Vietnam Sets Pullout From Cambodia : To Withdraw 50,000 Troops by Year’s End; Boost to Gorbachev

HANOI, Vietnam — Vietnam, which invaded Cambodia 10 years ago, said today that it will withdraw 50,000 troops by the end of this year and place the rest under the Cambodian high command, Western diplomats said.

The pullout will be the second major withdrawal by Communist forces from another nation this year and will create a more favorable atmosphere for Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in his Moscow summit with President Reagan beginning Sunday. The estimated 115,000 Soviet troops in Afghanistan have begun withdrawing from that country after nine years of fighting Muslim rebels.

Western diplomats said they have been told by a top Hanoi Foreign Ministry official that the phased withdrawal from Cambodia will begin in June, that Vietnamese forces will also pull back further from the Thai border and that observers will be invited to watch.

Invasion in 1978

Vietnam, which fought American forces in the 1960s and early ‘70s in a war that left more than 50,000 U.S. dead, invaded Cambodia in 1978 with an estimated 120,000 troops to oust Pol Pot’s Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge and set up a pro-Hanoi government.

The Khmer Rouge killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians during a four-year reign of terror that was dramatically captured in “The Killing Fields,” the movie based on the experiences of Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Sydney Schanberg and photographer Dith Pran.

The Phnom Penh government has since been under attack by three guerrilla opposition forces, including the Khmer Rouge.

Foreign Ministry sources in Hanoi said the withdrawals will be announced formally at a news conference Thursday, three days before the Moscow summit begins.

Annual Withdrawals

Vietnam has staged annual partial withdrawals from Cambodia since 1982. Until last year, however, when 20,000 troops were announced as being pulled out in November, Western states dismissed these withdrawals as troop rotations.

“A pullout of 50,000 must be taken seriously,” a Western envoy here said.

As well as the withdrawal and putting the remaining forces under Cambodian control, a Vietnamese official said Vietnamese troops inside Cambodia will be pulled back nine more miles from Cambodia’s western border with Thailand, the diplomats said. They said this will leave them at least 18 miles from the frontier after a pullback last year.

The Vietnamese official said the pullout was possible because of the growing strength of the Cambodian government forces.