When Communists Collide

Viet Nam and Cambodia clash in a far from fraternal border conflict

Fighting raged once again in Indochina last week, and troops surged into Cambodia's Parrot's Beak region, where American forces in 1970 had made their highly controversial incursion. This time, however, the foes were two Communist nations that had survived and triumphed over U.S. might. Viet Nam and Cambodia (which now calls itself Democratic Kampuchea) challenged each other not only with deadly gunfire but with blasts of bitter propaganda, while their sponsoring powers, the Soviet Union and China, watched uneasily from the sidelines.

By week's end, Vietnamese spearheads had penetrated some 65 miles into Cambodia along Route 1 only 36 miles from the capital of Phnom-Penh. Supporting them were elements of eight Vietnamese divisions, armed with captured American tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery. Neither side disclosed its casualties.

The propaganda war was just as intense. Phnom-Penh accused its neighbors in Viet Nam of destroying Cambodian rubber plantations, burning forests, seizing cattle and poultry, even "raping and killing our women in crueler manner than the Thieu-Ky and South Korean mercenary troops of the past." Hanoi charged that Cambodia's Khmer Rouge guerrillas had made incursions into Viet Nam and had looted and sacked its pagodas, schools and hospitals. Far worse, it accused the guerrillas of "raping, tearing fetuses from mothers' wombs, disemboweling adults and burning children alive." Were it not for the fact that thousands of helpless people have been killed or made homeless as a result of the fighting, the spectacle of a pair of rabidly Communist countries tearing at each other's throats, while professing the ideals of brotherhood, would have been called ludicrous.

The rivalry between Cambodia and Viet Nam started centuries ago, fueled by religious differences and by economic competition over the Mekong River basin, and has never ceased. Common cause against the South Viet Nam regime and the U.S. merely dampened mutual hatreds; even in the midst of war, there were incidents between them. In 1973 the Khmer Rouge attacked North Vietnamese who were maintaining a wartime supply line through the Parrot's Beak, where Cambodian territory protrudes into Viet Nam. The Cambodians suspected--justifiably, as it turned out--that the Vietnamese were holding Chinese arms meant for Khmer Rouge fighters.

When the war ended, the old antagonisms flamed again. The Khmer Rouge, xenophobic and oppressive to an extreme that embarrasses Big Brother China, started a reign of terror at home and abroad. Cambodians were driven from Phnom-Penh to the countryside; thousands, including Communists, were purged and killed, and thousands more fled the country. Obsessed with their long hatred of a powerful neighbor, the Cambodians forced Viet Nam to withdraw from the Parrot's Beak. The Khmer Rouge, meanwhile, also occupied several disputed islands in the Gulf of Siam, forcing Vietnamese to leave. After that, relations between the two neighbors disintegrated into a series of border raids punctuated by ineffectual attempts to negotiate their differences.

After Communist Chairman Pol Pot became Premier of Democratic Kampuchea in 1976, his forces stepped up their assaults along the border. The Vietnamese retaliated with air and artillery strikes. Four months ago, the defiant Khmer Rouge launched their most ferocious attack yet, killing at least 1,000 villagers in a series of raids.

Thousands of civilians had to be evacuated from Viet Nam border settlements to safer places. One of the evacuees was Nguyen Him Oanh, 26, who decided to keep on moving and finally escaped to Bangkok. "We had to give up our cloth and spice shop and move along the road east," she reported. "Then we had to dig bunkers and bomb shelters. Every day I saw Vietnamese soldiers going toward the border in trucks, with tanks and artillery. Just before I escaped, I saw the bodies of 20 Khmer Rouge laid out along the road. Our soldiers put them there as a display, to show us that they were killing Cambodians."

It was this episode that finally prompted Viet Nam's Premier Pham Van Dong to go all out in retaliation. No less a military leader than Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap, hero against the French at Dienbienphu and scourge of the Americans during the Viet Nam War, took charge of the campaign. Characteristically, Giap planned slowly; he devoted a full two months to studying the terrain and the situation.

Last month he called on his soldiers to "firmly defend our independence, sovereignty and territory, including our frontiers, offshore islands, waters, continental shelf and air space"--and sent 60,000 troops into the Parrot's Beak. This was the largest force that Viet Nam had put into the field since the two-week battle for Xuan Loc in April 1975, which sealed the doom of Saigon.

In the Parrot's Beak, Giap's troops were traveling in the area where American forces had invaded Cambodia to cut Viet Cong supply lines from the north. Route 1, the highway that Giap's soldiers used for their forays into Cambodia, was the same road along which Richard Nixon had sent U.S. troops in the eight-week U.S. invasion. It was also the route that the battle-tough North Vietnamese 9th Division, one of the units deployed last week, had traveled to enter Saigon in 1975.

This time the opposition was not even as strong as that offered by the faltering South Vietnamese army in 1975. From Chau Phu on the Vietnamese side of the border, Giap's artillery pumped shells into Cambodian territory to disperse the Khmer Rouge. Then Giap's troops rolled across under air support from captured American A-37 twin jets.

The Khmer Rouge in the Beak, consisting of about 25,000 troops fighting in small groups, mounted occasional ambushes but were no match for the overpowering Vietnamese. Last week Giap's advance units, bypassing towns, finally halted near Neak Luong on the banks of the Mekong River. Though fighting continued sporadically, Hanoi offered to negotiate and restore diplomatic relations, which Phnom-Penh had broken off as the new year began. Refusing the offer, the Cambodians instead angrily accused Moscow of providing troop commanders and advisers for the Vietnamese invasion. At week's end Phnom-Penh admitted that the Vietnamese had penetrated Cambodia but claimed that they had been driven back.

The Vietnamese seemed unlikely to move on to the Cambodian capital. Such a move could possibly invite the reluctant intervention of the Communist superpowers. Moscow has supported North Viet Nam since the earliest days of the war with the South, aiding Hanoi with loans for food and economic development. Peking, too, has given economic aid to Hanoi, if only to maintain a competitive position there with Moscow. At the same time, China, despite its distaste for Pol Pot's more-Marxist-than-thou zealotry, has continued to support Cambodia, where the Soviet Union has no leverage.

A full-scale Vietnamese invasion would also destroy the new, peaceful image that Hanoi has begun to project. To win friends and secure reconstruction credits, the Vietnamese have made friendly overtures to Communist and non-Communist nations alike. Economic missions have been dispatched to Jakarta and Singapore.

A proposed air route between Bangkok and Hong Kong that involved Vietnamese air space was speedily approved in Hanoi even though relations with Thailand had been frosty. Meanwhile, although Hanoi's friendship with Peking is equally cool, Vietnamese Party Secretary General Le Duan recently visited the Chinese capital and came home with $300 million in aid. Le Duan, China watchers believe, also asked Peking to curb Pol Pot's government.

If the Chinese tried to do so, they evidently failed.

Last week the Soviet Union and China, which fear each other's drive for ascendancy in Southeast Asia, refrained from taking sides publicly. Using a familiar technique, however, the Soviet press extensively quoted foreign reports favorable to Hanoi or damaging to Phnom-Penh --and by extension, to Peking. The Chinese, more restrained, declared only that they hoped the situation could be resolved by negotiation. Unhappy over their inability to contain Cambodian intransigence and intent on preserving their tenuous relationship with Hanoi, Chinese leaders evenhandedly publicized reports from both sides in the conflict.

The confrontation was particularly difficult for Peking, which has feared just such a challenge ever since the end of the Viet Nam War. Once, Peking could win friends by accusing major capitalist powers--first the French, then the U.S. --of manipulating the colonial states of Indochina. Now the only villains are its fellow Communists.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.