The fall of Indochina to communism in 1975 sharply changed the political dynamics of Southeast Asia within the framework of the Cold War. North Vietnam annexed the South, ending a decade of conflict but in Cambodia the arrival of the Khmer Rouge resulted in disaster.
Pol Pot and his henchmen inflicted unprecedented carnage, genocide, forced labor camps, and sickness, claiming about 2 million lives, or about a third of this country’s population, after seizing Phnom Penh on April 17 and evacuating the capital. South Vietnam fell on April 30.
The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in late 1978 ended Pol Pot’s tyrannical rule but civil war continued for another two decades, despite the Paris Peace Accords and the 1992-93 United Nations peacekeeping operation that enabled Cambodia’s first democratic elections.
In full: https://thediplomat.com/2025/01/pol-pots-march-into-phnom-penh-50-years-on/
