Cambodia's Curse (11 page)

Baker spoke just after a meeting with Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister, and Shevardnadze, standing next to him at the podium, said American and Soviet positions on Cambodia had now “come much closer.” Until that day, the world’s powers had been at odds, making a solution to the Cambodian mire impossible. China supported the Khmer Rouge, and over the previous decade had supplied at least $1 billion in military aid. The Soviet Union supported Vietnam. The United States backed 15,000 ineffective “noncommunist” rebel fighters in the northern jungle. But the Bush administration’s new position scrambled everything.

In short order China announced that it would normalize relations with Vietnam. It began cutting its aid to the Khmer Rouge. China had already normalized relations with the Soviet Union. So now, all of a sudden, all three countries agreed that they had to deal with Hun
Sen’s government in Phnom Penh, even though most of them had to hold their noses. “This was remarkable,” said Quinn, the State Department official. “The Soviet Union, China, Europe, and the U.S. all agreed. That’s a home run! It caused China to settle with Vietnam. It caused us to settle with Vietnam. My goodness, it was wonderful, and my country played a major role.”

Baker, sizing up the moment, told a meeting of Southeast Asian foreign ministers in New York that it was time the United Nations Security Council “laid its hands” on the Cambodia issue. Now, of course, every one of the permanent members of the Security Council—the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China, the “Perm Five,” as they were known—agreed. When would that ever happen again?

Back at the State Department, Richard Solomon suddenly realized: This is my chance! He was assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, the most senior official directing policy in Southeast Asia. At State every officer continually asked himself: What can I take on that is
mine
?

Solomon’s career to this point had been distinguished but not extraordinary. He had earned a Ph.D. in political science from MIT and taught at the University of Michigan before joining the foreign service. He’d held several middle-level, important-sounding jobs, but now he was an assistant secretary of state—quite a senior post. Unfortunately, as usually happened, higher-ups in the department managed his high-profile countries: China, Korea, and Japan. Cambodia, well, nobody held much interest. So Solomon grabbed it.

When Solomon took office in the spring of 1989, his instruction had been clear: Don’t take the lead on Indochina issues. Support the French, who were arranging that conference in Paris. But Solomon had other plans. He called Quinn back from a posting in the Philippines to be his deputy—Quinn, who had written that first airgram on the Khmer Rouge threat. He told Quinn they had a chance to make a difference. Solomon had no background in Vietnam or Cambodia. “That’s why he needed me,” Quinn said. “This was huge for him. But nobody in the U.S. government thought there was any chance an
agreement would be reached. They let Solomon go off, doing his thing,” he said with a dismissive wave.

Solomon also found an ally in Rafeeuddin Ahmed, who was the UN special representative for Southeast Asia. Ahmed had been shuttling around the region for more than ten years, trying to find an opening in the Cambodia impasse. “I realized that for us to play a credible role, I must go to Phnom Penh, even though the People’s Republic of Kampuchea was not recognized as a legitimate government, it was not recognized at the UN,” Ahmed said. This was in 1987. “I looked for a precedent and found that Dag Hammarskjöld went to China after some American planes were shot down during the Korean War. China was not a recognized country at that time.” He spent several hours talking to Hun Sen; he was impressed. And when the Security Council began a series of special meetings in 1990 to agree on a course of action in Cambodia, no one at the United Nations knew more about this problem than Ahmed. He attended every meeting.

At the first summit, the council agreed that a peaceful settlement would require “an enhanced United Nations role,” a news release said. Yet no further details were offered. When Ahmed briefed the council during its second meeting, in February, he told the members that agreement would be hard to reach as long as the Chinese, Soviet, and Cambodian government representatives all remained so far apart. What could the UN do without cooperation from everyone?

In New York a few weeks after Baker’s news conference in Paris, the Perm Five met again, and this time they quickly came to agreement on a plan so audacious that it scared some council members. The United Nations would actually take control of Cambodia; the state would become a UN protectorate. The four competing armies would be disarmed, their troops held in special camps until national elections were held and a new democratic government chosen. “This was something we had never done before—actually controlling, supervising, monitoring the way the government was functioning,” Ahmed said. “But we believed we could do it.”

Others were not so sure. Kent Wiedemann was serving as the Asia specialist on the National Security Council, in the White House. He described the whole operation as “a major, major experiment in the use of the United Nations as a peacekeeping force, to pull Cambodia out of the mire.” Very quickly, however, he and others began to realize that this experiment was turning out to be ruinously expensive. The British government threw out the first alarms, complaining about the likely high cost of this enterprise. In Washington, Bolton echoed that view. “We estimated this would cost $2 billion, which I thought was astronomical. This whole plan, it was completely unprecedented, and I didn’t think it would work.” And no wonder.

T
he United Nations is an imperfect reflection of its membership, the 195 nations of the world. Almost from the day of its founding, it had been paralyzed by the same conflict that froze the world: the cold war. Almost every nation belonged to one of three camps: the East, the West, or the nonaligned Third World. Each camp fell into conflict with the others over almost anything of importance. Most often the United Nations Security Council suffered the same paralysis.

But then the cold war ended, and the shackles fell away. The UN found a new confidence; it took on more missions—more in the fiveyear period than in the previous four decades. UN leaders spoke fondly of the “new congeniality” among members of the Security Council. The UN, they said, was undergoing a “renaissance.” Where better to demonstrate this than Cambodia? Cold war divisions had prevented a solution through the 1980s. Now the United Nations had a chance to be a player, to make a difference. It would take over and administer an entire nation, something it had never done before, and give Cambodians a chance for redemption, a new life, membership in the modern age. With that, the United Nations would finally prove its worth. And could there be a better moment for this?

The Berlin Wall had fallen. Former Soviet satellite states were reveling in new freedoms, and impressive new leaders were taking the stage. Václav Havel. Lech Wałęsa. Elsewhere, stunning resolutions were coming to frozen conflicts. In South Africa Nelson Mandela was released from jail and became president of the African National Congress. In Northern Ireland the Irish Republican Army began secret talks with the British government and soon announced a cease-fire. Surely, with the United Nations’ help, wouldn’t this fresh wind blow through Phnom Penh, too?

In fact, however, in Phnom Penh no bright new faces came forward. Nothing had changed. Cambodians could look only to Hun Sen and King Sihanouk, two sclerotic leaders with not a thought in their heads but to achieve complete, undisputed control of the nation. These were the men who would lead Cambodians into the new democratic age.

 

On October 23, 1991, the four Cambodian factions and representatives of nineteen nations met in Paris to sign the Paris Peace Accords. The Cambodians agreed to an immediate cease-fire, followed by the demobilization of rival armies, repatriation of 370,000 refugees still in camps on the Thai border—and national elections by mid-1993. The United Nations would administer the nation until then; soon it would deploy tens of thousands of troops and civilian administrators and begin the most ambitious peacekeeping operation it had ever undertaken.

The French staged a grand ceremony at the Kleber International Conference Center once again, where Secretary of State Baker told the gathering: “What makes the case of Cambodia so extraordinary and its claim for international support so compelling, is the magnitude of the suffering its people have endured.” François Mitterand, the French president, sensed the unease some of the Cambodians felt. The Khmer Rouge wanted no part of this. But the Chinese had abandoned them, and Pol Pot realized he had no choice. Their representatives, Khieu Samphan and Son Sen, sat impassively through the ceremony—knowing, as they did, that they still had by far the largest
military force in the field. The British representative, Lord Caithness, diplomatically omitted their names from the list of Khmer Rouge villains he recited: Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, and the rest—though he then pointedly added, “and certain others.” Khieu Samphan had been president of the Khmer Rouge government, and Son Sen was now “supreme commander” of the Khmer Rouge rebel forces.

The participants, maybe thirty people, sat at tables arranged in a large square, covered with yellow tablecloths. Hun Sen sat right next to Khieu Samphan. When the prime minister glanced at the Khmer Rouge chief of state—and at the leaders of the other rebel factions, Prince Ranariddh and Son Sann—he knew that all of these men, dressed in dark suits now, had spent the past decade trying to kill him. He had nothing to gain here; he was already the prime minister. First the Khmer Rouge and then the Vietnamese had schooled him every day since he was a teenager to serve as an absolute, unflinching autocrat. They’d taught him to do whatever was necessary—threaten, punish, kill—to hold on to power. What on earth did the UN occupation, particularly those “free and fair elections,” offer him?

The world’s powers had just signed an agreement to expend billions of dollars, years of effort by tens of thousands of people from dozens of nations, untold political capital, and probably even a few lives—all to give a small nation in a remote part of Asia of no strategic interest to anyone the chance to start anew after two decades of horror. Nothing like this had ever happened before—anywhere, anytime.

Cambodia’s leaders, watching this incredible ceremony as leaders of the world’s major nations bestowed this great gift in a glittering French reception hall, sat lost in their own thoughts, hatching new plots, devising fresh schemes. Observing them, Mitterand warned, “A dark page of history has been turned. Cambodians want peace, which means that any spirit of revenge would now be as dangerous as forgetting the lessons of history.” As Mitterand and others would soon learn, history was not the Cambodians’ strong suit.

T
he first UN forces arrived in Cambodia months late, of course. But undeterred, by the end of May 1992 Yashushi Akashi and John Sanderson, the UN’s two top mission commanders, were bumping along a rocky dirt road in far-western Cambodia, on their way to create an enduring metaphor.

Yashushi Akashi was the civilian director of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, which came to be known as UNTAC. Sitting next to him was Maj. Gen. John Sanderson of Australia, the mission’s military commander. A truck full of reporters followed just behind. Eventually, they reached a Khmer Rouge “checkpoint.” More precisely, they looked out their windows at one young Khmer Rouge soldier standing beside a single crooked bamboo pole propped up on sticks to simulate a roadblock.

Akashi and Sanderson asked to pass. They were on their way to meet up with a new Dutch military unit that was trying to cross the border from Thailand. The policeman, not even eighteen years old, told Akashi and Sanderson that he was not authorized to let them through. They tried to reason with the boy, but he was insistent. He didn’t have permission to let them pass.

Finally, the United Nations officials just turned around and drove back to Phnom Penh. There, they blustered and bleated about this grave affront. “We take this act quite seriously,” Akashi declared before issuing his ultimate threat:
I’m going to tell the Security Council!

 

The world watched with sky-high expectations as the United Nations arrived in Cambodia. This was the
new
UN, after all, taking on a mission more ambitious and more expensive than anything it had ever tried before, in a brave new world of comity and cooperation—Russia, China, and the United States all working together. Still, no one outside the high halls of government realized that from the day all parties signed the Paris Peace Accords, the preeminent concern was actually “Who’s going to pay for this?”

Britain complained the loudest, though American officials, too, made it plain that the price tag looked to be far too high. Bolton was the key official in this debate. As the assistant secretary of state for international organizations, he was the bridge between the UN and the State Department, which would have to come up with the money. “What happened was that we learned that the cost would be unbelievable,” Bolton said. “Since the UN had never undertaken a mission of this magnitude, there were no precedents—and the estimates that came in were in the billions. And this happened as it became more and more clear that the Khmer Rouge was not really a military threat to anyone after all.”