vietnamese protection and the backing of the Soviet Union behind the scenes, the KUFNS had an immediate success among exiled Cambodians. This organisation provided a much-needed rallying point for Cambodian leftists opposed to Khmer Rouge rule, channeling efforts towards positive action instead of empty denunciations of the genocidal regime. The KUFNS provided as well a framework of legitimacy for the ensuing invasion of Democratic Kampuchea by Vietnam and the subsequent establishment of a pro-Hanoi regime in Phnom Penh.
Vietnamese invasion
Vietnamese policymakers finally opted for a military solution and, on 22 December 1978, Vietnam launched its offensive with the intent of overthrowing Democratic Kampuchea. An invasion force of 120,000-150,000, composed of combined armour and infantry units with strong artillery support, drove west into the level countryside of Cambodia's southeastern provinces. After a seventeen-day blitzkrieg, Phnom Penh fell to the advancing Vietnamese on 7 January 1979. The retreating Kampuchea Revolutionary Army (RAK) and Khmer Rouge cadres burned rice granaries, which, along with other causes, provoked a severe famine all over Cambodia beginning in the last half of 1979 and which lasted until mid-1980.
On 1 January 1979, the Salvation Front's central committee proclaimed a set of "immediate policies" to be applied in the areas liberated from the Khmer Rouge. First the communal kitchens were abolished and some Buddhist monks would be brought to every community to reassure the people. Another of these policies was to establish "people's self-management committees" in all localities.
These committees would form the basic administrative structure for the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Council (KPRC), decreed on 8 January 1979, as the central administrative body for the PRK. The KPRC served as the ruling body of the Heng Samrin regime until 27 June 1981, when a new Constitution required that it be replaced by a newly elected Council of Ministers. Pen Sovann became the new prime minister. He was assisted by three deputy prime ministers – Hun Sen, Chan Sy, and Chea Soth.
History
Establishment of the People's Republic of Kampuchea (1979–1989)
On 8 January 1979, after the DK army had been routed and Phnom Penh captured by Vietnamese troops the day before, the KPRC proclaimed that the new official name of Cambodia was the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK). The new administration was a pro-Soviet government supported by a substantial Vietnamese military force and civilian advisory effort.
Despite the Vietnam-sponsored invasion and control, and the loss of independence that went along with it, the new order was welcomed by almost the entire Cambodian population due to the Khmer Rouge's brutality. However, there was some plundering of the almost empty capital of Phnom Penh by Vietnamese forces, who carried the goods on trucks back to Vietnam. This unfortunate behaviour would in time contribute to create a negative image of the Vietnamese soldiers. Heng Samrin was named head of state of the PRK, and other Khmer communists that had formed the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party, like Chan Sy and Hun Sen, were prominent from the start.
As events in the 1980s progressed, the main preoccupations of the new government would be survival, restoring the economy, and combating the Khmer Rouge insurgency by military and political means.
The PRK was a communist state. It continued the socialist revolution that had been started by DK, but abandoning the Khmer Rouge's radical policies and channelling the efforts of building socialism through more pragmatic channels in line with the policies marked by the Soviet Union and the Comecon. Very soon it would be one of the six countries regarded as socialist, and not just developing, by the USSR.
Regarding ethnic minorities, the People's Republic of Kampuchea was committed to respect Cambodia's national diversity, which brought some welcome relief to the ethnic Thai, Vietnamese, Cham and the "montagnards" of the northeast. The Chinese ethnic minority, however, perceived as an "arm of the hegemonists" continued to be oppressed, even though many of its members, mainly among the trader community, had endured great suffering under the Khmer Rouge. The speaking of Mandarin and Teochew was severely restricted, in much the same manner as under Pol Pot.
Restoration of cultural and religious life
One of the main official acts of the PRK was a partial restoration of Buddhism as the state religion of Cambodia and temples were gradually reopened to accommodate the monks and to resume a certain measure of traditional religious life. In September 1979 seven old monks were officially reordained at Wat Unnalom in Phnom Penh, and these monks gradually reestablished the Cambodian sangha between 1979 and 1981. They began rebuilding the community of monks in Phnom Penh and later in the provinces, reordaining prestigious monks who had been formerly senior monks. They were not allowed, however, to ordain young novices. Repair works were started in about 700 Buddhist temples and monasteries, of the roughly 3,600 that had been destroyed or badly damaged by the Khmer Rouge. By mid-1980 traditional Buddhist festivals began to be celebrated.
The DK had exterminated many Cambodian intellectuals, which was a difficult obstacle for Cambodia's reconstruction, when local leaders and experts were most needed. Among the surviving educated urban Cambodians who could have helped the struggling country to its feet, many opted to flee the communist state and flocked to the refugee camps to emigrate to the West.
The PRK's administration was technically unequipped and the state bureaucracy that had been destroyed by the Khmer Rouge was rebuilt slowly. The PRK managed to reopen the École de formation des cadres administratifs et judiciels, where in 1982 and 1986 training programmes were conducted. To rebuild the nation's intelligentsia, a number of Cambodians were sent to Eastern Bloc countries to study during the PRK's reconstruction period. Despite its efforts in the educational field, the PRK/SOC would struggle with the general lack of education and skills of Cambodian party cadres, bureaucrats and technicians throughout its existence.
Cambodian cultural life began also slowly to be rebuilt under the PRK. Movie houses in Phnom Penh were re-opened, screening at first films from Vietnam, the Soviet Union, Eastern European socialist countries and Hindi movies from India. Certain films that did not fit with the pro-Soviet designs of the PRK, such as Hong Kong action cinema, were banned in Cambodia at that time.
The domestic film industry had suffered a severe blow, for a large number of Cambodian filmmakers and actors from the 1960s and 1970s had been killed by the Khmer Rouge or had fled the country. Negatives and prints of many films had been destroyed, stolen, or missing and the films that did survive were in a poor state of quality. Cambodia's film industry began a slow comeback starting with Kon Aeuy Madai Ahp (Khmer: កូនអើយ ម្តាយអាប), also known as Krasue mother, a horror movie based on Khmer folklore about Ahp, a popular local ghost, the first movie made in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge era. The restoration of cultural life during the PRK was only partial though; there were socialist-minded restrictions hampering creativity that would only be lifted towards the end of the 1980s under the SOC.
Propaganda
The PRK relied heavily on propaganda to motivate Cambodians for reconstruction, to promote unity and to establish its rule. Large billboards were displayed with patriotic slogans and party members taught the eleven points of the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation (KUFNS) to assembled adults.
Survivors of Democratic Kampuchea rule lived in fear and uncertainty of the Khmer Rouge's return. Most Cambodians were psychologically affected and declared emphatically that they would not be able to survive another DK regime. The PRK government strongly encouraged such sentiments, for much of its legitimacy lay in having liberated Cambodia from Pol Pot's yoke. As a consequence, gruesome displays of skulls and bones, as well as photographs and paintings of Khmer Rouge atrocities, were set up and used as a pro-government propaganda tool. The most important museum about the Khmer Rouge era was located at the Tuol Sleng DK prison and was named "Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes", now Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.