Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

attempt to remodel society through destruction and genocide. All over the country, the
traumatized survivors began to return home in an effort to rebuild their shattered lives.
The fact that the new regime installed by the Vietnamese, the People’s Republic of
Kampuchea, was communist was of less consequence than the fact that it was not genocidal,
destructive, or (its ideological statements to the contrary) revolutionary.
Contrary to the belief of some, the Vietnamese did not, then, remove the Khmer Rouge
in order to halt the Khmer Rouge–perpetrated genocide. Rather, Vietnam unilaterally
invaded Democratic Kampuchea for its own strategic reasons. Still, the invasion freed the
Cambodian people from the Khmer Rouge, which had, by that time, been responsible for
the deaths of some 1 to 2 million people by forced labor under horrific conditions, starvation,
unattended illnesses, murder, and mass executions. The invasion resulted in an
occupation that lasted into the early 1990s.
Vietnam Intervention in Cambodia, United States’ Response. The downfall of
Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime (1975–1979) at the hands of the invading Vietnamese
in 1979 saw the end of Khmer Rouge dictator Pol Pot’s (1925–1998) genocidal revolution,
but Vietnam’s intervention was viewed as problematic by the United States. While most
U.S. politicians were glad that the slaughter had stopped, there were mixed emotions over
the fact that it was Vietnam that had been successful in deposing Pol Pot. The United
States in 1979 was still reeling over its own disastrous war with Vietnam, a conflict that
had lasted from 1961 until 1975, taken the lives of 58,132 U.S. servicemen, created deep
and devisive divisions within U.S. society, and destroyed the ambitions of two U.S. presidents,
Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973) and Richard Milhous Nixon (1913–1994).
With the Vietnamese victory in Cambodia, the incumbent U.S. president, Jimmy
Carter (b. 1924), saw himself forced to choose between the genocidal Khmer Rouge
regime or the former enemy, communist Vietnam—a government backed by the U.S.’s
Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union. Moreover, an argument was put in some circles
that the Vietnamese intervention was nothing short of an expansionist takeover, and this,
within a context of the “Domino Theory” (which asserted that once one nation in southeast
Asia fell to the communists, the fall of others would come in quick succession).
Adding to the considerations weighing against approval of the Vietnamese action was an
American infatuation with China, which it viewed as a counterweight within the communist
world to the domination of the Soviet Union. Taken together, there was little support
for the Vietnamese within the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. As a result,
the Carter administration decided to back the Khmer Rouge, calling upon Vietnam to
withdraw its forces from Cambodia. The United States was supported in this by China
(the main backer of Pol Pot and Vietnam’s longest-standing adversary), Australia, the
Philippines, Indonesia, and several other countries. The response of the U.S. government
to the ouster of Pol Pot and his genocidal Khmer Rouge regime by the Vietnamese, in
short, became symbolic of Cold War power politics. It represents a moral low-point for the
U.S. government, while at the same time a diplomatic success within the context of the
struggle with the Soviet Union, as it reinforced the resolve of the anti-Soviet bloc in
southeast Asia.
Visegrad. A town in eastern Bosnia, located on the Drina River. Visegrad was one of
the first major locations to be severely attacked by Bosnian Serb forces during the Bosnian
War of 1992–1995. The Muslim population of the town, numbering about fourteen
thousand at the beginning of the war, was systematically assaulted by Serbian militia
VISEGRAD
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