Vietnam’s Invasion of Cambodia, Revisited

On the morning of January 7, 1979 a small unit of the Vietnamese army swept into Phnom Penh virtually without firing a shot and ended the violent reign of the Khmer Rouge. It also dealt a heavy blow to China. The Vietnamese victory, however, turned out to be hollow, literally and metaphorically.

Hours earlier, the leaders of Democratic Kampuchea had fled the capital’s wide coconut tree-lined boulevards. The rumble of Vietnamese tanks and jeeps echoed from the abandoned buildings forcibly evacuated four years before when the Khmer Rouge had swept into power. Small numbers of Khmer Rouge cadres, soldiers, and families who camped out in the ghost city had been rushed to the station to cling to a train leaving for Battambang. The train carried Pol Pot’s brother-in-law Ieng Sary and other senior officials. There were decomposing bodies on the street but most overpowering was the stench of rotting fish. Residents would have no chance to savor the precious catch, piled high and abandoned, from the annual fishing season on the Tonle Sap.

The smelly shell of a capital devoid of inhabitants that the Vietnamese army took over in 1979 could not have been more different from the bustling Saigon that Hanoi troops had stormed into four years before – ironically, days after the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh. On April 30, 1975 I watched North Vietnamese tanks crash through the gates of the presidential palace and raise the communist flag. Ironically, the North Vietnamese colonel Bui Tin, who was present at the palace to take the surrender of the last president of South Vietnam, found himself in Phnom Penh four years later too. But this time there was no surrender to receive. He hovered over the abandoned capital in a helicopter.

The first Vietnamese disappointment came five days earlier, when a Vietnamese sapper unit’s attempt to kidnap Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who has been under house arrest since 1976, was foiled. The alarmed Khmer Rouge, who had kept the prince confined in a small corner of the palace, hurriedly put him in a car to drive to the northern town of Battambang. Then-Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach told me that the Vietnamese had been planning to “liberate” Sihanouk and place him at the head of a Cambodian liberation front. Chinese leaders, who had unsuccessfully pushed the Khmer Rouge to free Sihanouk from house arrest and build a broad-based nationalist government, now had their chance.

With the Democratic Kampuchean government not quite toppled (albeit withdrawing from the capital) it was now time to snatch Sihanouk out of Phnom Penh and present him to the United Nations as the representative of a wronged country. On the evening of January 5, Sihanouk, back in Phnom Penh from Battambang, was taken for his first meeting with Prime Minister Pol Pot. “From now on if you want to go to China very often, you can do that,” he told a stunned Sihanouk, calling himself “your servant.” As Sihanouk recounted to me later, he was told, “You are free. If you come back, you will be very warmly welcomed.”  Sihanouk could only stutter. “Oh, really? Thank you very much.”

In the afternoon of January 6, as the Vietnamese army was closing in on Phnom Penh, Sihanouk was driven to the airport in the hope that a Chinese evacuation flight would still be able to land. As instructed, Sihanouk and his wife Monique carried two bags: one with suits to wear in Manhattan and a second backpack stuffed with tinned food, khaki shirts, pajamas, Cambodian kramas (scarves), and Ho Chi Minh sandals. With cannon fire sounding increasingly close to Pochentong airport, the Chinese civil aviation Boeing 707 touched down. As dusk fell, a grateful and tearful Sihanouk, as well as some 150 lucky passengers on board the Boeing, took off for Beijing.