Brother Enemy – the War after the War
A History of Indochina Since the Fall of Saigon
By Nayan Chanda
(MacMillan Publishing Co., New York, 1986)
Excerpts from Chapter 7 (Calm Before the Storm)
Hanoi Plans for Cambodia
Every winter since the reunification of the country in 1975, top Vietnamese leaders would leave the cold and mist of Hanoi to travel to the sunny South... Those visits also offered them a holiday in hospitable climes. But 1978 was different... By the end of January 1978 the members of the Vietnamese Politburo had quietly assembled in Ho Chi Minh City for what turned out to be a momentous series of meetings... The Khmer Rouge decision to break relations had shocked the Vietnamese...
The Politburo's leaders met in total secrecy and assessed the result of their December (1977) invasion. They had badly mauled the Khmer Rouge, but there was no evidence that their victory had had any repercussions for Pol Pot's leadership... But the Vietnamese had succeeded in bringing back with them nearly sixty thousand Khmers. Since 1975 some three hundred thousand Khmers, Vietnamese, and Chinese refugees had escaped to Vietnam from Cambodia. Hanoi had kept quiet about it. But now the army-assisted exodus was presented to the world as additional evidence of people fleeing Pol Pot's Cambodia...
In March 1978 I visited a refugee cam--Ben Sanh--for newly-arrived Khmers in Vietnam's Tay Ninh Province. The "camp" was a dusty and barren stretch of land with a cluster of makeshift bamboo and straw-roofed huts. From my unmonitored conversations with the Cambodians there, it was clear that they were a different kind of refugee. And Vietnam had something different in mind that humanitarian concern in giving them asylum. "Would you go back to Cambodia?" I asked a young teacher presented by the Vietnamese to talk to the press about the atrocities in Cambodia. "Yes, when the whole country is liberated, " she answered in halting French. Liberated by whom? To the obvious discomfort of the Vietnamese officials she said, "Why, the Vietnamese army." She had perhaps been asked not to mention the formation of a Khmer resistance army in Vietnam. Other Khmers in the camp, however, privately told me of the recruitment of some two thousand men and women from the Ben Sanh camp to fight against Pol Pot in Cambodia. So while the UNHCR began a program of feeding the residents of the camp, the Vietnamese army took charge of the able-bodied Khmers...
In late January 1978, General Grigoriyevich Pavlovskiy, commander in chief of the Soviet ground forces, arrived in neighboring Laos...for a "friendly visit". Vietnamese minister of defense General Vo Nguyen Giap flew to Vieng Say in northern Laos for an unpublicized meeting with the Soviet general to review the Cambodian situation. Pavlovskiy's advice, a Vietnamese official told me years later, was: "Do a Czechoslovakia." The Chinese were powerless to come to the aid of their Khmer friends, the general argued, so the Vietnamese should simply drive their armored columns to Phnom Penh and remove Pol Pot from power the way the Soviet army removed Alexander Dubcek in Prague in 1968. Giap balked at the suggestion. The Vietnamese, he reportedly said, would solve the problem in "their own appropriate way" [long-term occupation through puppetry, a Khmer front, more palatable than outright Vietnamese-military-face invasion].
[ to be continued ]
2 comments:
Vietnam has always been able to recruit and trained many Cambodians to work for their interests at cost of Cambodian territorial integrity for many years and this strategy is still working very well, thank to the propensity of the Cambodians to obtain power and wealth for themselves and their groups withount any much regard to the wellbeing of their country.
It has always been one group going to the Viets and the others going to the Thais and they ended up fighting among themselves with the two bigger neighbours urging them on.
Are we genetically prone to disunity and self-serving or are we just simply stupid and can never truly work for our own people and country?
Anet Khmer
Vietnam has always been able to recruit and train many Cambodians to work for their interests at the cost of Cambodian territorial integrity for many years and this strategy is still working very well, thank to the propensity of the Cambodians to obtain power and wealth for themselves and their groups without any much regard to the wellbeing of their country and people.
It has always been one group going to the Viets and the other going to the Thais and they ended up fighting among themselves with the two bigger neighbours urging them on and supplying them with training and deadly weapons.
Are we genetically prone to disunity and self-serving or are we just simply stupid and can never truly work for our own people and country?
Anet Khmer
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