Stephen John MORRIS
Pseudonym: 2-TCE-98
Cases: Case 002/02
Category: Expert
Background and role
John Stephen Morris, an Australian academic on international affairs and history, and author of “Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia” and articles on his experiences with Democratic Kampuchea (“DK”) after 1979,
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testified as an expert witness in Case 002/02 on the Vietnam-Cambodia relations, the armed conflict, and the terms CIA or KGB.
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Morris visited Cambodian guerrilla-controlled areas in 1983 and met with different leaders, including Ieng Sary and Norodom Sihanouk.
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He had access to the archives of the former Communist Party of the Soviet Union on the history of the Vietnam War and the war in Cambodia.
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The archives contained Vietnamese communist documents and interviews or discussions conducted by Soviet officials about the problem in Cambodia.
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Morris confirmed that the Vietnamese, trained by the Soviets and the Chinese for decades, were more skillful than the Cambodians in the arts of propaganda.
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Vietnam-Cambodia relations
Morris explained that the Vietnamese territory came from conquering territories occupied by other ethnic groups including Cham and Cambodians.
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The Vietnamese conceived Indochina as a place where they would be dominant over Lao and Cambodians in terms of leadership.
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The Indochinese Federation’s whole concept, initiated in the 1930s, was a guiding impulse and motivating factor in their behavior toward Cambodia in subsequent decades.
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Morris recalled reading a 1973 report in the Soviet archives about Hanoi's goals to “replace the reactionary regime in Saigon, Vientiane, and Phnom Penh” and to “move toward the establishment of a federation of the Indochinese countries”.
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Vietnamese nationalism has been expansionist until recently.
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They had a condescending view of Cambodians as being inferior even if they did not express that explicitly and publicly.
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The origins of the Cambodian communist movement traced back to the founding of the Vietnamese Communist Party by Ho Chi Minh in January 1930.
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In 1951, the Vietnamese created proto-communist parties in Cambodia and Laos which were composed of few Cambodians or Lao and dominated by people of mixed Vietnamese heritage.
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From the 1930s through the 1970s, their long-standing method, modeled on the Soviet Union, was to use people regarded as being loyal to them to create communist parties in other countries.
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Between 1968 and 1970, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (“CPK”) and the Vietnamese had different objectives: the CPK wanted to overthrow Sihanouk, while the Vietnamese wanted to keep him in power to use Cambodia as a staging area and a supply route for their war in South Vietnam through Sihanoukville.
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During 1970-1975, Sihanouk was a vital figure of political legitimacy in helping the Khmer Rouge suppress some of the opposition, though he was downplayed domestically.
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After the coup d’état in March 1970, the Vietnamese and CPK shared the short-term objective of toppling the Lon Nol government to secure their sanctuaries in Cambodia.
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They provided the CPK with “a lot of military force” and launched offensives against the Khmer Republic in the Cambodian eastern regions.
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They fled into the interior of Cambodia and set up two political means for establishing their political control over the Cambodian insurgency: the liaison committees controlled by the Vietnamese and the Cambodian communist structures dominated by their Khmer-trained agents from Hanoi (“Khmer Vietminh”).
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Being aware of this strategy, Pol Pot and other leaders removed those people from positions of power in 1970-1972 and killed most of them by 1975 and afterward.
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After the US and Vietnam Peace Accord in January 1973, some Vietnamese soldiers remained to assist the CPK in transporting arms and ammunition provided by China through the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
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The Cambodian communists regarded the Vietnamese communists as their main enemy even though their common enemy was the US and its client regimes in both countries.
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The armed conflict
According to Morris, the border issues were not the real cause of the conflict between Vietnam and DK, but rather a symptom or a reflection of more profound political problems.
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The DK forces made two large-scale incursions into Vietnam: in April 1977 causing a substantial number of civilian casualties, and in September 1977 killing a lot of Vietnamese civilians.
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Vietnamese troops counter-attacked into Cambodian territory and voluntarily withdrew in January 1978.
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Morris found the DK attacks provocative and irrational based on their disparity of strength in terms of quantity and quality: numbers of the armed forces (70 000 DK soldiers against 615 000 Vietnamese soldiers), weapons, weaponry experience and command.
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Morris testified that there were “profound paranoid tendencies in the DK political culture”,
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though he found evidence in Soviet archives “attempted insurgencies against the government of Democratic Kampuchea”.
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The internal purges were aimed at CPK loyal members after 1975 because Pol Pot thought that those people, including the Eastern zone cadres, were traitors or agents of Vietnam.
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Morris said: “I think it was not only paranoia but also an attempt to explain weakness in conflict with Vietnam”.
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At first, Vietnam had hoped for an insurrection to overthrow the DK regime, but when that didn't happen, sometime in 1978 they decided to invade Cambodia.
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Terms CIA or KGB
Morris explained that the words CIA or KGB were not used as literal references to these intelligence agencies, based on their completely disparate intentions, ideologies, and purposes as part of a fantastic conspiracy.
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They were rather given to those with Western imperialist leanings, and Soviet or Vietnamese (revisionist) leanings.
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Findings
The Trial Chamber cited Morris’s evidence and others when finding that (i) Vietnam was resolved as the long-term “acute enemy” of Kampuchea since September 1971;
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(ii) the armed clashes between both countries commenced around May 1975, but there were no DK’s large-scale incursions into Vietnam in April and September 1977 as denounced by the Vietnamese authorities;
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and (iii) the terms CIA, KGB and Vietnamese agents were served predominantly for rhetorical purposes and expressed the CPK’s fear of any external influences on people within DK.
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Due to the limited scope of case 002/02, the Trial Chamber relied on Morris’s testimony about the incursions into Vietnamese territory only for assessing the witness’s credibility, understanding the armed conflict context, or the arrests of Vietnamese on their territory and sent to S-21.
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The Supreme Court Chamber found that the Trial Chamber did not err in designing Morris as an expert on the nature of armed conflict having considered his extensive research experience and specialized knowledge of Vietnam-Cambodia relations during the relevant time.
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