But whatever their shortcomings, the Khmers Rouges were the only Cambodian asset China had with a significant capacity to wage war against Vietnam, and Beijing was determined to make the most of them.
On the night of February 9,
eight Chinese diplomats
, led by Ambassador Sun Hao, each carrying a 40-pound rucksack, crossed into Cambodia near Poipet. They were greeted by Nikân and Pol’s nephew, So Hong, who led them on foot through the jungle to Malay, a then almost uninhabited area twelve miles to the south. There the ‘embassy’ was received by Ieng Sary. A week later they moved again, this time by car, to another stretch of empty jungle near Pailin, where Pol briefed them on the military situation. Finally, on February 23, they donned black Khmer Rouge outfits and
kramas,
and set off in a convoy of jeeps for Tasanh. But, contrary to their own and Beijing’s expectations, they were not based at Pol’s headquarters. Instead yet another isolated jungle clearing was prepared for them, with four open-sided thatched huts as embassy residences.
Even in the middle of a war, the CPK kept its allies at arm’s length. Pol’s command centre was only two miles away, but Ieng Sary assured the Ambassador that the journey ‘took three hours and was unbelievably difficult’, so Khmer officials would come to them rather than the other way round. Over the next five weeks, Pol visited the ‘embassy’ twice and Ieng Sary once. The diplomats’ only other contact was with a liaison officer, to whom they gave a daily briefing note for the Cambodian leaders on the basis of the coded telegrams they received each morning by radio from Beijing. The rest of the time they spent digging an air-raid shelter and clearing land for a vegetable garden.
Much of the cable traffic that month was devoted to the ‘appropriate, limited lesson’ which Deng Xiaoping had promised to administer to Vietnam.
It had started on February 17, with a sustained pre-dawn artillery barrage pouring 130-mm shells and rockets at a rate of one a second across the Chinese-Vietnamese border. This was followed by 85,000 Chinese troops, who headed for the five provincial capitals in the border region. Over the next two weeks they penetrated Vietnam to a depth of about fifteen miles. By the time the last Chinese soldier withdrew a month later, the Vietnamese had lost 10,000 dead, their military infrastructure along the border had been destroyed and their already weak economy crippled. Politically, the invasion had discredited the Soviet Union, which had conspicuously failed to come to the aid of its ally; it had cemented the growing Sino-American military entente; and it had given substance to Deng’s bold assertion, made during his visit to the US, that ‘we Chinese mean what we say.’
*
But its immediate goal — to make Vietnam withdraw regular units from Cambodia to reinforce the border with China, reducing the pressure on the Khmers Rouges and allowing them to establish a ‘liberated zone’ where the new Chinese Embassy could be based, so confirming their claims to be regarded as the legitimate government — proved a failure. Not only did the Vietnamese expeditionary force remain in place but in mid-March it launched a new offensive against Pol’s base at Tasanh. On March 27, the Chinese diplomats were asked to withdraw to a new site, a day’s march away, higher up in the mountains. The following morning Ieng Sary arrived, gasping for breath, with the news that a
Vietnamese special forces unit was nearby and they must set out at once towards the south. The same day Tasanh was overrun. Pol, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphân had left a few hours earlier, abandoning part of the Central Committee archive, vehicles and weapons, reserves of rice and 3,000 tons of ammunition.
On April 8, after a gruelling twelve-day trek across the mountains, Ieng Sary and his Chinese charges reached the Thai border. There, to their astonishment, they stumbled upon a group of Khmer Rouge officials bathing in a river. Among them Sun Hao recognised Pol and Nuon Chea. The CPK leadership had established its new temporary headquarters just inside Cambodian territory. But the fate of the ‘embassy’ was already sealed. Beijing had decided the diplomats should be pulled out. Not only were the Khmers Rouges unable to guarantee their safety, but there was no longer a ‘liberated zone’ in which they could be based. Three days later, they bid Pol’s ‘government’ farewell and crossed into Thailand, where they were detained by Thai border guards until urgent phone calls to Bangkok established their identity.
The Chinese diplomats were not alone in fleeing Cambodia that spring.
In the second half of March, Vietnamese units fanned out in an arc from Koh Kong to northern Battambang with orders to hem in the remnants of the Khmer Rouge army and the peasants they controlled — most of them ‘old’ people who had left their co-operatives more or less willingly to escape the Vietnamese advance — and to push them towards the border. The first groups crossed into Thailand in early April. Kriangsak’s government was appalled but could do little to stop them. Bangkok had already chosen its side. After consultations with China and the United States, it was agreed that the refugees would be allowed to enter temporarily until the situation stabilised and they were able to return. Over the next few weeks, some 200,000 people, soldiers as well as civilians, flooded into the border areas. Some left almost at once, marching in disciplined columns along the frontier to re-enter Cambodia in areas free of Vietnamese control. The majority lived rough in primitive squatter camps, a couple of miles inside Thai territory.
In May, Pol, too, slipped across the border. He, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphân were given the protection of the Thai army’s 3rd Bureau, headed by the Military Intelligence Chief, General Chaovalit. Mok was still inside Cambodia, along with Son Sen, Ke Pauk and some 20-25,000 soldiers, most of them in the Eastern Zone, at Mount Aural, in Pursat, Koh Kong and parts of Battambang. But the majority were dispersed in small, isolated groups, hiding in the jungle, without contact among themselves and with no means of communicating with their leaders. The Khmer Rouge military
command structure had been smashed in January. Now the movement’s principal leaders, and the bulk of their followers, were in exile.
To the overwhelming majority of Cambodians in January 1979, the Vietnamese appeared as saviours. Hereditary enemies or not, Khmer Rouge rule had been so unspeakably awful that anything else had to be better. Vietnamese propagandists exploited this to the full. Vietnam’s army, they claimed, had entered Cambodia not to occupy it but to deliver the population from enslavement by a fascist, tyrannical regime which enforced genocidal policies through massacres and starvation. That was of course untrue. The Vietnamese leaders had not been bothered in the least by Khmer Rouge atrocities until they decided that Pol’s regime was a threat to their own national interests. But the notion of a ‘humanitarian intervention’ influenced opinion abroad and, for a time, coloured attitudes inside Cambodia as well.
Human gratitude, however, is fleeting. Within months the Vietnamese had outstayed their welcome.
In one sense, this was inevitable: foreign armies stationed in other people’s countries are subject to the law of diminishing returns. In Cambodia, the alienness of the Vietnamese presence was all the more glaring because the Khmer figleaf, KNUFNS, was so small. A nominally Cambodian government had been established in January — headed by an ex-Khmer Rouge military commander, Heng Samrin, with a former Hanoi-based Issarak, Pen Sovann, Secretary-General of the revived People’s Revolutionary Party of Kampuchea (PRPK), as his deputy — ruling a country which now called itself the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK). But policy was set by Vietnam, transmitted through a VWP Central Committee liaison group known as A-40, and implemented by Vietnamese ‘advisers’ who were in charge of every Ministry and provincial administration.
It was the same system that the Vietnamese had used in Laos since the early 1950s. The impression of a country under occupation was heightened by the way the army behaved. In the spring of 1979, Phnom Penh was systematically looted. Nayan Chanda, of the
Far Eastern Economic Review,
reported:
Convoys of trucks
carrying refrigerators, air conditioners, electrical gadgets, furniture, machinery and precious sculptures headed towards Ho Chi Minh City . . . The once busy Chinese business section of Phnom Penh looked like a scene after a cataclysmic storm. Every house and shop had been ransacked and remains of broken furniture and twisted pieces of household goods were strewn over the road. Damp nodules of cotton from ripped-open mattresses
and pillows covered the ground. Clearly marauders had gone through the households, searching for gold and jewellery.
Factories
were dismantled and equipment sent back to Vietnam. As famine set in,
rice
from Khmer Rouge stockpiles left by the same route — or so, at least, many Khmers believed. When international organisations finally started sending food aid, part of that, too, was diverted to Vietnam.
Restrictions were placed on entry to the towns, which, with the exception of Phnom Penh, had been open during the initial months after the invasion. Former town-dwellers who had managed to return — often to discover that their old home had been requisitioned by a Vietnamese officer or a cadre in the new regime — were threatened with being packed off to the countryside to go back to working in the fields. Despite the government’s promises that basic freedoms would be restored, there was no return to private farming.
Former civil servants and professional people who had survived the Khmer Rouge years and were now recruited to build the new administration found themselves under Vietnamese tutelage. At the obligatory indoctrination sessions it was made clear that their future depended on having a ‘correct attitude’ towards their Vietnamese comrades. Those who refused to co-operate, or were suspected of opposing the new regime, risked imprisonment in very harsh conditions.
As a result, in April and May 1979, tens of thousands of Cambodians, mostly ‘new people’ from the towns — former Sino-Khmer shopkeepers and their families and members of the pre-Khmer Rouge intellectual elite — voted with their feet. Thailand became the highway to a new life in the West. But if the Thais had turned a blind eye to the arrival of the Khmers Rouges and the peasant population they controlled — seeing them as a crucial defence against Vietnamese military pressure along the border — they took a very different view of a massive influx of civilian refugees who wished to leave Cambodia permanently and might end up spending years as uninvited guests before other countries agreed to take them. The lesson of the Vietnamese boat-people, washing up in their hundreds of thousands on South-East Asian beaches — to a great wringing of hands from the West but at that stage not much else — was already there as a warning. In June, most of the refugees were forcibly repatriated by the Thai army, often with great callousness. At Preah Vihear, in the north, 45,000 people were made to scramble down a precipitous mountainside into an uninhabited, heavily mined area of jungle. Several thousand died, either shot by Thai soldiers to prevent them trying to cross back or blown up in the minefields.
That
finally got the attention
of Western governments. But another four
months passed before Thailand reached agreement with UNICEF and the International Red Cross on an orderly arrivals’ programme — to be funded, Kriangsak’s office emphasised, entirely by foreign aid — to deal with the refugee influx. For many, it was already too late. The famine which had spread through Cambodia that summer was as bad as, if not worse than, any in the Khmer Rouge period. To compound the misery, Vietnam initially refused to accept food aid from non-communist sources, fearing, correctly, that if it did so, relief would also be provided to the Khmers Rouges on the border. The upshot was that the number of refugees in Thailand jumped from 150,000 in October to well over half a million two months later.
Whatever else the Vietnamese were doing in Cambodia, they were not winning hearts and minds.
During the summer of 1979 the Khmers Rouges got their second wind. While the monsoon rains beat down, turning the roads into rivers of mud, and the Vietnamese remained in their barracks, the guerrillas and the population they controlled made their way stealthily back across the border. They had four months to reorganise before the next dry-season offensive began.
In July, Pol set up a
new permanent headquarters
, known as Office 131, on the western flank of Mount Thom, just inside Cambodian territory about twenty miles north-east of the Thai town of Trat in the coastal province of Chanthaburi. To mark the move, he changed his name to Phem.
Like the old HQ on the Chinit river, ten years earlier, Office 131 was a forbidden zone, protected by minefields and camouflaged pits filled with
punji
sticks. Access from Thailand was controlled by a Thai Special Forces group called Unit 838, formed by General Chaovalit to assure the Khmer Rouge leaders’ protection. A network of well-camouflaged trails led across the mountains to Samlaut, which became a staging area both for Khmer Rouge units, making their way out of the jungle to try to reach the border, and for the messengers Pol despatched to re-establish contact with the scattered groups of soldiers still dispersed in the forests.
Many of those who emerged were
walking skeletons
, having survived on leaves and roots. Dysentery, malaria and oedema were rampant. The civilian population under Khmer Rouge control, especially ‘new’ people, accompanying them against their will, suffered even more. Mey Mak encountered
cannibalism
in the jungles of Pursat. In one case, which still made him shudder, a woman ate her own child. Tens of thousands starved. By October, in the words of the writer, William Shawcross, ‘
awful spindly