This article is posted at the request and with the permission of its author.
The Khmer Rouge trial grinds on slowly on the outskirts of Phnom Penh largely ignored by the world and the citizens of Cambodia. As a Vietnam Veteran listening to testimony in February of 2015 describing the Maoist-inspired genocide that killed two million Cambodians, I was suddenly struck by the obvious- that the Vietnamese communists in Hanoi were just as guilty as the Khmer Rouge; after all, Ho Chi Minh and the Hanoi communists created the Khmer Rouge. And Hanoi should also be held responsible for the war crimes they committed against their own people after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Not only did the Hanoi Stalinists kill as many innocent people as the Khmer Rouge, but they are still doing it in the Central Highlands of Vietnam and the World gives them a free pass on it.
The Hanoi inspired Stalinists also forced masses of their population into 150 concentration/slave labor camps similar to what the Khmer Rouge did after April of 1975. According to R.J. Rummel in his statistics on democide, the number that Hanoi killed of their own people, and to include the Hmong in Laos and the Montagnards in Vietnam could have reached over two million from 1975 through 1987.
On a lesser scale, the communists are still doing it in Vietnam, incarcerating the Buddhist, Christian, Hoa Hao , and the Cao Dai religious leaders who still languish in prison if they don’t submit to the thought control policies of the State. And they still aggressively perpetrate an under-the -radar genocide in the Central Highlands against the Montagnard nation that had fought with the Americans in the Vietnam War. So how does Hanoi escape the scrutiny that is now applied to the five former leaders of the Khmer Rouge on trial? The answer is that they were much more clever and devious about killing large numbers of people and in a direct way, they control the outcome of the Khmer Rouge trial in Phnom Penh because they are the power behind the scenes in Cambodia and Southeast Asia.
The first Khmer Rouge to be found guilty since the trial began in 2006 was Comrade Duch, the chief torturer of the notorious S-21 detention center in Phnom Penh. When the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in 1979 and their forces entered Phnom Penh, they found the Toul Slung prison where Duch and his henchman first tortured, then obtained signed confessions from the 14,000 suspected spies and traitors who were then murdered. In the eyes of” Brother Number One”, Pol Pot, they were all guilty of being CIA agents, or were tainted and under the influence of the Hanoi-trained Khmer Rouge. Under the Orwellian nightmare the Khmer Rouge created, all the inmates were guilty because they had confessed their sins, albeit under torture, and signed their confessions under the direction of Duch.
The Hanoi Stalinists did exactly the same thing in their 150 Gulags. In 1981, Amnesty International wrote a protest letter to the Hanoi crowd demanding they release the hundreds of thousands they still held in their prison camps. Hanoi responded in Khmer Rouge fashion with a written response. “In all cases of people being sent to reeducation camps, the competent authorities have established files recording the criminal acts committed by the people concerned.”
To those they trusted, the Hanoi communists boasted in private about their bloodletting. Nguyen Cong Hoan, a member of the Buddhist antiwar opposition in the old South Vietnam and member of the National Assembly until he defected, has said, “The party leaders have told me they are very proud of their talent for deceiving world opinion. We’re worse than Pol Pot they joke, but the outside world knows nothing.”
There are many peculiarities connected to the trial that outside observers are unaware. Yes, a Khmer Rouge trial in a country governed by a former Khmer Rouge Commander put into power by the Vietnamese when they invaded Cambodia in 1979. Prime Minister Hen Sen is still in power after 40 years assisted by many former Khmer Rouge leaders and soldiers who run the country today serving in the Army and Police that run the dictatorship there. He is assisted by Vietnamese “advisors” who can be found at every level of the Cambodian government. Hun Sen controls the trial and he has limited the prosecutions to only five former Khmer Rouge leaders, one of whom has died, Ieng Sary, former Deputy Prime Minister, and his wife, Ieng Thirith, former Minister of Social Affairs, whose case has been dismissed because she suffers from dementia. Many believe that if any more Khmer Rouge leaders are put on trial they will rat out Hun Sen and leaders of The Cambodian Communist Party and tell of their role in the genocide in Cambodia.
Most citizens of Cambodia have lost interest in the trial because they believe it is a whitewash of the Chinese and Vietnamese involvement behind the scenes in the killing of two million Cambodians after 1975. Says Youk Chhang, survivor of the genocide and executive director of the documentation center at Toul Slung Prison, “China was there with the prison guards and all the way to the top leaders. “ Cambodians today refer to Prime Minister Hun Sen as a man with a Cambodian body with a Vietnamese mind.
After years of negotiation with the United Nations, Hun Sen allowed the establishment of a new Cambodian court that included international judges and staff. The trial is a hybrid concoction of international judges controlled by a majority of Cambodian judges of questionable judicial skills appointed by Hun Sen to try only the five former leaders and not go beyond that.
So now there are only two old leaders of the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge left, Nuan Chea, former Deputy of the Communist party, and Khieu Samphan, former head of state for Democratic Kampuchea, both who face life behind bars without parole. Samphan and Chea, both in their 80’s, face additional charges of crimes against humanity. What the five former leaders have in common, is that they were trained in France by the French communist party (co-founded by Ho Chi Minh) in the 1950s before going back to start the revolution in Cambodia. What is lesser known, and this is what the defense lawyers are trying to bring out at the trial, is that there was a 4000- member Vietnamese faction of the Khmer Rouge trained in Hanoi and that a civil war broke out between the two factions, causing many of the Cambodian deaths. The Vietnamese faction of the Khmer Rouge run Cambodia today, countering the argument that the domino theory was a US concocted theory.
During the Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh, masquerading as patriotic nationalist, but whose first allegiance was to international communism and the communist party, on orders from Moscow set up a powerful and highly secret organization in Cambodia staffed by Vietnamese to run revolutionary affairs in Laos and Cambodia. The North Vietnamese Army hiding in Ratanakiri Province in the Eastern Cambodia on the Ho Chi Trail, helped train Khmer Rouge guerillas and in actuality fought many of their battles against the American- backed Lon Nol regime. Hanoi trained and maintained three divisions (the 5th, 7th and 9th), often referred to as the Vietnamese Khmer Rouge divisions, fighting Cambodian government forces in the Eastern Zone of Cambodia. After the American congress ignobly abandoned their South Vietnamese allies in April of 1975, the iron lid of communism clamped down on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and the killing began in all three countries out of sight and out of mind.
To insure that Khmer Nationalism would not override Vietnamese interest in Cambodia, Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese communist party official who refused the Nobel Prize, was sent south to set up an organization to control Hanoi’s trained agents in Cambodia. In January 1979, a Vietnamese army of one hundred thousand troops with a token Cambodian force overthrew the Khmer Rouge and installed their carefully groomed former Khmer Rouge officer, Hun Sen who is still in power today. Hun Sen had fled from Eastern Cambodia to Vietnam, along with a number of other junior leaders of the Khmer Rouge and their soldiers, rather than be killed by the Pol Pot faction.
In November of 1978, Tho invited Hun Sen to Saigon, along with 7 other former junior leaders to prep them for the overthrow of Cambodia. After the fall of Phnom Penh in early 1979, this group was flown to Phnom Penh on a captured American DC -3 along with Tho to set up the new government.
The Vietnamese invasion army with the token Cambodian force was trained at a former American army base at Xuan Loc just across the border in Vietnam. Le Duc Tho and Col Bui Tin, an information specialist who was rewarded by Hanoi by being allowed to retire in the West, spent several years in Cambodia to insure that the Vietnamese communists dominated all levels of the new Cambodian government from top to bottom. Russian KGB and Eastern German Stasi personnel provided them direction on how to set up and control a government in police state fashion, just as they did in Vietnam, which holds true today.
In the handout literature to visitors at the trial, it is stated that one of the goals is to build a culture that will prevent the recurrence of such crimes as genocide occurring elsewhere. While the trial was in session in February of 2015, over a hundred Montagnards escaped into Cambodia from the Central Highlands of Vietnam fleeing ethnic genocide by their Vietnamese oppressors. Their goal was to meet with UNHCR representatives so they could present their cases as legitimate refugees fleeing religious/ethnic persecution.
Apparently the governments of Cambodia and Vietnam have ignored the lessons of the War Crimes trial because the current Cambodian government has tried to block the UNHCR representative, Wan-Hea Lee from meeting the Montagnards who were hiding in the jungle in Ratanakiri Province. She was able to rescue 13 of them for the UNHCR before being blocked by Cambodian police/military, preventing them from rescuing any more. This is in direct defiance of the United Nations International refugee law which both countries have pledged to honor. The Montagnards fear for their lives if they are captured and sent back to Vietnam where they will disappear in a prison gulag specially designed for Montagnards who choose to practice their Christian religion in their own homes.,
While this writer was in Ban Lung , Ratanakiri, in February, the Cambodian Police/Military used hunting dogs to track down the Montagnards hiding in the jungle in O’Yadow district. One Jarai villager reported, “The Montagnards told me they fled from Vietnam because the authorities threatened to kill them because they were practicing Christianity. They begged me to help them because they told me they would be killed if I refused.”
One Jarai acquaintance told this writer that to frighten the local Jarai Montagnards, the Cambodian police threatened local villagers that they would kill the Vietnam Montagnards if they found them and they would kill the UN if they showed their cowardly faces.” It is against Cambodian law to give food and shelter to the fleeing refugees from Vietnam. The Hun Sen regime has refused to allow UNHCR to meet with escaping Montagnards hiding in the forests.
What’s it like in the Central Highlands today where the Montagnards have suffered since the fall of Saigon in 1975? Their rich land has been taken from them by the Northern communist conquerors, those who resisted were either killed or imprisoned, former military leaders and public officials were executed right after the war, just like the Khmer Rouge did to the former Lon Nol soldiers, and the oppression continues to this very moment.
The secret police in the Highlands, deny all access to outside visitors, even the UNHCR last year. UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, Heiner Bielefeldt reported after his visit to Vietnam in July of 2014, “The rights and freedom of religion are grossly violated in the face of constant surveillance, intimidation, harassment, and persecution. “ Mr. Bielefeldt was closely monitored by “undeclared security or police agents” to prevent him from traveling in the Central Highlands where the Montagnards call their traditional homeland. He said he was “outraged” by the intimidation, police interrogations and even physical injuries of some of his interlocutors during and after his visit.
According to human rights advocate Mike Benge, former POW, he received a dated list of 344 Montgnard political prisoners from the Jarai tribal group in Gia Lai province who are languishing in prisons and jails under horrendous conditions. (The list does not contain the names of hundreds of others from the numerous Montagnard tribes that have also imprisoned for their Christian beliefs.) The Khmer Rouge are being prosecuted for such war crimes of genocide against the Muslin Cham population and the world is outraged but the Hanoi monsters get a free pass from the World media and Western governments.
In conversation recently with a former Montagnard interpreter who spent 7 years in a prison camp after the war, he describes a large prison camp in the middle of Gia Lai province south of Pleku where Montagnard Christians are taken to “disappear” never to be heard from again. Their crimes are minor offenses such as using the internet, owning a cell phone, or attending a house church.
The US State Department secretly ordered their people in Vietnam to ignore and play down the human rights abuses so Vietnam could be taken off the Religious of Particular Concern List that allowed them to become a member of the world trade association. But a Wikileaks document released several years later caught the US State Department in their despicable actions against the Montagnards who had helped the Americans fight the Vietnam War. Holding hands also with the communist liars and perpetrators of War Crimes was Ellen Sauerbrey , State Department Official responsible for refugees and migration, who in 2007 said she believed the communist officials in Hanoi when they told her the Montagnards enjoyed religious freedom, were not being persecuted and could travel freely to the US Consulate in Saigon and to the United States.
The Khmer Rouge trial of the five old leaders can be viewed as a smoke screen to cover the past and ongoing human rights abuses in the three Indochina countries of Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia-all currently controlled and ruled by sleight of hand by the Hanoi communist party. The perpetrators of the Indochina genocide skate free in Vietnam as well as China who had their advisors with the Khmer Rouge at all levels. Pol Pot visited his allies in Beijing at the height of the cultural revolutions where cities and educated people were viewed as evil. He also learned the importance of purges from his close association with the Chinese leaders who designed the Cultural Revolution for Mao that killed 35 million people.
Other war crimes charged against the Khmer Rouge were the establishment of people’s courts where thousands were executed without trial and the forced removal from the cities of hundreds of thousands of people into labor camps where they were worked unmercifully with little food and medical care where 2 million Cambodians died. The educated Cambodians, the doctors, civilian officials, former soldiers were executed and all else who couldn’t work like an animal in the killing fields.
The Hanoi thugs did just the same thing. After their takeover of the South, the front line peasant soldiers in the North Vietnamese Army discovered their masters had lied to them in the North when they discovered their Southern Vietnamese brothers had been living in luxury compared to the peasants back home. Hastily contrived people’s courts exacted their revenge by executing 100,000 former South Vietnamese government officials and military officers.
The Hanoi conquerors then imprisoned over a million South Vietnamese in 150 prison camps which they euphemistically called “reeducation camps.” Those Vietnamese on the wrong side in the war went there to discover the error of their ways and to learn silly Marxist doctrine taught to them by barely literate cadre in exact parallel to what the Khmer Rouge were doing at that time. A trick the communists used to hide the death count was to let the families of those prisoners close to death come to take them home where they would die out of sight denying they caused their death with their inhuman brutality.
In an interview with famous South Vietnamese General Le Minh Dao in 2005, he stated that there were more than a million South Vietnamese in concentration camps after the war where 250,000 died of starvation, forced labor, with no access to even the most basic health care. One of the real heroes of the Vietnam War and for all Vietnamese to emulate, Dao spent 17 years in one of these camps, ten of the years locked in a cage. The Hanoi oppressors knew how to collect their blood debt.
One Western journalist, Jean Lacouture, an apologist for the communists and against the American war effort in South Vietnam, changed his mind when he was allowed a visit back in Vietnam in 1976. He traveled by car from Hanoi to Saigon. “I visited a new economic zone”, he said. “It was a prefabricated hell-a place one comes to only if the alternative would be death.”
What Lacouture described was the exact replica of the Khmer Rouge slave labor camps that starved and killed two million people which the prosecutors have charged the Khmer Rouge with for their War Crimes trial. A reeducation camp was where prisoners moved huge mounds of dirt in baskets on starvation diets with no access to any type of medical care that caused the death of millions of people. That’s what the communists brought to Southeast Asia, destroying their own cultures following the doctrines of Stalin and Mao Ts Tung.
Yet the Vietnamese communists still cling to these old doctrines to control the people of Southeast Asia. If one visits their war museums, the ones near the border at Loc Ninh where their B 2 headquarters was located, and also the one next to the COSVN headquarters northeast of Tay Ninh, there are no pictures of Vietnamese nationalists there. The walls of the museums are covered with large framed photos of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Che Guevara, East German communist leaders, but no Vietnamese nationalists because they were viewed as enemies of the State purged by the international communist, Ho Chi Minh.
South Vietnamese President Thieu in 1972, speaking not far from where these two museums were to be located after 1975, issued the following statement praising the heroic soldiers of the South who had won the famous Battle of An Loc in 1972, “The Binh Long victory is not a victory of South Vietnam over Communist North Vietnam only, the BInh Long victory is also a victory of the Free World over the theory of people’s war and the revolutionary war of world Communism.”
The Khmer Rouge old men are also being charged with genocide against the Muslim Cham population where their leaders were hunted down and whole villages of people executed suspected as being enemies of the revolution. In like fashion, the Hanoi communists from the North who trained the Pathet Lao army force- marched 350,000 Laotians who were former soldiers, civilian officials, and especially the ethnic Hmong race that fought with the Americans into prison camps. The prisoners were overworked with little food or medical supplies, and the forced relocation of people into these prison camps fall within the definition of crimes against humanity as described by the Geneva Convention of 1949. The guards and prison officials at these camps were comprised of 60,000 North Vietnamese soldiers.
In Eastern Laos, the traditional homeland of the Hmong, those who couldn’t escaped to Thailand and wouldn’t come down from their mountain homes as they were ordered, had chemical weapons dropped on them by the North Vietnamese Army. These war crimes are described in Jane Hamilton -Meritt’s book, “Tragic Mountains”. Over 100,000 died in the Laos killing fields hidden from the world.
Thousands more Hmong were hunted down and killed in their jungle homes as the North Vietnam oppressors basically annexed eastern Laos for their economic exploitation. . French photographer, Yves Michel Dumont, captured during the heroic battle of An Loc where the South Vietnamese fought valiantly and eventually defeated the North Vietnamese army, went to Laos in the early 1990’s to document the killing of the innocent Hmong, but to his amazement he discovered that the World Media was not interested in atrocities committed by the Vietnamese communists. Read to the end to find out why the World turned a blind eye to the Vietnamese communist holocaust.
Estimates range between 250,000 to 500,000 Vietnamese boat people died fleeing the workers’ paradise created by the communists. The international Vietnamese community who fled to freedom in the West, have seen the work of the Hanoi oppressors up close and describe it in exact words, “The Khmer Rouge communists kill openly and display their results openly. The Vietnamese kill silently and slowly and hide their results.”
So why is there no outrage in the world about the Vietnamese holocaust the Vietnamese communists perpetrated against their own people? The first reason as has been discussed is that they were much more clever and devious about how they killed their citizens to extract revenge and maintain control.
The second reason they have escaped War Crimes recognition is that those who opposed the American war effort to back the South Vietnamese in the Vietnam War, and that includes the dominant media culture at that time and most of all academia in the world, supported a communist victory during the Vietnam War. The anti-war crowd in America has a blind spot about examining the killing fields in Vietnam and Laos. A close examination of the war reporting at the time one would discover very little attention to Communist policy in South Vietnam of terror, torture, and murder that the Viet Cong used on a daily basis to control the peasants, and an obsession by such reporters as Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam in magnifying every shortcoming of the old South Vietnamese army and government. After the fall of Saigon, it was discovered that these two famous reporters had been heavily influenced by the high- level North Vietnamese spy Pham Xuan An, who put on his Colonel’s uniform after the War.
An honest examination of the Vietnam War would depict how the Left in America and the World failed to distinguish between the authoritarian regime of old South Vietnam, and the Stalinist inspired North Vietnam that unleashed a hell on earth to the peasants and those left behind that included torture, executions, and mass murder.
The world view of the Left, which still rests comfortably in the halls of academia, is that the indifference to the spread of communism is perfectly acceptable from a moral and political point of view. The naïve leftists living the comfortable life in the tenured halls of academia, pictured themselves as the champions of the peasant by cheer leading for the anti-war movement in America. But they have forgotten to ask the Vietnamese and Cambodian peasants how they felt about their communist liberators who enslaved them and murdered their family members. This simply proves that every refugee who escaped from the Indochina countries with his/her life is smarter than the Western intellectual.
The left would just as soon the world not remember their support of the Khmer Rouge and the Ho Chi Minh communists during the Vietnam War. It is clear that the Ho Chi Minh crowd chanting “Let’s give peace a chance”, share much of the blame for the killing of all those innocent people in South East Asia. They were putting into practice the end results of communist revolutionary warfare just like the Khmer Rouge.
Another famous Vietnamese General, Ly Tong Ba, the hero of Kontum, who spent 13 years in a prison camp, tells the truth about what happened after the fall. “Who did the communists liberate when they conquered the South? They enslaved the people and operated revenge camps for years. Today their policies would be called terrorism because they murdered our teachers and killed our village chiefs. They ruled by torture to control the peasants.”
Generals Ba and Dao, are the real heroes and leaders of the Vietnamese people, but they have been written out of the history books and the cemeteries of their soldiers have been bull dozed out of existence by the Hanoi conquerors.
One is struck by the anomaly that Hanoi’s leaders following the policies of communism killed more of their own people after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 than were North Vietnamese/Viet Cong and South Vietnamese soldiers killed during the entire Vietnam War. One never hears at the Khmer Rouge trial, that it was the doctrines of communism that the Khmer Rouge were following, and that the Vietnamese communists are still following today to suppress their people.
And who was fighting against this evil and the enemies of mankind? It was the South Vietnamese and American soldiers, the real heroes in the South East Asian holocaust, forgotten for their valiant sacrifice and never once mentioned at the Khmer Rouge trial. If the Khmer Rouge were monsters, created and trained by the North Vietnamese soldiers, then wouldn’t those fighting them be viewed as the forces for good against evil?
There was more freedom in the old South Vietnam than there is in the communist controlled Vietnam today. There were independent newspapers and radio stations, and writers were given the freedom to express their thoughts openly. That’s all forgotten today where all citizens who speak their mind and advocate for human rights in Vietnam finds themselves silenced with a long prison term.
What the world needs is a War Crimes trial for the Vietnamese communists who murdered all those innocent people in Vietnam and Laos, just like their former comrades in arms, the Khmer Rouge. Those who escaped with their lives from the Vietnamese holocaust know the real horror created there which was met by complete silence by communist fellow travelers in the West, who had supported them and rooted for their victory.
The Khmer Rouge trial is a show trial for the world, and to be effective, it has to be taken out of the hands of the communist masters who control it by establishing an outside location. But why no mention of a trial for their partners in crimes against humanity, the Hanoi communists, who still enslave their own Vietnamese people and get a free pass on the crime of genocide?
The Co Van,
Rich Webster
MACV/CORDS
Advisor with the Regional Forces/Popular Forces, 1968/1969 April, 2015
