Heavy shelling reported on Vietnam border

Press, 10 January 1987, Page 8

Heavy shelling reported on Vietnam border

NZPA-Reuter Bangkok Vietnam has killed, wounded or captured a total of 1500 Chinese troops, including 900 who attacked its northern frontier under coyer of the heaviest artillery bombardment yet launched .there, Hanoi radio said yesterday. The radio, monitored in Bangkok, said about 900 Chinese soldiers died in 15 assaults by a divisionsized force against hills in Ha Tuyen province on Thursday. A western diplomat said Chinese troops appeared to be trying to take control of several strategic hills just inside the Vi Xuyen district of Ha Tuyen province. Chinese troops fired 60,000 artillery shells or mortar bombs during the dawn to dusk battles, some to within 2km of the provincial capital of Ha Giang, the agency said.

“It was the single heaviest shelling in one day by Chinese forces on Vietnamese soil in recent years,” according to the Vietnam News Agency (V.N.A.), which said 100 Chinese soldiers died on Wednesday trying to seize a hilltop. Since Tuesday, Vietnamese forces had “killed, wounded or captured nearly 1500 aggressors, decimated five regiments ... and seized or destroyed a large quantity of weapons and other war means,” said V.N.A. A Vietnamese Embassy spokesman told Reuters that the Vietnamese troops had occupied high ground and the Chinese forces tried to dislodge them.

“We defended our position firmly,” he said. China revealed yesterday that its forces were fighting Vietnamese troops at least until Thurs-

day night, but sidestepped Hanoi’s claim that 1500 Chinese troops had been put out of action. A Foreign Ministry spokesman, asked about the Hanoi Radio casualty figures, said: “It is learned that the provocative intrusions by Vietnamese troops were repulsed on the evening of January 8.” A toll of 1500 would be by far the biggest since the two countries fought a brief war in 1979. The Chinese Foreign Ministry does not normally give its own figures in response to Vietnamese allegations of Chinese troop deaths in border clashes.

On Thursday the Ministry dismissed Vietnamese claims at that time of 500 Chinese dead as “boasting” and an attempt to deceive Vietnamese and world public opinion. Hanoi Radio had said

that the Chinese forces launched “large-scale land-grabbing attacks under fierce artillery cover on a series of hills in our territory, using a division-sized infantry force and different combat tactics.” It added that “still incomplete statistics” showed that five Chinese infantry regiments had been “decimated” and “a lot” of enemy weapons and other military equipment destroyed. Western diplomats were sceptical about the accuracy of the Vietnamese casualty estimates, although they indicated that there had indeed been serious fighting. The diplomats said the timing of the fighting, if initiated by China, might be aimed at increasing pressure on Vietnam to break the impasse over its military presence in Kampuchea.