The Pol Pot Regime:
Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia, 1975-79
By Ben Kiernan
(Silkworm Books, 1996 Yale University)
Excerpts from Chapter 11: The End of the Pol Pot Regime
Since July 1978, Heng Samrin had been attempting to coordinate the two-thousand-strong Eastern Zone resistance. Following the paths of his officers north across Highway 7, he found Song Neat, commanding a company of 4th division rebels in Memot, and Pol Saroeun's artillery support troops...
In early August, Heng Samrin returned to the area south of the highway where his own Zone units were fighting alongside two hundred Center defectors, one hundred to two hundred Regional troops, and three hundred to four hundred district infantry, commanded by Chea Sim, Chum Sambor, Sae [Say] Chhum, and Sar Kheng... Samrin says that he, Pol Saroeun, Mau Phok, and two others "made the preparations to create the Front." More important, though, they then "went and made contact with Vietnam."
...The former acting secretary of Komchay Meas district, a sixty-two-year former Issarak name Tith Sou, was chosen to lead the first party of six hundred across the border into Vietnam... On arrival, Sou "smoothed things over with the Vietnamese," telling them, "If you don't help us we are finished." The Vietnamese guaranteed aid to the rebels, and Sou sent word back to Heng Samrin and Chea Sim. Meanwhile, a week after the Memot meeting, [Heng] Samrin met with [Chea] Sim "to draw up a plan for a Front program." [Chea] Sim crossed the border with a group of three hundred, mainly cadres, in late September. Another group of seven hundred, mostly civilian base people, was attacked four times by Center troops on the way across. Forty people were killed. Vietnamese troops then struck into Cambodia and escorted Heng Samrin and over two thousand others back across the border. As many as fourteen thousand others who had fled into Krabau forest from Komchay Meas, Ponhea Krek, and Kanchriech districts soon followed. Chum Sambor and one hundred others stayed to fight on in Krabau.
[to be continued with your own reading of the complete book, a basic foundational reading for all Cambodians]
3 comments:
Thank You Sam Dach Heng Sam Rin and Sam Dach Chea Sim for saving my family's and my life!!
Without you, I would've died while I was still A VIRGIN!!!
No wonder Chea Sim and Heng Samrin holds their tongue on the border creeping up literally to their doorsteps - they have been saved by Vietnam.
Khmer need leaders who owe no life-allegiance to foreign power.
These guys are still khmer rouge leaders who probably were involved in the torture and assasination of the civil population. t was only when they themselves were threatened with the same measures that they defected to vietnam.
In brief, Hun Sen, Chea Sim, Heng samrin and others were murderers during the KR rule and now they are still assasinating the opposition with help from the vietnamese..
J
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