ABSTRACT
On April 17, 1975, Cambodia emerged from five years of invasion, bombardment, and civil war when its capital, Phnom Penh, fell to the guerrilla armies known as the Khmer Rouge or Red Khmer, which had been besieging it since the beginning of the year. The city's population included over one million refugees, driven from their homes in rural areas. During the course of the civil war, perhaps as many as half a million Cambodians had been killed. People in the cities, without knowing much about the Red Khmer, presumed that peace would be better than war and that Cambodians, working together, could reconstruct their country.
