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On 10 March 1993, a group of Khmer Rouge soldiers marched into the Cambodian fishing village of Chong Kneas and opened fire, killing and injuring more than 60 people of ethnic Vietnamese background. In the panic which followed, more than 30,000 people from this minority group fled into Viet Nam, while 5,000 more found themselves stranded on the Cambodian side of the border. (Official report “The State of the World's Refugees” — published by UNHCR, pp-67)

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Even before the Khmer Rouge came to power, General Lon Nol launched a pogrom in and around Phnom Penh in which thousands of Vietnamese were massacred, often with a high level of brutality. According to the historian David Chandler, the pogrom was a “racially based religious war against unarmed civilians whose families have lived in Cambodia for generations.” The regime then killed thousands more Vietnamese who lived in the border region and expelled 500,000 of them to South Vietnam. (A Century of Genocide — by Eric D. Weitz)

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The slogan was “Rid ourselves of the Vietnamese cholera”. In a bloody rampage in Phnom Penh on the night of April 13, 1970, seven thousand people of Vietnamese were massacred. A thousand bodies were seen floating down the Mekong River past the city. Up to 200,000 others were then forcibly repatriated to South Vietnam. (Killing Fields, Living Fields — by Don Cormack)

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In April 1970, the Khmer military acted in a way that is impossible to explain or justify: they massacred Vietnamese civilian living in Cambodia, declaring that the yuon were Cambodia’s enemies just as the Vietcong were. The first victims were in the provinces; the yuon residents of the Chruoy Changva peninsula, opposite the capital, were next: bodies could be seen floating in the Mekong. For several days violence was unleashed. Soldiers executed several hundreds yuon. If foreigners had not intervened, the victims would have been even more numerous: four hundred fifty thousand Vietnamese living on Khmer soil. American journalists (Henry Kamm among them) stopped a massacre in progress at the Université de Takeo-Campot by threatening Lon Nol — the instigator of the action — telling him that they will report the story if he didn’t calm his unchained men. They might have disappear along with the other victims but the journalists were heeded. The massacres — of which reports nevertheless made their way to the West — ceased. (Cambodia: A Shattered Society — by Marie Alexandrine Martin)



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