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p Tiziano
Terzan,

p Der Spiegel, Hamburg, April 10, 1978

p Ha Tien, a Vietnamese port on the coast of the South China Sea, has become a ghost town: the doors and windows of the houses are closed, blinds have been lowered in shops and stores, there is not a soul on the streets. The 30,000 inhabitants of Ha Tien have abandoned their city.

p Tinh Bien, farther to the east, lies in ruins. The wind howls through the half-ruined buildings. The walls are black from fire. This town is also devoid of human life.

p Several hundred people have remained in Moc Noa, located north of Tinh Bien. The stalls of small vendors can be seen here and there. Soldiers are digging trenches next to houses.

p The road connecting these populated areas looks as though the recent past, which seemed gone for ever, has returned: multitudes of refugees are rushing along road, where disfigured 100 corpses lie about. The people crowd around them, searching for their relatives. One can hear the cries of children, the moans of the wounded. . . .

p All this is taking place in a region on the border between two neighbouring countries—Vietnam and Kampuchea. Just recently the citizens of these two countries joined to fight and triumph over a common enemy—the United States.

p Only a few months later, however, the flames of war once again engulfed Indochina, taking their deadly toll. This time they licked the 1,100 kilometre border between Vietnam and Kampuchea, which is under the yoke of the Khmer Rouge.

p The forces in this struggle would seem to be so unevenly matched that it is obvious who will win. Nonetheless, abandoned towns, destroyed homes and desolate fields line the Kampuchean border on the Vietnamese side and grenades explode in Vietnamese border towns. The Vietnamese population is hurriedly evacuating the border areas and moving further inland.

p The Khmers Rouge keep crossing the border attacking Vietnamese villages, terrorising the population and carrying out bloody massacres.

p “Late at night I heard screams,” relates an inhabitant from the Village of Ba Li, five kilometres from Ha Tien and four from the Vietnamese-Kampuchean border. “At that time I didn’t know what had happened, but I saw that people were leaving the village in a panic. I started to run too.”

p The Khmers Rouge attacked the village that night. They hurled themselves on the peaceful villagers with knives and clubs. Those who did not manage to escape in time were killed.

p I saw the corpses that the local inhabitants brought to a banana grove the next day—decapitated, limbless, some stabbed with wooden stakes. . . .

p Two kilometres from Ba Li, the Khmers Rouge left six bodies in a hut, among them three children. The women’s stomachs were torn apart. At the place of the crime they left a piece of paper with the words: “This land belongs to us.”

p One of the reasons for this ghastly “war” is the claims put forward by the Khmers Rouge to a vast area in the south of 101 Vietnam stretching to the sea and including Saigon, now renamed Ho Chi Minh.

p Initially, for a long time the Vietnamese tried to pacify their cunning neighbour through compromise. They even proposed holding negotiations on national borders—but Pnom Penh continued to fan the hostility.

p Thousands of Kampuchean refugees have fled to Vietnam. They are living in camps and are happy no longer “to tremble at night for fear that they are about to be killed”, I was told by one woman, a mother of two children.

Following an abortive coup in Pnom Penh (by those opposed to the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime—Ed.), the Khmers Rouge organised the general elimination of all old party workers, especially those who had taken part in the anti-American struggle together with the Vietnamese or who simply had been in contact with them.