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Angola
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Cambodia
AT A GLANCE:
Recent History Cambodia was a colony of France from 1884 until independence was declared in 1953 and Norodom Sihanouk was proclaimed King. His reign continued until 1968 when he was overthrown by the army. In 1969 the United States bombed a suspected communist base camp in Cambodia and drew Cambodia unwillingly into the US-Vietnamese war. American and South Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia in 1970 in an effort to eradicate Vietnamese communist forces. The Cambodian leftist guerillas (Khmer Rouge) were pushed into the interior but continued a savage war until 1975 when they overthrew the capital, Phnom Penh. Over the next four years the Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot's leadership, systematically killed an estimated one million Cambodians in an effort to create a Maoist, peasant-dominated agrarian cooperative. Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978, forcing the Khmer Rouge to flee to the jungles along the Thai border. From there, they conducted a guerilla war against the Vietnamese-backed government throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. In mid-1993, UN-administered elections led to a new constitution and the reinstatement of Norodom Sihanouk as king. Land mines in Cambodia Today there are over 10,000,000 deployed land mines in Cambodia, equaling the population of the country. One in every 236 Cambodians has lost a limb to land mines, giving the country the grisly distinction of having the highest rate of disability in the world. 80,000 Cambodians have been killed or injured by mines and there are hundreds more casualties every month. Almost half of the fertile agricultural land is unsafe. The worst, but by no means the only, faction to deliberately target
the civilian population with mines were the Khmer Rouge. Mines were also
laid by the Vietnamese and Sihanoukists among others. Armies were well
supplied with mines throughout by numerous countries including the Chinese,
Soviets and Americans.
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