By Allen Myers
PHNOM PENH — US Cambodian scholar Michael Vickery ruffled a few feathers at a seminar here on November 28 when he referred to the United Nations project in this country as "the Nicaragua- isation of Cambodia".
The comparison is illuminating. There is much in the current situation that recalls the US campaign of destabilisation and proxy warfare that eventually resulted in the 1990 electoral defeat of the Sandinistas.
As in Nicaragua, in Cambodia a government detested by Washington has been under sustained military attack and has agreed, in order to obtain peace, to conduct elections under conditions that provide significant advantages to the opposition.
Even more than in Nicaragua, the Cambodian opposition appears awash with funds, while the government of the Cambodian People's Party (CPP) has a budget deficit of around 50% of total expenditure.
One-sided
The October 1991 Paris peace accords, as actually enforced by the UN, must rank among the most one-sided agreements in the history of diplomacy. At the time, the government controlled 90-95% of the country's population and nearly all of its territory. Only strips of land along the Thai border and sparsely inhabited mountainous areas were controlled or contested by the Khmer Rouge and its allies — Prince Norodom Sihanouk's FUNCINPEC (Front Uni National Pour un Cambodge Independent, Neutre, Pacificque, et Cooperatif), which may have had more letters in its name than fighters under arms, and the equally token forces of the Khmer People's National Liberation Front (KPNLF), let by 1960's has-been Son Sann.
UN implementation of the accords turns the military and political relationship of forces upside down. Every government concession in the accords — and more — is enforced by UNTAC (United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia), while the Khmer Rouge has been allowed to thumb its nose at every single commitment.
Contrary to the 1991 agreement, UNTAC forces are simple barred from Khmer Rouge territory, which as gradually been expanded. UNTAC is even prepared to risk lives — not its own — to maintain the fiction that the Khmer Rouge is part of a "peace process". Civilian UN volunteers are being sent into Khmer Rouge areas to register votes, although registration was supposed to have been preceded by disarmament, which has not occurred. On November 25 three volunteers north-west of Siem Reap were wounded in a Khmer Rouge ambush.
The refusal of the UN Security Council to enforce the peace accord does not mean that a Khmer Rouge return to power is favoured by any of the five permanent members — with the possible exception of China ld be its result. Rather, Washington and its allies are using the Khmer Rouge to maintain the pressure for concessions on the Cambodian government and to blackmail voters in the May election with the idea that peace is impossible while the CPP remains in government.
The aim is an electoral victory for FUNCINPEC, possibly in alliance with the KPNLF or the Liberal Democratic Party, a split from the latter. These are busy trying to pose as "moderates" between the CPP and the Khmer Rouge, despite their record of a decade as little more than a front for the KR. FUNCINPEC in particular is cynically hoping to obtain a large vote from peasants, who are being reminded that the country hasn't known peace since Sihanouk was overthrown in 1970.
(The 1970 coup against Sihanouk by Lon Nol was part of the US strategy in the Vietnam War. It was soon followed by US Air Force saturation bombing of the Cambodian peasantry, which killed an estimated 600,000 people and contributed massively to the 1975 victory of the Khmer Rouge. US imperialism may succeed in bringing back Sihanouk; unfortunately there is not way to undo the destruction of Cambodia or bring back the several million lost Cambodian lives.)
Officially, Sihanouk is supposed to be non-factional and hence no longer head of FUNCINPEC. However, his son Ranariddh is now its head, and the party pushes itself as "Sihanoukist", in violation of the agreement by which Sihanouk became head of the Supreme National Council.
Protecting rightists
Under UNTAC protection, FUNCINPEC and KPNLF operate freely throughout Cambodia (except in zones controlled by the Khmer Rouge, which has always been fairly openly contemptuous of its allies). It appears that the CPP may soon be allowed to open its first office in a KPNLF zone, and that there are not such offices by these factions was taken over by the Khmer Rouge when the factions ceased military operations in accordance with the peace agreement.
UNTAC is particularly free in baptising as "human rights" anything that undermines the CPP. UNTAC, the KR and its allies claim that the State of Cambodia is merely one of four "factions". Yet UNTAC insists that government "faction" radio and television provide air time as a "human right" to opposition parties (which do not give time to the CPP on their own radio stations). Things even reached the point that an UNTAC official demanded to sit in on staff meetings and help decide editorial content of the official CPP newspaper, Pracheachun.
On the other hand, at an "International Symposium for Human Rights in Cambodia" organised here by UNTAC on November 30, Australian scholar Ben Kiernan was prevented from distributing leaflets describing the crimes of Khmer Rouge leaders.
UNTAC chief Yasushi Akashi gave the opening address, and the deputy head of the UNTAC Human RIghts Component told Kiernan that Akashi s" with the leaflet, which used such undiplomatic terms as "genocide". And so a gaggle of international guests flown in for the occasion began a 2 1/2 day workshop on "Human Rights in Cambodia" without directly referring to the murder of 1-1.5 million people.