4 January 2009: When the Vietnamese ousted the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime on 7 January 1979, they liberated the country but also settled in for a decade-long occupation. Today still, Cambodians have mixed feelings about the date, celebrated with much grandeur for its 30th anniversary.
(Photo: Visitors to the prison-turned-museum look at photos of the prisoners of the S-21 detention center. S-21 was discovered by Vietnamese troops in January 1979. About 16,000 people are estimated to have been killed there. 10 December 2008. By Isabelle Roughol)
By Isabelle Roughol
From the jungles of Kompong Cham province to the living room of a royal residence, Cambodians who could get their hands on a radio in January 1979 listened attentively for news of a military advance against the Khmer Rouge in Eastern Cambodia. Vietnamese troops with a small contingent of Cambodians—the United Front for the National Salvation of Kampuchea, mostly disaffected Khmer Rouge soldiers who had only recently fled internal purges—launched an attack on Christmas Day 1978 and were rapidly making their way through eastern Cambodia.
Khieu Kanharith, now Minister of Information, was in a youth brigade in Kampong Cham and in charge of listening to radio broadcasts and making daily reports to the head of the labor camp, he said. Distant broadcasters told him of the front’s creation in early December and of the troops’ advance until he himself could hear the cannons.
“On 7 January, the Khmer Rouge radio went silent. On the morning of 8 January, I heard from [Voice of America] that Phnom Penh fall,” he said.
In Phnom Penh too, foreign radio brought news of the Vietnamese advance.
“And it is thanks to these radio broadcasts that I am aware of the situation of our country: creation of the front of HE Heng Samrin [who led the UFNSK] and ‘liberation’ of wide swaths of the Cambodian national territory, in the South, South East, South West,” wrote Retired King Norodom Sihanouk in notes published on his Web site in December 2006.
“My son (the future King) N Sihamoni and I exchange in silence and with a wide smile of hope and joy the birth and expansion of the liberation front presided by HE Heng Samrin.”
Sihanouk did not get to see Phnom Penh’s fall as with the thunder of cannons approaching, he was put on a plane to China the previous night.
On Jan 7, 1979, the Vietnamese and Khmer rebel troops entered a deserted Phnom Penh without encountering much resistance. They arrived in a desolate city that had been emptied of its residents since the Khmer Rouge’s takeover on April 17, 1975. The few leaders and workers that remained in the capital under the Khmer Rouge’s reign had left hurriedly. In his book “Brother Enemy,” Nayan Chanda describes banquets meant to celebrate a Khmer Rouge victory left to rot away as the famished workers who were about to eat them were forced to evacuate.
Photos of the time show a ghost town with trash piled up in the streets the only sign there might have been humans there. Garbage was thrown behind roadblocks on secondary roads, according to Khieu Kanharith, who said he entered Phnom Penh about two weeks after the Khmer Rouge left it. Other streets were used as storage space, he said: plates and silverware were piled neatly in front of the current Ministry of Health on Kampuchea Krom Boulevard.
“And if you want to have clothes, it’s another area. If you want to have rice, it’s [the] Old Market,” Khieu Kanharith recalled.
“Very clean, very in order,” he added.
Things weren’t so orderly outside the city; thousands of former city dwellers had converged toward Phnom Penh but were kept out of the city. Vietnamese troops blocked the way and only those hired by the newly installed administration of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea could enter the capital.
Turn Saray, now ADHOC president and then a young father, made the perilous journey to the city with his family aboard a small boat, pausing along the way to earn their daily rice and avoid remaining pockets of Khmer Rouge. They were not allowed in the city, and outside Phnom Penh, he said, the atmosphere was that of a refugee camp, with too little food, water and medicine.
“I slept on the ground for a few months because there were not enough houses. My entire family slept on the ground,” he said.
Getting regular income was difficult, but at least, unlike under the Khmer Rouge, families were now free to be entrepreneurial to survive, he said. He earned his family’s rice by transporting people on his boat, bartering and taking a collection of odd jobs.
For Turn Saray, January 7 is not only the liberation of Phnom Penh; it’s the day of his personal liberation. Forced to accompany Khmer Rouge soldiers in their retreat through the forests of northern Kratie province, his family did their best to lag behind, under the pretense that the children and elderly could not follow and in the hope Vietnamese troops could catch up and liberate them. They did. Others, in the tens of thousands, were forced to accompany their captors to the Northwest, eventually landing in refugee camps along the Thai border.
“January 7, to me and my family, signifies a liberation, the day of liberation from the atrocity of the Khmer Rouge. But seeing many Vietnamese troops, we also had the feeling that our country would be dominated by Vietnam,” Turn Saray said, adding that nonetheless, joy overcame fear.
Pen Sovann, one of the founders of the front, a former prime minister in the 1980s and now an HRP member, said Cambodian rebels alone were not strong enough to topple the Khmer Rouge and needed Vietnamese help.
“The agreement was to establish friendships for mutual understanding, not to abuse the border, not to interfere with each other,” he said of a treaty between the PRK and Vietnam signed Feb 18, 1979.
“But on the contrary after the liberation, they abused the territory and they wanted this part and that part of Cambodia…. They wanted to colonize us and to control us,” he added. The Vietnamese troops remained in the country until 1989.
The significance of Jan 7, 1979—the symbolic date of both the fall of Cambodia’s most cruel regime and the onset of a decade of foreign occupation—remains a point of contention 30 years later.
Prime Minister Hun Sen, then 26, was part of the Cambodian front that ousted the Khmer Rouge, and the government, political heir of Jan 7, made the date a national holiday.
“January 7 was a historical day. It gave us a new birthday, and I want everyone to remember it in their hearts,” said CPP lawmaker Cheam Yeap.
This year, the 30th anniversary will be celebrated with a rally expected to bring 20,000 students to Olympic Stadium. That drew the ire of opposition leaders who say there is too much ambivalence about the date to make it a day of national celebration. They prefer the anniversary of the signing of the Paris Peace Accords on Oct 23, 1991, which is not a national holiday anymore.
“April 17 [1975] and January 7 [1979] are inextricably associated: both of them are communist Frankensteins. Celebrating January 7 without having in mind a broader historical perspective, is playing into the hands of the current Phnom Penh regime whose only raison d’etre was to ‘free’ the Cambodian people from the Khmer Rouge with communist Vietnam’s decisive but not unselfish help,” SRP President Sam Rainsy wrote in an e-mail.
Even 30 years after the fact, one’s position in the “liberation v invasion” debate is a quick identifier of their political alliances.
NRP spokesman Suth Dina once vehemently opposed the anniversary as former president of the Khmer Front Party. Now the NRP has realigned with the government, Suth Dina said he and the party would no longer oppose the national holiday.
“The overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime and the assumption of control of Cambodia by the Vietnamese in support of their Cambodian protégés is a notably ambiguous issue,” historian Milton Osborne noted in an e-mail. “Deciding where an observer stands on that issue determines how one describes what took place, and its significance.”
Additional reporting by Yun Samean
