bout de papier, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2017), pp. 12–15
Canadian diplomats may have written the first report suggesting that the Cold War
was coming to a close and that the West had won it. They did not know it at the time, but they certainly knew that the event they were describing was important, and it turned
out to be perhaps the first indication that the Communist world was in retreat. The development was Vietnam’s withdrawal from Cambodia, and the date was June 1987.
In 1978 Vietnam invaded Cambodia and installed a satellite regime. Having already attained effective control of Laos, its invasion of Cambodia fulfilled an ancient Vietnamese desire to dominate all of Indochina, a goal that had been cut short in the nineteenth century when France conquered the entire area. Hanoi had a good argument for intervention: to overthrow the murderous Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot that had killed some 20% of the population. That, however, could not disguise the fact that it merely replaced Pol Pot’s gang with another faction of the Khmer Rouge led by Hang Samrin, the ones who had fled to Vietnam to escape being purged. A nasty satellite of Communist China was replaced by a less repressive satellite of Vietnam, itself a Russian satellite.
The West had recognized North Vietnam’s conquest of South Vietnam in 1975 and its domination of Laos. It was not, however, prepared to accept Vietnamese control of Cambodia, the replacement of China by the USSR as the main threat to Southeast Asia, and the presence of a Vietnamese army a few hours drive from Bangkok. It was, after all, the Vietnamese army that had defeated the French and the Americans and soon thrashed the Chinese when they invaded in response to Vietnam’s conquest of Cambodia. It was said that the only thing that could slow that army in Thailand would be the traffic jams. The belief that the USSR was still on the offensive was strongly reinforced when Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
Three sanctions were imposed on Hanoi: no aid, no support for trade, and no high-level visit until Vietnam pulled out of Cambodia. Those sanctions, coupled with Hanoi’s mismanagement of its economy doomed Vietnam to stagnation, and the West waited and waited for the government to recognize that it could not keep Cambodia and have meaningful economic development. The job of this First Secretary in Bangkok was to monitor the situation in Vietnam, especially the question of when Hanoi would realize it had to withdraw from Cambodia.
In 1984, I was assigned to Bangkok with responsibility for Indochina. Every three months or so, I visited Hanoi and Saigon, accompanied alternately by Ambassador John Paynter or Political Counselor Gordon Longmuir. And every three months, I wrote three reports which were easily summarized: no change on Vietnamese policy towards Cambodia, no change on internal politics, and continued economic stagnation. We were in contact with the few Western missions and our reports were almost certainly the same as all of theirs. There was an excellent exchange of information, and everyone knew that little would change until Vietnam withdrew from Cambodia.
The situation in the mid-1980s was stalemate: Hanoi was determined to hold on to Cambodia and the West was determined to force it out. The question was how stubborn were the Vietnamese, and the key issue was their economy. Vietnam was falling further and further behind the rest of Southeast Asia which, at the time, was experiencing very rapid economic growth. Flying from Bangkok to Hanoi was like going back half a century or more in a time machine. Thailand was booming with smiling faces and signs of prosperity and growth everywhere; Hanoi featured bicycles and hungry, badly-dressed, sad-looking people. It was a bit of a joke amongst the Vietnam watchers that there were more cars in the parking lot at Bangkok’s airport than in the whole of Vietnam, and those of us who visited Hanoi and Saigon brought back stories of extreme poverty and steady deterioration in infrastructure. We stayed in the best hotels with incompetent and uninterested staff, mosquito netting, broken windows and missing toilet seats. We got sick on every visit, sometimes very sick.
In 1985, Gorbachev’s Soviet Union began announcing changes to internal and external policies. Was it propaganda? If real, what could the motives be? The Soviet economy was a mess — reform would make it less communistic, but, if successful, would make it a more powerful threat to the West. European satellites were becoming less tightly controlled, but there was no hint that the Warsaw Pact was ending. Improved relations with China made the world less dangerous, but a better Soviet-Chinese partnership posed a direct threat to Western interests throughout Asia-Pacific.
In a speech in Vladivostok on 28 June 1986, Gorbachev promised to withdraw some troops from Afghanistan. That was certainly desirable, but it was designed to reduce casualties and meet a Chinese demand. He did not announce a complete pull-out, which only happened in February 1988. Instead, he offered a more positive Soviet approach to the countries of Southeast Asia, but that was also a challenge to Western influence there. Gorbachev announced more confidence-building measures and disarmament proposals — again these were desirable but very self-serving as the arms race was destroying the Soviet economy. Overall the West’s reaction to these gestures was suspicious and negative. The speech also ignored one of China’s three main demands, that the USSR stop supporting the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia.
Photo: Liza Linklater Young kids on the street in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), early 1980s
In the spring of 1987, both the Ambassador and I were being posted back to Ottawa. Our June trip to Hanoi would be the Ambassador’s farewell, with his first meetings with the very top officials since presenting credentials four years earlier. There would be banquets and speeches and meetings with the main ministers, and the challenge of saying something positive about a relationship that had no positive elements and showed no signs of improvement.
At Bangkok airport, Ambassador Paynter said: “Well, Ed, it didn’t happen during our tour. Some day our successors will get to preside over the normalization of relations. We are both busy getting ready for our next jobs, so let’s just go, relax, and do the necessary. You write a short report, I’ll sign it, and that’s it for Vietnam.”
We went into our first meeting expecting to hear the usual fibs and banalities, but the meeting was a complete surprise. The Minister said that it was too bad that there had been a cloud over the relationship throughout the Ambassador’s tenure and that we had not had more productive relations. This message was not particularly surprising as we had repeatedly heard that things were fine, getting better, and we should continue broadening and deepening the relationship, none of which was true. Hanoi had also repeatedly brought the media to witness alleged annual withdrawals from Cambodia and, we believed, rotated new troops back in after the media left.
be done with Moscow’s approval. The Soviet Communist Empire was about to begin shrinking; the global Communist offensive that had begun in 1944 had run its course.
One of the most important and interesting aspects of visiting Hanoi, was talking to foreign diplomats stationed there — Western, neutral, and even Soviet satellite. At first, we felt we were the “takers,” since they were the ones who could tell us what was going on. We gradually realized, however, that they wanted to talk to us as badly as we wanted their views. They, in fact, had hardly any contacts with the senior Vietnamese leadership, but the latter had to meet a visiting ambassador, and after a couple of days in Hanoi an outsider could be more up to date than a resident diplomat.
When we visited our usual contacts that week, they were clearly surprised by what we were hearing. My guess is that the Politburo had made the decision to withdraw from Cambodia just days before our visit. A key part of their decision-making would be how to convey that to the West and the world in general. The farewell visit of a major Western Ambassador gave them a perfect opportunity. Some of the embassies we visited probably reported our comments to their capitals before we could report from Bangkok. There would, however, have been a significant difference — our report was first-hand — Canada was the first country to be told with conviction that the “cloud” over Vietnam’s relations with the West was about to be lifted.
Ambassador Paynter, I, and some others certainly believed that the message was that Vietnam was going to withdraw from Cambodia and that this withdrawal would be a very significant development. We were also aware of the games governments play, and that Canada’s position had to be to “wait and watch” for concrete proof. We did not then know for sure that the “cloud” would be lifted and that movement towards normalizing relations would occur, but we had been told that was in the works. We did not and could not know that this was possibly the first step in the ending of the Cold War, but in fact, the withdrawals that began that year were genuine — we had been told the truth and we had reported it.
Years later, some Western Cold Warriors still did not accept that we had won the Cold War. The Berlin Wall did not fall until November 1989, and the peace agreement on Cambodia was not completed until 1991. Nevertheless, our unexpected report of June 1987 may well have been the first diplomatic report by any foreign service presaging the end of the Cold War. And it was all an accident occasioned by the timing of Ambassador Paynter’s farewell visit.
Ed Whitcomb was First Secretary (Political), in Bangkok, 1984—87, as part of a foreign service career from 1975 to 2008. He has published fifteen books including histories of every Canadian province and a history of Canadian federalism (Rivals for Power) and was appointed to the Brandon University Wall of Fame in 2014. www fromseatosea com.
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2017), pp. 12–15. Read the rest of this issue →
