p According to refugees, the victims of the persecutions are not only ethnic Vietnamese, but also thousands of Kampuchean revolutionaries who, at the call of the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party (as the Communist Party of Kampuchea was known before Pol Pot and Ieng Sary took over) received political and professional training in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam while the liberation war was still raging. After their country’s liberation from the Lon Nol regime, they returned home. According to the Voice of Vietnam Radio Station in Hanoi, today “nearly all these Kampuchean cadres have been eliminated”. The number of victims does not stop here. The newspaper Nhan Dan, referring to the evidence of Im Soth Tanakita from the Siem Reap Province, writes that once Kampuchean soldiers drove 78 men, tied by a single rope, into the forest. Among them were Vietnamese and Chinese living in Kampuchea. All of them had been charged with conspiracy against the Kampuchean authorities. The soldiers killed them one by one, using shovels.

p Numerous facts support the Vietnamese News Agency’s statement that “the Kampuchean authorities pursue a barbarous policy against their own people too. For Kampucheans of all social and ethnic groups, life is worse than hell”. The Voice of Vietnam said in one broadcast: “The Pnom Penh 19 leaders who call themselves revolutionaries, claim that they follow some ’special course’ of restructuring Kampuchean society. In fact, this ’special course’ is nothing but an extremist and narrowly nationalistic policy—foreign and domestic—a policy marked by mediaeval barbarity.”

It would be wrong to say that this course met with no protest or resistance in Kampuchea. Vietnam radio pointed out that the resistance to the regime and the flight of refugees from Kampuchea had become a regular occurrence and had spread to the army itself. Even Pnom Penh radio had to admit that there had been anti-government uprisings in the country. The radio added, however, that “all the rebels have been eliminated".