Blowback - S5 Episode 8 - "Third World War"

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

Khmer Rouge horrors spiral toward conflict with an ex-comrade: Vietnam.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

On January 8th, 1979, two Vietnamese photojournalists wandered through the south side of Phnom Penh. The capital was quiet, almost silent. The pair were looking for the source of a terrible smell, the smell of rotting flesh. Elsewhere across the city, Vietnamese troops patrolled empty streets. Following the scent, the pear came across a compound, fenced off with barbed wire. It was an old school, concrete buildings, beaming white against the sunlight. Patches of green grass and coconut trees broke up different blocks of the compound. The two men entered one of the buildings.

What they saw were corpses, chained to beds by manacles, their throats, cut. In other rooms, whips, chains, handcuffs. In each building's upper floor, they found a series of makeshift prison cells and what looked like medieval torture devices. The two journalists photographed what they saw and ran back to inform the Vietnamese soldiers. What had happened here. The Vietnamese army, which had invaded Phnom Penh a day earlier, soon put the pieces together. This compound was the main torture center of the Khmer Rouge, which had ruled Cambodia for the past four years. This facility was known as S-21. The S, writes historian David Chandler, stood for Sala, or Hall, while 21 was the code number of

assigned to the word Sontobal, a Khmer term that combined the words security and police. S-21 and Sontobal were names for Democratic Campuchia's security police or special branch. Before it had served as S-21, the compound had hosted a lycée and primary school, called Tulslang, and that was the name that would become shorthand for the entire torture complex. As we walked through the place during our own research in Cambodia, it was impossible not to notice the contrast between the design of the area, the classrooms, the sunny courtyards, and the green grass, with its infamous place in Khmer history. The pictures taken by the Vietnamese photographers now hang on the walls of the different buildings. Tool slang's conversion from a school into a prison did not mean that children children disappeared from the compound.

The Khmer Rouge had no problem arresting, interrogating, torturing, and killing people of any age. In fact, the chief of the facility was himself a former school teacher. Photographs and interrogation records kept by the Khmer Rouge show children's faces and their quote-unquote confessions. During our visit to S-21, we spoke to a man, Norn Chanfal, who had been a prisoner there at nine years old. He is one of the handful of people who survived.

I was nine years old when I was arrested, then detained in this prison. All of us, the whole family were taken. They arrested us in two phases. Phase one, they arrested my father. Then they arrested us. They lied to us, saying that they were going to take us to see our father in the capital. He was already dead. Then I was stuck in here.

I survived because we were the last victims. Season 5, Episode 8, Third World War. Last time we saw the Khmer Rouge take over Cambodia, launching it's. version of revolution, round-the-clock work for men, women, and children, forced relocation for millions, and near total isolation from the rest of the world. This episode will take a closer look at perhaps the most dramatic aspect of their rule, a permanent campaign of torture and extermination. Democratic Campuchia's bloody and paranoid policies were increasingly fueled by its tensions with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

In 1977, the Khmer Rouge began confronting what it saw as a racially inferior, yet powerful and intimidating enemy across its border. In this episode, we will see the skirmishes, massacres, purges, and campaigns against non-Kamars that all lead up to war, the third Indochina war, fought between two communist governments, who had once fought side-by-side against the Americans. In America, meanwhile, some policymakers, old friends of this show, will discover a newfound charm in the Khmer Rouge.

They will see a blunt object with which to bash the struggling Vietnamese Republic, and Washington will have an ally in Beijing, which, after years of sending money and guns to Vietnam against America, now sees Vietnam as nothing more than a satellite of their arch-enemy, the Soviet Union. This American Chinese Khmer Rouge axis would have sounded like a bizarre conspiracy theory only a few years earlier. But now, as Cambodians and Vietnamese prepare for war, the United States and the People's Republic of China reach a backroom deal. On paper,

On paper, through 95 and most of 76, relations were solid between Cambodia and Vietnam. In the wake of the Mayaguez incident, where the U.S. had attacked and bombed Cambodia, just weeks after the Khmer Rouge first took power, territorial disputes between Hanoi and Phnom Penh, fell to the wayside. But Qusampan, the official Cambodian head of state at this time, later told journalist Philip Short that, Paul Pot had been, quote, simply playing for time with Vietnam.

1976 had been a turbulent year for the Khmer Rouge domestically. Only a quarter of Cambodians, writes journalist Elizabeth Becker, were truly behind the government. The yield of the country's now single cash crop, rice, was coming in below expectations. At this moment, quote, the Paul Pot regime needed an active and active and she writes. The Khmer Rouge were searching for a foreign enemy to blame for the awful problems overwhelming their country. It was in this situation that Pol Pot decided to pick a fight with Vietnam. Thailand, Cambodia's neighbor to the west, was not a plausible long-term enemy, though the Khmer Rouge attacked them as well, and the United States was now receding into

memory. But Vietnam, writes Becker, was one of the few threats that could strike a chord in the desperate, jumbled minds of all Cambodians in 1977. We spoke to Elizabeth Becker about how the Khmer Rouge planned and intended to use Vietnam as a scapegoat. They send people out to cultivate rice who don't know how to cultivate rice. Before you had a great rice harvest, normally in Cambodia, sometimes two cops a year. Now they're failing. So instead of saying, okay, we have to find some experts to help us, they start killing people for not just because they fail, but because they have to be agents of the CIA,

the Soviet Union or the Vietnam. So then, of course, it gets to eating their own. So you can't, pretty soon you have to start blaming your lieutenants. You have to start blaming that's the eastern sector. and you have to start blaming the Southwestern. And pretty soon, there are very few people left to blame. So you blame Vietnam. And that's the beginning of the border war.

The Cambodian raids on Vietnam began in January of that year, continuing into the summer. Khmer Rouge fighters crossed border to destroy villages, capture supplies, and to menace a civilian population that believed itself to be at peace. From Phnom Penh, the effort was organized by Cambodian defense minister Sonsen. He was, quote, a slender, bespectacled man in his mid-40s, according to Chandler.

And like Yang Sari, he had been born into the Cambodian community in southern Vietnam, where his parents were prosperous landowners, end quote. Now, he was tasked with gathering rice and other supplies for the war effort. and, in time, squashing any threats to that war effort, and by extension, Khmer Rouge rule. The Vietnamese government, meanwhile, wanted very badly to believe that some elements of the Khmer Rouge were just getting over-excited. For the Vietnamese, keeping up appearances was all-important. Well into 1977, Hanoi still held out hope for American aid and did not want to over-anger China, which was the primary Khmer Rouge benefactor. But the ferocious attack launched on April 30th

of that year seems to have been a turning point for Vietnam. From the start of the border raids, the government had kept extremely quiet, looking to maintain what the writer Nyan Chonda calls a facade of normalcy. But Pol Pot, quote, seemed to have decided that the pretense of normalcy in the relationship with Vietnam could now be dropped. Chanda continues. On the night of April 30, 1977, the Khmer Rouge had mounted attacks on a string of villages and townships in Anjong province in the Mekong Delta, killing civilians and burning down houses. The attack on Tin Bian township alone had caused about 100 civilian deaths. Although the Cambodians, had, in fact, been raiding Vietnam's border provinces since January, 1977.

Their choice of April 30th to launch the most vicious attack to date was rich with symbolism. It was the day when Vietnam was celebrating the second anniversary of the liberation of South Vietnam and preparing for the celebration of May Day. Hanoi's response to the team, Tinbien attack was, first, to use its air force to bomb Khmer Rouge positions along the border. Then, writes short, Vietnam, quote, proclaimed a 200-mile exclusive economic zone along the Vietnamese coast. Since the Cambodians had refused to make concessions over the sea border, the Vietnamese presented them with a fait accompli, end quote.

After a few weeks, Hanoi got messages through to Phnom Penh. Both sides said they wanted to cool things down, but low-level fighting continued, and tens of thousands of civilians were, quote, evacuated from the frontier areas in anticipation of worse troubles to come. Border trouble between Vietnam and Cambodia in the Mekong Delta, the Vietnamese defense minister, General Vo Nguyen Jop, a name all too familiar a few years ago, has made a personal inspection of the area. There have been reports of fighting there for about,

four months now officially admitted by Vietnam. Tensions kept on rising. Vietnam was running out of non-military options to get Cambodia to back down, particularly as Beijing began making its intentions known. The Chinese leadership has given its first indication that there indeed has been a purge of the country's radical faction. Photographs of Mao's widow, Chongqing, and three other leading radicals reportedly under arrest have been withdrawn from public sale. China had been something of a geopolitical basket case for the past year, thanks to a power struggle between more conservative leaders and the radicals known as the Gang of Four,

who increased their power after the death of Join Lai and then Mao Zedong. But in late 1976, the gang of four was thrown out. Influential moderates like Deng Xiaoping were returned to power. And despite the Khmer Rouge's affinity for the earthy radicals of the cultural revolution, and despite Chinese moderate's skepticism of the Khmer Rouge's extreme methods, the two sides had a historic enemy in common. Vietnam. As Deng himself would later put it,

he viewed the Vietnamese as the hooligans of the east. Already by March 1977, the Chinese had begun publicly making noise, about the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, which Vietnam had claimed upon reunification in 1975. And it didn't pass Hanoi by that when Yang Sari, the Khmer Rouge foreign minister, visited Beijing, one of the Chinese military's most senior officials was present.

Bit by bit, evidence was accumulating that China was drawing Pulpott in as a valued military ally and pushing Vietnam away. A June visit to Beijing by Vietnam's premier Fem Van Dong said it all. At a private meeting with Vice Premier Lee Shienien, Van Dong had hoped to discuss some kind of Chinese aid for Vietnam's ailing economy. Lee handed Van Dong a list of Chinese grievances against Vietnam and made it clear that relations between the two countries had entered a new era.

As Vietnam's trouble with China and Cambodia grew, as its economy was in a deepening crisis, and as its opening to the West floundered, Vietnam saw its margin of maneuverability narrowing steadily, writes Chanda, until it was time to swallow its pride and turn again to Moscow. In early June 1977, after two years of playing hot and cold and hard to get, the Vietnamese began upgrading their relationship with the Soviet Union. Before flying to Beijing, Fam Vandong had been in Moscow, hammering out a new deal for aid to Vietnam, including military cooperation. This deal had been far from a certainty earlier in the decade,

as Vietnam had tried to steer a middle way through the Sino-Soviet split. But now Vietnam's leaders felt they had no other choice, particularly as the threat from Cambodia had mounted. Moving to cover all its bases, the Vietnamese inked several treaties with its other communist neighbor, Laos, in the summer of 77. Hanoi saw Storm Cloud, rolling in, from both Phnom Penh and Beijing.

We spoke to another survivor at Tulslang, an older gentleman named Beaumang. Sometimes a younger relative spoke for him. They accused me of being CIA. or KGB. They tortured me to answer their questions until they found nothing. But they didn't let him go. They kept him in S-21. He could survive because he could paint pictures for them. He was stuck in S-21 for two years. Before the Khmer Rouge turned the Tolst-Sling complex into its national security hub, hub. S-21 was a catch-all term for outposts where interrogation, torture, and executions were carried

out. It wasn't until summer of 1976 that S-21 became synonymous with Toul Sleng, the otherwise innocuous school compound in southern Phnom Penh. Toul Slang was, in fact, only one piece of the nation's machinery of death. There were more informal killing fields all over the country. S-21 was a special channel by which the Khmer Rouge could gather intelligence and confessions, using a system of interrogation and torture, and eventually, execution. Toll-Sling was the flagship institution. Apart from the cells for prisoners and areas for their interrogation, the compound had enough space to house the many guards and officials needed to staff the facility, not to mention room for the meticulous records that were kept.

Still, usually cadre underreported the deaths, writes Becker. After all, the government had ordered that the population of Cambodia was to increase, double in two decades, to be exact. Strictly speaking, writes Chandler, S-21 was an interrogation and torture facility rather than a prison. Although people were confined and punished there, no one was ever released. The facility served primarily as an ante room to death, end quote. But until you died, you would be smothered daily with questions, threats, and violence. anyone who entered was expected to produce testimony, a piece of the grand puzzle of conspiracy against Unka. Paradoxically, the hyper-legalistic approach of the interrogators clashed with the fact

that Democratic Campuchia technically had no legal code or judicial system. When you walk into one of these buildings today, you can see the innocuous design of the rooms, checkered floor tiles of brown and white, blank walls, black shutters on the windows. But built over this, which is also preserved today, are tiny cells made of brick, bars over the windows made of iron, and a series of torture devices made from wood.

In some rooms lay rickety metal beds in front of tiny desks. Interrogators would sit there for hours, insisting that victims confess their guilt in between the sessions of torture. Chandler lists the forms of torture gleaned from both tool-slang records and testimony of the handful of survivors. They range from the brutal to the sometimes bizarre. Beating, subdivided by beating by hand, beating with a heavy stick,

beating with branches, and beating with bunches of electric wire. Cigarette burns, electric shock, forced to eat excrement, forced to drink urine, forced feeding, hanging upside down, holding up arms for an entire day, being jabbed with a needle, paying homage to images of dogs, paying homage to the wall, paying homage to the table, paying homage to the chair, having fingernails pulled out, scratching, shoving, suffocation with plastic bag, Water tortures, both immersion in water and continuous drops of water onto the forehead. A prisoner's typical day began at 5 a.m. He or she would be forced to, quote, unquote, exercise, though before long that was impossible and simply turned into its own form of torture. Quote, those scheduled for interrogation could be taken off to as many as three sessions a day, scheduled from 7 a.m. to noon, 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. and from 8 p.m. to midnight. Those who stayed behind were forbidden to communicate with each other. Dutch, the chief of the compound,

even set aside specific days for killing various types of prisoners, writes Becker. One day, the wives of enemies, another day, the children, a different day, factory workers, and so on. Dutch was the moniker of the man who ran Toul Slang. Real name, Kankakyu. He was a school teacher turned warden, just as Toulslang was itself a school turned death pit. Born into a poor Sino-Cambodian family in central Cambodia,

his time as a school teacher was interrupted by Sianuk's police, when he was arrested for communist activities and held without trial. By the time Dutch rose to be the head of S-21, he was known to drive out to observe the mass executions happening in the killing fields just outside the city. Quote, Dutch picked up his expertise in security matters as he went along. There is no evidence that he ever traveled abroad or received any training from foreign experts, end quote. He had been a part of the secret slaughter of the Khmer communists, who had come back from Hanoi,

as the war with America wound down. As indicated by the trove of records left behind, Dutch was a fastidious man and ran S-21 accordingly. He coded reports with his own notes, summaries, and questions in the margins. Quote, the most elaborate of Dutch's memoranda, Chandler writes, was titled The Last Plan. This attempted to weave two years' worth of confessions

into a comprehensive, diacronic conspiracy theory that implicated the United States, the USSR, Taiwan, and, of course, Vietnam. Like the late James Jesus Angleton of the CIA, Dutch was mesmerized by the idea of moles infiltrating his organization. As a mathematician, he enjoyed rationally pleasing models, end quote. Working under Dutch was a staff of interrogators, guards, and, for lack of a better term, archivists, all characteristic of the social base of the Khmer Rouge. Quote, most of the subordinates at S-21 were young ethnic Khmer from rural areas, writes Chandler.

Before joining the revolution in the Civil War, they had been students in primary school, apprentice monks, or helpers on their parents' farms. hardly any had lived in cities or worked for pay. Of some 166 employees, 44 classified themselves as poor peasants, 99 as lower-middle peasants, 16 as middle peasants, one as a worker, and six as petty bourgeois. They were almost all young, unmarried men. They were perfect personnel in the eyes of the Khmer Rouge.

What was the trajectory of S-21's activity as Democratic Campocia's revolution progressed? The first wave of victims came through the more decentralized system of S-21 in 1975, before Toole Sling was established. These were mostly those accused of association and collaboration with the La Null regime. But in 1976, things ratcheted up. There was a growing feeling in Anka's leadership that the ranks of the party, which was still secret to the world, had been infiltrated by enemies. The reports coming back from the countryside were not encouraging, and someone was responsible, most likely the new people, acting as agents from the USA, USSR, Vietnam, or elsewhere. The northwestern zone saw the greatest purge, as the center, Anka's leadership, played the other zones against it.

Rich peasants who had fought with the Khmer Rouge during the war were executed as class enemies, writes Becker. Yangtari himself later described this political transformation as a near disaster. The signs of these and other changes can be charted through the records at Touls Lange, writes Becker. In 1976, the people executed were members of the old society. Of the over 750 executions recorded that year at Toul Slang, no more than 12 were Communist Party members. The year 1977 was a turning point, following the change in party directives.

The number of recorded executions of party officials jumped. 142 workers were killed, the category with the highest number of executions. This purge reflected the party's decision to move ahead with industrialization, and consequently to examine the loyalty records of the workers, and to murder the proletariat in whose name the revolution was waged, end quote. Listeners may also recall, from a few episodes back, that the Khmer Rouge had never managed to break through to Cambodia's small working class. and in fact began to stigmatize it as an unreachable group of enemies to the Khmer people.

By the next year, it was another inter-party purge, with communist officials this time leading the body count. From the middle of 1977, the overriding principle guiding Palpat, Yangtari, Son Sen, and Dutch beneath them, was the threat from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Tolst Sling and its counterparts all over the country would be on one great hunt for Vietnamese mines in Khmerbodies.

This Vietnamese army outpost in Tainan province is less than a mile from the Cambodian border in an area of intense fighting for the last several months. When John Alfred and his PBS camera team were here just last last week, They saw truckloads of troops heading to and from the border. There were no signs of fighting then, but the Vietnamese said there had been lots of action against the Cambodians here. On September 24, 1977,

the Khmer Rouge launched an attack on the Vietnamese village, Tainan, near the Cambodian border. It was the first such flare-up in months. Three days later, a Hungarian journalist, Sandor Giori, was brought to, to the scene of the massacre, accompanied by a Vietnamese press officer, Fongnam. In his 30 years in the revolution, Fongnam had seen many deaths and scenes of violence, as had Giori in his job.

But neither was prepared for what they saw that day, writes Nyan Chanda. At a rear headquarters, officers claimed one Cambodian raid nearby had killed more people than any single raid during all the years of fighting in this province involving the Americans or the French. More than 700 people who were magical. The American camera team was not taken to see any fighting, but the Vietnamese showed what they said were films of a village under attack at night. In house after house, bloated, rotting bodies of men, women, and children lay strewn about.

Some were beheaded. Some had their bellies ripped open. Some were missing limbs. Others' eyes. Villagers could be seen running from the battle area. Albert and his crew said they saw evidence of casualties. About 40 people were buried here. The dates at the bottom of the markers all read 25-977, the 25th of September last fall.

Until then, Giori told Chanda, I was hesitating to accept the Cambodian Holocaust because the whole question was a total taboo in Hanoi. officially the relationship between the two countries was bright and fraternal end quote but while vietnam publicly sought to cool tensions with the Khmer Rouge in private they began to emphasize preparations for a military solution to the pulpit problem nearby a billboard showed a mother seeing her son off to the front a scene familiar to generations of Vietnamese On the day of Giori's visit to the wreckage of Tainin, Paul Pot delivered a five-hour speech broadcast over the radio from Phnom Penh. It was a significant address. Paul declared himself the previously unknown leader

of the country and the Communist Party of Campocia, writes Becker. Quote, the mystery was over. We learned today the name of the premier of the mysterious government of Cambodia. It is Paul Pot, the head of Cambodia's communists. Aside from unveiling himself and affirming the proletarian character of Cambodia's revolution, Paul Pot delivered, quote, a rallying cry for all to unite behind his leadership against the Vietnamese and the alleged Vietnamese agents within the party. The next day, Pol Pot, Yangt, and other Khmer Rouge leaders traveled to Beijing and Pyong,

Yang coordinated with their Chinese patrons. Yang Suri even continued on to New York City, where he spoke to the United Nations about Cambodian reconstruction. During this time, Suri was also tasked with improving relations with Thailand, with whom the Khmer Rouge had also been fighting along its borders. In January of this year, the Cambodians sent a force into Thai territory. They brutally murdered 30 Thai villages. Many of them, women and children. Later, the Cambodians claimed that the territory was theirs and that they were simply arranging internal affairs.

With China firmly behind Cambodia, it was time to focus aggression on Vietnam. In turn, the Vietnamese, writes Becker, started recruiting Cambodian refugees in southern Vietnam and overseas to join a united front to rid Cambodia of Pol Pot. Southern Vietnam, which the Khmer Rouge leaders still believed was actually Campocia Kram, or Lower Cambodia, was sealed off to foreigners.

Hanoi's first significant punchback at Cambodia came in October, weeks after Tainan. After driving armored columns up to 15 miles, into the Cambodian border province of Sfeyring, the Vietnamese feigned retreat, Reis Chanda. As a battalion of Khmer Rouge infantry entered Vietnamese territory in hot pursuit, another wading Vietnamese column swung from the side and caught several hundred of them in a mousetrap. However, the losses suffered by the Khmer Rouge did not seem to stop them one bit.

End quote. still had strong support, after all, in Beijing. China still sought to pull in Cambodia and push away Vietnam. Chinese airlines reduced their flights to Hanoi. When Lei Duan, General Secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party, visited Beijing in November, Chinese leaders told him, in no uncertain terms, that China would not stop supporting the Khmer Rouge, and nor would it sit idly by, while Vietnam supposedly bullied its smaller neighbors. In the last week of the year, Vietnam pressed its military advantage and sent troops led by tanks deep into Cambodia toward Phnom Penh. But while the Vietnamese units ran through

Khmer Rouge troops and positions, Cambodia refused to back down. In fact, Chanda writes, with Vietnamese forces occupying part of eastern Cambodia, the occasion was thought to be perfect to put Hanoi on the defensive by denouncing its aggression before the world. On New Year's Eve, 1977, Cambodia made its fight with Vietnam public and officially cut off relations with its neighbor. This maneuver, which involved expelling the Vietnamese embassy in Penhompin, did not go over well in Beijing, which was clearly, quote,

uncomfortable with the dramatic escalation of the conflict and open rupture of relations, end quote. But with the withdrawal of Vietnamese forces in early January, as Hanoi was unwilling to go to all-out war, Paul Potte declared victory. And however antsy it made Beijing, China did not pull away from its belligerent Cambodian ally. In early 78, China did, however, send one Madame Deng Chou to Phnom Penheng. The widow of the late Zhouan Lai and a Chinese foreign policy maven in her own right,

Madame Deng had been sent to convey a message, to repeat what Mao and other Chinese leaders had been telling Khmer revolutionaries for years. Slow down, broaden your political base, and, in this instance, negotiate with the Vietnamese. But Pol Pot brushed off, Madame Dunn. All the while, the Khmer Rouge armed its troops and began marching them east, launching a new set of attacks over the Vietnamese border. One such raid was carried out in the district of Budap in the early morning hours of March 16, 1978. Forty-six years and exactly one day later, we visited Boudap.

And we interviewed Ms. True, who recalled for us what happened. On the night of March 16, 1978, militias stayed overnight to protect the villagers. There was a young teacher here named Miss Yen, who was on her way to a meeting. A boy, a young soldier named Le Van Dien, was supposed to guard the village, but he snuck away and followed her. He brought with him two grenades but didn't bring a gun. Khmer Rouge appeared and stabbed Miss Yen, the teacher. Dien threw his two grenades at the soldiers.

The couple were killed. Then at 2 a.m., the soldier, started killing the villagers. They killed the villagers by burning houses and firing shots. We had to lay low, or we would be shot. Crawling outside from our

house, hiding where we could. The arson was crazy. They were chanting, kill all, destroy all, burn all. Approximately 250 people were killed at Budap, but it was nowhere near the largest of these springtime 78 massacres of Vietnamese by the Cambodians. The worst atrocity took place a month later in Bacuch, a village in the Mekong Delta.

At Bacchuk, more than 3,500 Vietnamese civilians were killed, hunted down with guns, dogs, grenades, and knives. One woman, later speaking to the International Herald Tribune, said that, quote, she was forced toward the border with parents, siblings, husband, and six children. Suddenly, the Khmer escorts began clubbing the children. Her youngest daughter was struck violently on the head three times and cried, mother, mother. The woman fainted, and when she regained consciousness, everyone was dead, and she was covered with blood. Although Cambodia and Vietnam would meet diplomatically through the summer, the two countries were increasingly locked on a course for more war. preparing in southern Vietnam, the Hanoi government ramped up the training of Khmer refugees and

escapees from Cambodia to prepare these men for a day when they might take on the Khmer Rouge directly. In the middle of 1978 as part of the continuing now almost decade-long thaw between China and the United States, the American National Security Advisor Spignew Brzynski took a trip to Beijing. The President's national security advisors, Vignab Brzynski, met in Peking today with Chairman Wago Feng. The two sides agreed to hold regular meetings on the establishment of normal relations. While Jimmy Carter's State Department had castigated Democratic Kempuchia for its human rights abuses, Brzezinski, always with an eye toward Moscow, took a different view of the government in Phnom Penh.

Last season, we told a story about Afghanistan. In the late 70s, political breakdown in that country, on the border of the Soviet Union, had many spooked, not least of all, the leadership of the USSR. There were two groups inside the Carter administration that fought to shape U.S. policy on Afghanistan, the bleeders and the dealers. The dealers were largely stable. Department officials and diplomats, including Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance. The Bleeders were led by Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor,

a successor to Henry Kissinger, both ideologically and professionally. Spigneubrizynski, the fanatical Cold Warrior with a 19th century approach toward geopolitics. Whereas the dealers looked to negotiate with the Soviets and their allies, bleaters like Brzezinski were always looking for an angle to strike. He did not believe the Soviet Union could be reasoned with, let alone partnered with to solve world problems. In Afghanistan, he designed a policy that would become known as the Afghan trap. Its purpose was to fund and support heroin trafficking gangs of Islamic warlord

to draw the Soviets into the country and give them, quote, their own Vietnam. One year before the invasion of Afghanistan, in the case of the actual country of Vietnam, and its war with Democratic Campuchia, Brzezinski devised a similar plan. Without much previous interest in Indochina, notes Becker, Brzezinski was suddenly all over it. From the very start, he declared it a proxy war between China supporting Cambodia, and the Soviet Union puppeteering Vietnam.

The United States, Brzynski argued, must intervene on the right side, as usual, against Moscow. The dealers in the State Department and elsewhere did not agree that the Soviet Union was driving the conflict, nor that Vietnam was a mere client state working for their masters in Moscow. And, much like in Afghanistan, the dealers thought Brzezinski was pursuing

senseless escalation in Indochina. But what Brzynski knew was that at this moment, there was a growing shift to court China in the wake of major political shifts post-Mao with the demise of the gang of four. And by now, the Sino-Soviet conflict had influenced Vietnam to essentially pick aside with the Soviets, signing military agreements, voting with them in international fora, and allowing them greater access as a trade partner. Beijing and Hanoi, as we've seen, were instead growing ever more hostile, fighting over their borders and the status of Chinese minorities inside Vietnam. In 1978, Brzynski championed Beijing's arguments, writes Becker. Whereas Kissinger

mined the Soviet-Chinese American triangle to win concessions from both communist powers, Brzezinski was willing to alter the triangle into a Chinese-American entente against the Soviet Union, end quote. In May, Brzinski made an official visit to China. By now, he and others in the U.S. government were aware of Vietnam's plans to invade Cambodia after the relentless attacks by the Khmer Rouge. The embassy wanted to know how the Chinese would react. Would China actively defend Pulpott's Cambodia? China emphasized their problems with Hanoi rather than the merits of Pulpott.

But Brzezinski could see that he had all he needed to make the case back home that Vietnam was a puppet of the Soviet Union and needed to be crushed again. much as he would do on the Pakistan-Afghan border the next year, quote, Brzynski the tourist, bounded up the flights of massive stone stairs at the silent great wall and shouted against the polar bear, the Soviet Union. At a decorous official banquet, Brzinski, the serious representative of the United States, said Washington shared, quote, China's resolve to resist the efforts of any nation which seeks to establish global,

or regional hegemony. Having consulted with Brezhinsky, Beijing fired off condemnation of Vietnam's treatment of the ethnic Chinese inside the country. Next, it closed the border with Vietnam. Hanoi, in turn, mobilized over 100,000 troops at the border. The dealers had lost this struggle, just as they would lose the struggle over Afghanistan. But Secretary of State Vance still held out hope for normally, between the United States and Hanoi.

There was some reluctance, however, due to the strange case of Mr. David Trong, a Vietnamese national living in America who had been discovered passing intelligence on U.S. Vietnam negotiations to Hanoi. Ronald Humphrey and American and David Trong, a Vietnamese, are on trial in a federal court near Washington for espionage.

Today, the government's most important witness testified against them. Corbett is covering the trial. The upshot for U.S. policy, writes Becker, was that discussions with Vietnam over normalization of relations were frozen until the Trung case was settled. Vance's policy plans for achieving peaceful, normal relations with all of these communist countries were coming to naught. Worse, Bersinski was taking over what was originally Vance's policy of advocating improved relations with China and turning it into an anti-Vietnam policy. Vance had advocated full normalized relations with Beijing, but not at the

expense of undercutting stability on the Asian continent. End quote. Now, Brzynski said Vance was trying to talk to the enemy camp, insisting that any discussions with Vietnam come after his plans with China. And those plans, of course, were to stamp out the possibility of any normalization at all. Dr. Brzezinski, what assurances do we have that China will not try to take Taiwan by force? I think we have to understand first of all the nature of the context in which this accommodation was reached. We're not dealing now with the China of the late 50s or even of the early 60s. We're dealing with the China that is anxious to enter the world, that is anxious to collaborate with Western Europe,

with Japan and with the United States. The negotiations between Richard Holbrook and the Vietnamese, which we covered last episode, limped along at the United Nations Plaza. Hanoi still pursued some kind of reparations. The U.S. made them wait, likely buying time until that year's midterm election. But for Hanoi, the clock was ticking.

Quote, quote, Foreign Minister Nguyen Kotak knew that waiting until mid-November was literally impossible for Vietnam. His country was on a war footing with Paul Pot and needed to line up support quickly, end quote. And so, on November 3rd, four days before the midterm elections,

Vietnam signed a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union. There was no turning back now, end quote. Vietnam said today that thousands of Chinese troops had crossed into Vietnam earlier this week and that many Vietnamese militiamen had been killed trying to stop them. Vietnam said the Chinese were finally driven out and that they left the body of six of their soldiers behind. In Moscow, the Soviet Union and Vietnam today signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation. President Brezhnev at the signing stressed his country's backing of Vietnam against China.

David? Well before the Khmer Rouge ever took power, during the reign of La Nalle, around a quarter million ethnic Vietnamese people living in Cambodia were rounded up and driven out, excluding the thousands who had been executed by the government. These were public campaigns waged by La Nol in speeches and over radio. The Khmer Rouge were no less contemptful, of the Vietnamese, as we've now seen. And at first, they too went for deportation rather than outright killing, according to the UN tribunal convened many years later. Quote, until late

1976, the Vietnamese were targeted for expulsion from April 1977 for destruction as such, Enquip. Unlike La Nol, the Khmer Rouge witch hunts and their aggressions on the Vietnamese border were carried out, like nearly everything in Democratic Campuchia, with the utmost secrecy. But thousands of Vietnamese remained in the country, and soon the Khmer Rouge's logic begged for a final solution. The UN Tribunal's summary of judgment identifies several mass-killing of Vietnamese inside Cambodia. This was, of course, part and parcel of the growing struggle against Vietnam itself, as shown by the massacres over the border,

where Democratic-Kampuchean troops massacred tens of thousands of Vietnamese citizens. In the halls of S-21, Dutch, for his part, had spent many months at Tolstlang piecing together evidence, quote-unquote, of a massive underground party of enemies organized and directed by Hanoi. In speeches in various parts of Cambodia, throughout 1977 and 78, as all Vietnamese residents were being hunted down for extermination, notes scholar Ben Kiernan. Numerous Khmer Rouge officials announced their ambition to, quote,

retake Campuchea Krom, better known as Vietnam's Mekong Delta. The enemies brought in to S-21 in 1978 were overwhelmingly accused of collusion with Vietnam, writes David Chandler. These deliberate killings occurred on a massive scale and were systematically organized and directed against the Vietnamese, reads the tribunal judgment. In each case, it continues, Vietnamese were targeted not as individuals, but based on their membership of the group and their perceived ethnicity. This happened under the umbrella of the Communist Party of Campuchia's policy to specifically target the Vietnamese, including civilians, as a group."

After the mass deportations and the pogroms of the La Nal regime and the subsequent deportations and killings under the Khmer Rouge, around 20,000 ethnic Vietnamese remained in the country. And by the time the Khmer Rouge were finished with them, only a few dozen survived. Journalist Wilfred Burchett, generally writing sympathetically of Hanoi, actually criticizes Vietnam's own silence about the massacres at the time. Quote, Hanoi's long silence as to what was going on along the frontier, it was a case of misplaced loyalty to the international revolutionary movement. and it was well exploited by Vietnam's enemies. Campaigns of extermination were not limited to the Vietnamese.

Quote, Cambodian xenophobia extended to its most respected ally, writes Becker, the Chinese. This is striking because at this point, the Chinese role in Cambodia was crucial. Chinese doctors, technicians, and advisors flowed from Beijing in order to help Cambodia with its many problems. They sent agricultural experts to shape up Cambodia's slipshod collectivization and were nearly the only source of Democratic Campuchia's very limited trade. Yet one Chinese diplomat told Becker that his government criticized Pol Pot for making what he called extreme left mistakes and did not consider the Cambodians to be modern Maoists.

Becker spotlights a young Chinese businessman named Hantau, who received lectures from Khmer Cadres. Quote, he was told regularly that the tables were now turned. The victims of his community's usurious money lending practices were now at the top, and he and the other Chinese were the last in line. When his son took ill, he was told by the cooperative leader that as a capitalist feudalist, he did not qualify for medicine. Much like the Vietnamese, persecution of the Chinese would eventually give way to extermination. Quote, roughly half of the urban Chinese were killed by the Khmer Rouge, writes Becker.

By now the momentum of this xenophobic violence was so strong it was spreading to other minorities. Quote, the swift purge of the Thai was so unexpected. It caught ethnic Thai members of the Khmer Rouge. by surprise, as many as one-third of the ethnic Thai community in Kolkong were killed, end quote. Then there was the case of Cambodia's Muslim chams. This indigenous ethnic group, which had practiced Islam since the 17th century, had been supportive of the communist opposition in years past and were tolerated by the old communist movement and even the Khmer Rouge during the

early years of the war against the Americans. But as we recall, with the war winding down, the Khmer Rouge areas began to enforce a uniform culture. And once in power, Anka fully turned against the chams, forcing them to assimilate. To look Khmer, they had to cut their hair, shave their beards, and wear clothes that further robbed them of their identity. They were forced to eat pork at gunpoint as a test. As went the logic for Vietnamese, Chinese, and the country's Buddhists, the chams were no longer considered welcome in Democratic Campuchea. Paul Potts' government unleashed a campaign against them as well. Quote, the number of chams in Cambodia fell from about 250,000 in 1975 to about 173,000 in

1979, a statistical loss of 77,000 people. To this must be added, at least another 10,000 chams born during the Democratic Campuchia period, who also disappeared. Quote, more than one third of the chams, about 90,000 people, perished in Democratic Campuchia, writes Ben Kiernan. Amid all of this, not merely the killing fields, but the back-breaking labor system, hunger, disease, and pitiful quality of life. Was there any resistance? Any revolt? The answer is yes. Part of the story of the Khmer Rouge's paranoia and the

constant interrogations in Toul slang is that there were ongoing attempts to resist Anka's rule. There were several Cambodian revolts across the years in the eastern zone. in Simri province, and elsewhere. Quote, armed resistance to the Khmer Rouge leadership started as early as 1973, writes Birchett. That year, there was an armed insurrection in the southwest province of Kokong, which borders Thailand,

precipitated by the revulsion of local cadres to the brutal measures ordered against the civilian population. It was put down, and all provincial cadres were executed, end quote. then in 1975 there was a rebellion by the chams in the central lowlands along the Mekong River the local Muslims attacked Khmer Rouge cadres with machetes There had been troop mutinies The approach in all of these situations by the Khmer Rouge Had been to line everybody up

Inquire who was involved and kill anyone suspected In the summer of 77 there was a plot to revolt in the northwest quote, the region's secretary named Hing took his forces to a dam site called Kamping Poi in Batambang and armed them to fight against the forces of the center. But the center found out about this plot and the cadre from the southwest was sent to replace him. When the purge team came for him, Hing attempted to escape and hide, but he was caught and taken to Toul Slang. End quote. In May of 78, the boss of the Eastern Zone, one of the old guard named Sofim, had soured on the direction of the revolution.

Imagining that Pol Pot must have been unaware of these expanding campaigns of senseless violence, so sped off in a Jeep to meet Pol Pot and bring things under control. His slow-motion defection touched off a clash between his zone and his rival warlords, which promised a chance of revolt among locals. Said one district chief, quote, there was fierce close-in fighting for three days and three nights. We fell back and regrouped, then attacked again, and drove them out of Swang Province.

This uprising was eventually smashed as well. The subsequent purge of the eastern zone was possibly the most vicious in democratic Campuchia's history. Quote, so many thousands of eastern zone, zone soldiers were sent to Tulls slang, writes Philip Short, that it was unable to cope with the influx. Dutch later remembered instructions saying, quote, there was no need to interrogate them, just smash them. If an Eastern Zone village was suspected of aiding the rebels, the inhabitants were slaughtered. Hundreds of thousands more were deported to the Central Zone, the North, and

northwest, where many were also killed, the death toll will never be known, end quote. In attempting to answer why no resistance could succeed against such an unpopular government, Birchett theorizes, quote, important and successful movements have been born under even less favorable conditions. But the difficulties of liaison and communications were formidable obstacles to forging a resistance movement on a national scale. Above all, there was no leading organization to guide and coordinate such a struggle. Such armed struggle as was taking place

was led by units of armed forces which had mutinied against the Anka leadership, end quote. So Fim, the renegade boss of the Eastern Zone, committed suicide once he realized Paul Pot was sending troops after him, before facing the sunset he told two subordinates quote

you must rise up and struggle the leadership are traitors you keep up the struggle I can't solve this we are alone I don't know what will happen I can't find a solution but just before the war breaks out

Vietnam signs a friendship agreement with the Soviet Union now that's thing, okay, if we go to war, the Soviet Union has our back. China's already got the Cambodians back. And so Popat realizes he may have gotten himself in a mess. And so he invites the UN Secretary General to come. And he hopes that if the U.S. Secretary General comes a visit, that will stop the Vietnamese. The U.N. Secretary General was warned off by the Soviet Union, so he invites some journalists, including me.

In December 1978, the Khmer Rouge welcomed for a visit Richard Dudman of the St. Louis Post Dispatch and Elizabeth Becker of the Washington Post. It was part of a wider attempt at polishing their international image ahead of the expected Vietnamese conflict. Becker, we have cited Amply, on this show.

And Dudman, as we mentioned earlier in the season, had been one of a handful of Americans to have actually been on the ground in Cambodia, while Nixon and Kissinger dropped bombs. Rounding out the group was a Scottish academic, Malcolm Caldwell, a Western supporter of the Khmer Rouge, employed at the prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies in London. In an interview, Becker told us about the trip. We come in December for two weeks, and it was all propaganda, all the time, everything was organized. We were forced to do their program, talk to their people. And I was appalled. I'd actually lived there and knew the place, and it was, it was scary

haunting, the emptiness and the fact that all these people were in these co-ops. And even though they only showed us what they considered their best places, it was, I was appalled. But anyway, on the very last day, with very little advanced notice, the other journalist and I interviewed Popop first and last while he was in power. And we'd given him questions. He didn't answer them. He said we would get the written answers. He wanted to lecture us on the upcoming war. So he knew it was coming. And he knew that he needed something. So he said he believed that Vietnam would invade and be supported by the Warsaw Pact, which is the Soviet Union equivalent of sort of NATO, and that he expected, and he wanted us to write this, that the United States

and NATO would come and support him, two hours of this lecture. And we went back to our guesthouse, really happy that we're relieving the next day. In her book, When the War Was Over, Becker describes her final night in the Phnom Penh guesthouse, where she was staying with Dudman and Caldwell. I heard a moan. I opened the door from my bedroom and stepped out just as a young man barged in from the back door. We met in the dining room and stared at each other. He looked strange to me.

His clothes seemed different. He was wearing a hat shaped like a baseball cap. He was Khmer. And, my God, he had two belts of ammunition strapped across his chest, an automatic rifle slung over one shoulder, and a pistol in his hand. And he was pointing the pistol at me. I thought he looked more frightened than I felt, and I felt as if my body would burst from fear. I yelled, no, don't shoot. I ran into my bedroom, shutting the door, but forgetting to lock it. I kept running, into the adjoining

bathroom, and jumped into the bathtub. I lay stomach down inside the tub. I wasn't thinking. I was moving by instinct, and some part of me remembered advice during the war years, when I was told that the tub was a porcelain fortress and the best protection any house offered from stray bullets. Eventually, one of Becker's Cambodian hosts knocked on the door. The intruder had been killed. Dudman was safe, too, but Malcolm Caldwell, the academic, had been murdered. In her book, Becker reports that men from the Khmer security forces were allegedly executed for the killing. Speaking with us, Becker gave her take on why this killing had happened at all. There are many hypotheses of why that happened to us, but the only thing that I believe wholly is that within the government D.K. circles,

someone wanted to send a message, don't send any more witnesses down. We don't want you to see what's going on. On December 23rd, 1978, Becker and Dudman arrived in Beijing with the corpse of Malcolm Caldwell. Two days later, Christmas Day, Vietnam launched its invasion of Cambodia.

The Vietnamese goal, to eradicate the Khmer Rouge government once and for all. The Pol Pot forces were put into massive disarray. So the original tactic did work. It did establish the command, and it did get the Vietnamese into Phnom Penh where they could quickly claim victory.

It took some two weeks to reach Phnom Penh. On December 25th, foreign radio stations reported that the Vietnamese had launched a large large-scale attack on Cambodia. Heavy fighting was going on. A 14-division push, including armored units and airpower, and crafted by the same Vietnamese general who had organized the taking of the South in 1975. Vietnamese forces dashed inward, targeting Khmer command positions,

before blossoming out, in the general's parlance, and destroying defensive positions from behind. Within a week, writes Philip Short, quote, the Vietnamese main force, consisting of more than 60,000 men, had smashed through the Khmer Rouge defense lines, heading up Highway 1 and Highway 7 to Phnom Penh. To cap their stunning victory, the Vietnamese had even planned to kidnap Sienuk from house arrest.

But just a day before Phnom Penh was captured, the prince was released by the Khmer Rouge and flown out to China. The Vietnamese did all of this while still refusing to admit they were invading Cambodia. Denials issued both in private to friendly governments such as Sweden's and in public at the United Nations. Before long, however, the Vietnamese would debut their hand-picked Khmer leaders, the Salvation Front. The group officially formed on Vietnamese soil a month earlier, composed largely of escaped or purged Khmer Rouge members. and quickly began operating from occupied Cambodian territory. Paul Pot himself and the leading Khmer Rouge

then fled to the jungle only hours in advance of the Vietnamese juggernaut. As his army was collapsing, Paul met with the chairman of the Canadian Marxist-Leninist Communist League one day, and then with, quote, an obscure left-wing Peruvian newspaper editor, the next. In a Friday, January 5th radio address, Paul even suggested Cambodian forces were winning the fight. But beginning the next day, eminences such as Sianuk and the Chinese and Yugoslav ambassadors began slipping out of the country through Phnom Pen's airport.

In the days following, the majority of the Khmer Rouge leadership began fleeing the capital, boarding helicopters, planes, and automobiles. This left 40,000 workers and soldiers, as short puts it, defend for themselves. On January 7th, Vietnamese forces entered Phnom Penh. Democratic Campuchia, the terrible three and a half year

Khmer Rouge experiment in power, was no more. Funding for this program has been provided by this station and other public television stations, and by grants from Exxon Corporation, Allied Chemical Corporation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Good evening.

As you know from today's headlines, the government of Cambodia, or Campuchia, as they call it, was overthrown yesterday in one of the shortest wars in modern history. When the capital fell on the 7th of January, 1979, the Vietnamese had one control of Campocia. After three and a half years of terror, the Pulpot regime had collapsed. Noin Chanfal, the man we interviewed, who was once a nine-year-old prisoner at Tulslang, told us what it was like when news of the Vietnamese invasion reached S-21. S-21 was chaotic.

It was crowded. The guards ran around the area. The guards shouted at each other over and over to bring all the prisoners outside because the Vietnamese soldiers and the Khmer People's National Liberation Front brought the fight into S-21. At this point, they took my mother away. My mother reminded me to look after my siblings and to not give up on them. I never saw her again.

When the Vietnamese arrived, they freed the prisoners. They freed the prisoners. I was still feeling scared as I didn't know who they were. They gave us food to eat and we hesitated to eat. They couldn't speak the Khmer language. After that day, S-21 was closed down for good. Although the third Indochina war had officially lasted about two weeks, and the Khmer Rouge were successfully kicked out of power, it also augured a new stage of conflict and crisis.

Intending to punish Vietnam for its alliance with the Soviet Union, it would be Deng Xiaoping's China that would make the next big play. And back in Washington, Zbignu Brzynski saw all of this as one door closing while another opened. His sabotage of negotiations with Vietnam, much as his predecessor Kissinger had done 10 years earlier, that was only the beginning. The next step of the plan was to help rebuild the Khmer Rouge. There was nothing secret about what the Americans were doing. I had on the record, Zbignu, Brzynski.

We couldn't support the Khmer Rouge directly, but we can support a coalition with Southeast Asia, with Europe, supporting them. So what does that mean? So this country has barely survived, famine, deprivation, the death of a quarter of their people, and what does the West do? and their Southeast Asian neighbors, they turn their back on.