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)
Birth of a Khmer “Liberation Army”
The Vietnamese Politburo met again in mid-February [1978] in the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City at the secluded compound of what used to be the police training school of the fallen Thieu regime. The meeting studied the nuts and bolts of the plan for setting up a Cambodian Communist party and a resistance organization. Shortly after the meeting, Le Duan and Le Duc Tho met separately with Cambodian party cadres who had lived in exile in Vietnam since 1954 and the ones who had escaped from Pol Pot’s purges to seek asylum in Vietnam.
Of some one thousand Khmers who had regrouped in Hanoi in 1954 under the Geneva Agreement, only a handful had stayed behind in North Vietnam. The majority had returned to Cambodia to join the anti-U.S. resistance, and few of them survived the war and the purges. So the Khmer candidates for leadership in February composed a small group whose main achievement was survival. There was Pen Sovan, a forty-year-old cadre who had come to North Vietnam in 1954, along with one thousand others, who had been educated in the party and army schools in Hanoi and made a major in the Vietnamese army. There were Chan Si and Khang Sarin, majors in the Vietnamese army; Tang Saroem, another Khmer exile, who was working as a labor supervisor in Vietnam’s Hon Gai coal mines; Keo Chanda, the Khmer language newsreader from Radio Hanoi; Chea Soth, a news editor from the Vietnam News Agency. And with them were escapees from Cambodia, political cadres like Hem Samin, Yos Por, Hun Sen, and Bou Thang.
Dragged out of their nondescript offices and refugees barracks, there were suddenly presented to the top Vietnamese leaders whom they had previously known only in pictures. By a turn of fortune there too were to be leaders in a new Cambodia still in the womb of the future…
… I slipped out to talk to some Khmers without my Vietnamese escort. Thong Pak, a former Lon Nol official, whispered to me about the political lecture sessions in the evening to prepare for a fight against Pol Pot. He pointed to a short, stubby man wearing a Vietnamese army pith helmet: “That’s him, ‘Mr. Duc.’ He gives the political lecture.”
Dressed in a white sleeveless shirt, khaki trousers, and plastic sandals, the roundfaced “Mr. Duc” was a bit shy when I approached him for his life story. He was uncertain how much he should tell a stranger. Despite his Vietnamese alias and his typical North Vietnamese cadre outfit, he was a full-blooded Khmer, a veteran cadre of Cambodia’s People’s Revolutionary Party. Like thousands of other party members, he went to Hanoi in 1954 as part of the Geneva Agreement… I was to discover three years later in Phnom Penh that Yos Por, the leader of the new Kampuchean National United Front for National Salvation (KNUFNS), the man with an assured smile, wearing shiny acrylic clothes and a large gold watch, was none other than “Mr. Duc” from Ben Sanh camp, and contrary to his claim of being a farmer in the delta, he had spent three years in Hanoi before taking charge of the camp...
… On April 22, 1978, the First Brigade of the Khmer dissident army was commissioned in a secret ceremony. By the end of 1978 several such brigades—the actual strength of which was that of battalions—were ready to join the Vietnamese army in its push against Cambodia.
Along with the secret preparations, Hanoi also cranked up its propaganda machine…
The man chosen by Hanoi to launch the first salvo of the propaganda war was none other than Vice-Foreign Minister Vo Dong Giang… Lacing a three-hour monologue with sad remarks about the fratricidal conflict and with scathing sarcasm about Pol Pot and his foreign backers, he gave an account of the Cambodia-Vietnam conflict never revealed before.
… The provincial capital Tay Ninh was clearly a nervous place. The city was pockmarked with shelters—dug under pavements, next to government buildings, and in the grounds of private houses… village of Tan Lap with its rows of charred mud huts on both sides of a dirt road; standing testimony of the Khmer Rouge attack nearly six months earlier…
But all that I saw that week did not suggest there had been any recent large-scale attacks such as those of the previous year. In fact, my suspicion was growing that the initiative was now in Vietnamese hands…
The suspicion that the Vietnamese were icing their propaganda war was bolstered during a visit to An Phu village near Chau Doc…
But someone must have decided that sensation-seeking bourgeois journalists should be given a piece of the action as well. Some of us were a little skeptical about the claim that the artillery shells producing the whistling sound high above us were coming from the Cambodian side. A little later my interpreter from Hanoi, Huynh Van Tam, called, “Let’s go to the edge of the village. Maybe you can see some fighting”… A Vietnamese army officer screamed, “Get into the trenches!” Seconds later there was a thud of an outgoing artillery shell from the village behind us, followed by a whistling sound and then an explosion in the tree line that we were watching. “The Khmers are attacking,” announced the officer glumly. He had not bothered to take cover…
…Less than one hundred miles away, at another corner of the border, real combat was in progress to drive away the Khmer attackers…
… After a briefing on the Khmer Rouge attack by Major Hoang Chau, we set out for Ha Tien. Formerly a bustling town of thirty thousand, it was now empty…
… The only plausible clue to what was behind the murderous raid was a Khmer slogan scrawled in charcoal on a door: Ti nih srok young (This is our country). Indeed some three hundred years ago the whole of the Mekong Delta, including Ha Tien, had been Cambodian territory. A large number of My Duc’s commune’s population and many of the dead were of Khmer origin…
… I soon learned that the decision to send journalists to Ha Tien by helicopter before the corpses were buried was made by Le Duc Tho, who had taken over the responsibility of directing Hanoi’s Cambodia policy. Pol Pot had handed him a propaganda coup, and he had not missed his chance…
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