Pedagogic War with Vietnam } 391
Sihanouk adopted a policy of friendship toward China: refusing associa-
tion with SEATO, embracing non-alignment and rejecting US containment,
while developing close relations with the PRC in the face of US criticism and
punishment. Furthermore, as discussed in an earlier chapter, it was under
Chinese prompting and with a Chinese guarantee that Sihanouk had agreed
to cooperate with the VWP war effort in the 1960s.
Vietnam’s leaders were convinced that they had a historical destiny to lead
the peoples of Indochina in their struggle for independence, development
and socialism. Their wars against the French and the Americans had led the
way for the liberation of the other peoples of Indochina. Moreover, those hard
struggles had been won by treating Indochina as a single battlefield, a single
strategic whole, and mobilizing the strength of the whole region, under VWP
leadership, to fight and defeat the imperialists. Vietnam was also more devel-
oped, and its people more disciplined, than Laos and Cambodia, so clearly,
in Hanoi’s view, it was Vietnam’s mission to lead all the peoples of Indochina
to a greater destiny, including building socialism and resisting Chinese he-
gemony.^16 Indochina should be a federal state—led by the VWP. Hanoi’s
efforts to move Indochina in this direction, toward what came to be called an
Indochina federation, was seen by the Khmer Rouge as a Vietnamese attempt
to take over Cambodia.
Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was headed in the opposite direction.
As soon as the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh in 1975, Pol Pot issued
an order expelling Cambodia’s entire Vietnamese minority. Through the
rest of that year over 150,000 ethnic Vietnamese were expelled and fled to
South Vietnam, where they sheltered in makeshift camps or urban slums.
Early in 1977, Pol Pot escalated the brutality, ordering the execution of ethnic
Vietnamese remaining in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge also turned their at-
tention to any member of their organizations judged to have had links with
or to sympathize with Vietnam. Large numbers of people were arrested and
tortured until they gave “confessions” naming other people. Those people
were then arrested and the process repeated. Khmer Rouge commanders,
and even whole units of the Khmer Rouge army, compromised in some way
by this witch hunt rebelled and, for survival, fled to South Vietnam. Any
Cambodian who had had past contact with Vietnamese was likely to disap-
pear in the Khmer Rouge killing fields. The “purification” of Cambodia from
all Vietnamese influence was accompanied by escalating military conflict
with Vietnam. By 1977, Khmer Rouge forces were attacking into Vietnam in
an attempt to “kill the aggressors in their lair.” Some Khmer Rouge dreamed
of retaking the Mekong River delta south of Ho Chi Minh City, taken from
Khmer rule by Vietnam only in the eighteenth century.^17
While the Khmer Rouge were using murder to purify Cambodia of
Vietnamese influence, Hanoi was moving forward with efforts to build
an Indochinese federation. Laos was a more willing partner for Hanoi. In