When the War Was Over (84 page)

Circumstantial evidence inside the confessions suggests that Caldwell was selected because he was the “friend” of the revolution and possibly to embarrass Ieng Sary and spoil his “liberalization” schemes. What is clear is that someone in the inner party circle ordered the assassination, knew how to break through the defenses around the guard house, and was confident enough to demand that only Caldwell be killed—and by a bullet, not a grenade that could have been thrown easily into the house. Whoever ordered the murder wanted the American journalists alive to report the death to the outside world.

We watched as the casket was loaded into a truck, and then our small sad caravan went off to the airport. Prasith accompanied us to Beijing with Malcolm's body. At this point no one knew about his death but us and the inner
circle of the regime. When we arrived in Beijing, Dick and I asked to go straight to the American consulate, where we could talk to the chief of mission, Leonard Woodcock. We had asked the Cambodians to send cables informing our newspapers what had happened, but they had thrown away our messages. Woodcock told the British diplomats in Beijing, who then cabled London and informed Caldwell's family. We arrived in Beijing on December 23, 1978, with Caldwell's body. Two days later, December 25, 1978, the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia. By January 7 they had captured Phnom Penh.

It was a classic invasion. The Vietnamese used fourteen divisions including armored divisions and air bombardments. It was planned by Vietnam's General Van Tien Dung, the armed forces chief of staff who had designed the final offensive against South Vietnam in 1975. The Vietnamese general used what he called the “open lotus” strategy pioneered in that 1975 offensive.

Before the full-scale Christmas invasion the Vietnamese launched an attack on December 21, 1978, in the mountainous northeast, striking toward Stung Treng on the Mekong River. On December 25 the main invasionary force struck from two bases in southern Vietnam. From Tay Ninh the Vietnamese pushed north to Kratie, northwest to Kompong Cham, and west to Phnom Penh. From the seaport of Ha Tien they moved west to Cambodia's seaport of Kompong Som and north past Takeo to Phnom Penh.

The Vietnamese strategy was to bypass the established defense positions of the Khmer Rouge and move directly to the main command posts, especially Phnom Penh. From these posts the Vietnamese troops then “blossomed out,” like a lotus, and hit the defense lines from behind. The Vietnamese troops moved under heavy air cover, using captured American planes and Sovietsupplied MiG-21s.

The Khmer Rouge soldiers fought fiercely, but they were completely outclassed by the Vietnamese and had nearly no support from the population. The open lotus strategy effectively cut the Cambodians off from each other and allowed the Vietnamese literally to bypass full regiments of Khmer Rouge soldiers in their march to Phnom Penh.

All this time, however, the Vietnamese denied they were fighting the war. They said the Cambodian front for salvation was doing the fighting, and they gave the front credit for capturing the capital. The Vietnamese maintained this lie until February, when the new regime was in place, and officially requested Vietnamese soldiers be posted in Cambodia for the national defense. Even old friends of Vietnam like Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme
were rebuffed when trying to force the Vietnamese to admit they had invaded Cambodia.

Pol Pot was caught completely by surprise. Vietnam, without the aid of the Warsaw Pact countries, did launch a lightning attack and sweep across eastern Cambodia with former Khmer Rouge figures guiding the way.

Ieng Thirith, wife of Ieng Sary, described how confused the leadership was. “We only packed a few of our clothes,” she said. “We left all of our papers, everything, in Phnom Penh because we thought we would be back shortly. We thought we were temporarily evacuating.”

The Vietnamese set up a puppet government headed by Heng Samrin, the commander from the Eastern Zone who had fled to Vietnam in September to avoid execution by Pol Pot. The country was renamed the People's Republic of Kampuchea or PRK and a government was formed centered on former Khmer Rouge who had escaped from Pol Pot's police during the purges.

The Vietnamese used the papers and documents left behind by Ieng Thirith and the other members of the regime to prosecute Pol Pot and his “clique.” Gradually, pictures and documents were released to a stunned world showing the corpses from Tuol Sleng, the corpses from mass graves and from fields behind cooperatives, where people were killed nearly at random.

Just two days before the Vietnamese captured Phnom Penh, Prince Norodom Sihanouk was freed from house arrest, apparently at the strong insistence of the Chinese. Sihanouk, with his wife, Monique, and what remained of his family and some friends, was first taken to meet Pol Pot, who told him: “It's time for you to help us in the diplomatic field. We are in great difficulty.”

Without hesitation Sihanouk agreed to help and went on to Beijing. There he held a record-breaking six-hour news conference. He spoke of his three years of house arrest, sleeping no more than three hours each night, pacing the rooms of a small apartment inside the royal palace, cooking his own meals, and listening to foreign broadcasts over the radio. Sihanouk and his entourage saw no one but Khieu Samphan during the first two years. During the final year, 1978, Sihanouk was taken around the countryside each month to lift up the spirits of the peasants in preparation for the coming Vietnamese invasion. “He was more popular than before the coup d'état [of 1970],” said Monique, who accompanied him. “People were crying, the women were crying. One woman ran behind the car crying out for Prince Sihanouk.”

From Beijing, Sihanouk flew on to New York, where he represented Democratic Kampuchea during the United Nations debate over the Vietnamese
invasion. But the debate was pointless. The Vietnamese pretended that not a single Vietnamese soldier had been involved in the invasion. Sihanouk won the vote for Democratic Kampuchea, the country that just months before was threatened with condemnation by the UN's Human Rights Commission. But this proved to be one of the many ironies and hypocrisies stemming from the invasion and the new situation in Asia.

Finally all of the pieces had fallen into place, at least for some years to come. Vietnam, the country made famous for its saying “Nothing is more precious than freedom and independence” was now the military lord over Cambodia. With the signing of the twenty-five-year peace and friendship treaty between Vietnam and the government it installed in Cambodia, the rulers in Hanoi were dominant over all of Indochina.

Cambodia's historic prophecy of being taken over by a neighbor had been fulfilled, largely thanks to its own ruler Pol Pot and the communist party he headed. In order to create a strong, independent Cambodia, one impervious to the economic world order as well as invulnerable to neighbors, the Communist Party of Kampuchea had not only decimated and weakened its own people and nearly destroyed the party itself, but had taunted Vietnam into invading. The cycle of fear, paranoia, executions, and exhaustive labor was unparalleled. It was also a tribute to the strong undercurrent in Cambodian culture that was drawn to the notion of annihilation and to the power of the communist party to unleash that fear.

In retaliation, China invaded Vietnam on February 17, 1979, sending in 250,000 troops, who fought for two weeks along a 500-mile-wide front. The Chinese withdrew in March, declaring that they had taught Vietnam a lesson in response to the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. But it was an odd show of support for their Cambodian friends.

The Chinese waited nearly two months after the invasion to strike back at Vietnam. Certainly the Chinese invasion of northern Vietnam could be seen only as a political reaction and not a serious military attempt to help the Cambodians. Its overall effect was something different altogether. China's feud with Vietnam was tied into the tangled knot of the war for Cambodia.

The Chinese also used the occasion to underline the new set of alliances that had fallen together in reaction to the horror of a Third Indochina War. The United States accepted the Chinese rationale of retaliating against the Vietnamese invasion without a whisper, even though more cautious nations
worried that the invasion appreciably increased the possibility of a full-scale Chinese-Soviet confrontation.

The invasion proclaimed the new China-U.S. alliance of interests and ensured that China continued to hold sway over affairs in Indochina, this time on the side of the West. To that end, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was of considerable help. Brzezinski himself claims that he concocted the idea of persuading Thailand to cooperate fully with China in its efforts to rebuild the Khmer Rouge. In the spring of 1979, Brzezinski says, he used the visit of Thailand's foreign minister to press forward his plans.

Brzezinski said: “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help the D.K. [Democratic Kampuchea]. The question was how to help the Cambodian people. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him but China could.”

The result was a policy that the United States continued to follow during the subsequent Republican administration. The United States “winked, semipublicly,” in Brzezinski's words, while encouraging China and Thailand to give the Khmer Rouge direct aid to fight against the Vietnamese occupation.

And famine followed this Third Indochina War. While politicians in capitals around the world tried to summon up a defense for the strange set of alliances forming, the people of Cambodia went through another series of tribulations—epidemics and famine in large pockets of the country. The Vietnamese invasion was seen at first as a liberation from the Khmer Rouge. Many Cambodians broke into the granaries left behind by the Khmer Rouge and put on feasts. The Vietnamese army also fed off the food stocks. Fighting continued for months before the Vietnamese could claim to have pacified the Khmer Rouge, and the pacification was short-lived.

China, Thailand, and, indirectly, humanitarian aid organizations helped rebuild the Khmer Rouge. A new form of fighting began. Rebels or resistance soldiers based on the border between Thailand and Cambodia began fighting back against the Vietnamese. Western and international aid organizations trying to help both sides got caught in the middle. It wasn't until November 1979 that aid groups finally reached accord with the Phnom Penh regime to send aid inside the country. That aid largely helped rebuild the former Khmer Rouge who were now running the country for the Vietnamese.

The Phnom Penh government, however, attracted a large number of non-communist Cambodians who felt Vietnam was the better alternative to the Khmer Rouge, and they helped bring about an inspired but short revival of the country. Their counterparts on the border began a non-communist resistance to the Vietnamese invasion under an aging politician named Son
Sann. Once prime minister for Sihanouk, Son Sann had been one of the original leaders in the democratic movement begun in the late forties. During the 1970–1975 war Son Sann refused to support either side, saying Lon Nol was inept and corrupt and bound to lose and that the Khmer Rouge were untrustworthy, violent, ruthless, and bound to win. He appealed to Sihanouk to desert the Khmer Rouge and form a “third force.” Sihanouk answered from Beijing that he would hang Son Sann. After 1975 Son Sann set up a network to keep the world informed of Khmer Rouge atrocities, and in 1978 the Vietnamese asked Son Sann if he would be part of the “front” they were creating. Son Sann declined.

After the Vietnamese invasion, Son Sann moved from his Paris home to the border area and at nearly seventy years of age put together a “third force” to fight the Vietnamese occupation. Unfortunately, his group—the Khmer People's National Liberation Front—was twenty years too late. The United States had no interest in giving Son Sann the military aid he needed to become a serious force. Although his army grew from 3,000 to some 15,000, it was never a match for the Khmer Rouge, who received generous military aid from China. Son Sann finally had to depend on China as well, but the Chinese gave him what amounted to leftovers, always making sure that the Khmer Rouge held the lion's share of power among the resistance groups. Cambodians continued to be faced with the awful choice of the tiger or the crocodile.

By 1980 the dust had settled. In Phnom Penh, the Vietnamese were setting up a government run by a revived Communist Party of Kampuchea that accepted Vietnamese dominance over Indochina and occupation of the country by 150,000 Vietnamese soldiers. In Hanoi, Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach said repeatedly that the situation in Cambodia was “irreversible” and not open to negotiations. In Phnom Penh the leadership's greatest claim to legitimacy was the fact that their sponsors—the Vietnamese—had rid the country of Khmer Rouge rule. Yet they were Khmer Rouge themselves, men who had faithfully followed Pol Pot's and the party's rule until their own lives were at risk and they fled to safety in Vietnam.