Third Indochina War Is Waged Behind The Kampuchea Wall
Sydney Morning Herald
Wednesday October 7, 1987
ARANYAPRATHET, Thailand, Wednesday: Kampuchea's communist rulers are building a wall - designed to keep resistance fighters out and refugees in -that will stretch the entire length of the 485-kilometre Thai-Kampuchean border.
The wall is nothing like the solid, imposing Berlin Wall, but consists mostly of a treeless strip containing barbed wire, bamboo fencing, booby-trapped trenches and thousands of land mines.
But what the wall lacks in technology, it certainly makes up for in size. As many as 50,000 to 60,000 people have worked on it at times since the project began in 1985, according to Western intelligence sources.
The Kampuchean Government calls the workers "volunteers", but Khmer exiles and Western diplomats say the workers are forcibly drafted into the extremely unpopular labour.
To Kampuchea's rulers, who acknowledge they are building a "barrier" a few kilometres inside their border, clearly it is worth the price.
Such is the magnitude of the little-known war now raging inside Kampuchea and along the Thai-Kampuchean border, known here as the third Indochina War.
"The war in Kampuchea today doesn't have the firepower and battles of Vietnam, but it's a real war, with substantial international implications,"said a Western diplomat who has watched the fighting for years.
The first Indochina war pitted the North Vietnamese against the French in the 1950s. The second saw the North Vietnamese fighting the South Vietnamese and the Americans in the 1960s and 1970s.
Now in the third war, the triumphant Vietnamese - who have 180,000 troops occupying Kampuchea, and strong Soviet backing - are fighting the growing forces of the Kampuchean (or Khmer) resistance, which is actively supported by China and, increasingly, by the United States.
This war has been going on since the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea in 1979, an invasion the Vietnamese say was necessary to topple the murderous Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot. But the invasion, in turn, gave birth to a Khmer war of liberation against the Vietnamese, who now dominate the country.
According to resistance leaders, the battles are mostly fought deep inside Kampuchea but, because the country is generally closed to outsiders, it is hard to know how frequent and extensive they are. But the fact the Government has decided to build the border barrier, with its high financial and political cost, suggests the fighting is substantial.
During a recent visit to the Green Hill and other Khmer refugee camps along the Thai-Kampuchean border, it was apparent at least some of the 70,000 fighters the Khmer resistance claims to have were leaving their border sanctuaries regularly to fight inside their country.
The border camps house an estimated 300,000 Khmer refugees and are supported by the United Nations; consequently they are supposed to be only for civilians. But many fighters clearly use them as bases to rest and resupply.
On a recent steamy afternoon, about 400 fighters - dressed in camouflage fatigues paid for, in part, by the US - gathered near the centre of the Green Hill camp. The men said they would be taken soon to a nearby resistance military base for weapons.
Then they would cross into Kampuchea for six months of military and political activity.
"Most of these men have already been inside many times," said a resistance leader at Green Hill. "We go in to attack the Vietnamese, to explain our position to the villagers, and make our presence known."
To those unfamiliar with its history, the third Indochina war can be a confusing one.
On one side, there are the forces of Heng Samrin, a communist ruler installed in 1979 when the Vietnamese overran Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge Government, which was also a communist one. Initially there was substantial international support for the Heng Samrin Government because Pol Pot had so clearly misruled Kampuchea during his four-year reign of terror, murdering or starving an estimated one-sixth of the country's six million people.
But that support gradually eroded as it became apparent that the Vietnamese, who have long dreamed of dominating all of Indochina, had no intention of withdrawing their troops.
Two years ago, Vietnamese officials announced that their troops would be withdrawn by 1990, but the international community has remained sceptical of that timetable, especially since the Heng Samrin regime has shown little ability to stand on its own.
Consequently, the Vietnamese-backed government of Kampuchea has been in power for eight years now, but the UN and most countries outside the Soviet bloc do not recognise it.
For many years the Pol Pot government-in-exile maintained the country's UN seat. But now it is held by a coalition of three Khmer resistance groups - one headed by a former ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk; one by a former prime minister named Son Sann; and one by the same Khmer Rouge group that inflicted such misery.
It is the continued presence of the Khmer Rouge that makes the current struggle so confusing and so difficult for Western governments to come to terms with.
The official American position regarding Kampuchea is to provide humanitarian aid to Khmer refugees along the border and to support the non-communist resistance of Prince Sihanouk and Son Sann with $US5 million yearly in "non-lethal aid". By law, this aid cannot go to the Khmer Rouge.
Yet the Khmer Rouge group is the only effective fighting force in the resistance coalition.
The Khmer Rouge forces are responsible for most of the fighting against Vietnamese forces, and it is widely believed here that without them, the Khmer coalition would have little of the muscle needed to bring the Vietnamese to the bargaining table.
Yet, according to UN and Western officials, the Khmer Rouge remains today as secretive, xenophobic and harshly disciplined as ever, with its entire pre-1979 leadership intact. Pol Pot continues to direct Khmer Rouge military activity in Kampuchea from his base in Thailand.
For the record, the Khmer Rouge says it has changed its policies, and wants to help establish a liberal, democratic government in Kampuchea, rather than a radical communist one. Its leaders also say their overriding goal is to liberate Kampuchea from the Vietnamese, and that they harbour no desire to rule the country by themselves.
But there have been numerous cases in recent years of Khmer Rouge forces attacking their nominal coalition allies. Prince Sihanouk, who ruled the country from the early 1950s to 1970, even stepped down temporarily as president of the coalition earlier this year to protest a particularly bloody Khmer Rouge attack on some of his men.
© 1987 Sydney Morning Herald
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