People's Republic of Kampuchea 1979-1993

Kampuchea (PRK) was founded after the overthrow of Democratic Kampuchea, the khmer Rouge government. Brought about by an invasion from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, which routed the Khmer Rouge armies, it had Vietnam and the Soviet Union as its main allies. Although it enjoyed very limited international recognition and failed to secure United Nations endorsement due to the diplomatic intervention of China, the United Kingdom, and the United States (among a host of other countries in their wake) on behalf of the ousted Pol Pot regime, the PRK was the de facto government of Cambodia between 1979 and 1993.
The People's Republic of Kampuchea was renamed as State of Cambodia (SOC), État du Cambodge, Roet Kampuchea in Khmer, during the last four years of its existence in an attempt to attract international sympathy. It retained, however, most of its leadership and single-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, year in which the ruling single party abandoned its Marxist-Leninist ideology.
The PRK was established in the wake of the total destruction
of the country's institutions, infrastructure and intelligentsia wreaked by Khmer Rouge rule. Despite its inherent weaknesses and the odds stacked against it, which included being dismissed as a "puppet state" of Vietnam and being imposed grievous economic sanctions, as well as a debilitating Civil War, the PRK/SOC remained stronger than its enemies and was able to achieve the reconstruction of Cambodia as a nation. Some authors have compared the PRK/SOC period to the Thermidorian Reaction, the 1794 revolt in the French Fevolution against the excesses of the Reign of Terror.

The Khmer Rouge directs its hostility against Vietnam

Initially, communist 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 May 1st 1975 Khmer Rouge soldiers raided the islands of Phu Quoc and Tho Chu, 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 "within the family sphere".
Massacres of ethnic Vietnamese and of their sympathizers, 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 1975. In November, pro-Vietnamese Khmer Rouge leader Vorn Vet led an unsuccessful coup d'etat 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.
By early 1978, however, the Vietnamese leadership decided to support internal resistance to the Pol Pot regime 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. 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 the Mekong Delta region, which they regarded as Khmer territory.

The Salvation Front

The Kampuchea United Front for National Salvation (KUFNS or FUNSK) was an organization that would be pivotal in overthrowing the Khmer Rouge regime and establishing the PRK/SOC state. The salvation front was a heterogeneous group of communist and non communist exiles determined to fight against the Pol Pot regime and rebuild Cambodia. Led by Heng Samrin and Pen Sovann in a zone liberated from the Khmer Rouge, the front's foundation was announced Radio Hanoi on December 3,1978. Of the salvation front's fourteen central committee members, the top two leaders —Heng Samrin, president, and Chea Sim, vice president— had been "former" Kampuchea 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.
The government of Democratic Kampuchea lost no time in denouncing the KUFNS, as "a Vietnamese political organization 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 organization provided a much-needed rallying point for Cambodian leftists opposed to Khmer Rouge rule, channelling 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.

The Vietnamese invasion

Vietnamese policy makers finally opted for a military solution and, on December 22, Vietnam launched its offensive with the intent of overthrowing Democratic Kampuchea. An invasion force of 120,000, consisting of combined armor 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 January 7,1979. The retreating Armed Forces of Democratic Kampuchea (RAK) and Khmer Rouge cadres burnt 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.
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. These committees would form the basic administrative structure for the Kampuchea People's Revolutionary Council (KPRC), decreed on January 8, 1979, as the central administrative body for the PRK. The KPRC served as the ruling body of the Heng Samrin regime until June 27, 1981, when a new Constitution required that it be replaced by a newly elected Council of Ministers.Pen Sovan became the new prime minister. He was assisted by three deputy prime ministers-- Hun Sen, Chan Si, and Chea Soth.

Establishment of the PRK (1979 - 1989)

On 10 January 1979, the DK army had been routed and the Vietnamese troops had captured the capital Phnom Penh. The KPRC proclaimed that the new official name of Cambodia was the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK). The new administration was supported by a substantial Vietnamese military force and civilian advisory effort. A genocidal regime had ended, but to China —who had steadfastly supported DK—, the USA —eager to find ways to get even with Vietnam for its humiliating defeat in the Vietnam War—, as well as other major powers, the swift defeat of the Khmer Rouge marked the beginning of "the Cambodian Problem".
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, weary of Khmer Rouge 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. The negative image played in the hands of the enemies of the PRK regime, who would manipulate it in their favour during the existence of the Vietnam-friendly PRK/SOC regime. However, the role of the Vietnamese Army (PAVN) in providing the security needed for the almost totally-destroyed nation to rebuild and develop institutions, should not be underestimated.
Heng Samrin was named head of state of the PRK, and other Khmer communists that had formed the Kamuchea People's Revolutionary Party, like Chan Sy and Hun Sen, were prominent from the start. 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.