Cambodia's Curse (12 page)

This news seemed to wake everyone up. Wasn’t the Khmer Rouge just about to march back into Phnom Penh, from which they would once again turn Cambodia into a “vast killing field,” as Senator George Mitchell had warned? Hadn’t sixty-six senators signed a letter to the president expressing their deep concern? Weren’t newspaper editorial writers having a field day with this? In October 1991 the
New York Times
had opined, “Even in real life, horror stories can have sequels. There’s a worrisome possibility that one entitled The Return of the Khmer Rouge might now be about to unfold in Cambodia.”

Now, months later, everyone realized they’d been duped. Yes, the Khmer Rouge were still a ruthless, murderous force. But now they were far more interested in gaining personal wealth—betraying the very principles their movement had stood for. “They were loggers and miners, not soldiers—selling timber and gems to generals on the Thai border,” Bolton said. The assault on Pailin, in late 1989, had been about money rather than power. “The military column never materialized. It was like the Wizard of Oz. Where were they?”

Bolton, no fan of the United Nations in any case, felt the United States had been deceived. But America had committed itself to Cambodia, and down the hall from Bolton, Solomon was charging ahead—knowing, he said, that some in the building thought he was on a quixotic mission. Bolton “didn’t think the UN was up to running the show,” Solomon said. “No one did, including Jim Baker.”

As soon as the Perm Five agreed on the details of a settlement, Solomon said he rushed to tell Lawrence Eagleburger, who was deputy secretary of state. “Now we are going to have to pay for it, aren’t we?” Solomon said Eagleburger told him. “And it was primarily going to be us. The Brits, they were out of Southeast Asia. So were the Russians.” In a booklet Solomon wrote about this period, he noted that, in the Security Council and other official settings, the British were primarily concerned with averting “a costly UN settlement.”

Rafeeuddin Ahmed, who had been the UN’s special representative for Southeast Asia, attended every Perm Five meeting at which the Cambodia operation was discussed. He said the United Nations “didn’t have any preconceived notion about what this would cost. But everyone knew it would be costly because this was something we had never done before—control, supervision, monitoring of an entire government and its functioning.”

As months went by, a realization dawned: We can’t afford this! So the Security Council began to cut, pare, and trim wherever it could, realizing that, if they weren’t careful, this initiative could end up costing as much as $10 billion. Where would the UN get money like that?
The treasuries of the wealthy nations, of course. American and British diplomats were confronted with the question: Would taxpayers sit still while their governments spent $2 or $3 billion of their money—on Cambodia? Not likely.

Soon this dilemma over cost entered the public debate. “The process is unfolding in disturbing neglect of the question of who is to pay the bills,” a
Washington Post
editorial said. “But to put the requisite thousands of military peacekeepers and thousand or more civilian administrators on the ground could take $2 billion. Is there not a cheaper model?” In response, the Security Council cut even more. “It was a creeping process of reducing the UN role,” Bolton said, “scaling back the scope of the UN’s political responsibility and oversight.”

Yet even as the resources shrank, the United Nations staff never exhibited anything but exuberant confidence in their ability to pull it off. This was their big chance to prove they could be relevant in the new world. “We never got from the UN that they couldn’t do it,” Solomon said.

As they pared back, no one—in the United States, Britain, Russia, or the halls of the UN—ever said anything in public about the cost cutting or reduced expectations. As far as anyone in the public knew, the United Nations was going to take over the country, disarm the Khmer Rouge and other military forces, run major areas of government, repatriate refugees, stage elections. But on the ground the forces were thin and grossly inadequate. “No one would acknowledge that we had scaled back,” Bolton said. “By the time it happened, it was a big, expensive fig leaf.”

Confronted by an eighteen-year-old guard at a bamboo-pole checkpoint, Akashi and Sanderson knew full well that they didn’t have the resources to take on the Khmer Rouge. Even when fully deployed, the UN would have just 16,000 troops on the ground. Fewer than 10 percent of them had yet shown up. Among the troops still missing were those Dutch soldiers stuck at the border. By comparison, thirteen years later, the United States had ten times as many troops on the
ground in Iraq, a nation two and one-half times the size of Cambodia, and for years the United States and its allies could not pacify the state. Now the Khmer Rouge was refusing to let the UN in.

Of even more importance in 1992 was the realization that the Khmer Rouge was just as strong if not stronger than the UN forces—intimately familiar with the terrain and unburdened by rules of engagement. For the UN’s part, no one had even defined the rules of engagement. What could be done about all of that? Nothing. The Khmer Rouge refused to disarm.

The Khmer Rouge leaders’ public explanation was this: Hun Sen has refused to give up control of the government or his army, so why should we? And in fact Hun Sen hadn’t. The UN did not have nearly enough civilian administrators to take command of the Cambodian government, as they had promised, or to disarm his army. And unless forced, Hun Sen had no intention of giving up control. For him, this was just another Cambodian power struggle, nothing more. Given his background, he was confident of his ability to win it. Discussing this, he had even slipped into the regal practice of referring to himself in the third person. “For Ranariddh and Son Sann and Pol Pot, the Paris Accords were useful,” he told author David Roberts. “How else can they join the politics and compete politically with Hun Sen?”

If anyone had doubted Hun Sen’s true intentions, he made them clear during the first Paris Peace Conference, in 1989, when he declared, “You can talk about sharing power in Paris, but not in Cambodia.” Vietnam had handed him the nation in 1985. He had ruled it uncontested for seven years. He would not step down or share his throne without a fight. And now, with wide reportage of the bamboo-pole incident, Hun Sen and everyone else realized that the UN was not to be feared. It was nothing more than a paper force. A correspondent for the
Far Eastern Economic Review
, reporting from Cambodia at the time, put it this way: “The Cambodian people believed that the UN blue berets were like Jupiter threatening to unleash lightning against the Khmer Rouge. What do people see? UNTAC pulls back.”

The fact remained that the Khmer Rouge had not been defeated. The UN’s deputy military commander, Michael Loridon, a French brigadier general, urged his commander to attack and “deal with the Khmer Rouge problem once and for all.” That never happened, though the debate continued for years, until the last UN officer boarded a plane home. From the first days of the UN occupation, everyone knew that over ten years the Vietnamese army, with hundreds of thousands of troops, had never been able to defeat the Khmer Rouge. So what could the UN possibly do now?

 

By December 1992, more than a year after the Paris Peace Accords, the United Nations finally had its full force of soldiers and administrators in country. They were too late. Every Cambodian already knew that Jupiter had never climbed up the mountain. Pol Pot and Hun Sen were ignoring the UN and facing no penalty. But the truth was, the UN force offered a great deal more than the prospect of military reconciliation. Most Cambodians loved having them in town.

The visitors spent money, more money, and then more money still—$3 billion in all. Every staffer was given a daily living allowance of $145 on top of his salary—a year’s income for most Cambodians. Contractors had quickly put up apartment buildings and now were taking in $2,000, $3,000 a month—ridiculously high rents for Phnom Penh. Hotels were full, and new ones were under construction. Anyone who’d ever had a fleeting thought of running a restaurant scrambled to open one. Everyone with a car hired himself out as a driver. Brothels worked overtime; UN doctors treated thousands of their men and women for sexually transmitted diseases. Liquor vendors couldn’t keep up with demand; restaurant and bar owners had to replace fixtures and furniture broken in drunken brawls almost every evening. UN vehicles and equipment routinely disappeared in the night, but no one was sure whether the thieves were Cambodian or renegade UN employees.

M
ichael Hayes, a young American from Massachusetts, had come to Phnom Penh looking for work. He’d been on the staff of the Asia Foundation in Bangkok. But this was the new boomtown. It was 1991, and he was just twenty-four years old. “I was staying at the Royale Hotel,” where everyone from the West stayed—journalists, UN officers, drug dealers, NGOs. “I went to the dining room for breakfast and asked for a newspaper. The waitress told me there are no newspapers here. So I began thinking: Maybe I should be a journalist. I had a lot of friends who were journalists. Maybe I should start a newspaper.” So he did. With help from the UN and his friends, he founded the
Phnom Penh Post
in 1992, the nation’s first English-language paper, still publishing today. His first readers were thousands of UN staff members.

The United Nations supervised the drafting of a new constitution, one that was to guarantee Cambodians everything promised under the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document first written in 1948. The authors of its preamble still had the Holocaust in mind when they wrote: “Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people.”

In Cambodia forty-four years later, that played just as well. And under the UN, freedoms of all kinds flowered. A group of political prisoners let out of jail opened a legal-aid organization. Under UN auspices new human-rights advocacy groups began work; education, agriculture, health assistance, and a host of other civil-society organizations opened shop. Groups like these had never been permitted by the Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge, or the monarchy. But would the new government, whoever won the upcoming election, allow all of this to continue? In 1992 and early 1993 it was hard to tell. The candidates were too busy fighting.

Prince Ranariddh and Son Sann had more or less disarmed and disbanded their troops, as they had agreed in Paris. Not so for Hun Sen and Pol Pot. And in early 1993 Hun Sen launched a military offensive against the Khmer Rouge stronghold in Pailin, violating every promise and tenet of the Paris Peace Accords, just as the Khmer Rouge had. But he knew he would pay no price, and he might just eliminate the only remaining military that threatened him. The fighting lasted for months, and the United Nations had only this to say: “It is a significant offensive that appears to exceed the right of self defense contained in the 1991 peace agreement.” That was all. The fighting ended in stalemate, but the real theater was the elections. Hun Sen knew the UN had declared that the Khmer Rouge was not permitted to put up any candidates. Instead, Hun Sen faced Prince Ranariddh, Sihanouk’s son.

Prince Ranariddh had led an unremarkable but privileged life. He spent his young adulthood in France, earning various advanced degrees and teaching. He did not return to Cambodia until 1974, when he was thirty years old, but then left for the duration of the Khmer Rouge years. He came back in the mid-1980s to head his father’s guerrilla group, called Funcinpec, which stood for the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful, and Cooperative Cambodia; the acronym was drawn from the name written in French. From the jungle Ranariddh’s small force tried to fight the Vietnamese—helped with significant U.S. aid.

After his group gave up its arms in the early 1990s Ranariddh turned Funcinpec into a political party. Hun Sen knew Ranariddh would be a fearsome political competitor simply because he was royalty. Most Cambodians still revered his father, and at every occasion Ranariddh reminded voters that Funcinpec was actually his father’s party. By voting for him, he was saying, they were voting to bring Sihanouk back.

So, just as his Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese tutors had taught him, Hun Sen went after Ranariddh with everything he had. In 1993
the United Nations reported more than one hundred political assassinations. Nearly all of the dead were Funcinpec officials. A few worked for another smaller Buddhist party.

Hun Sen’s political party, the Cambodian People’s Party, or CPP, controlled every province, every town and village—every political jurisdiction in the country. How could it not? Under Vietnam Cambodia had been a one-party state, and Hun Sen had led it. He directed his loyalists in all of these regional offices to bribe, or threaten, everyone to vote for him. The regional officers jumped into the fight with abandon. They burned down Funcinpec headquarters, disrupted rallies, and killed prominent party officials. After all, a few years earlier, when Vietnam ruled the nation, that had been the way things were done.