[11] In May 1993, Khmer rouge guerrillas operating in Banteay Meanchey set an ambush that killed Haruyuki Takata, a Japanese policeman working for the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia.

[16] The Khmer rouge used the Cambodian general election in 1993 as a diversion to launch an offensive with both diplomatic and military implications in order to show that "it must be allowed to share power in the new government if there were to be any peace".

As government troops prepared to retaliate and take back Pailin around January 1994, the Khmer Rouge multiplied the assaults on local villages of the province of Battamband and Bavel in a campaign of intimidation.

The government took control over strategic areas and was able to open a road from Preah Vihear to Siem Reap and chase the Khmer Rouge from their stronghold in Phnom Chat on August 20, 1993.

On February 2, 1994, General Ke Kim Yan launched the assault on Anlong Veng, and faced no resistance, as the Khmer rouge guerilla went into hiding once more in the tropical forest.

The operation was bankrolled by powerful Khmer tycoons, namely Teng Bunma, Sok Kong and Kith Meng who received "lucrative states contracts and monopolies" as a reward for their support of the politics of the Cambodian People's Party.

[21] By May 1994, the status ante quo had returned, and new peace talks were initiated by King Sihanouk who hosted a first round of negotiations with Khmer Rouge leaders at his private residence in the North Korean capital city of Pyongyang on May 17, 1994, before welcoming their representatives in Phnom Penh on June 16 but the parties failed to meet an agreement on a possible ceasefire.

[22] In October 1997, Ieng Sary made his first visit to Phnom Penh since the arrival of the Vietnamese in 1979 and met with Prime Minister Hun Sen. On November 8, 1997, an official ceremony was organized celebrating the normalization of the administrative status of Pailin as a municipality of Cambodia.

At the same time, Thailand also closed its doors to the massive influx of war refugees everytime new episodes of violence erupted in Pailin, showing an ambivalent with the last remnants of the Khmer Rouge.

[24] The battle of Pailin showed the world that after already ten years of guerilla fighting against the Vietnamese occupation, Pol Pot's men were still determined to remain "a force to be reckoned with and must be included in any negotiated solution of the conflict".

[25] A 1995 report of Human Rights Watch made between March 1994 and February 1995 documented cases of "murder, rape, hostage-taking, and the use of famine as a weapon by the Khmer Rouge in their scorched earth tactics".

[15] The history of the genocide that occurred in the area is slowly being forgotten in a climate of omerta,[26] partly because most of the population of Pailin being made of ex-Khmer Rouge who benefited from the politics of agrarian cooperativism in the countryside rather than terror and torture in Phnom Penh.

In 1997, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines received the Nobel Peace Prize partly for their involvement in raising awareness of this situation in the area of Pailin and Northwest Cambodia.

[35] Finally, because of poor access to healthcare in this tropical wet forest, added to mass migration to work in the camps, Pailin was the epicentre of malaria in Cambodia and in the whole area.