page_title: Khmer Rouge
section_title: Fall
hierarchical_section_title: Khmer Rouge / Fall
caption_attribution_description: Tiếng Việt: Ảnh nơi phòng trưng bày cuộc thảm sát tại khu Nhà Mồ Ba Chúc.
context_page_description: The Khmer Rouge is the name that was popularly given to members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea and by extension to the regime through which the CPK ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The name had been coined in the 1960s by Norodom Sihanouk to describe his country's then heterogeneous, communist-led dissidents, with whom he allied after his 1970 overthrow.
  The Khmer Rouge army was slowly built up in the jungles of Eastern Cambodia during the late 1960s, supported by the North Vietnamese army, the Viet Cong, the Pathet Lao, and the Communist Party of China. Although it originally fought against Sihanouk, on the advice of the CPC, the Khmer Rouge changed its position and supported Sihanouk after he was overthrown in a 1970 coup by Lon Nol who established the pro-United States Khmer Republic. Despite a massive American bombing campaign against them, the Khmer Rouge won the Cambodian Civil War when they captured the Cambodian capital and overthrew the Khmer Republic in 1975.
context_section_description: Fearing a Vietnamese attack, Pol Pot ordered a pre-emptive invasion of Vietnam on 18 April 1978. His Cambodian forces crossed the border and looted nearby villages, mostly in the border town of Ba Chúc. Of the 3,157 civilians who had lived in Ba Chúc, only two survived the massacre. These Cambodian forces were repelled by the Vietnamese.
  Due to several years of border conflict and the flood of refugees fleeing Kampuchea, relations between Kampuchea and Vietnam collapsed by December 1978. On 25 December 1978, the Vietnamese armed forces along with the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation, an organization founded by Heng Samrin that included many dissatisfied former Khmer Rouge members, invaded Cambodia and captured Phnom Penh on 7 January 1979. Despite a traditional Cambodian fear of Vietnamese domination, defecting Khmer Rouge activists assisted the Vietnamese and with Vietnam's approval became the core of the new People's Republic of Kampuchea. The new government was quickly dismissed by the Khmer Rouge and China as a "puppet government".
  At the same time, the Khmer Rouge retreated west and it continued to control certain areas near the Thai border for the next decade. These included Phnom Malai, the mountainous areas near Pailin in the Cardamom Mountains and Anlong Veng in the Dângrêk Mountains.
  These Khmer Rouge bases were not self-sufficient and were funded by diamond and timber smuggling, by military assistance from China channeled by means of the Thai military and by food smuggled from markets across the border in Thailand.
caption: Photo images of the Ba Chúc massacre at a Vietnamese museum, as the massacre was one of the events that prompted the 1978 Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea
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