When the War Was Over (90 page)

Rogachev never looked back.

On July 28, 1986, Gorbachev went to the Soviet port city of Vladivostok on the Pacific coast to outline a new Soviet strategy for Asia. He touched on all three problem areas that caused China such anguish. First, he said the Soviet Union would work with the Chinese to redefine their common border along the ship channel of the Amur River. He announced the withdrawal of six Soviet regiments from Afghanistan, and troop withdrawals from Mongolia. He promised to take an approach in the Asian-Pacific region “based on the recognition and understanding of the existing realities.”

Regarding the most complicated question—that of Cambodia—Gorbachev said that meant friendly relations with all the countries of Southeast Asia, not just those of Indochina, and with China itself. He spoke of the “terrible losses” sustained by the people of Cambodia but said their problems could not be solved “in distant capitals or even in the United Nations.”

“Here, like in other problems of Southeast Asia, much depends on the normalization of Sino-Vietnamese relations,” Gorbachev said.

Those phrases that may sound wooden to the average ear were pure poetry to Rogachev.

“We had an immediate, positive response from China,” Rogachev said. “It gave strong impetus to talks on where the border should be drawn. China agreed to restore the border talks.”

For Rogachev, the Vladivostok speech was the mirror image of Nixon's opening to China in 1972. With China now at the top of the list, where Rogachev believed it always should have been, Shevardnadze focused on the immediate questions of Afghanistan and Cambodia.

By October, Rogachev was in Beijing for talks with the Chinese foreign ministry, which for the first time included Cambodia.

By the following spring, he was on a tour with Shevardnadze to Southeast Asia, sowing the seeds for a radical new approach to an Asian-wide settlement. Shevardnadze was the first Soviet foreign minister to visit Thailand, where he talked about Cambodia, and he went on to Canberra and Jakarta.

On March 10 and 11 the Soviet foreign minister traveled to Phnom Penh. There he met Hun Sen, who since January 14, 1985, had become the prime minister while remaining foreign minister.

Rogachev had bet on the right horse. Hun Sen's chief liability—that he had no experience outside the deadly and rough politics of Cambodia's revolution and communist aftermath—had become his strength. Few Cambodians understood the political realities of the country better than Hun Sen or had his talent and determination to rule it. Since he had come of age during the Khmer Rouge war and revolution, he was not restrained by the morals or the pretense of morals that affected his elders.

Importantly, while he ruled a country of survivors, of people who had gone through one of the nightmares of the twentieth century and come out with unimaginable scars, Hun Sen had never seen himself as a victim. He had been on the winning side of the war and when the Khmer Rouge leadership went after his Eastern Zone cadres, he had slipped into Vietnam. His self-confidence was towering and he had few rivals. When Hun Sen wanted something he acted, without shame and usually with a keen sense of youthful entitlement.

He had become adept at hiding his ambition with charm and humility. In one interview he explained his extraordinary rise by saying: “I learn constantly. Maybe if I had a higher opinion of myself I wouldn't have tried so hard and I would have made more mistakes. So I try harder.”

At his March meeting with Hun Sen, Shevardnadze told the young prime minister that the Soviet Union hoped to arrange a meeting for him with Prince Sihanouk, to break the stalemate with direct negotiations between the two men. Hun Sen was overjoyed. That squarely placed him as Sihanouk's equal.

“We explained it on the basis of national reconciliation for regional problems, how this was partly theory and partly practice,” Rogachev later said. “In Cambodia what does it mean? It means reconciliation between the Phnom Penh government and Prince Sihanouk. The Khmer Rouge were too far from Phnom Penh for reconciliation. And Prince Sihanouk, we knew him very well.”

In the joint communique issued after the meeting, both sides supported Cambodian efforts to negotiate with opposing Cambodian individuals and
the two non-communist resistance factions. The first stage of the campaign was a success.

The next stop for Shevardnadze was Hanoi. Vietnam proved even more open to change than Cambodia. Three months earlier in mid-December, the Vietnamese communist party had sacked its top three party leaders as well as three other members of the politburo—the greatest single leadership shuffle in forty years, allowing a new generation to take over and shift the country's emphasis to wholehearted economic reform. Nguyen Van Linh was named the new party head and he put into place a program called
doi moi
, or economic renovation that included replacing the country's disastrous central planning with new private enterprises, free markets with competitive market pricing, and the dismantling of farming cooperatives.

In speeches before that congress, Linh's predecessor Truong Chinh admitted that the country was in dire economic straits, largely due to the straitjacket of communist doctrine. “We frankly analyze and bravely admit the serious and long-standing shortcoming and mistakes,” Chinh said, adding that responsibility “rests first of all with the party central committee, the political bureau, the secretariat and with the council of ministers.”

In fact, the lives of the people had essentially fallen below pre-war standards. To the Soviets, the Vietnamese
doi moi
plan for climbing out of poverty resembled their own
perestroika.
Unlike the Soviet Union, however, Vietnam consciously decided against any
glasnost,
or opening up society with free speech, thought, and association. Instead, Hanoi followed a pattern closer to China's four modernizations. But Vietnam needed investments and foreign know-how, quite impossible objectives so long as it remained under international sanctions.

China had an offshore source of badly needed cash in Hong Kong and the large overseas Chinese population of Southeast Asia. Vietnam had to look elsewhere for funds and to do that the Vietnamese had to settle the Cambodia problem. All solutions for Vietnam pointed to getting out of Cambodia—whether it was improving relations with the West and China, or climbing out of the economic hole it had dug for itself.

By 1987, these Vietnamese preoccupations were translated into greater room for maneuver for Cambodia. And Shevardnadze took full advantage of the situation.

During his visit, Shevardnadze made it clear that the Soviet Union wanted Vietnam to break the ice on Cambodia. “Shevardnadze made his visit to Southeast Asia right after his visit to Afghanistan,” said Rogachev, who described how Shevardnadze used the Soviet experience in Afghanistan
as an example for the Vietnamese in Cambodia. The Soviets were withdrawing and creating an opportunity for “national reconciliation on a broad basis,” and Shevardnadze told the Vietnamese he hoped they would understand this as “partly theory, partly practice” in communist doctrine.

The upshot was one the Vietnamese understood well. Their troops could not remain in Cambodia.

Shevardnadze's proposals for arranging a meeting between Sihanouk and Hun Sen, however, were met with only polite interest at first. At the March 12 banquet in Shevardnadze's honor, the Vietnamese foreign minister Nguyen Co Thach said that all three Indochinese countries would like discussions with China and the ASEAN nations to resolve the Cambodia problem.

Privately, the Vietnamese said they were not keen to see Hun Sen put up against Sihanouk for fear that the prince would overwhelm Hun Sen. Rogachev had been in charge of convincing the Vietnamese that Hun Sen could hold his own. “I went there [to Hanoi], the Vietnamese came to Moscow. But it was most difficult to convince the Vietnamese to allow Hun Sen to talk to Sihanouk. The visit by Shevardnadze was the beginning of this major effort,” Rogachev said.

More than that, Shevardnadze's visit helped push the Vietnamese to shift their entire attitude toward Cambodia. Only five days after the Soviet's departure, Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong announced that Vietnam would withdraw all its troops from Cambodia in 1990 whether there was a peace settlement or not. This was such an about-face that the United States and China immediately cast doubt on its sincerity.

The first reward for Vietnam was an invitation to the new party leader Nguyen Van Linh and Foreign Minister Thach to visit Moscow in early May for negotiations with Gorbachev that ended in new economic and diplomatic initiatives. The men signed a new thirteen-year agreement providing Soviet aid for Vietnam's production of light industrial goods, leading Linh to say, “We are convinced that the Vietnamese-Soviet cooperation will serve as a model of relations between a developed industrial government and an economically backward country.”

To emphasize the seriousness of Vietnam's new negotiating stance on Cambodia, Gorbachev was able to announce that the Khmer Rouge could be included in negotiations over Cambodia—clearly a way to please China and open the way for normal relations between the Soviet Union and China—Gorbachev's ultimate goal.

Hun Sen was prepared for Shevardnadze's proposals. He had received advance warning of the changes in Soviet thinking about Cambodia from his
handpicked ambassador to Moscow. In 1982 Hun Sen had sent Hor Nam Hong, the only polished diplomat who had survived from Sihanouk's day, to be the ambassador to Moscow, easily the most critical posting outside of Hanoi. Hor Nam Hong was immediately taken under the wing of Rogachev when he arrived. “Mr. Rogachev was most important for me,” Hor Nam Hong said. “Of course, I wouldn't talk to him about the Vietnamese occupation. No. But from Gorbachev's arrival on the scene, with Rogachev's encouragement I verbally told Phnom Penh to prepare for change. That it will change a lot because of the new thought of Gorbachev. It had to be verbal, though, and Hun Sen listened. I told him I saw the change in Soviet relations with Eastern Europe and I knew we were so far less important we would expect change, too.”

With strong Soviet support, Hun Sen convinced Hanoi and Phnom Penh that the two governments should allow him to see Prince Sihanouk. On April 12, with some fanfare, Hun Sen invited Sihanouk to meet him in Paris, Stockholm, or Canberra.

Sihanouk said no.

A few weeks later, however, on May 7, Sihanouk resigned as president of the coalition against Phnom Penh for one year. From Beijing, the prince said he was fed up with “the bloody dictatorship of the SS Khmer Rouges who have remained true to the super-Hitlerian and super-Stalinist methods of Mr. Pol Pot.” Behind the hyperbole was a legitimate complaint that the Khmer Rouge had fought with his supporters along the Thai-Cambodian border. This was not the first time, however, but it was an appropriate moment for Sihanouk to break away from the restraints of the coalition to meet with Hun Sen.

In Moscow, Rogachev called in Cambodian Ambassador Hor Nam Hong to begin coordinating a meeting by sending him to Paris. “I was to organize a meeting by visiting Paris,” Hor Nam Hong said, partly the result of talks between Rogachev and Claude Martin.

The two diplomatic sponsors had met earlier in Moscow, after Rogachev's return from Phnom Penh. Martin was on his way to Beijing to see Sihanouk and stopped off in Moscow for a long talk in Rogachev's office. “We discussed the relationship between Prince Sihanouk and the Phnom Penh government. Claude Martin told me a lot about Prince Sihanouk—his approach—and I told him the nature of the Phnom Penh government.

“Of course, we were criticizing each other's friends. But each of us had in mind the prospect of a conversation between Sihanouk and Hun Sen,” said Rogachev.

It was the beginning of an oblique alliance between Rogachev and Martin. They had enough in common—a love for China, an obsession with finding peace in Cambodia, and the elite sensibility of diplomats from countries that mattered. Eventually Rogachev would call Martin “my friend, possibly a close friend.”

For his part, Martin says Prince Sihanouk told him he wanted a conversation with Hun Sen in the fall of 1986. Martin was back in Paris, newly in charge of Asia for the foreign ministry, and he discussed the notion with the Soviet and Vietnamese ambassadors in Paris. Then he helped Sihanouk arrange a visit to Paris at the end of 1986, but it was a failure.

“I organized a dinner for him with the foreign minister,” Martin related. “But the atmosphere was cold. Not much sympathy for Sihanouk. Sihanouk basically said he wanted to install himself in France and asked, ‘What is France prepared to do for me?'”

Not much then, but the next year, as the Soviets got engaged, Martin went into action and helped convince the French government to “install the prince in neutral France so that he could invite Hun Sen to come and see him. At lunch, comme ça.”

Cambodia was ready to take advantage of the moment. The country was coming back to life. The last Vietnamese offensives on the Thai border against the Khmer Rouge had restricted the fighting largely to western Cambodia. Even though insecurity and stagnation kept much of the countryside in poverty, state capitalism, and its attendant corruption, were beginning to take hold in the towns. Private trade was flourishing between Vietnam and Cambodia, and to a lesser degree between Cambodia and tradesmen from Singapore and Thailand who ignored their countries' political boycotts and brought in goods. The people were finally eating. Some of the old villas and commercial buildings in Phnom Penh were being rehabilitated and the capital was recapturing some of its old elegance.

There were the firm beginnings of education, thanks largely to Soviet aid and the foreign nongovernmental organizations that filled the gap left when their own countries blackballed Cambodia. These NGOs operated as miniembassies, dispensing timely information, lobbying in their home countries, and giving aid and technical assistance throughout the isolation of the 1980s.