Cambodian Refugees

During the later years of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the American and South Vietnamese military sought to cut off community military supply routs which moved along the so-called Ho Chi Min Trail through the forests of eastern Cambodia, a country which at that time proclaimed itself to be politically "neutral." Cambodia, however, was ineffective in defending its military neutrality, and the U.S. and Vietnam supported the creation of an unpopular, anti-communist military regime in Cambodia. When American involvement in Southeast Asia waned and, in 1975, collapsed, a communist force influenced by the teachings of Mao Tse Tung called the Khmer Rouge swept through the country and seized its government. Some 34,000 supporters of the old regime fled to the safety of Thailand at that time. Most of them were resettled in third countries such as the U.S. and France where many of them had personal ties.

The Khmer Rouge then imposed what became popularly known as the "killing fields," in which unspeakable brutality was carried out by the insurgents and their supporters against the Cambodian population. Their purpose was the restructuring of Cambodian society, and they intended to destroy all of the features that characterized Khmer life and culture prior to their ascendancy. Through the most drastic of measures, the Khmer Rouge intended to create a supremely egalitarian agrarian society patterned after the most radical strains of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In the process, through starvation, disease, and murder, they killed between one and three million Cambodians — or approximately one-eighth of the total population — between 1975 and 1979. So pervasive was their rule during those years that few Cambodians were able to escape.

In 1978 and 1979, after a series of minor conflicts and skirmishes, the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and quickly captured the capital city of Phnom Penh, forcing the Khmer Rouge into the hinterlands, where they continued to wage guerilla warfare for several years. In the midst of the general confusion, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians moved westward toward the Thai border and into Thailand. In 1979, an international response led to the opening of several refugee camps within Thailand for some 160,000 refugees; another 350,000 lived in Thailand outside of the camps, and some 100,000 fled to Vietnam, where the UNHCR provided them with assistance. Between 1978 and 1993, Cambodian refugees from the UNHCR camps were admitted to the US, Australia, France, Canada, and several other countries. The US admissions program for Cambodians largely concluded in 1985, and only small numbers have entered the country since then.

Where do they live?: At present, approximately 206,000 people of Cambodian descent live in the U.S. The largest communities of Cambodian refugees are located in Long Beach, California, and in Lowell, Massachusetts. Sizeable communities also exist in Washington and several other states.