[chinhodado]

As a Vietnamese, one of the sad thing about this whole ordeal was how Vietnam's involvement in this was viewed under a very negative light by the world.

The year was 1978. Vietnam had just came out of the country's great war 3 years earlier, and was extremely exhausted to put it lightly. The last thing it wanted was getting in another war. But it had no choice. The Khmer Rouge crossed the Cambodian - Vietnamese border, looted nearby villages and massacred the people. You can read up on the details, but be warned the atrocities will ruin your day.

Under the circumstances which can be argued as an existential threat, Vietnam had no choice but to launch attack on the Khmer Rouge and swiftly got rid of them and liberated the Cambodian people, ending the genocide.

Yet the world's view on this has been incredibly negative. Even now, Vietnam is often seen as the invader, the aggressor in the conflict instead of the Cambodian people's liberator.

[notahacker]

Vietnam's removal of the Khmer Rouge was certainly necessary and ultimately spared a lot of people further suffering, but Vietnam's 'good guy' status in the conflict is somewhat dented by the fact that they'd provided the military support to help install the Khmer Rouge in the first place [see also a lot of other 'world policing' actions...] before the Khmer Rouge decided that Vietnam was an enemy due to a mix of ethnic and ideological hatred and being on different sides of the Sino Soviet split.

The Sino Soviet split was also a big deal for international and especially Western perceptions of Vietnamese involvement at the time: China at the time not only viewed Vietnam as an enemy but also the Khmer Rouge as an ally, and even pressured other anti-Vietnamese Cambodian exile factions to involve the defeated Khmer Rouge in their government in exile.

The regime the Vietnamese installed was less spectacularly genocidal but certainly very dubious, although it says a lot about the weirdness of Cambodian realpolitik that Hun Sen, the former Khmer Rouge cadre the Vietnamese installed as deputy PM, has held continuous office since then through years of decreasing Vietnamese influence and then a transition to notional multiparty democracy and capitalist oligarchy including coalitions with his former enemies. And that's even before we get into how many times the Cambodian king switched sides...

[walrus01]

I can tell you that from at least this Canadian's perspective, using military force to eliminate the Khmer Rouge was no less necessary than using military force to eliminate the Nazi control of Germany. I think you'll find that among people who have extensively studied asian and southeast asian history and military topics, it's almost universally agreed upon how evil their regime was.

The full weight of the evidence for how many people they killed, which only surfaced by the mid to late 1980s, only further reinforces this.

[cryptonector]

Mind you, the Vietnamese government went to war with the Khmer Rouge because the latter attacked Vietnam, not because the killing fields became unacceptable.

[chinhodado]

It's true, and it's sad but that's just how it works. Unless a country is attacked, it's very hard to find justification to intervene in the internal affairs of another country. That said, once war is inevitable, the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge made Vietnam understand that such a regime cannot be allowed to be left alone, both for the sake of the Vietnamese and Cambodian people.

[refurb]

As I'm sure you know, there is a lot of history between the Vietnamese and Cambodians. I understood that Cambodians hold a lot of animosity when the Vietnamese took the Mekong delta from Cambodia in 1698. They ended up as 2nd class citizens and the Khmer Rouge figured it was a good time to take it back.

And one can't ignore North Vietnam's support of the Khmer Rouge early on.

On 29 March 1970, North Vietnam launched an offensive against the Cambodian army. Documents uncovered from the Soviet Union's archives reveal that the invasion was launched at the Khmer Rouge's explicit request after negotiations were held with Nuon Chea.[33] A North Vietnamese force quickly overran large parts of eastern Cambodia reaching within 15 miles (24 km) of Phnom Penh before being pushed back....After defeating those forces, the North Vietnamese turned the newly won territories over to the local insurgents.[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide

[chinhodado]

About North Vietnam's support of the Khmer Rouge early on, it's worth viewing things in historical context. During the Cambodian coup of 1970, Vietnamese ethnic was massacred:

> Paranoia flourished and this set off a violent reaction against the nation's 400,000 ethnic Vietnamese.

> Lon Nol hoped to use the Vietnamese as hostages against PAVN/Viet Cong activities, and the military set about rounding them up into detention camps. That was when the killing began. In towns and villages all over Cambodia, soldiers and civilians sought out their Vietnamese neighbors in order to murder them. On 15 April, the bodies of 800 Vietnamese floated down the Mekong River and into South Vietnam. [1]

Under the circumstances, the North Vietnamese allied with the Khmer Rouge and the ousted Sihanouk to take back the government from Lon Nol. In the beginning there was no sign of a genocidal regime, and the Khmer Rouges were just "comrades" supported by the Cambodian prince trying to take back his government. It was not until later that ethnic and ideological hatred turned the Khmer Rouge against their Vietnamese allies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_Civil_War

[xuki]

You gotta see it from the other sides too. Vietnam had a strong standing army and took over a sovereign country, not that they had many choices, but that made the whole South East Asia uncomfortable. Who would be next? Thailand? Malaysia? Singapore? In fact, ASEAN was formed originally to fight communism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASEAN_Declaration