ABSTRACT
Civil war in Cambodia involved four different Khmer factions and each one had an outside sponsor state. During French colonial rule, Cambodia was a relatively peaceful area. The majority of its population was ethnic Khmers and Buddhism was the most dominant religion. Cambodia became independent in 1953, as a result of the French defeat in the First Indochina War. King Norodom Sihanouk, who according to Hampson and Zartman was a mercurial figure, immediately assumed a foreign policy of neutrality. The new regime immediately started applying severe policies of mass deportations of people from urban areas into agricultural labor camps in the northwestern part of the country, eventually doubling the population of that area. The irreconcilable positions of various Cambodian actors cannot be properly understood without a careful assessment of diverging interests and standpoints of major international and regional powers.
