Talk:1970 Cambodian coup d'état

Latest comment: 4 years ago by Mztourist in topic A legal take-over?

Untitled edit

Does anybody know what happened to Cheng Heng, former President of the National Assembly and (according to one timeline) nominal Head of State after the 1970 coup? He arrived in Milwaukee as a refugee May 31 1975 with 13 members of his family. I've found online mentions that he was one of those marked for death by the Khmer Rouge, and others that say he left the U.S. in 1992, and died in March of 1996. Anybody know whether he stayed in Milwaukee or Wisconsin, what he did with himself, whether he went back to Cambodia or ?, where he died? He doesn't even have a sketchy token article here right now.--Orange Mike 22:55, 9 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

This article should be renamed "Khmer Republic" edit

The title of the article really no longer matches the content. The Khmer Republic and its history deserves its own article. I would suggest renaming this article to "Khmer Republic". 70.234.193.225 03:49, 11 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

Agreed. Khmer Rep. deserves its own article here 64.72.137.241 19:25, 24 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Did neutrality end? edit

Did Cambodia's neutrality end with the 1970 coup? This should be added to the article. Badagnani (talk) 18:08, 28 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

Khmer edit

Who is full of ****? Lon Nol boasted about how anti-Vietnamese he was, and the anti-Khmer Rouge, anti-Communist Cambodian opposition hated the Vietnamese. Cambodian hatred of Vietnamese stretches back to when Vietnam took the Mekong Delta from Cambodia. This doesn't have a damn thing to do with the Khmer Rouge. Both Lon Nol and Khmer Rouge wanted to reconquer the Mekong Delta. The FULRO insurgents fought against bot South Vietnam and the Vietnamese Communists. It has to do with anti-Vietnamese sentiment by Cambodians and nothing to do with Communist or anti-Communism. This isn't controversial and not disputed. The part about the Khmer Rouge was specifically them dumping bodies into the Mekong in the 1990s during their insurgency which was reminiscent of Lon Nol's actions. Not about what happened during Khmer Rouge rule which was unprecedented.Rajmaan (talk) 01:30, 26 August 2016 (UTC)Reply

There is plenty of evidence of the rabidly nationalist (and particularly anti-Vietnamese) nature of Lon Nol's regime, as there is of rabidly anti-Vietnamese rhetoric under Sihanouk's Sangkum and under the (mis)rule of the CPK. All these organisations had drunk at the same well, so to speak. So you should easily be able to find several references both to this and the massacres of Vietnamese residents in 1970 (the petit frere Lon Non is particularly implicated in these events). However I'm not sure that the Khmer Rouge can be said to have 'imitated' these massacres or whether such a comparison is particularly illuminating given that the xenophobic nature of both regimes is well known. The most one can say is that both regimes, at various points, killed residents of 'foreign' origin as they were both inheritors of a long tradition of xenophobia and concern about domination by Vietnam.
On the other hand I agree that dismissing Kiernan as an apologist is astoundingly unhelpful. He has done a lot of work to increase understanding of why the KR regime became what it did.Svejk74 (talk) 20:56, 30 August 2016 (UTC)Reply
I already have another source available on the slaughter of Vietnamese after Lon Nol's coup.[1][2]Rajmaan (talk) 05:20, 31 August 2016 (UTC)Reply

References

  1. ^ Colin Mackerras (2 September 2003). Ethnicity in Asia. Routledge. pp. 197–. ISBN 1-134-51516-2.
  2. ^ Christopher R. Duncan (2004). Civilizing the Margins: Southeast Asian Government Policies for the Development of Minorities. Cornell University Press. pp. 247–. ISBN 0-8014-4175-7.

A legal take-over? edit

The coup is described as a legal take-over that "followed essentially constitutional forms". Is this really true?

Perhaps the Article 122 gave the National Assembly authority to withdraw confidence in the president, but from there to Lon-Nol & co's take-over there are several steps.

  • Was Lon-nol & co elected?
  • Was the Khmer Republic really a legal government for Cambodia?

Either way this issue needs to be addressed, as it affects the article greatly. RhinoMind (talk) 01:17, 17 August 2017 (UTC)Reply

I am also confused by what happened and how its described. WP defines a coup as "overthrow of an existing government; typically, this refers to an illegal, unconstitutional seizure of power by a dictator, the military, or a political faction", here it seems that constitutional steps were followed to withdraw confidence in Sihanouk and install Lon Nol, so that doesn't meet the definition. However we are probably bound by the reporting of the event which all refers to this as a coup. Mztourist (talk) 03:21, 2 October 2019 (UTC)Reply