Vietnamese Invasion of Cambodia: Fall of the Khmer Rouge
Vietnam invaded Cambodia on 25 December 1978 and took Phnom Penh on 7 January 1979, ending the Khmer Rouge regime in a fortnight. The two communist governments had been at war on their border since 1977. The Khmer Rouge had raided Vietnamese villages and massacred civilians, claimed territory in the Mekong delta, and purged the cadres in its own eastern zone who were suspected of Vietnamese sympathies — one of whom, Hun Sen, fled across the border and came back with the invading army. Behind that lay the Sino-Soviet split. Cambodia was aligned with China and Vietnam with the Soviet Union, and the war was in part a proxy between them. China invaded northern Vietnam in February 1979 in retaliation, fought a month of costly frontier battles, and withdrew claiming to have taught a lesson. What the invasion ended was a regime that had killed something between a quarter and a fifth of its own population, and what followed was one of the stranger episodes in the history of the United Nations. The West and China refused to recognise the government Vietnam installed, and the Cambodian seat at the UN was kept by the Khmer Rouge and its allies until 1993 — with American and Chinese support, on the reasoning that Vietnamese occupation could not be rewarded. Aid reached Khmer Rouge units in camps on the Thai border. Vietnam occupied Cambodia for ten years and withdrew in 1989. A UN tribunal convicted three senior figures decades later. Pol Pot died in 1998 without trial.
- Year: 1979 CE
- Category: Military
