When the War Was Over (92 page)

The two leaders agreed in principle on a phased withdrawal of all Vietnamese troops from Cambodia, the creation of a coalition government, and elections under international control. But they were far apart on the details of any of those ideas and failed to issue a communique.

At these talks Prince Ranariddh played a more visible role at the side of his father, even acting like Sihanouk, to whom he bears a striking resemblance. Ranariddh would pose on the elegant grand stairway waiting to brief the press about the stubborn disagreements between his father and Hun Sen. He challenged reporters in both English and French, with the temperamental charm and anger he either inherited or adopted from his father.

But the more Ranariddh tried to act like Sihanouk, the more obvious the differences between the two. Ranariddh left Cambodia when he was in his twenties and became a professor in France with no political experience in his home country. He had lived in exile ever since. Moreover, Sihanouk had left his mother for Princess Monique, who was extremely suspicious of Ranariddh. She preferred that her own son, a dancer, become Sihanouk's heir.

Also evident was the contrast between Ranariddh and Hun Sen. When Hun Sen referred to Sihanouk as his “father” he was not entirely off the mark. He was more exactly Sihanouk's political son—sharing the same huge ambitions, charm, and ruthless ability to survive—while Ranariddh was the royal progeny. In the face of this competition, Ranariddh began making an annoyance of himself. Martin, who should have been Ranariddh's natural ally, found himself complaining that “Ranariddh was always trying to complicate
things. Once he came to me and said ‘my father is too weak' and he then promised he would be tougher.”

Upon probing, Martin discovered that Ranariddh's version of toughness was a closer alliance with the Khmer Rouges—exactly what France did not want.

“Our game was always to convince Sihanouk to be neutral, to keep a position in the center without any connection to the resistance. You can't be in the resistance and also be the father of all the Cambodian people,” Martin said.

Ranariddh was arguing the contrary. And on February 28, 1988, Sihanouk returned as president of the resistance. “Slowly Ranariddh helped convince him,” Martin contends, having lost his side of the argument. Sihanouk left France and returned to China.

China's new foreign minister Qian Qichen seemed pleased to have Sihanouk firmly back in the fold, staying put in his palatial Beijing residence. Qian Qichen in fact warned the Soviet Union to “stop supporting Vietnam in the latter's aggression against Kampuchea and urge Vietnam to withdraw all of its troops from there,” a grating complaint considering the recent Soviet and Vietnamese concessions.

To Igor Rogachev, it sounded as if China had to keep all the factions in the resistance happy, including the Khmer Rouge. After the two rounds of talks in France, he said, Hun Sen was “very happy and very optimistic for prospects for peace. Mainly because they liked each other—Hun Sen and the prince liked each other.”

It was Rogachev's role to explain that since Sihanouk was only one side of the resistance, they had to figure out an approach to use with the other noncommunist Son Sann as well as the Khmer Rouge. The Soviet Union would start working on the United States.

In April Rogachev met Gaston J. Sigur, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs under President Reagan, for talks in advance of another Gorbachev-Reagan summit. But there was no change in the U.S. position—full support for ASEAN. “Mr. Sigur said the United States has very good friends in ASEAN. What they wanted, the U.S. supported.”

In June the Vietnamese withdrew its military high command from Cambodia with the promise that some 50,000 troops would be out by the end of the year.

That barely made news in the United States. Only a few members of Congress and American NGOs had kept up with the Cambodian issue. The Reagan administration continued to see it as a Vietnamese problem, requiring
full sanctions against Vietnam. And Congress, still largely influenced by Representative Solarz, saw the issue as supporting the non-communist members of the resistance.

As such Solarz increasingly became the target of NGO lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill. They argued for humanitarian aid for Cambodians in the PRK, not just those with the resistance, trying to convince Solarz and other members of Congress that their single focus on the non-communist resistance was standing in the way of a political settlement. Their argument got lost in Washington, however, where Cambodia—like so many other subjects—took on an entirely different cast than it did in debates in Paris, Moscow, or Bangkok.

The Reagan administration and most of Congress spoke as if American policy was built entirely around a firm condemnation of the Khmer Rouge. “I want to emphasize that the United States remains totally opposed to the Khmer Rouge,” Sigur said in testimony before Congress in July 1988. “We are appalled by their brutality and depravity and are committed to ensuring that they never again will be in a position to subject the Cambodian people to a repeat of the horrors of the past.”

He, like other administration officials, routinely refused to accept that American support of the coalition that contained these same Khmer Rouge amounted to support for that side of the war, and anything but absolute opposition. As Sigur told Rogachev, the United States was not about to change its policy of following the lead of ASEAN, or hiding behind it, as critics said.

Martin, however, had not given up the idea that France would hold a peace conference. He had convinced French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac to give the former Cambodian embassy in Paris to Sihanouk as a Christmas gift. Martin had spent much of the spring personally overseeing its refurbishing. He had even done the shopping to refurbish the lovely old building, buying curtains and linens that he knew would please the prince at a Parisian department store.

In June, after the French elections gave Mitterrand's socialist party full control of the government again, Martin went to Hanoi to discuss Cambodia with the foreign minister, Nguyen Co Thach. The new French foreign minister, Roland Dumas, had written Thach a letter asking that France and Vietnam begin to retrieve their good relations and work together toward a Cambodian settlement. Martin gave Thach the letter. “Thach responded with many kind words. He said Sihanouk had many friends in Hanoi.”
When Martin then pressed him to invite Sihanouk to Hanoi, Thach demurred. “He said ‘we have a nervous friend in Phnom Penh,' Hun Sen.”

Martin then went on to see Sihanouk in Thailand where he relayed his conversation with Thach. He found the prince upset. “Sihanouk was afraid the Thais had poisoned him, or someone had poisoned him. He was always afraid,” Martin said. The French diplomat patiently went over Sihanouk's concerns. He had become expert in the prince's foibles—how he refused to place a telephone call himself and listened in while others spoke for him, or how he tried not to eat dinner for fear it would increase his insomnia.

Martin reviewed with Sihanouk the options that lay ahead. “I didn't try to get him to break off with the Khmer Rouge,” Martin remembered. “I pushed him only to continue his dialogue with Hun Sen, to organize a Cambodian sharing of power with Hun Sen. I was convinced that if he did this, the Khmer Rouge had to fall in line.”

By now ASEAN was trying to take the lead. The Joint Informal Meetings were scheduled for late July, to be held in Bogor, Indonesia, with all four Cambodian factions meeting together one day, and Vietnam, Laos, and the countries of ASEAN meeting on their own.

Martin convinced Sihanouk to visit France before he went to Indonesia, and in Paris he was welcomed as a head of state. The new Prime Minister Michel Rocard promised that France would use its considerable influence to help find a solution that would put Sihanouk at the forefront. Then Sihanouk made his dramatic gesture and resigned again from the presidency of the coalition on July 10. This time, though, he said he was quitting because he feared the Khmer Rouge would start another “holocaust.” In a lengthy written interview Sihanouk said that he realized the Vietnamese were withdrawing from Cambodia and that he now believed that another Khmer Rouge holocaust “is becoming inevitable.”

“At the moment the Vietnamese danger begins to disappear, the mortal danger of the Khmer Rouge appears and manifests itself ignominiously before the eyes of the Khmer people,” he wrote in his most formal prose. Any country continuing to support the coalition that included the Khmer Rouge would have to accept “the entire responsibility for a new holocaust of the Cambodian people.”

Sihanouk then flew to Indonesia, where he was welcomed as the private guest of Indonesian President Suharto.

Nearly every delegation brought a new proposal of six or seven points with broad agreement on a few general issues. Hun Sen said, “it is progress that instead of confronting each other, we are now sitting in front of each other to
exchange views and stances.” That conciliatory note disappeared, though, when he berated his rivals for demanding more than the timetable he offered for withdrawal of all Vietnamese troops. “What does it mean if you demand that the Vietnamese troops withdraw, but allow the genocidal Pol Pot clique the possibility of returning to massacre the Cambodian people again?”

Prince Sihanouk spoke as a private citizen or more precisely as the father of Cambodia. After letting all the Cambodians have their say, he pulled out his detailed proposal for a political settlement through an international conference on Cambodia. It contained a list of sponsors for the conference as well as the design for a new Cambodian flag and lyrics for a new national anthem. This time around, the Khmer Rouge were the only ones to reject Sihanouk's proposal.

For the first time since 1979 the Khmer Rouge found themselves isolated. Even without a signed joint communique, Sihanouk and Hun Sen agreed to meet later that year, again in France.

Claude Martin and Igor Rogachev were pleased.

With the zeal of missionaries, both men had sought to undercut the Khmer Rouge to get over this next hurdle in the Cambodian peace negotiations. Now Rogachev could negotiate a new proposal with the Chinese, so he flew to Beijing on August 28 for several days of discussions with his Chinese counterpart, Tian Zhenbei. One strategy session lasted sixteen hours. “It had been a mistake from our side when we tried to create the image that there was no Cambodia problem,” Rogachev said. “Our rule had always been to say ‘no, that is not a problem' when China raised it. Now we decided to discuss Cambodia openly with China. We decided to set a goal: broaden our sphere of agreement, narrow our sphere of disagreement.”

In practical terms, that meant Rogachev had permission to act as a conduit between China and Vietnam, particularly on the thorny issue of the exact dates for the Vietnamese troop withdrawal from Cambodia.

“The Vietnamese had been discussing a withdrawal for a very long time. We brought the message to China because there were no direct channels. The Chinese put forward specific dates for a troop withdrawal,” Rogachev continued. “We also passed messages from the U.S. side concerning troop withdrawals with concrete, specific dates. But the Vietnamese made the final decision when to withdraw. There was no way they could not take into account the wishes of the other powers. In the end, their date coincided with the Chinese suggestions.”

The stage was now set for a true rapprochement between China and the Soviet Union. Rogachev was approaching his goal.

So, too, was Martin. That same month, on September 24, French President Mitterrand met with Sihanouk in Paris. The two leaders talked for forty-five minutes and agreed that France would convene an international conference on Cambodia. In the evening Foreign Minister Dumas held a working dinner with the prince to work out the details of a conference. Martin was relieved. France would be the host of a peace conference for its former colony, retain some influence in Southeast Asia, and hold on to its self-appointed role as a great power.

Events seemed to fall gently into place the rest of that year. At the United Nations General Assembly in the autumn the Cambodian seat was described as occupied by Cambodian forces under the leadership of Samdech Norodom Sihanouk. Hun Sen visited Eduard Shevardnadze in Moscow on his way to Paris, where he and Son Sann met with Sihanouk in the newly restored Cambodian embassy. In November the Chinese premier announced that all foreign aid to Cambodian factions should end after the Vietnamese troop withdrawal. In December 5o,ooo Vietnamese troops pulled out of Cambodia.

And also in December China's Foreign Minister Qian Qichen traveled to Moscow for discussions with Shevardnadze centering on Cambodia. Qian Qichen then spoke with Gorbachev, and they reached an agreement to hold a Sino-Soviet summit during the first half of 1989.

The new year of 1989 promised a breakthrough.