Abstract
From October 1979 through to the end of 1980 the divide surrounding Indo-China continued to widen. Reports of famine and the refugee crisis added a new dimension to Western responses to events in Cambodia. Although aid to the border was easily justified as a lifeline preventing many Cambodian civilians from starving to death, the aid played an additional role of rehabilitating, developing and sustaining the Khmer resistance to the Vietnamese invasion. Thus, while deliberation in the UN maintained the useful myth of the continued existence of the Democratic Kampuchea regime as a legitimate political entity, border aid, including internationally donated food and the provision of Chinese arms, transformed this myth into a reality.
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Notes
Brzezinski, Power, p. 425. See also Jimmy Carter, “Question and Answer Session with Foreign Correspondents, April 12, 1980”, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Jimmy Carter, 1980–81 (Washington, DC, 1982), p. 674.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Singapore, From Phnom Penh to Kabul (Singapore, 1980), passim.
“Bleak Prospects for Meeting Kampuchea’s Food Needs”, CIA, National Foreign Assessment Centre, GC80–10034, April 1980, p. 2. As always, it is difficult to evaluate such figures with complete accuracy. It is generally accepted, however, that this figure is highly exaggerated and that the total number of deaths by starvation, including that at the Thai border measured at a maximum in the few tens of thousands. See Kiljunen, Kampuchea, p. 33; Michael Vickery, “Democratic Kampuchea — CIA to the Rescue”, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, vol. 14, no. 4 (October–December 1982), pp. 45–54.
US Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1979 (Washington, DC, 1980), pp. 463–6.
Ian Brownlie, Principles of Public International Law (Oxford, 4th edn, 1990), p. 72.
See Douglas Dacy, Foreign Aid, War, and Economic Development: South Vietnam, 1955–1975 (New York, 1986), p. 27.
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© 1996 Jamie Frederic Metzl
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Metzl, J.F. (1996). September 1979–December 1980. In: Western Responses to Human Rights Abuses in Cambodia, 1975–80. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24717-2_7
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