Early 2002 saw Cambodia's first ever local elections to select village and commune level representatives, an important step in bringing grassroots democracy to the country. Even with national elections since 1993, the CPP continued to monopolise political power at local and regional levels and only with commune elections would this grip be loosened. However, the commune elections were only really a warm up for the country's third national election in summer 2003.
. The elections of July 2003 saw a shift in the balance of power, as the CPP consolidated their grip on power and the Sam Rainsy Party overhauled Funcinpec' as the second party. It was to be coalition time again, but this time the politicians wouldn't even sit down and talk. Funcinpec and the

 LIFE'S A RIOT

 What should have been a smooth run-up to the 2003 elections got a little hot, as parts of Phnom Penh burned in the so-called anti-Thai riots of January 2003. Historically relations between Thailand jj and Cambodia have been a little strained, for reasons that shouldn't need spelling out if you 3 have made it this far in the History chapter. Allegedly, a famous Thai soap star claimed Angkor | Wat belonged to Thailand, and this spread like wildfire through the Cambodian media. Prime ; Minister Hun Sen announced that said actress wasn't worth a patch of grass upon which Angkor 3 Wat was built. Within days the Thai embassy was up in flames and countless other Thai-owned * businesses were severely damaged, including the Royal Phnom Penh Hotel and Camshin, the •; mobile phone company owned by Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

Rumours spread faster than the fires as to how this happened and many observers feel it was | politically motivated to oust the popular governor of Phnom Penh Chea Sophara - even though | he was out of town at the time, he was the only one to take the fall. He had annoyed the Thais \ by building a new road to the Cambodian border temple of Prasat Preah Vihear and annoyed | Prime Minister Hun Sen by becoming too popular with the people. There had to be a certain * amount of high-level collusion in planning the demonstrations, as had this been an anti-CPP rally, I it would have been brought to an end in minutes. Most likely, someone powerful engineered the I demos, but severely miscalculated the mood of the street, which rapidly got out of control. The Cambodian government agreed a compensation package for the damaged property and slowly but surely relations began to heal.

Sam Rainsy Party formed another of their 'til death do us part' alliances and negotiations began for a tri-party coalition. After nearly a year of false starts, Funcinpec ditched the Sam Rainsy Party once again and put their heads in the trough for another term. The political impact of these machinations remains to be seen, but it looks like Funcinpec are on a one¬way ticket out of the political scene and future contests will be between the entrenched CPP and the upwardly mobile Sam Rainsy Party.

In 1998, it was time for the country's second election, and many observ¬ers were pessimistic about the chances for democracy aftei the tumultuous events of 1997. Funcinpec's network was also in tatters as many of its representatives had either left the country, been murdered or switched allegiances in a bid for political survival. To contest the elections the opposition formed an alliance called the National United Front (NUF), which brought together Funcinpec and the Sam Rainsy Party, but it was politically expedient rather than personally excellent.
The election result reinforced the reality that the GPP was now the dominant force in the Cambodian political system, but it lacked the two-thirds majority required to govern alone. The opposition cried foul and the subsequent stand-off again plunged Cambodia into a crisis of confidence. As the opposition escalated its campaign for democracy, mass demonstrations began in the capital, which soon descended into rioting, fighting and repression.
King Sihanouk eventually negotiated a settlement, which ended with business as usual, a much-weakened Funcinpec agreeing to govern with a now dominant CPP. The formation of a new coalition government allowed the politicians to once more concentrate on bringing an end to the civil war.

On 25 December Hun Sen received the Christmas present he had been waiting for: Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea were defecting to the government side. The international community began to pile on the pressure for the establishment of some sort of war-crimes tribunal to try the remaining Khmer Rouge leadership.
After lengthy negotiations, agreement was finally reached on the composition of a court to try the surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge. The CPP was suspicious of a UN-administered trial as the UN had sideJ with the Khmer Rouge-dominated coalition against the government in Phnom Penh and the ruling party wanted a major say in who was to be tried for what. The UN for its part rightly doubted that the judiciary in Cambodia was sophisticated or impartial enough to fairly oversee such a major trial. A compromise solution - a mixed tribunal of three international and four Cambodian judges requiring a super majority of two plus three for a verdict - was eventually agreed upon.

This elaborate process was blown apart with the dramatic UN decision to pull out of the process in early 2002, but it now looks like a trial will,finally go ahead, as a budget has been approved. What a pity that it comes 25 years too late, when many of the protagonists have already passed away, and that it will only try the limited leadership rather than get to the bottom of the who, how and whys that a truth and reconciliation commission might have untangled.

The 'events' of July 1997, as they are euphemistically known in Cambodia, were preceded by a lengthy courting period in which both Funcinpec and the CPP attempted to win the trust of the remaining Khmer Rouge hardliners in northern Cambodia. Ranariddh was close to forging a deal with the jungle fighters and was keen to get it sewn up before Cambodia's accession to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), as nothing would provide a better entry fanfare than the ending of Cambodia's long civil war. In his haste, he didn't pay enough attention to detail and was outflanked and subsequently outgunned by Second Prime Minister Hun Sen. On 5 July 1997 fighting again erupted on the streets of Phnom Penh as troops loyal to the CPP clashed with those loyal to Funcinpec. The heaviest exchanges were around the airport and key government buildings, but before long the dust had settled and the CPP once again controlled Cambodia. The strongman had finally flexed his muscles and there was no doubt as to which party commanded the most support within the military.

The international reaction was swift and decisive. Asean suspended Cambodia's imminent membership, the Cambodian seat at the UN was declared vacant and a freeze was put on all new aid money. This was to have a serious impact on the Cambodian economy over the next couple of years.

Following the coup, the remnants of Funcinpec forces on the Thai border around O Smach formed an alliance with the last of the Khmer Rouge under Ta Mok's control. The fighting may have ended, but the deaths certainly did not: several prominent Funcinpec politicians and military leaders were subjected to extrajudicial executions, and even today no-one has been brought to justice for these crimes. Many of Funcinpec's leading politicians fled abroad, while the senior generals led the resistance struggle on the ground.

As 1998 began the CPP announced an all-out offensive against its en¬emies in the north. By April it was closing in on the Khmer Rouge strongholds of Anlong Veng and Preah Vihear, and amid this heavy fighting Pol Pot evaded justice by dying a sorry death on 15 April in the Khmer Rouge's captivity. He was cremated on a pyre of burning tyres soon after; an official autopsy was never performed, which bred rumours and gossip in Phnom Penh that rumble on today. The fall of Anlong Veng in April was followed by the fall of Preah Vihear in May; and the big three, Ta Mok, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, were forced to flee into tha jungle near the Thai border with their remaining troops.

When the Vietnamese toppled the Pol Pot government in 1979, the Khmer Rouge disappeared into the jungle. The regime boycotted the 1993 elec­tions and later rejected peace talks aimed at creating a ceasefire.

The defection of some 2000 troops from the Khmer Rouge army in the months after the elections offered some hope that the long-running insur­rection would fizzle out However, government-sponsored amnesty pro­grammes initially turned out to be ill-conceived: the policy of reconscripting Khmer Rouge troops and returning them to fight their former comrades with poor pay and conditions provided little incentive to desert

In 1994 the Khmer Rouge resorted to a new tactic of targeting tourists, with horrendous results for a number of foreigners in Cambodia. During 1994 three people were taken from a taxi on the road to Sihanoukville and subsequently shot. A few months later another three foreigners were seized from a train bound for Sihanoukville and in the ransom drama that followed they were executed, probably some time in September, as the army closed in.

The government changed its course during the mid-1990s, opting for more carrot and less stick in a bid to end the war. The breakthrough came in August 1996 when leng Sary, Brother No 3 in the Khmer Rouge hierarchy and foreign minister during its rule, was denounced by Pol Pot for corruption. He subsequently led a mass defection of fighters and their dependants from the Pailin area, and this effectively sealed the fate of the remaining Khmer Rouge. Pailin, rich in gems and timber, had long been the economic springboard from which the Khmer Rouge could launch counter-offensives against the government. The severing of this income, coupled with the fact that government forces now had only one front on which to concentrate their resources, suggested the days of civil war were numbered.

By 1997 cracks were appearing in the brittle coalition and the fledgling democracy once again found itself under siege. On 31 March 1997 a grenade was thrown into a group of Sam Rainsy supporters demonstrat­ing peacefully outside the National Assembly. Many were killed and Sam Rainsy narrowly escaped injury. He fled into self-imposed exile, blaming Hun Sen and the CPP for the attack. However, it was the Khmer Rouge that again grabbed the headlines. Pol Pot ordered the execution of Son Sen, defence minister during the Khmer Rouge regime, and many of his family members. This provoked a putsch within the Khmer Rouge leadership, and the one-legged hardline general Ta Mok seized control of the movement and put Pol Pot on 'trial'. Rumours flew about Phnom Penh that Pol Pot would be brought there to face international justice, but attention dramatically shifted back to the capital.

As early as 1995 there were two major political incidents that boded ill for democratic politics. The first of these was the ouster of Sam Rainsy, a Paris-educated accountant, from Funcinpec. In mid-1994 Rainsy lost his position as finance minister, a job he had excelled at, largely, it was surmised, because of his outspoken criticisms concerning corruption. In May 1995 his party membership was rescinded and one month later he was sacked from the National Assembly. He formed the Khmer Nation Party (now called the Sam Rainsy Party) and found himself the country’s leading dissident in no time at all.

The other political headline of 1995 was the arrest and exile of Prince Norodom Sirivudh, secretary general of Funcinpec, former foreign minister and half- brother of King Sihanouk. The prince was allegedly plotting to kill Hun Sen, but it all boiled down to an off-the-cuff joke. Hun-Sen, who found himself with the perfect excuse to clear another prominent adversary from his path, was the only one laughing.

Cambodia has changed its name so many times over the last few decades that there are understandable grounds for confusion. To the Cambodians, their country is Kampuchea. The name is   • derived from the word Kambuja, meaning 'those born of Kambu', the mythical founder of the country. It dates back as far as the 10th century. The Portuguese 'Camboxa' and the French 'Cambodge', from which the English name 'Cambodia' is derived, are adaptations of 'Kambuja'. Since gaining independence in 1953, the country has been known in English by various names before coming full circle:

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 The Kingdom of Cambodia
The Khmer Republic (under Lon Nol, who reigned from 1970 to 1975)
Democratic Kampuchea (under the Khmer Rouge, which controlled the country from 1975 to 1979)
The People's Republic of Kampuchea (under the Vietnamese-backed Phnom Penh govern­ment from 1 979 to 1989
The State of Cambodia (from mid-1989)
The Kingdom of Cambodia (from May 1993)
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It was the Khmer Rouge that insisted the outside world use the name Kampuchea. Changing the country's official English name back to Cambodia (which was used by the US all along) was intended as a symbolic move to distance the present government in Phnom Penh from the bitter connotations of the name Kampuchea, which Westerners associate with the murderous Khmer Rouge regime.

In September 1989 Vietnam, suffering from economic woes and eager to end its international isolation, announced that it was withdrawing all of its troops from Cambodia. With most of the Vietnamese gone, the opposition coalition, still dominated by the Khmer Rouge, launched a series of offensives, bringing the number of refugees inside the country to more than 150,000 by the autumn of 1990.

Diplomatic efforts to end the civil war began to bear fruit in September 1990, when a peace plan was accepted by both the Phnom Penh govern ment and the three factions of the resistance coalition. According to the plan, the Supreme National Council (SNC), a coalition of all factions, was to be formed under the presidency of Sihanouk. Meanwhile the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (Untac) was to supervise the administration of the country for two years with the goal of free elections. Untac was successful in achieving SNC agreement to most inter­national human-rights covenants; a significant number of nongovern­mental organisations (NGOs) were established in Cambodia; and, most importantly, on 25 May 1993, elections were held with an 89.6% turnout. The results were far from decisive, however: Funcinpec, led by Prince Norodom Ranariddh, took 58 seats in the National Assembly; the Cam­bodian People's Party (CPP), which represented the previous communist government, took 51 seats; and the Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party (BLDP) took 10 seats. The CPP had lost the election, but senior leaders threatened a secession of the eastern provinces of the country. As a result, Cambodia ended up with two prime ministers: Norodom Ranariddh as first prime minister, and Hun Sen as second prime minister.

Untac was quick to pack up and go home, patting itself on the back for a job well done. Even today, it is heralded as one of the UN's success stories. The reality is that it was an ill-conceived and poorly executed peace because so many of the powers involved in brokering the deal had their own agendas to advance.

It was a travesty that the Khmer Rouge was allowed to play a part in the process after the barbarities it had inflicted on its people; it must have seemed like a cruel joke to the many Cambodians who had lost countless family members under its rule. It rapidly became far more than a cruel joke, as the UN's half-botched disarmament programme took weapons away from rural militias who for so long provided the backbone of the government's provincial defence network against the Khmer Rouge. This left communities throughout the country vulnerable to attack, while the Khmer Rouge used the veil of legitimacy conferred upon it by the peace process to re-establish a guerrilla network through­out Cambodia. It is not an exaggeration to say that by 1994, when it was finally outlawed by the government, the Khmer Rouge was probably a greater threat to the stability of Cambodia than at any time since 1979.

Untac's main goals had been to''restore and maintain peace' and 'promote national reconciliation' and it achieved neither. It did oversee free and fair elections, however these were later annulled by the actions of Cambodia's politicians. But a lot of people rode the gravy train as it steamed through Cambodia, with an army of highly paid consultants and advisers flying in... 1st and business class of course!

If that wasn't bad enough, the UN presence also kick-started Cambodia's AIDS epidemic, with well-paid overseas soldiers boosting the prostitution industry. Cambodia's AIDS problem is now among the worst in Asia. '

From 1976 to 1978, the xenophobic government in Phnom Penh instigated a series of border clashes with Vietnam, and claimed the Mekong Delta, once part of the Khmer empire. Khmer Rouge incursions into Vietnamese border provinces left hundreds of Vietnamese civilians dead. On 25 Decem­ber 1978 Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia, toppling the Pol Pot government two weeks later. As Vietnamese tanks neared Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge fled westward with as many civilians as it could seize, taking refuge in the jungles and mountains on both sides of the Thai border. The Vietnamese installed a new government led by several former Khmer Rouge officers, including Hun Sen, who had defected to Vietnam in 1977. The Khmer Rouge's patrons, the Chinese communists, launched a massive reprisal raid across Vietnam's northernmost border in early 1979 in an attempt to buy their allies time. It failed, and after 17 days the Chinese withdrew, their fingers badly burnt by their Vietnam­ese enemies. The Vietnamese then staged a show trial in which Pol Pot and leng Sary were condemned to death for their genocidal acts.

The social and economic dislocation that accompanied the Vietnamese invasion - along with the destruction of rice stocks and unharvested fields by both sides-(to prevent their use by the enemy) - resulted in a vastly reduced rice harvest in early 1979. The chaotic situation led to very little rice being planted in the summer of 1979. By the middle of that year the country was suffering from a widespread famine.

As hundreds of thousands of Cambodians fled to Thailand, a massive international famine relief effort, sponsored by the UN, was launched. The international community wanted to inject aid across a land bridge at Poipet, while the new Phnom Penh government wanted all supplies to come through the capital via Kompong Som (Sihanoukville) or the Mekong River. Both sides had their reasons - the new government did not want aid to fall into the hands of its Khmer Rouge enemies, while the international community didn't believe the new government had the infrastructure to distribute the aid - and both were right.

Some agencies distributed aid the slow way through Phnom Penh, and others set up camps in Thailand. The camps became a magnet for half of Cambodia, as many Khmers still feared the return of the Khmer Rouge or were seeking a new life overseas. The Thai military bullied and blackmailed the international community into distributing all aid through their channels and used this as a cloak to rebuild the shattered Khmer Rouge forces as an effective resistance against the Vietnamese. Thailand demanded that, as a condition for allowing international food aid for Cambodia to pass through its territory, food had to be supplied to the Khmer Rouge forces encamped in the Thai border region as well. Along with weaponry supplied by China, this international assistance was essential in enabling the Khmer Rouge to rebuild its military strength. The Khmer Rouge regrouped with food and shelter from willing donors and managed to fight on for another 20 years.

In June 1982 Sihanouk agreed, under pressure from China, to head a military and political front opposed to the Phnom Penh government The Sihanouk-led resistance coalition brought together - on paper, at least - Funcinpec (the French acronym for the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia), which comprised a royalist group loyal to Sihanouk; the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, a noncommunist grouping formed by former prime minister Son Sann; and the Khmer Rouge, officially known as the Party of Democratic Kampuchea and by far the most powerful of the three. The undisputed crimes of the Khmer Rouge were conveniently overlooked to ensure a compromise to suit the great powers.

During the mid-1980s the British government dispatched the Special Air Service (SAS) to a Malaysian jungle camp to train guerrilla fighters in land mine-laying techniques. Although officially assisting the smaller factions, it is certain the Khmer Rouge benefited from this experience. It then used these new-found skills to intimidate and terrorise the Cam­bodian people. As part of its campaign to harass and isolate Hanoi, the USA gave more than US$15 million a year in aid to the noncommunist factions of the Khmer Rouge-dominated coalition and helped the group retain its seat at the UN assembly in New York. Those responsible for the genocide were representing their victims on the international stage.

For much of the 1980s Cambodia remained closed to the Western world, save for the presence of some aid groups. Government policy was effectively under the control of the Vietnamese so Cambodia found itself very much in the Eastern-bloc camp. The economy was in tatters for much of this period, as Cambodia, like Vietnam, suffered from the effects of a US-sponsored embargo.

In 1985 the Vietnamese overran all the major rebel camps inside Cambodia, forcing the Khmer Rouge and its allies to retreat into Thai­land. From that time the Khmer Rouge - and, to a limited extent, the other two factions - engaged in guerrilla warfare aimed at demoralis­ing its opponents. Tactics used by the Khmer Rouge included shelling government-controlled garrison towns, planting thousands of mines along roads and in rice-fields, attacking road transport, blowing up bridges, kidnapping village chiefs, and killing local administrators and school teachers. The Khmer Rouge also forced thousands of men, women and children living in the refugee camps it controlled to work as porters, ferrying ammunition and other supplies into Cambodia across heavily mined sections of the border. The Vietnamese for their part laid the world's longest minefield, known as K-5, stretching from the Gulf of Thailand to the Lao border, in an attempt to seal out the guerrillas. They also sent Cambodians into the forests to cut down trees on remote sections of road to prevent ambushes. Hundreds, surely thousands, died of disease and from injuries sustained from land mines.

By the late 1980s the military wing of Funcinpec, the Armée Nationale Sihanoukiste, had 12,000 troops; Son Sann's faction, plagued by inter­nal divisions, could field some 8000 soldiers; and the Khmer Rouge's National Army of Democratic Kampuchea was believed to have 40,000 troops. The army of the Phnom Penh government, the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Armed Forces, had 50,000 regular soldiers and another 100,000 men and women serving in local militia forces.

Pol Pot, Brother No 1 in the Khmer Rouge regime, is a name that sends shivers down the spines of Cambodians and foreigners alike. It is Pol Pot who is most associated with the bloody mad­ness of the regime he led between 1975 and 1979, and his policies heaped misery, suffering and death on millions of Cambodians. Even after being overthrown in 1979 he cast a long shadow over the Cambodian people: for many of them, just knowing he was still alive was traumatic and unjust. He died on 15 April 1998.

Pol Pot was born Saloth Sar in a small village near Kompong Thorn in 1925. As a young man he won a scholarship to study in Paris and spent several years there with leng Sary, who would later become foreign minister of Democratic Kampuchea. It is here that he is believed to have developed his radical Marxist thought, later to transform into the politics of extreme Maoist agrarianism.

In 1963, Sihanouk's repressive policies sent Saloth Sar and comrades fleeing to the jungles of Ratanakiri. It was from this moment that he began to call himself Pol Pot. Once the Khmer Rouge was allied with Sihanouk, following his overthrow by Lon Nol in 1970 and subsequent exile in Beijing, its support soared and the faces of the leadership became familiar. However, Pol Pot remained a shadowy figure, leaving public duties to Khieu Samphan and leng Sary.

When the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975, few people could have anticipated the hell that was to follow. Pol Pot, with the help of others, was the architect of one of the most radical and brutal revolutions in the history of mankind. The year 1975 was proclaimed as Year Zero; Cambodia was on a self-destructive course to sever all ties with the past.

Pol Pot was not to emerge as the public face of the revolution until the end of 1976, after returning from a trip to his mentors in Beijing. He granted almost no interviews to foreign media and was seen only on propaganda movies produced by government TV. Such was his aura and reputation that by the last year of the regime a cult of personality was developing around him and busts were produced.

He was fervently anti-Vietnamese, a sentiment fuelled by the fact that the Vietnamese con­sidered the Cambodian revolution of secondary importance to their own. Fittingly, it was the Vietnamese that turned out to be his greatest enemy, invading Cambodia on 25 December 1978 and overthrowing the Khmer Rouge government. Pol Pot and his supporters were sent fleeing to the jungle near the Thai border, from where they spent the next decade launching attacks on government positions in Cambodia.

Pol Pot spent much of the 1980s living in an armed compound in Thailand, and with the connivance of both China and the West was able to rebuild his shattered forces and once again threaten the stability of Cambodia. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s his enigma increased as the international media speculated as to the real fate of Pol Pot. His demise was reported so often that when he finally passed away, many Cambodians refused to believe it until they had seen his body on TV or in newspapers. Even then, many were sceptical and rumours continue to circulate about exactly how he met his end.

Upon taking Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge implemented one of the most radical and brutal restructurings of a society ever attempted; its goal was to transform Cambodia into a Maoist, peasant-dominated agrar­ian cooperative. Within days of the Khmer Rouge coming to power the entire population of the capital city and provincial towns, including the sick, elderly and infirm, was forced to march out to the countryside and undertake slave labour in mobile work teams for 12 to 15 hours a day. Disobedience of any sort often brought immediate execution. The advent of Khmer Rouge rule was proclaimed Year Zero. Currency was abolished and postal services were halted. Except for one fortnightly flight to Bei­jing (China was providing aid and advisers to the Khmer Rouge), the country was cut off from the outside world.

In the eyes of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge was not a unified move­ment, but a series of factions that needed to be cleansed. This process had begun previously with attacks on Vietnamese-trained Khmer Rouge and Sihanouk's supporters, but Pol Pot's initial fury upon seizing power was directed against the enemies of the former regime. All of the senior government and military figures who had been associated with Lon Nol were executed within days of the takeover. Then the centre shifted its at­tention to the outer regions, which had been separated into geographic zones. The loyalist Southwestern Zone forces under the control of one-legged general Ta Mok were sent into region after region to purify the population, and thousands perished.

The cleansing reached grotesque heights in the final and bloodiest purge against the powerful and independent Eastern Zone. Generally considered more moderate than other Khmer Rouge factions (although 'moderate' is relative in a Khmer Rouge context), the Eastern Zone was closer to Vietnam. The Pol Pot faction consolidated the rest of the country before moving against the east from 1977 onwards. Hundreds of leaders were executed before open rebellion broke out and set the scene for civil war in the east. Many Eastern Zone leaders fled to Vietnam, forming the nucleus of the government installed by the Vietnamese in January 1979. The people were defenceless and distrusted - 'Cambodian bodies with Vietnamese minds' or 'duck's arses with chicken's heads' -and were deported to the northwest with new, blue krama (scarves). Had it not been for the Vietnamese invasion, all would have perished, as the blue krama was a secret party sign indicating an eastern enemy of the revolution.

It is still not known exactly how many Cambodians died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge during the three years, eight months and 21 days of their rule. The Vietnamese claimed three million deaths, while foreign experts long considered the number closer to one million. In early 1996, Yale University researchers undertaking ongoing investigations estimated that the figure was around two million.

Hundreds of thousands of people were executed by the Khmer Rouge leadership-while hundreds of thousands more died of famine and disease. Meals consisted of little more than watery rice porridge twice a day, meant to sustain men, women and children through a back-breaking day in the fields. Disease stalked the work camps, malaria and dysentery striking down whole families; death was a relief for many from the horrors of life. Some zones were better than others, some leaders fairer than others, but life for the majority was one of unending misery and suffering.

As the centre eliminated more and more moderates, Angkar (the or­ganisation) was now the only family people needed and those who did not agree were sought out and destroyed. The Khmer Rouge detached the Cambodian people from all they held dear: their families, their food, their fields and their faith. Even die peasants who had supported the revolution could no longer maintain their support. Nobody cared for the Khmer Rouge by 1978, but nobody had an ounce of strength to do anything about it...except the Vietnamese.

Sihanouk was condemned to death in absentia, an excessive move on the part of the new government that effectively ruled out any chance for com­promise over the next five years. Lon Nol gave communist Vietnamese forces an ultimatum to withdraw their forces within one week, which amounted to a virtual declaration of war, as no communists wanted to return to the homeland to face the Americans.

On 30 April 1970, US and South Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia in an effort to flush out thousands of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops who were using Cambodian bases in their war to overthrow the South Vietnamese government. As a result of the invasion, the Vietnam­ese communists withdrew deeper into Cambodia, thus posing an even greater threat to the Lon Nol government. Cambodia's tiny army never stood a chance and within the space of a few months, Vietnamese forces and their Khmer Rouge allies controlled almost half the country. The ultimate humiliation came in July 1970 when the Vietnamese seized the temples of Angkor.

In 1969 the USA had begun a secret programme of bombing suspected communist base camps in Cambodia. For the next four years, until bomb­ing was halted by the US Congress in August 1973, huge areas of the eastern half of the country were carpet-bombed by US B-52s, killing what is believed to be many thousands of civilians and turning hundreds of thousands more into refugees. Some historians believe the bombing campaign may have killed as many as 250,000 Cambodians. Undoubt­edly, the bombing campaign helped the Khmer Rouge in their recruit­ment drive, as more and more peasants were losing family members to the aerial assaults. While the final, heaviest bombing in the first half of 1973 may have saved Phnom Penh from a premature fall, its ferocity also helped to harden the attitude of many Khmer Rouge cadres and may have contributed to the later brutality of the regime.

Savage fighting engulfed the country, bringing misery to millions of Cambodians; many fled rural areas for the relative safety of Phnom Penh and provincial capitals. Between 1970 and 1975 several hundred thousand people died in the fighting. During these years the Khmer Rouge came to play a dominant role in trying to overthrow the Lon Nol regime, strength­ened by the support of the Vietnamese, although the Khmer Rouge leader­ship would vehemently deny this from 1975 onwards.

The leadership of the Khmer Rouge, including Paris-educated Pol Pot and leng Sary, had fled into the countryside in the 1960s to escape the summary justice then being meted out to suspected leftists by Sihanouk's security forces. They consolidated control over the movement and began to move against opponents before they took Phnom Penh. Many of the Vietnamese-trained Cambodian communists who had been based in Hanoi since the 1954 Geneva Accords returned down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to join the Khmer Rouge in 1970. Many were dead by 1975, ex­ecuted on orders of the anti-Vietnamese Pol Pot faction. Likewise, many moderate Sihanouk supporters who had joined the Khmer Rouge as a show of loyalty to their fallen leader rather than a show of ideology to the radicals were victims of purges before the regime took power. This set a precedent for internal purges and mass executions that were to eventually bring the downfall of the Khmer Rouge.

It didn't take long for the Lon Nol government to become very un­popular as a result of unprecedented greed and corruption in its ranks. As the USA bankrolled the war, government and military personnel found lucrative means to make a fortune, such as inventing 'phantom soldiers' and pocketing their pay, or selling weapons to the enemy. Lon Nol was widely perceived as an ineffectual leader, obsessed by supersti­tion, fortune tellers and mystical crusades. This perception increased with his stroke in March 1971 and for the next four years his grip on reality seemed to weaken as his corrupt brother Lon Non's power grew.

Despite massive US military and economic aid, Lon Nol never succeeded in gaining the initiative against the Khmer Rouge, which pursued a strategy of rural attrition. Large parts of the countryside fell to the rebels and many provincial capitals were cut off from Phnom Penh. Lon Nol fled the coun­try in early April 1975, leaving Sirik Matak in charge, who refused evacu­ation to the end. 'I cannot alas leave in such a cowardly fashion...! have committed only one mistake, that of believing in you, the Americans' were the words Sirik Matak poignantly penned to US ambassador John Gunther Dean. On 17 April 1975 - two weeks before the fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) - Phnom Penh surrendered to the Khmer Rouge.

Norodom Sihanouk has been a constant presence in the topsy-turvy world of Cambodian politics. A colourful character of many enthusiasms and shifting political positions, his amatory exploits dominated his early reputation. Later he became the prince who stage-managed the close of French colonialism, autocratically led an independent Cambodia, was imprisoned by the Khmer Rouge and, from privileged exile, finally returned triumphant as king, only to abdicate dramati­cally In 2004. He is many things to many people, a political chameleon, but whatever else he may be, he has proved himself a survivor.

Sihanouk, born in 1922, was not an obvious contender for the throne. He was crowned in 1941, at just 19, with his education incomplete. In 1952 he embarked on a self-styled 'royal crusade' for independence, which culminated in independence from the French in 19S3. In 1955 Sihanouk abdicated, and turned his attention to politics, winning every seat in parliament that year.

By the mid-1960s Sihanouk had been calling the shots in Cambodia for a decade. During this period, after innumerable love affairs, he finally settled on Monique Izzi, the daughter of a Franco-Italian father and a Cambodian mother, as his consort.

The conventional wisdom was that 'Sihanouk is Cambodia', his leadership the key to national success. However, as the country was inexorably drawn into the American War in Vietnam and government troops battled with a leftist insurgency in the countryside, Sihanouk increasingly was seen as a liability. With the economy in tatters, his obsessive involvement in the Cambodian film industry  and his public announcements proclaiming Cambodia 'an oasis of peace' suggested a man who had not only abdicated from the throne but also from reality.

On 18 March 1970 the National Assembly voted to remove Sihanouk from office. Sihanouk went into exile in Beijing and joined the communists. Following the Khmer Rouge victory on 17 April 1975, Sihanouk was confined to the Royal Palace as a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge. He remained there until early 1979 when, on the eve of the Vietnamese invasion, he was flown back to Beijing. It was to be more than a decade before Sihanouk finally returned to Cambodia.

Following his return and against all odds, he was back at centre stage again, calling the shots, forming alliances with the Khmer Rouge and breaking them off. After the May 1993 elections, Sihanouk abruptly announced that he was forming a coalition government with himself starring as president, prime minister and military leader. An ambitious move, it failed.

Sihanouk never quite gave up wanting to be everything for Cambodia: international states­man, general, president, film director, man of the people. On 24 September 1993, after 38 years in politics, he took on once again the role of king. In many ways his second stint as king was a frustrating time; reigning rather than ruling, he had to take a back seat to the politicians. He pulled Cambodia through political impasse on several occasions, but eventually enough was enough and he abdicated on 7 October 2004. Many reasons for his abdication were cited (old age, failing health), but most observers agree it was a calculated political decision to ensure the future of the monarchy, as the politicians were stalling on choosing a successor. His son King Sihamoni ascended the throne and Cambodia came through another crisis. However, it will be a hard act to follow, matching the presence of Sihanouk - the last in a long line of Angkor's god-kings.

In late-1952 King Sihanouk dissolved the fledgling parliament, declared martial law and embarked on his 'royal crusade': his travelling campaign to drum up international support for his country's independence.

Independence was proclaimed on 9 November 1953 and recognised by the Geneva Conference of May 1954, which ended French control of Indochina. In 1955, Sihanouk abdicated, afraid of being marginalized amid the pomp of royal ceremony. The 'royal crusader' became 'citizen Sihanouk'. He vowed never again to return to the throne. Meanwhile his father became king. It was a masterstroke that offered Sihanouk both royal authority and supreme political power. His newly established party, Sangkum Reastr Niyum (People's Socialist Community Party), won every seat in parliament in the September 1955 elections and Sihanouk was to dominate Cambodian politics for the next 15 years. Although he feared the Vietnamese communists, Sihanouk considered South Vietnam and Thailand, both allies of the USA (which he mis­trusted), the greatest threats to Cambodia's security, even survival. In an attempt to fend off these many dangers, he declared Cambodia neutral in international affairs and refused to accept any further US aid, which had accounted for a substantial chunk of the country's military budget. He also nationalised many industries, including the rice trade. In May 1965 Sihanouk, convinced that the USA had been plotting against him and his family, broke diplomatic relations with Washington and tilted towards the North Vietnamese and China. In addition, he agreed to let the communists use Cambodian territory in their battle against South Vietnam and the USA.

These moves and his socialist economic policies alienated right-leaning elements in Cambodian society, including the army brass and the urban elite. At the same time, left-wing Cambodians, many of them educated abroad, deeply resented his internal policies, which did not allow for political dissent. Compounding Sihanouk's problems was the fact that all classes were fed up with the pervasive corruption in government ranks, some of it uncomfortably close to the royal family. Although most peasants revered Sihanouk as a semidivine figure, in 1967 a rural-based rebellion broke out in Samlot, Battambang, leading him to conclude that the greatest threat to his regime came from the left. Bowing to pressure from the army, he implemented a policy of harsh repression against left-wingers.

By 1969 the conflict between the army and leftist rebels had become more serious, as the Vietnamese sought sanctuary deeper in Cambodia. Sihanouk's political position had also greatly deteriorated - due in no small part to his obsession with film-making, which was leading him to neglect affairs of state. In March 1970, while Sihanouk was on a trip to France, General Lon Nol and Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak, Sihanouk's cousin, deposed him as chief of state, apparently with tacit US consent. Sihanouk took up residence in Beijing, where he set up a government-in-exile nominally in control of an indigenous Cambodian revolution­ary movement that Sihanouk had nicknamed the Khmer Rouge. This was a definitive moment in contemporary Cambodian history, as the Khmer Rouge exploited its partnership with Sihanouk to draw new re­cruits into their small organisation. Many former Khmer Rouge fighters argue that they 'went to the hills' (a euphemism for joining the Khmer Rouge) to fight for their king and knew nothing of Mao or Marxism.

Cambodia's long period of bouncing back and forth between Thai and Vietnamese masters ended in 1864, when French gunboats intimidated King Norodom I (r 1860-1904) into signing a treaty of protectorate. French control of Cambodia, which developed as a sideshow to French-colonial interests in Vietnam, initially involved little direct interference in Cambo­dia's affairs. More importantly, the French presence prevented Cambodia's expansionist neighbours from annexing any more Khmer territory and helped keep Norodom on the throne despite the ambitions of his rebel­lious half-brothers.

By the 1870s French officials in Cambodia began pressing for greater control over internal affairs. In 1884, Norodom was forced into signing a treaty that turned his country into a virtual colony. This sparked a two-year rebellion that constituted the only major anti-French movement in Cambodia until after WWII. This uprising ended when the king was persuaded to call upon the rebel fighters to lay down their weapons in exchange for a return to the pretreaty arrangement.

During the next two decades senior Cambodian officials, who saw cer­tain advantages in acquiescing to French power, opened the door to direct French control over the day-to-day administration of the country. At the same time the French maintained Norodom's court in a splendour unseen since the heyday of Angkor, thereby greatly enhancing the symbolic posi­tion of the monarchy. The French were able to pressure Thailand into re­turning the northwest provinces of Battambang, Siem Reap and Sisophon in 1907, in return for concessions of Lao territory to the Thais, returning Angkor to Cambodian control for the first time in more than a century.

King Norodom I was succeeded by King Sisowath (r 1904-27), who was succeeded by King Monivong (r 1927-41). Upon King Monivong's death, the French governor general of Japanese-occupied Indochina, Admiral Jean Decoux, placed 19-year-old Prince Norodom Sihanouk on the Cam­bodian throne. Sihanouk would prove pliable, so the assumption went, but this proved to be a major miscalculation (see the boxed text, opposite).

During WWII, Japanese forces occupied much of Asia, and Cambodia was no exception. However, with many in France collaborating with the occupying Germans, the Japanese were happy to let these French allies control affairs in Cambodia. The price was conceding to Thailand (a Japanese ally of sorts) much of Battambang and Siem Reap Provinces once again, areas that weren't returned until 1947. However, with the fall of Paris in 1944 and French policy in disarray, the Japanese were forced to take direct control of the territory by early 1945. After WWII, the French returned, making Cambodia an autonomous state within the French Union, but retaining de facto control. The French deserved independence it seemed, but not its colonies. The immediate postwar years were marked by strife among the country's various political factions, a situation made more unstable by the Franco-Viet Minh War then raging in Vietnam and Laos, which spilled over into Cambodia. The Vietnamese, as they were also to do 20 years later in the war against Lon Nol and the Americans, trained and fought with .bands of Khmer Issarak (Free Khmer) against the French authorities.

From 1600 until the arrival of the French in 1863, Cambodia was ruled by a series of weak kings who, because of continual challenges by dissident members of the royal family, were forced to seek the protection - granted, of course, at a price - of either Thailand or Vietnam. In the 17th century, assistance from the Nguyen lords of southern Vietnam was given on the proviso that Vietnamese be allowed to settle in what is now the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam, at that time part of Cambodia and today still referred to by the Khmers as Kampuchea Krom (Lower Cambodia).

In the west, the Thais controlled the provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap from 1794; by the late 18th century they had firm control of the Cambodian royal family. Indeed, one king was crowned in Bangkok and placed on the throne at Udong with the help of the Thai army. That Cambodia survived through the 18th century as a distinct entity is due to the preoccupations of its neighbours: while the Thais were expending their energy and resources in fighting the Burmese, the Vietnamese were wholly absorbed by internal strife.

Some scholars maintain that decline was hovering in the wings at the time Angkor Wat was built, when the Angkorian empire was at the height of its remarkable productivity. There are indications that the irrigation network was overworked and slowly starting to silt up due to the massive deforestation that had taken place in the heavily populated areas to the north and east of Angkor. Massive construction projects such as Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom no doubt put an enormous strain on the royal coffers and on thousands of slaves and common people who subsidised them in hard work and taxes. Following the reign of Jayavarrnan VII, temple construction effectively ground to a halt, in large part because Jayavarrnan VII's public works quarried local sandstone into oblivion and the population was exhausted.

Another important aspect of this period was the decline of Cambodian political influence on the peripheries of its empire. At the same time, the Thais were ascendant, having migrated south from Yunnan to escape Kublai Khan and his Mongol hordes. The Thais, first from Sukothai, later Ayuthaya, grew in strength and made repeated incursions into Angkor, finally sacking the city in 1431 and making off with thousands of intel­lectuals, artisans and dancers from the royal court. During this period, perhaps drawn by the opportunities for sea trade with China and fearful of the increasingly bellicose Thais, the Khmer elite began to migrate to the Phnom Penh area. The capital shifted several times in the 16th cen­tury but eventually settled in present day Phnom Penh.

A popular place of pilgrimage for Khmers today, the sacred mountain of Phnom Kulen , to the northeast of Angkor, is home to an inscrip­tion that  Jayavarman II proclaimed himself a 'universal monarch", or devaraja (god-king). It is believed that he may have resided in the Buddhist Shailendras* court in Java as a young man. One of the first things he did when he returned to Cambodia was to reject Javanese control over the southern lands of Cambodia. Jayavarman II then set out to bring the country under his control through alliances and conquests, the first monarch to rule all of what we call Cambodia today.

Jayavarman II was the first of a long succession of kings who pre­sided over the rise and fall of the Southeast Asian empire that was to leave the stunning legacy of Angkor. The first records of the massive irrigation works that supported the population of Angkor date to the reign of Indravarman. His rule also marks the beginning of Angkorian art, with the building of temples in the Roluos area, notably the Bakong. His son Yasovarman moved the royal court to Angkor proper, establishing a temple-mountain on the summit of Phnom Bakheng.

By the turn of the 11 th century the kingdom of Angkor was losing con­trol of its territories. Suryavarman I, a usurper, moved into the power vacuum and, like Jayavarman II two centuries before, reunified the kingdom through war and alliances. He annexed the Dravati kingdom of Lopburi in Thailand and widened his control of Cambodia, stretching the empire to perhaps its greatest extent. A pattern was beginning to emerge, and can be seen throughout the Angkorian period: dislocation and tur­moil, followed by reunification and further expansion under a powerful king. Architecturally, the most productive periods occurred after times of turmoil, indicating that newly incumbent monarchs felt the need to cele­brate and perhaps legitimise their rule with massive building projects.

By 1066 Angkor was again riven by conflict, becoming the focus of rival bids for power. It was not until the accession of Suryavarman II  that the kingdom was again unified. Suryavarman II embarked on another phase of expansion, waging wars in Vietnam and the region of central Viet­nam known as Champa. He also established links with China. But Suryavar­man II is immortalised as the king who, in his devotion to the Hindu deity Vishnu, commissioned the majestic temple of Angkor Wat.

Suryavarman II had brought Champa to heel and reduced it to vassal.sta-tus. In 1177, however, the Chams struck back with a naval expedition up the Mekong and into Tonl6 Sap lake. They took the city of Angkor by surprise and put King Dharanindravarman II to death. The next year a cousin of Suryavarman II gathered forces and defeated the Chams in another naval battle. The new leader was crowned Jayavarman VII in 1181.

A devout follower of Mahayana Buddhism, Jayavarman VII built the city of Angkor Thom and many other massive monuments. In­deed, many of the monuments visited by tourists around Angkor today were constructed during Jayavarman VII's reign. However, Jayavarman VII is a figure of many contradictions. The bas-reliefs of the Bayon depict him presiding over battles of terrible ferocity, while statues of the king show him in a- meditative, otherworldly aspect. His programme of temple construction and other public works was carried out in great haste, no doubt bringing enormous hardship to the labourers who pro­vided the muscle, and thus accelerating the decline of the empire. He was partly driven by a desire to legitimise his rule, as there may have been other contenders closer to the royal bloodline, and partly by the need to introduce a new religion to a population predominantly Hindu in faith.

From the 6th century the Funan kingdom's importance as a port of call declined, and Cambodia's population gradually concentrated along the Mekong and Tonlé Sap Rivers, where the majority remains today. The move may have been related to the development of wet-rice agriculture. From the 6th to 8th centuries it was likely that Cambodia was a collection of competing kingdoms, ruled by autocratic kings who legitimised their absolute rule through hierarchical caste concepts borrowed from India.

This era is generally referred to as the Chenla period. Again, like Funan, it is a Chinese term and there is little to support the idea that the Chenla was a unified kingdom that held sway over all of Cambodia. In­deed, the Chinese themselves referred to 'water Chenla' and 'land Chenla'. Water Chenla was located around Angkor Borei and the temple mount of Phnom Da, near the present-day provincial capital of Takeo; and land Chenla in the upper reaches of the Mekong River and east of the Tonle Sap lake, around Sambor Prei Kuk, an essential stop on a chronological jaunt through Cambodia's history.

The people of Cambodia were well known to the Chinese, and gradu­ally the region was becoming more cohesive. Before long the fractured kingdoms of Cambodia would merge to become the greatest empire in Southeast Asia.

The early Indianisation of Cambodia occurred via trading settlements that sprang up from the 1st century on the coastline of what is now southern Vietnam, but was then inhabited by Cambodians. These settle­ments were ports of call for boats following the trading route from the Bay of Bengal to the southern provinces of China. The largest of these nascent kingdoms was known as Funan by the Chinese, and may have existed across an area between Ba Phnom in Prey Veng Province, a site only worth visiting for the archaeologically obsessed today, and Oc-Eo in Kien Giang Province in southern Vietnam. It would have been a con­temporary of Champasak in southern Laos (then known as Kuruksetra) and other lesser fiefdoms in the region.

Funan is a Chinese name, and it may be a transliteration of the ancient Khmer word bnam (mountain). Although very little is known about Funan, much has been made of its importance as an early Southeast Asian centre of power.

It is most likely that between the 1st and 8th centuries, Cambodia was a collection of small states, each with its own elites that often strategically intermarried and often went to war with one another. Funan was no doubt one of these states, and as a major sea port would have been pivotal in the transmission of Indian culture into the interior of Cambodia.

What historians do know about Funan they have mostly gleaned from Chinese sources. These report that Funan-period Cambodia (1st to 6th centuries AD) embraced the worship of the Hindu deities.Shiva and Vishnu and, at the same time, Buddhism. The linga (phallic totem) ap­pears to have been the focus of ritual and an emblem of kingly might, a feature that was to evolve further in the Angkorian cult of the god-king. The people practised primitive irrigation, which enabled the cultivation of rice, and traded raw commodities such as spices with China and India.

Cambodia came into being, so the story goes, through the union of a princess and a foreigner. The foreigner was an Indian Brahman named Kaundinya and the princess was the daughter of a dragon king who ruled over a watery land. One day, as Kaundinya sailed by, the princess paddled out in a boat to greet him. Kaundinya shot an arrow from his magic bow into her boat, causing the fearful princess to agree to marriage. In need of a dowry, her father drank up the waters of his land and presented them to Kaundinya to rule over. The new kingdom was named Kambuja.

Like many legends, this one I historically opaque, but it does say something about the cultural forces that brought Cambodia into existence; in particular its relationship with its great subcontinental neighbour, India. Cambodia's religious, royal and written traditions stemmed from India and began to coalesce as a cultural entity in their own right between the 1st and 5th centuries.

Very little is known about prehistoric Cambodia. Much of the southeast was a vast, shallow gulf that was progressively silted up by the mouths of the Mekong, leaving pancake-flat, mineral-rich land ideal for farming. Evidence of cave-dwellers has been found in the northwest of Cambodia. Carbon dating on ceramic pots found in the area shows that they were made around 4200 BC, but it is hard to say whether there is a direct relationship between these cave-dwelling pot makers and con­temporary Khmers. Examinations of bones dating back to around 1500 BC, however, suggest that the people living in Cambodia at that time re­sembled the Cambodians of today. Early Chinese records report that the Cambodians were 'ugly' and 'dark' and went about naked; but a pinch of salt is always required when reading the culturally chauvinistic reports of imperial China concerning its 'barbarian' neighbours.