History UsefulNotes / Cambodia

* '''Highest point:''' Phnom Aural (1810 m/5,938 ft) (151st)

* '''ISO-3166-1 Code:''' KH

* '''Area:''' 181,035 sq km (69,898 sq mi) (88th)

* '''Area:''' 181,035 km (69,898 sq mi) (88th)

* Unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy
** King: Norodom Sihamoni

** President of the Senate: Say Chhum
** President of the National Assembly: Heng Samrin

* ''Film/TheKillingFields'', a British movie about a couple of journalists, an American and a Cambodian, whose friendship is suddenly torn apart by the Khmer Rouge regime. The Cambodian journalist was played by a genuine survivor of the genocide, Creator/HaingSNgor.

* ''Film/TheKillingFields'', a British movie about a couple of journalists, an American and a Cambodian, whose friendship is suddenly torn apart by the Khmer Rouge regime.

The civil war ended in 1975 with [[FromBadToWorse the victory of the North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge rebels]] and their leader, a cruel man named Pol Pot. They renamed the country into [[PeoplesRepublicOfTyranny Democratic Kampuchea]] and soon decided to move the population into the deep countryside on forced marches. Why? To destroy everything and start the nation from YearZero. The harsh conditions, forced labor and famine caused an estimate two million deaths. Considering Cambodia's population was only about seven million... yeah. The Khmer Rouge also destroyed anything considered Western, including libraries and temples, and their death squads killed all the ethnic and religious minorities (Chinese, Vietnamese[[labelnote:*]]going by some estimates, the entire ethnic Vietnamese population of Cambodia may have been killed, making this one of the rare times where a genocide was successful[[/labelnote]], Javanese, Buddhist monks, Muslims, Catholics), anyone with a connection with the old regime and anyone considered an intellectual (usually that meant teachers, anyone who used to work at libraries, universities or hospitals, and even anyone who wore ''eyeglasses'' since that was a sign of literacy).

->Blue and red are traditional colors of Cambodia; at the center is the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angkor_Wat Angkor Wat]], obviously the country's most iconic landmark. The Angkor War and the blue and red stripes symbolize Buddhism, the King and the people, respectively.

The civil war ended in 1975 with [[FromBadToWorse the victory of the North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge rebels]] and their leader, a cruel man named [[UnfortunateNames Pol Pot.]] They renamed the country into [[PeoplesRepublicOfTyranny Democratic Kampuchea]] and soon decided to move the population into the deep countryside on forced marches. Why? To destroy everything and start the nation from YearZero. The harsh conditions, forced labor and famine caused an estimate two million deaths. Considering Cambodia's population was only about seven million... yeah. The Khmer Rouge also destroyed anything considered Western, including libraries and temples, and their death squads killed all the ethnic and religious minorities (Chinese, Vietnamese[[labelnote:*]]going by some estimates, the entire ethnic Vietnamese population of Cambodia may have been killed, making this one of the rare times where a genocide was successful[[/labelnote]], Javanese, Buddhist monks, Muslims, Catholics), anyone with a connection with the old regime and anyone considered an intellectual (usually that meant teachers, anyone who used to work at libraries, universities or hospitals, and even anyone who wore ''eyeglasses'' since that was a sign of literacy).

The civil war ended in 1975 with [[FromBadToWorse the victory of the North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge rebels]] and their leader, a cruel man named Pol Pot. They renamed the country into [[PeoplesRepublicOfTyranny Democratic Kampuchea]] and soon decided to move the population into the deep countryside on forced marches. Why? To destroy everything and start the nation from YearZero. The harsh conditions, forced labor and famine caused an estimate two million deaths. Considering Cambodia's population was only about seven million... yeah. The Khmer Rouge also destroyed anything considered Western, including libraries and temples, and their death squads killed all the ethnic and religious minorities (Chinese, Vietnamese[[labelnote:*]]going by some estimates, the entire ethnic Vietnamese population of Cambodia may have been killed, making this one of the rare times where a genocide was successful[[/labelnote]], Javanese, Buddhist monks, Muslims, Catholics), anyone with a connection with the old regime and anyone considered an intellectual (usually that meant teachers, anyone who used to work at libraries, universities or hospitals, and even anyone who wore ''eyeglasses'' since that was a sign of literacy).

The civil war ended in 1975 with [[FromBadToWorse the victory of the North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge rebels]] and their leader, Pol Pot. They renamed the country into [[PeoplesRepublicOfTyranny Democratic Kampuchea]] and soon decided to move the population into the deep countryside on forced marches. Why? To destroy everything and start the nation from YearZero. The harsh conditions, forced labor and famine caused an estimate two million deaths. Considering Cambodia's population was only about seven million... yeah. The Khmer Rouge also destroyed anything considered Western, including libraries and temples, and their death squads killed all the ethnic and religious minorities (Chinese, Vietnamese[[labelnote:*]]going by some estimates, the entire ethnic Vietnamese population of Cambodia may have been killed, making this one of the rare times where a genocide was successful[[/labelnote]], Javanese, Buddhist monks, Muslims, Catholics), anyone with a connection with the old regime and anyone considered an intellectual (usually that meant teachers, anyone who used to work at libraries, universities or hospitals, and even anyone who wore ''eyeglasses'' since that was a sign of literacy).

* SCP-800, one of the artifacts of the Wiki/SCPFoundation, is an East Asian scroll bearing a picture which allegorically representes the current geopolitic situation of the region (and changed on its own over the course of history). Here's one of its forms:
-->'''800-9''' (1975-1979)[[note]]the dates of the Red Khmer's regime[[/note]]: unknown style of painting resembling Khmer stone carving, [DATA EXPUNGED][[note]]In context, those mentions refer to information which are removed outright or deleted, or otherwise only available to those with the highest security clearances. Sometimes serves to cover something squicky, horrifying, or obscene, to add a NothingIsScarier effect. This specific example is notable for upping the NightmareFuel of the entry by expurging a horrible, yet well-known and perfectly real historical event.[[/note]]

-->'''800-9''' (1975-1979)[[note]]the dates of the Red Khmer's regime[[/note]]: unknown style of painting resembling Khmer stone carving, [DATA EXPUNGED][[note]]In contexte, those mentions refer to information which are removed outright or deleted, or otherwise only available to those with the highest security clearances. Sometimes serves to cover something squicky, horrifying, or obscene, to add a NothingInScarier effect. This specific example is notable for upping the NightmareFuel of the entry by expurging a horrible, yet well-known and perfectly real historical event.[[/note]]

And then all hell broke loose. When UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar came, Cambodia found itself near the middle of the great tug of war between the Communists in the North and the anti-Communists in the South of Vietnam. Officially Cambodia was neutral, but it soon found itself dragged into the war. First the North Vietnamese and Vietcong guerrillas setting up a truly massive state within a state to serve as a springboard and supply base for the NVA, Vietcong, and the Cambodian Communist guerrillas of the Khmer Rouge to attacks in the South and the rest of Cambodia. In turn, the United States supported a state coup led by General Lon Nol before deciding to bomb Cambodia without warning to catch the communists unaware. They did, but they also caught the Cambodians and the US representatives in Cambodia off-guard. The result was a true nightmare that saw the Communists decide to openly seize power in between periodic bombings by the Allies. The last “official” battle of the Vietnam War for the USA took place in Cambodia during this time, from May 12-15th, 1975, when Khmer Rouge gunboats seized the American container ship SS ''[[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayaguez_incident Mayaguez]]'' in disputed waters and US Marines took the ship back by force, which was messy for both sides.

The civil war ended in 1975 with [[FromBadToWorse the victory of the Khmer Rouge rebels]] and their leader, Pol Pot. They renamed the country into [[PeoplesRepublicOfTyranny Democratic Kampuchea]] and soon decided to move the population into the deep countryside on forced marches. Why? To destroy everything and start the nation from YearZero. The harsh conditions, forced labor and famine caused millions of deaths. The Khmer Rouge also destroyed anything considered Western, including libraries and temples, and their death squads killed all the ethnic and religious minorities (Chinese, Vietnamese[[labelnote:*]]going by some estimates, the entire ethnic Vietnamese population of Cambodia may have been killed, making this one of the rare times where a genocide was successful[[/labelnote]], Javanese, Buddhist monks, Muslims, Catholics), anyone with a connection with the old regime and anyone considered an intellectual (usually that meant teachers, anyone who used to work at libraries, universities or hospitals, and even anyone who wore ''eyeglasses'' since that was a sign of literacy).

Pol Pot was also kinda lousy with geography, [[MajoredInWesternHypocrisy despite studying in France]], and believed that he could continue his mad rampages across the border, in the Khmer-speaking areas of UsefulNotes/{{Vietnam}}. Naturally, the Vietnamese (even Vietnamese Khmer, who, despite being a forgotten minority living in the middle of nowhere, and thus bearing the brunt of Vietnamese Communist mismanagement and oppression, at least weren't being exterminated with gardening hoes[[note]]to save bullets[[/note]]) didn't take too kindly to this. In 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia. The ensuing chaos saw a large number of Khmer refugees fleeing into Thailand to get away from both sides, with many of them later making their way to the United States, where they mostly settled in southern California and central Massachusetts.

The Vietnamese got rid of the Khmer Rouge and put a puppet state in its place, run by former Khmer Rouge defectors. In the meantime Pol Pot and original Khmer Rouge tried to flee to the countryside or abroad, only for Pol Pot to be taken prisoner by a schismatic member of the Khmer Rouge and kept under house arrest until he died under questionable circumstances. But if you would think this would be the end of matters, it wasn't. With most of the hardline nutjobs forced into the background, the Khmer Rouge and the groups that were rapidly splintering off of it had control over chunks of the countryside and were in a position to contest the Vietnamese satellite government. In time [[GambitPileup a third faction]] of royalists called Khmer People’s National Liberation Front appeared on the scene. This civil war continued in a flurry of low level skirmishing, plenty of nasty business, man made famine, and other nightmares until 1991, when an agreement between the parts could be achieved. There remains some low-level Khmer Rouge activity in a few remote areas, but it tends less towards rebellion/terrorism and more towards petty banditry, and is treated accordingly by the authorities.

For reasons that could only make sense in [[UsefulNotes/ColdWar The Cold War]] that we won't mention here, the United States and much of the United Nations sided with China to continue to recognize the Khmer Rouge groups descended from Pol Pot's regime as the legitimate government -- even letting them keep the UN seat for Cambodia -- as opposed to the invading, Soviet-backed, but at least non-batguano crazy pro-Vietnamese regime. One of the first states to break with this policy was Sweden, which withdrew its support after a groundswell of protest from Swedish voters angry that its elected representatives were helping to prop up Pol Pot's zombie.

The Khmer Rouge enjoyed broad popular support of the poor, uneducated peasant masses of village Khmers, who were envious towards "[[CityMouse those city guys]]", which wasn't helped by the fact that a lot of city-dwellers were ethnically Chinese, and were overrepresented in the rich classes. But soon it turned out that [[EvilArmy Khmer Rouge]] in general, and the dictator Pol Pot in particular, didn't make any distinction between two populations. Their motto was "To keep you is no benefit; to destroy you is no loss," and they cheerfully applied it to anyone. Pol Pot's regime led to the death of around 2 million people out of a population of 8 million in the span of little less than four year. It's estimated that as many as 4 million died as a whole (according to the insane mathematics of the regime, they figured that they can whittle the Cambodian population down to 2 million people and still create their agrarian worker's paradise, which might explain the spectacular lack of concern the government showed to the carnage). The Cambodian Genocide has often been described as an auto-genocide, or in [[JustForFun/TVTropesWillRuinYourVocabulary troper speak]], a GenocideFromTheInside.

* The song “Holiday in Cambodia”, the TropeNamer of the [[HolidayInCambodia eponymous trope]], deals in length with the usual stereotype of the zone. It also has mentions of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot.

The most famous [[strike:tourist traps]] [[LandmarkOfLore landmarks]] are Angkor Wat (the building seen on the flag), a humongous temple complex, home of Buddhist tradition (formerly Hindu) and the killing fields, where the mass killings of the Khmer Rouge took place and the hundreds of skulls are displayed for the whole world to see the atrocities of Pol Pot and his followers. UsefulNotes/{{Tibet}} and UsefulNotes/{{Manchuria}} are also in Cambodia.

The most famous [[strike:tourist traps]] [[LandmarkOfLore landmarks]] are Angkor Wat (the building seen on the flag), a humongous temple complex, home of Buddhist tradition (formerly Hindu) and the killing fields, where the mass killings of the Khmer Rouge took place and the hundreds of skulls are displayed for the whole world to see the atrocities of Pol Pot and his followers.

The civil war ended in 1975 with [[FromBadToWorse the victory of the Khmer Rouge rebels]] and their leader, Pol Pot. They renamed the country into [[PeoplesRepublicOfTyranny Democratic Kampuchea]] and soon decided to move the population into the deep countryside on forced marches. Why? To destroy everything and start the nation from YearZero. The harsh conditions, forced labor and famine caused thousands of deaths. The Khmer Rouge also destroyed anything considered Western, including libraries and temples, and their death squads killed all the ethnic and religious minorities (Chinese, Vietnamese[[labelnote:*]]going by some estimates, the entire ethnic Vietnamese population of Cambodia may have been killed, making this one of the rare times where a genocide was successful[[/labelnote]], Javanese, Buddhist monks, Muslims, Catholics), anyone with a connection with the old regime and anyone considered an intellectual (usually that meant teachers, anyone who used to work at libraries, universities or hospitals, and even anyone who wore ''eyeglasses'' since that was a sign of literacy).

The place where everybody [[HolidayInCambodia goes on vacation]], Cambodia ('''Khmer:''' ''កម្ពុជា, Kampuchea''), officially known as the Kingdom of Cambodia ('''Khmer:''' ''ព្រះរាជាណាចក្រកម្ពុជា, Preăh Réachéanachăk Kămpŭchéa'') is full of tropical jungles, abandoned temples, guerilla warfare, and young women saying “Me love you long time” (''UsefulNotes/{{Vietnam}}ese'' women, mind you). Or at least that’s what the media wants you to think.

Cambodia today is a constitutional monarchy (unusually for an ex-communist country, they not only restored the monarchy, but also restored the former monarch[[note]]In fairness, he was a monarch who loved to be photographed with Mao Zedong and Kim il-Sung, so, yeah...[[/note]]) that, aside of a coup in 1997, has a steady government. Unfortunately, it is probably [[BananaRepublic too steady]] as the Prime Minister appointed by the Vietnamese- [[RegentForLife Hun Sen]]- has ruled with an iron fist and has even admitted he wants to keep power well into old age while maintaining a play theater of constitutional government. To be specific, the guy [[http://www.rfa.org/english/news/cambodia/election-05062013185646.html outright stated on national TV]] that he intends to stay in power until he is 74 years old which will be in August 2026 [[labelnote:*]]But because there is some dispute over his actual date of birth, it could be until 2028[[/labelnote]]. Why? Because [[FollowTheLeader the leaders of China and Vietnam don't retire until their 70s.]]

And then all hell broke loose. When UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar came, Cambodia found itself near the middle of the great tug of war between the Communists in the North and the anti-Communists in the South of Vietnam. Officially Cambodia was neutral, but it soon found itself dragged into the war. First the North Vietnamese and Vietcong guerrillas setting up a truly massive state within a state to serve as a springboard and supply base for the NVA, Vietcong, and the Cambodian Communist guerrillas of the Khmer Rouge to attacks in the South and the rest of Cambodia. In turn, the United States supported a state coup led by General Lon Nol before deciding to bomb Cambodia without warning to catch the communists unaware. They did, but they also caught the Cambodians and the US representatives in Cambodia off-guard. The result was a true nightmare that saw the Communists decide to openly seize power in between periodic bombings by the Allies.

Pol Pot was also kinda lousy with geography, [[MajoredInWesternHypocrisy despite studying in France]], and believed that he could continue his mad rampages across the border, in the Khmer-speaking areas of UsefulNotes/{{Vietnam}}. Naturally, the Vietnamese (even Vietnamese Khmer, who, despite being a forgotten minority living in the middle of nowhere, and thus bearing the brunt of Vietnamese Communist mismanagement and oppression, at least weren't exterminated by gardening hoes[[note]]to save bullets[[/note]]) didn't take too kindly to this. In 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia, got rid of the Khmer Rouge and put a puppet state in its place, run by former Khmer Rouge defectors. In the meantime Pol Pot and original Khmer Rouge tried to flee to the countryside or abroad, only for Pol Pot to be taken prisoner by a schismatic member of the Khmer Rouge and kept under house arrest until he died under questionable circumstances. But if you would think this would be the end of matters, it wasn't. With most of the hardline nutjobs forced into the background, the Khmer Rouge and the groups that were rapidly splintering off of it had control over chunks of the countryside and were in a position to contest the Vietnamese satellite government. In time [[GambitPileup a third faction]] of royalists called Khmer People’s National Liberation Front appeared on the scene. This civil war continued in a flurry of low level skirmishing, plenty of nasty business, man made famine, and other nightmares until 1991, when an agreement between the parts could be achieved.

For reasons that could only make sense in [[UsefulNotes/ColdWar The Cold War]] that we won't mention here, the United States and much of the United Nations sided with China to continue to recognize the Khmer Rouge groups descended from Pol Pot's regime as the legitimate government -- even letting them keep the UN seat for Cambodia -- as opposed to the invading, Soviet-backed, but at least non-batguano crazy Vietnamese regime. One of the first states to break with this policy was Sweden, which withdrew its support after a groundswell of protest from Swedish voters angry that its elected representatives were helping to prop up Pol Pot's zombie.

The Khmer Rouge enjoyed broad popular support of the poor, uneducated peasant masses of village Khmers, who were envious towards "[[CityMouse those city guys]]", which wasn't helped by the fact that a lot of city-dwellers were ethnically Chinese, and were overrepresented in the rich classes. But soon it turned out that [[EvilArmy Khmer Rouge]] in general, and the dictator Pol Pot in particular, didn't make any distinction between two populations. Their motto was "To keep you is no benefit; to destroy you is no loss," and they cheerfully applied it to anyone. Pol Pot's regime led to the death of around 2 million people out of a population of 8 million in the span of little less than four year. It's estimated that as many as 4 million died as a whole (according to the insane mathematics of the regime, they figured that they can whittle the Cambodian population down to 2 million people and still create their agrarian worker's paradise, which might explain the spectacular lack of concern the of the government to the carnage). The Cambodian Genocide has often been described as an auto-genocide, or in [[JustForFun/TVTropesWillRuinYourVocabulary troper speak]], a GenocideFromTheInside.