When the War Was Over (87 page)

With those sweeping assumptions came sweeping and unprecedented solutions. The conference declared in effect that all Vietnamese boat people would receive automatic assurance of refugee status. There would be no screening. No tests to determine the legitimacy of their claims of flight from persecution for political, religious, or ethnic reasons.

Crucially, they were given a second, unprecedented right to move to countries in the developed world, rather than being restricted to neighboring countries as is customary in cases of mass exodus.

Unlike African or Western European nations that accepted thousands of refugees from their neighbors, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia refused to resettle the Vietnamese. They said they feared political unrest and ethnic problems. After demonstrating that they were willing to send these boat people back to certain death on the high seas rather than give them new homes, the international community relented. A compromise was reached in Geneva whereby the Southeast Asian nations needed grant only first, or temporary asylum on the condition that the developed world—from Australia to North America to Europe—take in the Vietnamese for permanent resettlement.

Sympathy was so great that the highly expensive and complicated solution was an overwhelming success, and eventually 900,000 Vietnamese boat people were resettled. Throughout the 1980s the developed world generously kept their promise.

The Cambodian refugees received an entirely different welcome. They had come by land, walking in the tens of thousands across the border into Thailand. The majority were not given refugee status, either, but neither were they given blanket temporary asylum with the automatic promise of life in the West. Instead, Thai authorities allowed them to stay largely as displaced people, not official refugees. Only some 10 percent of the Cambodians were given refugee status, and all the international protection that implies, by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The majority of the nearly 300,000 Cambodians were settled in UN-assisted
camps under the control of Cambodian armies fighting the Vietnamese occupation, including the Khmer Rouge army.

This arrangement held throughout the 1980s, with the Cambodian refugees kept near their home on the Thai-Cambodian border to fight against the Vietnamese occupation with international help, while the Vietnamese boat people were resettled far away from their homeland.

Finally, the circle was complete with the international refusal to give development aid to the Cambodian people who remained inside their country and to severely restrict emergency aid.

The Khmer Rouge were allowed to regroup and rebuild on the Thai border with unimpeded foreign aid, largely from China. Non-communist resistance groups under the leadership of Son Sann, the non-communist leader who had moved to the border from Paris, and those loyal to Prince Sihanouk encamped along the border as well, recruiting soldiers and supporters from the refugees and receiving aid from the UN and private aid groups from around the world. The People's Republic of Kampuchea, the government in Phnom Penh, had to depend largely on Soviet aid that was estimated at some $80 million a year; aid from the communist countries of Eastern Europe and Vietnam added another $20 million. Any development aid from the West was explicitly forbidden. Only a few international organizations like UNICEF and the UN's refugee program were allowed to give some humanitarian relief. As a result, Cambodia remained at the bottom of the list of the world's nations, with one child in seven dying before reaching the age of one year, one in five dying thereafter before reaching the age of five years, and only 1 percent of the entire population with access to safe drinking water.

When Prince Sihanouk took up residence in Beijing he knew he had few choices if he wanted to stay in the good graces of his Chinese hosts and retain control of the Cambodian resistance. Candidly he told visitors that he didn't mind being a kept man, living a pampered existence in a Beijing villa while under constant surveillance. He would wait out the situation to return again to Cambodia as its leader.

“I have one recurring nightmare,” he explained.

“I am strolling up and down the boulevard on the Cote d'Azur, my head bowed, walking no where in particular, looking at strange faces. Then one face is recognizable in the crowd. It is Bao Dai,” he continued, referring to the last Vietnamese emperor who gave up the throne and accepted exile in
France, where he became a dissolute, forgotten man. At that point in the nightmare, Sihanouk said, “I wake up, shouting, no, it could never happen never. I won't disappear.”

But then at this low point of his life, Sihanouk met Claude Martin, a French diplomat who became determined to find another path for Sihanouk and Cambodia.

At thirty-five years of age, Martin was young to be the number two diplomat at the French embassy, second only to the ambassador. More unusual, it was his first posting overseas. But Martin was more than qualified. A gifted Sinologist, he had taken two degrees at university; one in political science in order to enter the French diplomatic school, the other in Oriental languages where he mastered Chinese and Russian. In 1964, when he was required to serve the compulsory two years of military service after university, the French government sent him to its newly opened embassy in Beijing, where he operated as a cultural attaché. Riding a bicycle around the capital for two years at the height of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Martin developed a romance for China and a repulsion for Chinese communism. He left in 1966, taking a roundabout route home through Cambodia, when Sihanouk was head of state and the French were still welcome friends. Martin toured Angkor and was struck by Cambodia's determination to conserve its great architecture after witnessing China's even stronger determination to destroy its own. On returning to Paris for diplomatic training, Martin decided, he said, to “keep my study of Chinese language and literature for my private life.”

Martin joined the foreign ministry's European section on his return.

Helie de Noailles, a friend in the diplomatic service who traveled with Martin on vacation to Burma, said Martin was very self-conscious about not falling victim to Asia's exotic appeal. “Martin was never totally eaten up by Asia. There were a lot of Asia experts in the Quai d'Orsay who are no longer French. Not him. He wasn't the type to dress in a sarong and drink green tea.”

After completing four years in the French president's cabinet, working eighty-hour weeks and becoming a master bureaucrat as well as gamesman, Claude Martin took up his post in Beijing and met Sihanouk. The Frenchman immediately fell under Sihanouk's famous charm and elusive intelligence. All the romance he had repressed about Asia and France, including the Ming poetry he read at night, rose to the surface. He now welcomed the challenge to restore a French role in Cambodia and save it from the Khmer Rouge through Sihanouk. The fact that Cambodia was such a mess only added to Martin's sense of mission.

The prince was just beginning to contrive a new strategy. He was traveling back and forth to France and the United States to win over the Cambodian émigrés. He pretended to be against both the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge, declaring at one session: “We, the Cambodian refugees around the world, will not join the Khmer Rouge.”

That was a lie. Practically, the prince had never really left the Khmer Rouge even if he was not a member of their party or their government. This was one of several reasons that the French government explicitly told Martin to stay away from Sihanouk. France was officially neutral on Cambodia. Unofficially, President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing was deeply suspicious of Sihanouk, “despised him,” according to Martin, and felt Vietnam was unjustly painted as the sole villain in the story. France had abstained from the vote to seat Pol Pot's government at the UN, saying that would have meant France recognized the Khmer Rouge, which was out of the question. At the same time, France said it would not vote to seat the government installed by Vietnam. The official French statement rejected both choices, hoping to find a peaceful middle ground. “As far as the humanitarian aspect [of the Cambodian War] is concerned, France has already . . . come to the aid of the civilian population of Cambodia,” the statement read. “As for the political aspect . . . in no circumstances can it accept the violation of the territorial integrity of a State, and consequently its occupation by foreign forces.”

Martin agreed with his government's position but not its appraisal of Sihanouk. He met secretly with the prince, listening to his stories and views over long lunches that he never reported back to Paris. He became an expert on the prince's habits. And he gradually broached his opinion that France could be crucial in helping Sihanouk regain his place at the head of a Cambodian government. While the prince encouraged Martin's search for a middle road centered on himself, he hardly depended on Martin, who was merely a French diplomat, not a leader of government.

But Martin remained intrigued throughout his five years at the French embassy in Beijing. In 1981 François Mitterrand was elected president, and Martin helped arrange a meeting between him and Sihanouk in 1983. Mitterrand and his government were more open to the idea of supporting Sihanouk not as the head of the three-party resistance but as “the person embodying the spirit of a free and independent Cambodia,” in Martin's words.

That was the basic flaw in Martin's calculations. As talented as Sihanouk was, he was a deposed leader, cut off from the people of Cambodia for the last nine years. Martin was like a gambler who bet on a jockey without knowing what horse he would ride. For the moment, Sihanouk had no
choice but to ride with the Chinese. That was a given, but in Martin's mind at least, a partnership had been made between him and the prince. But before the diplomat could make good on his side of the bargain he was assigned to a two-year posting in Brussels at the European Economic Community with special responsibilities for agriculture. There, Martin said, “I spent long nights discussing the price of butter.”

Then he was called back to Paris in 1986 to head the Asia division of the French foreign ministry.

During the early years of the new Cambodian War, from 1980 through 1985, Sihanouk gave in on nearly every principle he outlined from Beijing. A group of Cambodian exiles were promoting a resistance group under his name, eventually known as FUNCINPEC, a French acronym for the full title of National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia, that led to camps of civilian supporters and armed soldiers along the border and makeshift political representatives from Bangkok to Washington. They were the smallest resistance force at first behind the Khmer Rouge and the Khmer People's National Liberation Front under the non-communist Son Sann. Inevitably, Sihanouk's people were competing with Son Sann's group for refugee recruits and foreign assistance.

This era coincided with one of the deepest freezes in the cold war. Ronald Reagan became the fortieth American president in 1980 and immediately focused on the Soviet military buildup and its threat to world peace. Leonid Brezhnev was still leader of the Soviet Union and, with his ineptitude and blind Stalinist reactions, he was Reagan's unwitting ally in painting his nation as the “Evil Empire,” coined by Reagan. As thousands of refugees straggled across the border from Cambodia to Thailand, emaciated, disease-ridden, and filled with stories of destitution, the Soviet empire was under attack from within, beginning with the Gdansk shipyard strike in August 1980, under Lech Walesa. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan became more oppressive, and by association added to the sense that the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia was of a piece with Soviet hegemony. Soviet naval ships had begun using Vietnam's Cam Ranh Bay in March 1979. And the Soviets were among the few willing to support Vietnam in Cambodia.

And while the nations of Southeast Asia managed to pass off responsibility for resettling the Vietnamese boat people to the rest of the world, Thailand
was stuck with the hundreds of thousands of Cambodians. The first year was a chaotic mess. From March to April 1979, Thailand closed off its border. But after the Vietnamese decided to starve out Khmer Rouge remnants and the civilians under their control in the border areas, Thailand opened up its frontier to famished Cambodians who looked like walking skeletons. Then the Vietnamese tried to clear Phnom Penh of unwanted residents, especially Chinese Cambodians. This triggered a massive flight to the border of the people who had been pushed out of Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and had tried to return to the capital after the Vietnamese occupation. They feared the Vietnamese were going to repeat the Khmer Rouge forced evacuation of all cities and towns. At first the Thais let all these people in, but in June they pushed them back, sending 42,986 refugees into Cambodia over the mine-strewn slopes of Preah Vihear mountain, leading to the deaths of some 10,000 people.