A War Without End in Cambodia and Vietnam
By Tiziano Terzani; Copyright (c) 1978 ,
April 29, 1978
Hatien, a port city on the South China Sea, is a ghost town lying in the burning sun. The doors and windows of the houses are closed, the stores are locked up, and nothing moves. The 30,000 inhabitants have left their city.
Tinhbien, farther east, is in ruins. The winds howl through fallen roofs, and swirls bits of old newspapers around. The walls of the houses are blackened by smoke. Tinhbien, too, is empty.
In Hoemoa, to the north, a few hundred people remained. Merchants have set up their stands beside two shelters newly covered with concrete. Soldier are digging trenches around the huts of the farmers who are still working their fields.
The road connecting the towns presents an image which eerily recalls a past believed to have been overcome: fugitives stumbling along the road loaded with heavy baskets and carrying children tied to their backs. The wounded are whimpering, crowds form around mutilated bodies, silent and helpless.
This is the border land between two Communist neighbors. Vietnam and Cambodia. Less than five years ago guerillad from both countries fought side-by-side against a common, superior enemy, the United States. They won and last, the Exhausted Vietnamese Communist promised their people "ten thousand years of peace."
But now in the last few months, the shooting and the dying have resumed, A third Indochina war has broken out, and it is the most incomprehensible one yet. Its battlefield lies between the South China Sea and the Annamite Mountain Plateau along the 660-mile border between the heavily armed Vietnamese nation of 50 million people and the 7 million Cambodians tyrannized by a group of murderous Communists.
It looks like an uneven fight and the winner seems clear. Yet, the abandoned cities, the destroyed houses and the devastated rice fields are on the Vietnamese side of the border. The grenades have hit district capitals near the border and the Vietnamese living along the entire border have been evacuated intr the interior.
This was after three major offensives by the Vietnamese army, which penetrated up to 18 miles into the neihboring country, where, by evidence of the distant roaring of guns, and despite official denials, it maintains fortified bases.
How is it possible that the Cambodians are still able to cross the border attack the villages and massacre their inhabitants? Why doesn't the Vietnamese army, which was able to conquer enemies as mighty as the French and the Americans, destroy a few thousand fanatic Khmer guerrillas?
"The situation is complicated, extremely complicated," replies Gen. Tran Van Tra, the conqueror of Saigon who how now commands the Vietnamese troops at the threatened border. He only hints at further reasons.
The roles in this third Indochina war have been reversed. The Khmer Rouge guerillas now play the same game with the Vietnamese that the Vietnamese used to wear out the Americans: nocturnal advances through impassable jungle attacks and massacres, and then quick retreats before superior forces arrive.
"It was dark. Suddenly I heard screams. I didn't know what happened I saw people run and I ran away," relates a young woman from Blay, a small settlement 3 miles from Hatien and 2 1/2 miles from the border. At 3 a.m. the Khmer Rouge attacked the village. They killed the villagers with knives clubs and sticks.
Twenty-bodies lie in a banana orchard, some of them withouts heads, without legs, with wooden stakes stuck through their abdomens and chests. The bodies are covered worms and flies. On an adjacent field lie the puffed-up remains of three water buffalo.
A mile down the road is a hut with six bodies, three of them small children. The women's bellies are slit open. The attackers cut off the head of a pet dog.
On the walls are slogans in Khmer letters: "This is our country."
Claims on the land are a reason for this cruel war. Cambodia considers vast parts of the south of Vietnam its own territory, down to the sea. Included in the territory by the Cambodians is Saigon, now renamed Ho Chi Minh City, which once, when it was founded by the Khmer, was called Prei Kor.
Above all, Cambodia fears domination of the entire Indochina peninsula by Vietnam. Hanoi's desire for a treaty on "special relations" represent for the Cambodian government a threat of colonization. They consider Laos, which agreed to such a pact, a colony of Hanoi, and indeed about 40,000 Vietnamese soldiers are stationed in among the three million Laotians.
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