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Vietnam Conflict with Cambodia
Serious trouble between Hanoi and the Khmer Rouge under Pol
Pot began at the end of the Second Indochina War when both PAVN
troops and the Khmer Rouge engaged in "island grabbing" and
seizures of each other's territory, chiefly small areas in
dispute between Vietnam and Cambodia for decades. What goaded
Hanoi to take decisive action was Pol Pot's determination to
indoctrinate all Khmer with hatred for Vietnam, thus making
Hanoi's goal of eventual Indochinese federation even more
difficult to accomplish. Vietnam's Political Bureau had several
options in "solving the Pol Pot problem," as it was officially
termed. Vietnam's wartime relationship with the Khmer Rouge had
been one of domination, in which control had been maintained
through the intercession of native Khmers, numbering
approximately five thousand, who had lived and trained in North
Vietnam. The Political Bureau reasoned that by controlling the
Khmer Rouge "five thousand" faction it could control the Khmer
(Kampuchean) Communist Party, which in turn would control the
Cambodian state and society. This strategy broke down when most
of the Khmer communist cadres trained in Vietnam were executed by
Pol Pot.
In another effort, the Political Bureau dispatched Le Duan to
Phnom Penh soon after the end of the war for a stern meeting with
Pol Pot, but his efforts to persuade or intimidate failed. A
series of punitive military strikes followed with the objective
of triggering the overthrow of Pol Pot. Some of these assaults,
such as the one in the
Parrot's Beak (see Glossary) region in
1977, involved as many as 90,000 PAVN troops, but they came to
nothing. There also were covert Vietnamese attempts to eliminate
Pol Pot by bribing his bodyguards to assassinate him.
Finally, in early 1978, Hanoi returned to tested methods of
revolutionary guerrilla warfare. Special PAVN teams recruited
volunteers for a future Khmer liberation army from Khmer refugee
camps in southern Vietnam. About 300 of the most promising were
taken to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), installed in the
former Cambodian embassy building, and organized into armed
propaganda teams, with Khmer Rouge defector Heng Samrin in charge
of training. The plan, according to program defectors, was to
send armed propaganda teams, like the Kampuchea Liberation Front,
into Cambodian provinces along the Vietnamese border to
infiltrate Khmer villages and begin organization and mobilization
work. A Radio Liberation broadcast unit would be established, a
liberated area would be proclaimed, and eventually a Provisional
Revolutionary Government of Kampuchea would be formed that would
then dispatch emissaries abroad in search of support. In late
1978, however, this revolutionary guerrilla war strategy was
suddenly abandoned in favor of a full-scale, blitzkrieg-style
attack on Cambodia. Later it became evident that the idea for the
attack had come from young PAVN officers, many of whom had been
trained in Moscow, who had assured the Political Bureau that the
matter could be resolved in a maximum of six months. The
Political Bureau's decision to attempt a military solution in
Cambodia was taken against the advice of General Giap and
probably most of the other older PAVN generals.
PAVN struck across the Cambodian border from the Parrot's
Beak area of Vietnam on Christmas Day 1978. The drive was
characterized by a highly visible Soviet-style offensive with
tank-led infantry that plunged suddenly across the border, drove
to the Thai border, and then fanned out to occupy Cambodia within
days. Heng Samrin and his 300 Khmer cadres proceeded to form a
new government, called the People's Republic of Kampuchea, in
Phnom Penh, and began building an army to take over from the
occupying PAVN by 1990. The first indication to the PAVN high
command in Hanoi that it was in fact trapped in a protracted
conflict came in the summer of 1979, when a major pacification
drive, launched by PAVN forces using some 170,000 troops, proved
to be inconclusive. It was only in the wake of that drive that
PAVN settled down to the slow task of pacifying Cambodia.
Officially, PAVN troops in Cambodia were volunteers,
performing what were called their "internationalist duties." The
number involved decreased over the years, from 220,000 in January
1979 to 140,000 in January 1987. As the war progressed, Hanoi
officials increasingly portrayed it as a struggle against China
and labeled the Khmer insurgent forces as Chinese surrogates. By
late 1982, they had begun to portray the war as a thing of the
past, claiming that Vietnamese dominance had become irreversible,
with only mopping up of scattered pockets of opposition yet to
accomplish. The Cambodian resistance, however, continued, never
able to challenge PAVN seriously, certainly not able to drive it
from the country, but still gaining in strength. By 1987 the
resistance was stronger than it had been at any time since 1979.
To reduce strain on its system and to quiet outside criticism,
PAVN lowered the profile of the war. There were fewer military
sweeps into guerrilla lairs and greater use of artillery, more
static guard duty, and less road patrolling. Military forces
concentrated on keeping open the lines of communication, guarding
the towns, and building up Phnom Penh's fledgling army--the Khmer
People's Revolutionary Armed Forces (KPRAF). At the same time,
increments of PAVN forces were withdrawn from Cambodia each year
in what the Chinese press labeled the "annual semi-withdrawal
performance." By 1986 Hanoi was stating that all PAVN forces
would be withdrawn from Cambodia by 1990, a decision officials
insisted was "absolute and without conditions."
In retrospect, Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia appears to have
been a serious mistake. Apparently it was a decision hastily
taken in the belief that a quick, successful takeover would force
the Chinese to accept the new situation as a fait accompli. The
undertaking was also based on the estimate that Pol Pot had
neither the political base nor the military power to resist a
traumatic assault, which would shatter his capability to govern
and cause the Khmer people to rally overwhelmingly to the new
government. Assumptions proved wrong, and the strategy failed.
The invasion did not solve the Pol Pot problem, but rather bogged
Vietnam down in a costly war that tarnished its image abroad and
undermined relations with China that might otherwise have been
salvaged. The war drained the economy and continued to be one of
Vietnam's unsolved national security problems in late 1987.
Data as of December 1987
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