Hoxha and the Khmer Rouge

[Red Future]

I remember hearing that there was some trade and relations between the two states... but how far did this go???

[Ismail]

Milk would be able to provide the details, but the relationship between Albania and the Khmer Rouge wasn't much more than two pro-Chinese states engaging in trade. By 1978 relations pretty much dropped due to Sino-Albanian split.

On February 21, 1979 Hoxha published an article in Zëri i Popullit strongly denouncing China's invasion of Vietnam (which had invaded Kampuchea to oust Pol Pot.) Hoxha described the Khmer Rouge like so (from Selected Works Vol. V, pp. 724-725):

In Cambodia, the Cambodian people, communists and patriots, have risen against the barbarous government of Pol Pot, which was nothing but a group of provocateurs in the service of the imperialist bourgeoisie and of the Chinese revisionists, in particular, which had as its aim to discredit the idea of socialism in the international arena... The anti-popular line of that regime is confirmed, also, by the fact that the Albanian embassy in the Cambodian capital, the embassy of a country which has given the people of Cambodia every possible aid, was kept isolated, indeed, encircled with barbed wire, as if it were in a concentration camp. The other embassies, too, were in a similar situation. The Albanian diplomats have seen with their own eyes that the Cambodian people were treated inhumanly by the clique of Pol Pot and Yeng Sari. Pnom Pen was turned into a deserted city, empty of people, where food was difficult to secure even for the diplomats, where no doctors or even aspirins could be found. We think that the people and patriots of Cambodia waited too long before overthrowing this clique which was completely linked with Beijing and in its service.

When the first conflicts broke out on the Cambodian-Vietnamese border, the view of socialist Albania was, and the world is witness to this, that disagreements between the two neighbour countries should be resolved through talks and without the interference of the Chinese or Soviet social-imperialists. But this was not done. On the contrary, the Pol Pot group, incited by Beijing, brought out in Pnom Pen daily communiques in which they announced that thousands of Vietnamese were being killed by its army on Vietnamese territory....

But the question must be asked: Why do the Chinese imperialists allegedly have the right to defend the barbarous fascist Pol Pot group, and Vietnam does not have the right to support the revolutionaries and the people of Cambodia to build a free, independent and sovereign country?In his speech to the 8th Congress of the Party of Labour of Albania on November 1, 1981, Hoxha summed up the Albanian position on Kampuchea: "In regard to Cambodia, our Party and state have condemned the bloodthirsty activities of the Pol Pot clique, a tool of the Chinese social-imperialists. We hope that the Cambodian people will surmount the difficulties they are encountering as soon as possible and decide their own fate and future in complete freedom without any 'guardian'." (Selected Works Vol. VI, p. 419.)

[redSHARP]

The US-Khmer relations in even more interesting. The US government basically condoned the genocide and diplomatically supported the Khmer Rouge in the UN.

[milk]

Trade was limited but economic feelers were put out by the DK government. I think that perhaps it was not just 'independence-mastery,' or the position of self-reliance which played a significant role in the modest in-roads which were made, but alignment with China, which was then a pariah of the socialist world bloc. Relying on their own forces may have been trumpeted when it came to the refusal of aid, but little was probably offered anyway.

As for Albania, in 1976 a DK delegation went there in October (before heading to Romania and Yugoslavia) and trade was secured - in exchange for such things as hardwood, coconuts and rubber, the Albanians sent tractors and other agricultural equipment, arriving in the country in 1977.

Also, in 1976 the DK government set up a trading house in Hong Kong, called the Reng Fung Co. This was used to tentatively open up trade with non-socialist countries. Trade between DK and the United Kingdom, as well as the United States, was conducted through Reng Fung. The British bought rice, as well as exporting goods to Cambodia. DK imported 400 tons of the chemical pesticide DDT from the US, through this company.

A Quaker organisation in the United States, called the American Friends Service Committee, donated anti-malaria equipment (mosquito nets, drugs etc) to Cambodia, and DK also bought similar from France, 2 million francs worth. A 1977 visit was made to Malaysia for talks with the government there, in order to locate European outlets for DK-produced rubber. Trade was also conducted closer to home, with a handful of Thai concerns given the go ahead to trade in 1977, although informal, and unofficial trade had been conducted between the Thais and Cambodians since 1975 - exchanging dried fish for corrugated iron and engine parts.