History
In 1953 the French protectorate of Cambodia was granted full independence by France, allowing the young King Norodom Sihanouk to lead the government of the first post-colonial state in French-ruled Indochina. Under the terms of the Geneva Accords signed the following year which ended the Indochina War, French Army and Vietnamese Vietminh guerrilla units still operating in Cambodia were obliged to withdraw from its territory and that a new defense force was to be raised. Trained by the French and equipped by the United States since September 1950, the armed forces of the new Kingdom of Cambodia (FARK) were formed mainly by Khmer regular soldiers recently transferred from French colonial units, though ex-Vietminh and former Khmer Issarak guerrillas of Khmer origin were also allowed to join.
Most of the senior members of the Officer corps had been officials in the colonial regime. Lon Nol, for example, served as Commander of the Cambodian Police under the French protectorate. In 1955 Gen. Lon was promoted to Chief-of-Staff of the FARK, and in 1960 was appointed Minister of Defense. Meanwhile, Cambodia was admitted as a protocol state member of the US-sponsored SEATO alliance and under his command the FARK became a bastion of American influence on the Sihanouk regime, particularly because US military aid constituted 30% of the armed forces’ budget until August 1964, when it was renounced by the Cambodian government. Following his faction's seizure of a large number of seats of the ruling Sangkum party’s representation at the National Assembly in the 1966 general elections, Gen. Lon was elected Prime-Minister, thereby locking the state institutions under the firm grip of the military, just as Sihanouk had feared. However, he resigned from the post in 1967 after a car accident, only to return two years later when the monarch mounted a renewed purge against leftist dissidents.
As a representative of the conservative Khmer who had supported the French rule, Lon Nol never accepted Sihanouk's neutralist policy of non-alignment. Though the Prince's sporadic purges of leftist movements would quench Lon's wrath at the growing communist insurgency, what truly worried him was Sihanouk's covert deals with North Vietnam and the Viet Cong, which allowed them to establish base-camps on the Cambodian side of the border with South Vietnam and built a massive supply infrastructure. Lon also knew that Sihanouk's balancing appeasement of the US from 1968 onwards by allowing B-52 aerial bombings and ‘hot pursuit’ cross-border raids against NVA/VC base areas within Cambodia would be ineffective in stopping the wider, home-grown insurgency. One of the measures he was able to undertake was the build-up of a strong anti-communist faction within the FARK’s officer corps that would back him should Sihanouk shift again towards the left.
Read more about this topic: Khmer National Armed Forces
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