When the War Was Over (98 page)

Nonetheless, Roland Dumas welcomed back the delegates “after two years, two months and five days” since the first conference. He thanked his co-chair Ali Alatas as a “friend more today than yesterday” and thanked the five permanent members of the UN Security Council for giving the peace effort a “second breath.” When it was time to thank the Cambodians, he—like every other leader that day—singled out Prince Sihanouk for acting as the conciliator. Then he opened the short one-day conference by announcing that “Cambodia has returned to the international community.”

There followed sixteen speeches and the signing ceremony amid a subdued sense of relief. It had taken far too long to achieve this peace accord and there were too many questions and unrealistic assumptions about it. Hun Sen had announced that he would support Sihanouk in any election (the prince refused to run). Even the celebrations afterward were spare.

The next day at the Soviet embassy, Rogachev was relaxing in a windbreaker and khakis. “Our friends in Phnom Penh always thought it would
take a long time to have reconciliation and I'm not sure they ever believed in a peaceful solution, not with the Khmer Rouges.”

The main goal, he said, was accomplished before the first UN soldier ever arrived—ending the foreign support for the war. “There's no more war because no country will support it any longer. That's it. No matter what the Cambodians do to each other you'll be able to take a direct flight from Bangkok to Phnom Penh. It's over.”

In early August 1992 Vath Roeum settled into a one-room hut on stilts, furnished only with woven mats, earthen water jars, kitchen utensils, and simple cupboards made from old packing crates. She was one of several widows placed by the United Nations refugee officials in a small settlement thrown up in a barren field, without shade trees or any vegetation whatsoever, near the provincial city of Siem Reap. Several dozen families were each given one of the huts built in rows facing a wide dirt road that connected the families to nearby villages and water wells.

At forty-five years of age, Vath Roeum had her first home in over a decade. She had just returned from a refugee camp across the border in Thailand where she had fled in 1979. The bus trip took less than ten hours but it had taken her thirteen years to escape from what had become a virtual prison for her and most of the other 350,000 Cambodian refugees who returned thanks to the UN peace plan.

“When I went to Thailand I made the wrong choice,” she said. “I can't tell you now what was so frightening that I abandoned my children and my motherland.”

Vath Roeum remembered only being separated from her children at the time of the Vietnamese invasion and fleeing with other frightened villagers from Siem Reap province toward the border where food and security were promised. She had presumed that she could collect supplies in Thailand and then return to Cambodia, find her children, and move the whole family back to the camps and safety. Instead, she became a hostage to the resistance movement—in her case, the FUNCINPEC group loyal to Prince Sihanouk—forcibly kept inside a refugee camp enclosed by barbed wire.

When she asked the Cambodian camp officers if she could go home, they told her it was impossible since the country was being run by the Vietnamese. Even though the camps depended entirely on foreign and international relief aid, the Cambodian armies had full control over the inhabitants. She couldn't escape. If she tried to cross the border directly into Cambodia, she faced miles of disputed territory laced with land mines and beyond that forests rife with
disease. There was no exit through Thailand, either. Like all Cambodians in the camp, she did not have legal refugee status and would have been arrested and returned by the Thai security forces.

While she was stuck in the camp her three children had grown out of adolescence, gotten married, and made her a grandmother. She hoped to move in with one daughter soon and was in no mood to discuss her life in the camps. “It was difficult,” she said, refusing to elaborate.

Reports from that period document that difficulty.

“There is a hard hopelessness here, much more than in the past,” Dr. Steven Miles wrote in September 1983 in his report on camp life for the American Refugee Committee. “Escape is not possible. Violence and corruption are pervasive.”

In the following eight years after Dr. Miles wrote those words, more confidential reports for the UN, international and private agencies working on the Thai-Cambodian border described with alarm the complete deterioration of life in the camps. In a 1989 report for the International Committee of the Red Cross, Urs Boegli wrote that “the military commanders and their armed gangs seem increasingly to be taking the law into their own hands. Corruption, political in-fighting, feuds, domestic violence are the plagues of these camps.”

Those charges were supported by statistics and examples of the desperation. Reported violent incidents in all camps rose from 205 in 1986 to 1,264 in 1988, which meant that one person out of every 195 was a victim, and these were only the most dramatic incidents that could not escape detection. At the top of the list were beatings, axings, suicides, armed robberies, shootings, and rapes. “The numbers cannot graphically display the discovery of a crying two-year-old girl on a bamboo bed next to her mother, axed to death and her father, hung to death—all because her father planted his vegetable garden outside his allotted parcel of land much to the consternation of his neighbors, the accused murderers,” wrote Bob Maat, of the United Nations Border Relief Operation, in his end of mission report of ten years of refugee relief work on the border.

With the coming of the UN peacekeepers, the repatriation of these refugees to Cambodia in time for the 1993 elections was a top priority. Most of the concern focused on how to protect the refugees from Cambodians once they came under the control of the Phnom Penh government. Private buses ferried them across the border to temporary dormitories. Foreign refugee officials and lawyers were waiting for them in northwest Cambodia to arrange their resettlement and give them the resources to reestablish
themselves. While some of them returned to find homesteads placed off-limits because of land mines, the worst treatment awaiting the majority of them was indifference.

Cambodia in 1992 was not under stern Vietnamese occupation, as the refugees had been led to believe, nor did it resemble the communism of the Khmer Rouge. Hun Sen's 1989 liberalization program had been in effect for three years, long enough to restore a superficially free life with markets, private enterprise, private ownership, freedom to practice religion, and now, with the peace plan, the full lifting of curfews and martial law restrictions. Underneath, Hun Sen and the government retained tight control on the country's political life and bureaucracy, brooking no opposition. It was also a more corrupt country, with officials expecting bribes and new foreign businessmen able to pay them.

This was the atmosphere that greeted the refugees and the bluehelmeted peacekeepers from the UN. Bringing these 350,000 Cambodians home was a major accomplishment of the UN peace plan. The plan's mandate had grown grandiose, and at $2 billion it was the most expensive in UN history. (In the negotiations, the five permanent members often broke a deadlock by creating a new program, adding to the expense, but knowing the international community would gladly pay for this plan since it had been hugely responsible for the war.) The plan sought to end all foreign support for the warring parties; to ensure the full reunion and independence of the country; to disarm all the Cambodian political groups and reconcile them to working together to rebuild the country; provide economic support and political supervision to that end; and to organize free and fair elections resulting in a democratic government. All in one year.

Since the plan was dictated by the Great Powers who were behind the war in the first place, the greatest accomplishments were largely remedies for problems that the Great Powers controlled during the war. Ending foreign support for the war meant ending the country's isolation, lifting sanctions, letting Cambodians return, and opening up the country to all of modern life. Western embassies reopened and the UNTAC mission poured millions of dollars overnight into a country that had been starved for hard currency since the sanctions had been imposed. Signboards went up at the Bangkok airport posting the schedule for a direct flight to Phnom Penh, an impossibility since 1975. Ahead of nearly everyone was the first wave of rapacious entrepreneurs. Those from Thailand, with customers as far away as Japan, were intent on exploiting the country's teak forests that had been
left undisturbed during Cambodia's tragedies. Those had been boom years for the Thais, who had so despoiled their forests that logging was off-limits in their own country. With the help of all the armies—the Khmer Rouge, FUNCINPEC, and the Cambodian government—they began the wholesale destruction of the Cambodian forests.

Ending foreign aid also meant choking off the artificial support system for the Khmer Rouge, although it took the Khmer Rouge some time to appreciate this.

At first they thought they could return, too, like the refugees, like Prince Sihanouk. He came back in style on November 14, 1991, after thirteen years of exile. His chartered plane arrived from Beijing in the morning and he stepped out onto a red carpet and into a 1963 Chevrolet Impala convertible that he had had shipped into the country. He rode into the capital with Hun Sen by his side in open-air splendor, the two men smiling at the flag-waving crowd lining the highway all the way into the city and the royal palace. There could be no doubt which two men were perceived as the authors of peace that morning: Hun Sen of the younger generation and Norodom Sihanouk of the earlier days. Martin and Rogachev had picked the right candidates. In a speech that day from the balcony of the palace, Sihanouk seemed to be an honorary member of Hun Sen's government, notably calling for an international tribunal to try the Khmer Rouge.

“Sihanouk came without the Khmer Rouge this time,” said Hor Nam Hong, the foreign minister. “He came with our prime minister.”

Western embassies were already opening their doors. The American representative had arrived two days before, the Australian ambassador was already in Phnom Penh, and the new French ambassador was promised the privilege of being the first foreign envoy to present his credentials to Sihanouk, who had been declared the country's new head of state by Hun Sen. A few days later, on November 20, the prince opened the first water festival celebrated in the country since 1969, marking the reversing of the river currents when the Tonle Sap River changes its flow back into the Tonle Sap Lake.

Watching from afar, the Khmer Rouge thought their leaders could slip back into town easily. Ieng Thirith, wife of Ieng Sary, had already told the Japanese she hoped to be able to buy a house near the central market when the peacekeeping troops arrived. Khieu Samphan was the first to try. But when he entered the capital on November 27, 1991, he was mobbed by a crowd orchestrated by Hun Sen and assaulted. It's not clear whether the assault was by design or in the heat of the moment. His head streaming with blood, Khieu Samphan was rushed out of the country, scuttling the first
meeting in Phnom Penh of Cambodia's Supreme National Council. Thereafter, the Khmer Rouge came and went quietly, housed behind the royal palace in their own walled mansion. There was no house-hunting for Ieng Thirith and no more attempts to move around among the people.

By 1992 the full United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, or UNTAC, peacekeeping mission was in place. At its head was Yasushi Akashi, a senior UN diplomat, with Australian Lieutenant General John Sanderson as the force commander. The peacekeepers included twelve infantry battalions plus support units of 16,000 soldiers as well as 5,000 civilians. On the civilian side, UNTAC was supposed to oversee defense, finance, foreign affairs, information, and public security while preparing for the elections. But it became clear immediately that such an ambitious program was outlandish with the best of preparations, and UNTAC had been hastily put together with barely enough experts on Cambodia and fluent in the Cambodian language. One exception was the information component, headed by the American diplomat Timothy Carney, who was assisted by Stephen Heder, the American scholar of Cambodia. They supervised the first opening up of a free press since 1972, protecting the rebirth of Khmer-language journalism as well as English- and French-language newspapers. In advance of the elections, they created Radio UNTAC—the most striking of the mission's innovations—which offered Cambodians an indispensable source of unbiased information in their own language about the changes in the country and the upcoming elections.

Those elections drove the entire mission. Whether resettling refugees, helping draft possible constitutions, or deciding how to spend relief and rehabilitation money, the first question was how this would help ensure free and fair elections. In Battambang province, a Sicilian lawyer for the UN's refugee commission worked with a Singapore police officer on loan to UNTAC to teach the local police how to protect citizens' rights in the upcoming elections. UN volunteers, much like Peace Corps volunteers, were sent to the hinterlands to ensure an orderly balloting.

But the flaw in the election began before those peacekeepers, lawyers, experts, and volunteers even arrived. The only Cambodians brought to the negotiating table and given legitimacy were those with guns. The Supreme National Council was made up of Cambodian political groups that had armies. They were given legitimacy. The international community in this case abhorred moral judgments. The war had to end, all the armies had to be bought off with a seat at the table. This translated to a monopoly for these groups at the ballot box.

The two main groups were FUNCINPEC, the royalist-democrats loyal to Sihanouk, and the Cambodian People's Party, made up of the former communists installed by Vietnam who ran Cambodia. Hun Sen was the CPP candidate. But Sihanouk decided not to run as the FUNCINPEC leader. His son Prince Norodom Ranariddh led the party against Hun Sen. Sihanouk would remain above the fray as the unofficial father of the country.