Which route to restore peace in troubled Cambodia?

By Abdulgaffar Peang-Meth

GUAM, United States (JP): Recently, Indonesia's Minister of Foreign Affairs Ali Alatas made a candid, widely quoted remark about the United Nations peacekeeping operation in Cambodia that went a long way to explaining why Cambodia is in its present state of chaos and political terror.

After spending US$3 billion and involving 22,000 military and civilian peacekeepers, UN decision-makers acquiesced to Khmer Rouge objections to the 1991 Paris peace accords and to Hun Sen's assertion that only his forces had the capacity to maintain order: "So reluctantly, the United Nations said 'okay' and no one was disarmed and that is why... the two sides today still have armies and everyone in Cambodia is well-armed."

If Minister Alatas is correct, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations-led effort to end 20 years of war and restore human rights in Cambodia actually left in place the seeds that eventually germinated as the July coup that ousted Prince Norodom Ranariddh as first prime minister. The resulting instability has not only seen 41 and possibility up to 60 "extra-judicial" killings, but has caused ASEAN to delay Cambodia's admission to the organization.

The 1991 Paris peace agreements approved by the UN Security Council included the disarmament of all four Cambodian factions and UN administration of critical government ministries. A Cambodian Supreme National Council was to serve in an advisory capacity, so long as its advice was consistent with the objectives of the peace plan. None of this happened.

When the Khmer Rouge representatives to the peace talks, held in Phnom Penh, were beaten by a mob led by Hun Sen's thugs, the Khmer Rouge began to pull out of the peace agreements they had signed. The well-written, well-reasoned plan that had offered hope to the Cambodian people was undermined from the start, but blind foreign paternalism submerged reality in favor of a piece of paper signed by the warring Khmers.

When the Paris peace agreements produced a UN-supervised general election in Cambodia in May 1993, 1.8 million Cambodians risked their lives, despite threats and intimidation from Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge and the watchful eye of Hun Sen's ruling Cambodian People's Party, and gave electoral victory to Prince Ranariddh's royalist party.

When a government was set up to succeed the UN administrators, however, the election results were subjugated to the demands of Hun Sen, whose administration had been left in place during the UN occupation. He refused to cede authority or have his loyalists vacate their offices, so the UN forced upon Prince Ranariddh a 50/50 power-sharing arrangement that had not been sanctioned by the elections.

Today, these same Cambodian voters are asked anew to participate in an electoral exercise to elect new leaders. They are certain to question not only how a second prime minister whom they never elected was awarded equal status with the prime minister to whom they gave a clear mandate, and how that bogus leader is now in full authority and permitted to arrange the next elections without serious international oversight.

Not only did Cambodia become the only country with a "Made by the UN" government, however well-intentioned the compromises the UN permitted in the name of short-term stability, the resulting government was destined to fail. The Cambodian cultural makeup is such that compromise is an unfamiliar and alien concept: leadership is omnipotent and not to be shared. The two-prime minister system then could not succeed.

Theoretically, a free and fair election would allow the people to translate their will into governmental reality. In the present circumstances, however, it is a gross mistake to think that general elections are going to cure the ills of Cambodian society.

If the elections, now tentatively scheduled for May 1998, are to be meaningful, Prince Ranariddh and some 20 political figures and parliamentarians who fled the country must return to participate in the electoral process with guarantees of their personal safety. Sam Rainsy, head of the opposition Khmer Nation Party, lamented that guarantees of safety are one thing, but returnees must also be able to do their jobs.

Hun Sen has assured the world that the next election in Cambodia will be both free and fair. He has guaranteed personal safety to all political returnees and offered them foreign bodyguards, but says that "royal handcuffs" and jail are awaiting Prince Ranariddh.

ASEAN, Japan, and Western powers have focused their efforts on encouraging those who fled in fear of their lives to return to participate in the elections on the basis of Hun Sen's promises and UN monitoring of the elections.

But Hun Sen has remained intransigent in his position that Prince Ranariddh must face trial. He has also rejected ASEAN's suggestion that parliamentary debate be delayed on amendments his Cabinet has approved to key electoral commission that will oversee the elections, leaving the process therefore open to question.

Both Prince Ranariddh and Sam Rainsy have called for an international war crimes tribunal to prosecute Hun Sen for mass killings and political terrorism as a result of such acts as the grenade attack on peaceful demonstrators in Phnom Penh last March and the "extra-judicial" killings of political figures during and after the July 1997 coup.

Hun Sen is also widely believed to be involved in extensive and lucrative drug-trafficking operations.

Three potential options for addressing the Cambodian problem come to mind. The easiest, and most cynical, would be for the world community to wash its hands of a situation that seems insoluble. Even Cambodia's oldest and most skilled political hand, King Norodom Sihanouk, has recently said he is so despondent over his country's present plight that he has considered suicide.

A slightly less devastating strategy might be to deal with each problem singly, avoiding long-term, complex involvement in the arcane political minutiae of the country. Neither approach appears to represent a durable solution to Cambodia's problems.

The havoc wreaked by the current government has destroyed the individual freedoms and human rights to which all are entitled. As such, the appropriate course seems to demand concerted international pressure on Hun Sen.

If the world is united and uncompromising in its insistence that Hun Sen conform to its norms of political behavior, the emerging cracks in the Cambodian People's Party might widen sufficiently to swallow Hun Sen in the fissures. Things in Cambodia, after all, are rarely what they appear to be.

Abdulgaffar Peang-Meth was born and raised in Cambodia and was a senior official of the non-Communist Khmer People's National Liberation Front in 1980-1989. A naturalized U.S. citizen, he is associate professor of political science at the University of Guam, United States.