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CAMBODIA AFTER THE KHMER ROUGE: INSIDE THE POLITICS OF NATION BUILDING by Evan Gottesman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003)
The internal politics of Cambodia in the period from the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime by the Vietnamese army in 1979 to the arrival of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) in 1993 has been neglected by scholars. Evan Gottesman's excellent study fills this gap. He has had access to thousands of government documents in Phnom Penh, and has been able to write the story of the PRK from the inside. For those who knew the country in this period, this will not alter the broad picture. But it does flesh out the details, and definitively resolves many disputed issues about this period.
One is the role of the Vietnamese advisors to the PRK. They picked the "core group" of Cambodian communists who built the PRK, and guided their policy decisions in the early years. But the PRK leaders were not the servile "puppets" their opponents alleged. True, their relationship to the Vietnamese was initially one of heavy dependence. But as the PRK leaders gained experience and built their own power bases, they became increasingly assertive. Le Due Tho was in charge of the advisers until 1981. Not only the Cambodian leaders, but many of the Vietnamese advisors, regarded him as arrogant, and his role was increasingly resented. His successor, Tran Xuan Bach, was much more accommodating and is remembered more...