The Chronicle of a People's War: The Military and Strategic History of the Cambodian Civil War, 1979–1991

Boraden Nhem

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351807654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The Chronicle of a People's War: The Military and Strategic History of the Cambodian Civil War, 1979 – 1991 narrates the military and strategic history of the Cambodian Civil War, especially the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), from when it deposed the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in 1979 until the political settlement in 1991. The PRK survived in the face of a fierce insurgency due to three factors: an appealing and reasonably well-implemented political program, extensive political indoctrination, and the use of a hybrid army. In this hybrid organization, the PRK relied on both its professional, conventional army, and the militia-like, "territorial army." This latter type was lightly equipped and most soldiers were not professional. Yet the militia made up for these weaknesses with its intimate knowledge of the local terrain and its political affinity with the local people. These two advantages are keys to victory in the context of counterinsurgency warfare.

The narrative and critical analysis is driven by extensive interviews and primary source archives that have never been accessed before by any scholar, including interviews with former veterans (battalion commanders, brigade commanders, division commanders, commanders of provincial military commands, commanders of military regions, and deputy chiefs of staff), articles in the People's Army from 1979 to 1991, battlefield footage, battlefield video reports, newsreel, propaganda video, and official publications of the Cambodian Institute of Military History.

1 Introduction

The chronic war

1.1 The living chronicles of a People’s War

Rainy season 2009. Under the shade of a large tree across the street from the US embassy in Phnom Penh, I was standing uneasily with a group of strangers waiting for the visa to the US that had been approved the previous day. Naturally, we did not just wait silently. We conversed, we made friends. The outcome of a conversation with a stranger has never been predictable or forthcoming. But the one I had during that hot, humid day was very enlightening.

I sheltered from the sun next to an old man dressed in an austere outfit. Exhibiting a fatalistic and taciturn appearance, the man seemed unconcerned with the world around him as if he had already experienced all aspects of life. I decided to initiate a conversation. I asked him about the purpose of his visit to the United States of America. He said he planned to visit his daughter who was already a US citizen. I said I was going to the US for my study and boasted about my dissertation topic. In fact, I had already finished a master’s paper on the US military doctrine in the Vietnam War. Surely, I thought I was rightly entitled to some pride for such a knowledge on war.

But I have never been so wrong.

The old man turned to regard me with a cold smile and seemed impressed. “The Vietnamese military operations in Cambodia were a more interesting story,” he rebutted. I was dazed. I immediately asked myself why I didn’t study the “classic war” in Cambodia from 1979 to 1991. I then gave myself a reassuring answer “It’s impossible. No one could do it, there is no source.” Immediately giving up on this momentary spark of interest, I continued the conversation. “Have you served in the military, uncle?” I asked. To which he answered “Yes, but I served in the Vietnamese unit, the 330th Division.”

I had no clue as to what he was talking about. What? A Cambodian serving in a Vietnamese military unit? The old man must have been confused, I thought. But I was wrong again. I would later learn that during the Vietnamese drive inside Cambodia in 1979, they recruited many refugees into their ranks and many would return to work in the Cambodian units with actual combat experience. It’s certainly possible that a few could have chosen to stay in the division. But in 2009, I had no clue. “Was it good?” I asked. To my surprise, he did not answer in the affirmative.

The old man claimed that his unit operated in Battambang province and in one major operation, he witnessed the failed Vietnamese frontal assaults on fortified positions on high ground. The assault was repeated several times to no avail. “The division lost a lot of men,” the old man said. I could see that the weight of memory gave him quite an uneasy feeling.

“So you’ve now quit the martial arts world, right?” I asked by making reference to a popular Chinese martial arts movie series at the time, in order to help relieve some tensions in his mind.

“Yes. I’m retired, but I still receive pensions from the division,” the old man answered. Our conversation concluded when the embassy guard called us in to collect the approved visa.

The conversation lingered in my mind even after I bid farewell to that veteran of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) 330th Division. But there was nothing I could do. It was not like I could just call the 330th Division, asking about some undated and unnamed operation to try to test the old man’s claims.

Five years later, I was sitting with a former commander of a division belonging to the Phnom Penh government, the regime that was supported by Vietnam in the 1980s. The former commander was initially a regimental commander of the Cambodian 196th Division. His unit operated in support of the Vietnamese division, which he happened to identify as the 330th Division. The former commander claimed that the Vietnamese ran out of ideas, as their assaults on the Khmer Rouge’s fortified position on a large hill were repeatedly repelled. He then suggested an indirect attack involving an infiltration force behind the enemy lines. By avoiding frontal assault, the former commander was able to defeat the fortified position in the first assault and with a smaller force. The Vietnamese were impressed. The former commander was later rewarded with the command of a newly established 6th Division. I have always wondered if the former commander witnessed the very same Vietnamese assaults described by the old man I met outside the US embassy in 2009.

A new realization started to sink in. I was starting to think about the future of my writing project. As a political scientist by trade, my dissertation was quite theoretical, although I use historical accounts as evidence. After some interesting discussions with my PhD dissertation committee at the University of Delaware, as well as my master’s committee at the US Army Command and General Staff College, I decided to do what I could do best: to do the things that have never been done before.

“The Vietnam War has been studied to death,” one of my mentors had commented. The director of graduate studies at the US Army Command and General Staff College bluntly noted:

Unless you have discovered previously unexamined archives from the Central Committee or the Imperial General Staff, it’s unlikely that your work is going to be original. This is especially true if you study World War I, World War II, or the Vietnam War.

Any research in these topics now tends to be residual.

Consequently, I have decided to construct a historical narrative of the Cambodian civil war from 1979 to 1991. I was repeatedly advised and encouraged that being a Cambodian scholar, I have an undeniable advantage: I could understand the culture, speak the language, and would find it easy to find the primary sources. But there is indeed a very difficult challenge in trying to chronicle the war from 1979 to 1991. A combination of lack of care and political upheavals contributed to the destruction and deterioration of most of the written archives. A large part of any research would necessitate tracking down the “living chronicles of war,” i.e. the veterans of all four factions in the war. To say that this is difficult is a gross understatement.

Sometimes, what one needs is pure luck.

Luck for me materialized in the form of one of the major military figures in the war, the late General (retired) Dien Del, who was a high-ranking military commander of one of the four factions, the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (KPNLF). But he had already retired by the time I started my research and it was almost impossible to find him. Nevertheless, as fate would have it, in 2011, I was invited to my neighbor’s wedding and I was randomly ushered onto a table, sitting opposite to an old man who I recognized as General Dien Del. We exchanged contacts and I was able to interview him twice before he regrettably passed away in 2013. This research was not a short or easy process, nor was it frustration free.

Over a period of seven years, the laborious process of research and trying to find witnesses continued. I was very privileged to eventually meet and converse with veterans from all four factions, sometimes privately, sometimes as part of my job as Deputy Director of the Institute of Military History. From former battalion commanders to former divisional commanders, from former deputy chief of staffs to the former militias and territorial forces, everyone was eager to share their life stories and perspectives on the war. All of these oral accounts were then checked against the scant written archives that could be found to produce the narrative in this book.

1.2 What makes this book unique

A necessary background is that Cambodia was plunged into full-scale war in 1970 when Prime Minister Lon Nol and Prince Sisowath Sirimatak carried out a coup d’état that deposed Prince Sihanouk who was then head of state.¹ Even though one can also count 1968 as the start of the war because of the armed insurrection, albeit on a small scale, in Samlaut district, Battambang province, the year 1970 was a time when everywhere in Cambodia became a battlefield. The war did not end until 1999, when the last remnants of the Khmer Rouge, ironically also from the district of Samlaut, integrated into the government under the framework of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s “Win-Win Policy.”

However, the destruction of war that persisted over that period, occurrence of unusually extreme events (such as the city-wide forced evacuation under the Khmer Rouge in 1975) and more importantly, a lack of care, all had destructive effects on the archives. Most of the written archives were either destroyed or left to the elements. Those left to the elements deteriorated beyond any possibility of recovery.

The twenty-nine-year-old civil war could be divided into many periods. However, to simplify matters, we can divide the war into five major periods. The first period was from 1970 to 1975. The regime born out of the 1970 coup, the Khmer Republic fought against the Khmer Rouge and until 1973, the elements of the PAVN and the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF) who sought sanctuaries in Cambodia during the Vietnam War.² The second period was the Khmer Rouge period from 1975 to 1979, which was marked by genocide, mass killings, and a virtual destruction of the fabric of Cambodian society. Within this time frame, one could also count a third period between 1977 and 1979, which was marked by border war between Democratic Kampuchea (official name of the Khmer Rouge state) and Vietnam, which led to the Vietnamese intervention in 1979 and the collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime.³

The fourth period was between 1979 and 1991 when four factions fought against each other. Vietnam and the Soviet Union supported the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) against the Khmer Rouge, the KPNLF, and Prince Sihanouk’s movement, all of which were supported by the United States, China, and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).

All factions eventually agreed to a political settlement in 1991 and allowed the United Nations to organize elections to establish a government. But war continued as the Khmer Rouge boycotted the election and vowed to fight even without external support. Thus, the last period of the Cambodian civil war was from 1993 to 1999. This could be called the “Win-Win Policy” period, following the namesake of the policy of Prime Minister Hun Sen that integrated the last remnant of the Khmer Rouge into the government and ended the war.

All of these periods received careful and comprehensive examinations and studies by many scholars, most of whom are not Cambodian. This should come as no surprise, given the fact that the intellectuals in Cambodia barely survived the political and military upheavals in the twenty-nine-year-old war. The major exception was the fourth period between 1979 and 1991, which received very little attention. The main reasons why no book has ever studied this crucial period of Cambodian history have been the lack of sources and, to a certain extent, the false belief that the Vietnamese army, the PAVN, did all the fighting for the PRK, thus rendering the study of the PRK’s military exploits useless.

The current book aspires to bridge this gap in the literature by attempting to provide an authoritative narrative of the military and strategic history of the Cambodian civil war between 1979 and 1991.

To understand what this book brings to the table, one must first look at what had already existed in the literature. We could distinguish at least four themes of scholarly works that relate to the five periods of the Cambodian civil war. The works listed here are by no means exhaustive.⁴ They act only as reference points to the new researchers in the history of Cambodia.

The first theme was genocide study and the biography of Pol Pot. This theme occupies perhaps the largest space in the literature on the Cambodian civil war. The world was shocked by the scale of the disaster and the insanity that led to the Cambodian genocide. At least one million people perished under the Khmer Rouge regime (Democratic Kampuchea) between 1975 and 1979.⁵ A study of this sort inevitably leads scholars to ask why a country that was known to the French as pays du sourire (country of smiles) became hell on earth. Charles Meyer, for example, authored a book with a telling title, Derrière le Sourire Khmer (Behind the Khmer Smile).⁶

The major contributions in the search for the source of all the disasters were the books by Australian scholars Ben Kiernan and David Chandler. Both were fortunate enough to possess primary materials such as internal party documents (which probably surfaced after the Vietnamese intervention in 1979), which allowed them to trace the life story of Pol Pot, how he came to power, and the nature of his policy and ideology. Kiernan’s How Pol Pot Came to Power and The Pol Pot Regime chronicled the rise of Pol Pot and his cliques as well as the history of the Khmer Rouge regime.⁷ What Kiernan missed, Chandler has filled the gap in his book, Pol Pot: Brother Number One.⁸ Chandler also extensively studied the Khmer Rouge’s notorious prison “S-21” in his book, Voices from S-21.⁹ In addition to these English books, French authors who had lived in Cambodia until 1975 also published books that shed light on the events from 1970 to 1975. Meyer’s book above is one example. Another similar book was authored by François Ponchaud, Cambodge: Année Zéro (Cambodia: Year Zero), which recounted life under the Khmer Rouge.¹⁰

These are only some of the major books. Other books offering specialized or complementary studies of the Khmer Rouge regime include, but are not limited to: Henri Locard’s Pol Pot’s Little Red Book, Philip Short’s Anatomy of a Nightmare, Alexander Hinton’s Why Did They Kill, Elizabeth Becker’s When the War was Over, and Timothy Carny’s Communist Party Power in Kampuchea.¹¹

The second theme could be counted as part of the first theme, although this second one focused more on the war be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• List of tables
• List of acronyms
• 1 Introduction: the chronic war
• 2 Road to war
• 3 The Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea: the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend
• 4 The People’s Republic of Kampuchea: when in doubt, apply People’s War
• 5 When the sky falls and mountains are flattened: the CGDK made operation graduation
• 6 Parting offensives: residual battles of the Cambodian civil war
• 7 Conclusion: the elusive peace
• Appendix A: Cambodia timeline: chronology of conflict
• Appendix B: Map legends and order of battle by province
• Bibliography
• Index