S.E. Asian domino game goes on

Press, 25 July 1984, Page 20

S.E. Asian domino game goes on

The war that tore the United States of America apart goes on nine years after Saigon fell: RICHARD WEST, of the “Daily Telegraph”, reviews the continuing campaign that has made guerrilla targets of Hanoi’s army of occupation.

People tend to think that war ended in Indo-China with the fall of Saigon in 1975. It is not over yet; and journalists who report on it begin to feel like historians. Last month, for example, the Communist Vietnamese celebrated the 30th anniversary of the battle of Dien Bien Phu, which brought to an end the war with the French in the north. Visitors to the celebration remarked that the Vietanamese are still using Dien Bien Phu as a staging post for their troops who are still fighting in Laos, particularly against the hill people, who used to side with the French and then the Americans.

Today the Vietanamese are still a nation in arms, with more than a million troops employed in guarding the northern frontier against the Communist Chinese; in holding rebels in Laos; and in fighting the ever-growing guerrilla army in Cambodia, or Kampuchea as we must now call it.

My own involvement with IndoChina started just over 20 years ago when I visited the then happy and peaceful kingdom of Cambodia, under its genial ruler Prince Norodom Sihanouk. He was furious with the , anti-Communist South Vietamese who had been plotting

against him and broadcasting scurrilous stories about his sexual behaviour.ln today’s Kampuchea, the Communist Vietnamese have not only failed to win their accustomed annual victory but are finding that things have gone seriously wrong. Both in military and political terms they are close to finding themselves on the defensive; so much so that some Indo-China watchers have started to talk of Kampuchea as “Vietnam’s Vietnam.” The Kampucheans themselves have at last begun to hope for an end to the strife and misery which began in 1970 with the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk and the country’s becoming involved in the Vietnam war. From the time of the coup, both North and South Vietnamese started to fight in Kampuchea. At the same time there evolved an autonomous Kampuchean Communist army of unequalled ferocity, known to the outside world as the “Khmer Rouge” or “Red Kampucheans.” When the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh in April 1975, only a fortnight before the Communist Vietnamese took Saigon, they started a reign of terror and mass-.

murder worse, in proportion, than anything done by Lenin, Hitler, or Stalin.

When the Vietnamese, who had been sorely provoked, invaded Kampuchea in 1979 and expelled the Khmer Rouge, they were greeted at first almost as liberators. Although foreigners and communists, they at least did not go in for mass murder, nor the destruction of Kampuchea’s family system, religion, culture and language. If the Vietnamese had conquered Pol Pot and then gone home again, they would be remembered as saviours. However, the Vietnamese would argue, and not without reason, that if they had left, the Khmer Rouge might simply have taken over again from their bases close to the frontier. Vietnam’s principal enemy, Communist China, continued to recognise Pol Pot and to arm and supply his armies. So the Vietnamese set up a puppet Communist Government favourable to themselves, and maintained an army in Kampuchea of nearly 200,000 men. As long as Pol Pot represented the sole alternative, it was difficult for the rest of the world to object to Vietnam’s presence in Cambodia. It is true that most of the hundreds of thousands of Kampuchean refugees were against all forms of Communism. Those living in camps just inside Thailand had no wish to associate with the

Khmer Rouge troops in the vicinity. But the non-Communist troops were for the most part scarcely better than bandits. This has now changed. The Khmer Rouge still have about 30,000 troops in the mountainous jungle near the sea in south-west Kampuchea; but now there are also sizeable armies of non-Com-munists or nationalists. The larger force, called the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (K.P.N.L.F.) have about 12,000 men under arms and 5000 more if there were weapons available. e Another group, led by Prince Sihanouk (its acronym is Funcipec) claims to have 6500 men under arms with another 5000 ready. Its base is - at Tatum in northern Cambodia. The two nationalist groups are joined with the Khmer Rouges in a coalition presided over by Sihanouk. Whereas the two nationalist groups get on cordially, both detest the Khmer Rouge and have no intention of letting them get back into power. When I asked a Sihanoukist which he preferred — the Vietnamese or the Khmer Rouge — he answered: “It is like having to choose between cholera and the plague.” The Vietnamese in Cambodia now face much the same problem that the Americans faced in Vietnam: large groups of guerrillas supplied from abroad and able to

take sanctuary over a border, plus smaller groups of guerrillas carrying out sabotage and armed attacks. Each dry season over the last four years, the Vietnamese army has tried to destroy the Kampuchean bases along the frontier. Like the Americans before them, they have relied on tanks and artillery against these guerrilla units, and like the Americans they failed. The K.P.N.L.F. base at Ampil in April survived an artillery barrage and a tank attack supported first by Vietnamese troops and then by, conscripted Kampucheans. The Vietnamese are learning some of the other hardships of fighting guerrillas in a foreign country. The morale of their own troops, so justly famous when they were fighting in Vietnam, has suffered abroad. They are not liked by the civil populations. They cannot rival their opponents’ military intelligence. Nor have they ■ got the numbers. The successful resistance to Vietnam’s dry season offensive followed a very successful campaign by guerrillas inside Cambodia, not only in nearby districts like Battanbang and around Tonle Sap lake but as far afield as Phnom Penh and the Vietnamese frontier. Like the Vietcong before them, the nationalist Kampucheans have ' found it easy to form cells and to enrol the help of village headmen, even supposedly Communist officials. Unlike the Khmer Rouge whose four years in power made them almost universally feared and hated. The Kampuchean nationalists are hostile to Communism but also to what they see as Vietnamese imperialism, going back to the 10th century when Vietnamese armies started to move south, destroying the Kingdom of the Chams, in Annam, and then of the Khmers in Cochin China. “These events are very real to us,” I was told by Mr Laptol, one of Prince Sihanouk’s staff in Bangkok, prompting comparisons of Vietnam and Kampuchea in terms of Britain and Ireland. While the Chinese have given the Khmer Rouge arms and equipment in abundance, the West gives little support to Kampuchean nationalists. One old Indo-China watcher, who lived for years in Kampuchea and Vietnam, told me: “What bewilders us is why the Americans don’t help. They’ve given $l2 million to help the Nicaraguan contras, who are mostly old Somoza supporters, to try to overthrow a popular regime, but nothing to the Kampucheans who really have the people behind them. Even a million dollars would help.” A second article will deal with Thailand, the stubborn domino, tomorrow.