CIVIL RESISTANCE
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CIVIC EDUCATION
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Vietnamization: Military Occupation - Present Francois Ponchaud, a French Jesuit who had diligently chronicled the destructiveness of the Khmer Rouge in his book "Cambodia: Year Zero," maintained that the Vietnamese were conducting a "new, subtle genocide" against the Cambodian people... - William Shawcross, The Washington Post, 18 March 1980
According to the Central Intelligence Agency... the Vietnamese invasion and food embargo caused 700,000 deaths in Cambodia in 1979. - Stephen Morris, Harvard International Review, Dec.-Jan. 1981
"At present, 200,000 Vietnamese soldiers occupy Cambodia. Behind them, following a policy dictated by Hanoi, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese are beginning to establish themselves in the country. In history there are few more obvious examples of a 'final solution' devised to blot out a national and ethnic identity. The Cambodians...are now being absorbed." - James Webb, The Washington Post, 14 April 1983
Work on what the Cambodians called the "K-5" project was essentially slave labor, and conditions in the malaria-infested and heavily mined border regions were appalling and dangerous. A minimum of 50,000 "volunteers" were estimated to have succumbed to yellow fever alone by the end of 1986, prompting one Western observer to refer to the campaign as the "new genocide." - "Bamboo Wall", GlobalSecurity.org The requisitioning of civilians started in September 1984. The Cambodians often refer to the departure to the "clearing" duty as a new "April 17". (17 April 1975 marks the entry of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh...) ...
the K5 plan, described by some people as a "new genocide", made tens of thousands of victims. (See "Un nouveau genocide", Philippe Pacquet, La Libre Belgique, 26 May 1986)... During our outings in the provinces, it was rarer and rarer to see men tilling the fields and most of the time women planted, bedded plants or harvested, on their own.
- Dr. Esmeralda Luciolli, Le Mur de Bambou
"At the end of Cambodia's war, there were entire villages which had no men." - A Christian pastor, Joel, who has lived and worked in Cambodia since 1990 For ten years, the Vietnamese tried to apply to Cambodia a policy of ethnocide--the destruction of a culture within those who carry it--insidiously carried out, particularly in the beginning, in the educational domain. - Marie Alexandrine Martin, "The Vietnamese Occupation and the Resistance" chapter 8 of Cambodia: A Shattered Society (Univ. of California Press, 1989, 1994)
GENOCIDES Vietnamese occupation: 25 Dec. 1978--23 Oct. 1991
UNDER THE COVER OF GENOCIDE Khmer Rouge: 17 April 1975--25Dec. 1978 UNDER THE COVER OF GENOCIDE American carpet bombings: 1969-1973
How could have these genocides happened, you may ask. And unknown and denied for decades? Here's an instructive article that may help to elucidate what I mean by the Vietnamese "genocides under the cover of genocide". Ultimately, it comes down to the overweening hubris of many foreigners to contribute ad hominem fallacies to Cambodians with detrimental consequences to this day. Related, it is the failure to practice what Hannah Arendt called an "enlarged way of thinking" or what Miroslav Volf called "double vision". The situation also speaks to the enduring effectiveness of Vietnamese Fifth Column presence in history to the present time. We must be vigilant against tyranny and weary about half-truths, particularly during periods of unimaginable cruelty and overwhelming suffering; we must stand guard against viewing the world in Manichean duality: that if the US bombing is evil, the KR must be good; that if the KR is evil, the Vietnamese must be good; and more currently, that if China has influence, Vietnam no longer does.
Click here to read the 9-page article in the Harvard International Review (Dec. - Jan. 1981), on Facebook. Also, scroll down to read more from this Chomsky article. Once the evidence of Indochinese Communist behavior began to accumulate, there were three possible responses open to those in the West who had been helping to give history a push: the first was to admit the facts and hence the error of their past political position, and work to eradicate the evil they had mistakenly contributed to;... The second possible response to the evidence was to admit what was going on, but to try and justify it, usually with some bizarre form of moral relativism (letting "them solve" their own problems in "their own way").... The third possible response was to deny the evidence of repression, either totally or in part, and thereby retain one's pride and prejudice. (p. 4)
The facts about post-1975 Indochina are fairly well-established. The repression of the Vietnamese, Laotian, and Kampuchean Communists is exceptional by international standards. ... What is most disturbing however is not Chomsky's denial of the truth; far more serious are the methods he uses to deny the truth. For Linguistics professor Chomsky, here working in conjunction with Finance professor Herman, has adopted the halo of Professional Scholar, armed with hundreds of footnotes to give pretence of serious and balanced inquiry. Yet the footnotes cannot stand serious scrutiny. What Chomsky and Herman do over and over again is to present the most tenuous and unreliable sources as firm and credible evidence, while dismissing the contradictory accounts of eyewitnesses whose past record (often of support for the Communist movement) makes them highly credible sources. (p. 27)
Cambodia prior to Khmer Rouge
By the time the US bombing raids ended, refugees fleeing the countryside had swollen the population of the capital to nearly two million, three times the pre-war level. Around the city and along the banks of the Mekong, as far as the Vietnamese border, the land was pitted with craters that it looked in the words of one diplomat, "like the valleys of the moon." - POL POT: Anatomy of a Nightmare by Philip Short, p. 251
Aerial view of Kampot prior to the Khmer Rouge
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The Khmer Rouge
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Genocidal decade-plus of Vietnamese military occupation
24 December 1978--23 Oct.1991 (Vietnamese invasion to Paris Peace Agreements) Almost four years of complete darkness under the Khmer Rouge communists followed immediately by 13 years of complete darkness under the military occupation of the Vietnamese communists. Genocides under the cover of genocide.
There exists no book in the English language about the decade-plus-long Vietnamese military occupation of Cambodia. The only three books (one in English, 2 in French no longer in print) that I know that cover certain aspects of it are: (i) Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia (which someone has translated and published in Khmer as "Why Vietnam Liberated Cambodia"!!), (ii) The Bamboo Wall which is about the K-5 genocide and (iii) Cambodia: A Shattered Society which has been well-translated into English but covers it with one chapter. The Vietnamese occupation lasted till the Paris Peace Agreements signed on 23 October 1991, even if the official year is 1989, the year the Soviet Union collapsed and could no longer finance Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia.
However, there exist academic essays and news articles that tried to penetrate this hermetically sealed-off country with a population of 5 million survivors who had just barely emerged out of the Khmer Rouge hell, now quivering under the lordship of an occupation force of nearly 200,000 Vietnamese soldiers. Vietnam at the time had the 3rd largest military in the world.
It is not then surprising that very few people--both Cambodians and foreigners alike, particularly young journalists who are writing the "history" of Cambodia from translation with their "first drafts"--know anything about Cambodia save the Khmer Rouge years and what they've experienced in the few years they spent in Cambodia, and for the Cambodians, what they can remember since coming of age. After all, journalism anywhere is "history in a hurry". But in Cambodia, the problem is compounded, for this writing of "history in a hurry" is often done (i) via translation, (ii) by journalists or overnight-minted "journalists" parachuting into a completely foreign culture, (iii) young or without experience, (iv) in a licentious expatriate environment, (v) relying on local friends and apprentices who are eager to please as their sources, with (vi) their "first draft" reporting without competing narratives calcifying into hard facts. Writings on Cambodia "history" as transmitted for public consumption are unlike writings in developed countries where the writers, often trained as historians with multiple advanced degrees, are within or of that culture, and are critiqued by multiple, knowledgeable academic peers. What about De Tocqueville's Democracy in America? It is only one foreign perspective from the outside looking in on American democracy. The controlling narrative is from within, and of multiple layers. De Tocqueville's is but one important contribution on American democracy among countless insider writings on American democracy. The writings on Cambodia, about Cambodia are qualitatively different than those of developed nations. In Cambodia, our history is written from without, often with our insider perspective disregarded or skewered either intentionally or unintentionally through translation and the misreading of culture.
We all can learn from William Shawcross and have some humility.
We need to realize the ASYMMETRY OF INFORMATION, ASYMMETRY OF PASSION, ASYMMETRY OF LONGEVITY, ASYMMETRY OF INTENTION for Cambodia of the seasoned, formidable Vietnamese political and military leaders vis-à-vis the writers and diplomats of Cambodia.
We must also keep in mind the ASYMMETRY OF POWER AND KNOWLEDGE between the Vietnamese political leaders/generals and their PRK recruits, e.g. Le Duan/Le Duc Tho/Gen. Giap vs. Heng Samrin/Pen Sovann/Hun Sen.
You cannot understand this CPP regime if you do not know about and understand its birth and development under the brutal Vietnamese military invasion/occupation, 25 Dec. 1978 to 23 Oct. 1991 (Paris Peace Agreements).
You cannot understand Hun Sen if you do not understand his rebirth and grooming by top Vietnamese diplomats (Le Duc Tho), seasoned military commanders, and senior politicians during the brutal occupation to this very present day.
One Michael, a very respected Cambodian watcher, often said to me how he has never known another regime or set of leaders in the world who is as brutal and savage as this regime toward its “own people”.
Deaths/population: Khmer Rouge (April 1975-Dec. 1978): 1.7M deaths Occupation Famines (1979, 1980): 700,000 to 1M deaths Occupation K5 plan: 1M-plus deaths 7M (pop pre-KR) — 1.7M deaths — (700,000 to 1M) deaths — 1M deaths — 500,000 refugees = @ 3-4M pop Cambodians in Cambodia during occupation (if we take out births during this period) Population filled in by Vietnamese settlers as a matter of policy. - Theary, April 2018
Click to read more on Facebook When the War Was Over by Elizabeth Becker Chapter 10: The Silence Ends Neither side had looked much beyond the American war for answers--at Indochina as a whole, at the history and relations between Cambodia and Vietnam, Vietnam and China. That might have confused the ideological lines drawn during the war in the United States. (p. 364)
The American retreat from the region was swift. Only two major U.S. newspapers--the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times--kept a staff correspondent in Bangkok to cover the region in 1975 through 1978. Indochina was no longer considered "newsworthy"--all of Southeast Asia was covered from Hong Kong, which was also the listening post for China. The countries that had monopolized American attention for decades vanished from newspapers and television screens overnight. Academia lost interest as well... (p. 365)
The few experts, academics, government officials, and journalists who continued reporting and studying the region became known as "Indochina watchers,"... The Indochina watchers could only follow their countries of interest from a distance... The total was a very incomplete patchwork of information.... Many of the experts themselves had been embroiled in the bitter wartime debates over the American involvement....
The overall result was the increasing specialization of experts and writers on Indochina. Since the whole picture could not be drawn, Indochina watchers concentrated on details. (p. 366)
Unified Vietnam was a nation of 50 million people, and the second largest communist power in Asia. Its military prowess was staggering; Hanoi had not demobilized its army in peace. Instead, communist Vietnam expanded its armed forces in peace until it included one million fighters--the third largest in the world. The Vietnamese were ranked among the five most effective military powers in the world. (p. 370)
The Vietnamese may have been the victors, but the spoils were hardly enough to rebuild the land ripped apart during the war. The bounty was in military hardware: 1.6 billion rifles; 130,000 tons of ammunition; 42,000 trucks; 1,200 armed personnel carriers; 63,000 antitank weapons; and enough jet fighters and other aircraft, along with some 1,000 ships, to make Vietnam one of the foremost military powers in the world. (p. 379)
To this day, this is typically how Cambodia is written up: the complete blackout of 14 years of military occupation when Vietnam committed multiple genocides against the immediate survivors of the Khmer Rouge, then an estimated population of 5M. (Vietnam invaded Cambodia in Dec. 1978; Vietnam "officially" withdrew its troops in 1989 but it was only a matter of changing clothes from military uniform to civilian attire; UNTAC came in 1993.) It should be clarified that "the UN and the world’s leading powers put huge efforts" against Vietnamese occupation; to do so, they even sided controversially with the Khmer Rouge, allowing it a seat at the UN in a triage calculation of survival among evils. Read below the rare published articles about this almost unknown period of Vietnamese military occupation of Cambodia of nearly 200,000 hardened Vietnamese soldiers lording over a shattered country just emerging out of the Khmer Rouge hell with an emaciated population of barely surviving 5 million Cambodians. They were to endure multiple genocides by Vietnam during a period of nearly 14 years of darkness before the UN stepped in 1993. The Vietnamization process continues to this day, posing an existential danger for the people and nation of Cambodia:
** Cambodia in 1979 **
Click to read the complete chapter 8, on Facebook
As the Vietnamese occupiers committed the first of many LEGAL GENOCIDES in Cambodia -- 700,000 deaths alone in 1979 according to the CIA -- it diverted and kept international attention on the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge by focusing on Tuol Sleng. "The term was first used by the Vietnamese in the spring of 1979, when they were turning the Tuol Sleng interrogation centre into a museum cleverly designed to recall images of Belsen."
ABC News (US), 26 Nov. 1979, along National Road 5 (Phnom Penh - Battambang).
Click here or on image to listen to the 3 Paul McCartney songs at the concerts "The Pol Pot regime had ended. But the worse was still not over. The new nightmare was famine. It seemed impossible in a land of plenty... But in the wake of Vietnam's military takeover, hundreds of thousands died during two long years of famine." Vietnam Invasion of Kampuchea (2 of 5, English) [ការឈ្លានពាន របស់យួន មកលើកម្ពុជា, ភាគ ២/៥]
On Dec 26-29, 1979 , the musician Paul McCartney and Kurt Waldheim, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, organized a four-night benefit, Concerts for the People of Kampuchea, to raise funds for UNICEF and UNHCR. The concert featured Paul McCartney and Wings, The Who, Queen, Elvis Costello, The Pretenders, The Clash and other artists at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, England.
According to the Central Intelligence Agency study Kampuchea: A Demographic Catastrophe (recommended to me by Professor Chomsky), the Vietnamese invasion and food embargo caused 700,000 deaths in Cambodia in 1979. ("Chomsky on US Foreign Policy", Prof. Stephen Morris, p. 26)
My commentary published 11 January 2012
** Cambodia in 1980 **
Throughout 1979, the Joint Mission negotiated for greater operational presence in Cambodia, something that Vietnam and the new Cambodian government resisted. ... Another famine? ... At the end of March 1980, international relief agencies predicted the failure of rice harvest and massive food shortages in the coming year. At a conference with donor countries, the Joint Mission requested new pledges for funding to deliver rice seed to Cambodian farmers to plant now for the next harvest in December. The problems of delivery and distribution of food aid inside Cambodia were omnipresent. Whether the new Vietnamese-backed government in Phnom Penh was able to distribute food throughout the country to those most in need was a debated subject for most of 1980. There appeared to be no end to the refugee crisis at the border or the threat of famine inside Cambodia. In March 1980 William Shawcross published a 6-part series in The Washington Post on the relief effort in Cambodia and at the border. Henry Kamm visited Cambodia in April and wrote a series of articles highlighting the obstacles of food delivery and distribution and supporting his belief that food was not being properly distributed. … March for Survival Meanwhile, the refugee crisis at the border became a cause célèbre among many activists, artists and academics from the West, many of whom visited the border camps. In early February, for example, a group of aid workers, peace activists and celebrities, including Joan Baez and Elie Wiesel, led a “March for Survival” at the border town of Aranyaprathet, demanding an end to what they perceived was the deliberate obstruction of food distribution by the Vietnamese. Using a bullhorn the group offered 20 truckloads of food and medicine to the Vietnamese and Cambodian soldiers on the other side of the border. See the Columbia University page
6-part Series by William Shawcross in the Washington Post, 16-24 March 1980
1. THE MAKING OF AN ASIAN HOLOCAUST
(William Shawcross, Washington Post, Sunday, 16 March 1980): The famine came on the heels of a decade marked by war, bloody revolution and foreign invasion... Even the most basic population figure --one that would reveal how many Cambodians have survived this Asian holocaust [the 1979 famine]--is a matter of mystery and fierce dispute among humanitarians and politicians. But two things are clear: * Famine threatened to extinguish the people of Cambodia last year, and is now -- after a period of abatement -- again threatening the survivors. The new threat can be averted only by increased international aid and significant improvement in the way the Vietnamese occupiers of Cambodia respond to the continuing crisis. * ...The famine has no natural causes--Cambodia, unlike Bangladesh, is not a naturally impoverished land. The disaster was even foreseen.... This series will explore the past year of famine... At the same time, evidence indicates that some food paid for by British schoolchildren who sold their toys for Cambodian relief has gone to sustain occupying Vietnamese forces.... There were extensive reports of famine long before the relief agencies responded. What were the reasons for their delay, which inevitably caused deaths?... Or was the delay caused by Vietnamese refusal both to admit that the famine existed and to allow the world to help?... The most detailed study of what happened inside Cambodia during 1979 has been made by a young academic from Cornell University, Stephen Heder. He has spent months on the Thai-Cambodian border, interviewing some 250 Cambodians of different social, political and geographical backgrounds. Heder's study was funded by the State Department "with the clear understanding that [he] would be completely free to draw and express his own conclusions whether or not these were in agreement with the views of the U.S. government." Heder has never been a supporter of the U.S. role in Indochina: until he began his research he was sympathetic to the Khmer Rouge. Heder's study suggests that month by month through 1979, relief over liberation gave way to disillusionment and even opposition to the Vietnamese.
2. A SOCIETY WHOSE SINEWS WERE RIPPED OUT (Shawcross, Washington Post, 17 Mar. 1980) For months a whisper of disaster had run through Southeast Asia. Reporters in Bangkok began writing of the specter of starvation stalking Cambodia. A great silence and emptiness spread through the center of the country as continued fighting and political chaos scattered an entire population. But it was not until late June of last year that the Vietnamese-installed government in Phnom Penh agreed to let a two-man team from the International Committee o the Red Cross and from UNICEF enter the country... What they saw was worse than anything they could have expected.... Famine had been in the long time in the making. But in those early crucial months, two key governments had failed to see it, or at least to acknowledge it.... And the Vietnamese, who had invaded in January, had labeled stories of famine as Western paranoia. In a starving nation, food is direct political power and the relief effort quickly became a hostage of differing political objectives. Hanoi seems determined to stay in Cambodia, while the United States, Thailand, China , and others have shaped their policies around an overriding goal of Vietnamese withdrawal. ...charges that the Vietnamese actually refused to respond to repeated international offers of help.... ...at the very least an extraordinary tale of political and bureaucratic misunderstanding and obstruction. Bugnion and Beaumont [ICRC, UNICEF] made their trip in midsummer; the flow of aid from their agencies did not start until fall. It is clear that if they had made their trip earlier, or--once the trip had been made--a program of aid had been organized more rapidly and efficiently, then tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Cambodians could have been saved. ...The particular circumstances of Cambodia--its decade of war, revolution, invasion, and four years of rule by what is almost universally recognized as one of the most brutal regimes in history--are virtually unprecedented. Probably never before has a society been so thoroughly destroyed. [Theary: Shawcross penned this only after 15 months into the Vietnamese military occupation of a 200,000 armed force, Vietnam then had the 3rd largest military in the world. Shawcross could not have guessed that Cambodia would/could experience another K5 genocide under the cover of KR genocide over the next decade.] Red Cross officials say that other offers of help were made, both directly to the Phnom Penh government and through the Red Cross office in Hanoi throughout the first six months of 1979. All of these overtures were ignored. By late spring, predictions of famine had become commonplace.... But in Washington and Hanoi, the warnings appeared to fall on stony ground. The State Department saw no danger. Hanoi kept silent until the Heng Samrin government approved the trip of Beaumont and Bugnion.... Red Cross officials in Bangkok now concede that the idea of allowing scores of Western officials into Cambodia must have been alarming for Cambodian officials--not to mention the Vietnamese.... It was with this sort of informal, and hardly satisfactory understanding--nothing definite and nothing on paper--that Red Cross-UNICEF went ahead with their full-scale relief operation.
3. FOOD AID: TALE OF DECEIT, OBSTRUCTION (Shawcross, Washington Post, 18 Mar. 1980) One-half of all the international aid reaching the port of Kompong Som, the defector told Red Cross officials, was being trucked to Vietnam. Almost all the rest was being warehoused, apparently for sale to the starving people of Cambodia once a currency had been reintroduced into that war-ruined nation. The story of supplies withheld echoed in detail the tales of thousands of Cambodian peasants who had made the same trek and who also said that no food was being distributed in Cambodia despite the great international efforts. ... "People are dying on the road and in the villages because they have no food, quietly dying of starvation." Refugees from Kompong Speu Province were telling officials from Thailand then that 30 to 40 people a day were still dying in their district. Suicide was said to be common. That, however, was not the picture being painted by the Vietnamese or by many journalists and relief officials allowed to visit Cambodia.... But the accounts of refugees, including the Ministry of Commerce defector, and the embarrassed silence by relief agencies during a critical period last year suggest that the possibility for new tragedy still exists in Cambodia, which remains balanced on a knife's edge. Speaking in December, the defector asserted that very little food was reaching the people at all, because even what was being distributed from the warehouses remained in the hands of province chiefs. He also maintained that food sometimes was "distributed" merely to deceive visiting aid officials, who wanted evidence of distribution. As soon as they had left, the food was taken back again. ... In late November, a furious debate erupted in the Western press. Were the Vietnamese and the Phnom Penh governments withholding the food they had allowed to be sent--or even diverting it to Vietnam? Vietnam was experiencing its own food shortage, and some charged that the food was simply uploaded in Cambodia, then trucked eastward across the Vietnamese border. Others said the Vietnamese were using the food as a political weapon inside Cambodia... The State Department announced its belief that the hold-ups in distribution were indeed deliberate. Francois Ponchaud, a French Jesuit who had diligently chronicled the destructiveness of the Khmer Rouge in his book "Cambodia: Year Zero," maintained that the Vietnamese were conducting a "new, subtle genocide" against the Cambodian people... [Theary: again, this is only 15 months into occupation, before the K5 genocide] Refugees, however, continued to tell a very different story. They spoke of theft by the Vietnamese, and said they sometimes were sold, rather than given, food provided free by the international agencies.... To try to feed Cambodians, the agencies had accepted unusual restrictions and conditions on their operations. Once inside Cambodia, they were loath to acknowledge that their efforts were being undercut by the government in charge. To be able to stay, they apparently felt that they were not free to voice their frustrations openly.... Whichever figures one accepts, they confirm that distribution of food until the end of 1979 was minimal. Inevitably this poor distribution killed many Cambodians. How many is not known. The original fears for "2 million dead by Christmas" may have been exaggerated, but one U.S. analyst now reckons that at least half a million people died of famine last year.... There is no doubt that the Heng Samrin government is far more benign than that of the Khmer Rouge's Pol Pot. But questions about Vietnam's intentions remain. Why did they wait until July, six months after taking over Cambodia, to appeal for help?... Most important, perhaps, why has it taken so long for them to put together an effective Health Ministry?... ...In early December, Oxfam officials in Phnom Penh complained that the "January 7" Hospital still had no supplementary feeding facilities, even though there were plenty of supplies in Phnom Penh.... The government's refusal to allow an army of Red Cross bureaucrats into Cambodia may be explained by suspicion about Western intentions. But does this explanation also justify the government's refusal to allow Western doctors and nurses into the country?... ...starved population now thought to number around 5 1/2 million. It is hardly indicative of a government which adequately cares for its people.
4. THAILAND STILL WARY OF ACCEPTING SWARMS OF DESPERATE REFUGEES (Shawcross, Washington Post, 19 Mar. 1980) The Vietnamese in Thailand. Its name is Kao-I-Dung, and it is run by a young British journalist working for...(UNHCR). The story of the tensions between UNHCR and the Thai government... At the same time, the precarious position of the Cambodian refugees--at least 150,000 in makeshift camps along the Thai border as well as another 150,000 in UNHCR camps inside Thailand... ...the Thais will act unilaterally and drive them all back by force--with terrible loss of life. Twice last year, in fact, Thai authorities organized forcible mass repatriations of Cambodian refugees to their native battleground to face almost certain death. Now fears for the refugees are being expressed with greater urgency every week by Western officials in Bangkok.... Lionel Rosenblatt, head of the U.S. Embassy's Kampuchea Emergency Group, is anxiously trying to find countries to take as many refugees as possible--now. ...to resettle Cambodian refugees in Jonestown, Guyana.... ...Immediately after the January 1979 Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, thousands more refugees headed for Thailand.... ...Those who did enter the country in the first few weeks of 1979 were put under military control rather than, as before, under the Interior Ministry. There were not given refugee status; instead they were labeled "illegal immigrants." UNHCR offered to help care for the new arrivals. The Thai government refused assistance. Refugees came in small numbers between January and April. Some were allowed to stay; many were pushed back into Cambodia by the Thai military. In April, the Vietnamese mounted a new offensive... This attack pushed about 40,000 people into Thailand. Again UNHCR offered its services; again the Thais refused.... On April 12, 1979, a group of about 1,700 "illegal immigrants" at the border town of Aranyaprathet -- many of whom had relatives in Thai camps for pre-1979 "refugees" -- were loaded by the Thai military onto buses. They were told they were being taken to another, better camp site. It was not true. They were forced at gunpoint back over the border into Cambodia where they faced death from either starvation or continued fighting. UNHCR reaction was muted. No protest was made, except by the field officer for the Aranyaprathet area, David Taylor. When the Thais tried to force more refugees back over the border a few days later, Taylor rushed to the scene and dramatically barred the way. He saved one group. Taylor's effort was written up critically--in the local press. Thai officials were furious at this "intervention in Thailand's internal affairs." They demanded Taylor's withdrawal from the border. His life was threatened. Taylor was withdrawn, and UNHCR sent no one to replace him for several months. For much of 1979, the UNHCR office in Bangkok was also without a Regional Protection Officer, the post with the overall responsibility for preventing forced repatriation. So neither on the border nor in Bangkok did UNHCR have officials dealing full time with the repatriation crisis. At that time the official policy of the Bangkok office of the UNHCR was not to antagonize the Thais lest they treat the Cambodians even worse.... In May, U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim visited Aranyaprathet... Waldheim took the issue seriously and raised it with Kriangsak, then Prime Minister. He emphasized that as far as UNHCR was concerned these were genuine refugees who must not be forced back into Cambodia: UNHCR would do all it could to help.... The government was obviously not impressed. The next repatriation was far worse. In June the Thai military gathered some 40,000 refugees who were camped along the border (including the 4,000 whom Waldheim had visited), bused them away and then forced them, at night and at gunpoint, down a steep cliff, across a minefield and back into Cambodia. There was no water there. Many who tried to move forward were killed by mines. Many who tried to move back were shot by Thai soldiers. Thousands died. [Theary: Read my great-aunt Nan and great-uncle An's account in my memoir Daughter of the Killing Fields] ` After the April repatriation the main coordinating group of the voluntary agencies protested to the Ministry of Interior. The effect was, however, badly undercut when World Vision, one of the largest Christian agencies trying to work with Cambodians, wrote a letter to the Ministry of Interior disassociating itself totally from the protest. [Theary: World Vision is founded by Bob Pierce, father of my friend/spiritual mentor Marilee Pierce Dunker whom I met decades later from my refugee days. I am saddened to read about this particular episode and curious about the leadership and the rationale of that time for that situation.] The forcible repatriation issue was one that Western embassies also found difficult to address. Few, if any, seem to have made any effective protest. The U.S. Embassy, however, was able to rescue about 2,000 of the refugees involved. The U.S. Ambassador Morton Abramowitz, has throughout the crisis been one of the most effective and energetic spokesmen for the Cambodians.... In the event, Thailand's problems were practically ignored, as was Cambodia itself, at Geneva. All through last summer attention was fixed only on the Vietnamese boat people. But at Geneva the United States raised its quota of Indochinese refugees to 14,000 and promised that a large number would be Cambodians from Thailand. The Thai government seemed appeased. By early September it was clear that conditions in western Cambodia were becoming more desperate than ever and that a massive flood of diseased, exhausted, starving people--far greater than any before--was about to swamp the border.... By now the attention of the Western press was finally directed toward Thailand. Pictures of starving Cambodian mothers and children replaced those of boat people.... Thailand now adopted a new four-part policy:... The speed with which UNHCR created a reasonable township at Sakeo clearly impressed the Thai authorities. On Oct. 30, Sithi asked the agency to coordinate plans for receiving up to 300,000 "illegal immigrants." Another site was found. This was Kao-I-Dung. [Theary: We arrived into Kao-I-Dung (Khao-I-Dang) days later, in November 1979.]
5. Opportunists Thrive in Camps' Squalor
(Shawcross, Washington Post, 20 March 1980)
Son Sann is a thin, frail old man who walks through the forests of Cambodia's war zone supporting himself with a stick. He is a guerrilla leader, unlikely as that seems, who is stirring hope in Washington and other capitals that a third force is finally emerging in the struggle for Cambodia. The idea of a third force in Indochina, neither communist nor corrupt, has always been attractive to the Westerns who have become involved here. Graham Greene ridiculed the notion in his book "The Quiet American" in the 1950s. Yet once again, the idea is being touted for Cambodia. Son Sann is now its symbol. Sitting under a hurricane lamp in his well-ordered camp high in these densely wooded mountains, Son Sann talked to this reporter recently about his main concern of the moment, which is the same as the main concern of every other Cambodian: food. Now 68 and in poor health, Son Sann was 17 times a Cabinet minister under deposed Prince Norodom Sihanouk in those halcyon days of the 1950s and '60s, when Sihanouk managed to keep war, hunger and geopolitics largely out of Camboida. Son Sann also ran the national bank; now he sends his supporters walking through the countryside telling villagers that his Khmer People's National Liberation Front offers an alternative to both Heng Samrin and the Khmer Rouge and will organize a food distribution system for this ravaged country. "Our first aim is to try and get food to people in the interior," he said. "We don't think people should forever be encouraged to go to the [Thai] border for rice" -- which is handed out in camps often controlled by remnants of the rightist group that overthrew Sihanouk on March 18, 1970. After spending most of the post decade in exile in Paris, Son Sann formed his front and returned to Cambodia last year. He now controls several villages in the west of the country. At his headquarters he has about 3,000 people, including about 100 Khmer Rouge defectors. International food aid is brought in by porters every day from Thailand; only a few miles down the mountain. Land is being cultivated. He hopes to make the camp self-sufficient in rice and vegetables by the end of the year. In those border camps that Son Sann hopes to keep his supporters away from, another group of former officials have risen from the ashes of Cambodia and are flourishing in a corrupt commercialism that the across-the-border feeding operation has encouraged. [...] The Camobdians are captive many times over, to the hostilities within their own country, to the politics of Thailand, to unpredictable superpowers maneuvers, and even to those who claim to represent them. [...] If Son Sann or other serious leaders could embody Cambodian nationalism, then there would be a possibility that their movements could yet play a significant role in Cambodia's evolution. But now, as ever in Cambodia, that evolution will be dominated by events and political priorities way beyond the control of the Cambodians themselves.
6. FAMINE CONDITIONS WILL PERSIST UNTIL POLITICAL ACCORD IS FOUND (Shawcross, Washington Post, 21 Mar. 1980) That more tragedy will follow is a bitter truth for Cambodians. But it will weigh also on a world that will have shown that it did not learn enough from the last year of disaster to find ways to halt the suffering. This series has sought to trace the humanitarian and political responses of the international community to the Cambodian tragedy, one of the great man-made disasters of our time.... ...U.S. Ambassador to Thailand Morton Abramowitz was among the first officials anywhere to warn of impending famine. Rosalyn Carter has attached her own and the president's prestige to the Cambodian effort.... It is not easy to imagine the Vietnamese, who still have 200,000 troops in Cambodia, and their principal allies, the Soviets, accepting the international conference that Sihanouk says must be called to resolve the Cambodian conflict. Hanoi says the situation in Cambodia is "irreversible."
The Formidable Vietnamese Cast of Characters
The "laptop generals in the press corps" (Shawcross), blinded by and stuck in the gore of the Khmer Rouge, failed to see the carnage perpetrator and left by the VN generals before their very eyes on a vulnerable emaciated population under military occupation with asymmetry of knowledge, asymmetry of political experience, asymmetry of power, and a history of violence, dominance, and annexation.
** Cambodia in 1981 **
Chomsky on U.S. Foreign Policy Stephen Morris, Harvard International Review (Dec. - Jan. 1981)
Click to read the 9-page article, on Facebook. In Vietnam this meant the creation of an enormous gulag of prisons, "re-education camps and new economic zones to deal with the hundreds of thousands of people and their families who had dared to swim against the tides of history. Less than three years later, the devious dialectics of international realignment forced the Vietnamese Communist leaders to begin to undertake a final solution to their ethnic Chinese "problem". (p. 3)
As if these atrocities did not suffice, the Hanoi regime in 1978 began a racist pogrom against its ethnic Chinese citizens.... This racist policy, like the earlier repressive policies, elicited the protest of the civilized wing of the American antiwar movement, led by Joan Baez. But it did not raise a murmur from Professor Chomsky and friends. (p. 27) The Vietnamese Communist regime, which had launched a military invasion of its neighbor under the pretext of saving the Cambodian people from Pol Pot, had prevented food and medicines from being delivered to the starving population via a truck convoy from Thailand. According to the Central Intelligence Agency study Kampuchea: A Demographic Catastrophe (recommended to me by Professor Chomsky), the Vietnamese invasion and food embargo caused 700,000 deaths in Cambodia in 1979. (p. 26) After all the Vietnamese Communists are, and always have been, great admirers of Joseph Stalin. Stalin gave the Vietnamese Communists their moral and political upbringing in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.... It is also to be expected that Stalin's enthusiastic students would conceal their crimes with the same techniques that he used.... Finally let us turn to the moral climax of the Chomsky-Herman book -- their apologies for Pol Pot... The facts about the brutality about the Khmer Rouge were known as early as 1975.... Later, John Barron and Anthony Paul attempted to conduct their own refugee interviews in order to provide a more systematic account of the Holocaust. Their book Murder of a Gentle Land reported cruelty reminiscent of Nazi death camps. Because Barron and Paul were politically conservative, many intellectuals in the West refused to take any notice of the story they were presenting. It took another study by Francois Ponchaud, a French pries with previous sympathies for the Khmer Rouge, to persuade the most stubborn doubters. By 1978 most people in the Western world had come to realize that hell on earth had been created in Democratic Kampuchea. The belated shock of these revelations of horror stirred Professor Chomsky to write in defense of Pol Pot... Chomsky and Herman used much the same scholarly techniques which we say employed in their attempts to whitewash the Hanoi regime. (p. 30)
Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia Stephen Morris
Click to read complete Preface, and Chapter 9: Consequences of Invasion on Facebook
Abstract (Jan. 1981): The invasion and occupation of Kampuchea was only one aspect of Vietnam's general policy of building up, by force if necessary, an 'Indochina bloc' conceived of as a system of compulsory and permanent 'friendship and co-operation' in furtherance of Vietnam's national unity and 'socialist' development. Again, Hanoi's consummation of an all-embracing alliance with the Soviet Union in 1978 was no sudden and involuntary reaction to the 'Chinese threat' but a qualitatively new alignment tailored to the requirements of asserting Vietnam's 'leadership' over Indochina and, specifically, for solving the thorny 'Kampuchean problem' once for all. Kampuchea itself was not at all a minor issue for Vietnam, but almost a life-and-death matter, both because of its intrinsic importance as an integral and indispensable part of Indochina (as the crucial agricultural 'hinterland' for Vietnam's industrial revolution) and, more important, because of the fierce nationalism and stubborn defiance of Kampuchea which could jeopardise Vietnam's entire Indochina project. Vietnam's decision to assume direct physical control of Kampuchea was, and remains, an extremely costly business in every respect, and the normally prudent and sensible authorities in Hanoi would not have embarked upon such a risky venture except as a desperate measure of last resort. Click to read complete 4-page article, on Facebook.
Click to read the full 3-page UN Resolution, on Facebook.
Click to read full 4-page UN resolution, on Facebook.
I had Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick for a professor at Georgetown University. Click to read full statement on Facebook
Kampuchea in 1981: Fragile Stalemate Timothy Carney, Asian Survey (Jan. 1982) I met Tim and his wife once at a small gathering at their home in Washington, DC. years ago when I was living there.
Click to read the 10-page article on Facebook
Pen Sovan was the first Prime Minister propped up by Vietnam during its military occupation of Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge. In this chapter, he recounted his 5-hour meeting on 27 March 1981 with Le Duc Tho—yes, the same Le Duc Tho who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with Kissinger, but he turned it down—and one other Vietnamese official, where Le Duc Tho asked him as Prime Minister to broadcast to other officials a list of points, mainly: K5 plan, fake troop withdrawal, annexation of territory, Vietnamese settlers. He did not raise them with the other Cambodian officials.
Vietnam subsequently arrested him and put him in solitary confinement in Hanoi for his resistance against the Vietnamization of Cambodia. He was only freed as part of the Paris Peace Agreement, over a decade later. Click to read the complete chapter, on Facebook.
Pen Sovan recalled when Hun Sen and Say Phouthang accompanied Vietnamese soldiers to arrest him as 1st Vietnamese-installed Prime Minister at his residence in Phnom Penh, bounded him onto plane for solitary confinement in Hanoi. Vietnam installed Chan Si (or Chan Sy), then its propped-up Defense Minster, as PRK’s 2nd Prime Minister. '
He was later murdered in December 1984 for his refusal to continue implementing the K5 Genocide, the killing off of Cambodian males; according to Pen Sovan, between the ages of 18-48 years.
Vietnam filled the vacant PM position with Foreign Minister Hun Sen in January 1985.
Vietnam also at this time replaced the Hanoi Khmers (ex. Pen Sovan, Chan Si) with the more battle-hardened Khmer Rouge (Hun Sen, Chea Sim) into senior, executive leadership. Psychologically they were more ready to please and kill compared to those who had been away from the battlefields in the safety of Hanoi since the 1950s. The K5 plan took off with even greater fury.
In December 1981, it was not politically viable to kill Pen Sovan even if sickness was given for his absence from the scene in the shroud of darkness. Also the K5 plan had not been fully off the ground. Chan Si, however, had to die. As Defense Minister, having overseen for 3 years the conscription en masse, he knew intimately the cost to lives, particularly Cambodian men’s, particularly massive deaths’ fury in 1984. Click to read complete chapter on his imprisonment, on Facebook.
** Cambodia in 1982 **
Click to read the 11-page article here, at Facebook.
Kampuchea in 1982: Ploughing Toward Recovery
Click to read the 11-page article, at Facebook.
** Cambodia in 1983 **
Click to read the full article in Foreign Affairs (Winter 1983) on Facebook.
Brother Enemy by Nayan Chanda
Click to read the ASEAN Foreign Ministers' Appeal for Kampuchean Independence.
Click to read complete article, on Facebook.
Click here to read the complete article, on Facebook.
** Cambodia in 1984 **
Click here to read the full article, on Facebook
Click to read complete exchange on Facebook
Click to read complete article, on Facebook.
The Vietnamization of Kampuchea: A New Model of Colonialism Indochina Report (October 1984) Part II: Vietnamization of the Economic Framework (continued) The Unequal Exchange
It is within this new institutional framework that the Vietnamese are asserting their hold over the economy and future of Kampuchea. Fisheries, rubber and rice are the three main sectors affected by what should be termed the Unequal Exchange between Vietnam and Kampuchea.
As for fisheries, a cooperation accord was signed on 20 January 1984 between Phnom Penh's Ministry of Agriculture and Hanoi's Ministry of Marines Products.
During his visit to Phnom Penh, the Vietnamese Minister Nguyen Tien Trinh has pledged to provide "all kinds of assistance to the PRK's Ministry of Agriculture, including fishing tools and moral, maternal and technical aid for building fishing sites and shrimp boats for sea fishing, in order to develop the Kampuchea-Vietnam solidarity in fisheries." On this occasion, Khmer Minister of Planning Chea Soth curiously expressed the confidence that "with the assistance of the Vietnamese delegation, Kampuchea's fisheries will soon make progress!"
In reality, what is this accord about? Behind all the redundant jargon, the agreement serves only to sanction the near monopoly of the Vietnamese over the fisheries resources in Kampuchea, and in particular in the Sea-Lake area (Tonle Sap). Since the beginning of 1983, all fishing activities in this area have to be registered at the local "Production Office" (Phong Tang Gia), which provide all the necessary tools such as boat motors, gas and nets, in exchange for 90 per cent of the catch. Thus, the Rear Services and Supply Department of the Vietnamese occupying forces collects some 50 tones of fish (of the 150 tonnes daily catch) which are then distributed to all the units stationed in Kampuchea. Besides, 60 tonnes of fish are sent daily by cargo ship to Chau Doc, My Tho, Can Tho, and Saigon. Recently, the Vietnamese Authority set up cold storage facilities in Kampuchea to reduce losses in storage and processing.
Rubber is another product which is systematically exploited by the Vietnamese in Kampuchea. With approximately 50,000 tonnes produced in the prewar years, rubber was Kampuchea's most important export commodity after rice.
During the Khmer Rouge period, rubber production had totally collapsed. Since 1980, with the direct intervention of Hanoi's General Rubber Department, the production and processing of latex had steadily expanded and in 1981, 18,577 tonnes of rubber were exported, exclusively to the Soviet Union. In 1983, latex exports to the same country even increased by 40 per cent. This year the production is expected to reach that of the prewar years.
Such an increase in the rubber production is not only due to the expansion of rubber plantations and latex treatment enterprises or the building of new crepe processing workshops with the assistance of the Soviet Union but is also due to an over-exploitation by the Vietnamese of some 60,000 hectares of heveas plantations, mostly located in the district of Kompong Cham (Choup, Kret, Svay, Chroum, and Svay Thep).
As for the plantations of Choup, according to a Vietnamese dissident source, the Hanoi authorities have mobilized since 1981 some 20,000 young people, not only from the Dong Nai province (South Vietnam), but also from Thai Binh, Thanh Hoa, Nghe Tinh and Ha Nam Ninh (North Vietnam). Considered as a 'New Economic Zone' the Choup Rubber Plantation is today divided into 12 work farms (nong troung).
Its administration has been taken over by the Vietnamese state-owned Dong Nai Rubber Company which employs only some 4,000 Khmer workers. The annual production of latex is up to 15,000 tonnes which are directly transported to Kompong Som to be taken away in Soviet ships.
And what is the state of rice production in Kampuchea. Recently, the Heng Samrin regime announced a food shortage of 228,000 tonnes of milled rice for 1984, with the 1983-84 monsoon and dry season rice crops yielding only 864,000 tonnes of milled rice. UN sources forecast that an acute food shortage will develop in July-October 1984 and a full famine emergency may occur in 1985, if large relief operations are not mounted soon. Such a dramatic situation could no longer be put wither on the account of the Khmer Rouge's legacy, or on the war situation. In fact, it stems mainly from the very fact that the Vietnamese occupying forces, as well as the Vietnamese settlers, are misappropriating a good part of the Khmer rice. Aid workers in Phnom Penh reported that there are rice shipments by boat down the Mekong River to Vietnam.
Indeed, it is widely admitted by foreign observers that the Bo Doi has the right to requisition the rice and other farm products directly from the Khmer peasants and for his personal needs. Since the reorganization in 1979-80 of the labor force into about 95,000 Krom Samaki (of 12 to 15 families each), the collection of crops and taxes has become more systematic. Through the local Production Offices, some 25,000 tonnes of rice are annually diverted by the Rear Service and Supply Department to the Vietnamese occupying forces. The arrival of thousands of Vietnamese families in the Eastern regions bordering Vietnam (Kratie, Kompong Cham,Prey Veng, Takeo, Svay Rieng) has considerably aggravated the food situation in Kampuchea since the Khmer peasants are forced to share their lands, labor tools and even the paddy crops. Furthermore, the Vietnamese advisors of Phnom Penh's Ministry of Finance have just established a new farming tax. called "Viphiekatien Sneha Cheat Samrap Dey Srae" or national contribution on paddy fields."'
An agreement on economic and technical cooperation for 1984 was signed on 21 January between Hanoi's Food Ministry and Phnom Penh's Trade Ministry. By virtue of this accord, the Vietnamese will aid Kampuchea in installing the network of rice huskers, setting up a service to control the quality of foodstuffs and training cadres in this sector (67). Are the Vietnamese authorities eager to expand their control over the rice production in Kampuchea? Anyway; according to another incontrovertible source, the biggest rice processing factory in the District of Siem Reap is in the hands of the Vietnamese, who have introduced the planting of the IR-36 rice grain in the area (68)
The twinning of "sister provinces between Kampuchea and Vietnam, completed in the summer of 1983, has installed another institutional framework for the Unequal Exchange. Indeed, this technique allows the Vietnamese to reap the full benefit of the national resources of Kampuchea under the umbrella of the so-called "shining solidarity between Vietnam and Kampuchea," since the twinning process imposes all kinds of accompanying obligations upon the Khmer people.
List of Sister Provinces 1. Ho Chi Minh City Phnom Penh 2. Ha Tien Kompong Som 3. Binh Tri Thien Siem Reap 4. Quang Narn Danang Battambang 5. Nghia Binh Ratanakiri 6. Gia Lai Kong Turn Mondulkiri 7. Phu Khanh Kratie 8. Dac Lac Kandal 9. Thuan Hai Koh Kong 10. Lam Dong Stung Treng 11. Song Be Preah Vithear 12. Tay Ninh Kompong Cham 13. Dong Nal Oddar Manchey 14. Long An Svay Rieng 15. Dong Thap Pursat 16. Ben Tre Kompong Speu 17. Cuu Long akeo 18. An Giang Kompong Thom 19. Hau Giang Kompong Chhnang 20. Minh Hal Kampot
Some examples suffice to show that the twinning of the Khmer provinces only serves to facilitate the economic integration of Kampuchea within Vietnam's economy. It is not a coincidence that the rich province of Battambang is coupled with the overpopulated region of Quang Nam. Indeed, a good part of rice from this province is annually sent to Danang, which is always in a state of chronic food shortage, in order to help the Vietnamese to meet their requirements. In exchange. the Khmers receive bicycles and cement (69) Siem Reap, twinned with Binh Tri Thien, has to provide the Vietnamese, besides paddy crops, with the missing farm products, such as corn, lotus seeds and salt vegetables. To reciprocate, workers from Hue and its suburb, are now investing in the expanding building industry in Siem Reap, where the Khmer workers are forced to find the clay, while the Vietnamese new settlers produce bricks and tiles, earning a monthly salary of 90 riels. In Siem Reap, the Vietnamese also control the biggest factory of fish sauce (nuoc mam) (70)
In some other important twinned provinces, such as Phnom Penh (with Ho Chi Minh City), Kompong Cham (with Tay Ninh) of Kompong Som (with Ha Tien), the Vietnamese settlers will eventually control the commerce in basic products, such as fabric and clothing, crockery, oil, salt and soap, while the Khmers continue to contribute the traditional dry fish and the usual fruits. But among all these trends, the Vietnamese penetration in key commercial sectors in Kampuchea appears to produce far reaching effects in the long run. Will the Vietnamese eventually replace the Chinese in the Khmer economy? Anyway, such a trend is inseparable from a deliberate policy of Vietnamese settlement in Kampuchea.
In contrast to Pol Pot's radical, doctrinaire approach to economic development, Heng Samrin and the leaders of the Kampuchean (or Khmer) National United Front for National Salvation (KNUFNS), the umbrella group of anti-Pol Pot forces sponsored by Hanoi, sought to rally public support by formulating a policy that would be pragmatic, realistic, and flexible. In an eleven-point program promulgated shortly before the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, the front articulated the economic guidelines that would mark its tenure in power. These guidelines advocated a gradual transformation to socialism; a "planned economy with markets"; the restoration of banks, of currency, and of trade; and the abolition of forced labor. But so-called "Voluntary" work soon assumed particularly brutal proportions in Cambodia after the Vietnamese invasion. With the installation of the Heng Samrin regime, tens of thousands of students, civil servants, and employees were "volunteered" for two months of work in the fields, combined with political indoctrination to enlighten the peasants about the advantages of the new collective form of labor being introduced in the villages, known as Solidarity Production Teams (SPT). Large numbers of Cambodian civilians were also recruited after 1979 on a "voluntary basis," i.e., without pay, to work under Vietnamese army supervision on military construction projects. In January 1979, an invasion by Vietnamese forces drove the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh into the countryside, and sparked a 13-year civil war. Since Cambodia was surrounded on its other borders by Vietnam and Laos, Thailand was the only front along which such external aid could reach the Khmer Rouge.Thai military and government authorities repeatedly denied any involvement or connivance in the shipment of military hardware. In the 1980s Thailand was not so much supporting the Khmer Rouge as protecting it. Aid from China reached the Khmer Rouge from Thailand. Such military supplies were brought in by boat and offloaded at Hat Lek or in other places in Chanthaburi or Trat provinces, and then moved to the border. Since the mid-1970s, more than 500,000 Cambodians had fled into Thailand, first in response to the reign of the Khmer Rouge and later to escape the 1978 Vietnamese invasion and subsequent war with Cambodian resistance fighters. It is estimated that as of 1991 more than 350,000 refugees and displaced persons remained in the border camps. Insurgent factions at the Thai-Cambodian Border utilized the many refugee camps as sources of medical supply, food, and safe haven for their families. The Khmer Rouge would relocate camps from the Thai-Cambodia border into more obscure, mountainous regions, making them more suitable as bases from which to launch insurrection. In the early 1990s, unrepentant Khmer Rouge forces were still getting assistance from across the border in Thailand. After the 1984-85 dry season offensive. the Vietnamese did not withdraw from the area but continued their attacks against resistance forces and civilian camps. As a result, Cambodians were forced into Thailand, where they were granted temporary asylum until conditions inside Cambodia improved sufficiently to permit their return. The dry season offensive of 1984-1985 destroyed the major camps of the resistance located in the Thai border areas. To reinforce this victory, the Vietnamse sought to seal the country against infiltration by the guerrillas and prevent the population from fleeing to the border. At the beginning of 1984, the Vietnamese leadership decided to seal the Thai border. The Vietnamese Communist Party's central committee decided in early 1984 to build a "defense line" some eight hundred kilometers long. This series of defensive fortifications along the Thai border was designed to prevent resistance infiltration. The decision to build the "bamboo wall" was never publicly announced. But as early as July 1984 it was announced that Cambodians must go to the border for several months a year, in regions mined and highly infected by malaria. Volunteer work on defense projects became a nightmare for countless Khmers, beginning in July 1984, when the Vietnamese began building the so-called "Bamboo Wall," Hundreds of thousands of Khmers were recruited and sent to the border for periods of three to six months. The requisitioning of civilians started in September 1984. Two or three times a year contingents of so-called "volunteer" workers were recruited for periods ranging from three to six months. A quota was set by the central government for each province, in proportion to the local population. The provinces determined the quotas for each district, the districts doing the same for the communes and the communes for the villages. For the whole country, each departure gathered an average of 100,000 to 120,000 persons. Work on what the Cambodians called the "K-5" project was essentially slave labor, and conditions in the malaria-infested and heavily mined border regions were appalling and dangerous. A minimum of 50,000 "volunteers" were estimated to have succumbed to yellow fever alone by the end of 1986, prompting one Western observer to refer to the campaign as the "new genocide." The construction from 1984 was implemented in several steps. The first task was clearing a strip of land three to four kilometers wide along the border, through forests and mountains. Next, constructoin work included excavating trenches, building dams, setting up bamboo fences lined with barbed wire and mine fields. Finally, a strategic road was opened running along the "wall", to convey troops and ammunition and monitor the frontier. According to one estimate, at least one million people participated in the labor from September 1984 to end of 1986. The ninth contingent left for the border in October 1986. Each contingent numbered an average of 120,000 persons. The mortality rate from malaria amounted to around 5%, so there would have been a minimum of 50,000 dead from malaria alone during this period. The intention was to seal the border with Thailand by a combination of deforestation, dykes, canals, strategic fences, and minefields. The construction itself went more slowly than planned, and, three years after the work started, only a few sections were completed.
Big Brother in Cambodia in 1984: Orwellian nature of Vietnamese Military Occupation of Cambodia
Orwell's 1984 and Hun Sen's 1984 1. Orwell: Two Minutes Hate, Hate Week | Hun Sen: Day of Hatred 2. "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past" 3. Manipulation of language: (a) neutral "Yuon" as racist (but only in Cambodia after occupation, and not in Thailand); (b) nuanced placing of blame on "Pol Pot-Ieng Sary-Khieu Samphan clique" (naming of individuals) rather than the "Khmer Rouge" (translated as "Red Khmer") or understood to be Cambodian communists; the focus should be shifted away from Communist ideology as the Vietnamese occupiers were Communists themselves to particular individuals, e.g. "ah-Pot" (contemptible Pol Pot). To this day, the older CPP cadres and the older generation in the provinces continue to use "Pol Pot" rather than "Khmer Rouge". I encountered this firsthand a few years ago with a former Khmer Rouge cadre, KEO Sok, responsible for issuing the arrest warrant for my mom and us her 5 children, who in conversation with me and the Financial Times, never referred to "Khmer Krahom" (or Khmer Rouge in Cambodian) but always the "Pol Pol regime" or just "Pol Pot". The 20-something-year-old Cambodian interpreter kept translating "Pol Pot regime" as "Khmer Rouge" during the course of the long conversation; (c) "traitor" -- the charge that Hun Sen and Say Phouthang accompanied by a phalanx of Vietnamese soldiers delivered to then-prime minister Pen Sovan at his residence before he was airlifted to Hanoi for solitary confinement; the multiple charges against Sam Rainsy, Kem Sokha and other opposition figures. (d) political captions and listening tours at Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek memorials (e) "friendship" treaties
"Friendship" image from the PRK era. And WE are the racists?!
NPR: "...the clandestine archive whose code name was "Oyneg Shabes" (joy of the Sabbath). Fully aware that they and their neighbors were unlikely to live to tell their stories, the members of Oyneg Shabes collected writings, documents, and artifacts. Just before the April 1943 ghetto uprising, the archivists buried the material in three caches. (Two were unearthed in, respectively, 1946 and 1950; the third remains underground.)
The history of this remarkable undertaking was recounted in a 2007 book by American historian Samuel Kassow. …
The writings that were buried under the ghetto, soon to be burned to the ground by German troops, offer as many viewpoints as the people who contributed their words to the project. Together, though, they constitute what one historian calls "one great accusation."
Published Articles re Vietnamization - 7 Parts អត្ថបទ បានបោះពុម្ភផ្សាយ អំពី វៀតណាមនីយកម្ម - ៧ ផ្នែក
1. Cambodia 1979-1984 (Genocides under Occupation, Jan. 7, Orwellian) កម្ពុជា ១៩៧៩ - ១៩៨៤ (អំពើប្រល័យពូជសាសន៍ ក្រោមការកាន់កាប់, ៧ ខែមករា, «បងធំ»)
2. Cambodia 1985-1990 (K5 Genocide, Vietnam Security Intelligence Monitoring My FB, Blacklisted); What's past is prologue.
កម្ពុជា ១៩៨៥ - ១៩៩០ (ឧក្រិដ្ឋកម្ម ប្រល័យពូជសាសន៍ ក៥, ស៊ើបការណ៍សម្ងាត់ វៀតណាម ត្រួតពិនិត្យ ហ្វេសប៊ុកខ្ញុំ, បញ្ជីខ្មៅ)
3. Cambodia 1991-1999 (Paris Peace Accords)
កម្ពុជា ១៩៩១ - ១៩៩៩ (កិច្ចព្រមព្រៀង សន្តិភាព ប៉ារីស)
4. Cambodia 2000-Present (ECCC "Genocide" verdict)
កម្ពុជា ២០០០ - បច្ចុប្បន្ន (សាលក្រម «ឧក្រិដ្ឋកម្ម ប្រល័យពូជសាសន៍» នៃសាលាក្តី ខ្មែរក្រហម)
5. Vietnamization: Demographic, Military, By Province, Along Border, Economic
វៀតណាមនីយកម្ម៖ ប្រជាសាស្ត្រ, យោធា, តាមខេត្ត, តាមបណ្តោយព្រំដែន, សេដ្ឋកិច្ច
6. Vietnamization: China Responds, ប្រវត្តិសាស្រ្ត (ខេមរ ភាសា)
វៀតណាមនីយកម្ម៖ ចិនឆ្លើយតប, ប្រវត្តិសាស្រ្ត (ខេមរ ភាសា)
7. Vietnamization: Third-Party Spokespeople, Helen Jarvis, Ben Kiernan's Yale Genocide Program, "Yuon" Racism, Ad Hominen
វៀតណាមនីយកម្ម៖ អ្នកនាំពាក្យ ភាគីទីបី, ហេឡិន ចាវីស, កម្មវិធី ប្រឆាំង អំពើប្រល័យពូជសាសន៍ របស់ បិន ឃឺននីន នៅសាកលវិទ្យាល័យ យ៉េល, ការប្រកាន់ពូជសាសន៍ «យួន», តក្កវិជ្ជា យោងតាម មនុស្ស ជាជាង ភាពត្រឹមត្រូវ នៃគំនិត
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