When the War Was Over (96 page)

The French were equally concerned. French Foreign Minister Dumas talked about a UN solution with his Soviet counterpart Shevardnadze and then sent Claude Martin to the region, first visiting Vietnam, then Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia. In Jakarta, Foreign Minister Alatas wanted to start up the regional JIMs but Martin said France thought it would not work out, the major powers had to solve the problem. “I said it was clear China is blocking a major solution.” Then Martin met Rogachev in Moscow and went on to Washington to see Richard Soloman. At the meeting Soloman told Martin of Baker's plans to bring together the five permanent members of the UN's Security Council and scrap the Paris Conference. “I said no, we can't kill Paris. But let's pick up the UN. We are ready and the Soviets are ready.”

In the meantime, yet another country got in the act. On November 24 the Australian secretary of state, Gareth Evans, announced a separate Australian initiative he had worked out with several ASEAN foreign ministers and the U.S. Congressman Stephen Solarz. It would install a transitional Cambodian administration directly under the authority of the United Nations that “would mean that no Cambodian party would be in a position to decide the country's destiny pending free and fair elections.” It immediately won the approval of Hun Sen and Prince Sihanouk, who said it “deserved serious consideration.”

The Australians then sent their diplomat Michael Costello around the region—to Beijing, Hanoi, and Phnom Penh, as well as Bangkok, Singapore, and Jakarta, to whip up support for what they called the Evans Plan.

But this diplomatic free-for-all over Cambodia was drowned out by the electric news from Europe. On the night of November 9 the Berlin Wall had fallen. Earlier, tens of thousands of East Germans had begun fleeing their country from newly opened routes through Hungary and Czechoslovakia, where many of them were camping out in the West German embassies. Thousands more had started daily pro-democracy demonstrations, culminating in a parade of half a million protesters in East Berlin on November 4. Then, at an otherwise tepid news conference on the afternoon of November 9, the spokesman for the government announced that from then on all East German citizens could apply for travel abroad without preconditions.

Within an hour thousands of East Berliners headed toward the wall. By midnight the border guards were forced to open all the barricades. West Berliners had climbed to the top of the wall and started dancing. By 1 A.M. Berliners from both sides were singing together and celebrating. Thereafter,
the dominoes fell quickly. Poland and Hungary had already begun their transition out of communism. On the evening of November 24 champagne was flowing in Prague, Czechoslovakia, to toast the triumph of their peaceful “velvet” revolution and the end of communism. And in December the communist dictatorship in Bucharest, Romania, came to a violent end.

On January 2, 1990, Secretary of State Baker sent a letter to his Chinese, Soviet, French, and British counterparts requesting that they immediately convene as the permanent members of the UN Security Council to sort out the Cambodia problem. Everyone was enthusiastic except the Chinese, who sent a “frosty reply,” in the words of the Americans, but agreed to attend. If the cold war could end in Europe, Baker reasoned, why was a small country like Cambodia proving so difficult?

The idea of calling together the five permanent members of the UN Security Council was not new. At the United Nations, the five ambassadors of those countries had set up a routine for discussing difficult issues. They first met to figure out a solution for the Iran-Iraq war and later for Namibia. Cambodia became part of their discussions as early as 1988 and they had prepared common position papers for the Paris Conference.

What was different was the very public display of these five powers imposing a solution without the countries involved taking any role. Claude Martin won his argument and got the new “P-5” meetings to be held under the general rubric of the Paris Peace Conference with the first session in Paris. Thereafter the five alternated between Paris and the UN in New York.

The State Department experts spent the subsequent weeks debating what their new position would be. Brent Scowcroft, the national security advisor and longtime associate of Henry Kissinger, was the hard-liner in support of China and against Vietnam and Hun Sen. He was the official sent by Bush the year before on the secret mission to China following the Tiananmen massacre. He was the official who went through the defeat in the Vietnam War with Kissinger as well as the triumph of opening relations with China. Richard Soloman had been a young member of Kissinger's China team as well, but had never dealt with Vietnam. Soloman's first visit to China was as a Kissinger aide in 1972 when, on the day of his thirty-fifth birthday, he met Zhou Enlai. “Pretty awe inspiring,” he said years later. Soloman had never lost his high regard for the Chinese as geopoliticians and, with no knowledge of Cambodia itself, he argued on behalf of the State
Department that the UN had to have authority over the Cambodians and allow the United States to disengage. As Baker had told his aides, he did not want Cambodia to become an American problem.

Meanwhile, Igor Rogachev went directly to Beijing to make sure the Chinese would actually negotiate and not give in to the Khmer Rouge. He also spoke to the leaders in Hanoi and Phnom Penh to convince them it was the right path for a solution. The Vietnamese and Cambodians accepted the idea of the five nations largely because it sounded to them like the Australian plan. This was a coincidence at the time, Rogachev said, but it helped since they did trust Evans. But, he added, “You should have heard them when they found out who was representing each country. We were all China scholars. Did they protest.”

Those China scholars—Richard Soloman of the United States, Claude Martin of France, Igor Rogachev of the Soviet Union, and Xu Dunxin of China—assembled in Paris with David Gillmore of Great Britain, the one non-China specialist, for their first meeting on January 15 at the Kleber Center. Martin presided, and soon a compromise began to develop. Soloman and John Bolton, the assistant secretary of state for international organizations, had come up with a chronology for transforming the administration and preparing for elections. It included a Cambodian Supreme National Council made up of the resistance, and it meant the Phnom Penh government would be under UN supervision. Rogachev argued for keeping two separate Cambodian governments in place. After lunch, Martin suggested a compromise that would allow the technical agencies of the Phnom Penh government to remain unchanged but would transfer the chief ministries to the UN. China agreed. The afternoon session was adjourned.

But around 9 that night Martin and Gillmore arrived at the U.S. embassy to go over a fifteen-point program with the Americans. They finished before midnight. That began a subdivision of labor. The “Free Three” as the Americans call this grouping of Soloman, Martin, and Gillmore, came up with their common program before joining the “Commie Two”—Rogachev and Xu—who were rarely in agreement with each other.

The full five met the next day, and Xu and Rogachev signed on to the fifteen points with little question, agreeing to them before lunch at 1 P.M. Later that evening at a press conference at the American embassy, Soloman was able to declare victory. The Cambodian peace process was on a firm footing without the Cambodians. And it was being decided largely by diplomats who had no direct knowledge of Cambodia. (Only Rogachev had visited the country—except for Martin's youthful tourism in the sixties.)

But it reflected the predicament of the countries at the table. The Vietnamese had withdrawn from Cambodia, removing the decade-old raison d'être for their involvement. Now the foreign patrons had to devise some way to get themselves out without undercutting the Cambodians they had sponsored. Martin was used to promoting France and Sihanouk in the same strategy. He had succeeded in defending the prince's preferred role as “father” of the country, the natural leader of Cambodia, and the obvious benefactor when the citizens were allowed to vote in free elections. Rogachev, too, had largely accomplished his work before the first meeting. He had gotten the Vietnamese out and kept Hun Sen in control in Phnom Penh. Indeed, his colleagues were amazed at Rogachev's posture through most of the discussions. He was correct but cold to Xu Dunxin. Sometimes they would speak in Chinese together, but Xu enjoyed speaking Chinese with Martin and Soloman as well. Above all, Rogachev never wanted to be the main speaker. He seemed comfortable sitting back, according to his colleagues, letting his assistant tackle many of the arguments and jumping in only for critical debates.

Before long it became clear that the United States and China were the countries most on the hot seat, the ones most responsible for keeping the war alive and clearly without common agreement on how to withdraw. The simple fact that the Khmer Rouge were still free to fight a civil war, still free to hold Cambodia's seat at the UN in a coalition they dominated, and still free of any fear of arrest or persecution for genocide underlined how much they owed their foreign sponsors and coalition partners. While Khmer Rouge diplomats flew back and forth from Paris to New York to Bangkok, those same foreign sponsors made sure that Cambodia was isolated and punished under one of the strictest sanctions regimes ever imposed even though the Vietnamese were gone.

At a second meeting in New York in February, the five countries began negotiating the disarmament and demobilizing of all the Cambodian armies even as the Khmer Rouge kept up their dry season offensive. The Soviet and Chinese representatives argued about the power of an interim Cambodian authority. The Chinese again wanted four equal seats for the Khmer Rouge, Sihanouk, Son Sann's group, and Hun Sen. The Soviets saw this as ridiculous: There were two sides, the resistance and the government, hence two equal roles for each. When the Chinese countered with full UN control and no Cambodian authority, the Russian responded: “What if an entire American government suddenly went on vacation?” The American representatives applauded that idea.

It was time for the Cambodians to talk among themselves. Thai Prime Minister Chatichai invited Hun Sen and Sihanouk to meet in Bangkok in February and they agreed to a solution that bore a strong resemblance to the P-5 negotiations. Sihanouk pointedly told the French he no longer wanted to travel to Paris. “You don't ever ask my opinion anymore. Who do the Big Five think they are?”

At the end of February the two co-chairmen of the Paris Conference—Dumas and Alatas—met in Jakarta. Over an eight-day session they essentially put a stamp of approval on the P-5 sessions and Indonesia invited Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans to join in some of the discussions, to the horror of Claude Martin. “The Australians came with their red book [the Evans Peace Plan] which I said were largely the papers from the Paris Conference,” Martin said. “At our final press briefing before hundreds of journalists I did say the Australians had played a positive role. Evans said ‘I thank you for the kind words.' I answered: ‘They came from the heart.' Evans replied ‘You have a heart?'”

By March the five had moved to a new stage. They were able to unveil UNTAC, the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, a new beast on the international stage giving the UN more power than any other peacekeeping operation. At the March meeting Rafeeuddin Ahmed, special representative of the UN secretary general, was worried about the cost of such a monster, estimated by the Americans at $1.5 billion. At a side meeting he warned diplomats of the “Free Three” countries that they shouldn't solve their differences with the Soviets and Chinese by simply adding a new layer of UN responsibility. It would cost too much.

In the end, that wasn't necessary. The five agreed to adopt the refugee repatriation scheme and reconstruction program outlined at the Paris Conference the summer before. Rogachev lost his argument that the human rights section include a condemnation of the Khmer Rouge genocide under the Pol Pot regime of Democratic Kampuchea. He was outvoted by the United States, France, Great Britain, and China. The American diplomat John Bolton had suggested at least mentioning the genocide convention but that idea went nowhere. They agreed on general outlines for an election, including the requirement that refugees must return to Cambodia to be eligible to vote. The British diplomat Gillmore crafted the compromise for the role of the Cambodian Supreme National Council, or SNC. It would “enshrine the sovereignty of the government” rather than actually operating as a government, as the Chinese wanted, or having no sovereignty, as the Soviets had demanded.

Martin declared this a “beautiful solution from a man of great culture and sense of moderation.” Everyone agreed and the diplomats went out to meet the press. To their dismay, there was only a handful of journalists waiting to report the most significant progress to date.