When the War Was Over (66 page)

In 1845 a compromise was reached whereby Cambodia was ruled by a new, wiser king who accepted joint protection from both Vietnam and Siam. But the Vietnamese occupation lived in modern Cambodian memory and prompted many of the fears that the Vietnamese were the Khmers' greatest “historic” enemy

Then France intervened and upset the balance achieved by the 1845 compromise. In the name of protecting Cambodia from the Thais, the French created the implausible union of “Indochina” and made Cambodia even weaker and more susceptible to Vietnamese ambitions. The French had begun their conquest of Vietnam in 1862, and by the turn of the century they had colonized or occupied all of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam—the new union of Indochina.

French colonial rule was brutal for all the countries. Vietnam was broken up along its three administrative regions: Cochin China, with its capital city,
Saigon, was the French base and was ruled as a direct colony; the other two Vietnamese “states” were administered by a resident superior. The new unity of Vietnam was destroyed; the modern state had lasted little more than sixty years. But the French ultimately provided the disparate Vietnamese with a common enemy and a common goal—freedom—that spurred the development of a single Vietnamese nationalism.

As noted earlier, the French quickly stereotyped the Annamites, or Vietnamese, as the clever, industrious, and brilliant peoples of their Indochina and the proper receptors of French civilization. The Vietnamese leaders who eventually rose to fight against the colonial powers were French-educated men and women who learned many of their ideas about overthrowing colonialism from the French.

The French rewarded the Vietnamese in several instances. They gave the Vietnamese territorial rights to Cambodia and bureaucratic positions in Cambodia and Laos that enhanced the Vietnamese sense of manifest destiny. Nearly every aspect of the Indochinese union favored the Vietnamese. First, it legitimized the idea that the three countries were a single entity under a single ruler. It was as false and abrasive an idea as a Franco-Germany would be, but the colonialists were unfamiliar with the history of the region. Underneath the political artifice of Indochina there was no “Indochinese” culture, no Indochinese people but Cambodians and Lao of the Indian traditions with very little in common with the Vietnamese of the Chinese tradition.

When the French spoke of things Indochinese they usually meant Vietnamese. Vietnamese became the second language, after French, in Phnom Penh and Vientiane as well as in Saigon, Hue, and Hanoi. The French openly spoke of the Khmers and Lao as the minorities in the Indochina Union, the weaker, less intelligent, superstitious, and lazy natives who would one day be properly ruled by the Vietnamese.

Predictably, the Vietnamese accepted this notion of Indochina while they rejected French colonial rule. They incorporated the word and the concept of “Indochina” into the language, translating it with the Chinese phrase that means “land east of the sea.” The Cambodians refused to accept either the idea or the name. They gave it no Khmer language equivalent and merely used the French word Indochine when speaking in Khmer or French.

When the Vietnamese, under Ho Chi Minh, created a communist party in 1930 dedicated to ending French colonial rule and bringing a revolutionary communist regime to power, they did so in the name of all of Indochina. That decision and its implementation helped sow the seeds of war which
erupted between communist Cambodia and communist Vietnam forty-seven years later.

Vietnamese communists were divided over whether their party should cover just Vietnam or the whole of Indochina, but Moscow settled the matter. The herculean task of making the idea of an Indochina-wide communist revolution real went to Ho Chi Minh. The son of a low-level mandarin, Ho Chi Minh formed his earliest and strongest political ties with the international communist movement, in distinct contrast to Cambodia's Saloth Sar. Ho set out on his international odyssey early in youth, after completing a standard French colonial education in his native Annam. He ended up in Paris nearly thirty years before Saloth Sar and became a founding member of the French Communist Party in 1920. He was the only person from Indochina in attendance at its congress, where he raised the issue of colonization and began the legend that would propel him to the head of the Vietnamese anticolonial movement.

Ho learned his early political skills from the young French communist movement and in 1925 was selected a party delegate to the Fifth Congress of the Communist International in Moscow. Thereafter he became a student and bureaucrat of the international communist movement. He was sent by the International to aid the Chinese revolutionary movement shortly after arriving in Moscow. Later he was placed in charge of coordinating the communist movement in all of Southeast Asia for the International. By the time he returned to Vietnam after thirty years in exile he was one of the few Asian “international” communists. He had founded and printed a newspaper in Paris, taught at the famous Whampoa military academy in China, and, disguised as a monk, organized revolutionaries in Thailand.

He was asked in 1930 to save the communist movement in Vietnam. He was well known at the time as a patriot, but he had not taken part in the early, bloody beginning of the Vietnamese communist movement. He was a veteran of international communist politics, not the local anticolonialist war.

As such, Ho Chi Minh proved an able negotiator, and at a now legendary soccer field in Hong Kong he brokered an agreement with the three separate Vietnamese communist groups: simply that they should form one party and not three, at least for the time being. But the Communist International rejected Ho's compromise and ordered him to expand the Vietnamese Communist Party into an Indochinese Communist Party. He obeyed the command
and passed on the instructions, which were followed. Then he left and did not return to the Vietnamese revolution until 1941.

The new party embraced its Indochinese mandate even though it failed to recruit Cambodians. In a “letter to comrades in Cambodia” written in 1934, officials of the ICP stated in unequivocable terms there could be no separate party for Cambodia, presumably in response to such a request. “There is only a single Indochinese revolution,” the letter stated. “Indochina being under the domination of a single, imperialist government, all the revolutionary forces must be unified. . . . Cambodia does not have the right to a separate Cambodian communist party”

At the ICP's First Party Congress in 1935, the Vietnamese elaborated on their aim of forming a Soviet form of government in Indochina. This Soviet of Indochina would be composed of a Vietnamese majority and Khmer and Lao minorities. These “minorities” would lose control of their countries within the soviet. They would only have the right to “secede and form an independent state” pending permission of the soviet controlled by the Vietnamese majority.

Trading French for Vietnamese rule in a communist state was hardly attractive for Cambodians, and they continued to resist overtures from the ICP. The Lao did not join the ICP at the start, either. Only Vietnamese residents in both countries joined this party.

It took a shift in the international communist ideology and the return of Ho Chi Minh to alter this self-destructive insistence on an Indochina-wide party. From 1935 onwards, Moscow had ordered that communism, especially in the colonies, be formed as national parties. The Communist International created the Vietminh, an abbreviation for the League for Vietnamese Independence, which was an umbrella group designed to embrace all Vietnamese nationalists to fight against the French and the newly arrived Japanese imperialists.

The ICP, however, was at the core of the Vietminh, directing the revolution but in a discreet fashion. The accent was on fierce nationalism. The consequent reduction of rhetoric about Indochinese-wide revolution enabled Vietnamese communists to make headway in Laos, where the Pathet Lao were nurtured and their leaders trained by the Vietnamese communists. But in Cambodia the Vietnamese were able to induct only forty members into their ICP by 1951. And as was shown earlier, the role of the Vietnamese in this early stage of revolt against colonialism was often divisive, discouraging the Cambodians from uniting in protest unless it was under their tutelage.

Vietnamese attention was directed toward winning their war against the French, and their Cambodian comrades were not crucial in this effort. In 1945 the Indochinese Communist Party went underground, calling itself the Revolutionary Organization. In Vietnam, the organization reemerged in 1951 as the Vietnam Workers Party and thereafter became the chief promoter of nationalist communism. The Vietnamese ordered the Lao and Khmer to form their separate precommunist parties or organizations. The Cambodians began to try to create a party in 1951 and a party much later in 1960 but the Vietnamese did not give up control. In November 1951 they wrote that “the Vietnamese party reserves the right to supervise the activities of its brother parties in Cambodia and Laos . . . later, however, if conditions permit the three revolutionary parties of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos will be able to unite to form a single Party: the Party of the Vietnam-Khmer-Laotian Federation.”

At this stage, their Chinese comrades were of paramount importance in the Vietminh's war against the return of French colonialism. Mao Zedong's victory in 1949 gave the Vietnamese the rear base and material support that ultimately secured their victory in the First Indochina War. Mao and Ho both launched successful wars of “national liberation,” following a model set forth by Stalin that altered the character and appeal of communism from one aimed solely at the “working class” to one geared toward peasants. The Cambodian communist movement could not have developed without these powerful models. And through the fifties into the early sixties the Vietnamese and Chinese revolutions appeared to be of a piece. In the fifties the Vietnamese officially adopted Chinese communist ideology for a short period—their relations were nearly familial, elder and younger cousins. Their common Chinese heritage was a help, and not a hindrance.

The Chinese provided the Vietminh their only regular arms supply, which reached up to 6,000 tons a month by the final offensive at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The Chinese also provided a staff of military advisors headed by eight generals. The Soviet Union gave the Vietnamese nothing. In 1950 Stalin offered moral and propaganda support but no arms and no material aid of any kind, despite the fact that Ho had become one of the Communist International's most respected Asian figures.

Then came the 1954 Geneva Conference and the disarray described earlier in the young Asian communist movement. It was after Geneva that China turned its attention toward Cambodia, the Cambodia headed by Prince Norodom Sihanouk, and the Cambodia-Vietnam-China triangle emerged. Besides verifying the pecking order in the unsettled communist
world, the Geneva Convention underlined the individual threats each country faced. China continued believing that its chief enemy was the United States, and it was with the American threat in mind that China befriended Cambodia's Prince Sihanouk.

The United States had fought in Korea against Chinese troops. The United States accorded the island of Taiwan status as the “real” China and refused to recognize Beijing and the People's Republic of China for decades. The United States raised economic and military sanctions against Beijing that were enforced for decades. Worse, the Americans encouraged the Chinese on Taiwan in their dream of defeating the communist Chinese and conquering the mainland. In 1954 the United States seemed as great a threat to China as to Vietnam.

The American decision to fight communism in Vietnam, to fill the vacuum left by the defeated French, was made within the context of this policy to defeat or at least contain the People's Republic of China. The fate of Vietnamese communism was intertwined with that of the PRC. It was very much in China's interest to court the new regime of Norodom Sihanouk to keep Americans out of Cambodia and less of a threat to Vietnam and hence to China.

China befriended Sihanouk before Hanoi and without the restrictions of the Vietnamese communists, who after 1955 were sheltering the leader of the Cambodian communist movement in Vietnam along with half of its members. Moreover the Vietnamese were rightly preoccupied with developments in their own country. Ngo Dinh Diem, who became president of the South Vietnam government in 1955, refused to take part in the scheduled 1956 elections to unify the country; Diem believed Ho Chi Minh would defeat him handily. Hanoi showed no sign of suspicion of China at the time; the North Vietnamese based their 1956 agricultural revolution on the Chinese model, and even after it failed—the peasants balked at coercion from the center—the Vietnamese blamed their own theoretician who conceived the plan and not China. (It would be much later before they turned China into the scapegoat.)