When the War Was Over (86 page)

So this boyish foreign minister, probably the youngest and least prepared in the world, sat across from Igor Rogachev, taking the precious information Rogachev provided him and figuring out how it fit into his understanding of Cambodia. Question followed question until Hun Sen had something to work with, some way to figure out how Vietnam and the Soviet Union worked together, and how that relationship affected Cambodia. The peasant soldier was filling in the blanks.

In this methodical approach to education, Rogachev recognized the ruthless practicality of a talented survivor. “It was clear he stood out from the others,” the Russian said.

That was the beginning of the most important of several foreign sponsorships that ultimately remade Cambodian history. Rogachev became an early supporter of Hun Sen even though it was quite a stretch to certify the young Cambodian's talents. But Rogachev stuck by his recommendation.
He made it his business to visit Hun Sen several times every year, each time more pleased with his protégé's progress. “I watched how he broadened his vision, not only on external affairs but internal affairs as well,” he said. “He became an outstanding politician.”

And over the next decade Hun Sen relied heavily on his Soviet sponsors. In this last, treacherous stage of the cold war, Cambodia found itself in the unusual position of center stage. During the Vietnam War, Cambodia was treated as an afterthought or sideshow to the main contest. But now it was the last great prize, the last point of contention between the Soviet Union and the United States.

The Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia was listed at the top of everyone's list of world problems. It was one of the three problems dividing China and the Soviet Union. (The other two were disagreements over their common border and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.) It was at the top of the agenda at the United Nations, where it helped to solidify China's new friendship with the United States and the countries of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. And it was the chief reason cited by the United States for its continued refusal to have normal relations with Vietnam.

Nothing would move if the Cambodia problem remained unsolved.

That winter, as Hun Sen was meeting Igor Rogachev, Prince Norodom Sihanouk was embarking on another long odyssey in exile. He had been one of the main actors responsible for the international predicament Rogachev had tried to explain to Hun Sen at that fly-infested banquet. After fleeing Cambodia with Pol Pot's blessing, Sihanouk had triumphed at the United Nations in New York with his twisted speeches condemning the Vietnamese, supporting the Chinese, and trying to sidestep the obvious result that he was the star promoter of the Khmer Rouge. The prince condemned the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia as “a danger not only in Asia but from Asia to the world.” When it came to justifying the Khmer Rouge, he answered: “The U.S. has said that for the time being we must put aside the question of human rights because there is a much more urgent problem to solve, the problem of peace and stability of the big powers.”

This early in the game, the terms were set. The United States, the countries of Southeast Asia, and most of Europe accepted China's demand that power politics trumped human rights in Cambodia. The question was framed
in a straitjacket of how to end Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia. No other subject was allowed to enter the debate; especially forbidden was any acknowledgment of the genocide of the Khmer Rouge, how it was ended by the Vietnamese occupation, or how the Khmer Rouge should be held responsible for their crimes against humanity. This was especially daunting at the United Nations, where Hitler's name is routinely invoked to prove international commitment to preventing genocide from ever happening again.

Cambodia and Vietnam, however, were at the top of China's list of problems, and the Chinese used all their influence—with the United States and Southeast Asia, in particular—to control international opinion. The 1979 Cambodia debate marked the first time China had put a resolution before the UN Security Council. It asked to condemn and cut off aid to Vietnam, and to continue to regard Pol Pot's government as the legitimate representative of Cambodia. In this, its last big fight at the UN with the Soviet Union, China's strongest supporter was the United States. China won everything it asked for. The Khmer Rouge government kept Cambodia's seat at the UN. That autumn the General Assembly endorsed the seating of Pol Pot's exiled government with a vote of 71 nations in favor, 35 opposed, and 43 abstaining. The legal compromise of leaving Cambodia's seat empty was never brought to a vote.

Criticism was instant. One of Europe's leading institutions on international law wrote: “By seating the overthrown [Cambodian] administration the General Assembly has made a decision that has no parallel in other cases of military interventions involving the toppling of a government.”

A few months later, history proved that point. On April 11, 1979, the equally abhorrent Ugandan government of Idi Amin was overthrown by the neighboring army of Tanzania. The United Nations automatically accepted the new government imposed by Tanzania without any thought of recognizing Idi Amin in exile. Unlike Cambodia and Vietnam, which had retained the dubious honor of being the favored battleground of the cold war in Asia, Tanzania and Uganda were outside the dictates of power politics. Common sense and rule of law prevailed in their case.

Sihanouk ended his triumph at the UN in an anxious swirl of caviar and dread. At one of his last lavish supper parties, the prince complained that “my life is one of ironies. It has not been pleasant.” And he gave the impression that he believed he would soon be rid of the Khmer Rouge. “They say they are stronger than ever. They say they will fight to the end and they will win. But they live in illusion—like Goebbels in the last months of the Hitler government.”

His wife, Princess Monique, said simply that she would never go back to Cambodia.

The next morning, the prince woke up panicked by the chains that international diplomacy had thrown around him. In an uncharacteristically clumsy gesture, he passed a note to Andrew Young, the U.S. ambassador at the United Nations, pleading for political exile. Ambassador Young immediately consulted his superiors at the State Department in Washington and, on their orders, arranged for the prince to be admitted to the Lenox Hill Hospital. There, Young told Sihanouk that it would be a mistake for him to choose exile. Richard Holbrooke, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia, said, “We told him that he would lose his standing as an independent leader if he chose exile in the United States.”

This time, the United States would not have a horse in the race. Washington would work against Vietnam but avoid putting its weight behind any Cambodian leader.

Sihanouk got the message. China still controlled him and did not want him in America. Even his beloved France had let him down by saying he would have to drop all political activities if he were given asylum. He checked out of the hospital and moved to regal housing in Beijing. In his 1981 memoirs Sihanouk mentioned none of this, saying he moved to China for financial reasons. “In January 1979, in New York, I found myself poor as Job. I never had a personal fortune . . . I would have wanted to retire with my wife in France, at Mougins, in the Alpes-Martimes . . . but. . . .”

At fifty-seven years of age, Sihanouk would have been forgiven if he had retired and left Cambodia's newest nasty war to be waged by other, younger figures. But he would then have had to allow someone else to claim the mantle of savior of Cambodia, and that was out of the question. As it turned out, this would be one of the longest and, in its own way, one of the cruelest of Cambodian wars.

The outlines were set that first year. The repercussions of the international decision to outlaw Vietnam and occupied Cambodia spilled over into every aspect of those nations' lives.

Central to the war—how the sides were drawn, who was punished, who was rewarded—was the international decision to ignore all charges of genocide and massive human rights violations against the Khmer Rouge. The United Nations dropped its investigation into the gross human rights abuses committed by the Khmer Rouge. The case as it was developing in Geneva was put aside with the simple statement that sovereignty was more important than human rights, glossing over the fact that Pol Pot and the Khmer
Rouge were accused of one of the worst cases of genocide in the twentieth century. Unmentioned was the international community's assessment of the military dimensions of the problem. It was decided that the Khmer Rouge army would be needed to force the Vietnamese to retreat and negotiate a peace accord. If the Khmer Rouge were taken out of action, the reasoning went, and brought before an international tribunal, then the Vietnamese would never leave. All alternative scenarios, especially any that included the trial of the Khmer Rouge in order to foster a sense of justice and self-confidence in Cambodians, were dismissed out of hand. It was argued that a trial should proceed after a peace accord, once the war was over and the accused had been enticed into the peace agreement. A trial beforehand would only prolong the conflict. (It would take another fifteen years before that myth was overturned. In the former Yugoslavia, a war crimes tribunal was begun in 1994, one year before the actual peace accord for Bosnia was signed at Dayton, Ohio.)

The State Department throughout the 1980s refused to use the term genocide to describe Pol Pot's regime. An attempt by the Australian government to revive the inquiry in the early 1980s was blunted by the United States, China, and ASEAN. To have explored how the Khmer Rouge were committing genocide when the Vietnamese overthrew them would have implied some merit to the Vietnamese invasion, which in turn may have forced a compromise involving direct negotiations with Hanoi. The United States, above all, wanted the Vietnamese occupation to be the only catastrophe under discussion and helped convince the international community to adopt this practical and thoroughly cynical stance. The United States hid behind irrelevant gestures of disdain. U.S. diplomats were forbidden to shake the hands of Khmer Rouge officials, and most U.S. speeches included some reference to the horrors of the past, but that had no bearing on the pursuit of the war.

First and foremost the Vietnamese occupation had to be punished. Propelled by the United States and China, the most severe international sanctions to date were levied against Vietnam for its occupation of Cambodia. By the summer of 1979, the Carter administration had begun a successful campaign to convince other nations as well as charities, international aid organizations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank to end aid to Vietnam as well as Cambodia. Holbrooke and his deputy Robert B. Oakley led the fight, using the argument that all aid should be canceled “given the preoccupations of the Vietnamese government with security,” meaning the occupation of Cambodia. One of the first organizations the
United States lobbied was the World Bank, in which the United States is the major voice and shareholder. The bank, Oakley said, was told to be “very, very careful when considering loans to Vietnam.”

The target was to eliminate the $1.7 billion worth of non-communist programs that accounted for roughly one-third of Vietnam's foreign aid. “There is no way you're going to get the international community to pay off the Vietnamese now,” Holbrooke said. “I know it's a difficult argument. If you beat them over the head, you might push them closer to the Soviets, but the Vietnamese are hard people to deal with, to continue talking to in a generous spirit when they're doing what they're doing now.”

This was something other than the cautious and successful American doctrine of containment. When applied to the Stalinist regime of Vietnam, and its occupation of Cambodia, the policy became active punishment.

The effect was to begin the slow strangulation of Vietnam's economy and the continued stagnation of Cambodia at the moment when it was trying to dig out of the misery left by the Khmer Rouge. There would be no economic revival in Phnom Penh as long as Vietnam was in control. Countries such as Japan, Australia, Canada, and Malaysia, organizations like the European Economic Community and the World Bank, were among those cutting off aid and relief programs at the insistence of the United States. Outside the Soviet bloc, only Sweden, France, and India continued giving aid to Vietnam. The Vietnamese economy, already stumbling under misguided state socialism, nearly fell apart, and within two years malnutrition became all too common among Vietnamese children. Even the Soviet Union was unable to help feed Vietnam's growing population. In 1979 the Soviets gave Vietnam 1.2 million tons of food, but within two years that figure had dropped to 700,000 tons.

Vietnam was discovering the price it was to pay for occupying Cambodia and opening the door for the United States to demonstrate its open guilt and bitterness over losing the Vietnam War and the lives of over 50,000 U.S. soldiers.

In the summer of 1979, Vietnam found itself condemned on another front. The secretary general of the United Nations chaired an extraordinary session in Geneva of the United High Commissioner for Refugees to decide the fate of the boat people fleeing Vietnam. By July 1979 some 200,000 Vietnamese boat people were in refugee camps in Asia and nearly 100,000 more had found permanent homes around the world. The flight of Vietnamese on the high seas seemed endless and the debate at the conference was highly colored by a sense of immediate doom—their plight was routinely,
and wrongly, compared to that faced by the Jews fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe. While the boat people faced persecution and hardship in Vietnam, it was nothing like the extermination policies of the Khmer Rouge.

“Let us do something meaningful—something profound—to stem this misery. We face a world problem. Let us fashion a world solution. History will not forgive us if we fail. History will not forget us if we succeed,” Vice President Walter Mondale said in his opening statements.