Bureaucrats fall out over Kampuchea invasion

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Kampuchean envor Sihanouk with Andrew Young As the Vietnamese Stalinists consolidate their invasion of Kampuchea (Cambodia), the rivalries within the camp of world Stalinism have flared up with a new intensity.

=o-ces supporting the toppied govermer: o* Po. Pot are conducting a rearguard action in the mountainous west, with their backs to the Thai border.

As Vietnamese troops were pulled out of Kampong Som to be deployed inland and further along the coast, the Khmer Rouge moved in to recapture the port.

But their occupation lasted only a few days, and effective military resistance to the invasion now • seems to have been broken in all but a few isolated areas.

Second liberation'

The workers and peasants of Kampuchea now face a second Stalinist liberation' under the puppet government of the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation.

The forms of restriction and suppression they will be forced to endure at the hands of their new bureaucratic masters in Hanoi will differ from those they suffered from the primitive Maoists of the Khmer Rouge.

But the content of political oppression will remain the same.

Yet the fate of the Kampuchean masses is not in itself a question of any importance to the Stalinist leaders, let alone to the imperialists.

For them, misery and poverty, starvation and death weigh nothing against the bureaucratic self-interest of the one, or the profits of the other.

Cries of dignified and wellbred indignation have broken from the lips of the imperialists.

But Carter and his breed have wisely elected to keep their distance from an area where she attentions have not been too popuiary received in the recent past.

The move by the Romanian bureaucracy to condemn the invasion did not represent any sudden turn to proietarian internationalism by these diehard Their concern was not with the democratic rights of the Kampuchean people, and above all it was not with the struggle for socialist revolution.

In the fall of Pol Pot, Ceaucescu and his clique saw an example of the fate that could befall a national bureaucracy which fell out of step with more powerful. neighbours in the Kremlin bloc.

The implications were not lost on the Romanian leaders, who have been driven into increasing conflict with the other members of Comecon and the Warsaw Pact.

Ceaucescu's example was swiftly followed by Tito's Stalinist bureaucracy in Yugoslavia.

Their complaints were even backed up by the regime of North Korea, where the bureaucracy has so far attempted to remain neutral in the conflict between Peking and Moscow.

Such open disagreements can only add to the delight of the imperialists as they seek to rip apart the solidarity of the degenerated workers' states.

But this latest development seems to have proved too much for the Albanian Stalinists, coming so soon after they had 'discovered' that both the Soviet and the Chinese bureaucracies were counter-revolutionary.

Not noted for his reticence, Albanian leader Enver Hoxha has preserved a discreet silence this time round.

At the same time as the Vietnamese invasion has revealed yet again the tensions between national sections of international Stalinism, it has also produced further shifts in political alignment in eastern Asia.

The capitalist government of Thailand has attacked Vietnamese aggression, and provided assistance for Kampuchean efugees.

Bui the Thai government has stepped definitely short of harbouring Khmer Rouge military opposition to the new regime.

Stifle Its aim has been to forge closer links with the Chinese bureaucracy, partly for trading purposes, but also to stifle the guerrilla war within Thailand and that has been supported by Peking in the past.

The Chinese Stalinists may well feel that the loss of a poor, unstable and embarrassing ally in Kampuchea is only a smali price to pay in its search for intimate alliances with the reactionary pro-imperialist regimes of south-east Asia.