CPP Plans Large Party to Mark 35th Anniversary of KR Fall

This year’s January 7 celebrations on Tuesday to mark the day in 1979 that Vietnamese forces toppled the Khmer Rouge regime will be the biggest in years, CPP lawmaker Cheam Yeap said Sunday.

While the ruling CPP celebrates the day as the end to Pol Pot’s nearly four years of rule over Cambodia, the political opposition says the day should not be celebrated but remembered as the start of 10 years of Vietnamese occupation. It was under that occupation that Prime Minister Hun Sen and other top CPP leaders first came to power.

Mr. Yeap said Sunday that Tuesday’s 35th anniversary celebrations would be the biggest since the 30th anniversary festivities in 2009. While short on details, he said the celebration would be moved from CPP headquarters—where they usually take place—to Phnom Penh’s Koh Pich and draw many more guests.

“This year the CPP will be celebrating with a huge memorial at Koh Pich, where many attendees are expected to join,” he said.

As usual, he said the ceremony would be an opportunity to give thanks to the Vietnamese, without whose weapons and troops the Khmer Rouge defectors—who included Mr. Hun Sen—could not have overrun Pol Pot’s forces.

“If there were no Vietnamese and weapons, we could not have toppled the Khmer Rouge,” Mr. Yeap said. “We cannot forget how the Vietnamese Communist Party helped us, and we always celebrate this event every year.”

He added that National Assembly President Heng Samrin—who co-founded the rebel group that helped to topple Pol Pot as a Khmer Rouge defector—was already in Vietnam and had taken part in January 7 celebrations in Hanoi on Saturday.

Mr. Samrin also held talks with his Vietnamese counterpart, Nguyen Sinh Hung, as well as Vietnamese President Truong Tan Seng, according to Cambodian state news agency Agence Kampuchea Presse.

Despite the CPP’s plans to make this year’s celebrations the biggest in years, it comes amid an uptick in anti-Vietnamese sentiment among Cambodians stirred up by the opposition during last year’s national election. The opposition made claims of rampant illegal immigration and land grabbing from Vietnam a fixture of its campaign, one that resonated strongly with the electorate.

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