A bloody border conflict has begun between Vietnam and Cambodia. It remains difficult to determine the real extent of the clashes that have taken place, and the exact state of the military situation on the ground. Nevertheless, the grave political consequences of these confrontations must not be underestimated.
The first border incidents between the two countries go back to the immediate aftermath of the imperialist defeat in Indochina, and have never been suspended for very long since then. The fact, dreadful in and of itself, that two peoples who had long fought side by side against a common enemy were involved in a fratricidal war, was known before the recent events.
On December 31, 1977, the conflict between Vietnam and Cambodia took on new political dimensions. Cambodian radio broadcasts announced a “temporary break-off” of diplomatic relations between Kampuchea and Vietnam, denouncing “the invasion of our territory” by Vietnamese troops and the “crimes” allegedly committed against Cambodian citizens, going so far as to compare the Hanoi regime to that of Hitler's Germany.
A short time later, the Vietnamese government issued a statement in which it too condemned the “atrocities” it claimed Cambodian troops had repeatedly carried out on Vietnamese territory. It claimed to be acting in “self-defense” and called for the immediate opening of negotiations to settle the border dispute. The depth of the rift now separating the two regimesthough both emerged out of related liberation struggles—was suddenly brought out in the open.
The ramifications of the conflict between Vietnam and Cambodia must not be underestimated. It sets up a situation that could deteriorate into a broader military conflict. Its human and material cost to the Vietnamese and Kampuchean populations is already exorbitant, for they also face terrible hardships as a legacy of their precolonial past, a century of French rule, and more than three decades of imperialist war. This conflict may deal a hard blow to the revolutionary struggles under way in Southeast Asia, including in Thailand, after the defeat of imperialism in Indo- 130 china had opened a period favoring their development.
The international consequences may also prove to be grave. The Indochinese peoples’ struggle against American imperialism largely contributed to Washington’s loss of political credibility and moral authority. The Vietnamese-Cambodian crisis is lending considerable assistance to Carter’s efforts to refurbish American imperialism’s image.
Since the victory of the liberation struggles in Vietnam, Laos, and Kampuchea in 1975, the bourgeois media around the world have pounced on all of the bureaucratic and antidemocratic measures taken by one or the other regime to feed their anticommunist campaign. This was particularly the case with respect to Cambodia, where the leadership adopted brutal measures of mass social repression. Now the mass media have seized on the Vietnamese-Kampuchean border dispute to even further discredit revolutionary struggle, internationalism, and the fight for socialism.
How such a conflict could have arisen between two regimes claiming to be socialist cannot be understood without taking into account the history of the international workers movement over the last fifty years. It provides a dramatic illustration of the terrible price workers are still paying for the victory of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and in the international communist movement. Stalinism, wedded to the defense of the narrow national interests of the Kremlin bureaucracy in the name of the “theory” of “socialism in one country,” caused the destruction of the Third International by burying the program of the world revolution: revolutionary internationalism, the basis on which the Comintern was founded after the victory of October 1917.
One of the most harmful consequences of this degeneration was the abandonment of genuine internationalist cooperation by those countries that had overturned capitalism, and the development of nationalist rivalry. This tendency was clearly illustrated by the domination of Eastern Europe by the Kremlin and by the outbreak of the Sino-Soviet conflict. Had the Stalinist ideology of “socialism in one country” not triumphed, the sharpness of the confrontation between Vietnam and Cambodia would be inconceivable.
Furthermore, the Sino-Soviet conflict has played a direct role in the deterioration of relations between Vietnam and Cambodia. Moscow and Peking’s share of responsibility must be pointed out. In the past the Soviet leadership refused, in the name of “peaceful coexistence,” to provide the type of support to the peoples of Indochina that could have brought a quick end to American escalation and substantially lessened the toll of an exhausfing liberation struggle against the most powerful imperialist country in the world.
In addition, up to the last minute Moscow refused to break with the puppet regime of Lon Nol in Cambodia, for fear of the pro-Chinese sympathies of Sihanouk and the Khmers Rouges. As for the Chinese Communist Party, it has covered up for the bureaucratic and nationalist line of the present Cambodian leadership so as to resist the spread of Vietnamese influence in the area.
In Peking’s view, the Vietnamese leadership is guilty of having refused to condemn Russian “social imperialism” as the “main enemy of the world’s peoples.” The Soviet and Chinese leaderships are both covering up for their “ally” in the conflict between Vietnam and Cambodia, on behalf of their own narrow national interests as a state bureaucracy.
The weight of Stalinism internationally and the Stalinist training of the Vietnamese and Cambodian leaderships partly explain the extent of the resurgence of nationalism in Indochina. Because, too, of the historic animosity deliberately intensified by imperialism, an outlook molded by more than thirty years of long-isolated national liberation struggles, and now, because of the extreme bureaucratic deformation that characterize these regimes, not one of the leaderships—Vietnamese, Laotian, or Cambodian—has been able to avoid taking this course.
The rejection in principle by the Cambodian leadership of any form of real cooperation among the three Indochinese countries, the sealing of the country’s borders, and the intense nationalism of its political line, are the most extreme reflection of this, and certainly bear a share of the responsibility for the violence of the current conflict. However, each of these regimes is characterized, to one degree of another, by strong nationalist traits.
At a time when the “Eurocommunist” parties are helping to reinforce reformist illusions about the “national roads to socialism,” there is a great danger that, after having been the leaven of internationalism for several political generations, Indochina may become a symbol! of the supposedly inevitable triumph of national chauvinism. To counter this danger, it is necessary to struggle unrelentingly for the rebirth of genuine revolutionary internationalism, and therefore to work at building its indispensable tool—the international, the world party of socialist revolution.
It must be stated that the interests of the working masses of Indochina are bound up with the establishment of growing cooperation on all levels—economic, military, and political—among Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. It is in this way that these countries will be able to gather the strength to rebuild to face the threat of imperialism.
However, such cooperation cannot be imposed. The federative structures it requires can only arise out of the revolutionary mobilization of the Indochinese masses, with strict respect for the rights of minorities to decide for themselves. Because of this, the struggle for internationalism is closely connected to the fight to establish genuine socialist democracy in Vietnam, Kampuchea, and Laos, to institute a government of workers and farmers councils in the Socialist United States of Indochina. Not one of the Indochinese leaderships is capable of putting forward such a program for socialist democracy. But the most pressing issue raised today by the outbreak of this conflict is the need for an immediate suspension of the armed clashes. It is still impossible to make a final judgment as to the direct responsibility borne by each of the parties for the deterioration of the border dispute between Vietnam and Cambodia. The total control imposed by each regime over news reports, and their consistent use of secret diplomacy—both of which are in opposition to Leninist traditions—clearly present sizable obstacles to making such an assessment. But those who were the first to take up arms in the past—and would do so again in the future—must bear the responsibility in the eyes of the Indochinese masses and the worldwide workers movement.
It is criminal to involve the Vietnamese and Cambodian populations in bloody clashes for the sake of a border dispute, and all in the name of socialism! The use of weapons should be banned from the resolution of such problems. The border issue should be settled through open and public negotiations.