title: V/H/S/2

text: Some time later, Herman awakens and sees Clarissa sleeping on the couch. He finds the young girl in his bed and flees, before witnessing Clarissa being dragged into the pool by an unseen entity. Despite Herman's best efforts to save her, Clarissa drowns. Running back through the house in an attempt to escape the ghosts, Herman locks himself in his bathroom again and uses a straight razor to cut out the implant. The ghosts of Clarissa and her uncle appear in the bathroom as Herman tries to escape, but he unwittingly runs directly into the ghosts of the young girl and the man, who strangles him. The man grabs the implant, still attached to the razor, and shoves it deep into Herman's throat, killing him.


title: V/H/S/2

text: Back in the frame story, Ayesha calls Larry into the room, where they discuss the tapes' legitimacy. Larry tells Ayesha to continue viewing the tapes. She continues playing Kyle's video, where he explains that the tapes must be watched in a proper sequence "to affect you." Ayesha finds a new tape and proceeds to watch it.


title: V/H/S/2

text: After answering a call from his girlfriend Amy, cyclist Mike affixes a camera to his helmet and goes on a bike ride through the woods of a state park. He abruptly comes across a terrified, blood-covered woman, who begs him to help her boyfriend, before she begins vomiting blood. Mike sees several zombies approaching them before the woman suddenly turns into a zombie herself and bites Mike on the throat. After he manages to kill the woman, Mike staggers through the woods, heavily bleeding, before he too vomits blood, collapses, and apparently dies.


title: V/H/S/2

text: A pair of bikers, a man and a woman, come across him and attempt to call for help, but Mike reanimates, attacks, and kills the man before attacking and biting the woman before she runs off into the woods. He begins devouring the man as the woman returns, having become a zombie as well. She joins Mike in devouring the man before he too reanimates. Hearing noise in the distance, the three zombies head towards it, and find that the source is a young girl's birthday party. The zombified trio invade the party, killing several people, some of whom reanimate to attack others. While trying to attack a man and his three daughters in their car, Mike notices his bloodied reflection in their car window, which seems to subdue his aggressive behavior. After getting run down by a fleeing truck, he accidentally pocket dials Amy. Mike is shocked back to a semi-conscious state upon hearing her voice. Regaining some of his humanity, Mike kills himself with a discarded shotgun.


title: V/H/S/2

text: Back in the frame story, Larry re-enters the room and finds Ayesha staring at the TVs in a hypnotized state with her nose bleeding. After being woken from her trance, Ayesha says she has a migraine. Larry leaves to find medicine as a seemingly entranced Ayesha proceeds to insert another tape into the VCR. As she watches, the figure from earlier crawls out from the shadows and watches her.


title: V/H/S/2

text: A film crew, composed of interviewer Malik, producer Lena (also Malik's fiancée), Malik's best friend Adam, and cameraman Joni, infiltrate a cult in Indonesia known as Paradise Gates in hopes of shooting a documentary about their mysterious activities with numerous cameras, both displayed and hidden. The film crew are invited inside the cult's compound by a woman known as "Madame". Inside, they find the walls adorned in bizarre symbols, schoolchildren in classrooms, and women dressed in white garments. The crew meets with and interviews the leader of the cult, a man referred to as "Father". During the interview, Lena becomes ill and steps out. While searching for a spare camera battery, Malik overhears a private conversation between Lena and Adam in which Lena reveals that she is pregnant with Adam's child. In the basement, Adam finds a woman with her womb carved out strapped to a chair. The woman awakens and begins screaming and convulsing, causing him to run away.


title: V/H/S/2

text: While Father is being interviewed, a bell chimes, and he suddenly announces the "time of reckoning" over the intercom. The cultists begin a mass suicide via poison and gunshots, while Joni has his throat cut by Father after repeatedly interrupting the announcement. Lena is abducted by several women in surgical apparel, and Malik is shot dead by one of the cult members. As Adam attempts to rescue Lena, an explosion knocks him back. After watching a figure crawl across the ceiling, he stands and attempts to advance into the fiery room, only to be intercepted by Father, covered in blood with the cult's symbol inscribed on him, who tells him the time has come, then proceeds to explode into a cloud of blood and organs. Adam finds Lena on an altar with the cult's symbol carved into her skin. He kills Madame, but is unable to save Lena, watching as the horned demon the cult worships (which resembles Baphomet) tears its way out of her body. As Adam attempts to flee, he is attacked by the cultists and schoolchildren, including Joni and Malik, who have all risen from the dead and turned into zombie-like ghouls. Adam escapes outside to his car and he drives off, only to be rammed by the demon and gravely injured. As he crawls out of the car's wreckage, the demon looks down on Adam before calling him "papa". The revelation that the demon is, in fact, his child drives Adam insane. He is last seen laughing hysterically before the camera malfunctions.


title: V/H/S/2

text: Back in the frame story, Larry returns to the room with medicine, only to discover Ayesha is dead, having killed herself with a gun. A VHS tape with the word "WATCH" written on it in lipstick lies beside her. Larry picks up the tape, inserts it into the VCR, and anxiously watches it.


title: V/H/S/2

text: Brothers Gary and Randy attach a camera to their Yorkshire Terrier, Tank, to film videos at their lakeside house. Their parents leave on a romantic getaway after giving them a list of chores. Gary and Randy invite their friends Shawn and Danny over so the group can harass the brothers' older sister, Jen, her boyfriend Zack, and her friends. While the group is swimming at a nearby lake, ambushing Jen and her friends with squirt guns filled with urine, they fail to notice a grey alien hiding beneath the water.


title: V/H/S/2

text: Later that night, the group startle Jen and Zack during sex by blaring loud music and flashing lights. A deafening noise is heard, but the group does not notice. In retaliation, Jen and Zack attach another camera to Tank to catch one of the boys masturbating to a pornographic film. The deafening noise is heard again and the power goes out. Seeing a figure outside the door, Zack goes to grab Gary and Randy's father's gun. Suddenly, Zack is grabbed by the alien from earlier, along with others of its kind. The aliens abduct the rest of the group, sealing them in their sleeping bags and attempting to drown them in the lake.


title: V/H/S/2

text: Only Gary, Randy, Jen and Tank escape, running into the woods to hide. After Tank inadvertently alerts the aliens to their location by barking, the kids run toward what they believe to be police lights and sirens, but it turns out to be a trap set by the aliens, who abduct Randy. Jen and Gary flee to a nearby barn, where the aliens drag Jen away as Gary and Tank escape up a ladder. As the aliens close in on Gary, he is suddenly pulled into the air by the alien ship's tractor beam. As Gary is pulled into the air, his grip loosens on Tank's leash, and Tank falls down the ladder to the floor, the impact loosening the camera from his back. Mortally injured by the fall, Tank whimpers as he and the camera both slowly die.


title: V/H/S/2

text: After watching the tape, Larry watches the webcam footage and sees Kyle explain that he and his mother want to make their own tape. Kyle then attempts suicide on-camera by shooting himself through his jaw, but survives with his lower jaw shattered, and runs off moments before Larry and Ayesha enter the house. As Larry watches it, an undead Ayesha suddenly rises and attacks him. In self-defense, Larry breaks her neck and rushes into the other room as Ayesha rises and chases after him on all fours. Larry hides in a closet and shoots Ayesha in the face when she finds him. Hearing a strange gurgling sound, he explores the closet, only to find Kyle has been hiding there the whole time. Kyle lunges at Larry and strangles him to death. Afterward, Kyle gives the camera a "thumbs up", revealing that he and his mother's plan has been successful, before turning off the camera.


title: V/H/S/2

text: The film was rushed into production in late 2012, and premiered January 19, 2013 at Park City's Library Center Theatre as part of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, much like its predecessor.


title: V/H/S/2

text: The film was released via VOD on June 6, and theatrically on July 12. Dance punk band The Death Set recorded a song, "6 Different Ways To Die", for the film's credits.


title: V/H/S/2

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, 71% of 66 reviews were positive. The site's consensus is: "It's as scattershot as its predecessor, but "V/H/S/2" rounds up enough horror filmmaking talent to deliver a satisfyingly nasty – albeit uneven – dose of gore." On Metacritic it has a score of 49% based on reviews from 21 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".


title: V/H/S/2

text: Borys Kit of "The Hollywood Reporter" wrote, "The scares are as hit-or-miss as the filmmaking". Dennis Harvey of "Variety" called it "rip-roaring good time for genre fans".


title: V/H/S/2

text: On July 10, 2013, Rex Reed was the subject of controversy due to a scathing review of the film in which he admitted having walked out at the end of the first segment. His review does complain about parts of the film that happened after he left the film, but his references are rather imprecise, e.g. describing segment "Slumber Party Alien Abduction" as "a sleepover invaded by psycho kidnappers [as opposed to aliens] told from the perspective of a GoPro camera attached to the back of a dog" or summarizing segment "A Ride in the Park" as the tale of "a mountain biker pursued by flesh-eating zombies [rather than turned into one himself early on]".


title: V/H/S/2

text: A third film in the series, titled "", was released in the US on November 21, 2014. A fourth film in the series, titled "V/H/S/94", was released exclusively on Shudder on October 6, 2021.


title: Gas giant

text: A gas giant is a giant planet composed mainly of hydrogen and helium. Gas giants are also called failed stars because they contain the same basic elements as a star. Jupiter and Saturn are the gas giants of the Solar System. The term "gas giant" was originally synonymous with "giant planet". However, in the 1990s, it became known that Uranus and Neptune are really a distinct class of giant planets, being composed mainly of heavier volatile substances (which are referred to as "ices"). For this reason, Uranus and Neptune are now often classified in the separate category of ice giants.


title: Gas giant

text: Jupiter and Saturn consist mostly of hydrogen and helium, with heavier elements making up between 3 and 13 percent of their mass. They are thought to consist of an outer layer of compressed molecular hydrogen surrounding a layer of liquid metallic hydrogen, with probably a molten rocky core inside. The outermost portion of their hydrogen atmosphere contains many layers of visible clouds that are mostly composed of water and ammonia. The layer of metallic hydrogen located in the mid-interior makes up the bulk of every gas giant and is referred to as "metallic" because the very large atmospheric pressure turns hydrogen into an electrical conductor. The gas giants' cores are thought to consist of heavier elements at such high temperatures () and pressures that their properties are not yet completely understood.


title: Gas giant

text: The defining differences between a very low-mass brown dwarf (which can have a mass as low as roughly 13 times that of Jupiter) and a gas giant are debated. One school of thought is based on formation; the other, on the physics of the interior. Part of the debate concerns whether brown dwarfs must, by definition, have experienced nuclear fusion at some point in their history.


title: Gas giant

text: The term "gas giant" was coined in 1952 by the science fiction writer James Blish and was originally used to refer to all giant planets. It is, arguably, something of a misnomer because throughout most of the volume of all giant planets, the pressure is so high that matter is not in gaseous form. Other than solids in the core and the upper layers of the atmosphere, all matter is above the critical point, where there is no distinction between liquids and gases. The term has nevertheless caught on, because planetary scientists typically use "rock", "gas", and "ice" as shorthands for classes of elements and compounds commonly found as planetary constituents, irrespective of what phase the matter may appear in. In the outer Solar System, hydrogen and helium are referred to as "gases"; water, methane, and ammonia as "ices"; and silicates and metals as "rocks". In this terminology, since Uranus and Neptune are primarily composed of ices, not gas, they are more commonly called ice giants and distinct from the gas giants.


title: Gas giant

text: Theoretically, gas giants can be divided into five distinct classes according to their modeled physical atmospheric properties, and hence their appearance: ammonia clouds (I), water clouds (II), cloudless (III), alkali-metal clouds (IV), and silicate clouds (V). Jupiter and Saturn are both class I. Hot Jupiters are class IV or V.


title: Gas giant

text: A cold hydrogen-rich gas giant more massive than Jupiter but less than about () will only be slightly larger in volume than Jupiter. For masses above , gravity will cause the planet to shrink (see degenerate matter).


title: Gas giant

text: Kelvin–Helmholtz heating can cause a gas giant to radiate more energy than it receives from its host star.


title: Gas giant

text: Although the words "gas" and "giant" are often combined, hydrogen planets need not be as large as the familiar gas giants from the Solar System. However, smaller gas planets and planets closer to their star will lose atmospheric mass more quickly via hydrodynamic escape than larger planets and planets farther out.


title: Gas giant

text: A gas dwarf could be defined as a planet with a rocky core that has accumulated a thick envelope of hydrogen, helium and other volatiles, having as result a total radius between 1.7 and 3.9 Earth-radii.


title: Gas giant

text: The smallest known extrasolar planet that is likely a "gas planet" is Kepler-138d, which has the same mass as Earth but is 60% larger and therefore has a density that indicates a thick gas envelope.


title: Gas giant

text: A low-mass gas planet can still have a radius resembling that of a gas giant if it has the right temperature.


title: Gas giant

text: Heat that is funneled upward by local storms is a major driver of the weather on gas giants. Much, if not all, of the deep heat escaping the interior flows up through towering thunderstorms. These disturbances develop into small eddies that eventually form storms such as the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. On Earth and Jupiter, lightning and the hydrologic cycle are intimately linked together to create intense thunderstorms. During a terrestrial thunderstorm, condensation releases heat that pushes rising air upward. This "moist convection" engine can segregate electrical charges into different parts of a cloud; the reuniting of those charges is lightning. Therefore, we can use lightning to signal to us where convection is happening. Although Jupiter has no ocean or wet ground, moist convection seems to function similarly compared to Earth.


title: Gas giant

text: The Great Red Spot (GRS) is a high-pressure system located in Jupiter's southern hemisphere. The GRS is a powerful anticyclone, swirling at about 430 to 680 kilometers per hour counterclockwise around the center. The Spot has since become known for its ferocity, even feeding on smaller Jovian storms. Tholins are brown organic compounds found within the surface of various planets that are formed by exposure to UV irradiation. The tholins that exist on Jupiter's surface get sucked up into the atmosphere by storms and circulation; it is hypothesized that those tholins that become ejected from the regolith get stuck in Jupiter's GRS, causing it to be red.


title: Gas giant

text: Condensation of helium creates liquid helium rain on gas giants. On Saturn, this helium condensation occurs at certain pressures and temperatures when helium does not mix in with the liquid metallic hydrogen present on the planet. Regions on Saturn where helium is insoluble allow the denser helium to form droplets and act as a source of energy, both through the release of latent heat and by descending deeper into the center of the planet. This phase separation leads to helium droplets that fall as rain through the liquid metallic hydrogen until they reach a warmer region where they dissolve in the hydrogen. Since Jupiter and Saturn have different total masses, the thermodynamic conditions in the planetary interior could be such that this condensation process is more prevalent in Saturn than in Jupiter. Helium condensation could be responsible for Saturn's excess luminosity as well as the helium depletion in both Jupiter and Saturn's atmosphere of both.


title: Gas giant

text: The internal heat of Uranus is very low. Uranus is the coldest planet in the Solar System with an upper atmospheric temperature of –224 °C. The deepest sections of the mantle are so hot and under such pressure that methane is decomposed to elemental carbon. Diamond rain is the potential result of this phenomena. Higher up in the atmosphere where conditions are milder, products from the photolysis of methane (such as acetylene and diacetylene) have been detected; there is likely to be a lot of interesting organic chemistry (potentially life-enabling processes) happening in the regions between the diamond nucleation zone and the upper atmosphere.


title: Shriek (character)

text: Shriek (Frances Louise Barrison) is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. She is usually depicted as an enemy of Spider-Man, and the lover of Cletus Kasady.


title: Shriek (character)

text: Shriek first appeared in "Spider-Man Unlimited" #1 (May 1993) and was created by writer Tom DeFalco and artist Ron Lim.


title: Shriek (character)

text: Shriek is a dangerous and criminally insane villainess with the ability to manipulate sound. During the events of "Maximum Carnage", she allied herself with Carnage and several other supervillains who went about New York on a killing spree.


title: Shriek (character)

text: Shriek's origins and real name were, at first, uncertain. She was named Sandra Deel in her earliest appearances, but named Frances Louise Barrison in later appearances. According to the "Spider-Man Encyclopedia", she was born Frances Louise Barrison, but used Sandra Deel as an alias.


title: Shriek (character)

text: During her childhood, Frances was abused by her mother for being overweight, driving her to drugs and leading to her later fixation on becoming a mother herself. She became a drug dealer, which exposed her to situations that ultimately damaged her sanity; namely, being shot in the head by a police officer, and being put in Cloak's Darkforce Dimension, which awakened Shriek's latent mutant abilities.


title: Shriek (character)

text: Shriek debuted at the start of the "Maximum Carnage" crossover. During Carnage's violent escape from the Ravencroft mental institution, he came across Shriek, who was also incarcerated and wished to join him. He freed her, and the pair embarked on a killing spree. They attracted the company of several other homicidal supervillains (Demogoblin, Doppelganger, and Carrion), and formed a "family," with Carnage and Shriek as the "parents" and the others as their "sons". (Although it is clearly obvious that Shriek had love for Carnage, it is uncertain whether he felt the same for her; it is implied many times that he did.) Shriek also used her mental powers to increase the chaos by causing a number of New Yorkers to violently turn on one another, although the heroes were able to calm the people down before they did anything too serious, such as killing their own children. The killers fought a number of heroes, led by Spider-Man, but succumbed to in-fighting. Carnage slew the Doppelganger and left the others to their defeat and capture, although he was subsequently contained by the Avengers after a clash with Spider-Man, Venom and Black Cat.


title: Shriek (character)

text: In the aftermath, Shriek is returned to Ravencroft, but escapes her cell by short-circuiting her power dampening unit. Shriek frees fellow inmates Gale, Webber, Pyromania, and Mayhem, and together they try to break out of the facility, opposed by Spider-Man and John Jameson. While distracted by Spider-Man, Shriek is knocked out with a tranquilizer gun by Jameson.


title: Shriek (character)

text: When Dr. Ashley Kafka brings Malcolm McBride near Shriek's cell, Shriek recognizes Malcolm as her "son" Carrion, breaks out of her room, and escapes from Ravencroft with Malcolm. Agitated by Malcolm's refusal to acknowledge her as his mother, Shriek becomes violent towards him, and uses her powers to turn him back into Carrion after an encounter with Spider-Man, who Shriek plans on making her new "husband" after sensing a growing darkness within him. In an attempt to make Carrion fully embrace her as his mother, Shriek takes him to Beatrice McBride, the biological mother of Malcolm, with the intent of having Carrion murder the woman. The duo are tracked by Spider-Man, and in the ensuing brawl, Shriek abandons her plans to convert Spider-Man to her side, and forces Carrion to choose between her and Beatrice. The distraught Carrion instead begins to commit suicide with his own powers, which Beatrice tries to stop, stating, "Do you think my life matters? Do you think I wouldn't sacrifice myself a thousand times over to save my child?" when Shriek tells her that she will be killed by contact with Carrion. Touched, Shriek absorbs the Carrion virus, incapacitating herself, and turning Carrion back into Malcolm.


title: Shriek (character)

text: Shriek is readmitted to Ravencroft, where the dormant Carrion virus (which she had been treating like an unborn child) is extracted from her by the Jackal. Later, Shriek is brought on as a juror in Judas Traveller's mock trial of Spider-Man in the basement of Ravencroft. Shriek and the other members of the jury deem Spider-Man guilty of ruining lives and creating supervillains, but before they can execute their sentence of death they are returned to their cells and have their memories altered by Traveller.


title: Shriek (character)

text: She appears in "" as one of the villains in the Bar With No Name. After Carnage is returned to Earth by Hall Industries, the company purchases Ravencroft with the intention of using Shriek (who had been responding well to the treatment being administered to her by Doctor Tanis Nieves) as a power source for the Carnage symbiote, which had been separated from Cletus Kasady. Shriek is brought to Hall Industries, where exposure to the Carnage symbiote, coupled with her witnessing guards beating Doppelganger (who had been attempting to rescue her) causes her to snap, and return to homicidal mania. After Cletus reunites with his symbiote, Shriek and Doppelganger aid him in causing chaos throughout New York City, with Shriek gaining additional powers from another symbiote (which gives her a third arm, and covers half of her face) that Carnage's had spawned. Growing fearful of Shriek, the symbiote leaves her in favor of Nieves, its initial host, to create Scorn, who forces Shriek to use her powers to weaken Carnage, allowing Spider-Man and Iron Man to defeat him. In the aftermath, Shriek is shown to be in a coma, Scorn having done some unspecified damage to her brain.


title: Shriek (character)

text: Shriek regains consciousness, and is recruited by Caroline le Fay to battle the Fearless Defenders as a member of the new Doom Maidens. After the Doom Maidens are disbanded, Shriek reunites with Carnage, and saves him from Deadpool in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The two killers flee pursued by Deadpool, who crashes their car with a combine harvester, severely injuring Shriek, and enraging Carnage. Carnage flings Deadpool away, and escapes to the base of the Mercury Team (who he kills) with the unconscious Shriek. Carnage, troubled by Deadpool making him question his nihilistic beliefs, then has Shriek help him break into a psychiatric hospital, where they try to force the patients and staff to answer Carnage's questions about being controlled by higher powers, a concept which disgusts Carnage. Deadpool, who has bonded to the Mercury Team's symbiotes, uses his new shapeshifting abilities to disorient Shriek, causing her to run off. After a skirmish with Carnage, Deadpool captures Shriek, uses his symbiotes to disguise her as himself, and tricks the already distraught Carnage into nearly killing her, causing Carnage (who believes his attacking Shriek was "foreshadowed" by the higher powers) to suffer a mental breakdown. Shriek is hospitalized, and Carnage willingly allows himself to be arrested.


title: Shriek (character)

text: Shriek recovered, and was hired onto the Sinister Sixteen by Boomerang and the Owl. After being manipulated and abandoned by Boomerang, Shriek and three other members of the Sinister Sixteen sought revenge on him in the Bar With No Name, only to be defeated by him, Beetle, Overdrive, and Speed Demon.


title: Shriek (character)

text: Shriek subsequently attacks a police station with Gibbon, Griffin, and Ruby Thursday. The quartet is subdued by Spider-Woman's apprentice Porcupine.


title: Shriek (character)

text: Detroit-based supervillain Nain Rouge afterward hires Shriek and a new Firebrand to be his enforcers, bringing them into conflict with the Great Lakes Avengers.


title: Shriek (character)

text: Shriek later appeared as a secret ally to Kraven the Hunter at the time he was leading the NYPD's SWAT Team into hunting the Dinosaur People living beneath New York City ever since they were created by Stegron. She made herself known where she used her sonic attack on Venom and then collapsed the ceiling on him much to Kraven the Hunter's annoyance. Shriek stated to Kraven that he can have the head of Eddie Brock after their mission. Venom catches up to Kraven the Hunter and fights him and Shriek. With help from Tana, Venom stated that the Dinosaur People weren't killing anybody and that they are only surviving underground. Kraven the Hunter and Shriek are arrested by the NYPD.


title: Shriek (character)

text: Shriek eventually reunites with Carnage and Doppelganger again and together formed a cult dedicated in worshiping Knull. They eventually return to Doverton and got the codexes – the symbiote remnants left on the bodies of previous hosts – from the citizens who were infected by Carnage.


title: Shriek (character)

text: Being a mutant and following exposure to Cloak's Dimension, Shriek has the ability to manipulate sound in a number of elaborate ways. She can harness it for destructive concussive force or use it to disorient and agitate her enemies. She can apparently hypersonically induce intense emotion in those around her (generating fear, hate, or despair). She also has moderate powers of levitation that she can use to make herself fly and possibly some low level of psionic ability.


title: Shriek (character)

text: She is able to sense the darkest side to a person's psyche so that she can use her powers to specifically manipulate that person's emotions. Her scarred left eye is also prone to glow whenever she uses her powers. Why only that eye glows is uncertain.


title: Shriek (character)

text: During the "Secret Wars", in a world of zombified characters, a zombie Shriek worked with zombie Mystique deep in the Deadlands and was amongst the zombies who were attacked by Ulysses Bloodstone after Deadpool, who acted as a source of meat, was destroyed. Later, she attempted to recapture a child named "Shuttup" after she had been rescued and was with Mystique during the fight between Elsa Bloodstone and Ulysses. She is seemingly killed along with the rest of the zombie horde.


title: Shriek (character)

text: Shriek made minor appearances in "Ultimate Spider-Man", voiced by Ashley Eckstein. Throughout her appearances, she is consistently defeated by Spider-Man, with two occasions seeing her being prevented from joining Doctor Octopus' Hydra-backed Sinister Six and being infected by the Carnage symbiote before being neutralized by the Anti-Venom symbiote.


title: Shriek (character)

text: Frances Barrison appears in the live-action Sony's Spider-Man Universe film "" (2021), portrayed by Naomie Harris. This version fell in love with Cletus Kasady in her youth while they were both at the St. Estes Home for Unwanted Children before she was taken to the Ravencroft Institute. On the way there, Barrison tried to use her sonic powers to escape but was shot by police officer Patrick Mulligan. While Mulligan believed that he had killed her, Barrison survived, but was left heavily scarred, blind in her left eye, and subsequently imprisoned within a reinforced glass cell. In the present, after Kasady becomes Carnage, he breaks Barrison out of Ravencroft, and together they go on a rampage through San Francisco before capturing Mulligan and Anne Weying to lure out Venom. As Kasady and Barrison attempt to get married in a cathedral, they are confronted by Venom, who tricks Barrison into attacking Kasady and Carnage with her powers. This demolishes the cathedral and kills Barrison, who is crushed by a falling bell.


title: George Gascón

text: George Gascón (born March 12, 1954) is an American attorney and former police officer who is the district attorney of Los Angeles County. A member of the Democratic Party and a former Republican, Gascón served as the district attorney of San Francisco from 2011 to 2019. Prior to his work as a prosecutor, he was an assistant chief of police for the LAPD, and Chief of Police in Mesa, Arizona and San Francisco.


title: George Gascón

text: Gascón was born in Havana, Cuba. In 1967 his family emigrated to the United States and settled in Bell, California. He joined the United States Army at the age of eighteen and became a sergeant. After earning a Bachelor of Arts in history from California State–Long Beach, Gascón joined the Los Angeles Police Department as a patrol officer.


title: George Gascón

text: During his tenure with the Los Angeles Police Department, he attained the rank of assistant chief of police under Chief William Bratton. In 2006, Gascón was appointed chief of police for the Mesa Police Department. He had frequent clashes with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio over immigration sweeps targeting Latinos. In 2009, then-Mayor Gavin Newsom appointed Gascón as the chief of police for the San Francisco Police Department. In 2011, after Kamala Harris was elected California Attorney General, Newsom appointed him to be the San Francisco district attorney. In 2020, Gascón unseated incumbent Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey with a reformist agenda. Gascón's liberal and progressive policies received backlash during his time in San Francisco and Los Angeles, leading to several recall attempts in the latter role.


title: George Gascón

text: Gascon was born on March 12, 1954, in pre-Communist Cuba. Shortly after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, his father lost his job for alleged anti-government activity, and his uncle, a union organizer, was jailed for over a decade. In 1967, Gascón and his family emigrated from Cuba to the United States.


title: George Gascón

text: The family settled in Bell, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. At the age of thirteen, Gascón enrolled in Los Angeles Unified School District schools where he struggled to learn English. He recalled: "I was spending hours translating everything with a Spanish-English dictionary. I started missing a lot of school." By 1972, he dropped out of Bell High School.


title: George Gascón

text: Gascón joined the United States Army in 1972. In the army, he earned his high school diploma and two years toward an undergraduate degree. Gascón served in the 64th Military Police Detachment, much of it in Germany. In 1975, he received an honorable discharge as a sergeant. After the Army, Gascón completed a Bachelor of Arts in history from California State-Long Beach while working sales jobs.


title: George Gascón

text: In 1978, Gascón joined the Los Angeles Police Department as a patrol officer. After a three-year stint with the LAPD, he returned to work in business management. He served as a reserve officer in the Hollenbeck Division of LAPD until 1987. In 1987, he returned to LAPD as a full-time police officer. Upon his return, he rose through the ranks of LAPD as a Sergeant, Lieutenant, Captain, Commander, and Deputy Chief in 2002. During his time with LAPD, Gascón earned his J.D. degree from Western State College of Law in 1996.


title: George Gascón

text: In 2000, he took command of the LAPD training unit at the height of the Rampart scandal. He was in command of the LAPD training unit, overseeing the LAPD Academy and in-service training, during the federal government's oversight of police reforms. Even though there was a mandate for reform, then-Police Chief Bernard Parks did not allocate funding for additional training. Gascón used a grant that had originally been funded to research community-policing strategies, and produced three hundred thousand additional training hours.


title: George Gascón

text: One of his first orders as training commander was to create an ethics training manual for the LAPD. He also implemented problem-based learning and posted a copy of the bill of rights in every LAPD classroom. Michael Gennaco, the former head of the United States Justice Department's civil rights division said at the time: "He fundamentally changed the way the LAPD teaches its officers about civil rights."


title: George Gascón

text: In 2002, Gascón applied to be the Los Angeles Police Department Chief of Police. He wanted to partner with community agencies to reduce California's prisoner-recidivism rate. William Bratton was ultimately appointed Chief of Police.


title: George Gascón

text: In 2003, he was sworn in as Assistant Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department under Chief William Bratton. In 2004, Gascón oversaw the daily operations of the department. William Bratton credited Gascón with helping reduce the rate of violent crime in Los Angeles at that time.


title: George Gascón

text: In 2006, Gascón was hired as Chief of Police for the Mesa Police Department. Gascón had frequent clashes with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio over immigration sweeps allegedly targeting Latinos. Arpaio regularly conducted saturation patrols and immigration sweeps, targeting Latino neighborhoods and day laborers. Arpaio allegedly stopped cars with Latino drivers or passengers to check their immigration status. Gascón condemned the policies and tactics of Arpaio and his deputies, and actively worked to protect the Latino community in Mesa.


title: George Gascón

text: Gascón served as San Francisco Police Department chief from August 2009 to January 2011, succeeding Heather Fong. He was replaced by Greg Suhr. In 2009, San Francisco saw a significant drop in homicides, falling from 96 in 2008 to 45 in 2009. At the time, Gascón attributed the dramatic drop in homicides to the policies enacted by his predecessor. Between 2009 and 2011, (reported) violent crime decreased in San Francisco by 3%.


title: George Gascón

text: In March 2010, Gascón made remarks about San Francisco's susceptibility to terrorism by the "Middle Eastern community" that upset Arab-Americans. Several San Francisco police officers accused Gascón of calling African-Americans "those people" in "a derogatory way." Gascón denied making those remarks.


title: George Gascón

text: In 2011, in his last act as Mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom appointed Gascón as San Francisco District Attorney, filling the seat vacated by Kamala Harris. In 2018, Gascón announced that he would not be seeking re-election, citing his need to care for his mother in Los Angeles. He resigned from his San Francisco District Attorney position in October 2019.


title: George Gascón

text: Gascón advocated for the end of cash bail. Gascón brought the Public Safety Assessment (PSA) tool to San Francisco to assist courts in making bail decisions more equitably. Initial results indicate that for the 15 months following the implementation of the PSA tool, only 6% of defendants released went on to commit a new crime while awaiting trial, roughly half the rate observed during a similarly recorded period of time in 2006 during which cash bail was used exclusively to determine which defendants were released awaiting trial.


title: George Gascón

text: During Gascon's time as District Attorney, property crime increased by 49%. Some of Gascon's critics have blamed this increase on his office's reluctance to file charges against "High-level" offenders; during Gascon's tenure, misdemeanor charges were only filed in 40% of cases presented by the San Francisco Police Department. Having worked with Gascon, San Francisco Mayor London Breed and City Attorney Dennis Herrera declined to endorse him in his bid to become the District Attorney of Los Angeles County; Breed and Herrera instead endorsed his opponent, the incumbent Jackie Lacey.


title: George Gascón

text: In 2018, Gascón announced that he would apply California's Adult Use of Marijuana Act retroactively to every marijuana case since 1975 in order to level the playing field for those adversely affected by the criminalization of marijuana. The move cleared misdemeanor convictions and reduced felony convictions for those entitled for record relief under the act. He partnered with Code for America, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, which kicked off a national movement resulting in dozens of cities across the country clearing marijuana convictions.


title: George Gascón

text: Prop 47, which was co-authored by Gascón, reduced simple drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanor in California.


title: George Gascón

text: Gascón implemented and launched California's first prosecutorial data management system, similar to CompStat, called DA Stat. This internal data collection tool is part of a trend toward "data-driven prosecution".


title: George Gascón

text: Gascón launched a blue-ribbon panel, which was set to investigate a scandal in the San Francisco Police Department regarding allegations that homophobic and racist texts had been exchanged between 14 or more police officers in 2014.


title: George Gascón

text: In 2016, following recommendations of both the Department of Justice and Blue Ribbon Panel, Gascón secured funding to create the Independent Investigations Bureau, which investigates shootings involving police officers, excessive force, and in-custody deaths.


title: George Gascón

text: Gascón helped launch San Francisco's Young Adult Court in 2015. He described the program as "a hybrid of the adult and juvenile justice systems tailored to the biology and circumstances of offenders 18 to 24." In the program, a prosecutor refers a case to the Alternative Sentencing Planner (ASP) who determines if alternatives to incarceration in the community are appropriate.


title: George Gascón

text: In 2019, Gascón supported San Francisco's move to close Juvenile Hall, citing studies showing that incarceration of juveniles significantly increases a young person's likelihood of recidivism and that "California's juvenile facilities aren't rehabilitating kids or making our communities safer."


title: George Gascón

text: Gascón has taken a like approach to prosecuting youth in Los Angeles County, launching a program to spare minors from criminal charges for burglary, vehicle theft, arson, sexual battery, assault, and robbery in cases that resulted in no serious harm and involved no firearms, depending on the victims’ agreement, the offenders’ admission of responsibility, and the expectation that offenders meet their victims. This program’s description in a memo drew prompt criticism from other officials, such as Sacramento Dist. Atty. Anne Marie Schubert, who called it “reckless,” and Los Angeles Deputy Dist. Atty. John Hatami, who noted that it failed to bar offenders who used weapons other than guns. "I don’t think any reasonable or experienced prosecutor would issue blanket policies,” said Hatami, “but George Gascón has no experience … in any court.” Similarly, when a 17-year-old offender in a potentially fatal hit-and-run case was sentenced to five months’ detention in a juvenile probation camp, Deputy Dist. Atty. John McKinney denounced Gascón for leniency: "I would have been considering attempted murder charges and at least assault with a vehicle.… He obviously cares more for offenders than he does for victims."


title: George Gascón

text: Gascón coauthored Senate Bill 962, legislation requiring a "kill switch" on all smartphones sold in California.


title: George Gascón

text: Gascón co-authored Proposition 47 that reduced many crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. Proposition 47, according to one study, has reduced the disparity in arrests in San Francisco between Caucasians and African Americans by nearly half. Some have criticized the law.


title: George Gascón

text: Gascon filed a civil complaint against Uber alleging that the company failed to protect riders from sex offenders and other people who have been convicted of serious felonies.


title: George Gascón

text: Gascon expanded the DA's Charging Unit to support "weekend rebooking" in order to reduce the jail population and reduce time in custody.


title: George Gascón

text: In 2019, Gascón announced he was running to be the district attorney for Los Angeles County. Contributions against Gascón largely came from law enforcement groups, such as one million dollars from the Los Angeles Police Protective League, while contributions to his campaign came from progressive donors like George Soros, Patty Quillin and Reed Hastings. During the race, he indicated that he supported creating a civil rights division within the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office. He defeated incumbent DA Jackie Lacey on November 6. Gascon's candidacy was endorsed by California Governor Gavin Newsom.


title: George Gascón

text: Gascón began his time as Los Angeles DA by announcing that his office would not seek cash bail for certain offenses and would seek release for those currently awaiting such bail, would never seek the death penalty, and would end the charging of juveniles as adults. He also announced plans to reevaluate any sentence for which the prisoner had already served 20 years, and to reopen some cases of officer-involved shootings from the previous eight years. His policies have sparked outrage from some victims and their families, and revolt from some of his own prosecutors, who have sought to block him in court. In at least one case, a criminal who received a light sentence due to Gascon’s policies was recorded gloating about the lack of severity to their sentencing, not having to register as a sex offender, or go back to prison.


title: George Gascón

text: In February 2021, an effort began to place a proposition on an upcoming ballot to remove Gascón from office. While the recall's most visible supporter is Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, it is led by former District Attorney Steve Cooley, as well as Desiree Andrade and Tania Owen, two women who lost relatives to violent crime. In March 2021, the effort to recall Gascón was started after a petition was approved, to which the group would need to gather 579,062 by October 2021. In September 2021, the recall effort failed after the group were unable to gather enough signatures for the October deadline, but the group vowed to retry at a later time.


title: George Gascón

text: Subsequently, a third attempt to recall the District Attorney began. On June 15, 2022, the group announced that they had secured more than 566,857 signatures required to officially make the ballot, with them shifting focus onto gathering more signatures to help with any invalidated signatures. The group behind the recall effort submitted the signatures on July 6, 2022. On July 9, 2022, the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk announced that the campaign had submitted 715,833 signatures, and would be conducting the verification process by using a 5% random sample of the total signatures. On July 14, the Registrar announced that it has completed its check and would proceed to checking all the ballots. On August 15, 2022, the recall petition failed as the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk stated that 195,783 signatures were invalid.


title: Eugene Allen

text: Eugene Allen (July 14, 1919 – March 31, 2010) was an American waiter and butler who worked for the US government at the White House for 34 years until he retired as the head butler in 1986.


title: Eugene Allen

text: Allen was born in Buckingham County, Virginia and raised on Shirland Farm near Scottsville. He worked as a waiter for many years, in "whites-only resorts and country clubs", including The Homestead resort in Hot Springs, Virginia, and a club in Washington.


title: Eugene Allen

text: He started in the White House in 1952 as a "pantry man", a job which involved basic tasks such as dish washing, stocking and cleaning silverware. Over the years Allen rose in his position, becoming the butler to the president.


title: Eugene Allen

text: Allen was particularly affected by the murder of President Kennedy in 1963. According to his son, "My father came home late on the day that President Kennedy had been shot. But then he got up and put his coat back on. He said, 'I've got to go back to work.' But in the hallway, he fell against the wall and started crying. That was the first time in my life I had ever seen my father cry." He was invited to the funeral, but chose to stay at work to prepare for the reception, because "Someone had to be at the White House to serve everyone after they came from the funeral." Allen never missed a day of work in 34 years.


title: Eugene Allen

text: Allen finally attained the most prestigious rank of butlers serving in the White House, "Maître d'hôtel", in 1981, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Reagan invited Allen and his wife Helene to a state dinner in honor of Helmut Kohl at the White House. Allen was the first White House butler ever to be invited as a guest to a state dinner. He retired in 1986, after he worked for Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan, a total of eight presidents.


title: Eugene Allen

text: Allen was married to his wife, Helene, for 65 years. They met at a birthday party in Washington in 1942, and married a year later in 1943. The couple had one son, Charles Allen. He and his wife had intended to vote for Barack Obama in 2008, but she died the day before the election, on November 3.


title: Eugene Allen

text: Allen died of kidney failure at the Washington Adventist Hospital in Takoma Park, Maryland on March 31, 2010.


title: Eugene Allen

text: Allen came to public attention when a 2008 article about him and his wife, by journalist Wil Haygood, entitled "A Butler Well Served by This Election", was published in "The Washington Post" shortly after the 2008 presidential election. It placed Allen's life in the context of changing race relations and the personalities of the presidents he'd served. It ended with the story of how the couple intended to vote for Obama together but Helene died just before the election,


title: Eugene Allen

text: They talked about praying to help Barack Obama get to the White House. They’d go vote together. She’d lean on her cane with one hand, and on him with the other, while walking down to the precinct. And she’d get supper going afterward...On Monday Helene had a doctor’s appointment. Gene woke and nudged her once, then again. He shuffled around to her side of the bed. He nudged Helene again. He was all alone. “I woke up and my wife didn’t,” he said later.


title: Eugene Allen

text: The story had an immediate impact. Columbia Pictures bought the film rights to Allen's life story, and he was invited to Obama's inauguration, where he commented, "That's the man...Whew, I'm telling you, it's something to see. Seeing him standing there, it's been worth it all."


title: Eugene Allen

text: Allen and other workers who served presidents were featured in a 32-minute documentary, "Workers at the White House", directed by Marjorie Hunt and released on a 2009 DVD, "White House Workers: Traditions and Memories" by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.


title: Eugene Allen

text: Allen's life was the inspiration for the 2013 film "The Butler". Danny Strong's screenplay was inspired by the 2008 "Washington Post" article. The film departs from the facts of Allen's life. The central character, "Cecil Gaines", is only loosely based on the real Allen.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) was a partially recognised state in Southeast Asia supported by Vietnam which existed from 1979 to 1989. It was founded in Cambodia by the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation, a group of Cambodian communists who were dissatisfied with the Khmer Rouge due to its oppressive rule of Cambodia 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.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: 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 1993, albeit with limited international recognition outside of the Soviet Bloc.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Beginning 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.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: 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.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The PRK was established in January 1979 as a result of a process that began with Khmer Rouge belligerence.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: 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 things began to turn sour, 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 Hanoi. 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".


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: 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.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: 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.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: 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.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Of the Salvation Front's fourteen 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.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: 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.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: 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, consisting 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 Armed Forces of Democratic Kampuchea (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.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: 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.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: 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.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: 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.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: 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 invaders. 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.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: As events in the 1980s progressed, the main preoccupations of the new regime would be survival, restoring the economy, and combating the Khmer Rouge insurgency by military and political means.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: 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.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: 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.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: 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.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: 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 Socialist state and flocked to the refugee camps to emigrate to the West.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: 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.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: 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.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: 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" (), 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.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: 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 National United Front for National Salvation (FUNSK) to assembled adults.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Survivors of Democratic Kampuchea rule lived in fear and uncertainty, lest the feared Khmer Rouge returned. 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.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The annual Day of Remembrance, also known as "Day of Hatred" against the Khmer Rouge was instituted as part of the PRK's propaganda. Among the slogans chanted on the Day of Remembrance, one of the most often repeated was "We must absolutely prevent the return of the former black darkness" in Khmer.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: At least 600,000 Cambodians had been displaced during the Pol Pot era when cities had been emptied. After the Vietnamese invasion freed them, most Cambodians who had been forcefully resettled elsewhere in the countryside returned to the cities or to their original rural homesteads. Since families had been disrupted and separated, many Cambodians freed from their communes wandered over the country searching for family members and friends.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Following the invasion there were severe famine conditions in the country, with some estimates reaching 500,000.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Traditional farming had been so severely interfered with that it took time to be established anew. Meanwhile, the Khmer Rouge commune system had completely collapsed, following which there were no jobs and not enough food to eat. It took six months to begin the gradual repopulation of Phnom Penh, as electricity, water and sewage systems were reestablished and street repair and removal of garbage were undertaken.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The destruction of Cambodian social institutions during the "Year Zero" period (1975–1979) had been thorough. It had left the PRK with little to start with, for there were no police, no schools, no books, no hospitals, no post and telecommunications, no legal system and no broadcasting networks, either for television or radio, whether state-owned or private.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: To compound the situation for Cambodia, the Western nations, China and the ASEAN states refused to provide reconstruction assistance directly to the new regime. Owing to US and China's opposition to the international recognition of the PRK, the United Nations relief and rehabilitation agencies were not allowed to operate within Cambodia by the UN authorities. The little development help that was available came only from the Eastern Bloc nations; among these only the Socialist Republic of Romania would refuse assistance to the PRK.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The bulk of international help and aid from Western nations would be diverted to refugee camps along the Thai border.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Faced with a destroyed country and lack of international aid, large numbers of distraught Cambodians flocked to the Thai border in the years that followed. There, international help provided by different international aid organisations, many of them backed by the United States, was available. At one point, more than 500,000 Cambodians were living along the Thai-Cambodian border and more than 100,000 in holding centres inside Thailand.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: More than US$400 million was provided between 1979 and 1982, of which the United States, as part of its Cold War political strategy against communist Vietnam, contributed nearly $100 million. In 1982, the US government had initiated a covert aid program to the non-communist resistance (NCR) amounting to $5 million per year, ostensibly for non-lethal aid only. This amount was increased to $8 million in 1984 and $12 million in 1987 and 1988.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: In late 1988, the United States pared back Central Intelligence Agency funding to $8 million, following reports that $3.5 million had been diverted by the Thai military. At the same time, the Reagan Administration gave new flexibility to the funds, permitting the NCR to purchase US-made weapons in Singapore and other regional markets. In 1985, the United States established a separate, overt aid program to the non-communist resistance which came to be known as the Solarz Fund after one of its chief sponsors, Rep. Stephen Solarz. The overt aid program channelled about $5 million per year to the non-communist resistance through USAID.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Meanwhile, a sizeable portion of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge forces regrouped and received a continuous and abundant supply of military equipment from China, channelled across Thailand with the co-operation of the Royal Thai Armed Forces. Along with other armed factions, the Khmer Rouge launched a relentless military campaign against the newly established People's Republic of Kampuchea state from the refugee camps and from hidden military outposts along the Thai border. Even though the Khmer Rouge was dominant, the non-communist resistance included a number of groups which had formerly been fighting against the Khmer Rouge after 1975.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: These groups included Lon Nol-era soldiers —-coalesced in 1979–80 to form the Khmer People's National Liberation Armed Forces (KPNLAF)— which pledged loyalty to former Prime Minister Son Sann, and Moulinaka (Mouvement pour la Libération Nationale du Kampuchea), loyal to Prince Norodom Sihanouk. In 1979, Son Sann formed the Khmer People's National Liberation Front (KPNLF) to lead the political struggle for Cambodia's independence. Prince Sihanouk formed his own organisation, FUNCINPEC, and its military arm, the Armée Nationale Sihanoukienne (ANS) in 1981.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Fraught with both internal and mutual discord, the non-communist groups opposing the PRK, were never very effective, so that all through the civil war against the KPRAF/CPAF the only seriously organised fighting force against the state was the former Khmer Rouge militia, ironically labelled as the "Resistance". This armed faction would wreak much havoc in Cambodia even after the restoration of the monarchy, well into the 1990s.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: This protracted civil war would bleed Cambodia's energies throughout the 1980s. Vietnam's occupation army of as many as 200,000 troops controlled the major population centres and most of the countryside from 1979 to September 1989, but Heng Samrin's regime's 30,000 KPRAF troops were plagued by poor morale and widespread desertion owing to low pay and poverty. Men were directly needed in their family farms as they were being rebuilt and there was much work to do.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Disoriented Cambodian refugees from refugee camps in Aranyaprathet, Thailand, were forcefully sent back across the border beginning in 1980 and many of them ended up in areas under Khmer Rouge control.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The process was organised by pro-Democratic Kampuchea cadres, but it was presented to the press as "voluntary". The undermining of the People's Republic of Kampuchea was supported by the United States government, who took a dim view of the existing pro-Vietnamese Cambodian regime, as well as countries like Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore, whose representative exhorted the dispirited refugees to "go back and fight."


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The civil war followed a wet season/dry season rhythm after 1980. The heavily armed Vietnamese forces conducted offensive operations during the dry seasons, and the Chinese-backed insurgency held the initiative during the rainy seasons. In 1982, Vietnam launched a major offensive against the main Khmer Rouge base at Phnom Malai in the Cardamom Mountains. But this operation met with little success.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: In the 1984–85 dry season offensive, the Vietnamese again attacked base camps of all three anti-PRK groups. This time the Vietnamese succeeded in eliminating the Khmer Rouge camps in Cambodia and drove the insurgents into neighbouring Thailand.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Before retreating the Khmer Rouge laid down numerous landmines and cut down giant trees to block roads in the thick jungle along the Thai-Cambodian border causing heavy deforestation.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The Vietnamese concentrated on consolidating their gains through the K5 Plan, an extravagant and labour-intensive attempt to seal guerrilla infiltration routes into the country by means of trenches, wire fences, and minefields along virtually the entire Thai-Cambodian border. The K5 border defence project, designed by Vietnamese general Lê Đức Anh, commander of the Vietnamese forces in Cambodia, irritated Cambodian farmers and ended up being psychologically counterproductive for the PRK. Large swathes of formerly inaccessible tropical forests were destroyed, leaving a negative ecological legacy.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Despite the help of the Vietnamese Army, as well as of Soviet, Cuban and Vietnamese advisers, Heng Samrin had only limited success in establishing the PRK regime in the face of the ongoing civil war. Security in some rural areas was tenuous, and major transportation routes were subject to interdiction by sporadic attacks. The presence of Vietnamese throughout the country and their intrusion into Cambodian life added fuel to the traditional Cambodian anti-Vietnamese sentiment.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: In 1986, Hanoi claimed to have begun withdrawing part of its occupation forces. At the same time, Vietnam continued efforts to strengthen its client regime, the PRK, and its military arm, the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Armed Forces (KPRAF). These withdrawals continued over the next two years, although actual numbers were difficult to verify. Vietnam's proposal to withdraw its remaining occupation forces in 1989–90—one of the repercussions of the dismemberment of the Soviet bloc as well as the result of the US and Chinese pressure—forced the PRK to begin economic and constitutional reforms in an attempt to ensure future political dominance. In April 1989, Hanoi and Phnom Penh announced that final withdrawal would take place by the end of September the same year.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: On 29–30 April 1989, the National Assembly of the PRK, presided by Hun Sen, held a meeting in order to make some, at first, largely cosmetic constitutional changes. The name "People's Republic of Kampuchea" was officially changed to the State of Cambodia (SOC)—a name that had been previously used right after the 1970 coup—reintroducing the blue colour in the Cambodian flag and other state symbols, although the coat of arms remained almost the same. The national anthem and the military symbols were also changed.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The name "Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Armed Forces" (KPRAF) were changed to "Cambodian People's Armed Forces" (CPAF). Capital punishment was officially abolished and Buddhism, which had been partially reestablished by the PRK in 1979, was fully reintroduced as the national religion, by which the restriction was lifted on the ordination of men under 50 years old and Buddhist traditional chanting was resumed in the media. Following the complete normalisation of traditional religious life, Buddhism became extremely popular in Cambodia, experiencing a widespread revival.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Intending to liberalise Cambodia's economy, a set of laws on "Personal Ownership" and "Free Market Orientation" was passed as well. The new Constitution stated that Cambodia was a neutral and non-aligned state. The ruling party also announced that there would be negotiations with the groups of the opposition.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The State of Cambodia lived through a time of dramatic transitions triggered by the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. There was a reduction in Soviet aid to Vietnam which culminated in the withdrawal of the Vietnamese occupying forces. The last Vietnamese troops were said to have left Cambodia on 26 September 1989 but probably they did not leave until 1990. Many Vietnamese civilians also returned to Vietnam in the months that followed, lacking confidence in the ability of the PRK's new avatar to control the situation after the Vietnamese military had left.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Despite the quite radical changes announced by Hun Sen, the SOC state stood firm when it came to the one party rule issue. The leadership structure and the executive remained the same as under the PRK, with the party firmly in control as the supreme authority. Accordingly, the SOC was unable to restore Cambodia's monarchical tradition. Although the SOC reestablished the prominence of monarchical symbols, like the grand palace in Phnom Penh, that was as far as it would go for the time-being, especially since Norodom Sihanouk had steadfastly associated himself with the CGDK, the opposition coalition against the PRK that included the Khmer Rouge.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: In mid-1991, however, succumbing to a number of pressures both within and outside of the country, the government of the State of Cambodia signed an agreement that recognised Prince Norodom Sihanouk as head of state. By late 1991 Sihanouk made an official visit to the SOC and both Hun Sen and Chea Sim took a leading role in the welcoming ceremony.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Still, fissures appeared on the monolithic structure that the State of Cambodia was trying to preserve. Revolutionary idealism was replaced by practical cynicism, so that corruption increased. Cambodian state resources were sold without benefitting the state and high placed civil and military individuals in key posts of authority enriched themselves by pocketing whatever benefits they could grab. The result of this moral breakdown was that students revolted in the streets of Phnom Penh in December 1991. The police opened fire and eight people died in the confrontations.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Conditions for ethnic Chinese improved greatly after 1989. Restrictions placed on them by the former PRK gradually disappeared. The State of Cambodia allowed ethnic Chinese to observe their particular religious customs and Chinese language schools were reopened. In 1991, two years after the SOC's foundation, the Chinese New Year was officially celebrated in Cambodia for the first time since 1975.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Peace negotiations between the Vietnam-backed regime in Cambodia and its armed opposition groups had begun formally and informally after the mid-1980s. The negotiations were extremely difficult, for the Khmer Rouge stubbornly insisted in the dismantlement of the PRK/SOC's administration before any agreement could be reached, while the PRK/SOC leadership made it a point of excluding the Khmer Rouge from any future provisional government. Finally it would be outside historical events, in the form of the Fall of Communism and the ensuing collapse of Soviet support for Vietnam and the PRK, that would bring the PRK/SOC to the negotiating table.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The haphazard efforts towards conciliation in Cambodia culminated in the Paris Agreements in 1991, in which United Nations-sponsored free and fair elections were scheduled for 1993. As a result, the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) was established at the end of February 1992 to supervise the cease-fire and the ensuing general election.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The "Kampuchean (or Khmer) People's Revolutionary Party" (KPRP) was the sole ruling party in Cambodia from the foundation of the pro-Vietnam republic in 1979, as well as during the transitional times under the SOC in 1991, when it was renamed the Cambodian People's Party (CPP) at the beginning of the UN-sponsored peace and reconciliation process.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Many members of the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party were former Khmer Rouge members who had fled to Vietnam after witnessing the wholesale destruction of Cambodian society as a result of the regime's radical agrarian socialist and xenophobic policies. Several prominent KPRP members, including Heng Samrin and Hun Sen, were Khmer Rouge cadres near the Cambodian-Vietnamese border who participated in the Vietnamese invasion that toppled the Khmer Rouge.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Founded in June 1981, the KPRP began as a firmly Marxist–Leninist party within the PRK. However, in the mid-1980s it took on a more reformist outlook when some members pointed out problems with collectivisation and concluded that private property should play a role in Cambodian society. The extreme collectivisation of the Khmer Rouge had caused severe burn-out and distrust among farmers, who refused to work collectively as soon as the threat of the Khmer Rouge disappeared from the liberated areas.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Therefore, PRK government policies had to be implemented carefully to win back the rural population's trust and to alleviate the prevailing conditions of poverty. This led eventually to the effective reinstitutionalisation of the traditional Cambodian family economy and to some more radical change of policies regarding privatisation during the State of Cambodia time (1989–1993). Despite the watered-down ideology the KPRP/CPP remained firmly in control of Cambodia until 1993.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Among the most significant policy shifts of the SOC was putting aside Marxism–Leninism as the party's ideology in 1991. This move effectively marked the end of the socialist revolutionary state in Cambodia, a form of government which had begun in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge took over.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Hun Sen, the current Prime Minister of Cambodia, was a key figure in the KPRP and is the current leader of its successor party, the CPP, a party that no longer lays claim to socialist credentials.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: After the KPRC proclaimed in January 1979 that the new official name of Cambodia was the "People's Republic of Kampuchea" (PRK), the newly established government notified the United Nations Security Council that it was the sole legitimate government of the Cambodian people.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Vietnam was the first country to recognise the new regime, and Phnom Penh immediately restored diplomatic relations with Hanoi. On 18 February, Heng Samrin on behalf of the PRK and Phạm Văn Đồng on behalf of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam signed a twenty-five-year Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The Soviet Union, East Germany, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Laos, Mongolia, Cuba, South Yemen, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Congo, Benin, and other Eastern Bloc states, as well as a number of Soviet-friendly developing countries, like India, followed Vietnam in recognizing the new regime. By January 1980, twenty-nine countries had recognized the PRK, yet nearly eighty countries continued to recognize the Khmer Rouge.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: In turn, the regime's symbols, slogans and ideology, the military uniform and insignia largely copied Soviet-style patterns.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Despite the previous international outcry and concern surrounding Pol Pot's DK regime's gross human rights violations it would prove difficult for the PRK/SOC government to gain international recognition beyond the Soviet Bloc sphere.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: A draft resolution by the People's Republic of China sought to condemn Vietnam in the UN Security Council after its invasion for "its acts of armed invasion and aggression against Democratic Kampuchea, acts which ... cause serious damage to the lives and property of the Kampuchean people".


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: As a result of the vehement campaign against the PRK, the Khmer Rouge retained its UN seat despite its genocidal record. Cambodia would be represented at the UN by Thiounn Prasith, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary's crony since their student days in Paris. The seat of Democratic Kampuchea's regime lasted for three years at the United Nations after the fall of Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia. Only in 1982 it would be renamed as 'Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea'. The CGDK would hold the seat until 1993, when the SOC gave way to the restoration of the Cambodian monarchy.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: To refer to Cambodia as a state, the General Assembly of the United Nations continued using the terms "Democratic Kampuchea" and "Kampuchea" for over a decade. It decided to start using the term "Cambodia" only at the 45th session in 1990, when the transitional phase of the SOC was well on its way.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The government of the People's Republic of China, which had consistently supported the Khmer Rouge, quickly labelled the PRK as "Vietnam's puppet state" and declared it unacceptable. Thailand and Singapore were very vocal in their opposition to Vietnamese expansion and influence; the Singaporean representative stated that recognition of the PRK would "violate the UN's non-intervention principle."


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: International forums, like ASEAN meetings and the UN General Assembly would be used to condemn the PRK and the genocide of the Khmer Rouge was removed from the centre stage of attention and Pol Pot effectively won the support of the US and most of Europe against Vietnam.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: China and most Western governments, as well as a number of African, Asian and Latin American states repeatedly backed the Khmer Rouge in the U.N. and voted in favour of DK retaining Cambodia's seat in the organisation at the expense of the PRK. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously explained she believed that there were some among the Khmer Rouge "more reasonable" than Pol Pot.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The government of Sweden, however, had to change its vote in the U.N. and to withdraw support for the Khmer Rouge after a large number of Swedish citizens wrote letters to their elected representatives demanding a policy change towards Pol Pot's regime. France remained neutral on the issue, claiming that neither side had the right to represent Cambodia at the UN.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: In the years that followed, the United States, under the staunch anti-Soviet "rollback" strategy of the Reagan Doctrine would support what it perceived as "anti-communist resistance movements" in Soviet-allied nations. The largest movement fighting Cambodia's communist government was largely made up of members of the former Khmer Rouge regime, whose human rights record was among the worst of the 20th century. Therefore, Reagan authorised the provision of aid to a smaller Cambodian resistance movement, a coalition called the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, known as the KPNLF and then run by Son Sann; in an effort to force an end to the Vietnamese occupation. Eventually, the Vietnamese withdrew, and Cambodia's communist regime accepted a democratic transition. Then, under United Nations supervision, free elections were held.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Ben Kiernan claimed that the US had offered support to the Khmer Rouge after the Vietnamese invasion. Other sources have disputed these claims, and described "extensive fighting" between the US-backed forces of the Khmer People's National Liberation Front and the Khmer Rouge.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: On 10 January 1980, the People's Revolutionary Council named Ros Samay to lead a council to draft the Constitution. He carefully wrote it in Khmer using clear and easy language whenever possible, mindful that every Cambodian should understand it. He took the constitutions of Vietnam, East Germany, the USSR, Hungary and Bulgaria, as well as previous Cambodian constitutions (Kingdom of Cambodia, Khmer Republic), as a reference. Since Ros Samay's draft failed to please the Vietnamese, he was publicly discredited and his draft scrapped.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The wording of the PRK's constitution stressed the relations between the PRK regime and Vietnam. Prime Minister Pen Sovann acknowledged that the Vietnamese "insisted on changing some clauses they didn't agree with". Finally, on 27 June 1981, a new Constitution was promulgated that pleased the Vietnamese. It defined Cambodia as "a democratic state...gradually advancing toward socialism." The transition to socialism was to take place under the leadership of the Marxist–Leninist KPRP. The Constitution explicitly placed Cambodia within the Soviet Union's orbit. The country's primary enemies, according to the Constitution, were "the Chinese expansionists and hegemonists in Beijing, acting in collusion with United States imperialism and other powers."


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: While technically guaranteeing a "broad range of civil liberties and fundamental rights", the Constitution placed a number of restrictions. For example, "an act may not injure the honor of other persons, nor should it adversely affect the mores and customs of society, or public order, or national security." In line with the principle of socialist collectivism, citizens were obligated to carry out "the state's political line and defend collective property."


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The Constitution also addressed principles governing culture, education, social welfare, and public health. Development of language, literature, the arts, and science and technology was stressed, along with the need for cultural preservation, tourist promotion, and cultural co-operation with foreign countries.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Provisions for state organs were in the constitutional chapters dealing with the National Assembly, the Council of State, the Council of Ministers, the local people's revolutionary committees, and the judiciary. Fundamental to the operation of all public bodies was the principle that the Marxist–Leninist KPRP served as the most important political institution of the state. Intermediary linkages between the state bureaucracy and grass-roots activities were provided by numerous organisations affiliated with the Kampuchean (or Khmer) United Front for National Construction and Defense (KUFNCD).


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The constitution was revised in 1989 to accommodate the market-oriented policies of the newly formed "State of Cambodia". This state was basically a continuation of the PRK regime adapted to the new realities dictated by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, when Mikhail Gorbachev reduced to a minimum Soviet support for Vietnam and Cambodia. Suddenly the Cambodian leadership found itself scrambling for favour abroad, which included the need to open its markets, the gradual abandoning of its original pro-Soviet stance and the pressure to find some accommodation with the factions warring against it.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The PRK's Constitution had not made any mention of a Head of State, perhaps reserving this role for Sihanouk.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The State of Cambodia Constitution, however, stated that the President of the Council of State would be the "Head of State of Cambodia".


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: An administrative infrastructure functioning under the Marxist–Leninist KPRC was more or less in place between 1979 and 1980. With the promulgation of the Constitution in June 1981, new organs, such as the National Assembly, the Council of State, and the Council of Ministers, assumed certain functions that the KPRC had provided. These new bodies evolved slowly. It was not until February 1982 that the National Assembly enacted specific laws for these bodies.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Despite the presence of Vietnamese advisors, the government of the PRK was made up entirely of Cambodian KUFNS members. Initially the Vietnamese advisors, like Lê Đức Thọ, had promised that they would not interfere with Cambodian internal affairs. However, as soon as the PRK was formed and the KUFNS was in power, Lê Đức Thọ, acting as liaison chief between Hanoi and Phnom Penh, broke his promise. Henceforward the members of the Government of the PRK had to walk a narrow path between Cambodian nationalism and "Indochinese solidarity" with Vietnam, which meant making sure they didn't irritate their Vietnamese patrons. PRK government members, no matter how highly placed, who offended the Vietnamese, whether intentionally or not, were swiftly denounced and purged. Among these were Ros Samai, Pen Sovann and Chan Sy. The latter, a founding member of the KUNFS who had reached the post of Prime Minister, died in mysterious circumstances in 1984 in Moscow.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The "supreme organ of state power" was the National Assembly, whose deputies are directly elected for five-year terms. The assembly's 117 seats were filled on 1 May 1981, the date of the PRK's first elections. (The KUFNS had nominated 148 candidates.) The voter turnout was reported as 99.17 percent of the electorate, which was divided into 20 electoral districts.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: During its first session in June, the assembly adopted the new Constitution and elected members of the state organs set up under the Constitution. The assembly had been empowered to adopt or to amend the Constitution and the laws and to oversee their implementation; to determine domestic and foreign policies; to adopt economic and cultural programs and the state budget; and to elect or to remove its own officers and members of the Council of State and of the Council of Ministers. The assembly also was authorised to levy, revise, or abolish taxes; to decide on amnesties; and to ratify or to abrogate international treaties. As in other socialist states, the assembly's real function is to endorse the legislative and administrative measures initiated by the Council of State and by the Council of Ministers, both of which serve as agents of the ruling KPRP.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The National Assembly met typically twice a year. During the periods between its sessions, legislative functions were handled by the Council of State. Bills were introduced by the Council of State, the Council of Ministers, the assembly's several commissions (legislative committees), chairman of the KUFNCD, and heads of other organisations. Individual deputies were not entitled to introduce bills.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Once bills, state plans and budgets, and other measures were introduced, they were studied first by the assembly's commissions. Then they went to the assembly for adoption. While ordinary bills were passed by a simple majority, constitutional amendments required a two-thirds majority. The Council of State had to promulgate an adopted bill within thirty days of its passage. Another function of the assembly was to oversee the affairs of the Council of Ministers, which functions as the cabinet. Assembly members were not entitled to call for votes of confidence in the cabinet. Conversely, the Council of Ministers was not empowered to dissolve the National Assembly.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The Constitution stated that in case of war or under "other exceptional circumstances," the five-year life of the Assembly may be extended by decree. In 1986 the assembly's term was extended for another five years, until 1991.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The National Assembly elected seven of its members to the Council of State. The chairman of the council served as the head of state, but the power to serve as ex officio supreme commander of the armed forces was deleted from the final draft of the Constitution.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The council's seven members were among the most influential leaders of the PRK. Between sessions of the National Assembly, the Council of State carried out the assembly's duties. It may appoint or remove (on the recommendation of the Council of Ministers) cabinet ministers, ambassadors, and envoys accredited to foreign governments. Foreign diplomatic envoys presented their letters of accreditation to the Council of State.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The government's top executive organ was the Council of Ministers, or cabinet, which in late 1987 was headed by Hun Sen (as it had been since January 1985). Apart from the prime minister (formally called chairman), the Council of Ministers had two deputy prime ministers (vice chairmen) and twenty ministers. The National Assembly elected the council's ministers for five-year terms.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The Council of Ministers met weekly in an executive session. Decisions made in the executive sessions were "collective," whereas those in the plenary sessions were by a majority. Representatives of KUFNCD and other mass organisations, to which all citizens may belong, were sometimes invited to attend plenary sessions of the council "when [it was] discussing important issues." These representatives could express their views but they were not allowed to vote.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: Government ministries were in charge of agriculture; communications, transport, and posts; education; finance; foreign affairs; health; home and foreign trade; industry; information and culture; interior; justice; national defence; planning; and social affairs and invalids. In addition, the cabinet includes a minister for agricultural affairs and rubber plantations, who was attached to the Office of the Council of Ministers; a minister in charge of the Office of the Council of Ministers; a secretary general of the Office of the Council of Ministers, who was also in charge of transport and of Khmer-Thai border defence networks; a director of the State Affairs Inspectorate; and the president-director general of the People's National Bank of Kampuchea.


title: People's Republic of Kampuchea

text: The restoration of law and order was one of the more pressing tasks of the Heng Samrin regime. Since 1979 the administration of justice was in the hands of people's revolutionary courts that were set up hastily in Phnom Penh and in other major provincial cities. A new law dealing with the organisation of courts and with the Office of Public Prosecutor was promulgated in February 1982. Under this law, the People's Supreme Court became the highest court of the land.