Southeast Asia Assault and Pursuit

By George Russell.

The attack was carefully timed and meticulously planned. Shortly after midnight under a full moon, small-arms fire began to crackle around the Kampuchean refugee camp and guerrilla base known as Ampil, hard by the border with Thailand. The shooting eventually died away, only to be replaced, just after sunrise, by a thunderous artillery barrage. Plumes of smoke rose from the dusty thatch-and- bamboo compound as heavy Vietnamese guns poured thousands of rounds into the area--"a huge rumbling," as one witness described it, "an explosion not every minute but every second." A dozen Soviet-built T-54 tanks and nearly two dozen armored personnel carriers added to the cacophony as they nosed into battle ahead of some 4,000 Vietnamese infantrymen.

Unnerved by the concentration of firepower, many of Ampil's 5,000 defenders, all members of the anti-Communist Khmer People's National Liberation Front (K.P.N.L.F.), broke and ran. Some managed to regroup for counterattacks, but eventually most of the lightly armed guerrillas scrambled to safety across the Thai border. Within 36 hours last week, the Vietnamese had mopped up all significant resistance at Ampil, in the process sending small detachments of regular troops across the ill- defined Thai border. At one point, a Vietnamese officer walked up to a Thai army checkpoint to inquire where the frontier was. During a brief argument, a Thai sergeant said, "If you fire at us, we'll fire back." Replied the Vietnamese, "If you fire at us, we'll invade Thailand." In the end, the Vietnamese pulled back into Kampuchea after being warned that the Thai government would "take action." Thai soldiers set out orange sticks marking the frontier, and the two forces agreed to establish a 22-yd. demilitarized zone on each side of the line.

So ended the latest phase of the annual dry-season effort by Hanoi to stamp out forces opposed to the Kampuchean regime of Heng Samrin, who is widely considered to be a Vietnamese puppet. From Hanoi's point of view, the operation was a success: between 89 and 103 guerrillas were killed or wounded in the action, while Vietnamese casualties were presumed to be much lighter. Moreover, the attack dealt a blow to the Khmer Front, the major non-Communist element in the close to 60,000-member guerrilla coalition that is continuing to resist the 1978 Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea.

The Vietnamese launched the initial phase of their offensive in November, and on Christmas Day attacked Rithysen, the biggest of eight Khmer Front guerrilla bases that dot the Kampuchean side of the border. The Christmas onslaught drove some 62,000 civilian refugees into Thailand; the threat to Ampil added 23,000 more. Many of the guerrillas are expected to filter back into Kampuchea, but the Vietnamese have made public statements indicating that they intend a permanent occupation of the border region, depriving the guerrillas of their comfortable zone of sanctuary. If the K.P.N.L.F. intends to fight on, it will probably have to abandon static defenses in favor of more classic guerrilla tactics, dispersing its strength and moving deeper into the Kampuchean countryside. Said one analyst in Thailand: "If you're going to be a proper guerrilla, you can't be protecting large, fixed bodies of civilians."

This year's Vietnamese drive has differed from earlier campaigns in both its relative ferocity and its single-minded concentration on the Khmer Front component of the Kampuchean resistance. With an estimated 12,000 fighters led by onetime Prime Minister Son Sann, the front is linked in a loose alliance with some 40,000 guerrillas of the Communist Khmer Rouge, backed by China, and 5,000 soldiers loyal to Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Kampuchea's former head of state. The guerrilla forces are no match for the Vietnamese, who maintain approximately 160,000 troops in Kampuchea and can bring in heavy weapons.

Diplomatically, however, the guerrilla alliance has been holding a strong hand: the Heng Samrin regime has never been recognized as legitimate by the United Nations. The Khmer Front and the Sihanouk forces have the backing of the U.S. and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei and the Philippines). A sustained Vietnamese attack on the front thus weakens a non-Communist alternative to the Heng Samrin government. By themselves, the stronger and more aggressive Khmer Rouge are far less likely to draw international sympathy to the resistance cause, since they are still remembered by the rest of the world with disgust for the deaths between 1975 and 1978 of as many as 2 million of Kampuchea's then approximately 7 million people.

Last week's attack, especially the brief incursion into Thailand, drew a predictable response from Washington, which termed the intrusion "deplorable." In Peking, the Chinese government issued condemnations of "the crimes of aggression committed by the Vietnamese," but refrained from making any direct threats against Hanoi. Despite reported Chinese troop movements over the past few weeks along the Sino-Vietnamese border, Peking does not appear eager to repeat its costly 1979 invasion of Viet Nam in order to relieve the pressure on its Kampuchean allies.

With reporting by Narunart Prapanya and James Willwerth/Ban Sangae