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Cambodia

By Franklin FoerPosted Sunday, June 22, 1997, at 3:30 AM ET

Cambodia

By Franklin Foer
(840 words; posted Saturday, June 21)

An estimated 2 million Cambodians perished between 1975 and 1979 under the Maoist Khmer Rouge regime. This week, ailing Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot reportedly surrendered to a Khmer Rouge faction, signaling an end to his 18-year quest to regain power. Meanwhile, armed militias backed by the country's dueling prime ministers began sparring in the capital city of Phnom Penh, foreshadowing another civil war. How did the peaceful Cambodian kingdom become a killing field? What are the country's prospects for peace?
Colonized by France in 1863, Cambodia regained independence in 1953. Led by its king, Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia remained neutral, not aligning with either the United States or Communist North Vietnam. But Sihanouk's strategy began to unravel as the North Vietnamese established army sanctuaries just inside the Cambodian border: In the spring of 1969, the United States began secretly bombing these sanctuaries, ultimately dropping 540,000 tons of explosives. One year later, the CIA helped Cambodian army Gen. Lon Nol oust Sihanouk and, weeks later, U.S. troops invaded Cambodia in pursuit of the North Vietnamese bases.

Caught in the cross fire, the peaceful nation disintegrated into civil war. The China-allied Khmer Rouge, promising reconciliation with the Soviet-sponsored North Vietnamese, battled Lon Nol's government and finally deposed him in 1975. The movement's French-educated leaders, veterans of Parisian student radicalism, renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea and declared a revolutionary peasant's paradise. They rounded up millions of people, relocated them to collective farms, and murdered those whom they arbitrarily deemed unfit to work the land: intellectuals, critics of the regime, Vietnamese refugees, "beautiful" and "popular" people. Others starved to death.
The Cambodian genocide ended in 1979. The Vietnamese, alienated by the Khmer Rouge, invaded the country in December 1978 and installed a puppet government led by Hun Sen, a one-eyed former Khmer Rouge. Hun Sen's Communist government and the Vietnamese army battled the Khmer Rouge and Sihanouk's supporters, the FUNCINPEC Party, for a decade. When the beleaguered Soviets reduced aid to Vietnam in the late '80s, Vietnam withdrew its military support for Sen.

The 1991 Paris Agreement, brokered by China, the United States, and the Soviet Union, authorized the United Nations to disarm the Khmer Rouge, FUNCINPEC, and Sen's army, and to oversee democratic elections. The United Nations' $2 billion effort failed. Sen retained control of the army, while the Khmer Rouge refused to disarm or to participate in elections. When King Sihanouk's son, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, won the 1993 U.N.-run elections, Sen refused to relinquish power. King Sihanouk, who returned from exile and was reinstated as the country's figurehead, negotiated a power-sharing arrangement, making Sen and Ranariddh co-prime ministers until the next scheduled election, in 1998.
The power-sharing arrangement failed, too. Sen and Ranariddh have met only once in the last two years and no longer speak to each other. Both have amassed hundreds (perhaps thousands) of well-armed guards. And Sen boasts of having several dozen tanks, as well as the loyalty of the army and police. Also, a rash of political murders has claimed Sen's brother-in-law, a Ranariddh bodyguard, and two provincial FUNCINPEC leaders in the last year. Last week, police loyal to Sen surrounded Ranariddh's Phnom Penh fortress and exchanged automatic-weapon fire with the prince's bodyguards. The violence is expected to resume.
Both Sen and Ranariddh have personally helped themselves to Western aid, becoming two of the country's wealthiest men. With the government's blessing, the heroin trade also flourishes (Phnom Penh is nicknamed "Medellin on the Mekong").

According to the polls, the royalists will win the next election. But if the conflict turns bloody, the well-armed forces of Sen will have the upper hand. The wild card is the Khmer Rouge. Since August, thousands of Khmer Rouge--up to half of the total number--have laid down their arms in return for amnesty. But observers assume that these ex-Khmer Rouge have cached weapons to protect themselves in the event that shooting starts.
Pol Pot, 69, is no longer a political force. Many Cambodians have called for him to be put on trial, but such a trial is unlikely because it would implicate many higher-ups (in both Hun Sen's government and FUNCINPEC) who collaborated in the genocide.

Despite 13 percent growth in GDP last year, the disparities between Cambodia's urban rich and rural poor remain mammoth. The average life span is 49 years, one of the lowest in the world, and the literacy rate, 35 percent, is the lowest in Asia.
Western media, skeptical of Sen and Ranariddh, extol the virtues of Sam Rainsy, an investment banker and former FUNCINPEC official. Early this year, Rainsy founded the Khmer National Party, committed to free elections, governmental reform, and deregulation of the Cambodian economy. He has little popular support and no armed support. If the conflict between Sen and Ranariddh escalates, he will likely resume his alliance with FUNCINPEC. King Sihanouk, 74, still the government's figurehead, could leverage his prestige to play peacemaker. But rumors abound that he is clinically depressed, and that the current crisis has caused him to flee to China.

Links

Several groups devote themselves to compiling evidence of Pol Pot's atrocities. The most controversial and most interesting is Yale's Cambodian Genocide Program. It includes photographs, maps, and biographies of victims and perpetrators. Ben Kiernan, the project's head, is disdained by many scholars because he was outspokenly pro-Khmer Rouge during the 1970s. The Digital Archive of Cambodian Holocaust Survivors has harrowing firsthand accounts. Beauty and Darkness collects articles about Cambodia and links to a thorough, evenhanded history of the postcolonial era. For more on the current crisis, the Phnom Penh Post is superb.

Photograph by Chris Rainier/Corbis.