Thais ‘Clash with Vietnamese’

Press, 2 January 1985, Page 6

Thais ‘Clash with Vietnamese’

NZPA-AP Bangkok Vietnamese and Thai troops clashed for what is believed to be the first time in this round of fighting along the Thai-Kampuchean border, which entered its second week on New Year’s Day, a Thai military officer at the frontier said. The officer said that the Thais had clashed with a Vietnamese unit that penetrated about Ikm into Thai territory on Monday night. The alleged intrusion took place at Klong Luek, about 6km south of the key Thai border town of Aranyaprathet. The Thais had opened fire with mortars against the lightly armed Vietnamese, he said. There were no casualties reported, and the Thai military officer said Thai troops were heading for the area to determine if the Vietnamese had already withdrawn into Kampuchea. Artillery and small-arms fire could be heard echoing across the border from Kampuchea yesterday, where non-Communist guerrillas fought Vietnamese troops for a seventh straight day, the New York “Times” reports. The heaviest fighting was concentrated at the rebel camp of Rithisen, 3km across the border from Nong Samet, a small Thai village. Vietnamese troops overran the camp on Christmas Day, and guerrillas of the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front have been trying to take it back since. More than 60,000 people opposed to the Government in Phnom Penh lived at Rithisen. The area is now a battlefield, with “almost all” of its buildings destroyed, said the camp’s chief civilian administrator, Tu Tun. At other Kampuchean insurgent camps scattered along the Thai border, there was a atmosphere of tension as the guerrillas - and Thai troops nearby - braced for a New Year’s offensive by the Vietnamese. Thai soldiers were building more sandbagged bunkers along their border fortifications. Meanwhile, at hastily con-

tructed civilian refugee centres in Thailand, to which tens of thousands of Kampucheans have fled, there was exhaustion, misery and hunger. On Sunday the Rithisen came under heavy artillery attack, shells landing every few minutes. Wounded soldiers were brought out in a non-stop guerrilla ambulance action to be treated at a makeshift, roadside emergency centre run by medical officers of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Casualties from the fighting are not known with any certainty on either side. There were fears that the Vietnamese would exact a high toll before giving up the camp, possibly to launch a similar attack on the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front headquarters at Ampil. All civilians have already been moved from that site. Vietnam and Kampuchea have given no reports of casualties or details of the offensive. The camps now under attack by the Vietnamese and their Kampuchean allies are border settlements controlled by one or another of three anti-Phnom Penh guerrilla groups — the nonCommunist Khmer People's National Liberation Front, the Communist Khmer Rouge, and the followers of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. The three groups are part of an often-uneasy coalition that does not fight in close alliance. On the contrary, there have been attacks by soldiers of one group on another. The division is greatest between the two non-Communist groups and the Khmer Rouge, whom many Kampucheans on both sides of the Vietnamese question oppose. About 250,000 Kampucheans live in the border camps, which are out of the reach of most Western aid officials because the people in them, technically Kampucheans living in Kampuchea, are not considered refugees. The United Nations Border Relief Operation, has provided the camps’ civilians with food, education and other social services.