$Unique_ID{COW00670}
$Pretitle{250}
$Title{Cambodia
Introduction}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Russell R. Ross}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{khmer
cambodia
rouge
sihanouk
vietnamese
cambodian
government
penh
phnom
regime}
$Date{1987}
$Log{Figure 1.*0067001.scf
}
Country:     Cambodia
Book:        Cambodia, A Country Study
Author:      Russell R. Ross
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1987

Introduction

[See Figure 1.: Administrative divisions of Cambodia]

     Although the land occupied by Cambodia has been populated for millennia,
the area's history was unrecorded until the Chinese chronicles of the early
Christian era. In the fewer than 2,000 years of its imperfectly documented
existence, the Cambodian state has evolved along the lines of ascension,
dominance, and retrogression inherent in all civilizations.

     Historians surmise that by the first century A.D. a small number of Khmer
(or Cambodian) states already existed on the fringes of the earliest recorded
state in the region, the empire of Funan. Centered in the Mekong Delta of
present-day Vietnam, Funan derived its power from commerce. With its port of
Oc Eo on the Gulf of Thailand, Funan was well-placed to control maritime
traffic between India and China. According to Chinese annals, Funan was a
highly developed and prosperous state with an extensive canal system for
transportation and irrigation, a fleet of naval vessels, a capital city with
brick buildings, and a writing system based on Sanskrit. The inhabitants,
whose adherence to Indian cultural institutions apparently coexisted with
Mahayana Buddhism, were organized into a highly stratified society.

     When the small Khmer states to the northwest of the Mekong Delta emerged
into recorded history, it was to make war upon the declining empire of Funan.
Between A.D. 550-650, these Khmer states overran their adversary, which fell
apart, losing its tributary states on the Kra Isthmus and along the Gulf of
Thailand.

     Chaos and economic decline followed the fall of Funan, but the sequence
of events over the next 500 years led to the ascension of the Cambodian state
and its evolution into an increasingly powerful and dynamic entity. The first
unified and distinctly Khmer polity to emerge after Funan was Chenla. It
absorbed the Indianized cultural legacy of its predecessor and established its
capital near the Tonle Sap (Great Lake), the heartland of Cambodia, then as
now. Under expansionist rulers, its authority was pushed into the territories
of present-day Thailand and Laos. The development of Chenla was not marked by
an unrelieved accretion of power, however. Divisive forces quickly resulted in
a split into Land (or Upper) Chenla and Water (or Lower) Chenla. Land Chenla
demonstrated the greater vitality, controlled some thirty provincial cities,
and sent emissaries to China under the Tang dynasty. Water Chenla slipped into
vassalage to Java.

     The historical ascension of the Khmer polity began during the early 800s.
The initiator of the period was the first empire builder, Jayavarman II (A.D.
802-50), who carved out a feudal state generally encompassing modern Cambodia.
Jayavarman revived the cult of Devaraja, an Indianized cultural institution
that was intended to confer, through elaborate rituals and symbols, heavenly
approbation or even divine status upon the ruler. Following the reign of
Jayavarman II, the two Chenlas were reunited peacefully, and the Khmer polity
continued to develop, establishing over time a priestly hierarchy, an armed
force and police, a provincial administration of subordinate officials, a
system of courts, corvee labor by the peasants, and a capital on the site of
Angkor near the Tonle Sap.

     The Khmer state reached its apogee in the Angkorian period--also called
the empire of Angkor--during the period from the eleventh century to the
thirteenth century, when it was ruled by a succession of able monarchs. The
last great monarch of the Angkorian period was Jayavarman VII (1181-ca. 1218).
He reversed the Cham encroachments that had taken place after the death of
Suryavarman II (1113-50) and carried the war to the enemy, conquering Champa
itself and briefly reducing it to a Khmer vassal state. At its greatest
extent, the Angkorian empire of Jayavarman VII encompassed not only Champa on
the coast of southern Vietnam but also extended north to the vicinity of
Vientiane in present- day Laos and south to include the small trading
city-states of the Malay Peninsula. Jayavarman continued the public works
program of his predecessors, uniting his realm by elevated military causeways
with resthouses at intervals. He also built hospitals for the aged and the
infirm and sponsored the construction of Angkor Thom and the Bayon, the last
major temples of Angkorian times and splendid edifices in their own right, but
presaging the decadence that shortly set in (see The Angkorian Period, ch. 1).

     Jayavarman VII's wars and public works exacted a heavy toll on the
finances and the human labor force of the Angkorian empire. The drain of
resources coincided with the gradual intrusion of Theravada Buddhism, with its
egalitarian focus, at the expense of the Indianized cults that stressed a
hierarchical, stratified society (see Buddhism, ch. 2). Whether it was this
development or the inability of the Khmer monarchs to command the fealty of
their subjects that led to a societal breakdown remains open to conjecture.
Also coupled with these internal developments was the accelerated southward
migration of the Thai, who, dislodged from their state in southwestern China
by the Mongols in the mid-1200s, flooded into the Menam Chao Phraya Valley.
Subject to internal and external pressures, the Khmer state became unable to
defend itself at the very time its enemies were growing stronger. Thai attacks
were stepped up around 1350, and they continued until Angkor itself was
captured and sacked in 1430-31. The fall of Angkor ended the dominant period
of the Khmer state. Thereafter, its borders shrank, and it controlled little
more than the area around the Tonle Sap, the alluvial plain to the southeast,
and some territory west of the Mekong River. To the east, the collapse of the
kingdom of Champa in 1471 opened the Khmer lands of the Mekong Delta to the
steady Vietnamese expansion southward.

     The long waning of the Cambodian empire after the fall of Angkor is not
well documented. The transfer of the capital from the Angkorian region around
the Tonle Sap to the vicinity of Phnom Penh may have heralded the shift of
emphasis from an agricultural to a trading society. Even with this change, the
Khmer state retained some of its vitality into the seventeenth century,
alternately trading and warring with its neighbors. By the eighteenth century,
however, it had become a backwater buffer state, existing solely on the
sufferance of its increasingly powerful neighbors, Thailand and Vietnam. The
imposition of the French protectorate upon Cambodia prevented its neighbors
from swallowing it completely.

     Cambodia's status declined further under the French, however, when the
last vestiges of its sovereignty were lost, especially after 1884, when Paris
imposed another unequal treaty that went beyond the original protectorate of
1863. The newer pact limited the authority of the king, abolished slavery,
stationed colonial officials in the countryside, and codified land ownership.
Reaction to the 1884 treaty produced the only sustained rebellion during
colonial times. Unrest persisted until 1886 and was put down with troops from
Vietnam (see The French Protectorate, ch. 1). Thereafter, the French
consolidated their grasp on the country, and Cambodia became merely a heavily
taxed, efficient rice-producing colony, the inhabitants of which were known
for their passivity.

     As the Southeast Asian colonies of the European powers stood on the brink
of World War II in 1940 and 1941, the utter powerlessness of Cambodia was
illustrated by the fact that it was compelled to surrender its provinces of
Siemreab and Batdambang (Battambang), which included some of the country's
most fertile agricultural area, to Thailand, as a result of the brief
Franco-Siamese War. In addition, some months later it was the French, not the
Cambodians, who selected the candidate who would sit on the throne in Phnom
Penh. Their choice was the young Prince Norodom Sihanouk, because French
officials considered him more manipulable than the heir apparent. (Sihanouk
was then a shy youth, well-disposed toward his role as figurehead monarch, and
totally inexperienced in governing. His formidable international reputation
lay far in the future.)

     In March 1945, the Japanese swept aside the Vichy French administration
in Cambodia (as elsewhere in Indochina), and they induced the young king to
proclaim independence. The event offered little occasion for euphoria,
however. The Japanese remained in control, and then, after the Japanese
surrender, the French returned to reimpose their authority, granting the
Cambodians, as consolation prizes in early 1946, the right to have a
constitution and the right to form political parties.

     In the late 1940s and the early 1950s, the struggle for independence in
Cambodia took place on several levels. Two political parties were formed under
princes of the royal house. The Liberal Party, the more conservative of the
two, advocated an evolutionary approach to independence. The Democratic Party,
the more radical one, favored the rapid attainment of independence and the
formation of whatever political alliances might be necessary. Underground,
Cambodian guerrillas took to the jungles to fight the returning French. The
Khmer Issarak (see Appendix B), as these guerrillas were called, encompassed
disaffected Cambodians from across the entire political spectrum. Meanwhile,
the French managed to secure the return of Cambodia's two provinces lost to
Thailand in 1941. In 1949, under increasing military pressure from the Viet
Minh (see Appendix B) in neighboring Vietnam, the French granted Cambodia
qualified self-government in certain areas and an autonomous zone in
Batdambang and Siemreab.

     Sihanouk continued the political struggle above ground, embarking upon a
campaign for independence. Using a combination of private and public
initiatives and grandiose gestures, he exacted grudging concessions from a
French government increasingly hard-pressed in Indochina by its war against
the Viet Minh. In November 1953, Sihanouk announced dramatically that
independence had been gained, and he returned triumphantly from Paris to Phnom
Penh.

     Sihanouk quickly emerged as a leader of stature in his newly independent
country. In an effort to gain a freer hand in the politics of his nation, a
role he was not permitted to play as the ruler in a constitutional monarchy,
he abdicated the throne in 1955 and formed a political movement, the People's
Socialist Community (Sangkum Riastre Niyum, or Sangkum). With control of the
Sangkum, Sihanouk succeeded in having himself named both chief of state and
head of government. For nearly sixteen years, from 1954 to 1970, he dominated
Cambodian politics and ruled at the head of a highly authoritarian and
centralized government.

     In the countryside, Sihanouk kept the support of the people through his
charismatic personality, his highly visible personal forays among the rural
peasantry, and his adherence to the traditional symbols and institutions of
the Khmer monarchy, such as public audiences and participation in time-
honored ceremonies. Among the politicized urban elite, Sihanouk maintained
power and kept his opponents off-balance through a range of manipulative
stratagems, pitting them against one another when he could and co-opting them
with government positions when he could not.

     In spite of Sihanouk's efforts, the situation in Cambodia began to go
awry in the mid- to late 1960s. Internally, the country had been savaged by
economic reverses. The budget was chronically in deficit; United States aid
had been terminated; and state socialism had stifled development (see
Sihanouk's Peacetime Economy 1953-70, ch. 3). Prices for Cambodia's export
commodities--rice and rubber--were declining. Numerous members of the
youthful, educated elite were underemployed and dissatisfied. Among the
politicized middle class, the military leadership, the intellectuals, and the
students, opposition was developing to Sihanouk's authoritarianism. In the
countryside, heavy taxation had ignited the shortlived Samlot Rebellion in
BatdambangnProvince. Although suppressed ruthlessly, it refused to die out,
and smoldered on in remote corners of Cambodia. Disaffected elements still
were at large, and some of the country remained insecure. The radical wing of
the Kampuchean (or Khmer) Communist Party, (KCP--see Appendix B), led by
Saloth Sar (later to be known as Pol Pot), had gone underground and had taken
up arms, unleashing its own insurgency against the Sihanouk regime. In the
northeast, minority ethnic groups were alienated from the government in Phnom
Penh because of its corvee labor, forced resettlement, and assimilationist
policies (see Cambodia under Sihanouk, 1954-70, ch. 1).

     Internationally, the picture was not much better. Sihanouk tried to
maintain a nonaligned course in the country's foreign policy. During its first
decade of independence, Cambodia had received aid from East and from West, and
it was respected internationally. In the mid- to late 1960s, however, this
neutrality was fast eroding, and Cambodia was about to be engulfed by the war
in neighboring Vietnam. The country rapidly was becoming a logistical rear
area and a safe haven for North Vietnamese and Viet Cong (see Appendix B)
forces fighting the Saigon government. Cambodia was exposed to cross-border
forays and airstrikes from South Vietnam to neutralize these enemy
installations. The Cambodian port of Kampong Saom also was becoming the
terminus for Chinese weapons and supplies that were then trucked, sometimes in
Cambodian army vehicles, overland to North Vietnamese and Viet Cong supply
depots.

     Sihanouk sought to adjust to the prevailing trends in Indochina. He
sought to distance Cambodia from South Vietnam and accepted accommodation with
North Vietnam and with the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam
(NFLSVN--see Appendix B), the political arm of the Viet Cong. He broke
relations with Washington, looked for support to Beijing--which was then
distracted by its Cultural Revolution, and then resumed ties with Washington.

     Events in Cambodia were moving out of control, however. When Sihanouk
went abroad for a lengthy sojourn in January 1970 to solicit Soviet and
Chinese assistance in curbing the presence of North Vietnamese sanctuaries on
Cambodian territory, domestic opposition to his regime became more outspoken
and soon acquired a momentum of its own. The entire Cambodian National
Assembly, led by a rightist cabinet under Premier Lon Nol, voted on March 22
to bar the return of Sihanouk to the country. Cambodia's first
post-independence era thus ended, and the country soon was plunged into a
period of war, chaos, and human suffering perhaps unparalleled in its history.

     The Lon Nol government that succeeded the fall of Sihanouk quickly
abolished the monarchy and proclaimed itself the Khmer Republic (see Appendix
B). It initially enjoyed wide support among the urban population, but it soon
proved itself unequal to the tasks of governing and defending the country and
capturing the allegiance of the Cambodian masses. The new government in Phnom
Penh began by fanning anti-Vietnamese sentiment among the Khmer population, as
a result of which countless numbers of civilian Vietnamese migrants in
Cambodia were massacred. The government then turned against the North
Vietnamese and the Viet Cong by calling publicly for their ouster from
Cambodia and by initiating ineffectual military operations against them.
Shortly thereafter, an offensive military thrust of the United States and
South Vietnam into Cambodia dislodged North Vietnamese and Viet Cong units
from their border sanctuaries; instead of driving them away from Cambodian
territory, however, it pushed them deeper into the country, where they soon
swept before them the ill-trained, ill-armed, and totally inexperienced
Cambodian republican forces.

     At the same time, two concurrent developments conspired to erode further
the shaky position of the Khmer Republic. The first was that Sihanouk
established a government-in-exile in Beijing, where he had fled following his
ouster. There, he raised the standard of revolt against the republican regime
in Phnom Penh, and he united in a common front with the armed Khmer communist
rebels. Both sides saw the advantages to such an alliance of convenience. The
Cambodian communists, dubbed the Khmer Rouge (see Appendix B) by Sihanouk, had
ignited a small-scale insurgency in early 1968, but they had not been able to
move beyond their redoubts in remote corners of Cambodia or to gain mass
support in their first two years. Their alliance with Sihanouk, in a broad
resistance front called the National United Front of Kampuchea (Front Uni
National du Kampuchea--FUNK--see Appendix B), transformed their forlorn
rebellion, which was aided by Washington, into a war of national liberation
against a puppet regime in Phnom Penh. At the same time, Sihanouk's name
attracted to the FUNK cause Cambodians of every political persuasion,
including many people without communist antecedents.

     The second development, one with equally serious consequences for the
Khmer Republic, was that the North Vietnamese quickly undertook the training
of the Khmer Rouge guerrillas to transform them into a conventional fighting
force. While this training program was underway, North Vietnamese units
temporarily assumed the burden of keeping the Khmer republican forces at bay,
an effort that did not tax them unduly. By 1973 the Khmer Rouge were
conducting most combat operations against the Phnom Penh government by
themselves.

     The ill-fated Khmer Republic was unable to defend itself. By 1971 it was
on the defensive, and it was losing ground steadily. Fleeing the fighting in
the countryside, peasant refugees crowded into the government's shrinking
strongholds around Phnom Penh and the provincial centers. Lon Nol's inept and
corrupt regime went from one military defeat to another. By early 1975, the
situation of the Khmer Republic was so precarious that Phnom Penh itself was
invaded, and government control was limited to the provincial centers and to a
patch of territory in western Cambodia around the Tonle Sap. In the following
months, the Khmer Rouge steadily tightened the noose around the capital until
all escape routes were cut off, and resistance collapsed. The fall of Phnom
Penh in April 1975 marked the end of the Khmer Republic (see The Fall of Phnom
Penh, ch. 1).

     For the Cambodian people, the entry of the Khmer Rouge into the capital
began the grimmest period in Cambodia's long history. The Khmer Rouge rulers
of Democratic Kampuchea, as the regime that supplanted the Khmer Republic was
called, envisioned a totally self-sufficient Cambodia. This self-sufficiency
was to be achieved by accelerated agricultural production, which in turn would
provide the wherewithal to develop the other sectors of the economy.

     Self-sufficiency, however, was pursued with such single-minded
ruthlessness that between 1 million and 3 million persons died because of
purges, beatings, malnourishment, and overwork. To head off opposition to
economic and social restructuring, the new regime hunted down and executed
virtually anyone who had served the former government. The regime emptied the
cities of inhabitants and forced the entire population into rudimentary, badly
organized collectives in the countryside; untold numbers died, worked to death
under slave labor conditions or executed for minor infractions of camp
discipline. At the same time, the regime nurtured an acute paranoia that
brooked no potential opposition but that prompted it to eradicate the educated
middle class of Cambodia. When this eradication was accomplished, it turned on
its own cadres at every echelon, torturing and executing thousands (see
Revolutionary Terror, ch. 1). The regime's ruthless extermination of
opponents, however, could not ensure its security; ultimately its own paranoia
brought it down.

     Regionally, the Khmer Rouge paranoia manifested itself in the
exacerbation of tensions with Vietnam. During the war against the United
States and its allies, commonalities of enemy and of ideology had enabled the
Vietnamese and the Cambodians to bridge their mutual distrust. After April
1975, however, with the xenophobic Pol Pot factions of the KCP in control in
Phnom Penh, the traditional Cambodian antipathy for the Vietnamese reemerged.
The source of the friction was the recurrent cross-border forays by combatants
from both sides into the Mekong Delta and the Parrot's Beak area. The Khmer
Rouge regime viewed itself as threatened, its territory violated by Vietnam.
Hanoi in turn felt compelled to deploy substantial military assets along the
border, as fighting continued to erupt on both sides of the frontier. By
mid-1978 Hanoi's patience was rapidly running out, as it became obliged to
commit division-sized units to pacification missions along the Cambodian
border.

     Sometime in the fall of 1978, the leadership in Hanoi decided to mount a
multi-division punitive expedition into Cambodia. To lend a veneer of
political legitimacy to this military undertaking, Hanoi sponsored the
establishment of an anti-Pol Pot movement called the Kampuchean (or Khmer)
National United Front for National Salvation (KNUFNS--see Appendix B), made up
of fugitive Cambodians who had fled the Khmer Rouge. Accompanied by token
KNUFNS units, the Vietnamese launched their military campaign into Cambodia in
late December 1978 (see Vietnamese Invasion of Cambodia, ch. 5). The Khmer
Rouge proved surprisingly vulnerable to the onslaught, and Phnom Penh fell to
Hanoi's forces in early January 1979. The Khmer Rouge, defeated militarily for
the time being, but not destroyed, ignited a persistent insurgency in the
remote regions of Cambodia. The country then embarked upon a decade- long
period of fitful rehabilitation, made more precarious by the lack of
resources, the enduring guerilla war, and the military occupation by Vietnam.

     It was evident that the institutions of the new Cambodian regime, which
called itself the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK--see Appendix B), were
virtually identical to those of Vietnam. In the PRK, only a single,
pro-Vietnamese political party was permitted. This party, the Kampuchean (or
Khmer) People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP--see Appendix B), was headed by a
political bureau with a secretariat and a general secretary in charge. It also
had a central committee with a control commission to handle day-by-day affairs
(see The Kampuchean, or Khmer, People's Revolutionary Party, ch. 4). The party
was backed by a mass movement-- the successor to KNUFNS, the Kampuchean (or
Khmer) United Front for National Construction and Defense (KUFNCD--see
Appendix B) and by a number of front organizations such as labor, women's, and
youth groups. As in Vietnam, party and government were intertwined: the same
individuals held concurrent leadership positions in both sectors. The Council
of State was the highest government body; it reserved to itself the major
decision-making authority. A Council of Ministers exercised cabinet functions
and was responsible to a National Assembly elected from KPRP members. The
National Assembly heard reports from ministers and from the rest of national
leadership, but appeared to exercise little legislative authority (see
Government Structure, ch. 4).

     Cambodian rehabilitation and development were hampered by the civil war
that plagued the country after the ouster of the Khmer Rouge. When the
Vietnamese drove Pol Pot from power in their December 1978 invasion, they
failed to administer the coup de grace to their adversaries, who regrouped
their forces and initiated a guerrilla war against Hanoi's occupation forces.
Despite their odious reputation and their abominable human rights record, the
Khmer Rouge were able to attract guerrilla recruits to their ranks. The Khmer
Rouge applied the same coercive measures in the remote areas of Cambodia under
their control as those they had used when they ruled all of Cambodia, and they
cast themselves as the sole nationalistic force opposing the Vietnamese
occupation of Cambodia. In terms of the number of combatants they could
muster, the Khmer Rouge, throughout the decade-long civil war, continued to be
the largest single guerrilla force in the field.

     For many Cambodians, however, the option of joining either the Khmer
Rouge or the Vietnamese-installed regime was a Hobson's choice. Consequently,
soon after Hanoi's invasion, two additional insurgent movements arose among
the Khmer refugees who had fled both Hanoi's and Pol Pot's forces. One of
these movements coalesced around the elderly nationalistic figure of Son Sann,
a cabinet minister under Sihanouk. Son Sann's movement took the name Khmer
People's National Liberation Front (KPNLF--see Appendix B), and its armed wing
was called the Khmer People's National Liberation Armed Forces (KPNLAF--see
Appendix B). In the meantime, a third insurgent force rallied under Sihanouk
and his son Prince Norodom Ranariddh. Sihanouk's political movement was called
for the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful, and
Cooperative Cambodia (Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Independent, Neutre,
Pacifique, et Cooperatif--FUNCINPEC--see Appendix B), and his armed wing, the
Sihanouk National Army (Armee Nationale Sihanoukiste--ANS--see Appendix B).

     The three insurgent forces maintained their own separate structures; they
initiated their own guerrilla campaigns against the PRK regime in Phnom Penh
and its Vietnamese mentors. After several years of sustained pressure from the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to form a unified front against
the Vietnamese occupiers, the Khmer insurgent movements came together in an
uneasy union, the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK--see
Appendix B), in mid- 1982. Sihanouk was chosen president of the CGDK; during
the succeeding years, he launched an unending series of attempts to bring
reconciliation to his divided country and to achieve some power-sharing
arrangement agreeable to all four warring Khmer factions. Although the methods
for achieving peace in Cambodia remained in dispute, there was agreement that
the Vietnamese occupation forces must depart and that the Khmer Rouge must
never again reimpose its brutal rule over Cambodia.

     Cambodia's civil war had an international dimension as well. Arrayed on
one side were the PRK, its Vietnamese allies who did much of the fighting,
and, by proxy, the Soviet Union. Arrayed on the other side were the CGDK, its
ASEAN supporters, and China. Vietnam was involved because it had placed the
PRK in power and because it feared being caught between a hostile China and a
pro-Chinese Khmer Rouge regime. The Soviet Union was involved because of its
treaty relationship with Hanoi and because it provided much of the military
hardware used by the PRK and by the Vietnamese. ASEAN was involved because it
feared a heavily armed, expansionist Vietnamese state, which might not stop at
conquest of the Indochinese Peninsula. China was involved and became the chief
supporter of the Khmer Rouge faction in the CGDK because it saw the PRK and
Vietnam as two more links in the chain of Soviet client states being forged
around it.

     As the 1980s closed, there were hopeful signs that the situation in
Cambodia might not be as intractable as it had seemed in previous years. For
example, the international environment had changed considerably. Soviet
withdrawals from Afghanistan and Mongolia, as well as the renewed dialogue
between Moscow and Beijing, culminating in a Sino- Soviet summit in May 1989,
allowed to some extent Beijing's fears of encirclement by client states of
Moscow. China itself stepped back from its support of the Khmer Rouge regime
of Democratic Kampuchea s the sole legitimate government of Cambodia, and
seemingly accepted the Vietnamese-installed Phnom Penh regime as a partner in
any postwar government. The United States continued to oppose the return of
the Khmer Rouge to a position of dominance in a future government, but
appeared to acquiesce in a power-sharing arrangement between the Phnom Penh
regime and the non-communist resistance. Vietnam stepped up the pace of its
troop withdrawal from Cambodia, ending its decade of occupation in September
1989--a year ahead of time.

     Among the four competing Khmer factions who remained at an impasse over
power--sharing in a post-occupation Cambodia, informal meetings in Jakarta in
February and May 1989 produced a useful dialogue, but little agreement on
matters of substance. The PRK, in an effort to attract the support of Prince
Sihanouk and the non-communist resistance and to isolate the Khmer Rouge,
amended the Constitution and changed the name of the country, the flag, and
the national anthem in April 1989. The amended Constitution, however, upheld
the dominant position of the incumbent Kampuchean, or Khmer, People's
Revolutionary Party, and made no provision for the establishment of a
multi-party system in the newly named State of Cambodia. As a result of these
cosmetic gestures, plus a series of meetings between Prince Sihanouk and Prime
Minister Hun Sen, as well as conciliatory utterances by Khmer Rouge leaders,
the differences among all sides seem to have narrowed, and the hopes for a
successful resolution of the Cambodian situation seemed to have progressed
sufficiently for the French government to convene the Paris International
Conference on Cambodia from July 30 to August 30, 1989.

     The optimism on the eve of the conference--attended by nineteen countries
including the United States, as well as the UN Secretary General and the four
rival Cambodian factions, proved to be ill-founded. The forum expired amid the
intransigence of the Khmer factions on five basic issues: verification of the
Vietnamese troop withdrawal; establishment of provisions for a ceasefire in
the fighting; determination of the status of Vietnamese residents in Cambodia;
official characterization of the Khmer Rouge period as a genocide; and the
establishment of a power-sharing arrangement among the four factions. The
latter issue proved to be the major stumbling block. The non- communist
resistance headed by Prince Sihanouk lobbied for the inclusion of the Khmer
Rouge on the grounds that they already exercised a decisive presence in
Cambodian affairs and that their exclusion from a future government would lead
inevitably to a civil war between them and the coalition that opposed them.
The Phnom Penh regime countered that to include the Khmer Rouge in a postwar
government would lead to a repetition of the cruelty and repression they
wrought during the Democratic Kampuchea period. Thus, the impasse continued,
and the failure of the Paris conference brought negotiations to an end for the
time being. The State of Cambodia, in a preliminary fashion, however, cast
about for a renewal of the dialogue by reconvening informal talks in Jakarta.

     In the meantime, pessimistic forecasts of a civil war in Cambodia
following the Paris conference, the Vietnamese troop withdrawal, and the end
of the dry season, seemed to be borne out. On the western frontier with
Thailand, Khmer resistance forces took to the field with renewed
aggressiveness, capturing in succession a number of border towns. The
single-minded purposefulness of the Khmer Rouge in the rebel offensive came as
no surprise. What astonished foreign observers, however, was the unexpected
combativeness of the Khmer People's National Liberation Armed Forces, which in
previous years had been reduced to ineffectuality by the bickering of its
leaders. As this book goes to press, the Thai- Cambodian border remains in
turmoil, with the Phnom Penh regime in a defensive posture--increasingly
hard-pressed to contain rebel actions and confronting increased speculation
from foreign observers as to whether it can hold its own or indeed survive
without outside help.

December 28, 1989/Russell R. Ross and Andrea Matles Savada