When the War Was Over (68 page)

After searching for a modus vivendi with the Lon Nol regime to aid the Vietnamese communists, the Chinese dramatically increased their support for both Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge. In this regard they were more cautious than the Vietnamese communists, who expanded their war into Cambodia against the Lon Nol regime within days of the coup.

The Vietnamese expanded their influence in Laos and Cambodia through their army, pushing deep into territory in both nations and fighting their wars for communism. The Chinese sought to broaden their ties with Lao and Khmer communists through politics and aid. They were searching for safeguards against “encroachment” of their sphere of influence by the Soviet Union or its allies. Nearly one million Soviet troops were massed along China's northern border at the time, with Moscow regularly promising to “teach the Chinese a lesson.”

China hosted the 1970 “Conference in Solidarity with the Indochinese People” at Canton and put Prince Sihanouk as the chair of the meeting. Later the Vietnamese claimed they had authored the front joining Sihanouk with the Khmer Rouge, but the evidence suggests the alliance was brokered by China. And during the 1970 conference China won Vietnam's promise to treat the Cambodian revolutionaries as equals and help build their army.

While the Vietnamese gave uninvited help to build the Khmer Rouge army and fought off Lon Nol's forces in the process, this enforced cooperation undercut relations rather than repaired them. The Vietnamese at first wanted to mix military commands inside Cambodia, undertake joint propaganda activities, and open a Vietnamese military school in northeastern Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge refused all of these and any other suggestions to blend the two communist armies and organizations together. They feared this would be the beginning of a campaign to absorb their army into
the Vietnamese army, giving Hanoi ultimate command over the Cambodian revolution. The Vietnamese would have resisted such an offer from the Chinese for a proposed mixed military command during the First Indochina War, particularly if China had suggested earlier that Vietnam become a minority member of a Greater China Union or Soviet.

This was a rehearsal for the deadly competition that fell on Indochina when the war was over, probing the defenses of the various communist actors to determine how best to come out on top and in control. The Soviet Union was the most stolid. Moscow continued to concentrate its support on Hanoi and treated the Cambodian War as the last chapter of the Second Indochina War. Moscow left open its embassy in Phnom Penh throughout the war, and belatedly accepted low-level representation by the Sihanouk/ Khmer Rouge front.

China moved closer to Washington. In 1970 Beijing began secret talks with the Nixon administration. In 1972 President Nixon made his historic trip to Beijing, giving official American recognition of China twenty-three years after Mao's victory. Nixon also visited the Soviet Union that year and signed the SALT arms limitation treaty. It was the height of the American campaign to wrest concessions from Hanoi at the Paris peace talks, and the North Vietnamese leadership was distressed that its allies were entertaining Nixon and forging new agreements at their expense.

The North Vietnamese had no doubt that Moscow and Beijing were taking advantage of their predicament. The question was only who was the true enemy, and Hanoi already had the answer. Thereafter, North Vietnam's communist leaders secretly blamed all their problems on Beijing. China was trying to reinstate their “Han chauvinism,” their “imperial politics of traditional China . . . Chinese hegemony over all of Southeast Asia.” Worse, China wanted to break up the “traditional solidarity” of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

Vietnam's dispute with China inspired and fed Vietnam's problems with the Khmer Rouge, and vice versa. A triangle of fear developed before the war ended. In 1973 Vietnam signed the Paris Peace Accords, upsetting Prince Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge and unleashing, inadvertently, the American air war against Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge believed they were the injured party; North Vietnam had urged Sihanouk to negotiate and had cut back aid to the Khmer Rouge once the prince refused.

But China answered in kind against Hanoi. China completely approved of the Khmer Rouge decision to fight until a military victory and after 1973 scaled down its support to North Vietnam. Moreover, China did not give its
wholehearted approval to the accords. Later, Beijing claimed to have been worried that the accords gave the north carte blanche to take over the south at the time of victory

By 1974 a race had developed between the two communist armies of Vietnam and Cambodia over who would win victory first. Each believed the other was trying to thwart victory. The Khmer Rouge say, with evidence, that the Vietnamese not only cut back on aid but prevented Chinese aid from reaching them. Vietnam, suffering from Chinese aid cutbacks, had to watch helplessly as China took back the disputed Paracel Islands from the South Vietnamese that year, islands Hanoi wanted to rule.

By the time of victory, wheels within wheels of suspicion had grown until they were out of control. Relations between the United States and China became the Vietnamese litmus test for Chinese betrayal. Vietnamese ties to the Soviet Union served the same purpose for Beijing. These galloping fears formed a medley of suspicion in communist Asia and set off the domino reaction in postwar Indochina.

These fears were well founded. All three countries—Vietnam, Cambodia, and China—had suffered from American treachery and American aggression. They had all felt the sting of betrayal by close allies. They all faced nearly insurmountable problems at home, where their people were told to expect economic and social miracles from the revolution.

But there were also rewards for this triangle of paranoia. Chinese fears of the Soviet Union could justify Chinese intentions to keep Indochina within its sphere of influence. Vietnamese fears of China could justify Vietnam's dominance over and later its invasion of Cambodia. Cambodian fears of the old Indochinese Communist Party's plans and “historic” fears of Vietnamese dominance could be used to deflect the people from misery at home, and ensure continued, largely unquestioning, support from China.

Vietnam, however, was the pivotal member of the triangle. And it was Vietnam that stretched the fears to the limit. Eventually the Vietnamese claimed that China was acting like an “historic” enemy and planned to colonize Vietnam while exterminating the Vietnamese race. Moreover, and without a shred of proof, the Vietnamese said the Cambodians were conniving with the Chinese to destroy the Vietnamese race and had agreed to allow China to use Cambodia to invade Vietnam. Given this “life-or-death” scenario, the Vietnamese could justify invading and occupying Cambodia. And that is what they did.

They fled in rickety boats by the thousands, then the tens of thousands, braving the pirates and storms of the South China Sea to escape Vietnam. They became known collectively as the “boat people,” Vietnamese who were forced out of their country or who could no longer bear it.

The larger exodus began in 1978 and continued for years. It was an awful and awesome spectacle. By tradition Vietnamese are close to their land, country, and customs. They stayed put in their homeland through the two Indochina wars, famine, and over a century of colonization. Even when these calamities forced the people to flee their home villages and ancestral plots, they stayed in Vietnam, some traveling from north to south or south to north and back again but always remaining within the boundaries of Vietnam.

But when peace finally settled over the land, when the promised revolution for social and economic justice had begun, when Vietnamese should have been enjoying the fruits of “freedom and independence,” they left their country. Vietnamese from north and south, from all classes, with every kind of political view, fled their land in a movement of historic proportions.

This mysterious flight of the boat people is a major key to understanding the Vietnamese-Cambodian War and the dreadful consequences of that triangle of disputes between Cambodia, Vietnam, and China which ignited the Third Indochina War.

At first glance the connection between the boat people and the war for Cambodia is not obvious. The boat people themselves said they fled their country for every reason but Cambodia: They fled because they were unwanted ethnic Chinese caught in the disputes between Vietnam and China; or because Hanoi had announced a drastic change in the southern economy that put them out of business; or because their living standards had plummeted. They said they feared the society no longer wanted them and they would end up in a reeducation camp. Young men said they feared they would be drafted into Vietnam's expanding army

The boat people composed a deadly flotilla of complaints against Hanoi; the South China Sea was a graveyard for the Vietnamese forced out by the new regime. More than that, their small craft were the equivalent of thousands of red warning flags proclaiming that the ills of postwar Vietnam had exploded and that explosion was pushing Hanoi to extremes. Vietnam was angry and frightened, afraid of China and Cambodia, afraid that nothing would succeed in liberated Vietnam, not the dream of socialism and a prosperous reconstructed Vietnam within the lifetime of the aging leaders, and particularly not the dream of one, cohesive Indochinese communist bloc headed by Hanoi.

The boat people were the first victims of a furious disillusion that led inextricably to the war between Vietnam and Cambodia, a link that is obvious if one views postwar Indochina from the vantage of Hanoi.

The army of North Vietnam took the surrender of the Saigon regime on April 31, 1975. It was the end of the Republic of Vietnam, of American hopes to hold back the course of Vietnamese history and, pointedly, the abrupt end of the separate southern cause of the PRG and the NLF. All of this was apparent on the first day of victory when three divisions of soldiers under North Vietnamese command took the surrender and walked through a loophole that gave Hanoi control over the entire country—north and south.

The 1973 Paris Peace Accords the Cambodian communists so despised had set the stage for this conquest. The North Vietnamese convinced the United States to drop its demand that they withdraw their troops from the south, a concession that nearly everyone recognized as the death warrant for America's ally, the Republic of Vietnam. What was not obvious was the moral effect the same clause would have on Hanoi's southern allies.

After both sides broke the cease-fire imposed by the peace accords, Hanoi began plotting the final victory. By December 1974 the North Vietnamese were prepared to design the final offensive. For twenty-two days the party's political bureau met in the north to hammer out the details, which they knew would not require the political or military inconvenience of a coalition government—with either representatives from the enemy Thieu regime or their own NLF allies. The North Vietnamese were in place in the south and could deliver a military defeat. There was no need for a “front” or a southern revolutionary regime. There was no need for a transitional southern government. On the first day the south was placed under martial law by the northern army That same day the northern army took over what remained of the southern pro-communist forces known as the Vietcong. The north said it was “unifying the two armies”: Indeed it was removing any potential armed opposition to its plan to rule the entire country immediately.

Hanoi's abrupt assumption of rule, breaking innumerable promises to southerners, especially its own southern allies, paved the way for southern disenchantment and the failure of Vietnam's ambitious postwar plans. The program of the NLF had promised a gradual reunification of North and South Vietnam “by peaceful means.” The NLF promised that at war's end southerners would enjoy democratic rights not allowed in the north. And Hanoi steadfastly approved the program, insisting that the PRG and not Hanoi was the alternative to the Saigon regime.

But neither the leaders of the PRG nor the NLF ruled the south for a single hour. Most were sent out of Saigon on “get acquainted” trips around the southern countryside. Immediately the new northern rulers changed the name of the city from Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City, and the people of Saigon were told to live up to this new name, to become a “civil, clean, healthy, happy and rejoicing revolutionary city, worthy of the great name of Uncle Ho.” It was no longer a capital city. Hanoi, which had never been the capital of a unified Vietnam, immediately functioned as the capital of the new unified communist Vietnam. The French, who had maintained ambassadors in both Saigon and Hanoi, were told that only the French ambassador to Hanoi was the legitimate representative of his country. The envoy to Saigon was ordered back to France.

Hanoi's flag and national anthem became the national flag and anthem. There was no attempt to pretend the southerners would be consulted. Of the twenty-four leaders of the PRG at the time of the peace accords, only three were given positions in the new “unified” government, and they were all communists. The Vietnamese communists did away with their “front” as quickly as the Cambodian communists and with a similar disregard for promises made to the sympathizers who had fought and sacrificed so that the Thieu regime would be defeated.