The Khmer Rouge captures the capital Phnom Penh and Cambodian government forces surrender.

Prince Sihanouk, facing internal struggles of his own, due to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, did not want Cambodia to be involved in the conflict.

Sihanouk called these insurgents the Khmer Rouge, literally the " Red Khmer.

The relationship between the massive carpet bombing of Cambodia by the United States and the growth of the Khmer Rouge, in terms of recruitment and popular support, has been a matter of interest to historians.

Some historians have cited the U. S. intervention and bombing campaign ( spanning 1965 – 1973 ) as a significant factor leading to increased support of the Khmer Rouge among the Cambodian peasantry.

Craig Etcheson agreed that it was " untenable " to assert that US intervention caused the Khmer Rouge victory while acknowledging that it may have played a small role in boosting recruitment for the insurgents.

" When Congress, in the summer of 1973, legislated an end to U. S. military action in, over, or off the shores of Indochina, the only U. S. military activity then going on was air support of a friendly Cambodian government and army desperately defending their country against a North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge onslaught ... What destabilized Cambodia was North Vietnam's occupation of chunks of Cambodian territory from 1965 onwards for use as military bases from which to launch attacks on U. S. and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.

The Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia, launched at the request of the Khmer Rouge, has also been cited as a major factor in their eventual victory, including by Shawcross.

China " armed and trained " the Khmer Rouge during the civil war and continued to aid them years afterward.

Former businessmen and bureaucrats were hunted down and killed along with their entire families ; the Khmer Rouge feared that they held beliefs that could lead them to oppose their regime.

A few Khmer Rouge loyalists were even killed for failing to find enough ' counter-revolutionaries ' to execute.

Modern research has located 20, 000 mass graves from the Khmer Rouge era all over Cambodia.

Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge forces retreated rapidly to the Thai border.

The Khmer Rouge and the PRK began a costly struggle that played into the hands of the larger powers China, the United States and the Soviet Union.

Over 4 million Cambodians ( about 90 % of eligible voters ) participated in the May 1993 elections, although the Khmer Rouge or Party of Democratic Kampuchea ( PDK ), whose forces were never actually disarmed or demobilized, barred some people from participating.

On October 4, 2004, the Cambodian National Assembly ratified an agreement with the United Nations on the establishment of a tribunal to try senior leaders responsible for the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge.

The tribunal started trials of senior Khmer Rouge leaders in 2008.

Cambodia is also recovering from the land mines which were used heavily by the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese ; it will take approximately a decade to remove most of the land mines from Cambodia.

* Khmer Rouge

* Selective Mortality During the Khmer Rouge Period in Cambodia

* Crossroads in Cambodia: The United Nation ´ s responsibility to withdrawn involvement from the establishment of a Cambodian Tribunal to prosecute the Khmer Rouge

By 1975 when the Khmer Rouge took power, it was estimated at 7. 3 million.

For instance, in 1976, the New York Times published 66 articles on alleged human rights abuses in Chile and only 4 on Cambodia, where the communist Khmer Rouge killed some 1. 5 million people of 7. 5 million people in the country.

This usually occurred when towns and villages were under Khmer Rouge control, and food was strictly rationed, leading to widespread starvation.

Among these languages, only Khmer, Vietnamese, and Mon have a long-established recorded history, and only Vietnamese and Khmer have official status ( in Vietnam and Cambodia, respectively ).

* Khmer New Year in Cambodia – April 13

** Khmer New Year, or Chol Chnam Thmey, most commonly celebrated on April 13 ( Cambodia )

Khmer (, ; or more formally,, ), or Cambodian, is the language of the Khmer people and the official language of Cambodia.

Khmer is spoken by approximately 12. 6 million people in Cambodia where it is the official language.

The conquests of Cambodia by Naresuan the Great for Ayutthaya furthered the political and economic isolation from Cambodia proper leading to a dialect that developed relatively independently from the midpoint of the Middle Khmer period.

Western Khmer, also called Cardamom Khmer or Chanthaburi Khmer, spoken by a very small, isolated population in the Cardamom mountain range extending from western Cambodia into eastern Central Thailand, although little studied, is unique in that it maintains a definite system of vocal register that has all but disappeared in other dialects of modern Khmer.

In the first millennium AD, an urban tradition developed in the Khmer region of Cambodia, where Angkor grew into one of the largest cities ( in area ) of the world.

The immense influence on the identity of Cambodia to come was wrought by the Khmer Kingdom of Bhavapura, in the modern day Cambodian city of Kompong Thom.

The golden age of Khmer civilization, however, was the period from the 9th to the 13th centuries, when Khmer Empire, which gave Kampuchea, or Cambodia, its name, ruled large territories from its capital in the region of Angkor in western Cambodia.

This measure taken by the short-lived governmental authority would be popular and long-lasting, for since then no government in Cambodia has tried to romanize the Khmer language again.

It was composed of Khmer Communists who had remained in Vietnam after 1975 and officials from the eastern sector — like Heng Samrin and Hun Sen — who had fled to Vietnam from Cambodia in 1978.

These form thirteen established families ( plus perhaps Shompen, which is poorly attested, as a fourteenth ), which have traditionally been grouped into two, as Mon – Khmer and Munda.

It is also the earliest recorded and earliest written language of the Mon – Khmer family, predating Mon and by a significant margin Vietnamese.

Khmer is primarily an isolating language.

The Khmer language is written with an abugida known in Khmer as អក ្ សរខ ្ ម ែ រ ().

Khmer differs from neighboring languages such as Thai, Lao and Vietnamese in that it is not a tonal language.

Khmer is a member of the Austro-Asiatic language family, the most archaic family in an area that stretches from the Malay Peninsula through Southeast Asia to East India.

Standard Cambodian Khmer is mutually intelligible with the others but a Khmer Krom speaker from Vietnam, for instance, may have great difficulty communicating with a Khmer native to Sisaket Province in Thailand.

The following is a classification scheme showing the development of the modern Khmer dialects.

Standard Khmer, or Central Khmer, the language as taught in schools and used by the media is based on the Battambang dialect spoken throughout the plains of the northwest and central provinces.

Additionally, syllable-final, which has become silent in other dialects of Khmer, is still pronounced in Northern Khmer.

Phnom Penh Khmer is spoken in the capital and surrounding areas.

Khmer Krom or Southern Khmer is spoken by the indigenous Khmer population of the Mekong Delta, formerly controlled by the Khmer Empire but part of Vietnam since 1698.