Vietnam Attacked Kampuchea? Me No Think So.

by David E. McReynolds

[On the claim that Vietnam attacked "Democratic Kampuchea" and that the Khmer Rouge did not kill over one million people, David McReynolds writes...]

I started to write "this is a load of crap", which it is, but it won't change anyone's mind to say that. Let me give what history of this I can.

Of course Kissinger should be tried as a war criminal, and of course US actions in Cambodia helped lay the basis for the Khmer Rouge. King Norodom Sihanouk had been able to play one side against the other, the US, the Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge, Moscow, Beijing, etc., until the US foolishly supported or organized a coup by General Lon Nol when the King was out of the country on a trip to Beijing and Moscow. (The King had been appointed by the French in 1941, when he was 19 years old - the French thought he would be pliable, but he proved very shrewd, let the Vietnamese Communists use parts of Cambodia near the border of Vietnam and generally was able to keep Cambodia out of harm's way). The US hoped Lon Nol could clear out any Vietnamese bases along the border, but it was a disastrous US error.

Once Lon Nol was in power, the Khmer Rouge continued to grow in strength, under the leadership of Pol Pot. All of this you can get by googling Cambodia. Try the "Lonely Planet World Guide". Even the "CIA facts page" has some useful information (but it leaves out the fact the US supported Pol Pot for several years, as did the Chinese, and I'll come to that in a moment). In 1975, at about the same time (actually a few days earlier) that Hanoi re-united Vietnam and liberated Saigon, Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and renamed it Kampuchea. What happened then remains as mysterious as ever. Pol Pot attempted to leap directly into Communism. He blew up the national bank in the capital, Phnom Penh, with the currency fluttering in the street. (I saw the ruins of the bank when I was there in 1981). He abolished money. And he began the mass killing of anyone suspected of not being loyal.

The first real news of this which the West got was the wave of refugees fleeing Cambodia for Vietnam. At first these were ethnic Vietnamese. A lot of them were killed and floated down river. Others, by the tens of thousands, fled into Vietnam. Then came the Cambodians, again, tens of thousands fleeing with impossible stories of murder, of the Khmer Rouge killing anyone with glasses, anyone who seemed to be intellectual. Of course, the first group that was killed, almost immediately after the Khmer Rouge took over, were all the Cambodian Communists who had been trained in Hanoi.

In 1978 Cambodia launched a series of military attacks on Vietnam. I remember trying to make sense out of this in the reports from the New York Times but the facts were very few. Why did the Cambodians attack Vietnam? That is still not clear, though the early fighting took place over disputed territory. The attack was foolish - the Vietnamese army, while weary from years of fighting, was a formidable fighting force. In 1978 Hanoi ordered the invasion of Cambodia. They swept, very swiftly across the country, driving the Khmer Rouge into hiding along the Thai border, where they fought a prolonged guerilla war which is now over but continued for some years (with Chinese military support).

The Vietnamese were not able to absorb the influx of refugees - think for a moment of how we would feel if Canadian military forces attacked North Dakota, Minnesota, etc., driving tens of thousands of farmers south to Chicago, etc. The Vietnamese economy was badly strained by the war. There were shortages, and they could not afford to have their own farming areas under attack. The mystery is not why Vietnam struck back, but why Cambodia launched the attack.

There is some element of mystery over what was actually happening in Cambodia just before the Vietnamese attack. There seemed - and the reports were very few - to be some return to normal life. (I talked at the time to a Yugoslav contact active in the peace movement, they had been allowed in, and she said things were very bad - but at least they had been allowed in.) Two Western reporters, one of whom I knew (can't think of his name - but his politics were good, independent left) were allowed in, and then one night they were attacked and one was killed in their compound in Phnom Penh. Who attacked them and why? I don't know. Was there a danger they would have reported that things were getting better? Were the murderers Vietnamese agents? Cambodian government agents? CIA agents? No one knows. It was a "secure compound" under Khmer Rouge control - how could anyone even enter it?

But some things are not mysteries. The Americans and Chinese both supported Pol Pot. The Chinese because they realized that Vietnam wsn't going to follow the Chinese line and Pol Pot was a handy tool. The Americans because we were angry at the Vietnamese for throwing us out - the mass murders by Pol Pot didn't matter, the point was they were a problem for Vietnam. I visited Phnom Penh in 1981, saw the ruins of the city. Saw where the old Catholic Cathedral had stood - leveled to the ground. The old national bank still in ruins. Buddhist temples and statues were destroyed. The Buddhist monks had been killed. I visited the torture chambers in the capitol, where on one wall there were hundreds of photos of the young cadre that had done the killing - all with the caps of revolutionary fighters. And then in other rooms the hundreds of photos of the people who had been tortured and murdered. The tragedy of looking at these Polaroid shots was that there wasn't much difference - all the faces (or almost all) were young.

I visited one of the many death pits outside of Phnom Penh, where they were digging up the bodies. They had stacks of skulls, of which I took photos, of men and women who had been blindfolded, holes in their heads where the bullet had gone in. The stench of death. There were many skulls stacked up as the new government, installed by the Vietnamese, tried to find out what had happened. This was only one of many such killing fields and death pits scattered around the country.

I wasn't looking at Vietnamese propaganda - I was looking at the results of the Khmer Rouge. There had been no time to clean things up. There were very few foreign visitors. Much of the country still wasn't secure - we were not able to travel to Angkor Wat (though I did get several beautiful temple tracings and have one on my wall here - the kind of art where you lay paper on top of a stone carving, and rub charcoal across it to get an impression).

When we met with Vietnamese officials in Saigon I felt they were as naive about Cambodia as Americans had been about Vietnam. They talked about how much the two people had in common, when in fact they don't have much in common. The culture, the architecture, their physical look - all very different. But that is another long discussion. The former Vietnamese Ambassador to Cambodia said that Pol Pot had hoped to be another great thinker like Marx or Lenin or Mao and had always asked the Vietnamese to bring him more Marxist reading material - "to bring in kilos of Marx".

Yes, the Cambodians did kill between one and a half million and two million of their people. This isn't propaganda. It was a horror for which Vietnam can't be blamed. But one can blame the US for supporting Pol Pot, and the Chinese for supporting him. In 1979 the Chinese attacked Vietnam along the Northern border to "teach Vietnam a lesson", but that was a mistake, as the Chinese got soundly trounced.

No one is totally innocent, no history is simple, but [the claim that the Khmer Rouge did not murder over one million people] is strange history - the events in Cambodia were far too stark and tragic to let this go by and merely say it is "crap".

Peace,
David McReynolds