When the War Was Over (97 page)

But beyond this tidy enclosed world of diplomacy a full-scale political brawl was breaking out in the United States Congress against the Bush administration's policy toward Cambodia. In the House of Representatives Congressman Chester Atkins, a Democrat from Massachusetts, was the loudest critic while in the Senate the Majority Leader George Mitchell, a Democrat from Maine, was causing the greatest problems for the administration. Atkins had once worked with Solarz to provide relief for the Cambodian refugees on the Thai border, many of whom eventually settled in his district around Lowell, Massachusetts. But later he broke with Solarz over support for the Sihanouk/Khmer Rouge/Son Sann coalition because it included the Khmer Rouge. Now, after the Vietnamese withdrawal, he was adamant that the U.S. policy of continuing that coalition support was immoral. He finally reached a national audience with his argument on an
ABC News Special Report
with Peter Jennings, which was aired on April 26, 1990.

Under Jennings's sympathetic questioning, Atkins laid out his frustrations that the Bush administration continued to give money to the Khmer Rouge refugee camps, which were under complete military control of Pol Pot's army, continued to recognize the Khmer Rouge coalition government at the UN, continued to block humanitarian assistance to the people of Cambodia, all in the name of fighting against the Vietnamese occupation even though the Vietnamese had withdrawn from Cambodia.

When Jennings asked why, Atkins answered that the U.S. policy was “a policy of hatred.”

“We're still fighting the Vietnam War and this is the last battle of that war and if we have to use the Khmer Rouge as a pawn in that we'll use them,” Atkins said. “We don't appreciate we're being used by the Khmer Rouge rather than the other way around.”

With the lush jungle backdrop of the border region, Jennings interviewed soldiers who described the military cooperation between the Khmer Rouge and the troops of Sihanouk and Son Sann even though the United States forbade the latter two armies from such cooperation as a condition of American aid. Jennings showed footage of the refugees forced to remain in the camps for ten years by their military commanders and the price they paid for straying outside the boundaries. By this point, the Thai-Khmer border was more heavily mined than any other territory in the world.

Jennings's questioning of Soloman was more like an interrogation. The newsman forced the diplomat to admit that the United States refused to consider arresting Pol Pot or any other Khmer Rouge figure on charges of genocide. Indeed Soloman followed American policy and refused to even use the word genocide, instead saying “the kind of violence Pol Pot perpetrated.”

Jennings began his program saying the United States tolerated the Khmer Rouge, and he ended it warning that the Khmer Rouge could return to power now that the Vietnamese had withdrawn, leaving “the U.S. in danger of being on the wrong side of history.”

The reaction was swift on Capitol Hill and in the press. Atkins's point of view won begrudging respect in editorials by both the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
. Once again Cambodia was a topic of debate. And for a change, world events encouraged the dialogue. In May the Chinese and Vietnamese finally began talking about restoring full diplomatic relations. And at the end of the month the five countries met again for Cambodia talks, putting down on paper the various agreements they had largely reached before, but failed to get the Chinese to budge from their demand to get rid of the Hun Sen government entirely. Japan tried to step in and sponsored a peace conference for the Cambodians but the Khmer Rouge refused to attend, leaving Hun Sen and Prince Sihanouk to sign another separate communique.

Fortified by the momentum, Atkins took to the floor of Congress in June and offered an amendment to cut off all aid to the resistance and instead create a new $10 million fund for peace in support of talks. That led to a debate on the floor of the House against his old ally Solarz, who argued instead for continuing aid to the non-communists. Solarz said there was no proof that any U.S. aid “ended up in the hands of the Khmer Rouge. If it were true, I would be leading the fight to cut off this aid to the non-communists.”

In response, Atkins asked: “How is it possible for us to support with exclusivity the non-communist resistance that sits in a war council with the Khmer Rouge? There is no fig leaf large enough to obscure the fact that for ten years the non-communist leaders have shared their UN seat with the Khmer Rouge.”

Even though logic was on the side of Atkins, Solarz won the vote hands down, 280 to 163.

But the fight was just beginning. By July the Senate was fully involved. Senator Mitchell and Senator John C. Danforth, a Republican from Missouri, circulated a letter demanding that the Khmer Rouge coalition be
denied the UN seat, to begin humanitarian aid to Cambodia, to open direct contacts with the Hun Sen regime, and to specifically state that the Khmer Rouge will have no role in Cambodia's future. The two senators were collecting more than sixty signatures when the P-5 was scheduled to meet again on Cambodia, this time in Paris.

Now the Bush administration had to choose between the two sides. National Security Advisor Scowcroft led a group that continued to resist any overture to the Vietnamese or the Hun Sen regime. Baker's advisors were pushing him in the opposite direction. His deputy Robert Kimmit admitted as much. “There was a group of people in the administration who believed the best approach to Vietnam was to be very hard-line. They believed the problem was in Vietnam and the best way to get the Vietnamese to be flexible was for us to be inflexible,” Kimmit said. He was put in charge of figuring out a new policy toward Hun Sen and Vietnam for Baker. After talking to several officials, Kimmit said he put their ideas “together in a package that could be accepted by the people in the White House who were against any overture but we had to do it quietly.”

Other members of the administration date Baker's uneasiness to the failed 1989 Paris Peace Conference, when he asked Kimmit to take a special interest in Cambodia. John Bolton, the assistant secretary for international organizations, said Baker thought it strange that the United States was not dealing at all with Hun Sen and Vietnam once the Vietnamese withdrew. “Then the Peter Jennings program got Congress all upset,” Bolton said. “It was part of the erosion that brought Cambodia to a head in July.”

Soloman left for Paris without knowing what that compromise was. When he arrived in Paris, however, he went to the Chinese diplomat Xu Dunxin and showed him Senator Mitchell's letter of complaint. “I said to him, ‘you've got to understand, this is the kind of pressure the administration is under on this issue. If we can't create the process, people will throw their support behind Hun Sen. You will be left holding the bloody bag for the Khmer Rouge.'”

Soloman didn't have to wait long to find out Baker's compromise. The day after the five countries met again on Cambodia, the secretary of state arrived in Paris for a meeting with Eduard Shevardnadze at the U.S. ambassador's residence in Paris. Baker now openly considered Shevardnadze a friend after their intimate cooperation throughout the tumultuous events that led to the liberation of Eastern Europe. So it was not surprising that he made his announcement on Cambodia standing next to Shevardnadze, who would benefit the most from it. In answer to the very first question at a news conference, Baker announced that the United States acknowledged the
Vietnamese withdrawal and would take several major steps to ensure the Khmer Rouge never returned to power. “In keeping with that objective,” Baker said, “we will open a dialogue with Vietnam about Cambodia, we will be prepared to enhance our humanitarian assistance to Cambodia, and we will be prepared to and will in fact change what has been our policy regarding the seat at the United Nations which has been held by a coalition that includes the Khmer Rouge.”

Baker then admitted that the United States was concerned that the Khmer Rouge could win a military victory. “For over a year now we've been trying to have a political dialogue through the Cambodia Conference that was convened here a year ago in Paris. The Khmer Rouge has succeeded in turning that political dialogue into a dialogue of the battlefield.”

He said, “Our goal is to prevent a return to power of the Khmer Rouge.”

As Baker spoke in Paris, a personal letter from him arrived at the office of Senator Mitchell in Washington, dated July 18, 1990, and addressed: “Dear George.” In it Baker informed Mitchell of the administration's new policies in more succinct terms: to begin direct discussions with Vietnam and Phnom Penh; to vote against the Khmer Rouge coalition at the UN; to allow more humanitarian projects in Vietnam and Cambodia; and to launch a new program to help Cambodian children and victims of war.

This huge shift in U.S. policy essentially wrapped up the negotiations. The Chinese immediately backed down from their requirement that the Hun Sen government be dismantled. Indeed, the Phnom Penh government got equal footing with the resistance in a fifty-fifty arrangement much as Rogachev had asked. Prince Ranariddh complained loudly, saying the move was “tantamount to simply killing your friend. The solution is to neutralize the Khmer Rouges later, not now.”

Martin disagreed. “While I don't underestimate the French role in Cambodia, the Chinese understood then that America was openly more and more against China. They understood they would be isolated with the Khmer Rouge. And the Chinese always make concessions with foreign relations in order to avoid having to make concessions inside their country—especially regarding human rights.”

Rogachev's response was more practical. “Baker's statement had a big influence on the ASEAN countries. They realized that Phnom Penh was a real force. It was over.”

The next month, in August, an initial agreement was reached for a Cambodian settlement. The Cambodian resistance met in Beijing and approved it. At the end of the month the five countries created the full framework.
And on September 9 Hun Sen accepted the framework documents at a meeting of the JIM group in Jakarta. The next day all the Cambodians signed the agreement.

By then Cambodia had been forgotten. Iraq invaded Kuwait at the beginning of the month, igniting an international crisis that lasted through the end of the year and into the next.

That autumn, the United Nations voted to seat the new Supreme National Council of Cambodia created by the new peace talks. The United States finally invited Vietnamese Foreign Minister Thach to Washington, a far too tardy gesture for the one Vietnamese official who consistently argued in Hanoi for improving relations with America before China. He had lost, and within the year the party had stripped him of his post.

Iraq inadvertantly forced a deadline on the negotiators, especially the Khmer Rouge and their non-communist partners. At the end of the year, Dumas called all the Cambodians to Paris to order them to finish up their negotiations immediately. “I must warn you that the world has changed. Other priorities require our attention,” he said. “The international community cannot indefinitely focus on the fate of Cambodia if the Cambodians do not show the political will to reach a settlement.”

The lecture achieved its aim. On December 22 the Cambodians agreed in writing that they accepted “the Framework document formulated by the five permanent members of the Security Council in its entirety as the basis for settling the Cambodia conflict.”

That was the last attention paid to Cambodia for many months. Governments around the world were trying to prevent full-scale war from breaking out between the United States and Iraq. But after nonstop negotiations failed to achieve an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, the United States and its allies attacked the Iraqi army in Kuwait in February.

The Thai army took advantage of the huge distraction. While attention was wholly centered on Kuwait, the generals overthrew Prime Minister Chatichai in a bloodless coup d'état. The generals could live with Chatichai's foreign policy and his corruption, but they were threatened when he announced plans to reevaluate the military leaders. Then they used corruption as a pretext for the coup.

Throughout the spring and summer the Cambodians quietly racked up one agreement after another naming Sihanouk the chair and Hun Sen the vice-chair of the SNC. At a July meeting of all the Cambodians as well as representatives of the Paris co-chairs and the UN, the prince was recognized as “the sole Cambodian statesman in a position to achieve national reconciliation
among all Cambodians.” In August, at the Thai seaside resort of Pattaya, the negotiations were finally completed on the framework. A second session of the Paris Conference was scheduled for the end of October.

The UNTAC mission was the most ambitious and, at $2 billion for a two-year operation, the most expensive the UN had undertaken. It required the return and resettlement of the 350,000 refugees along the Thai border; the disarmament and cantonment of the armies; preparations for free and fair elections within a year after the mission was fully established; the creation of the SNC to allow Cambodians to oversee the mission; UN supervision of all the major ministries of the Phnom Penh government to guarantee neutrality during the elections; and the establishment of institutions to begin rebuilding the country.

This time when the delegates arrived at the Paris Conference on the afternoon of October 23, 1991, nothing had been left to chance. No group or country, especially not the Khmer Rouge, would have an opportunity this time to block an accord. The gathering had a far more somber feel than the first conference two years earlier. For one thing, several crucial personalities were missing. Rogachev was there but Shevardnadze had resigned in protest over Gorbachev's handling of what turned out to be the demise of the Soviet Union. Dumas presided at the session but Martin was missing. He had been promoted to ambassador and sent to Beijing. Vietnam had a different foreign minister. Nguyen Co Thach had been pushed aside as the final price for normal relations with China.