Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  The Dilemmas of Cambodia

  THERE is no doubt that Cambodia was the orphan of the Vietnam settlement. The engagements regarding it were the least binding; its indigenous Communists were the most ferocious. The non-Communist Cambodians, despite their reputation for passivity, fought perhaps the most heroically of all the peoples of Indochina, with the least outside help.

  In 1973 I still hoped that we could end the war without abandoning those who had relied on us. I was determined to try once again to negotiate a cease-fire for Cambodia. To arm myself for my talks in Hanoi and in Peking, I met in Bangkok with our Ambassador to Cambodia, Emory C. (Coby) Swank. Phnom Penh was not on my itinerary because Spiro T. Agnew was visiting there as well as Saigon; staking the Vice President’s prestige to the South Vietnamese government was one of the minor inducements for President Thieu to sign the Paris Agreement. Thieu’s venomous hatred of me would have made a visit by me to Saigon unproductive in any event. On the other hand, I could not visit the other two capitals of Indochina while omitting Saigon. Thus I was forced to miss Phnom Penh and discuss the future of Cambodia in Bangkok — an omen of things to come.

  Ambassador Swank was anything but a hawk on Indochina. He observed the restrictions imposed by the Congress with conviction and efficiency — without the sense of frustration that seized me as I watched the slow throttling of a courageous people. We differed as is normal among serious individuals; but I respected his professionalism, his honesty, and his ability. Though Swank did not believe a military solution was possible, he also did not delude himself about the character of our adversaries. He was convinced that the Khmer Rouge were determined on total victory regardless of the Paris Agreement or the unilateral ceasefire declared by Lon Nol. And they were being aided by Hanoi. Forty-two thousand North Vietnamese troops remained in Cambodia, he told us, now in clear violation of Article 20 of the Paris Agreement.3 The overwhelming majority (35,000) were servicing Hanoi’s supply system for South Vietnam — violating the clauses against maintaining base areas and infiltration in the countries of Indochina. There were 7,000 combat troops, of which half were supporting and assisting the Khmer Rouge.4 All this compared to the fewer than 200 American personnel in Cambodia, military and civilian, all under severe legislative restrictions (which will be discussed in Chapter VIII). There were no signs of any North Vietnamese withdrawals; perhaps it was too early, but if the situation persisted this would be a most serious betrayal of Hanoi’s undertakings.

  As for Cambodia’s former neutralist leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who was in exile in Peking, it was Swank’s judgment that he had become irrelevant; he no longer had a following in Phnom Penh; he was distrusted by Communists and government leaders alike. Swank expressed the hope that he would be permitted to tell Lon Nol that on my forthcoming visit to Peking neither I nor any of my associates would have any dealings with Sihanouk.

  As will be seen, Swank thus took a somewhat harder line on Sihanouk than I did. It made sense in terms of Swank’s necessities in Phnom Penh and the passions that had seized the Cambodian parties. Swank told me that Lon Nol was prepared to negotiate with anybody except Sihanouk: with Hanoi, with the Khmer Rouge, or with Peking. And Sihanouk took the same position with respect to Lon Nol. Both parties were willing to court oblivion if they could only take their hated enemy with them into it.

  The monumental ruins of Angkor Wat in northwestern Cambodia have long puzzled historians. What happened to the magnificent civilization that produced them? Why did it disappear without a trace when it once dwarfed all surrounding countries? No convincing explanation has ever been advanced. I wonder whether it is possible that Cambodians are occasionally seized by a suicidal madness. Here were Sihanouk and Lon Nol, who had worked in close harmony all of their lives, fighting to mutual destruction rather than settling for a compromise of their relatively trivial differences. They found it easier to turn over their country to Cambodia’s traditional enemies or to a maniacal indigenous group whom both feared and despised. Lon Nol’s government was in fact Sihanouk’s without the Prince; before Sihanouk was deposed, Lon Nol had been his Prime Minister and Defense Minister, corruptly profiting from the North Vietnamese supply routes into the sanctuaries. Sihanouk in turn had invited our bombing of the sanctuaries and sentenced the Khmer Rouge leaders to death in absentia. Yet by 1973 both these aristocrats were courting the Khmer Rouge, who hated them, and the North Vietnamese, who sought to dominate them. Rarely can there have been a more striking example of personal animosity fatally overriding rational calculation. Both leaders could have survived their conflict, played a role of dignity, and spared their people a holocaust had they been prepared to subordinate their personal feud and their egos to the necessities of their nation. Unable to do so, they doomed themselves and Cambodia.

  And it was this blind hatred that in 1973 was the key obstacle to our dealing with Sihanouk. The previous November I had told Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua that we were prepared to work with the Chinese to end the war in Cambodia in a manner that would give Sihanouk a significant role.5 But for Sihanouk to resume his traditional balancing act among the various contenders for power in Cambodia, I insisted there had to be some contenders left to balance. So long as he was nominal head of one faction — the Khmer Rouge — that was implacably determined on total victory, Sihanouk was dooming himself to irrelevance if the war continued or total subservience if the Khmer Rouge won. Though we did not insist on Lon Nol’s remaining in office, it was in Sihanouk’s own interest that the non-Communist forces represented by Lon Nol should survive in some form. Otherwise Sihanouk would become a dispensable figurehead, useful only to legitimize a Communist-dominated Cambodia, after which he would surely be discarded. (This, of course, is precisely what happened.)

  Swank and I differed marginally also on the utility of military operations to bring about the cease-fire we both considered essential. Swank thought a cease-fire was more probable if there was only a minimum of American military pressure. I was willing to test that hypothesis. But if it failed, I believed that military pressure would be necessary. Experience had taught me that a deadlock with the Indochinese Communists would be broken only if the alternative was more painful to them. As yet this was a theoretical point. Lon Nol’s unilateral cease-fire declaration had just been put on the table. The Khmer Rouge had rejected it but Swank as well as I still hoped that perhaps they had not yet shown their hand completely. In our optimistic view the possibilities of a negotiated outcome in Cambodia had not yet been exhausted.

  Like Lon Nol, Swank preferred negotiations through Hanoi. I had my doubts; I thought Peking the better intermediary. Lon Nol’s preference might be more convenient in the short run; strategically, it was the less productive. Hanoi wanted Cambodia as a satellite. Its aim was to dominate Cambodia, reopen its southern supply route, and demoralize South Vietnam by creating the impression that its ultimate overlordship of Indochina was inevitable. China, on the other hand, was above all interested in an independent Cambodia. Peking did not wish to see Phnom Penh as a satellite of Hanoi. It preferred independent states in Southeast Asia, not a region dominated by North Vietnam with its historic enmity of China and dependence on Moscow. This interest happened to coincide with ours; it was also imperative for the survival of South Vietnam. I thus sought to negotiate through Peking (which implied a role for Sihanouk, who was based there). But no decision needed to be made right away. My forthcoming visits to Hanoi and Peking would shed light on what was possible.

  A Visit to Vientiane

  FOR years I had been reading battle reports from Vientiane, and, as often happens, the mind’s eye had fashioned a relationship between the magnitude of the events and the scene of their occurrence: the dateline “Vientiane” evoked images of an intense metropolis under siege. In reality Vientiane is a quiet, dusty, hot provincial city inhabited by a gentle, peaceable people. Its pace is slow, its manners conciliatory; all Laos wanted was to be left alone. And this is precisely what its relentl
ess North Vietnamese neighbor would not grant it.

  Vientiane, the capital of Laos, nestles on the banks of the Mekong River, which constitutes the boundary with Thailand. Rare indeed is the capital located at the edge of the national territory, its city limit coincident with the frontier of another country. It was as if the Laotians, terrified of their North Vietnamese neighbors, had fled as far away from their threatening shadow as possible; as if the tactile presence of Thailand was an assurance of Laotian survival.

  Since the late 1950s Laos had been the victim of its geographic circumstance. The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) along Vietnam’s seventeenth parallel barred massive, direct infiltration from North Vietnam into South Vietnam without a flagrant violation of the 1954 Geneva Accords. By some convoluted North Vietnamese logic, bypassing the DMZ through the territory of another sovereign country seemed more legitimate even though Laotian neutrality had also been solemnly guaranteed by the same accords. The Ho Chi Minh Trail (actually a whole network of routes) was hacked through jungles covering the southern half of Laos. As in Cambodia, Hanoi simply appropriated the territory of a neighbor and expelled the local population. And as in Cambodia, those Americans who favored helping Laos retain its independence found themselves accused of “expanding” to a peaceful country a war that had been implanted there by an illegal North Vietnamese occupation. Not content with taking over the southern half of Laos, the North Vietnamese in 1961 armed a Communist faction, the Pathet Lao, in the northeast corner of the country and sent in some 6,000 combat troops.

  Southeast Asia, 1973

  As Hanoi’s drive for hegemony was constant, so was America’s ambivalence. In the 1950s, in keeping with the anti-Communist mood of the period, the United States supported a pro-Western government in Vientiane that claimed control over all of the national territory. Hanoi, testing out the tactics that were to become stereotyped, urged the creation of a coalition government headed by the neutralist Prince Souvanna Phouma — in fact a dedicated nationalist. The Kennedy Administration accepted this formula though it required the dispatch of marines to Thailand to deter Hanoi from completing the conquest of all of Laos in 1962. Hanoi treated this agreement with characteristic cynicism; it would win, hands down, the modern world’s record for disregard of written undertakings.

  At the 1962 Geneva Conference, Laos obtained the neutralist Prime Minister and neutralist government that Hanoi had demanded; all foreign troops were to be withdrawn through international checkpoints. But neither this, nor the fact that even the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China recognized Souvanna Phouma, discouraged Hanoi from appropriating the two northeastern provinces under the exclusive control of its Communist stooges, the Pathet Lao. The area of the Ho Chi Minh Trail remained occupied by North Vietnamese forces. As for the withdrawal of foreign troops, all 666 American advisers left through international checkpoints; of the 6,000 North Vietnamese, exactly forty (yes, forty) presented themselves for repatriation — it must have been the weekly rotation quota or maybe officers in need of compassionate leave in Hanoi. The North Vietnamese did not even pretend to live up to the Geneva Accords, while trumpeting to the world the sins of American intervention. Each year the numbers of North Vietnamese on Laotian soil increased. By 1973, there were 60,000 North Vietnamese troops in Laos pressing toward Vientiane and occupying the entire border region contiguous to Vietnam.

  Not surprisingly, Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma and his colleagues who greeted us on February 9 viewed the Paris accords with hope overshadowed by foreboding. It was not yet two weeks since the signature of the Paris Agreement and it was already becoming frayed.

  In Laos no more than in Cambodia was there any sign of the North Vietnamese withdrawal required by Article 20. On the contrary, a new North Vietnamese division had been introduced into southern Laos in the previous week.

  Such was Hanoi’s contempt for bourgeois notions of legality that it did not feel the necessity even for hypocrisy — of going through the motions of recognizing that a signed agreement imposed any obligations. Le Duc Tho had given me in Paris a written undertaking that a cease-fire would come into being in Laos within fifteen days of the signature of the Agreement. That time period was nearly up and there was no sign whatever of implementation. Hanoi had suddenly made a cease-fire dependent — without a shred of legal basis and in plain conflict with the written understanding — on the conclusion of a political agreement. Then Hanoi topped this with another of its patented cynicisms. It stopped treating Souvanna Phouma as head of the neutralist faction; it suddenly discovered a new “neutralist” group that not even its most devoted adherents had heard of previously. Hanoi’s stooges also insisted that they would sign no document that did not condemn American intervention, thereby incorporating Hanoi’s warped interpretation into the legal instrument ending the conflict and inhibiting recourse to American power to uphold the Agreement.

  Souvanna Phouma was determined not to accept such terms. He had fought tenaciously for his country’s independence. Though willing, in his extremity, to accept American and Thai help, he wanted nothing so much as to have Laos disappear as a point of contention of international politics. Gentle and extraordinarily suave, he exemplified in his bearing the virtues of a people who have made their contribution to history through the grace of their life-style rather than martial qualities. It would in any case have been an uneven contest against an adversary possessing seven times the population. Laos, exposed daily to Hanoi’s military and political blackmail, was no exception to the rule that no country actually dealing with Hanoi entertained a shred of the illusion of so many in our peace movement that North Vietnam was a benign nationalist power victimized by senseless and arbitrary American pressure.

  Souvanna was prepared to continue his hazardous and complicated balancing act; he would play out the string of peace negotiations; he would run the risks of negotiating new arrangements. He neither complained nor whined. All he asked of us was not to remove the American weight on the scale.

  On the evening of February 9 he gave a dinner for the American party in his simple villa at the outskirts of Vientiane. It looked like the residence of a French junior minister, without the trappings usually associated with presidential palaces. At the end of the meal Souvanna rose and delivered an eloquent and moving toast, which can serve as a summation of the hopes and fears of all in Indochina who wanted only to be left alone and looked to us for succor:

  Dr. Kissinger and friends, we welcome you to Laos at this critical moment in our history. The very survival of Laos rests on your shoulders. But your shoulders are broad shoulders. We are counting on you to make our neighbors understand that all we want is peace. We are a very small country; we do not represent a danger to anybody. We count on you to make them know that the Lao people are pacific by tradition and by religion. We want only to be sovereign and independent. We ask that they let us live in peace on this little piece of ground that is left to us of our ancient kingdom. Our old kingdom used to be 17 million people; now it is just 3 million.

  If pressure is kept on the North Vietnamese to understand the risk they run from violating the Agreement, then perhaps they will respect the Agreement. Laos must live in peace. The United States does not want its efforts to end in the hegemony of North Vietnam over Indochina. This was the desire of Ho Chi Minh, to replace the French as the dominators of Indochina. . . .

  Therefore we must count on our great friends the Americans to help us survive. We hope, we dream, that this wish will be granted.

  What a touching hope it was that a distant country, as far away as it is possible to be on the globe, would be able to convey to Laos’s next-door neighbor a pacific intent that, given the latter’s mind-set, may have spurred aggressiveness. And that we would be forever willing to defend the freedom of a distant people.

  Perhaps because Souvanna’s speech brought home to me as no formal negotiating session could have the fragility of these hopes and the nature of our responsibility, my reply did not rise to
the nobility of my host. It was somewhat self-centered, as if a pedantic reassurance could ease an almost spiritual travail — though it made the essential point in which our Laotian hosts were interested:

  Your Highness, I greatly appreciate the very moving things you have spoken. It is a very heavy responsibility you have assigned me. I have had the honor to serve in my present position for four years, and we have gone through great difficulties, and we have not come all this way in order to betray our friends at the beginning of a new Administration — after an election that was fought precisely on the issue of whether the United States would stand by its convictions.

  The next morning, at Vientiane’s airport just before leaving for Hanoi, I publicly called for strict implementation of the Paris Agreement and an early cease-fire in Laos.

  At this writing, Laos is under Communist rule. Over 40,000 Vietnamese troops remain as an occupation force. Souvanna is under house arrest. Between 10,000 and 30,000 political prisoners are in labor camps in the name of “re-education.” The Hmong (Meo) tribesmen who fought the North Vietnamese with our help are being systematically exterminated, some by poison gas. Hundreds of thousands of Laotians have fled in terror to Thailand.

  All that has happened since 1973 has reinforced my conviction that the United States did nothing ignoble in attempting to safeguard the independence of small countries in Southeast Asia. America has nothing to be ashamed of in its resistance to the oppressors of the weak, even if in the end we set ourselves goals beyond our capacity to sustain. But I cannot, even today, recall Souvanna Phouma’s wistful plea without a pang of shame that America was unable to fulfill his hopes for our steadfast support against a voracious enemy.