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p I spent a week on the Vietnamese-Kampuchean frontier, talking in detail with local leaders, visiting the camp for Kampuchean refugees and that for prisoners of war. Previously the Vietnamese and Khmers in this region had been good neighbours. They traded with each other and built dams together. After April 1975, however, the entire border was made into a military zone and the people herded out of their villages. Then armed sorties began into Vietnamese territory.

p “For whose benefit?" asks Hoang Tung, the chief editor of Nhan Dan, answering his own question, “For China’s and China’s alone.”

p I arrived at the Nhan Dan office at a busy moment, with only an hour left before the next issue of the paper was to be signed for press. Even so, Hoang Tung willingly gave me his views.

p “South-East Asia holds a special place in China’s plans. The latter sees the area as a spring-board for establishing its domination over all Asia. Our country is the main thorn in its flesh. This is why Peking has thrown everything against Vietnam.

p “Why,” I asked, “do you think the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime so took Peking’s fancy?”

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p “I think there are two reasons. First, the Maoists decided to build their version of ’socialism’ in another country after failing at home. They hoped that by starting the experiment from scratch and, what is more, in a small state, they would be successful. Pnom Penh blindly accepted already outdated dogma, began to repeat borrowed slogans of ’people’s communes’, ’cultural revolution’, ’big leaps’, ’self-reliance’ and so on. But the results of Peking’s ’social experimentation’ in Kampuchea were, of course, deplorable.”

p “Second, and no less important,” Hoang Tung went on, “is Peking’s hegemonistic goals in foreign policy. The PRO chose Kampuchea as the centre of its struggle against Vietnam, which is a serious obstacle to the Maoists’ designs. In general, to provoke conflict between neighbours has long been a favourite method of the Chinese rulers.”

p In all recent years, the PRG has been advertising the thesis that historically only two civilisations exist in Eastern Asia: the Chinese and the Khmer. At the same time, Peking has encouraged Kampuchea in military ventures against Vietnam, imposing on the country the Maoist slogan: “Only by the rifle can the whole world be transformed.” As a result, in its foreign policy, too, Pnom Penh did what it was told, and continued doing it. How many times after 1975 did Vietnam call on Pnom Penh to stop the bloodshed! But Pnom Penh ignored these calls, as did Peking.

p In 1978, the Kampucheans made over 3,000 incursions into Vietnam. They made barbaric attacks on villages, burned homes, fired on Vietnam with artillery. The artillery attacks were combined with propaganda ones.

p In Vietnam they have a saying: monks sing as the abbot commands. Peking commanded, and the “monks”, that is, the Kampuchean leaders, sang. They sang of the need to win back supposedly “lost land in Vietnam”. They also sang a “ historical song" about how, even in the ancient past, the Khmer rulers had joined forces with the Chinese to fight Dai Viet (as Vietnam used to be called), that in the llth century the Sun Chinese dynasty concluded a compact with Cambodia and their armies surged to the south.

p In contrast to Kampuchea, however, Vietnam preferred to 57 recall not military confrontations in the distant past, but something else. The Voice of Vietnam radio station spoke of how many generations of Vietnamese and Khmers had helped each other, fighting together to overcome the common enemy. When, in 1970, the Sihanouk government was overthrown by pro-American forces headed by Lon Nol, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam rendered assistance to Cambodian revolutionaries who rose to resist the puppet regime.

p In Pnom Penh, the radio went on, everything was done to make the people forget about this; all Khmer revolutionaries returning from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam were killed. The Kampuchean propaganda was based on lies and falsifications, and more—on the propagation of violence and cruelty.

p I saw people who had been taught to kill.

p . . . The camp for Kampuchean prisoners of war is situated eighty kilometres from Ho Chi Minh. I was present during the interrogation of Chan Mon, a former company commander. He looked sullenly away and hissed through his teeth:

p “They taught us that Kampuchea is building true socialism, that Vietnam and the Soviet Union are preventing us, while China, who is our old friend and brother, is helping us.”

p “Who taught you this?”

p “Our commanders. And the Chinese. I remember, one gave a talk to us. He said: ’You are fighting not only against Vietnamese soldiers, but against the whole of Vietnam. So spare nothing and no one. When you seize a village, kill everybody and burn everything.’ "

p Sixty-two corpses, almost all of them without arms or legs. Burnt homes and gardens. Thus appeared a village in the Vietnamese province of Tay Ninh after Mon’s soldiers had left it.

p The Vietnamese captain in charge of the interrogation couldn’t stand it any more, and rose from his seat. How easy to understand what he felt! Seven years before his battalion had been ordered to give immediate assistance to the Kampuchean soldiers, who had no ammunition left. The battalion travelled day and night through the dense jungle until the soldiers’ feet were bleeding, their clothes in tatters, and their 58 shoulders raw from carrying the weight of the ammunition boxes. Finally, however they reached their goal and delivered the cartridges to a Kampuchean detachment engaged in fighting against the Americans.

p In one battle the captain was seriously wounded, and was looked after in one of the border villages by an old Khmer woman, who treated him with forest herbs.

p Chan Mon said that he had been sent on punitive operations within Kampuchea itself, too. The people he was to “punish”, including children, women and old people, were usually declared “henchmen of Zuon" (that is, of the Vietnamese).

p The prisoners held in the camp were, of course, of different types. There were also some who had refused to participate in the fratricidal war and surrendered to the Vietnamese. I also saw fourteen and fifteen-year-old “soldiers”. Kampuchean rulers have been in a tight corner to start recruiting teenagers!

p In fact, what sort of life could there be in a country transformed into a testing ground for monstrous experiments! It was inevitable, that the uprising broke out in the land of the Khmers in late 1978. Under the leadership of the Kampuchea United Front for National Salvation, the patriots liberated one region after another. The army, whose main function had been not to defend the country—for no one, after all, was attacking it or even intended to—but to wield the harshest terror against the peaceful population, disintegrated before their eyes. Dozens of thousands ’of armed soldiers went over to the insurgents.

Nothing could shake the Kampucheans’ resolution to regain their freedom—neither the step-up in the reprisals by the authorities, nor the increased deliveries of military hardware from China.