When the War Was Over (88 page)

As with the boat people, the international community responded with exceptional generosity. The photographs of Cambodians so skeletal they looked like ghosts prompted relief organizations to rush to the border. Foreigners volunteered on the spot, throwing up plastic tents, digging latrines, and coaxing diplomats and journalists to the fields of eastern Thailand to witness the human invasion. Their stories proved far more complex than most foreigners could comprehend. Included in those receiving aid were the Khmer Rouge and their hostages who had been driven across the border at gunpoint by their captors in a procession one relief worker described as a “walking concentration camp.” But the message that got out to the world was that these people were seeking freedom from war, the Khmer Rouge, and the Vietnamese. They suffered from malnutrition, dysentery, malaria, and tuberculosis, and were dying at the rate of fifty a day. They presented a dense, uniform mass of abject misery. That first year this side won the war for international sympathy and money, helped very much by the consensus reached at the UN condemning Vietnam.

By 1981, the camps had produced some of the best results in the shortest time in modern relief history. The rate of malnutrition among children, for example, fell in one year from 50 percent to 2.5 percent. It was also the most expensive, with some $71,500 spent daily at the Kao-1-Dang camp, where the food, medical care, vocational training, and education were far superior to those found in the average Thai village. “There was overspending here, without question,” said John Moore, the UN's coordinator at the camp. “And I don't think you could have helped the overspending. . . . Because of the former American involvement, what people see as Russian expansionism,
there was a lot of interest here. Interest you don't have for programs in places such as Africa.”

Inside Cambodia, relief took the opposite turn. Cambodians who quit their country and got to the Thai border were rewarded. Those who stayed at home were largely ignored. A major source of the problem was Vietnam's miscalculations. Only select journalists were allowed into Cambodia. Restrictions were placed on any aid coming in that effectively prevented the donors from knowing if food got to the civilians or to the military. A Joint Mission of UNICEF and the International Committee of the Red Cross was greeted with lukewarm cooperation at best. The Cambodian government was loath to admit that it was ill-equipped to accept, much less distribute, aid. After the Khmer Rouge, there was literally no logistical network in the country—no trucks or gas stations or spare parts for them, no cranes to unload, no smooth airfields or roads, and no warehouses. But rather than admit to these problems, Vietnam was trying to create the impression that things were not so bad in Cambodia. When asked why Cambodia was not soliciting food aid to avert a potential famine, Cu Dinh Ba, counselor for the Vietnamese mission at the UN, answered back that “this so-called famine is a trap, a Chinese plot . . . the West is playing it up to supply food and ammunition to the Pol Pot forces.”

In Phnom Penh, the Cambodian government announced that it was suffering only a food shortage that would disappear after one good harvest. The cost of that lie fell on the Soviet Union, which contributed some $85 million in emergency aid for Cambodia's civilians to keep them those first years, including 40,000 tons of red corn. Cambodians, desperate for rice, found this food impossible to eat. After the UN vote to recognize the Pol Pot regime, the People's Republic of Kampuchea, or PRK, along with their Vietnamese overlords, became convinced that any international aid was intended to undermine them and favor a return of the Khmer Rouge. UNICEF, the UN children's relief organization, and the International Red Cross jointly offered assistance to Cambodia itself, but the Phnom Penh authorities waited a full year before allowing that relief to be fully distributed throughout the country. While the Cambodians complained, with reason, that they did not have the proper equipment to unload and ship the aid, in fact they and the Vietnamese did not trust the foreign relief workers and the countries and organizations they came from.

By that time, too, the PRK had set up a system that used aid as a kind of pay for the civil service. Ordinary people complained they were getting only a fraction of what was intended for them. To make up the difference, they
flocked to the border, where they could pick up food and seed and return to the farms and villages. But while at the border, they could also be recruited into the anti-Vietnamese opposition: Everyone was using food as a political weapon.

In his first and subsequent visits, Igor Rogachev says that Hun Sen gave him detailed briefings about the overwhelming problems facing Cambodia and that he dutifully reported these conversations back to Moscow. While he is unsure how much Moscow then relayed to the Vietnamese, particularly since Brezhnev himself was overwhelmed by Afghanistan, Rogachev knows that Vietnam repeatedly ignored inconvenient Soviet advice to admit the problems it faced in Cambodia. “It was a mistake from our side when we tried to create the image that there was no Cambodia problem,” Rogachev said.

Two years later, in 1981, the United Nations held its first conference on Cambodia. In a self-congratulatory spirit, all the countries lined up against Vietnam controlled the agenda. Their diplomats dutifully attended the four-day conference in a hot July week, leading impressive delegations for the first chance to elaborate the international stance on how to get Hanoi to end its occupation of Cambodia. This time, Vietnam and the Soviet Union showed they were beginning to understand the depth of their miscalculations. They refused to attend a conference to solve the Cambodian conflict that invited only the Khmer Rouge to be the official representative of Cambodia.

A slim eleven-page text was adopted. Seventy-nine countries attended and elected the Austrian foreign minister as president and diplomats from Honduras and Senegal as vice presidents of a permanent conference on Cambodia. Few of the delegates at that conference had ever visited Cambodia, much less had a sophisticated understanding of the current problems. They voted to allow the non-communist allies of the Khmer Rouges to be silent observers at the conference but refused to even admit a delegation of the Cambodians who were actually living in their country.

Not surprisingly, the conference adopted the mantra that stuck for the rest of the decade. “The Conference expresses its concern that the situation in Kampuchea has resulted from the violation of the principles of respect for the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of States, noninterference in the internal affairs of States and the inadmissibility of the threat or use of force in international relations.”

A nod was made toward human rights in the closing remarks of Willibald Pahr, the Austrian president of the conference. “In the Declaration which we have just adopted, we try to pave the way for further progress toward the
re-establishment of the political independence and territorial integrity of Kampuchea, a freely elected government and the effective safeguarding of the human rights and fundamental freedoms of the Kampuchean people.”

Mr. Pahr then asked all the countries that “have chosen, at least for the time being, to be absent” to change their minds and take part in the deliberations. This was taken as an insult by Vietnam, the PRK, and the Soviet Union, who refused to agree that the Vietnamese occupation was the only problem facing Cambodia or to ignore the genocide of the Khmer Rouge.

On the contrary, the Vietnamese concentrated on publicizing the conclusive evidence they and the new Cambodian government were unearthing showing the methodical way the Khmer Rouge had destroyed the country and led to the death of upward of one million people. Gradually more journalists and foreign relief workers of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were allowed inside the country. Soon there was a small community of foreign workers of NGOs who became the one voice demanding that the people inside Cambodia be given the same consideration as the refugees on the border. But their credibility was suspect because they became full partisans of the Phnom Penh regime and denied that the PRK was responsible for any of the problems facing Cambodians. Their favored solution of world diplomatic recognition of the PRK was unsatisfactory to much of the world and many Cambodians who preferred a Vietnamese withdrawal and elections of a new Cambodian government.

Through newspapers, televisions, radios, and partisan campaigns a new image of Cambodia was emerging. It was no longer just another third world catastrophe, or a small country that had been manipulated and abandoned during the cold war. It was taking shape as one of the world's most disturbing countries. On the one hand Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were slowly becoming known for “auto-genocide” and one of the twentieth century's worst cases of gross human rights abuses. Yet the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia was being promoted in international politics as the primary problem facing the long-suffering Cambodian people. Public awareness was being raised by the evidence of Khmer Rouge abuses, but public opinion was being steered toward the resistance led by the Khmer Rouge.

Remarkably, Cambodia was held hostage to that impossibly split perception throughout the 1980s. Despite every effort by Vietnam and Phnom Penh to create sympathy for their position against the Khmer Rouge, they were completely outmaneuvered by the resistance. The greater the awareness of the plight of the Cambodian people under the Khmer Rouge, it
seemed, the harder it was for them to challenge the resistance that included the Khmer Rouge.

They were up against another piece of theater orchestrated by China and starring Prince Norodom Sihanouk. The non-communist and anti-Vietnamese groups under Sihanouk and Son Sann had hoped the United States would give them military aid to fight for the “liberation” of Cambodia. Instead, the United States told them to go to the Chinese. And the Chinese insisted they make a formal alliance with the Khmer Rouge in return for guns and bullets. In 1982 Prince Sihanouk agreed to the arrangement he had promised he would never repeat. He rescued the Khmer Rouge and the international community by agreeing to head a coalition including Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge and the other non-communist resistance movement—the KPNLF led by Son Sann. The Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK) was unveiled in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on June 22, 1982 with great fanfare. It was the perfect political solution. The resistance groups were united, rather than competing with each other, for the right to represent Cambodians opposed to the Vietnamese occupation. By retaining the name Democratic Kampuchea and simply adding the Coalition Government prefix, the new group claimed to be the government recognized by the United Nations with all of its international legitimacy. It was no longer headed by Pol Pot but by Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who agreed, as he had during the 1970 war, to allow the Khmer Rouge to hide behind his name, his title, and his reputation.

Above all, the new coalition could argue that the Khmer Rouge threat was a thing of the past—they were now subsumed within the CGDK—and the immediate danger was Vietnam's occupation.

The new coalition was as much a conceit as the earlier Khmer Rouge front groups. The three resistance organizations remained entirely separate. Even though Sihanouk was the president and Son Sann the prime minister, the military muscle remained the Khmer Rouge. And they won the right to keep Khmer Rouge diplomats in all the foreign posts for this new entity, from Permanent Representative of Cambodia at the United Nations to Cambodian ambassador at the UNESCO in Paris. The loudest protests came from Son Sann, who had built his career on independence. But he, too, succumbed under pressure from his sponsors: the governments of the United States and the Southeast Asian nations, in particular, Singapore. As promised, all three resistance groups received more aid—in weaponry and in humanitarian assistance—to allow them to maintain their bases of operation on Thai soil and “liberated Cambodia,” those stretches of no-man's-land along the border out of range of Vietnamese cannon.

The United States gave aid to the non-communist resistance of Sihanouk and Son Sann, some $15 million each year channeled largely through international organizations like the United Nations Border Relief Operation, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the UN World Food Program. The countries of ASEAN provided military aid as well as humanitarian support. China continued to take care of the military needs of the Khmer Rouge.

The next dry season, from January through April, the Vietnamese responded with a powerful offensive. They destroyed the non-communist resistance bases in Nong Chan and Rithisen, forcing some 60,000 Cambodians to flee across the border to Thailand, secured their own lines of defense in western Cambodia, and penetrated into resistance areas within Thailand. A flurry of protests from Bangkok ensued, with warnings from the West and China that Vietnamese expansionism would not be tolerated. But Vietnam had made its point. The new CGDK might have won the battle on the international political stage but it was still denied the ultimate prize—Cambodia itself.

During the same period, China launched a small incursion into northern Vietnam as if to ensure that the Vietnamese understood who was supporting the Cambodian resistance.

Maintaining the reputation of this new coalition government occupied diplomats everywhere. Cambodia was such a central focus of UN debate during the 1980s that Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's ambassador to the UN in 1984, called it the “Rolls Royce” of diplomacy. The nations of ASEAN became a newly formidable bloc, standing in the spotlight on one of the most important issues of the cold war, declaring that Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia was a direct threat to them, Cambodia's neighbors. Separate initiatives were undertaken to “solve” the Cambodian conundrum not only by the UN, which held an annual Cambodia conference, but eventually by Australia, Japan, and individual politicians, including the American Congressman Stephen Solarz, Democrat from New York. Meetings were held and papers published, but for all the activity, little changed.