When the War Was Over (95 page)

“The first week went well,” admitted Martin. “But in the second week everything started falling apart.” Sihanouk refused to budge for most of the conference, striking any mention of Khmer Rouge “genocide,” any admission of their responsibility for the problems of Cambodia. It was all the fault of Vietnam and the Hun Sen government.

Martin made nearly daily visits to Sihanouk at the airport Holiday Inn where he insisted on staying. “The prince complained that he did not want to go to the conference with all of those low level foreign ministers, as he
put it. He demanded a closed circuit [television monitor] to watch the proceedings.”

On August 18 Dumas invited Sihanouk to lunch with Martin. Dumas told Sihanouk that France had put the conference together to give him a chance. Sihanouk then asked if there was a way to get a Cambodian compromise. “Dumas and I suggested a four-member council of state with a two-party government,” according to Martin, who suggested the prince keep it secret. Sihanouk said fine. Then he went out to explain the compromise to a waiting reporter. Within hours the resistance declared this was a French-imposed solution they refused to accept. They won backing from their sponsors.

By the conference's end, Sihanouk's patrons still supported him. Singapore, in particular, spoke strongly in the prince's favor and against Hun Sen, largely erasing any change in ASEAN's position that was started by Thailand's Prime Minister Chatichai. In Singapore's view, according to its Ambassador Tommy T B. Koh, the conference “was about the invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam and how to terminate the occupation in a manner that will leave behind a Cambodia that will be at peace.” When asked about the Khmer Rouge responsibility, Koh answered like his government, “I don't want to go back to the past; I want really to look to the future.”

On the last night of debate, Sihanouk took to the floor, bleary-eyed, and shouted, “I am for genocide, I am for genocide.” Then, realizing his faux pas, he retracted the statement and said, of course, he was opposed to the genocide by the Khmer Rouge, adding, “I am sorry. I have not slept for forty-eight hours.”

Martin remained faithful to the prince. “Sihanouk said he was ready for battle and that he was impressed by the support of China, ASEAN, and the United States for him. But at the end of the month he became obsessed by the idea that he would be blamed for the checkmate. He didn't sleep for nearly one week. He was stressed out and depressed,” Martin said.

By then Sihanouk had abandoned his rigid habits of taking siestas and doing without late dinners. “In this last week he had non-stop visitors until midnight or one in the morning,” Martin said. “And the prince tires easily.”

Dumas suspended the conference on August 30 after a month of indecisive discussions. “Maybe, we could have gone further and gained time and avoided further suffering and more loss of human life,” he said.

Sihanouk had lost the most, especially with the French government, where it was said Sihanouk didn't serve much anymore. There was talk among other delegations of the enormous waste of time—one month—and money—15 million francs for Sihanouk to walk out on a deal.

Hun Sen left Paris declaring he had been “fooled by Sihanouk.” Vietnam's Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach said all of Vietnam's troops would be out within the month and dared the United States to make good on its promises to begin normalizing relations with Hanoi. In a private meeting, Richard Soloman had told Thach that despite those promises of a withdrawal, the United States was not ready to begin normal relations with Vietnam.

Moreover, he voiced the private opinions of many countries that feared Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge stalled on a peace agreement precisely because they knew the Vietnamese would withdraw, which they believed would allow them to win back the country through a military victory. “They are taking advantage of our withdrawal, to make use of this vacuum for their last test,” Thach said.

Then he warned that if the Khmer Rouge actually got close enough to threaten Phnom Penh, Vietnam would not come back to help Hun Sen. “It will be the responsibility of the world community to deal with it, especially the countries who demanded the withdrawal of Vietnam from Cambodia.”

On September 21, 1989, Vietnam began their final troop withdrawal by announcing how many casualties they had suffered in Cambodia since the first day of their invasion in December 1978. They said 55,300 Vietnamese soldiers had died, a figure hauntingly close to the number of Americans who had died in the Vietnam War. Cambodian military bands provided the music, young women in their best sarongs gave the soldiers flowers, and in some cases, the people cried as the troops passed by. Throughout the country the people expressed mixed emotions. Government officials repeated their gratitude at being rescued a decade earlier from the Khmer Rouge, while some citizens worried that without the Vietnamese the Khmer Rouge would come back. With an informal group of foreign monitors marking their departure, the last Vietnamese soldiers officially left Cambodia on September 29.

No one doubted that several hundred Vietnamese advisors stayed behind in some capacity, but the Phnom Penh regime was on its own. Hun Sen had prepared for this day over the past year. All the signs of the Vietnamese were gone—from the ubiquitous portraits of Ho Chi Minh to the early morning radio propaganda programs reminding everyone of the Khmer Rouge atrocities. He replaced the broadcasts with Buddhist prayer services, lifting the thirteen-year-old ban on full practice of the faith. He also restored ownership of private property and initiated what he called capitalism, but left most of the power over the administration in his party's hands. The government
also adopted a new constitution, based largely on the laws enacted under Lon Nol, which neglected to give guarantees of personal liberties such as freedom of speech, the rights of free association, or a free press and a multiparty political system.

Unlike Sihanouk, who left the Paris Conference more dependent than ever on his foreign sponsors, Hun Sen adopted a tough boxer's pose, saying he could wait out the Khmer Rouge with his army. He traveled around the country and reported back that his troops were fighting the Khmer Rouge near the Thai border. “You heard the threat from the enemy that they would fight into the heart of Phnom Penh,” Hun Sen said at a press conference. “If the Khmer Rouge can't control the border areas or the provincial capitals how can they claim to control the city itself?”

But Hun Sen was aware that he was also losing support from the Soviet Union, having been warned by Rogachev that Soviet assistance could not last forever. With the departure of the Vietnamese, the Cambodian government was more independent of foreign protection than it had ever been since its inception in 1979.

Other countries were less sanguine about Phnom Penh's ability to withhold a Khmer Rouge onslaught. That month at the opening of the UN General Assembly, Secretary of State James Baker met with the ASEAN foreign ministers over breakfast on September 29 and asked what they thought about the “major powers” coming up with a Cambodian solution. In Washington, the Bush administration was under increasing pressure to answer for its policy toward the Khmer Rouge. That autumn, newspaper editorials were asking how Bush could allow Pol Pot to remain free after the Vietnamese withdrawal, leading Baker's Deputy Secretary of State Robert Kimmit to complain at one high-level meeting that “we must avoid more editorials about the Khmer Rouge—keep looking at what the United Nations could do,” according to a participant at the meeting.

And while the Bush administration publicly refused to acknowledge that Vietnam was actually withdrawing from Cambodia, secretly it was sending prohibited light arms to the non-communist Cambodian resistance to ensure they had a chance to get the upper hand should all-out fighting resume.

These questions about a new diplomatic solution for Cambodia were met by a new Khmer Rouge offensive. After several weeks of fighting, Pol Pot's army announced it had captured the western town of Pailin, the center of the lucrative gem trade. The Khmer Rouge then turned their sights on Battambang, the most important center in the whole northwestern region. In
response the Hun Sen government declared a dusk to dawn curfew at month's end, sparking frantic concern that the worst scenario might occur with Pol Pot's soldiers descending on the western plains of the country.

It was up to Igor Rogachev, again, to soothe the nervous bitterness in both Hanoi and Phnom Penh after the failure of the Paris Conference. He visited both capitals, urging them to have faith in a United Nations solution despite the behavior of Washington and Beijing after the Vietnamese withdrawal. He met considerable resistance. “Publicly we supported Vietnam and Cambodia when we said the UN was not impartial,” he said, referring to the continued seating of the Khmer Rouge-led resistance at the UN and its refusal to acknowledge that Vietnam had withdrawn. “But privately we tried to convince them that the UN was the best organization for this. It wasn't easy. They had their own very good reasons for not trusting the UN.”

The Vietnamese were easily the most bitter. On October 26, 1989, General John W Vessey, Jr., the special U.S. envoy for POW and MIA questions, visited Nguyen Co Thach in Hanoi. The two men had developed a close professional relationship, according to both men, and Thach was looking forward to receiving some good news from Washington. He had accommodated Vessey's requests for the past two years to increase Vietnamese cooperation in its search for information and remains of American servicemen and women who died during the war. When Vessey warned him, “We'll part friends but if we can't move any further you've seen me for the last time,” Thach had relented and got his government to allow Americans to search on their own for remains.

But this time, when Thach most needed his help, Vessey came empty-handed. As usual, he arrived with Ann Mills Griffith, who proved to be “an irritant,” in Vessey's words, pushing Thach for more information on remains. For his part, Vessey said the United States was not prepared to normalize relations with Vietnam now that it had withdrawn from Cambodia.

It didn't matter that the year before, on July 28, 1988, then assistant secretary of state for East Asia, Gaston Sigur, had publicly testified that “we have refrained from establishing normal diplomatic relations with Vietnam as a demonstration of our opposition to Vietnam's illegal occupation of Cambodia.”

Thach asked for a private session with Vessey. “Thach reminded me how in the first trip I made to Hanoi I had clearly laid out that Vietnam had to get your troops out of Cambodia,” Vessey said. “Now, Thach said, the U.S. had raised the high bar. I had to say, ‘That's the way it is.'”

Then Thach looked Vessey in the eyes and said simply, “You've hung me out to dry.”

Thach had already set up committees to begin preparing for establishing normal relations with Washington and opening up embassies. He now had to tell his government that the entire operation was off.

Vessey left, disappointed that he was still far from improving U.S.-Vietnamese relations, a goal he had especially fostered as a decorated veteran of that war. “It was a bad scene,” he said.

Mills Griffith, however, was pleased. Later she explained: “I have a vested interest in not losing the POW-MIA issue because of what the Vietnamese do in Cambodia.”

When Rogachev found out about the American decision he reported back to Moscow. “We had thought that improved U.S.-Vietnamese relations would be the shortest route to peace in Cambodia. But that wasn't to be. Later I said to the Americans that Vietnam had fulfilled all of their preconditions but the U.S. still won't change. Theirs was the most ideological of all positions in this confrontation.”

In Europe, where Cambodia was more a matter of public debate than in the United States, newspaper headlines were ominous: “Vietnam Leaves a Minefield . . . Turmoil Ahead”; “Trumpets for a Lone Cambodia”; “Vietnam Withdraws from Cambodia Without Winning Dialogue with China or the U.S.”; “Cambodia—the Birth of a New Lebanon.” The year before several Nobel Peace laureates, including Desmond Tutu of South Africa and Elie Wiesel, had called for the recognition of the Hun Sen government as a way to prevent the Khmer Rouge from returning.

The British government was the first to crack. On November 8 the government's minister of foreign affairs, Douglas Hurd, told the parliament that he believed that the Vietnamese had withdrawn and it was time for Great Britain to finally give humanitarian aid to Cambodia. The government was donating some $350,000 to UNICEF for Phnom Penh and was sending a diplomat to the Cambodian capital for the first official visit since 1975.

That same month the Thai Prime Minister Chatichai floated the idea of a new conference. His advisor Pansak traveled around the region and to Europe to promote a cease-fire at the least. “It is immoral to continue supporting Khmer Rouge war efforts,” he said at the time. “Our government nearly fell on questions about Cambodia with newspapers publicly fighting out the battle between the Prime Minister and the foreign ministry bureaucrats who said that they weren't concerned about Cambodia anymore and were willing to leave the status quo.”