Fifteen Eighty Four

The literature of the Third Indochina War has been dominated by journalists and political scientists, particularly international relations specialist with an interest in Asia and/or Indochina writing during the duration of the conflict. Like all contemporary accounts, they are very much dependent on open sources and media reports with very limited access to archival sources, if at all.

Interest and writings on the war dwindled in the early 1990s. Also, compared to the abundance of writing (which continues to proliferate) on the better-known Second Indochina War (or more commonly known as the Vietnam War), the literature on the Third Indochina War is sparse in comparison, and its increment hardly moves the dial.  Unlike the ‘First’ and ‘Second’ Indochina wars which lasted just as long, “the post-1975 period in general and the Third Indochina War in particular continue to be, as Edwin Martini noted, relegated to footnotes and epilogues”. Although Martini made this observation in 2009, the state-of-the field has not changed much today. 

The Paris Peace Agreement signed in October 1991 is also hardly remembered or commemorated, except for those who use the occasion to chastise the Cambodian government and remind the Cambodian leaders of its failure to adhere to the agreements which laid the foundations for a democratic system of government.

The war is sensitive for the Vietnamese as allowing any discussion of the war threatens the rift and the survival of the party and would expose the mistakes of party leadership, as well as Sino-Vietnamese relations.  Both Hanoi and Beijing continue to try to create highly selective memories of the war. 

As for Cambodia, in his eagerness to appease his Chinese benefactor, in Hun Sen’s account of the history of the war, he had excluded China from his narrative, maintaining silence about Chinese support for the Khmer Rouge. Hun Sen has been re-writing the history of the Third Indochina War since he ousted his co-premier Norodom Ranariddh in July 1997 (and along with that eradicated the Khmer Rouge military threat). Six months after the coup, his party, the CPP (Cambodian People’s Party) President Chea Sim called on the Cambodian people to consider 7 January (Liberation Day) as the second birthday of the country – the day the Cambodian people regained their rights and freedom, peace, and hope for the future. In Hun Sen’s interpretation, Vietnamese soldiers had sacrificed their lives for “the survival of the Cambodian people and the country”. In 2019, the Hun Sen government marked twenty years of peace in Cambodia with days of celebration starting from 29 December dating back to 1998 instead of 1991. From 2020, Paris Peace Agreement Day on 23 October each year which celebrates the signing of the Paris Peace Agreements in 1991 that marked the end of the Third Indochina War, was removed from the list of public holidays in Cambodia. According to Hun Sen, the Paris Peace Agreement was “no longer relevant”. Two-thirds of Cambodians are under the age of thirty who were born after the Paris Peace Agreements were signed have no direct knowledge of the Third Indochina War. Their knowledge is mostly derived from the Hun Sen who believed that “only the victor can claim a righteous cause and write history”.

Even though there is general agreement that the resolution of the decade-long Cambodian issue was “the greatest diplomatic success” for ASEAN since its inception in August 1967, that is however the assessment of and looking from the perspective of the ASEAN-5 members. Since the expansion of ASEAN to ten in 1999, it has become harder, if not impossible, to celebrate this achievement as a group given the contrasting interpretations of the Cambodian issue amongst the old and new members. Unlike the Second Indochina War where the United States was a major protagonist, the Americans played a periphery role in the Third Indochina War. Unsurprisingly, there is very little interest in the third war in US academia.

My book is thus a small effort to fill the gap and present a dispassionate account of the Third Indochina War. Utilising old and new Vietnamese, Cambodian, Chinese, Soviet, American ASEAN as well as British and Australian archival sources, this reconstruction of the war takes an international history perspective focusing on the simultaneous decision-making of all sides directly or indirectly involved in the conflict It hopes to explain the deep and precipitating causes of the war which led to the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1979, the evolution of the war from 1979 to the Paris Peace Agreement signed in 1991, the UNTAC (United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia) phase from February 1992 to September 1993), the events leading to the July 1997 coup that ousted the First Prime Minister Prince Ranariddh to Cambodia’s admission into ASEAN in April 1999. While most accounts of the Third Indochina War end with the Paris Peace Agreement signed on 23 October 1991- the date which formally marks the end of the war. I am of the view that bringing the narrative to 1999 is much more meaningful and offers a fuller and more satisfactory history of the conflict. As Diep Sophal (Cambodian historian, Institute of Military History) noted “The Paris Peace Agreements …did not actually end the civil war in Cambodia…war (with the Khmer Rouge) only ended on December 29 1998…”