ABSTRACT
The civil wars in Cambodia and Vietnam ended within two weeks of each other and featured communist parties emerging as victors over non-communist regimes supported by the United States. Former opponents were constructed as individuals who could be rehabilitated and integrated into a unified socialist Vietnam. Although regarded with some suspicion, South Vietnamese were not defined as lying completely outside the revolution and the vision of united Vietnam. The immediate post-unification period in Vietnam – the same years that overlapped with the genocide in neighbouring Cambodia – was point at which regime in Hanoi came closest to turning on the first, "foreign" switch with regard to its former southern opponents. Throughout war for reunification, southerners as a group were not conceptualized as enemies, let alone as lethal threat. Southerners who sided with the US-backed Government of South Vietnam (GVN) – real enemy, described as "cruel" and "dictatorial" fascists – were portrayed as wayward brothers who had yet to see the socialist light.
