ABC News reporter Jim Laurie went to Cambodia soon after Vietnam’s invasion to see what remained of the Cambodian society after three years of Khmer Rouge’s rule. 

VIETNAM INVADES CAMBODIA

by  PHI-VÂN NGUYEN

December 2019

The Consultation meeting in Geneva made significant progress. It established the multilateral nature of the refugee crisis. And it found the next course of action. But as soon as one crisis improved, the other one worsened significantly. At the global level, the Communist world had split into two camps. Yet the division also showed within Southeast Asia. On December 25, 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia, marking the beginning of the Third Indochina War. The two countries shared a long past together. Both communist parties originated in the Indochinese Communist Party created in 1931. Why did the two countries come to fight each other? Vietnam and Cambodia did not envision revolution in the same terms. The Khmer Rouge launched radical reforms, whereas Vietnam planned to build on its military success. Hanoi believed that the chaos generated by the Khmer Rouge would destabilize Vietnam. It invaded  Cambodia to eliminate this threat. 

The End of Indochinese Communist Fraternity

Relationships between Vietnam and Cambodia have been conflictual from times immemorial. The Vietnamese empire annexed territories belonging to the declining Khmer empires. Racial policies under French colonial rule contributed to the emergence of separate national consciousnesses.1 Yet the confrontation between Vietnam and Cambodia was not inevitable. It was neither rooted in millennial hostility nor based in cultural difference. Different leaderships set the two Communist parties into a collision course. 

Much to it had to do with the political background of their leaders. Pol Pot, also known as Brother number one in the Cambodian Communist Party, was part of a new generation of Khmer communists. He did not fight alongside Vietnamese and Laotian communists in the Indochinese Communist Party. Pol Pot came from an urban background and studied in Paris. His greatest sources of inspiration were not Lenin or Rosa Luxembourg. He was inspired by Tito’s independence from the Soviet Union. He  focused on rural revolution and glorified national independence.2 In 1965, Pol Pot met Mao Zedong, who would become a model. Maoism strongly shaped his ambition to carry out a utopian rural revolution. This inspired the Khmer Rouge to put the entire peasant population to work in order to make the leap to industrialization. Hence the Khmer Rouge emptied the cities and set productivity targets. This utopian vision also had implications on the regime’s relationship with Vietnam.

These different sources of inspiration did not provoke an irreparable rupture. It was the Communist reaction to the Lon Nol coup in 1970, which drove the two apart. Who would respond to the American and South Vietnamese attacks on Cambodia territory? Should Khmer communists carry this fight or should Vietnamese assume this responsibility?3 Vietnamese considered it was their fight. The Khmer Rouge, however, did not agree. Communist or not, they did not want yet another invasion of Vietnamese troops into their territory. Their attacks to Vietnamese munitions depots signaled the end of Indochinese Communist solidarity.

After their respective victories in April 1975, the relationships were still tense. Vietnamese knew that the Khmer Rouge mobilized their base against all forms of Vietnamese presence. Within the first year in power, Angkar openly declared that Vietnam was a black dragon spitting its venom. Later, it exhorted each Cambodian to kill thirty Vietnamese. This would allow two million Cambodians to get rid of sixty million Vietnamese.4 

This anti-Vietnamese propaganda was worrying because it did not stop at the Cambodian border. The Khmer Rouge made several incursions into the Vietnamese part of the Mekong Delta. Villagers were massacred and inscriptions “this is our land” left no doubt. The Khmer Rouge wanted to restore the lost Khmer empire.5 For Hanoi, the Khmer Rouge’s aggressiveness was threatening Vietnam’s security. Eventually, they would be a confrontation with its neighbour.

AP Press archives show images of Cambodia after the Vietnamese invasion.

Vietnamese Intervention and the Discovery of the Khmer Genocide

When the Vietnamese army finally invaded in December 1978, a few days of fighting quickly showed that Vietnam would succeed. Once arriving in Phnom Penh, the city was almost empty. Nayan Chanda, the  reporter remaining in the Indochinese peninsula after the Vietnamese Communist victory, gave a vivid depiction of the entrance in Phnom Penh. Unlike their arrival in Saigon in April 1975, there was no one to surrender. The urban population had evacuated years ago. There was nothing but the smell of decomposing fish.6 Khmer Rouge officials and Chinese ambassadors fled at the very last minute. They went into hiding and reached Thailand, from where they could easily return to China.7 In early January, the Vietnamese installed a new government, the People’s Republic of Kampuchea. Hun Sen, its leader, was a former Khmer Rouge who had crossed over to the Vietnamese side. The Vietnamese declared that it had no choice. They had to install a new government to provide relief to a dying population.

Historians doubt the idea that ending the genocide was the only motive for invasion. The Vietnamese Communist Party had been aware of Khmer Rouge atrocities long before December 1978.8 While nobody knew for sure the magnitude of the genocide, many suspected that the Khmer Rouge conducted arbitrary killings. The press, the White House, and members of the Congress brought up the issue several times.9 Refugees sheltered in Thailand and Vietnam told the press about Khmer Rouge atrocities.10 Even the UNHCR and the World Food Programme gathered important details while interviewing refugees in early 1978.11 Despite that, the Western world and the international community remained passive even after discovering the genocide.12 

The key reason the Vietnamese intervened was strategic. The Vietnamese Communist Party decided to invade Cambodia as early as January 1978.13 Vietnam needed stability to recontruct a country ravaged by decades of armed conflict. The anarchy brought by the Khmer Rouge was a threat to this much needed peace. Since negotiations did not prove successful, a military intervention was the only option. It was necessary however, to obtain two confirmations before taking action. A last attempt to normalize the relationships with the United States was useful. It could give the impression that Washington’s refusal had contributed to Hanoi’s rapprochement with the Soviet Union. Moscow’s support proved an absolute necessity. It would apply external pressure on China, in case Bejing would retaliate against Vietnam.

A Defeat on the Ground, A New Offensive at the Diplomatic Level

The Khmer Rouge lost the capital. But they survived along the Thai border and on the international stage for years. The only reason behind this survival is the unbreakable support of key allies over the years. China was most vocal in the early months after their military defeat to defend them.14 The United States, before their overthrow, had criticized the Khmer Rouge’s infringements on human rights.15 Yet the need to denounce Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia and Soviet expansionism became more important.16 Under Carter, Washington agreed to let China help the Khmer Rouge, and contributed over 12 million dollars to the World Food Programme, whose aid went to the Khmer Rouge hiding in refugee camps. Reagan created a more direct lifeline, providing between $80 to $86 million to the Khmer Rouge.17 After 1986, the United Kingdom took over and provided both funding and training to the insurgents.18

Scholars and intellectuals in the West also contributed to the Khmer Rouge’s endurance. Some minimized the Khmer Rouge’s exactions. Others considered that Western concern for atrocities was another form of imperialism.19 Criticism of the Soviet Union grew. Jews in the United States mobilized for their co-religionists in the Soviet Union.20 And French left-wing intellectuals turned their back on Moscow with the discovery of gulags and internal repression.21 So the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities were real. Yet Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia was just as reprehensible in the eyes of the international community. 

The Third Indochina War was thus a peculiar war. The Khmer Rouge could not stand a chance against its neighbour. Yet the support they received from the West allowed them to turn their defeat into an attack against Vietnam. 

WHAT’S NEXT

Return to the Timeline

Jump to a list of links and references for further reading

References

  1. On these policies in French Indochina, see Goscha, Christopher E. Going Indochinese, Contesting Concepts of Space and Place in French Indochina. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2012.
  2. Kiernan, Ben. How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930–1975. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
  3. On this see Goscha, Christopher E. “Vietnam, the Third Indochina War and the Meltdown of Asian Internationalism,” In The Third Indochina War, Conflict Between China, Vietnam, and Cambodia, 1972–1979, edited by Odd Arne Westad, and Sophie Quinn-Judge, 152–86. London: Routledge, 2006.
  4. See Kiernan, Ben. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008 [1996], p. 393.
  5. Chanda, Nayan. “Vietnam’s Invasion of Cambodia, Revisited.” The Diplomat (2018).
  6. Ibid..
  7. See Chanda’s groundbreaking study on a conflict that was at the time almost unknown, Chanda, Nayan. Brother Enemy: The War After the War. New York: Harcourt Publishing, 1986.
  8. See Goscha, quoted above. It seems that the economic crisis, compounded with diplomatic isolation of Vietnam, led Hanoi authorities to realize as early as January 1978 that they would have to invade Cambodia to protect their own revolution,Path, Kosal. Vietnam’s Strategic Thinking during the Third Indochina War. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020, p. 55.
  9. Clymer, Kenton. “Jimmy Carter, Human Rights, and Cambodia.” Diplomatic History 27, no. 2 (2003): 245–78.
  10. Kiernan, Ben. “Le communisme racial des Khmers rouges: Un génocide et son négationnisme: le cas du Cambodge.” Esprit 252, no. 5 (1999): 93–127.
  11. See the article in the Journal of X studies.
  12. See Kiernan’s article in Esprit, quoted above.
  13. See Marangé, Kiernan, cited above.
  14. See Goscha, quoted above, and the minutes of Kurt Waldheim’s meeting in Bangkok in May 1979, https://boatpeoplehistory.com/archives-3/kd/kurt-waldheims-visit-to-thailand/
  15. FRUS 1977–1980 Volume XIII China. “Memorandum of Conversation, Beijing, 21 May 1978,” p. 420.
  16. Clymer, Kenton. “Jimmy Carter, Human Rights, and Cambodia.” Diplomatic History 27, no. 2 (2003): 245–78.
  17. Pilger, John. “The Long Secret Alliance: Uncle Sam and Pol Pot.” Covert Action Quarterly 62 (1997): 5–9.
  18. Pilger, John. “How Thatcher Gave Pol Pot a Hand.” The Newstatesman, 17 April 2000.
  19. Beachler, Donald. “How the West Missed the Horrors of Cambodia.” The Daily Beast (2017): Accessed 17 December 2019, https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-west-missed-the-horrors-of-cambodia?ref=scroll. The most famous case was Noam Chomsky, Chomsky, Noam, and Edward S. Herman. After The Cataclysm, Postwar Indochina & The Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume II. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1979. This denial continues to this day, see Kiernan’s Esprit article quoted above. For an analysis of French intellectuals' lack of engagement with the issue, such as Jean Lacouture, Lionel Jospin, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Jacques Vergès ou Bernard-Henri Lévy, see Dauzat, Pierre-Emmanuel. “L’aveuglement Des Intellectuals Face Au Génocide Khmer Rouge.” L’Express (2012): Accessed 17 December 2019, https://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/l-aveuglement-des-intellectuels-face-au-genocide-khmer-rouge_1069522.html, and Hourmant, François. Le Désenchantement des clercs, Figures de l’intellectuel dans l’après-Mai 68. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1997.
  20. Bon Tempo, Carl. Americans At the Gate, the United States and Refugees During the Cold War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
  21. Soljenitsyne, Alexandre. L’archipel Du Goulag, 1918–1956, Essai D’investigation Littéraire. Paris: Seuil, 1974.