[As we go to press, negotiations are continuing in an effort to free three Western hostages being held in Cambodia by the forces of the Khmer Rouge. Despite a peace agreement signed in October 1991, Cambodia remains at war. How this situation came about is outlined here by BEN KIERNAN, the author of How Pol Pot Came to Power and many other works on Cambodia. The text is abridged from a talk given in Sydney last month to a meeting organised by the Campaign to Prevent the Return of the Khmer Rouge.]
Quite a few people draw comparisons between the current situation in Cambodia and the situation of the Lon Nol regime from 1970 to 1975. The Khmer Republic headed by Lon Nol — which succeeded the royal government of Prince Sihanouk — was defeated by the Khmer Rouge in April 1975, and it is often said that the current regime is in danger of following the same route.
Indeed, there are some parallels between the Lon Nol regime and its experience and the current situation. First there is the international connection: in 1970-75 the rebels had base areas along the Vietnamese border and were able to spread from those base areas; at the current moment they have large base areas along the Thai border and are attempting to expand those areas and strangle the cities.
Another parallel with the Lon Nol regime is the corruption. There is high-level corruption in Cambodia today, probably not as high as the Lon Nol regime but certainly a worrying feature.
A further similarity is the gap between the urban areas and the countryside — the wealth disparities between the cities and rural Cambodia (70-80% of the population). People are talking about the reappearance of this urban-rural gap after many years of a progressive government.
One important difference of the earlier period was the bombardment of the countryside by the United States and the Lon Nol regime. There is a continuing war which has recently escalated, but it hasn't reached the level of destruction, nor have the peasants been suffering under a rain of bombs as they were in 1969 to 1973, which caused many thousands of them to join the Khmer Rouge.
Pol Pot's rule
Khmer Rouge was actually a French term for "red Khmer", which is the name given by Sihanouk to the rebel movement in the '60s, which was led by the Communist Party of Kampuchea without revealing it was the Communist Party. When they achieved power in 1975, they took a large number of measures which resembled the height of terror in Stalin's Soviet Union in the 1930s. Apart from the massacres of the population in 1975 to 1979, there was also a very reminiscent purge of the Communist Party. Another parallel was the mass mobilisation of labour and forced labour, which was very common under Pol Pot.
However, there are some important differences. One is that under Pol Pot the urban areas were entirely evacuated. That was a distinction from the Stalinist period in Russia, where the urban areas were developed at the expense of the countryside.
Another difference, a very strong feature of the Pol Pot regime, was the aggression committed against all three of its neighbours: Vietnam, Thailand and Laos.
Apart from Stalinism, the Pol Pot regime was compared quite often to Maoism, and it did have some parallels with Maoism in the greater sanction given to agriculture and the ideological preference to what we would call the poorer or lower middle peasant. The economic policy of self-reliance was also borrowed from China.
The ultranationalist and chauvinist regime of Pol Pot bore some resemblance to Hitler's regime as well as Mao's and Stalin's. It was reminiscent of Hitler's in the way it deported large populations, suppressed minority groups and took military action against its neighbours.
Even when minority groups had formed their own branch of the Communist Party, they were still not trusted. For instance, in the west on the Thai border there was a Thai branch and there was also a Muslim association near Vietnam. In the north-east where small minority groups lived, there was large participation by minorities in the Communist Party . All these branches were abolished just before Pol Pot took power in 1975.
The Khmer Rouge regime aimed to take territories from its neighbours — territories which had been lost by Cambodia to Thai and Vietnamese expansion as long ago as the 18th century. The anti-Vietnamese attacks eventually provoked a massive Vietnamese invasion in 1979, which overthrew the Khmer Rouge and established a new regime of Cambodian rebels who had earlier defected from the Khmer Rouge, who had taken up arms and rebelled.
International pressure
Australia, the ASEAN countries, the United States and China all demanded an immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Vietnam from Cambodia. As part of the pressure against the Vietnamese, they recognised the ousted Khmer Rouge as the legitimate regime, and the United Nations seat for Cambodia was occupied from 1979 by Pol Pot diplomats, despite the fact that they were not in power any more and that when they were in power about one and a half million Cambodians had perished in four years.
There was also an international embargo to force Vietnamese withdrawal. Australia cut off its aid to Vietnam, and other countries refused recognition of Vietnam. Australia refused to recognise the Cambodian government; until 1981 it recognised the regime of Pol Pot as the legitimate government of Cambodia.
Hanoi made two conditions before it would withdraw from Cambodia. The first was that China stop threatening Vietnam (soon after the invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam, China invaded Vietnam and there was a major war). The second demand was that the Khmer Rouge be excluded from Cambodia's future and be prevented from returning.
Over the 1980s, the Vietnamese trained a Cambodian army as well as re-establishing a Cambodian state. So the Vietnamese dropped both of their conditions over time and eventually withdrew unilaterally. The Cambodian army was able to hold the line pretty much against the Khmer Rouge, who were taking sanctuary in Thailand and had received a large amount of international aid (the aid for Cambodia from the UN went to Khmer Rouge in the border camps).
When the Vietnamese left, the Khmer Rouge went back into Cambodia and did take territory along the Thai border. They captured the town of Pailin, which was the first important town they had taken since 1979, but they were held pretty much in that position and there was more or less a stalemate by 1991.
In that same period, a peace process began to pick up speed. This process had two important features which weren't included at the end. First, it was a regional process with negotiations not only between Cambodian parties, which began in 1987 between Hun Sen and Prince Sihanouk, but particularly between the south-east Asian countries.
The second major feature was the way the Khmer Rouge were progressively marginalised. This was partly contributed to by Bill Hayden when he was Australian foreign minister with his call in 1986 for the Khmer Rouge to be tried by an international tribunal for crimes against humanity or genocide.
Australian shift
However, about the time that Gareth Evans replaced Bill Hayden as foreign minister, Australian policy began to take a new direction. It involved inclusion of the great powers in the Cambodian negotiations. Australian weight was thrown behind moving the negotiations from Indonesia to Paris, which involved the permanent five members of the UN Security Council.
Once China was involved, its client the Khmer Rouge had a powerful backer to prevent the marginalisation that had been taking place. The result was the return of the Khmer Rouge to centre stage. A unanimity principle was adopted in the negotiations, which gave the Khmer Rouge a veto over specific points. Indeed at that time in 1989, Gareth Evans backed the formula for returning the Khmer Rouge to positions of power in Cambodia by including them in a government of all the four major parties.
There was a watering down of negotiation achievements, which had come out very strongly against the genocidal policies and practices of the Pol Pot regime. The United Nations General Assembly did this in 1989 by talking only very generally about the danger of "universally condemned policies and practices of the recent past", without mentioning that they were genocidal or who they were committed by.
The Australian peace proposal of 1990 went a step further in watering down the condemnation of the Khmer Rouge by talking about the danger only of unspecified "human rights abuses of the recent past". Then the permanent five members of the Security Council came up with another version, further watered down, which was the basis for the peace agreement in Paris in 1991 and which referred simply to unspecified "policies and practices of the past". So we had lost the reference to genocide and to the Pol Pot regime.
There are three major reasons for the peace process culminating in an agreement. First, the Cambodian government was still, despite the Vietnamese withdrawal, subject to an international embargo. Australia, for instance, refused to recognise the Cambodian government, and that forced the Cambodian government, particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to look elsewhere for international assistance and to become much more easily pressured into an agreement like this.
Secondly, however, the state of Cambodia's strength was that it had contained the Khmer Rouge, so there was a stalemate fairly close to the border of Thailand and Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge through most of 1991 were unable to expand and in fact suffered some defeats.
Third was international developments. In Thailand in February 1991 a very brutal military dictatorship took power, which massacred demonstrators in the streets. It had very good relations with Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge forces along the border. China had gained quite a lot on the mainland of South-East Asia and was more prepared to be flexible as far as Cambodia was concerned.
Paris agreement
So the agreement was signed in October 1991. There was supposed to be a cease-fire, disarmament of all the forces and demobilisation of 70% of them, the other 30% to remain in barracks unarmed. The UN was supposed to assist in de-mining the country side. It was also supposed to supervise five areas of administration in Cambodia, repatriate 300,000 refugees from Thailand, establish a neutral political atmosphere and then hold elections.
Of seven aims in the Paris agreement, the UN really achieved only two. The repatriation of refugees was probably the most successful of the seven goals, and the elections were also a rather successful outcome for the United Nations. But the UN failed completely to establish a cease-fire, to disarm the Khmer Rouge — who refused to be disarmed — and they only partially disarmed other forces. They failed to achieve the de-mining of the countryside or to assist in any substantial way in that. They failed completely to supervise the five areas of administration in the Khmer Rouge areas and only partially achieved it in a sometimes rather desultory way in the state of Cambodia's areas. They also failed, at least in large part, in achieving a neutral political atmosphere.
So the UN peace plan failed. There is no peace in Cambodia today, so the peace process did not achieve its major goal.
The plan also had as a major goal the inclusion of the Khmer Rouge. This was in fact the key distinction between the United Nation's plan's advocates, like Senator Evans, and its critics: what Evans stuck to against his critics was the importance, he said, of including the Khmer Rouge. That completely failed, because the Khmer Rouge did not abide by the peace agreement even though they signed it.
The election could have been held without five or more years of failed attempts to include the Khmer Rouge. The outcome of the election, a coalition of the non-Khmer Rouge parties, could have been achieved many more than five years before the election finally was held.
One-sided
From 1991 to 1993 the Khmer Rouge got away with massive violations of the peace agreement. They violated the cease-fire from the very beginning and continued their attacks as if nothing had changed. Secondly, they refused to be disarmed. They refused the UN access to Khmer Rouge areas; in the latter part of 1992 they began to kidnap United Nations troops in a series of incidents which continued into 1993. They then escalated their slaughter of Cambodians of ethnic Vietnamese origin, and they continue to massacre them right up until the present. They also opposed the elections by force until it was quite clear that at this point the UN was going to hold the line and the Khmer Rouge decided at the last minute that their former allies, the FUNCINPEC party of Prince Ranariddh, had a chance of winning and they would be better off sending their supporters to vote for it.
But because of China's role, the Khmer Rouge were never met hit with any sanctions for their violations. In fact, the UN did things that favoured the Khmer Rouge. At one point the UN announced that it had found six or eight alleged Vietnamese soldiers in Cambodia and that they were contravening the Paris agreement (they were in fact civilian former soldiers). By contract, the United Nations had information from its own private research organisation that the Thai government had regular troops stationed in the Khmer Rouge areas in Cambodia contrary to the Paris agreement, but it suppressed its own report.
This kind of one-sided application of the agreement gave advantage to the Khmer Rouge, who responded by escalating their slaughter of ethnic Vietnamese civilians.
After the election, the Khmer Rouge continued to attack, and Senator Evans called for their inclusion in the government unelected; it was only after this became obviously unacceptable that Evans stopped talking about it.
During the 18 months of the peace process from 1991 to 1993, the Khmer Rouge increased the territory under their control from about 5% of the Cambodian territory to 15-20%. The population under their control increased from around 100,000 to more than 400,000.
Despite the fact that China ceased to provide military aid to Cambodia as a result of the peace agreement, which was an achievement, the balance of forces didn't change because the Khmer Rouge had seized so much territory that they now controlled valuable resources, and they exported these to Thailand and made massive profits. Whereas in the 1980s they had been getting about $100 million worth of military aid per year from China, after the peace process was nearly complete, the Khmer Rouge income was more like $250 million per year because of trade with Thailand. The Khmer Rouge army, according to UN sources, increased from about 10,000 to about 15,000 troops by the time of the election.
One-sided application of the peace process gave one-sided advantage. The side that had been much weaker was now relatively stronger than it had been, and this has resulted in an escalated civil war.
Two tasks
It seems to me that there is no prospect of an end to the civil war in Cambodia. It may get much worse before it gets better. It certainly looks as if the war will continue largely because of the increased strength the Khmer Rouge managed to gain during the so-called peace process.
I think there are two things that can be done by Australia and other people interested in bringing Cambodia to a situation of stability again. One is that the Thai connection needs to be cut, the aid that the Khmer Rouge get from Thailand. There needs to be open pressure on Thailand to stop aiding an outlaw army with the record of genocide that the Khmer Rouge have.
Secondly, there needs to be massive aid to Cambodia. There needs to be development aid, road-building programs so that the peasants can market their produce and escape the economic net of the Khmer Rouge as well as the military terrorism. And community development needs to be fostered by outside aid with the same aim of building up a more prosperous countryside so that the rural-urban gap doesn't get out of control and so that the peasants have an incentive to continue their economic activity rather than abandon it.