When the War Was Over (67 page)

The year 1060 was a watershed for relations between the three countries. The Cambodian communists formed their own party, which refused to accept the Indochinese Communist Party as its sole progenitor. Instead, the communists described themselves as a “nucleus trained in the Indochinese, French, and Thai communist parties and with the support of the Vietnamese Communist Party.” The debt to Vietnam was acknowledged, but not with subservience.

At the same time, in response to bitter fighting in the south, Hanoi approved guerrilla warfare in the south and the eventual formation of the National Liberation Front, which promised “the gradual reunification of the country by peaceful means, on the principle of negotiations and discussions between the two zones (north and south) on all forms and measures beneficial to the Vietnamese people and their fatherland.”

This front was controlled by a “southern” communist party named the People's Revolutionary Party, which was a cover for the southern arm of the Vietnam Workers Party's Communist Committee for the South (COSVN). To appeal to the greatest variety of political persuasions, the north agreed to a public division of the party The north insisted repeatedly that this NLF was the alternative to the Saigon regime and that Hanoi was merely its ally. The NLF platform included promises of democratic freedoms not allowed in the north—freedom of expression, press, assembly, association, and movement—to be enforced after victory.

The escalation of fighting in neighboring southern Vietnam immediately worried Sihanouk, and in December 1060 he signed a treaty of friendship and nonaggression with China. The Chinese repeatedly assured the Cambodians they would respect their neutrality and in 1963 inaugurated their military aid program for Sihanouk. The Chinese originally befriended the prince to frighten off American designs to encroach on Khmer soil in their war in Vietnam. But the Chinese were well aware that Cambodia's interest in strict neutrality was aimed at least as much on Vietnamese as American designs—whether communist or non-communist. While China saw Cambodia as protection against the United States, and Cambodia saw China as protection against Vietnam and the United States, Vietnam was beginning to reassess how it viewed both of these nations.

For 1060 was also the year of the public split between China and the Soviet Union. The timing was awful for Hanoi. The North Vietnamese were unquestionably closer to China then. Both heralded the peasant revolution, both believed in “linking the emotional appeal of nationalism to the bitterness of class struggle.” Vietnam had adopted the basic Maoist concept of twining the intellectual and the peasant against the “class” enemies of both—the bureaucrat, tax collector, and large landholder and the aristocracy. Vietnam accepted, then, the Chinese accent on developing agriculture as opposed to Soviet plans for heavy industrial growth first and the Chinese accent on guerrilla warfare rather than the Soviet belief in conventional warfare.

But Vietnam was at war and needed the backing of both China and the Soviet Union, particularly because the United States was lavishing military
aid on Diem. Hence Ho Chi Minh immediately advocated unity between China and the Soviet Union even though he seemed to favor China in the dispute on specific issues. Hanoi rebuked the Soviet Union when it offered military aid to India following India's border war with China in 1963. Such military support for an enemy of China was inexcusable, said the North Vietnamese. That same year Hanoi joined China in deploring Moscow for signing the partial test-ban treaty with the United States. The North Vietnamese said: “Compared with the demand of the people of the world and the previous stand of the Soviet Government on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, the treaty signed recently is a step backward. . . . The Chinese Government proposals are fully correct.”

Hanoi tried mediating between Beijing and Moscow in 1963, but to no avail. China returned Vietnam's political support in the form of increased arms shipments to Hanoi to allow the southern National Liberation Front to step up its military campaign following the American-approved coup against Diem.

The Chinese clearly considered Vietnam and the rest of Indochina within its sphere of influence. Beijing was cementing its ties to Sihanouk at the time as well as to the leftists within his government, particularly Hu Nim. It was not an aggressive push; no Chinese armies marched into the region as Soviet troops had done to ensure Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe. There was no mention of Chinese bases; the Chinese instead encouraged Sihanouk to aid the Vietnamese by granting them access to Kompong Som seaport and giving them sanctuaries in eastern Cambodia.

The political pragmatism behind Chinese foreign policy suited Vietnam. The Chinese and the Soviets were arguing bitterly over how to promote wars of national liberation around the globe. The Chinese maintained that all types of people should be included in “united fronts,” even certain “kings, princes, and aristocrats” as long as they were “patriotic” and accepted communist dominance of an anti-imperialist united front. The Soviets answered that the Chinese were being used by “princes and kings” and they privately worried that their “national liberation” war methods were promoting racism. It was a fear that proved entirely correct.

One of the “princes” the Chinese had in mind as a patriot who would accept communist domination was Sihanouk. The Sino-Soviet split had nearly no effect on Sihanouk or the Cambodian communists. Sihanouk's neutralist policy was designed to keep a distance from the Soviet Union and its communist bloc as well as from the United States and its alliances. And
the Cambodian communists had failed to receive recognition, much less support, from the Soviets.

There was never any question whether the Soviet Union or China had the greater influence in Cambodia. The Chinese eventually became the patrons of the Cambodian prince and his enemies, the Cambodian communists. No matter which group ruled Cambodia, China would support them. In 1965 China went so far as to declare that an attack on Cambodia would be considered an attack on China.

But no political situation lasted long in communist Asia in the sixties. By the next year Red Guards were waving their Red Books and throwing China into upheaval in the name of the Cultural Revolution. American marines landed in South Vietnam to fight the war against communism. The escalation of the Vietnam War was quick, bloody, and ferocious. And just as Hanoi needed its allies the most, the Chinese became preoccupied with their domestic revolution, with the superiority and purity of Maoism. “They showed no respect for their elder party leaders,” said Vietnam's Nguyen Co Thach years later. “It looked like anarchy and chaos, like a coup d'état.”

To Ho Chi Minh, the Cultural Revolution was far too radical and stressed Mao's personality to the point of idolatry. Ho was asked by a foreigner why he, too, did not publish his concepts and theories as Mao did in his Red Book. Ho winked at his guest and retorted, “If there is a subject Chairman Mao hasn't written about tell me and I'll try to fill in the gap.”

Ho Chi Minh was in the midst of fighting the longest modern war, and neither of his powerful allies—China and the Soviet Union—offered to retaliate against direct American involvement. China seemed more anxious to offer protection for Sihanouk in Cambodia. And China and the Soviet Union began fighting over aid to Hanoi. Moscow suggested a joint action group for sending aid, stipulating that the proposal required the construction of Soviet airstrips in southern China. China rejected the proposal and instead offered to head a “world's people's front” to aid Hanoi that would exclude the Soviet Union. That front became a reality and the Soviet Union was required to ship its aid to Vietnam without help from China.

More ominously, the Chinese told the Vietnamese to reject Soviet aid entirely, warning the Vietnamese that if they accepted Soviet aid and conventional Soviet methods to fight the United States they would be buying into the Soviet system and end up a Soviet satellite. The Chinese claim they also offered to pay for the entire war if Hanoi rejected Soviet aid. But the balance had shifted. Vietnamese suspicions of Chinese intentions started to surface. Not only did Hanoi gratefully accept Soviet aid, the Vietnamese began following the Soviet model rather than the Chinese.

The Vietnamese tilt toward the Soviet Union was assured by Chinese reactions to the 1968 Paris talks between Vietnam and the United States. The Vietnamese went to negotiate a bombing halt with the United States. The Chinese protested loudly. In a
Beijing Review
editorial that April, the Chinese said: “The Vietnamese question can be solved only by completely defeating the U.S. aggressor on the battlefield and driving it out of South Vietnam.”

The Soviets not only approved of the talks but increased their military aid to Vietnam, sending the Vietnamese sophisticated military equipment to defend them against the American bombing. The Chinese were ideologically opposed to such weaponry, a position the Vietnamese privately despised. Ideological purity meant the Chinese were willing to fight the Americans to the last Vietnamese.

The Republicans won the 1968 elections and ended the Paris peace talks. The Soviet Union invaded Prague that year. The Vietnamese no longer criticized their sponsors in Moscow. Hanoi did not protest the Soviet invasion. The Vietnamese were desperate to win their war. They had embarked on a new political path, one that would become a battle of mutual antagonisms between them and the Chinese and eventually affect their relations with Cambodia. The personal intimacies dissolved into aggravated suspicions. The upheavals and near chaos in southern China during the Cultural Revolution—in Yunnan, Kuangsi, and Kwangtung—sowed fear in Vietnam. Hanoi questioned the reliability and judgment of the Chinese.

For their part, the Chinese felt Vietnam was making a deal with the devil—the Soviet Union—to hold off the lesser evil of U.S. imperialism. But Vietnamese were dying under American bombs. Vietnamese communist soldiers were fighting American troops. During the Second Indochina War, the United States and its South Vietnamese allies exploded three times as many bombs in Vietnam as were dropped in all of World War II. Bombs and all other kinds of explosives tore up the country—north and south. No northern industry of any consequence was left unharmed. The northern industrial base was pushed back to pre-1954 standards by the American air war. Bombs and explosions damaged or destroyed ten million hectares of land and another five million hectares of forest. In the south, more than half of the rural hamlets were damaged or destroyed. The north lost most of its rural electricity during the bombing raids. Electric irrigation pumps stood mute while farmers returned to ancient manual irrigation methods. Bomb craters made farming impossible for countless other northern villagers.

Finally, at least two million Vietnamese died during the American war—half a million had died during the French war. Some ten million Vietnamese
were made refugees in their own country. The vast majority of these casualties and refugees were in the south, but the toll may be higher because the north steadfastly refused to detail the extent of casualties its army suffered.

The United States was not a “secondary enemy” in North Vietnam. It was the worst enemy in Vietnamese history. Hanoi's bitterness toward the United States was as deep at the time as any enmity in that part of the world.

By 1968 the majority of military aid for Hanoi was supplied by the Soviet Union. Moscow's failure to help in the First Indochina War was old, forgotten history China took affront at this and other signs of Vietnam strengthening its alliance with the Soviet Union and decided to make cause with its enemy's enemy—the United States. In 1968 China offered to reopen discussions with the United States. The Soviet Union had become its primary enemy, the United States a potential buffer against Soviet aggression.

That same year Vietnam launched its Tet Offensive in the south and lost 50,000 southern NLF cadre. The north responded by sending its regular army troops into the south in large numbers and relying even more on Cambodian sanctuaries and assistance from Prince Sihanouk. It was at this moment that the Khmer Rouge chose to begin their armed revolt against Sihanouk.

There is no dispute that the Vietnamese communists did not want the Cambodian communists to fight Sihanouk in 1968. The Vietnamese viewed the Cambodian decision as selfish and doomed to failure. They said the Cambodian communists were a political “minority,” that the masses supported Sihanouk, hence there was no reason to fight. They agreed that certain aspects of Sihanouk's regime may have been reactionary and feudal, as they later wrote, but to fight the prince would be to open the door to American involvement in Cambodia—the real issue for Vietnam.

Every communist revolution began very much in the minority, as the Vietnamese well knew: That was not the point. Nor was the other criticism leveled by the Vietnamese—that the Cambodian communist leadership had been tainted by Trotskyist doctrines when students in Paris. The Cambodian communists, particularly Saloth Sar, returned from France as Stalinists. The Vietnamese simply felt their war came first at this stage. They needed Sihanouk and his cooperation, not an entirely new Cambodian front to fight. They failed to understand that regardless of whether Cambodian communists declared war, Sihanouk was on his way out—and soon.

Relations between the two communist parties became strained. The Cambodian communists claim the Vietnamese threatened them if they did not back off from their battle with Sihanouk, if they upset Vietnamese access
to Cambodian sanctuaries and transit rights from the deep-water port of Kompong Som. “Before the [1970] coup, everything done by the Communist Party of Kampuchea was condemned by the Vietnamese.”

The 1970 coup against Sihanouk changed everyone's strategy. The Cambodian communists crowed that the Vietnamese were forced to make an about-face at the time. “Now, anything the Communist Party of Kampuchea did was correct and praiseworthy. Before, when Comrade Khieu Samphan joined the maquis [in 1967], the Vietnamese reproached the Communist Party of Kampuchea for making an erroneous decision. Now that he was in the [front with Sihanouk] they congratulated the Communist Party of Kampuchea for having made a judicious decision and for having gotten ready far in advance.”