1981 book on the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge (PDF)

https://archive.org/details/ChinaCambod ... amTriangle

Scanned by me.

From the back of the book:

Quote:

Wilfred Burchett is an internationally known and respected journalist who has personally witnessed and reported on most of the major world events of the last forty years. "The China-Cambodia-Vietnam Triangle" is the result of interviews he conducted during five trips to Kampuchea and Vietnam since the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime. The topics covered include the following:

The Formation of the Indochina Communist Party
The 1954 Geneva Conference
The Birth, Rise, and Rule of the Khmer Rouge
Anti-Pol Pot Resistance and the Liberation of Kampuchea
The China Connection
Vietnam's Relations with China and Kampuchea
Kampuchea's Survival Miracle

For another book on the subject of the Khmer Rouge that I scanned two years ago, see: https://archive.org/details/KampucheaTh ... ionRescued

Does it have a chapter about how Yugoslavia helped the Khmer Rouge? Or maybe a whole part of the book?

Pages 161-162, in the context of Pol Pot's army invading Vietnamese territory and carrying out massacres:

"In May 1978 Hanoi proposed that the UN appoint a mission to mediate frontier and other outstanding problems between Vietnam and Kampuchea. This move was blocked by China.

Then at the Belgrade Conference of Foreign Ministers of the Non-Aligned Movement in July 1978 — which I attended — Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Duy Trinh asked that the appointment of a 'good offices' mission, composed of Non-Aligned members, to mediate Vietnam-Kampuchea differences be placed on the agenda. Sri Lanka's foreign minister A. C. S. Hameed, as Chairman of the Movement, was willing, as was India's foreign minister, A. B. Vajpayee, who chaired the Political Committee where the agenda was decided. But Yugoslavia's foreign minister, Josip Vrhovec, acting as the delegate of the host country and under intense pressure from China — which was not a member but was extremely active in the lobbies — persuaded Sri Lanka's Hameed that this would be a 'divisive move' because only one of the two parties to the dispute sought mediation. To force the proposal through — assured as it was of overwhelming support — would be 'interfering in the internal affairs' of Pol Pot's Kampuchea! Under pressure from Sri Lanka, Vietnam withdrew the proposal in the interests of 'maintaining Non-Aligned unity'!

On the opening day of the Belgrade Conference I met Milan Marcovich, head of liaison with foreign delegates and a friend from my days in Phnom Penh when he had been Yugoslavia's Charge d'Affaires there. His first question was: 'Do you know what's going on in Cambodia?' I replied that I did not and that it was just this lack of information that was most troubling. All of my requests to make a visit had been ignored. 'It is simply awful,' said Marcovich, 'and we are the best placed in the West to know because we have maintained an embassy there all the time. All our mutual [Cambodian] friends have been killed.' ...

He asked if I had met Vittorovich, a Yugoslav filmmaker who had made the only Western film inside Pol Pot’s Kampuchea. I had, but had not seen him since he visited our home in Phnom Penh years earlier. Marcovich said he would be at the conference the following day — and he was. After greetings, his first question to me was: 'Did you see my film?' I had not but my wife Vessa, who was standing alongside me, said she had seen it on French television. Asked what she thought of it, Vessa replied: 'For anyone who has lived in Cambodia, it was terrifying. The only smiling face was that of Pol Pot.' Vittorovich seemed relieved. 'Then my message got through,' he said. 'What we saw was a hundred times worse than we could put on film or I could express in my commentary.' It was clear that diplomatic considerations were an inhibiting factor!

What was extraordinary at Belgrade — and in February 1979 at a meeting of the Non-Aligneds' Coordinating Bureau in Maputo (Mozambique) and even more so at the Non-Aligneds' summit in Havana in September 1979 — was that Yugoslavia took the lead in stubbornly defending the Pol Pot regime. It continued to do so later at the United Nations. That the 'best informed' Western country would do this is explainable only by Yugoslavia's intimate relations with the United States and its new-found friendship with China."

Yugoslavia continued to recognize Pl Pot's "Democratic Kampuchea" in exile at the United Nations after Vietnam liberated the country. Alongside Yugoslav recognition was recognition from the USA, UK, China, Thailand, the DPRK, Romania, etc.

So, what do you make of that?

EdvardK wrote:

So, what do you make of that?

Yet another example of Yugoslavia collaborating with American imperialism and having reactionary foreign policy positions.

By contrast, this was the position of Albania as noted by Enver Hoxha:

Quote:

In Cambodia, the Cambodian people, communists and patriots, have risen against the barbarous government of Pol Pot, which was nothing but a group of provocateurs in the service of the imperialist bourgeoisie and of the Chinese revisionists, in particular, which had as its aim to discredit the idea of socialism in the international arena... The anti-popular line of that regime is confirmed, also, by the fact that the Albanian embassy in the Cambodian capital, the embassy of a country which has given the people of Cambodia every possible aid, was kept isolated, indeed, encircled with barbed wire, as if it were in a concentration camp. The other embassies, too, were in a similar situation. The Albanian diplomats have seen with their own eyes that the Cambodian people were treated inhumanly by the clique of Pol Pot and Yeng Sari. Pnom Pen was turned into a deserted city, empty of people, where food was difficult to secure even for the diplomats, where no doctors or even aspirins could be found. We think that the people and patriots of Cambodia waited too long before overthrowing this clique which was completely linked with Beijing and in its service.

When the first conflicts broke out on the Cambodian-Vietnamese border, the view of socialist Albania was, and the world is witness to this, that disagreements between the two neighbour countries should be resolved through talks and without the interference of the Chinese or Soviet social-imperialists. But this was not done. On the contrary, the Pol Pot group, incited by Beijing, brought out in Pnom Pen daily communiques in which they announced that thousands of Vietnamese were being killed by its army on Vietnamese territory....

But the question must be asked: Why do the Chinese imperialists allegedly have the right to defend the barbarous fascist Pol Pot group, and Vietnam does not have the right to support the revolutionaries and the people of Cambodia to build a free, independent and sovereign country?

Now it dawned on me - for all the bad things which happened in socialist or state-capitalist (such as Albania, USSR etc.) countries throughout the world Yugoslavia was to blame!
Of course, it's all clear to me now - the break-up of USSR, the backwardness of Albania, the mass killings in Campuchea etc. - it was marshal Tito and his clicque of warmongering cohorts.

EdvardK wrote:

Now it dawned on me - for all the bad things which happened in socialist or state-capitalist (such as Albania, USSR etc.) countries throughout the world Yugoslavia was to blame!
Of course, it's all clear to me now - the break-up of USSR, the backwardness of Albania, the mass killings in Campuchea etc. - it was marshal Tito and his clicque of warmongering cohorts.

Nice try, but at the end of the day Yugoslavia was still defending the Khmer Rouge and providing diplomatic cover to it, whereas Albania was denouncing the Khmer Rouge and welcoming the Vietnamese liberation of Cambodia. You can't deny or justify Yugoslavia's action.

Like I said - marshal Tito and his cohorts are to blame for all the conspiracy theories since 1945:
1. hitler's disappearance
2. stalin's death
3. JFK's murder
4. albania's isolation
5. breakup of the USSR
etc. etc.
How did I not see that before??

Edvard, quit trolling. Either respond to the allegation ("the state of Yugoslavia supported the Khmer Rouge") or stay silent, don't throw out strawmen.