p The Socialist Republic of Vietnam has become a serious obstacle to Peking in implementing its hegemonistic designs in South-East Asia.

p By trumpeting about a struggle against expansionism, China is trying to divert attention from its own expansionism. The contention that the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime was the “result of a plot" is absurd. That the Kampuchean people would rise in revolt was inevitable. Peking’s support for Pol Pot was merely a manifestation of the Chinese leadership’s general foreign policy line. It supports Pinochet in Chile and Mobutu in Zaire, provided support for the Shah of Iran and the separatists connected with the CIA in Angola. Today it is conniving with US imperialists. Expansionism obliges it to do so!

p Like most progressives who supported the Kampucheans in their struggle against American imperialism and the bloody Lon Nol regime, at first I couldn’t believe the Kampuchean refugees’ terrible accounts: atrocities, the execution of entire families, forced labour, the separating of relatives, forced marriages, widespread starvation, and the physical obliteration of all intellectuals. As time went on, however, evidence of the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime’s crimes mounted, even though the country was surrounded by a wall of silence. Refugees coming from all the provinces of Kampuchea and belonging to various social strata related horrible, and very similar, stories.

p As I had been one of the most ardent defenders of the Kampuchean revolutionaries, I decided that I would be permitted to return to the country, where, I was certain, I would find facts for determining the truth. Yet my endless demarches 105 before the Kampuchean authorities went unanswered. I was all the more surprised, since during a meeting in October 1975 with Sihanouk, just before his final return to Kampuchea from Peking, he promised me that I would be “one of the first, if not the first, journalist" to come to his country.

p It is quite surprising that the first foreigners allowed to enter the country were not specialists on Kampuchea, with the exception of Vittorovic, the Yugoslav newsreel man. In 1978 he made a film about this country and once told me: “The shots I took are terrible to look at. But reality is a hundred times more horrible than what I can talk about.”

p From my conversations with about a dozen refugees from Kampuchea (including both native Kampucheans and people of Chinese and Vietnamese origin), I realised that even the most gruesome stories cannot fully reflect the real state of affairs. In all my forty years as a journalist I have never heard anything to compare with it.

The preamble to the Programme of the Kampuchea United Front for National Salvation gives an idea of what Kampuchea went through from April 17, 1975: “For over three years Kampuchea was under a militarist and nazi-type dictatorship of unprecedented cruelty.” The reactionary Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique held complete sway. In the interests of “radicalising the social revolution on all levels" and under the guise of “cleansing society”, it emptied the towns and forced millions of people to leave their homes and property and move into the countryside, dooming them to a life of poverty and to death.