Vietnam 1979: Year of Calamity

Abstract

AFTER THE COMMUNIST VICTORY in April 1975, there was a series of alternating hard line and moderate policy periods in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) and 1979 saw the starkest fruition of the hard line. First there had been the drastically accelerated reunification of Vietnam but it had been followed by gradualist measures to reabsorb the South. During this comparatively moderate period, there were conciliatory gestures toward the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the U.S. and efforts to improve relations with the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the spring of 1977. The SRV evidently desired a rough balance of trade and aid with the communist nations on one hand and the western and other noncommunist nations on the other and in this period Hanoi promulgated a liberal foreign investment code. It also sought (unsuccessfully) to solicit aid from European noncommunist nations and while it also was interested in establishing relations with the U.S., it was still about a year away from dropping demands for U.S. reparations. The first serious clashes with the Khmer Rouge had occurred in April 1977 and by about mid-1977, when Pham Van Dong went to Moscow, the hardliners in the party had seen mounting evidence that Vietnam had nowhere else to turn for the sizeable aid and trade it needed. Then as the PRC began to endorse Pol Pot's campaign in early 1978, prospects of more serious confrontation began to loom on both the Kampuchean and Chinese borders. The PRC had ended its technical cooperation with the Vietnamese military in December 1977 and cut off economic aid in July 1978. So to procure increased military and economic assistance and also additional protection against the Chinese, the SRV had joined COMECON, the East European economic bloc, in June 1978 and had signed a treaty of