Thursday, July 29, 2004
Remains of Vietnamese soldiers returned from Cambodia
Agence France-Presse Hanoi, July 29
The remains of 189 Vietnamese soldiers killed during Hanoi's decade-long occupation of Cambodia have been repatriated to Vietnam and given a formal burial, the military said on Thursday.
The corpses, which were discovered during joint search operations with the Cambodian military, were interred at a war cemetery in the Tan Bien district of the southern Vietnamese border province of Tay Ninh on Tuesday.
"We discovered these remains in five different Cambodian provinces earlier this year," said Major Nguyen Van Dung, the military commander in Tay Ninh. Since 2001, 1,339 bodies have been repatriated to the province from Cambodia, he added.
Vietnam, whose intervention in its western neighbour remains a deeply sensitive issue, began the search for its missing in action in July 2001 in partnership with the Cambodian military.
It was only then that Hanoi finally acknowledged that more than 10,000 soldiers were killed or went missing during its December 1978-1989 intervention to overthrow the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime.
Vietnam asserts it saved Cambodia from Pol Pot, whose ultra-Maoist regime was responsible for the deaths of up to two million people between 1975 and early 1979.
However, its intervention sparked a bloody 17-day war with its giant northern neighbour China, which viewed the attack on its Khmer Rouge allies as a serious provocation.
It also prompted an acrimonious split within Vietnam's ruling Communist Party.
© HT Media Ltd. 2004.