PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said Friday Vietnam has withdrawn all civilian and military advisers from the country it invaded 10 years ago, but he insisted the Hanoi-installed government could still hold its own aainst three rebel armies.
Hun Sen said the advisers left the country as part of a phased withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia that began earlier this year. On Thursday, Hanoi announced 18,000 soldiers were being pulled out from battlefields in western Cambodia, bringing to 50,000 the number of troops withdrawn this year.
Hun Sen said only 50,000 Vietnamese would be left in Cambodia when the latest phase is completed next Wednesday.
'This will not affect the balance of forces on the battlefield due to our Cambodian troops, who are in control of all areas from which the Vietnamese have withdrawn,' he said.
'Vietnamese assistance ... is considered very important, but final success depends on the Cambodian people,' he told about 150 foreign correspondents.
Vietnam has promised to pull out the remainder of its forces by the end of 1990.
An estimated 180,000 Soviet-backed Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia in 1978 after a series of border clashes and quickly swept across the country to topple the radical communist Khmer Rouge regime backed by China.
Cambodian officials said many of the departing Vietnamese troops would pass through Phnom Penh Saturday for farewell ceremonies. Most are scheduled to cross the border into Vietnam by Monday.
United Press International observed about 1,500 green-uniformed Vietnamese soldiers begin their departure from western Cambodia on Thursday.
The troops, carrying guitars, pets and supplies of fresh sugar cane along with their weapons, clambered aboard about 50 troop carriers in the district town of Sisophon.
A crowd of Cambodians, mostly women and children, waved redpaper Vietnamese flags and cheered as the soldiers left.
Hun Sen said the Cambodian government would wage a 'people's war,' using local and regional militia, to eliminate the guerrillas once the Vietnamese are gone. But he conceded that at present the militia face a shortage of ammunition and had to rely on a mix of 'traditional' and modern weapons.
A rebel radio broadcast by the Khmer Rouge insurgency said the Vietnamese withdrawal was a farce. The radio said instead of reducing its forces, Hanoi had introduced another 20,000 troops into Cambodia in the past six months.
'The Hanoi Vietnamese propaganda on troop pullout is just a deceitful maneuver to dupe international opinion,' it said.
The Khmer Rouge is the largest of three guerrilla armies fighting the Phnom Penh government and Vietnamese occupation forces.
Hun Sen said he had met Thursday with Rafiuddin Ahmed, special envoy of United Nations Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, to discuss ways to achieve a political solution to Cambodia's civil war.
He said the two agreed that a dissolution of the pro-Hanoi government in Cambodia prior to a formal peace agreement, as proposed by the rebels during talks in Indonesia earlier this year -- would 'certainly bring chaos.'
Hun Sen reiterated his opposition to an international peace-keeping force in Cambodia, and said that while he was willing to work with moderate members of the Khmer Rouge, he would not negotiate with elements of the insurgency linked to former Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, who led a reign of terror in Cambodia between 1975 and 1978.
