Pol Pot's Terror Ends: Vietnamese Take Phnom Penh

Vietnamese forces crossed the Cambodian border on December 25, 1978, and reached Phnom Penh in just fourteen days, toppling a regime that had murdered roughly two million of its own citizens. When soldiers entered the capital on January 7, 1979, they found a country of walking skeletons. The Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot''s leadership, had emptied Cambodia''s cities at gunpoint in April 1975, marching the entire urban population into the countryside at the start of what the regime called Year Zero. The scale of the atrocity defied comprehension. The Khmer Rouge abolished money, closed schools, emptied hospitals, and banned religious practice. Anyone with an education was suspect. Wearing glasses could get you killed, as it suggested literacy. Speaking a foreign language was a death sentence. Former soldiers, civil servants, teachers, monks, and ethnic minorities were systematically executed at sites across the country. Tuol Sleng, a former high school converted into a torture prison, processed roughly 17,000 detainees. Fewer than a dozen survived. Those who were not murdered outright died of starvation, disease, and exhaustion in forced agricultural labor camps. Vietnam''s invasion was not driven by humanitarian concern. Repeated Khmer Rouge border incursions into Vietnamese territory, combined with the massacre of ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia, provoked the attack. China backed the Khmer Rouge. The Soviet Union backed Vietnam. The fall of Phnom Penh was a proxy conflict within the broader Sino-Soviet split as much as it was a liberation. The international response was perverse. The United States, China, and much of the Western bloc condemned the Vietnamese invasion as a violation of Cambodian sovereignty. Cambodia''s seat at the United Nations remained with the Khmer Rouge for over a decade after they had been driven from power. The regime that had orchestrated one of the twentieth century''s worst genocides retained diplomatic legitimacy while the country that stopped the killing was treated as the aggressor. The contradiction remains one of Cold War diplomacy''s most shameful episodes.