The Third Indochina War

 Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1.Vietnam - Cambodia - China Relations (1950s - 1975)

2.From the Fall of Saigon to the Invasion of Cambodia (April 1975 - December 1978)

3.The Sino-Vietnamese War (February 1979)

4.Regional Responses to the Vietnamese Invasion

5.The Long-Drawn Endgame

Epilogue

List of Characters/Dramatis Personae

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge my debt to the many scholars who have written about the Third Indochina War upon whose works I have drawn. I wish to thank Chong Yee Ming, Huang Zihao, Joachim Lai, Vu Minh Hoang, Tran Thi Bich, Ha Hoang Hop, and Terence Chia for their help. I also wish to express my appreciation to Lucy Rhymer at Cambridge University Press for her support, Rose Martin, Dan Harding, Natasha Whelan, Sunantha Ramamoorthy as well as the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. Any mistakes and shortcomings in this book are my own.

This book is perhaps the culmination of my long-time interest in both contemporary and international history, particularly that of Southeast Asia, and also the Indochina Wars, which began under the tutelage of the late Professor Ralph Smith. His pioneering multi-volume international history of the Vietnam War inspired this book. This book is dedicated to his memory.

Abbreviations

ANS 

Armée Nationale Sihanoukiste

 

ASEAN 

Association of Southeast Asian Nations 

CCP 

Cambodian People's Party 

CGDK 

Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea 

COMECON 

Council for Mutual Economic Assistance 

COSVN 

Central Office for South Vietnam 

CPK 

Communist Party of Kampuchea

CPP 

Cambodian People's Party

DK 

Democratic Kampuchea 

FCO 

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

FUNCINPEC 

National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative 

GRUNK: 

The Royal Government of the National Union of Kampuchea

ICC:

International Criminal Court

ICP: 

Indochinese Communist Party

JIM: 

Jakarta Informal Meeting

KPNLF: 

Khmer People's National Liberation Front

KPRP: 

Kampuchean (Khmer) People's Revolutionary Party

KUFNS: 

Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation

MFA: 

Ministry of Foreign Affairs

MIA: 

missing in action

NSC: 

National Security Council

PAVN: 

People's Army of Vietnam

PLA: 

People's Liberation Army

PRC: 

People's Republic of China

PRK: 

People's Republic of Kampuchea

RCAF :

Royal Cambodian Armed Forces

SNC:

Supreme National Council 

SOC:

State of Cambodia

UN:

United Nations

UNTAC:

United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia

USSR:

Union of Soviet Socialist Repblics

VCP:

Vietnamese Communist Party

Introduction

On 31 May 2019, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong sent a condolence letter to his Thai counterpart, Prayut Chan-o-cha, on the passing of former Thai Prime Minister and Privy Council President General Prem Tinsulanonda, who passed away on 26 May 2019 aged 98. The condolence letter was also posted on the prime minister's Facebook page. It would have been one of those innocuous diplomatic letters which friendly countries occasionally send, except that in this case, it caused a brief diplomatic incident between Cambodia as well as Vietnam and Singapore. Both Cambodia and Vietnam took issue with Lee’s account of General Prem’s contribution to the region during his tenure as prime minister from 1980 to 1988, which coincided with the Third Indochina War.

The disputed paragraph in the condolence letter is as follows. According to Prime Minister Lee:

General Prem’s leadership has benefited the region. His time as Prime Minister coincided with the five countries of ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] coming together decisively to resolutely oppose Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia and the Cambodian government that replaced the Khmer Rouge. Thailand was on the frontline, facing

Vietnamese forces across its border with Cambodia. General Prem was resolute in not accepting this fait accompli. Supported by his able Foreign Minister, Air Chief Marshal Siddhi Savetsila, General Prem worked with ASEAN partners to support the resistance forces of the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea from Thai territory, and to oppose the Vietnamese occupation in international forums. This effective collective resistance prevented a military invasion and regime change from being legitimized, and protected the security of other Southeast Asian countries. Eventually the invasion forces withdrew, a peace settlement was signed, and internationally supervised elections were held to elect a new Cambodian government. This decisively shaped the subsequent course of Southeast Asia. It paved the way for Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to join ASEAN, as partners in promoting the region’s peace and development.

It should also be noted that Prime Minister Lee in his speech at the opening of the 18th edition of the Shangri-La Dialogue, also on 31 May 2019, of which the first part of his speech was a survey of the international history of Southeast Asia, also referred to the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia as a milestone.

When General Tea Banh (deputy prime minister and minister of national defence of Cambodia) arrived in Singapore for the Shangri-La Dialogue, he asked Singapore’s Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen to inform Lee to ‘make correction on his remark’ as it was ‘not true and not reflective of the history … It is not true at all because he said that Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia. We cannot accept what he said. We have already clarified that Vietnamese volunteer troops came to liberate our people.’

Leap Chanthavy, a political analyst based in Phnom Penh, berated Lee for ‘being disrespectful to the Khmer Rouge victims and those who sacrificed their lives in deposing the genocidal regime of Khmer Rouge’ and ‘denying legitimacy of the new Cambodian government that saved lives of the remaining four million Cambodians with support from the Vietnamese forces’. She reminded readers that ‘Singapore has never denounced auto-genocide conducted by the Pol Pot regime … even recognized the genocide state and killing machines, provided military assistance, and’.

mobilized international community to deny the legitimacy of Heng Samrin’s regime to deny humanitarian assistance to survivors of the Khmer Rouge. Youk Chhang (executive director, Documentation Centre of Cambodia and a survivor of the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields) remarked that Lee’s words ‘showed there was a need to establish an Asean peace and human rights education programme for the region – starting with Singapore’. On 6 June 2019, Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen in his Facebook post wrote that he ‘deeply regretted Lee’s remarks’ and accused Lee of supporting the Khmer Rouge genocide. Hun Sen said that Lee’s statement ‘is an insult to the sacrifice of the Vietnamese military volunteers who helped to liberate Cambodia from the genocidal regime’ and also ‘reveals to the Singaporean people and the world that [the] leader of Singapore has contributed to the massacre of Cambodian people’. He ended by asking whether Lee considered the trial of the Khmer Rouge leaders to be legitimate.

The Vietnamese too were upset by Lee’s condolence letter. The spokeswoman of Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that Vietnam regrets that the statement ‘did not reflect history objectively, causing negative public opinions’ and revealed that her ministry had ‘discussed’ the matter with her Singapore counterpart. She also said that ‘Vietnam’s contribution and sacrifice in helping [the] Cambodian people end Khmer Rouge’s genocide is true and widely recognized.’

Although both Cambodia and Vietnam disagreed with Lee's interpretation of the history, Lee’s statement created much more furore in Cambodia than in Vietnam. It clearly touched a raw nerve in Cambodia. As Kimkong Heng noted, Cambodians ‘have been divided over their differing interpretations of their country's historical events. Some historical facts such as the Liberation Day on 7 January has been over-politicised. Two conflicting narratives prevail and dominate the social and political discourses in the Kingdom.’ Those who were critical or against the Hun Sen government generally held the view that 7 January ‘marked the invasion and occupation of Cambodia by Vietnam’. 

Sophar Ear (an Cambodian-American political scientist at Occidental College in the US and who survived the Khmer Rouge regime) said that Lee’s statement was ‘factually correct ... but of course, Phnom Penh wants to rewrite history and have everyone who opposed the Vietnamese-backed regime of the 1980s apologise, because anyone against them was pro-Khmer Rouge.’ Theara Thun noted that ‘Hun Sen’s long years in power’ has allowed him ‘to reconstruct a collective historical narrative that draws a direct and continuous connection between the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) formed after Vietnam’s removal of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, and his current regime’. One way of doing so is through the annual Liberation Day commemoration—by promoting the notion of Vietnam’s ‘liberation’ of Cambodia, along with the role played by his Cambodian People’s Party (CCP). Thun highlighted that the term ‘Liberation’ for the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1979 remains ‘controversial’ both in Cambodia and abroad, although in his view many of those who opposed Hun Sen, including royalist supporters, ‘have gradually abandoned their criticisms of the Liberation Day celebration due to his narrative and consolidation of power.’ Kimkong Heng, on the other hand, speculated that given the ‘current political development,’ the ‘two divergent narratives over this contentious day are here to stay, whether one likes it or not, [and] will further divide the Cambodian people for years to come.’ He called for Cambodians, particularly the politicians, to move beyond the ‘contrasting narratives’ and ‘find common ground to maintain peace and stability and bring prosperity to Cambodia and its people.’

On 7 June 2019, the Singapore Foreign Ministry said in a statement that ‘Singapore highly values its relations with Cambodia and Vietnam’ and that ‘notwithstanding our differences in the past, we have always treated each other with respect and friendship.’ that they have taken ‘the path of cooperation, dialogue and friendship’. The three countries agreed to move on from the controversy and focus on the future. Hun Manet (the current prime minister since August 2023), the oldest son of Hun Sen who has been groomed to succeed his father, paid an introductory visit to Singapore on 11–13 June 2019. It was reported that Hun Manet and the Singapore leaders ‘reaffirmed the longstanding ties’ between the two countries and their ‘wide-ranging and substantive cooperation, which has benefited both countries and the region’. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong met Hun Sen on 23 June in Bangkok for the 34th ASEAN Summit; their first meeting since 31 May 2019. In his Facebook post after the meeting, Lee remarked that it was ‘good to meet directly to understand each other’s positions’. Thus, this brought an end to what Tan Bah Bah claimed would have been a ‘routine walk in the park’ but which became ‘unplanned and unnecessary diversions into a mini minefield’.

We now shift our focus to another facet of the politics of historical memory, commemoration, and forgetting with regard to the Third Indochina War.

The New York Times article of 9 April 1989 noted that many Vietnamese view the decade-long involvement in Cambodia with some pride for the salvation of a close neighbor from the degradation and genocide of the Khmer Rouge Government of Pol Pot, whom Vietnamese troops ousted from power when they invaded [on] 25 December 1978. The Vietnamese also take pride in the assistance that enabled Hanoi’s chosen government in Phnom Penh to rebuild a semblance of normal life from the detritus of ‘Year Zero’.

But there was a darker side as well. The article further noted that there had been some disaffection among those who returned from.the war front ‘to face a not always appreciative citizenry’ and the difficulty of finding a job in an economy where the unemployment rate was as high as 30 per cent, a consequence of Vietnam’s long presence in Cambodia, prioritising security concerns above everything else.

For those who survived the Khmer Rouge regime, they have now changed their initial view of the Vietnamese as ‘liberators’ to ‘occupiers’ of their country. The Cambodians, to the dismay of the Vietnamese, did not show gratitude while ‘hostility towards the Vietnamese remains ubiquitous’. According to Carlyle Thayer, ‘Cambodia was an unpopular war for Vietnam’, unlike the earlier wars against the French and Americans. Veterans of the Cambodia war feel that they have been ‘forgotten’. Kevin Doyle described it as ‘Vietnam’s forgotten Cambodian war’.

The Chinese too were silent about their role in the Third Indochina War. On 17 February 1979, about 300,000 Chinese troops attacked Vietnam in response to Vietnam’s invasion in Cambodia two months earlier. Zhang Jie (researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) explained that the anniversary ‘is a bit sensitive’ and ‘Chinese officials still begin from the perspective of maintaining the big picture of relations with Vietnam’. It could also be because, as Collin Koh (senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies) pointed out, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) performed poorly in the war. According to Derek Grossman (senior analyst, RAND Corporation), Beijing’s ‘reticence on the anniversary had mixed results for China, and affected regional conversations with Asian neighbours about past and present conflicts.’

The anniversary is sensitive for the Vietnamese side as well. As mentioned earlier, there is no consensus in the interpretation of ‘Liberation Day’ or ‘Victory Day’ in Cambodia and this remains one of the unresolved issues in their bilateral relations. Until today, there has also not been any official commemoration of the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War. According to Duong Danh Dy (first secretary).

of the Vietnamese Embassy in China in 1979), ‘Vietnam’s reticence to discuss the war was motivated by the greater cause of fostering amity between the two neighbours.’ Nguyen Ngoc Truong, a former Vietnamese diplomat, noted that no senior Vietnamese official made a statement about the anniversary of the Sino-Vietnamese War and explained that 2019 was ‘the first time the Vietnamese media had been allowed to write about the anniversary so publicly, due in part to public sentiment about the war’. It is perhaps more than just wanting to preserve amity, as Tuong Vu pointed out – the war still divides Hanoi’s leadership today. One faction puts the blame on Le Duan ... known for being anti-China, while the other faction believes the party was wrong all along for having trusted China too much. Allowing any discussion of the war threatens that rift and the survival of the party and would expose the mistakes of party leadership. Teaching children about this war might over time create public pressure that forces the party to move away from China and closer to the US, which it does not want to. In sum, as Christelle Nguyen observed, both the Chinese and Vietnamese governments have ‘deliberately tried to bury memories of their 1979 war’. Not everyone in Vietnam and China agrees that silence is the best approach. As Qingfei Yin and Kosal Path noted:

The development of the official and Chinese and Vietnamese memories of the war largely mirrored each other... how China and Vietnam remember, forget and re-remember the Sino-Vietnamese War reflects not only the fluctuations in Sino-Vietnamese relations but also the changing relationships between the state and society in the two countries as they undergo rapid transformations. The Chinese and Vietnamese governments both continue to try to create highly selective memories of the war.

Turning to 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. As noted earlier, Hun Sen has be rewriting 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, the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) 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 and were born after the Paris Peace Agreements were signed, and therefore have no direct knowledge of the Third Indochina War. Their knowledge is mostly derived from Hun Sen who believed that ‘only the victor can claim a righteous cause and write history’.

As for ASEAN, there is general agreement that the resolution of the decade-long Cambodian issue was ‘the greatest diplomatic success’ since its inception in August 1967. That is, however, the assessment 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 as this account illustrated. In his foreword in the publication Cambodia: Progress and Challenges since 1991 commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Paris Peace Agreement on Cambodia, Prince Sirivudh highlighted how the book ‘focused on the future prospects of Cambodia, looking ahead and putting acrimony behind’.

As Theara Thun reminded us, ‘history written by the winners may not be history but instead pure propaganda. Although leaders of Cambodia, Vietnam and Singapore may have agreed to disagree over the issue, they should leave the debate on the meanings of this historic event to historians who are capable of grounding their argument in sources and critiques rather than specific political agendas.’

Thus, the purpose of this book is precisely to elucidate this ‘verbal war after the war’ in 2019 recounted in the opening of this chapter that necessitates a new history of the Third Indochina War. Instead of forcing the present to fit the past as so many of those countries involved still do, we need to revisit the war and situate it in its truly international context.

This book is thus an attempt to present a dispassionate account of the Third Indochina War. 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 United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) 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 – this author is 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.’

The book is modelled on the late Ralph Smith’s much-lauded An International History of the Vietnam War, also referred to as the Second Indochina War, which preceded the subject of this book. An International History of the Vietnam War is an example of Smith’s scrupulous and impeccable attention to both evidence and chronology, two aspects which I hope my book will also exude. I further hope that this narrative will be impartial, for in the words of Smith, ‘the principal task of the historian is to try to understand why things happen as they did.’ As Isaiah Berlin noted, to explain is to understand, but to understand does not mean to justify.

Although on the surface the origins of the Third Indochina War involved the relationship between Cambodia and Vietnam, it was in fact a multinational conflict, or quickly morphed into one. Thus, the war can only be fully understood in the broader context of events in the region and beyond. One of the most challenging problems in writing international history is to strike the right balance between the analysis of situations in terms of everything happening at one time (within the chosen perspective) and the pursuit of a narrative of the sequence of events in one place or institution over a period. International history gives precedence to the former.

This book adopts an essentially chronological approach following the life-cycle of the conflict by first locating the origins of both wars, both the deep and precipitating causes, from the interconnected perspectives of the three main protagonists: Vietnam, Cambodia, and China. Following that, it describes the conduct of both wars and their eventual resolution. This is where, apart from the three main protagonists, the Soviet Union, the US (and its European allies), and ASEAN come into the picture. Although these countries were not directly involved in the fighting, they played a significant role in both prolonging the war and bringing about its end. In short, we need to consider the decision-making on all sides of the conflict.

Marshalling old and new Vietnamese, Cambodian, Chinese, Soviet, American, and ASEAN, as well as British and Australian, archival sources, this reconstruction of the war thus takes an international history perspective focusing on the simultaneous

"decision-making of all sides directly or indirectly involved in the conflict which, in the words of Odd Arne Westad, ‘created shockwaves within the international system of states’. What is commonly known as the ‘Third Indochina War’ comprises two related wars: the Vietnam-Kampuchea War from 1978 to 1990 and the brief Sino-Vietnamese War in February 1979. Although the latter military confrontation was brief, China and Vietnam were technically at war until the resolution of the Cambodian conflict in 1990."

The literature of the Third Indochina War has been dominated by journalists and political scientists, particularly international relations specialists 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. They should also be read with a critical mind as media reporting is not always ‘politically, socially or culturally neutral’. 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 (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.

Faced with limited archival sources, few historians have focused on this topic. While there have been numerous articles, book chapters, and books which deal with various aspects and phases of the Third Indochina War, there is still no single-authored book which "attempts to reconstruct the war from start to end in a coherent manner. In 2013, I wrote a book, Singapore, ASEAN and the Cambodian Conflict 1978–1991, which was an account of the war from principally the Singapore (and to an extent the ASEAN-5) perspective, based on Singapore archival sources. In this book, I attempt to cover a broader canvas. It is not by any means a definitive account. While we know more now than what we did then during the Cold War years, sources remain limited. There will never be a time when the internal archives of the Southeast Asian countries as well as China will be opened. I hope this book will at least be an all-inclusive, impartial, and dispassionate account which future historians can build on. As what Ralph Smith wrote in the context of the Vietnam War, our concern here is not who is right or who is wrong but ‘with the unfolding of the conflict itself, and the interactions of decisions by the opposing sides’."

In writing this book, I have drawn on a voluminous number of writings spanning the 1960s to the present. I am indebted to numerous scholars and researchers, too long to list but which are evident from the notes and Bibliography. It is perhaps helpful to provide a brief survey of the English-language historiography of the ‘Third Indochina War’ here. Under Pol Pot, Cambodia was a very closed society. Our knowledge of the Khmer Rouge – their origin and roots, ideology, policies and practices, and relations with Vietnam came notably from the scholarship of Ben Kiernan, Steven Heder, Michael Vickery, and David Chandler; about the root problems in Sino-Vietnamese relations culminating in the February 1979 war from noted Vietnam historian William Duiker, Chang Pao-min, King C. Chen, Eugene K. Lawson, Robert S. Ross, Anne Gilks, and Steven J. Hood. These studies, mostly by political scientists (David Chandler and William Duiker being the exceptions), were mainly published in the 1980s and were based mainly on contemporary information and open sources. Three accounts of the conflict which I found most helpful are Grant Evans (a socio-anthropologist) and Kelvin Rowley (a sociologist) in 1984 – Red Brotherhood at War: Indochina Since the Fall of Saigon – which was described as the first major study of

Indochina since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975; and Nayan Chanda's (then the chief of the Washington Bureau of the Far Eastern Economic Review) Brother Enemy: The War after the War (1986). The third is by political scientist Stephen J. Morris on political culture and the causes of the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia.

There was another long lull after that before the publication in 2006 of The Third Indochina War: Conflict between China, Vietnam, and Cambodia, 1972–1979, edited by Odd Arne Westad and Sophie Quinn-Judge, which essentially focuses on developments in the 1970s leading to the conflict. As the editors noted, few scholars have revisited the war since the Russians and Chinese archives were opened in the early 1990s. The book is very informative but does not really get to grips with the two key questions: why did Vietnam launch its invasion of Cambodia (then known as Kampuchea) on 25 December 1978; and why did China attack Vietnam on 17 February 1979 and withdraw a month later? These questions were somewhat more directly addressed in a much earlier book, also entitled The Third Indochina War, edited by David Elliot. Published in 1981, in the wake of the war, the book was the product of a panel at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in late March 1979 and a follow-up conference of the contributors (except for one) on 2 April 1979. The aim of the book was to "analyse the origins and development of the Third Indochinese Conflict and the problems posed by the complex issues involved." Though dated, it remains a very informative book.

Bringing this very brief overview of the state of the field to a close are three recent books published in 2014, 2015, and 2020 respectively: Brothers in Arms: Chinese Aid to the Khmer Rouge 1975–1979 by Andrew Mertha; Deng Xiaoping’s Long War: The Military Conflict between China and Vietnam 1979–1991 by Xiaoming Zhang (which is useful to read alongside Edward C. O'Dowd's Chinese Military Strategy in the Third Indochina War: The Last Maoist War (2007)); and the most recent, Kosal Path's Vietnam’s Strategic Thinking during the Third Indochina War, which has a chapter on Vietnam’s decision to invade Cambodia in which he argues that the geopolitics (the alliance between Democratic Kampuchea and China backed by the US) was a more significant reason for the war than the border conflict and the historical animosity between Democratic Kampuchea and Vietnam. All these books extend our knowledge of an aspect of the war but they do not cover the Third Indochina War as a whole. One rare and recent study which deserves to be mentioned is Hoang Minh Vu’s 2020 PhD thesis, The Third Indochina War and the Making of Present-Day Southeast Asia, 1975–1995, which this author hopes that Hoang will eventually recast into a monograph to reach a wider reading public. Hoang concurs with Kosal Path, arguing that the conflict was not inevitable and that it grew out of mutual misunderstandings, in his words ‘overlapping misperceptions’; and that ASEAN prioritise non-interference over human rights. He also argues that Hanoi found it difficult to extricate from Cambodia and did not intentionally stay in the country for a decade.

This book consists of seven chapters, inclusive of the Introduction and the Epilogue. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on both the deep and precipitating issues and events that led to the war in December 1978, which was quickly followed by that of February 1979. Chapter 1 deals with the deep causes, the period from the 1950s to 1975, while Chapter 2 examines the precipitating causes of the conflict, from 1975 to 1979. Chapter 3 recounts the events leading to the Sino-Vietnamese War in February 1979 and its immediate aftermath. Chapter 4 covers the 1980s and concentrates on the regional, namely ASEAN, response to the Vietnamese invasion and the Sino-Vietnamese War. Chapter 5 continues the narrative, expanding beyond the regional to the global up until the signing of the Paris Peace Agreements on 23 October 1991. This period lasting a decade can be characterised by a ‘talk-fight’ strategy. The Epilogue brings the account of the conflict to its end. It describes the brief UNTAC experience.

period (1992-1993), culminating with the May 1993 general elections in Cambodia. The story ends with the July 1998 general election and Cambodia joining ASEAN in April 1999. It is the belief of this author that bringing the narrative to 1998-1999 provides better closure and a more complete account than the dominant representation of the conflict being over with the signing of the Paris Peace Agreement in October 1991. Indeed, 1998 marks the beginning of a new phase in both Cambodian and regional politics in the post-Cold War era.

Historians may never agree on every strand of this narrative. As Queen Elizabeth II said (although in a different context), ‘some recollections may vary’. But as the late Ralph Smith, remembered for his pioneering work An International History of the Vietnam War, wrote, ‘the principal task of the historian must be to try to understand why things happen as they did’; I hope I have achieved that in the narrative you are about to read.

1.Condolence Letter on the Passing of Former Thai PM and Privy Council President General Prem Tinsulanonda, Prime Minister’s Office, 31 May 2019, www.pmo.gov.sg/Newsroom/Condolence-Letter-on-the-Passing-of-Former-Thai-PM-General-Prem-Tinsulanonda, accessed on 5 April 2022. Siddhi Savetsila was foreign minister of Thailand from 1980 to 1990 and passed away in 2015.

2. PM Lee Hsien Loong at the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue 2019, www.pmo.gov.sg/Newsroom/PM-Lee-Hsien-Loong-at-the-IISS-Shangri-La-Dialogue-2019, accessed on 5 April 2022.

3.‘Minister, lawmaker lash out at Singaporean prime minister over Vietnamese invasion’, Khmer Times, 4 June 2019, www.khmer timeskh.com/610795/minister-lawmaker-lash-out-at-singaporean-prime-minister-over-vietnamese-invasion/, accessed on 5 April 2022.

4.‘Lee Hsien Loong disrespectful of Khmer Rouge victims’, The Independent, 3 June 2019, https://theindependent.sg/political-analyst-accessed on 5 April 2022.

5.‘Hun Many “surprised” by Singapore’s leader’s remarks’, Phnom Penh Post, 4 June 2019.

6.‘Hun Sen accuses Singapore PM Lee Hsien Loong of “supporting genocide” as war of words over Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge-era escalates’, South China Morning Post, 6 June 2019.

7.‘Vietnam opposes Lee Hsien Loong’s remarks on Cambodia “invasion”’, 4 June 2019, https://e.vnexpress.net/news/news/vietnam-opposes-lee-hsien-loong-s-remarks-on-cambodia-invasion-3933809.html, accessed on 7 April 2022.

8.‘Conflicting historical narratives are divisive,’ Khmer Times, 6 June 2019. At the point of writing this commentary, Heng was a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland and a research fellow at the Cambodian Institute for Cooperation and Peace. See also, Kimkong Heng, ‘January 7 in Cambodia: one date, two narratives,’ The Diplomat, 16 January 2019.

9.‘Hun Sen accuses Singapore PM Lee Hsien Loong of “supporting genocide” as war of words over Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge-era escalates,’ South China Morning Post, 6 June 2019.

10.Theara Thun, ‘“Invasion” or “Liberation”? Contested Commemoration in Cambodia and within ASEAN,’ TRaNS, Volume 9, 2021, p. 219.

11.‘Conflicting historical narratives are divisive,’ Khmer Times, 6 June 2019.

12.‘S’pore committed to good ties with Vietnam and Cambodia: MFA,’ The Straits Times, 8 June 2019.

13.Introductory Visit of Royal Cambodian Armed Forces Deputy Commander-in-Chief and Commander of Army Lieutenant-General Hun Manet, 11 to 13 June 2019, www.mfa.gov.sg/Newsroom/Press-Statements-Transcripts-and-Photos/2019/06/20190611_RCAF-DCIC-Hun-Manet, accessed on 7 April 2022. See also, Prashanth Parameswaran, ‘Hun Manet introductory visit highlights Singapore-Cambodian relations,’ The Diplomat, 17 June 2019.

14.‘PM Lee on Vietnam-Cambodia controversy: helpful to meet directly to understand where we stand,’ Mothership, 24 June 2019, https://mothership.sg/2019/06/pm-lee-cambodia-comments/, accessed on 7 April 2022.

15.‘Cambodia: paying the high price of regional neglect?’ The Independent, 9 June 2019, https://theindependent.sg/cambodia-paying-the-high-price-of-regional-neglect/, accessed on 7 April 2022.

16.‘Vietnam’s Vietnam: scars of Cambodia,’ New York Times, 8 April 1989.

17.‘Vietnam’s forgotten Cambodian war’, BBC, 14 September 2014, www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-29106034, accessed on 10 April 2022. See also, ‘What happened to Vietnam’s forgotten veterans?’, Southeast Asia Globe, 25 December 2018.

18.‘40 years on, Chinese veterans defy official silence to remember the Vietnam border war’, South China Morning Post, 19 February 2019. See also, ‘Chinese regime prohibits Sino-Vietnam veteran memorial’, The Epoch Times, 14 February 2009.

19.See Kimkong Heng, ‘Cambodia-Vietnam Relations: Key Issues and the Way Forward’, Perspective, Number 36, 12 April 2022. See also, ‘Vietnam tense as China war is marked’, BBC News, 16 February 2009. Vietnam

20.‘40 years on, Chinese veterans defy official silence to remember the Vietnam border war’, South China Morning Post, 19 February 2019. See also, Nguyen Ming Quang, ‘The bitter legacy of the 1979 China-Vietnam War’, The Diplomat, 23 February 2017, and Martin Grossheim, ‘How the Vietnamese began to remember a Forgotten War’, Wilson Center, 7 September 2021, www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/how-vietnamese-began-remember-forgotten-war?fbclid=IwAR1WY6_b6nKqBXA-Cwc2p1dF5QSMR5orjG9jt72gxIcj9l_ggOrb0g2QsYc, accessed on 12 April 2022, as well as Martin Grossheim, ‘Remembering a Forgotten War: The Vietnamese State, War Veterans and the Commemoration of the Sino-Vietnamese War (1979–89)’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Volume 53, Number 3, 2022, pp. 459–487. In Vietnam, over the years, low-profile anniversaries have been organized each year in local cemeteries in the northern border provinces where the fighting took place. There were also small-scale demonstrations in Hanoi.

21.Travis Vincent, ‘Why won’t Vietnam teach the history of the Sino-Vietnamese War?’, The Diplomat, 9 February 2022.

22.Christelle Nguyen, ‘How the Sino-Vietnamese War was purposefully forgotten’, The Diplomat, 17 February 2023.

23.See Qingfei Yin and Kosal Path, ‘Remembering and Forgetting the Last War: Discursive Memory of the Sino-Vietnamese War in China and Vietnam’, TRaNS, Volume 9, Number 1, May 2021, pp. 11–29.

24.‘Xi’s fake history lesson for Hun Sen’, Foreign Policy, 10 March 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/10/xi-jinping-fake-history-lesson-hun-senchina-cambodia-khmer-rouge/, accessed on 10 April 2022. See also, ‘China says it won’t apologise for supporting the Khmer Rouge’, New York Times, 7 November 2000; Alex Willemyns, ‘Cambodia and China: rewriting (and repeating) history’, The Diplomat, 15 January 2018.

25.Theara Thun, ‘“Invasion” or “Liberation”? Contested Commemoration in Cambodia and within ASEAN,’ TRaNS, Volume 9, 2021, p. 219.

26.‘Vietnam the only country that helped Cambodia during its darkest hours: PM Hun Sen’, Thanh Nien, 8 January 2012; ‘Vietnam did not invade, but revived Cambodia: Hun Sen’, Thanh Nien, 24 June 2013.

27.‘Hun Sen says Paris Peace Agreement no longer relevant, critics disagree’, VOA Cambodia, 22 October 2019, www.voacambodia.com/a/hun-sen-says-paris-peace-agreement-no-long-relevant-critics-disagree/5134511.html, accessed on 12 April 2022. See also, Luke Hunt, ‘The truth about war and peace in Cambodia,’ The Diplomat, 5 January 2019; Courtney Weatherbee and William M. Wise, ‘Why the Paris Peace Agreements deserve a place in Cambodia’s national calendar,’ The Diplomat, 31 January 2022; Pou Sothirak, ‘The significance of the Paris Peace Agreements,’ Khmer Times, 22 October 2023.

28.‘They don’t know about war’: the legacy of forgotten horrors, New York Times, 16 March 2022. See also, Frederick J. Ngo, ‘Revision for Rights? Nation-Building through Post-war Cambodian Social Studies Textbooks, 1979–2009’, in James H. Williams (ed.), (Re)Constructing Memory: School Textbooks and the Imagination of the Nation (Rotterdam: Sense Publisher, 2014), chapter 8.

29.Hun Sen quoted in Theara Thun, ‘“Invasion” or “Liberation”? Contested Commemoration in Cambodia and within ASEAN’, TRaNS, Volume 9, 2021, p. 219.

30.Pou Sothirak, Geoff Wade, and Mark Hong (eds), Cambodia: Progress and Challenges since 1991 (Singapore: ISEAS, 2012). The three co-editors are a Cambodian, an Australian, and a Singaporean.

31.Theara Thun, ‘“Invasion” or “Liberation”? Contested Commemoration in Cambodia’.

32.‘Banh marks anniversary of PM’s “struggle,” Phnom Penh Post, 20 June 2019.

33.R. B. Smith, An International History of the Vietnam War (London: Macmillan). Three volumes were published before Professor Smith abandoned the project. Volume 1 covers the years 1955–1961 (published in 1983), volume 2 covers the period 1961–1965 (published in 1985), and volume 3 covers the years 1965–1966 (published in 1991).

34.R. B. Smith, An International History of the Vietnam War, Volume 3: The Making of a Limited War, 1965–66 (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 16.

35.Ved Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963), p. 103. See also, Isaiah Berlin, ‘Historical Inevitability’, in Henry Hardy (ed.), Isaiah Berlin: Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 94, 131.

36.Odd Arne Westad and Sophie Quinn-Judge (eds), The Third Indochina War: Conflict between China, Vietnam and Cambodia, 1972–79 (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 1.

37.The ‘First’ was the Vietnamese war against the French, which culminated at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and ended with the signing of the Geneva Agreements both in 1954. The ‘Second’ (more popularly known as the Vietnam War) was the Vietnamese war against the Americans, which ended in April 1975.

38.See Gea D. M. Wijers, ‘Framing Cambodian Affairs: French and American Scholarship, Media and Geopolitics’, in Albert Tzeng, William L. Richter, and Ekaterina Koldunova (eds), Framing Asian Studies: Geopolitics and Institutions (Singapore: ISEAS, 2018), p. 121; Geoffrey C. Gunn and  .Jefferson lee Cambodia watching down under ( institute of Asian studies, Chulalongkorn University, IAS Monograph, Number  047, 1991 ).

39.The most recent book published is Kosal Path, Vietnam’s Strategic Thinking during the Third Indochina War (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020). Also, Hoang Ming Vu’s 2020 Cornell PhD thesis, The Third Indochina War and the Making of Present-Day Southeast Asia, https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/103452, accessed on 14 April 2022. Kosal Path is a political scientist. Hoang is a historian by training.

40.Ed Martini in his review of Mark Bradley’s book Vietnam at War, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Volume 5, Number 1, Winter 2009, pp. 218-221. Martini posed his observation as a question.

41.R. B. Smith, An International History of the Vietnam War, Volume 3: The Making of a Limited War, 1965–66 (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 16.

42.Odd Arne Westad and Sophie Quinn-Judge (eds), The Third Indochina War: Conflict between China, Vietnam and Cambodia, 1972–79 (London: Routledge, 2006).

43.For details of the origins and objective of this book, see David W. P. Elliot, The Third Indochina Conflict (London: Routledge, 2019), preface. The book was first published by Westview Press in 1981 and reissued in 2019 by Routledge.

44.Andrew Mertha, Brothers in Arms: Chinese Aid to the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); Xiaoming Zhang, Deng Xiaoping’s Long War: The Military Conflict between China and Vietnam, 1979–1991 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Edward C. O’Dowd, Chinese Military Strategy in the Third Indochina War: The Last Maoist War (London: Routledge, 2007); Kosal Path, Vietnam’s Strategic Thinking during the Third Indochina War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), chapter 2. Chapter 3 takes the story from the perspective of the Chinese invasion in February 1979 to punich the Vietnamese, which led to a two-front war'

45.Hoang Minh Vu, The Third Indochina War and the Making of Present-Day Southeast Asia, 1975–1995, unpublished PhD thesis, Cornell University, December 2020.

46See Ang Cheng Guan, Southeast Asia after the Cold War: A Contemporary History (Singapore: NUS Press, 2019).