Phnom Penh Post
By Justine Drennan
As several of the “Kissinger Cables” made accessible by anti-secrecy
website WikiLeaks this week suggest, the Lon Nol regime by 1973-74 was
unable – at least publicly – even to accurately identify its opponents.
Cables
to DC from US officers on the ground show statements from the US-backed
Lon Nol government blaming the communist insurgency largely on the
North Vietnamese – who by the start of 1973 had largely withdrawn from
Cambodia.
A ceasefire declaration at the end of 1972 and the
Paris Peace Accords in January 1973 between the US and North Vietnamese
signalled an official break between the North Vietnamese and the Khmer
Rouge, who in fact had been purging Vietnam-trained cadres by 1971,
according to historians such as David Chandler and Ben Kiernan.
Nevertheless,
several cables reveal that government statements, as well as proposed
propaganda leaflets the Lon Nol government asked the US to airdrop,
still referred in 1973 and 1974 to the North Vietnamese as the primary
enemy.
A July 1974 cable from US Ambassador to Cambodia John
Dean reports that the Lon Nol government had recently stated: “It is
public knowledge that, on the enemy side, the local communist forces are
recruited, directed, trained, armed and supplied by the North
Vietnamese invaders, in flagrant violation of Article 20 of the January
27 1973 Paris Accords.”
One proposed leaflet declares: “The Nort[h] Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, signatories to these accrods [sic] take no notice.”
“It
is asked of our Khmer compatriots who live under the influence of the
North Vietnamese and Viet Cong to rejoin us, the Republicans, in order
to defend the independence, the sovereignty, the territorial integrity,
and the national unity of our country,” says another.
Historian
David Chandler told the Post it was less likely that the Lon Nol regime
was trying to misrepresent the strength of the Khmer Rouge’s connections
to the North Vietnamese than that they actually believed close
connections still existed.
“The idea that the KR were a rogue,
indigenous communist movement was hard to swallow or program, for many
people for many years,” Chandler said.
US officials, too, were
most likely not aware of the extent of the split between the Khmer Rouge
and the North Vietnamese, he added.
Chandler and others have
attributed many US miscalculations in Cambodia and elsewhere to a Cold
War mindset that conflated the motivations of different communist
groups.
In the case of the anti-Vietnamese propaganda, Chandler
said he didn’t believe it would have had much effect, because Vietnamese
cadres no longer led the conflict.
He added that the Lon Nol
regime “didn’t want to believe they had a civil war on their hands, as
opposed to a war against non-Khmer non-believers.”
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