Historical Context for Vietnamization of Cambodia (e.g. Viettel/Metfone; Hun Sen's rise to power)

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 10 (A Red Christmas)

A Backdoor Entry for the Front

An interesting glimpse of the behind-the-scenes Vietnamese preparation for launching the Cambodian front was given by Dinh Can, a former officer of the South Vietnamese army engineering corps.  Can got off rather “lightly” from the reeducation camp for old-regime officers run by Hanoi… His suspicion that the Vietnamese were planning something in Cambodia had grown since the summer of 1978 when orders had come for urgent repair on routes leading to Cambodia.  Since October, Vietnam.  Theese units had actually occupied stretches of Cambodian territory along the border.  In mid-November the Vietnamese army had launched a big operation in Cambodia’s Kratie Province along Route 13.  The bloody battled had ended with near decimation of a Khmer Rouge division and had secured the area for use as a “liberated zone”.  But its intended purpose was not clear to Can of red dust at his work headquarters near the border.  To his surprise, the visitors were none other than Le Duc Tho and General Dong Van Cong, deputy commander of the Seventh Military Region.  They had come to supervise the launching of the Cambodian resistance organization and the installation of a forward headquarters for the Vietnamese army.

The site chosen for unveiling the newest Cambodian liberation front—the Kampuchean National United Front for the National Salvation (KNUFNS)—was two miles inside Cambodia.  It was a small clearing in the middle of a rubber plantation east of the Cambodian township of Snoul… On the morning of December 2, 1978, several thousand Khmers gathered in the bright sunshine to witness the formal launching of the KNUFNS.  Most of the assembled men and women had come in a convoy of trucks from Khmer refugee camps in Vietnam.  Several hundred front soldiers composed of deserters from Khmer Rouge divisions as well as ones trained in Vietnam also had assembled, proudly sporting their new green uniforms and caps.  A newly written national anthem was sung as dozens of newly fashioned red-and-yellow front flags fluttered in a gentle breeze.

One after another, fourteen members of the front Central Committee were given bouquets of flowers brought from Vietnam as they were introduced to the cheering crowd.  Front chairman Heng Samrin read out the KNUFNS program as those assembled shouted in approval with raised fists.  After the meeting, Heng Samrin walked up to thank Le Duc Tho, who had watched the ceremony from a distance like a proud mother hen.  “I did not think you would have done things so perfectly,” a beaming Samrin told Tho.

After the meeting, resistance army units and the front leaders set out to visit villages along the border from which Khmer Rouge units had withdrawn.  They explained to the population the eleven-point program of the front to oust Pol Pot regime and restore family life, markets, money, and religion and to put an end to the border war with Vietnam.  A radio station in Ho Chi Minh City, calling itself “Voice of the Kampuchean People,” began broadcasting the front program and reports of the struggle.  Thousands of leaflets calling for an uprising against the Pol Pot regime were dropped by Vietnamese aircraft over Cambodian provinces close to the border.

The founding of the front seemed like a rerun of an old movie.  Twenty-eight years after the Vietnamese helped to set up the first Cambodian national liberation organization—the United Issarak Front—to fight against French rule and eight years after they joined hands with the anti-U.S. National United Front of Cambodia, the Vietnamese were back again promoting another “liberation struggle” in the neighboring country.  Even the Vietnamese leader in charge of training Khmer resistance cadres was the same Le Duch Tho who helped set up the United Issarak Front and had been in charge of a special politburo office for Cambodia since 1966.  However, the enemy this time was neither French colonialism nor U.S. imperialism but Hanoi’s onetime Communist allies.

A striking symbol of the rerun to the old tradition of Cambodia-Vietnam collaboration was the new flag—five yellow towers on a red background.  This banner, originally used by the Khmer Issarak in the 1950s, was abandoned by the Pol Pot group in 1975 when Democratic Kampuchea adopted a three-towered red flag.

The symbolism was, however, lost on most Cambodians, whose principal concern was the life and death of families and friends still left under Khmer Rouge control.  It was the common hatred for the Pol Pot regime that had brought together under Vietnamese guidance the disparate collection of survivors—middle-class refugees, escapees, defectors.  Many of the assembled Khmers both on the dais and among the crowd harbored grave doubt about Vietnam’s ulterior motives, but they saw no other alternative to seeking help to fight the murderous regime that seemed to threaten the existence of Cambodia.  The fourteen Central Committee members presented at the meeting represented that uneasy coalition.  Six of them, including Chairman Heng Samrin, were former Khmer Rouge, four were pro-Hanoi Cambodian Communists (Khmer Issarak), and the other four included urban intellectuals and a monk.

While the meeting was in progress, Vietnamese regular units ringed the area and antiaircraft gunners kept a wary eye on the horizon.  After the ceremony was over, Dinh Can and his men were ordered to clear a wooded area a little more than a mile inside Cambodia’s Kratie Province to be used as the forward headquarters of the Vietnamese army.  Aluminum container boxes, which once dotted American bases in Vietnam, were brought in, thatched houses and bunkers built, electrical generators and radio equipment set up under the trees.  The headquarters, named Tien Phong, or “Vanguard,” was soon to unleash a storm on Cambodia.