392 { China’s Quest
February 1976, the general secretary of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party
signed in Hanoi a communiqué declaring a “special relation” and long-term
cooperation and mutual assistance between Laos and Vietnam. The next year,
a twenty-five-year treaty further institutionalized Lao-Vietnam cooperation.^18
By fall 1977, it was clear to Hanoi that Pol Pot’s regime was determined
to thwart development of a cooperative relation with Vietnam. Hanoi began
preparing the means to oust the Khmer Rouge and install a pro-Vietnamese
Khmer communist regime in Phnom Penh. In October, Hanoi began en-
couraging formation of an anti–Pol Pot Khmer liberation army. The small
number of Khmer who had made careers in the DRV in the 1950s–1970s were
inducted and given influential positions in the new organization. Former
Khmer Rouge commanders and soldiers who had fled to Vietnam to escape
the murderous purges underway in Cambodia were recruited. Young Khmer
men were recruited from refugee camps and given military training, many
at ex-US facilities in South Vietnam. The first units of the Khmer liberation
army were commissioned in April 1978.^19 Many of these recruits had good
reason to despise the policies of the Khmer Rouge and welcomed a chance to
oust that cruel regime. Parallel with these organizational efforts, Hanoi began
Khmer-language broadcasts calling for uprisings against Khmer Rouge rule.
Hanoi also began intensified propaganda about the atrocities in Cambodia
committed by the Khmer Rouge. Western reporters were allowed to visit the
Khmer refugee camps and learn from survivors about the holocaust being
wrought by Pol Pot’s regime. Hanoi’s calculation was that such information
would generate understanding for its ouster of the Khmer Rouge.
Late in January 1978, Vietnam’s senior General Vo Nguyen Giap met se-
cretly in Laos with the commander of Soviet ground forces to consider the
problem of regime change in Cambodia. The Soviet general recommended
a swift armored thrust to “do a Czechoslovakia”—a reference to the 1968
Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia to oust a liberal communist
regime. Giap listened, but promised only to act in an appropriate way.^20
Prospects for an internal coup ousting Pol Pot greatly diminished in May
1978, when an attempted uprising in eastern Cambodia failed and resulted
in the execution of large numbers suspected of involvement. That setback
seems to have shifted Hanoi toward an externally imposed regime change. In
September 1978, CPV Politburo member Le Duc Tho met with leaders of the
Khmer liberation organization in Hanoi to decide on strategy. They decided
on a military thrust in December to push rapidly to Phnom Penh, oust Pol
Pot, and install a new communist government dedicated to more reasonable
policies—including cooperation with Vietnam.^21
That offensive thrust took place as planned in December. It looked very
much like another “Czechoslovakia”: armored columns with infantry in ar-
mored personnel carriers and trucks, supported by mobile artillery and air-
craft. Phnom Penh was taken within a few days. “Democratic Kampuchea”