Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Tho had dedicated his life to the cause. In 1941 he became a founding member of the
Viet Minh front, and had played a key role in the communists' struggle against the French
and the Americans. In 1978, three years after Vietnam was reunified under communist
rule, Tho was given a mission to assemble a group of revolutionaries and defectors, guid-
ing and shaping them into a force capable of advancing Vietnamese interests in Cambod-
ia. He would remain in Cambodia until 1982, “guiding” the Cambodian revolution and
keeping a close watch over his hand-picked protégés. His appointment was an indication
of the importance Hanoi placed on the survival of its new Cambodian satellite.
As the leadership of Democratic Kampuchea retreated west, their reign of terror contin-
ued. Cadres herded frightened villagers toward the Thai border at gunpoint. Emaciated
refugees arriving in Thailand told of widespread massacres in areas of western Cambodia
that fell back under Khmer Rouge control in the chaotic months following the invasion.
“Many of us died at the last moment,” said Kassie Neou, who was recaptured briefly by
the Khmer Rouge after liberation, before escaping on foot into Thailand. By the end of
1979, around 100,000 former DK cadres, soldiers, and their families had arrived at the
Thai border, where they settled in a series of makeshift camps. The defeated regime was
in disarray, its senior leadership hemmed into an unwelcoming sliver of territory along
the Thai border, a thickly forested area traditionally inhabited by outlaws and bandits.
Only intense international lobbying prevented the disappearance of the Khmer Rouge
as a political entity. When Pol Pot was overthrown, China, the US, and the anticommunist
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) all condemned the Vietnamese over-
throw of DK and withheld recognition of the new government in Phnom Penh. When a
barefoot Ieng Sary crossed into Thailand four days after the fall of Phnom Penh, officials
from the Chinese embassy in Bangkok were there to greet him, with fresh clothes and
shoes to replace the sandals he had lost in the confused retreat from Phnom Penh. DK's
foreign minister was then placed aboard a Thai military helicopter to Bangkok and flown
to Beijing. 12 The next morning, Sary met Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping, who criticized
his government's excesses and “deviations,” but immediately pledged to back a guerrilla
war to unseat the Heng Samrin regime, securing Thai support for the shipment of aid and
military supplies to DK sanctuaries along the Cambodian border.
Deng followed up this show of hospitality with a more pointed “lesson” for Hanoi.
On February 17, after heavy shelling, waves of People's Liberation Army troops invaded
northern Vietnam. Fierce fighting dragged on for nearly three weeks and laid waste to the
Vietnamese border region. As a pedagogical exercise, Beijing's invasion had mixed res-
ults—Chinese forces sustained heavy casualties and were soon forced to withdraw—but
it set the geopolitical battle-lines that would determine the course of the Cambodian
civil war for the next decade. Each year between 1979 and 1989, the Chinese provided
Search WWH ::




Custom Search