“It all appears very confused when communists start fighting communists, but I think it’s fairly simple here really: the border fighting merely provided an excuse for something that was bound to occur sooner or later; if there had not been border fighting it might have had to be achieved through a coup d’état in Phnom Penh, or an infiltration of Pol Pot’s Communist Party, but Vietnamese control of Indochina is a basic tenet.”
“There is no question that for a certain period of time the Vietnamese army in Kampuchea is going to be necessary in order to stop a Pol Pot take over; if they withdrew now the Heng Samrin regime would collapse. But I think the question of Vietnamese total withdrawal from Kampuchea simply does not arise. If you study Vietnamese history from the last 700 hundred years in Kampuchea the manner of conquest had always been to move people forward and follow up with the army. This time it is the other way around: the army has come, conquered Kampuchea, occupied Kampuchea, and it is entirely logical to presume that the Vietnamese will end up with a real colonialism of real occupation, of Vietnamese presence throughout all of Indochina living and working as citizens of Indochina, so to speak, but ethnic Vietnamese.”
-Alan Dawson, author and journalist
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