One of us must kill thirty Vietnamese … So far, we have succeeded in implementing this slogan of one against thirty … We need only two million troops to crush the fifty million Vietnamese, and we would still have six million people left.
Radio Phnom Penh broadcast, 10 May 1978
Well, the DK government’s confidence was severely shaken in December of that year. Thirty thousand of the best RAK troops weren’t much use against the meticulously planned Vietnamese invasion, with its inside information, Russian tank spearhead which sped down the country’s highways, and the swift application of the Blooming Lotus tactic. A move that either destroyed or sent the DK forces scurrying about the countryside like confused insects without a nest. A strategic withdrawl to the western border areas ensured survival for these ultra-nationalists. With a shared hatred of the Yuon, but unlike their old enemy Marshall Lon Nol, they didn’t bother drawing a circle of coloured and supposedly magical sand around the perimeter of Phnom Penh, but instead decided to leg it. During the Cambodian Civil War, Lon Nol, with his mumbo-jumbo Neo-Khmerisme, believed it would somehow protect the capital city from attacks by Khmer Rouge units, like the animal tooth and claw necklaces worn by his oft-stoned soldiers. He needed all the help he could get. The roaring jets of B-52s were no longer causing those in rural areas to lose control of their bodily functions in the nether regions. Obviously keeping that letter from Richard Nixon in his pocket, as if it was some kind of talisman, didn’t help because by August 1973 the bomb supply had dried up. Forward again to December 1978, and early January 1979, final victory for the Vietnamese was only delayed when the tank units only stopped short of their target for want of fuel. Also in that year 1978, the soon to be toppled group of self-regarding but incredibly sensitive Khmer intellectuals were trying to get to the bottom of the problems that had befallen their attempt at state building. Without, of course, blaming themselves. They produced an unintentionally amusing but interesting document which, while being crammed with facts, is an ample demonstration of how facts can be bent to suit the needs of ressentiment. This document is called the Black Paper or Livre Noir. Now, chauvinist attitudes bordering on racism have long been a clichéd aspect of Khmer-Vietnamese relations, but the Black Paper at least tried to paint a serious picture of grievance, some of its content genuine, some of it fanciful, and about which the Vietnamese, when apart from producing their weaker Dossiers, remained quiet on the history of hostilities between Communists in the region.
In 1980 an English-translation of a paper produced by French sociologist Serge Thion, was published in the journal Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (Issue 4 in the 12th volume), named The Ingratitude of the Crocodiles. In his usual wry style, he offered a critical assessment of the Black Paper’s content. The DK document is rich in information, Thion’s paper is rich in its informed and detailed piss-taking of it, but this is a blog post by an amateur, and not a school essay, so there are only going to be a few choice snippets for you to perhaps chuckle at — on Khmer-Vietnamese relations during the war, quoted below. By no means the most interesting of items which can be picked out of course. Pages and pages could be written in discussion on other matters regrading the bad feeling felt between the Khmer and Vietnamese Communists and what is found in the Black Paper. That’s what the comment function is for I suppose. Its okay to laugh you know. It’s good for you. But firstly, here is Thion on the actual word Kampuchea and its origins.
A lot of smart pedants straightaway renounced the dirty colonialist word Cambodia for a rejuvenated Kampuchea, free of its past, for better or worse. Can such a grotesque rush to this cheap symbol be attributed to ignorance? Who can not see that Cambodia and Kampuchea are one and the same word, that they simply come from different phonetic contexts? When what used to be French Sudan rebaptized itself Mali, albeit a historical mistake (the Mali Empire was in another part of West Africa), this was at least a real change, the recovery of a political past which had been abolished by a colonial presence. But the Cambodia case is nothing like this. The term Kampuchea is found in Sanskrit writings around the seventh and eighth centuries, when the ruling dynasty settled in Angkor. Previously, the country had been known only by the name given it in Chinese annals, Chen La.
The Portuguese navigators again tried to find a written form that corresponded to what they had heard, and came up with Cambogia. The first French missionary in the country tried to do the same thing: in 1783 he wrote “Kamphoxa.” It was the French version of the Portuguese transcription that was adopted by the first travellers and Orientalists. But also, how can one render the true sound of the Khmer word? The transcription is an approximation which, moreover, has been in use for a very long time. Prince Sihanouk, who often mixes French and Khmer in his speeches, had used it quite a lot. Similarly, he named a monthly magazine that he ran Kambuja, which is the Sanskrit transcription later modified to suit Cambodian phonetics. Should we end this squabble over transcriptions by proposing a new one just a bit closer to the original, and henceforth write “Kampoutchi”?
As to the origins and meaning of the word itself, we are rather in the dark. Khmer myths claim a certain Kambu as an eponymous ancestor who is said to have united with a serpent goddess. There are many reasons to think that this is a case of the Khmers remoulding mythical material which, like much of the local culture, originates in India. Although, we do not know anything about the local origins of the name, in the geography of classical India it is quite well known that there was a region of the northwest periphery, perhaps roughly what is Afghanistan, named Kamboja. It seems highly probable the Indianization, reinforced by the subsequent diffusion of Buddhism, transferred to Southeast Asia a geographic representation based on India and its Gangetic center. (The name Mekong is probably a doublet of Ganges.) In his remarkable work on Cambodian chronicles, Michael Vickery demonstrates the existence of this transfer by the fact that other regions of Burma and Thailand were called Kambojoa during certain periods: “What is certain is that in medieval Burmese and Thai traditions “Kamboja” does not refer to Cambodia, and that the confusion is not due to the fact that Khmers once ruled over central and southern Siam, as Coedes believed, but rather from the displacement of classical geography.
One could give a thousand examples of this kind of phenomenon. Greeks and Romans easily transposed their own toponyms to the peoples they subjugated. The Crusades brought us a good number of Biblical place-names which became scattered over the map of Europe. Europe’s colonial expansion littered the world map with New Scotlands, New Hebrides, New Caledonias, New Yorks, New Amsterdams, etc., not to mention the bewildering toponymy of the United States. That the Northwest part of classical India should thus be transferred at an early time to the Northwest of what was undoubtedly the first center of Hinduization in the Indochina peninsula, in the lower Mekong Delta, seems highly probable. This is how history mocks fledgling nationalisms. After all, what does France owe a few handfuls of Germanic warriors who crossed the Rhine in 454? Nothing, just its name.
Into the twentieth century and the escalation of the Second Indochina War. With a silly rewriting of developments there was, it seems, a dastardly long-devised plan by the Vietnamese to take control of Cambodian territory for the purposes of settling their own people there. But here is where ugly chauvinist tendencies of the Khmer left and right meet one another and say hello:
According to the Black Paper the “manoeuvers used by the Vietnamese” to annex Cambodian territory were of several types, including the sordid use of young girls and drawing maps, as we have seen. But there were others as well. In 1966-67 the Hanoi and Viet Cong authorities are said to have been planning to bring hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese nationals into the country and settle them along the rivers and in the border zones. It seems the Black Paper is alluding here to the refugees who fled the escalation of the war in South Vietnam that followed the introduction of American combat units. This paragraph, which describes the setling of the Vietnamese, contains a phrase which I find interesting: “If measures had not been taken, they would have totally annexed the districts of Saang and Koh Tom.”
Naturally, the Black Paper never states what everyone knows, which is that Vietnamese nationals were almost all expelled from Cambodia immediately after the Communist Party took power. They are estimated to have totalled 300,000, of whom some were evacuated by special river convoys which came from Vietnam for this purpose. But the reference to Saang, which is not far from Phnom Penh, recalls another evacuation, the one Lon Nol troops provoked in 1970 when they launched their anti-Vietnamese pogroms. Saang had been taken by the guerilla forces and, to get it back, General Sosthene Fernandez’ troops advanced behind rows of Vietnamese hotsages from the local Catholic community. The others were shoved into camps. Does the Black Paper, in recalling “the measures taken” to avoid “the total annexation” of Saang, wish to congratulate the Lon Nol regime?
That shared chauvinism rears its head, even when bitter enemies are trying to annihilate one another and history with the ‘truth’ it contains is all tangled up. The Khmer Rouge must have missed those scores of Vietnamese corpses, their hands and feet tied, heads with bullet holes, bobbing up and down the Mekong when they were waiting along the riverbanks for Phnom Penh-bound supply boats to blow up. Fernandez was a FANK General and war criminal of Khmer-Filipino descent, who in an attempt to retake Saang from the enemy, thought it would be a good idea to have his troops follow behind a procession of poor Vietnamese civilian prisoners, this shield of flesh forced to approach the town in the hope that their Communist compatriots wouldn’t shoot. The Vietnamese forces present at Saang, in the words of Philip Short, weren’t impressed and opened fire. You can guess the rather unpleasant result. Those Vietnamese nationals who were interned didn’t escape massacre either. It was a poor mistake for Lon Nol to instigate these ugly pogroms, for when Operation Junction City wound down its failed mission to destroy the Communists’ Central Office for South Vietnam, and American soldiers withdrew, undisciplined South Vietnamese troops stayed behind, marauding around the countryside with vengeance on their minds. Looting villages, stealing livestock and raping girls and women didn’t exactly endear these allies of the Khmer Republic to the local populations they terrorised. The Khmer Rouge can’t have been referring to their Khmer wartime enemies when “measures were taken” to avoid annexation, surely? But in reality at the time, they themselves couldn’t have “taken measures” against the Vietnamese, not when they were beneficiaries (with some grudging thanks) of further North Vietnamese and NLF military penetration into Cambodia, when the Sangkum became defunct in 1970 and their complexes of border camps crucial to the war effort, and which the United States Air Force had been hammering for years, were now exposed at the rear. It is also worthwhile to note that the earlier 1960s maquis in the Northeast was where the Ho Chi Minh Trail reached the country, and the Khmer wannabe guerillas must have found it quite comforting to have a shield of Vietnamese forces protecting them, even if indirectly. The Sihanouk regime by the 1960s, with its ‘independence,’ and as conservative and corrupt as it was, had proven to be an effective bulwark against US imperialism and kept the US military out of the country, much to the pleasure of the Vietnamese. And so, below is an illustration of the arrogance faced by the maquisard skulkers who after being refused help in earlier times, now got it in small doses with a condescending pat on the head:
We all know that relations between communist powers are generally characterized by flippant cynicism. The revelation of Sino-Soviet relations and the Yugoslav stories about the 1948 confrontations taught us a lot. The way the Chinese dumped the Albanians, like brushing an insect off their sleeve, set off some interesting revelations in Tirana. Around 1965 and later, the Vietnamese would have needed an almost inconceivable supply of urbanity to treat their Khmer comrades without a hint of condescension, given their own prestigious past, long experience of struggle and political-military resources that bear no comparison with the several hundred ragged guerillas, who had experienced more hardship than success. In an April 1970 internal document, an officer from a Viet Cong-North Vietnamese security unit in Cambodia notes that
Forces are available but the ideology and sense of organization of our [Cambodian] friends are poor. Therefore, we must be patient in providing help for their movement. (Because their capability of learning is slow we must use explanations that suit their level of understanding when we request their help, they request us to provide them with weapons, medicine, food, provisions, etc.)
Harumph! Cleaning out other people’s latrines and doing the washing up is not not what Paris-educated intellectuals expected. They had a sense of entitlement. They were leaders. Some among them had developed a political line in direct opposition to the one pushed by the Vietnamese and older Hanoi-oriented comrades of the KPRP, then turned that organisation into a pseudo-Communist Party. The poor buggers just lacked experience and guns. And although grumbling about the Vietnamese, they reaped the positive results of political and military collaboration because, well, the Khmers really needed the Vietnamese, particularly in military matters for the first two years of the war. For example, it wasn’t the Khmers who in a daring night-time raid on the Pochentong airfield in January 1971, destroyed nearly all the planes and helicopters of the Khmer Republic’s Air Force, but 97 soldiers of an elite North Vietnamese Dac Cong brigade.
Lastly, one of my favourite bits, where the unqualified Khmers, like stroppy teenagers, come out with a rather sexist comment in an attempt to assert that “Yeah yeah, fuck off fancy pants, we’re better than you, so ner.” The CPK leadership visited Peking and Hanoi for meetings on cooperation and aid, through March and April 1970, following the Lon Nol coup, and when the changed political situation in Cambodia called for more Vietnamese involvement in assisting the armed struggle of the Cambodian Communist movement.
On the way back [from Peking], when they stopped off in Hanoi after the March 18 coup d’ etat, the Khmer delegation found a completely changed atmosphere. Hugs and kisses instead of grimaces, “but in the middle of the embraces, Vo Nguyen Giap, ever boorish and undiplomatic, let this remark escape: ‘This is a historic occasion that allows our three parties to unite once again.’” (p. 50.) The proud Cambodians must have shuddered. They saw right away that even though the Vietnamese were grappling with serious difficulties, they “did not for a moment give up their ambition to annex and devour Kampuchea” (p. 51). Try negotiating with such sensitive people ….
However, there were urgent affairs to discuss. The Vietnamese made a number of proposals, the most important of which was the establishment of joint military commands — “which would be joint in name only,” adds the ever perfidious Black Paper (p. 52). The Khmers obviously refused. There then follows a murky story of a telegram from the guerilla zone which was given to Pol Pot in truncated form, which it is hard to know quite what to think about. Further negotiations took place in Cambodia upon return of the leaders. We learn incidentally that the Vietnamese offered a hospital with 200 beds and a full staff, including cooks. “The Vietnamese even wanted to teach Kampuchea how to cook rice,” adds the Black Paper hysterically (p. 54). On the same delirious tone, among the types of cooperation proposed by the Vietnamese the text mentions aid in organizing women, which elicits this vengeful barb:
“Even with regard to work among women, the Vietnamese Nguyen Thi Dinh offered to come and educate the women of Kampuchea, to teach them how to work. In fact, this Nguyen Thi Dinh did not know how to do anything, either housework or mass political work, nor military work. What the Vietnamese really wanted was to control the people of Kampuchea like they did at the time of the fight against the French colonialists” (p. 55).
I will not pass judgement on Nguyen Thi Dinh’s competence at housework, but I recall that she was Deputy Chief of Staff of the Liberation Armed Forces in the South and that she was anything but ignorant of “military work.”
