Fifty years after fall of Phnom Penh, history weighs on Cambodian politics

Al Jazeera

17-04-2025

Fifty years after the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge rebel army, the events of April 17, 1975 continue to cast a long shadow over Cambodia and its political system.
Emerging from the bloodshed and chaos of the spreading war in neighbouring Vietnam, Pol Pot's radical peasant movement rose up and defeated the United States-backed regime of General Lon Nol.
The war culminated five decades ago on Thursday, with Pol Pot's forces sweeping into Cambodia's capital and ordering the city's more than two million people into the countryside with little more than the belongings they could carry.
With Cambodia's urban centres abandoned, the Khmer Rouge embarked on rebuilding the country from 'Year Zero', transforming it into an agrarian, classless society.
In less than four years under Pol Pot's rule, between 1.5 and three million people were dead. They would also almost wipe out Cambodia's rich cultural history and religion.
Many Cambodians were brutally killed in the Khmer Rouge's 'killing fields', but far more died of starvation, disease and exhaustion labouring on collective farms to build the Communist regime's rural utopia.
In late December 1978, Vietnam invaded alongside Cambodian defectors, toppling the Khmer Rouge from power on January 7, 1979. It is from this point onwards that popular knowledge of Cambodia's contemporary tragic history typically ends, picking up in the mid-2000s with the start of the United Nations-backed war crimes tribunal in Phnom Penh, where former regime leaders were put on trial.
For many Cambodians, however, rather than being relegated to history books, the 1975 fall of Phnom Penh and the toppling of the Khmer Rouge in 1979 remain alive and well, embedded in the Cambodian political system.
That tumultuous Khmer Rouge period is still used to justify the long-running rule of the Cambodian People's Party (CPP) under varying forms since 1979, and the personal rule of CPP leader Hun Sen and his family since 1985, according to analysts. It was the now ageing senior leadership of the CPP who joined with Vietnamese forces to oust Pol Pot in 1979.
While memories of those times are fading, the CPP's grip on power is as firm as ever in the decades since the late 1970s.
The ruling CPP see 'themselves as the saviour and the guardian of the country', said Aun Chhengpor, a policy researcher at the Future Forum think tank in Phnom Penh.
'It explains the making of a political system as it is today,' he said, noting that the CPP has long done what it required to 'ensure that they are still there at the helm … at any cost'.
Most Cambodians have now accepted a system where peace and stability matter above all else.
'There seems to be an unwritten social contract between the ruling establishment and the population that, as long as the CPP provides relative peace and a stable economy, the population will leave governance and politics to the CPP,' Aun Chhengpor said.
'The bigger picture is how the CPP perceives itself and its historic role in modern Cambodia. It's not that different from how the palace-military establishment in Thailand or the Communist Party in Vietnam see their roles in their respective countries,' he said.
The CPP headed a Vietnamese-backed regime for a decade, from 1979 to 1989, bringing relative order back to Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge, even as fighting persisted in many parts of the country as Pol Pot's fighters tried to reassert control.
With support dwindling from the Soviet Union in the last days of the Cold War and an economically and militarily exhausted Vietnam withdrawing from Cambodia, Hun Sen, by then the leader of the country, agreed to hold elections as part of a settlement to end his country's civil war. From 1991 to 1993, Cambodia was administered by the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC).
The Cambodian monarchy was formally re-established, and elections were held for the first time in decades in 1993. The last Khmer Rouge soldiers surrendered in 1999, symbolically closing a chapter on one of the 20th century's bloodiest conflicts.
Despite a bumpy road forward, there were initial hopes for Cambodian democracy.
The royalist National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia Party – better known by its acronym FUNCINPEC – won the UN-administered elections in 1993. Faced with defeat, the CPP refused to cede power.
The late King Norodom Sihanouk stepped in to broker an agreement between both sides that preserved the hard-won peace and made the election a relative success. The international community breathed a sigh of relief as the UNTAC mission in Cambodia had been the largest and costliest at that time for the world body, and UN member states were desperate to declare their investment in nation rebuilding a success.
Ruling jointly under a power-sharing agreement with CPP and FUNCINPEC co-prime ministers, the unsteady alliance of former enemies held for four years until ending in a swift and bloody coup by Hun Sen in 1997.
Mu Sochua, an exiled opposition leader who now heads the nonprofit Khmer Movement for Democracy, told Al Jazeera that the CPP's resistance to a democratic transfer of power in 1993 continues to reverberate throughout Cambodia today.
'The failure of the transfer of power in 1993 and the deal the King made at the time … was a bad deal. And the UN went along because the UN wanted to close shop,' she told Al Jazeera from the US, where she lives in exile after being forced to flee the CPP's intensifying authoritarianism at home.
'The transitional period, the transfer of power … which was the will of the people, never happened,' Mu Sochua said.
Following the coup in 1997, the CPP did not come close to losing power again until 2013, when they were challenged by the widely popular Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP).
By the time of the next general election in 2018, the CNRP was banned from politics by the country's less-than-independent courts, and many of the opposition leaders were forced to flee the country or ended up in prison on politically motivated charges.
Unhindered by a viable political challenger, Hun Sen's CPP went on to win all seats in the 2018 national election, and all but five of the 125 parliamentary seats contested during the last general election in 2023.
The CPP has also firmly aligned with China, and the country's once vibrant free press has been shut down, and civil society organisations cowed into silence.
After notching up 38 years in power, Hun Sen stepped aside as prime minister in 2023 to make way for his son Hun Manet – a sign that the CPP-led political machine has eyes on dynastic, multi-generational rule.
But new challenges have emerged in Cambodia's post-war decades of relative prosperity, huge inequality and de facto one-party rule.
Cambodia's booming microcredit industry was intended to help lift Cambodians out of poverty, but the industry has instead burdened families with high levels of personal debt. One estimate put the figure at more than $16bn in a country with a population of just 17.4 million and a gross domestic product (GDP) of $42bn in 2023, according to World Bank estimates.
Aun Chhengpor told Al Jazeera there are signs the government is taking note of these emerging issues and demographic changes.
Hun Manet's cabinet is shifting towards 'performance-based legitimacy' because they lack the 'political capital' once bestowed by the public on those who liberated the country from the Khmer Rouge.
'The proportion of the population that remembers the Khmer Rouge, or that has usable memories of that period, is shrinking year by year,' said Sebastian Strangio, author of Hun Sen's Cambodia.
'I don't think [the CPP 's legacy] is sufficient for the majority of the population born since the end of the Cold War,' Strangio told Al Jazeera.
Now, there even appears to be room for a limited amount of popular opposition, analyst Aun Chhengpor said.
In January, Cambodian farmers blockaded a main highway to protest against the low prices of their goods, suggesting there may be 'some space' in the political system for localized dissent on community-based issues, he said.
'[It] will be an uphill struggle for the fractured political opposition to thrive – not to mention to organise among themselves and, let alone, have the hope of winning a general election,' Aun Chhengpor said.
'However, there are indications that the CPP still somehow believes in the multiparty system and limited democracy in the way that they can have a say on when and how much democracy,' he added.
Speaking in exile from the US, Mu Sochua had a dimmer view of Cambodia's situation.
The same month as the farmer protests in Cambodia, a former Cambodian opposition member of parliament was shot dead in broad daylight on a street in Thailand's capital, Bangkok.
The brazen assassination of Lim Kimya, 74, a dual Cambodian-French citizen, recalled memories of the chaotic political violence of the 1990s and early 2000s in Cambodia.
Peace and stability, Mu Sochua said, exist only on the surface in Cambodia, where still waters run deep.
'If politics and the space for people to engage in politics is non-existent, what dominates then is not peace,' she said.
'It's still the feeling of war, of insecurity, of the lack of freedom,' she told Al Jazeera.
'After the war, 50 years later, at least there is no bloodshed, but that alone does not mean there is peace.'