Southeast Asia Cold War in Southeast Asia U

Southeast Asia

Cold War in Southeast Asia • U. S. supported independence of colonial people. • U. S. feared the spread of communism • Southeast Asian countries lack experience in selfgovernment

Let’s take a closer look at the War! http: //www. youtube. c om/watch? v=r 0 t. YBemwzs

• First Battle Vietnam Two Battles • 1946 -1954 Ho Chi Minh, Vietnamese communist, resist the Japanese invasion. • Controlled Northern Vietnam • French tried to maintain control of Indochina (peninsula of SEAsia) • With peasant support and guerrilla fighters he forced the French out.

Ho Chi Minh Viet Cong

A Divided Vietnam • • • Struggle in Cold War 1954 conference in Geneva, Switzerland, western and communist powers agreed to a temporary division of Vietnam North Vietnam= Communist South Vietnam= noncommunist, led by Ngo Dinh Diem Cambodia and Laos became independent

South Vietnam Ngo Dinh Diem

Reunite Vietnam • 1956 agreement called for elections to reunite Vietnam. • Domino Theory: U. S. was afraid that if election were held that south Vietnam would fall to communism that would sweep across Asia. • U. S. sent military to help Diem

American Involvement Second Battle 1959 -1975 • Ho Chi Minh wanted to unite Vietnam under communist rule. • He supported the Viet Cong, communist rebels in the South who are trying to overthrow Diem. • U. S. President Kennedy and Johnson sent 500, 000 American troops by 1969. • Soviet Union and China only sent aid no troops

Ho Chi Minh Trail

• South could not defeat the north • President Nixon arranged for a cease -fire • 1973 U. S. troops start to withdraw • Two years later Vietnam reunited under communist rule.

What effects of the Vietnam war can still be seen today, even in America?

Cambodia • North Vietnam sent the Viet Cong supplies through Cambodia. • U. S. bombed that route and invaded Cambodia. • The communist guerrillas in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, overthrew the government.

Pol Pot • Leader of the Khmer Rouge • Led a reign of terror • The name Khmer Rouge, which means "Red Khmers, " was given to a left-wing Cambodian group in the 1950 s. Led by Pol Pot, it gained control of Cambodia in 1975. And then began one of the century's greatest massacres. • In 1979 Vietnam invaded and Pol Pot retreated. • 1993 UN peace keepers supervised elections.

• The enormity of what Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge party did in the latter half of the 1970 s can be defined as a genocide. The death toll: certainly more than a million, perhaps twice that amount. Among the first evidence of the horror, this "killing field" was uncovered in 1980.

• Massacres took place in this Phnom Penh high school which turned into its headquarters, renamed S-21. Thousands were tortured and executed in former classrooms.

• Pol Pot declared "Year Zero" and began a radical program to create an idealized agrarian communist society. He crushed social institutions such as banking and religion and emptied cities of their inhabitants. • Intellectuals and anyone else seen as standing in the way of the new social order were mercilessly killed, while many of those who escaped execution died from overwork and starvation.

• The Khmer Rouge was ousted from power by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979. But it had already caused the deaths of between 1. 5 million and 2 million people, according to Western estimates. "To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss. "

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