The Third Indochina Conflict

David Elliott, Gareth Porter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000306316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Third Indochina Conflict (1975-) is seen by some as the escalation of a local quarrel between Vietnam and Kampuchea; others attribute it to the attempts of external powers to advance their own interests by encouraging conflict among the various Indochinese states; most agree that it is a logical--but not inevitable--consequence of the First (1946-54) and Second (1959-75) Indochinese conflicts. The contributors to this book analyze the origins and development of the Third Indochinese Conflict and the problems posed by the complex issues involved.

1 The Third Indochina Conflict: Introduction

David W.P. Elliott

There seems to be an iron law regulating events in Indochina: nothing is ever simple, and things can always get worse. The First Indochina War, fought by France from 1945-54 to retain its colonial possessions there, was a contest between the forces of empire and the aspiration for independence complicated by its linkage to larger international issues. United States involvement in Vietnam led to the Second Indochina War (1959-75), initially construed as an effort to defend the interests of the "Free World" against a monolithic communist bloc. By the time this rationale had lost its relevance the changes that had occurred in Indochina and in the world had prepared the ground for another round of conflict, this time between allies who had stood together in the earlier contests. No sooner had the Second Indochina War ended in 1975 with the victory of the revolutions in Vietnam, Kampuchea and Laos, than the hitherto submerged antagonisms between three parties China, Vietnam, and Kampuchea -- came to the surface. These tensions ultimately led to open armed hostilities and ushered in the Third Indochina Conflict.

This book is an attempt to examine the causes and consequences of the Third Indochina Conflict. It tries to unravel the tangled knot of issues involved in this analysis by following two principles proceed from the basic to the more complex aspects of the problem, and take the perspective of each participant in the conflict as a starting point. Stephen Heder, in an article completed just prior to the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea and republished here in its original form, explicates the historical and political factors underlying the conflict between the two countries. Gareth Porter examines the Vietnamese view of the deteriorating relations between Vietnam and Kampuchea and the escalating involvement of China. Charles Benoit discusses the problem of the "boat people" and the position of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam, which became the focal center of a major turning point in the escalation of hostilities. His article is based on interviews conducted with refugees from Vietnam in various locations throughout Southeast Asia in 1979. Robert Sutter then explores China's motivations in intervening in Indochinese affairs, and discusses the internal political factors that affected the decisions on policy toward Vietnam, as well as the general foreign policy context in which these decisions were made. The final author, Banning Garrett, looks at the conflict from a broader international perspective, analyzing the ways in which the regional issues of the Indochina conflict intersect with those on the larger chessboard of global politics.

Given the complexity of the conflict, finding definitive answers to the fundamental questions of causation and resoonsibility is not an easy task. The major events in the conflict are clear enough. Vietnam invaded Kampuchea in December 1978 and China invaded Vietnam in February 1979. The connections between the key events, and the chain of cause and effect that produced them are not so easily discerned, however. Briefly, the basic positions of each of the major actors may be summarized as follows: Pol Pot's Kampuchea pointed to a long history of Vietnamese aggression and encroachment on Khmer sovereignty and maintained an inflexible diplomatic stance based on the view that compromise would lead to capitulation to the stronger power. Vietnam found it difficult to comprehend this rigid stance, was critical of the Kampuchean revolutionaries' independent strategy which Hanoi felt undermined the struggle against a common enemy, and ultimately came to see Kampuchea as a pawn of Chinese interests at a time when China had clearly signalled its hostility to Vietnam. Having led the anti-colonial struggle and having been the principal resistance force against the United States intervention in Indochina, the Vietnamese felt that they had a right to be the senior partner in a "special relationship" with Kampuchea as well as Laos. China, for its part, saw Vietnam as a potential rival in Southeast Asia as well as an instrument of Soviet policy in a region which China regarded as its sphere of influence, and as a link in the Soviet effort to surround and "contain" China with a ring of anti-Chinese states.

Vietnam's connections with the Soviet Union were regarded by Beijing as the root of the problem, and China moved to establish close ties with the Pol Pot government to counterbalance the "Cuba of Southeast Asia." The superpowers played a critical, if indirect role in the escalation of the conflict, Vietnam's friendship treaty with the Soviet Union preceded its invasion of China's ally Kampuchea by one month, and China's attack on Vietnam followed shortly after signing the normalization pact with the United States.

What, then, are the issues raised by the Third Indochina Conflict? One crucial issue is the role of diplomacy in avoiding or defusing such conflicts. Was the conflict inevitable, or could it have been forestalled by more skillful diplomacy and a better understanding of the fundamental problems? What implications does this have for the resolution of the conflict and the prevention of future hostilities in the region? A related problem is the linkage between regional and global politics. Was this a local conflict which inadvertently escalated into an international crisis? Or did the structure of global international relations, in particular the triangular relationship between China, the United States, and the Soviet Union, exacerbate a potentially manageable problem by grafting extraneous issues onto the existing tensions of local disputes? Is the Third Indochina Conflict, then, a local quarrel which spun out of control, becoming in the process a component of a larger global conflict, or was it a "proxy war" that inflamed the frictions of the local actors into open warfare? And, from the standpoint of resolving the conflict, does it make any difference which of these interpretations is correct?

An equally important question is why the causes and consequences of the Third Indochina Conflict have been the object of disputation. Is it the basic facts that are in question? Or do the values and sympathies of the proponents of the various positions influence their conclusions? To some extent, both of these problems have complicated the analysis of the conflict. But the main problem is not one of facts or values, but of interpretation and perspective. There are so many variables and possible connections between events, that even establishing a chronology of events is difficult. Relating causes to effects, and highlighting of crucial turning points in the evolution of the conflict involves not simply the cataloguing of facts, but also establishing the relationships between them. Presenting a chronology implies that a judgement has been rendered on what elements constitute the key links in the causal chain. In addition, the problem of perspective is vitally important. Kampuchea saw the problem in terms of national survival and was mainly preoccupied with its immediate problems with Vietnam. Vietnam viewed Kampuchea as a secondary problem whose main importance lay in its connection with China. Beijing, in turn, regarded Vietnam as a relatively minor irritant made intolerable only by its ties to the Soviet Union. There is an ironic parallelism here. In the ascending hierarchy of size and power, each actor regarded its own relations with the lesser power as reasonable and innocuous, and ascribed the source of conflict to the threatening behavior of the greater power. Only Kampuchea, at the bottom of this ladder, had no such bifarious view. Indeed it is precisely its weak and exposed position, and its single minded obsession with Vietnam that led to policies and actions that are not easily explained by conventional diplomatic analysis or by imperatives of revolutionary strategy.

Two analytic orientations have dominated the discussion of the Third Indochina Conflict; the "national interest" approach stressing reasons of state, and a focus on decision making which emphasizes the importance of perceptions and misperceptions and the range of choices available to the political leadership of each country. The national interest view points to the geopolitical realities of the region and the inherent conflicts of interest between the parties to the conflict. The rivalry between Vietnam and China for influence in Laos, Kampuchea, and the rest of Southeast Asia is frequently cited as a basic ingredient of the conflict. Another key element is the dynamics of the US-China-Soviet Union strategic triangle. As several contributors have demonstrated, these factors are indispensible to understanding the bilateral conflicts between Vietnam-Kampuchea and China-Vietnam, as well as the diplomatic-strategic interplay that fueled the escalation of the conflict.

At the same time, it would be a mistake to underemphasize the alternative options available to each national leadership, and the predispositions that made one choice seem better than another. Also, internal considerations such as divergences within the leaderships and responses to the expectations of non-elites cannot be overlooked. We are not dealing with the classic "unitary actor" of traditional statescraft, but with an extremely complex series of cross pressures that combine to produce decisions. And, as many recent studies of decision making would predict, often decisions are reactive, partial, and incremental, rather than part of a "game plan" concocted by a team of "rational actors."

Historical factors weigh heavily among the determinents of the decisions affecting relations between the antagonists. Not only are there general ethnic-cultural antagonisms between Vietnam and Kampuchea and Vietnam and China, but the experiences of each revolutionary leadership with its counterpart left a legacy of mistrust arid ill will. Heder's article reveals how crucial the discord between the Kampuchean and Vietnamese Parties over revolutionary strategy was in precipitating open conflict between them. Porter likewise shows the strains that have existed between Vietnam and China since at least 1954. Both cases illustrate the necessary linkage between the national interest and decision making approaches. Without the inherent conflicts between their mutual stategic objectives, cultural and ethnic tensions would not have led to open conflict, nor would the differences in revolutionary line have been as potent a contributing factor in fueling the conflict. As it was, however, Pol Pot's forces ultimately accused the Vietnamese of genocidal designs against Kampuchea. Vietnam, in turn, revived the spectre of Great Han chauvinism, as is evidenced in Premier Pham Van Dong's scathing attack on Mao Zedong as "a former Chinese emperor" who had always been obsessed by a dream of "expansion" and "hegemony." No doubt the traditional Vietnamese hostility to China exacerbated the conflict once it had occurred, as did the traditional Chinese view of Vietnam as an insignificant but insubordinate troublemaker in its rightful sphere of influence.

During the 19th century Vietnam and Thailand contested for power in Vietnam. One account of the period notes, "The almost total control exercised over Cambodia by the Vietnamese at this period set the stage for a struggle by Siam to regain its influence The Vietnamese, following the stern policies of Emperor Minh Menh, attempted to change the face of Cambodia. Vietnamese provincial administration was substituted for the Cambodian, and an attempt was made to impose Vietnamese patterns of dress on the Cambodians. It is difficult to exaggerate the searing effect of the Vietnamese occupation."¹ As Heder observes, the fear of national extinction at the hands of more powerful neighbors prompted the Khmers to approach questions of territorial sovereignty with an uncompromising rigidity. Even the supple Sihanouk made the nonnegotiability of Kampuchea's borders a major object of his diplomacy in the 1960s.

An example of the importance of the historial and psycho-cultural background of antagonism between Vietnam and Kampuchea is a relatively minor episode in the gradual escalation of hostilities between the two countries, the breakdown in April 1976 of the technical talks between them that led to the collapse of higher level substantive discussions scheduled for the following month. The specific point of contention was the delineation of the boundary between the two countries, but this was quickly overshadowed by much broader questions involving the fundamental bases for relations between them. As Heder observes, the Kampucheans "saw the Vietnamese proposals at the technical conference as an attempt to undermine the principle of non-negotiability of the borders" backed up by a military presence in areas claimed by Kampuchea" in order to negotiate in a big power way, from a position of strength." The abortive technical talks of April 1976 marked the last time that territorial issues were diplomatically discussed between the two sides. According to Democratic Kampuchea sources, an anti-government plot was crushed in that month. Subsequently, it was charged that Vietnam (and CIA) agents were collaborating to overthrow Pol Pot. Whatever the truth of this allegation it did, as Porter notes, lead to an intensification of Pol Pot's concern with "insuring security and loyalty of the Party and army itself." This, in turn, probably contributed to the escalation of the conflict by exacerbating Pol Pot's already intense concern about internal and external security and the link between them. Porter concludes that the internal purge in Kampuchea which began in 1976" was accompanied by a new policy of military initiative on the border with Vietnam and a propaganda campaign in the villages to portray Vietnam as Kampuchea's enemy," leading to escalating Kampuchean military attacks across the Vietnamese border from January 1977 on. Although the exact connection between the purges and the acceleration of Kampuchean military activity along the Vietnamese frontier is unclear, the probable connection of these internal upheavals with the expanding conflict between the two countries should caution against analyzing the conflict purely in terms of an action-reaction cycle based on decisions made by unitary actors in response to external stimuli.

Nonetheless, such a cycle is discernable in the events that followed. Heder writes that in early 1977 the Kampucheans increased their pressure on the disputed zones, which led to a Vietnamese reinforcement of their military position along the frontier. Shortly thereafter the "escalating spiral in the military sphere gained momentum in April and May 1977. The Kampucheans who had previously only wanted to suggest that they could make things costly for the Vietnamese and who had probably sent in patrols with orders to fire only in self defense, now began to initiate military activies." Heder feels that these Kampuchean military initiatives were part of a negotiation strategy aimed at convincing the Vietnamese to acknowledge the Kampuchean definition of an acceptable framework for negotiations. Whatever the intent, it led to a further intensification of hostilities and hardening of positions.

Heder observes that the "border conflict alone probably would not have had the same profound consequences had there not existed other fundamental conflicts that poisoned the diplomatic atmosphere." In the area of revolutionary strategy Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge stood at opposite poles. Conflict and tension between the two revolutionary movements of Vietnam and Kampuchea emerged at the Geneva Conference of 1954 when Vietnam, under pressure from: China and the Soviet Union dropped its insistence that the Khmer People's Party be legitimated within the framework of the settlement. Subsequently, a revolutionary leadership independent of the Vietnamese emerged, and the strategy of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (founded in 1960 as the successor to the KPP) diverged sharply from that of the Vietnamese Party. Vietnam saw Sihanouk as a valuable (if untrustworthy) ally and gave its support to Sihanouk as long as his policies excluded US influence from Kampuchea. The CPK, on the other hand, found that its own revolutionary requirements necessitated going into armed revolt against Sihanouk and pursuing the "anti-feudal" task of class struggle and the transformation of society even though the "anti-imperialist" struggle suffered in the process.

Vietnam viewed this as a short sighted policy, a threat to its own interests, and a renunciation of the obligations of "proletarian internationalism". As Porter's article suggests, the Ho Chi Minh legacy led Vietnam to take the idea of solidarity in the world revolutionary movements very seriously, even though they had more often been the victims than the beneficiaries of this policy.² Comintern shifts in strategy embarrassed the Vietnamese Party more than once and, like Kampuchea, they were pressed to compromise crucial objectives in the Geneva conference of 1954. This is now blamed on China, but it seems clear that it was, in fact, the Soviet Union that pressured Vietnam, just as it was the Soviet Union that nearly undermined Vietnam's unification struggle by proposing admission of both North and South Vietnam into the United Nations in 1957, and pressed Hanoi to pursue a policy of non-violent struggle in line with the dialectics of "peaceful coexistence" until the pressure on and from the southern revolutionary movement forced a change of line. Vietnam's stress on the united front as a crucial element of the anti-imperialist struggle was rejected by the CPK. As Heder has written elsewhere, the divergent policies constituted "an implicit mutual critique" in which "each revolutionary model points out the real or imaginable shortcomings of the other and thereby questions its legitimacy."³ From critique to armed conflict was a long step, but the groundwork had been laid by the contrasts in revolutionary experience.

For Kampuchea, the concept of proletarian internationalism was merely semantic covering for the idea of a Vietnamese dominated Indochina Federation. From 1930 to 1951, the Indochinese Communist Party had placed the communist movements in Kampuchea and Laos under the aegis of the Vietnamese leadership on the theory that the French colonial regime constituted a common enemy against which coordinated action was required. Subsequently the Vietnamese continued to play the lead role against the United States intervention. Porter points out that, "The more troubled relations between Vietnamese and Cambodian parties became, the more the Vietnamese turned to the relationship between the Vietnamese and the Laotian parties as a model of Indochina unity...The Vietnamese regarded their military presence as a normal form of cooperation between stronger and weaker states required by Indochinese revolutionary solidarity."⁴ The Vietnamese first employed the term "special relationship" to describe their view of the ties between the Indochinese combatants which "must be close to each other, although each country is independent."

To the Kampucheans, the "special relationship: meant Vietnamese hegemony, while to the Vietnamese it was a statement of self-evident strategic necessity which was vital to the security of all three states. This is a particularly apt illustration of the complexity of the two frameworks of analysis noted earlier. From the strategic, geo-political perspective, the divergence between the Vietnamese and Kampuchean position reflects an inevitable clash of state interests. The relationship of Kampuchea to Vietnam (and of Vietnam to China) simply illustrates the sardonic Vietnamese folk wisdom that "the big fish eat the little fish" - each larger power strives for hegemony where it can. It is, however, necessary to add the role that political, cultural and historical factors play in tempering or exacerbating this simple rule of international politics. Had not the Vietnamese amd Kampuchean revolutionary experiences been so markedly different, it is quite conceivable that the events which led to an armed Vietnamese intervention might not have taken place. In this case, the two perspectives complement each other. One explains the necessary structural preconditions for conflict, the other the sufficient motivating perceptions that pushed the situation over the brink.

Can the same analysis be applied to Vietnam's relations with China? The parallels are suggestive but limited. Vietnam's historical experience with China has not been a happy one. Clearly the harshness of Vietnam's post-1978 policies toward overseas Chinese in Vietnam is in some measure due to ethnic hostilities which are an outgrowth of that historical experience. Yet Vietnam had used Chinese culture and institutions in its efforts to strengthen itself and throw off Chinese domination and had also had close and cordial relations with China at critical junctures in its own revolution. Although Vietnam's post-1954 internal development model was an implicit critique of China's, this never became a major point of contention between them. And although China's revolutionary strategy significantly diverged from Vietnam's strategy from 1965 ...