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Kampuchea's armed struggle the origins of an independent revolution

1979; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14672715.1979.10424028

0007-4810

Stephen Heder,

Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies

In early 1930, on the initiative of Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnam Communist Party was founded. Later in that same year, the Party's name was changed to the Indochinese Communist Party on the advice of the Comintern. Vietnamese Communists thus took up the task of organizing a communist movement in Kampuchea (Cambodia). Before the end of World War II, however, little organizational work was carried out in Kampuchea, and most-perhaps all-of this was among overseas Vietnamese resident there. After 1945, Vietnamese Communists were much more active in their Kampuchea-oriented efforts. Operating through liaison organs both in Thailand (until the right-wing military coup there in 1947) and southern Vietnam, as well as through cadres sent into Kampuchea itself, they encouraged, encadred and then attempted to establish Communist hegemony over the movement for independence that was developing there. Although the movement they supported gave the French a good deal of trouble, the Vietnamese were not completely successful in consolidating a communist movement or communist leadership of the independence movement in Kampuchea. The Vietnamese-supported resistance groups were fragmented geographically, with apparent tendencies toward factionalism and regional warlordism, and faced credible competition from right-wing maquisards and then-King Norodom Sihanouk for popular recognition as the leader of the struggle for Kampuchean national independence. Moreover, the Khmer People's Party (KPP), which was founded in September 1951 as a result of the Vietnamese decision to split the Indochinese Communist Party into three national Parties, never achieved the status of a Communist Party or genuine independence from the Vietnam Workers' Party (which succeeded the Indochinese Communist Party in Vietnam). Thus, according to VWP documents, the KPP was “not a vanguard party of the working class,” but rather, “the vanguard party of the nation gathering together all the patriotic and progressive elements of the Khmer population,” and, the Vietnamese Party reserved “the right [sic] to supervise: the activities of its brother parties in Kampuchea and Laos.” That there were still serious problems within this semi-independent proto-Party was demonstrated in 1953, when its leader, Sieu Heng, defected to the French.