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The Pain of Cambodia
| Article
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16542 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1989 |
1,870 Words |
| Author
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William J. Duiker
William J. Duiker is professor of East Asian history at
Pennsylvania State University. |
After several months of cautious optimism, observers of Cambodian affairs have been abruptly brought back to reality.
The peace conference in Paris opened at the end of July with high hopes, but it adjourned without accord. In the end, no firm date for reconvening the talks was set, and diplomatic sources predict a resumption of bitter fighting between the armed forces of the Phnom Penh government and those of the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK).
The buoyant atmosphere surrounding the opening of the peace talks had been the product of a number of recent events. First of all, Hanoi announced that all remaining Vietnamese occupation forces (estimated by observers at 50,000-60,000 troops) would be removed from Cambodia by the end of September. Secondly, CGDK President Prince Norodom Sihanouk declared in May that he had reached a tentative agreement with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen to serve as chief of state in a postwar government in Phnom Penh. And finally, growing pressure for a settlement emanated from Moscow and Washington. China, of course, has often been viewed as a major obstacle to a settlement, but even Beijing appeared more conciliatory in recent months, promising that it would reduce or eliminate its military assistance to the Khmer Rouge once all Vietnamese troops were withdrawn from Cambodia.
Heartened by such developments, the protagonists agreed to convene the international conference. Attending the talks, in addition to Vietnam and representatives from the ruling party, the People's Republic of Kampuchea (the PRK) and the CGDK, were the ASEAN states and the permanent members of the UN Security Council. Prior to the conference, delegates from the four Cambodian factions (the Khmer Rouge, the PRK, and the two noncommunist groups led by Son Sann and Sihanouk) agreed to meet separately to single out the key issues to be resolved at the conference.
At the preliminary meeting, the Cambodian factions agreed to sit as a single delegation at a rectangular table marked simply "Cambodia." Once the larger conference was underway, the participants quickly agreed to form committees to work on the key sources of dispute, while a separate "coordinating committee" would attempt to stimulate progress from the others and draft a final document.
When the plenary sessions resumed at the end of August, however, it was soon evident that none of the key issues had been resolved. Consequently the conference
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