Samlaut Uprising

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The Samlaut uprising, also called the Samlaut rebellion or Battambang revolts, consisted of two significant phases of revolt that first broke out near Samlaut in Battambang Province and subsequently spread into surrounding provinces of Cambodia in 1967-1968. The movement was largely made up of dissident rural peasantry led by a group of discontented leftist intellectuals against Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s political organization, the Sangkum regime.

The rebellion first erupted in early 1967 in the Samlaut subdistrict when hundreds of frustrated peasants, fed up with government policies, mistreatment by local military, land displacement, and other poor socio-economic conditions. They then revolted against the government, killing two soldiers on the morning of April 2.^[1] In the following weeks, the revolt expanded with more destruction of government property and personnel.

By June 1967, 4,000 or more villagers had fled their homes in southern Battambang Province into the maquis (forest) to join the growing group of rebels and escape the military troops sent by Sihanouk.^[2] In early 1968, Cambodia experienced a more organized second uprising that expanded both geographically and politically through months of re-grouping, recruitment and propaganda processes, and was much more widespread and destructive than the first.^[2]

Some academics such as Ben Kiernan and Donald Kirk, see the Samlaut rebellion as the beginnings of the Cambodian revolutionary movement (the Cambodian Civil War) that eventually led to the victory of the Khmer Rouge and the establishment of Democratic Kampuchea.

Kiernan says that the rebellion was the “baptism of fire for the small but steadily growing Cambodian revolutionary movement”^[2] and Kirk mentions that it was “a prelude, in a microcosm, of the conflict that would sweep across the country three years later.”^[3]