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Cambodia's years of genocide were over, but the hunger problem was made worse, if possible, by the Vietnamese conquest. Hanoi's forces, numbering about 180,000, found themselves locked in a war with 20,000 to 30,000 dogged Khmer Rouge guerrillas, who still control much of the countryside. As a result of the continuing war, food has become a weapon on both sides. The Khmer Rouge routinely ravage the new paddyfields planted under the Vietnamese occupation. Not only are the Cambodians starving, but even the Vietnamese troops are said to be on short rations. Many of the Khmer Rouge have been pressed back into hilly, thickly jungled areas where rice cannot be grown. Still, the Khmer Rouge eat almost as well as they always have; it is the civilian slave laborers they force to accompany them who are starving.
Systematic pillaging by Vietnamese troops has compounded the country's plight. Cambodian shops, homes and Buddhist temples have been stripped by Hanoi's invaders. Machines, household appliances, furniture and Buddha heads have been loaded aboard planes and trucks and shipped to Viet Nam. There are even reports that the Vietnamese are loading rice intended for refugees aboard carriers headed for Hanoi.
Hanoi's disregard of the plight of the Cambodians has been reinforced by the enmity between the two peoples. The Vietnamese have long regarded the Cambodians as treacherous barbarians who had the impudence to revolt against their domination in 1840. Observed Minh Mang, the Vietnamese emperor at the time: "We helped the Cambodians when they were suffering and lifted them out of the mud. Now they are rebellious. I am so angry that my hair stands upright. Hundreds of knives should be used against them, to chop them up, to dismember them."
Partly as a result of this historic hostility, Viet Nam has been unable to colonize or pacify Cambodia effectively. No one, least of all the Cambodians, believes that the present regime in Phnom-Penh is anything other than a Hanoi puppet government. Many analysts think that Cambodia is being run by a high council in Hanoi, headed by Vietnamese Politburo Member Le Due Tho, who was co-winner (with Henry Kissinger) of the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for having brought peace to Indochina. Tho refused to accept the honor.
The Cambodians hate their Vietnamese conquerors, but they live in deathly fear of the Khmer Rouge, who have not abandoned their politics of terror. Though it is not known for sure whether Pol Pot survived his ouster by the Vietnamese last January, he is widely believed to command his guerrilla forces from hideouts in the Cardamom Mountains of southwest Cambodia. Other known areas of Khmer Rouge strength are in the heavily forested northeast and the mountainous west.
From these strongholds the guerrillas fan out across the country for swift strikes against Vietnamese army outposts and supply routes. One broadcast by a clandestine Khmer Rouge radio station —probably located in China's Yunnan province—claimed that several Cuban and Soviet advisers had been killed in a Phnom-Penh airport ambush.