Cambodia is a tropical country roughly the size of Oklahoma located in Southeast Asia. It is bordered to the northwest by Thailand, to the north by Laos, to the east by Vietnam, and to the south by the Gulf of Thailand. The capital city Phnom Penh has around two million residents. Other major cities within Cambodia are Kompong Som, Kompot, Kompong Cham, Battambang, and Siem Reap. In 1975 a hardline communist regime supported by China staged a coup, evicting a constitutional monarchy destabilized by the US war in neighboring Vietnam. For the next four years they instituted an extreme social engineering under the brutal dictator Pol Pot, murdering all educated or foreign residents and exiling all citizens to labor camps in the countryside, where many starved. Four years later, after perhaps one third of the population had been killed, Vietnam invaded beginning a civil war which lasted almost fifteen years. In 1993 the United Nations helped establish an independent parliamentary representative democracy government in Cambodia. Since then the country has gradually been rebuilt, with per capita CDP rising from $280 in 1998 to $501 in 2006. |
