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Everyone's Playing the Cambodian Card
| Article
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16429 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1989 |
4,956 Words |
| Author
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Stephen J. Morris
Stephen J. Morris is a fellow at the Russian Research Center,
Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and associate
for International Affairs, Harvard. The views expressed in
this article are those of the author and do not reflect the
official policy or position of the U.S. Department of Defense
or the U.S. Navy. |
On the surface, an end to the 10-year war in Cambodia would now seem to be in sight. The three major external powers--the Soviet Union, China, and the United States--agree on the need to end the fighting and negotiate a political solution. But the ultimate issue in the war--the question of who holds political power in Cambodia--has yet to be resolved. The reason is that in spite of superpower goodwill, the two original players--the Vietnamese communists and the Khmer Rouge--are incapable of compromising on their incompatible political objectives. To understand why, we must first understand the origins of the war.
The Vietnamese communists had originally staked a claim to the political future of Cambodia back in 1930. In that year the Comintern functionary Nguyen Ai Quoc, who later changed his name to Ho Chi Minh, founded the Vietnamese Communist Party in Hong Kong. But after reviewing the founding documents, the Comintern ordered the name changed to the Indochinese Communist Party. This was in accordance with Comintern doctrine about the "internationalist" nature of world socialist revolution. The ethnically diverse peoples of French Indochina were to culminate their anticolonial struggle with a political federation of the three states--Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia--modeled on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
A protocommunist movement in Cambodia was founded by the Vietnamese at the end of the World War II, ostensibly to fight French colonialism. But as with the Vietnamese-created communist movement in neighboring Laos, it was staffed by people of ethnic Vietnamese ancestry. Thus even when the Indochinese Communist Party was formally dissolved in 1951 and replaced by three nominally independent parties--the Vietnam Workers Party, the Lao People's Revolutionary Party, and the Khmer People's Revolutionary Party--the hand of Hanoi was still apparent. Consequently, the Cambodian party had little success in recruiting ethnic Cambodians into its ranks.
The Geneva Conference of 1954, which ended French colonial rule in Indochina, recognized the royal government of Prince Nordom Sihanouk as the legitimate government of Cambodia. At the same time, it mandated the withdrawal of all the Vietnamese communist forces, including those occupying parts of Cambodia, to North Vietnam. Most of the tiny Cambodian communist party and army, known as the Khmer Vietminh, retreated with their Vietnamese patrons to Hanoi. There they undertook further political and military training, often marrying Vietnamese spouses. It was Hanoi's view that they should be held in reserve, waiting for the opportune moment when they could return to
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