Vietnam Pressing a Cambodian Peace Offensive : Hanoi Pledges Troop Cut, Will Attend July Meeting Seeking Political Solution

Beset by crippling problems at home, Vietnam is trying to put its best foot forward abroad, loosing a monthlong Cambodian peace offensive.

In Hanoi, Communist Party leader Nguyen Van Linh and other top officials are railing these days against economic mismanagement, party obstructionists and stalled food production.

“Only a radical renovation will take us out of recession, but how?” party propagandist Tran Trong Tan wrote recently in the newspaper Nhan Dan.

Out on the road, Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach has been bearing roses, meeting last weekend for the first time in two years with his Thai counterpart, Siddhi Savetsila, over steps to be taken toward a political settlement in Cambodia.

“Breakthrough in Peace Talks,” a headline in the Bangkok Post said.

Diplomats Cautious

But diplomats here were more cautious, looking for thorns among Thach’s roses.

“There are a lot of folks with short memories,” a regional diplomat said. “Don’t you recall Le Duc Tho talking peace and political settlements with Henry Kissinger in Paris?”

In the past month, however, Hanoi’s Cambodian diplomacy has overshadowed reports of its domestic disasters or memories of 1970s negotiating tactics:

-- In late May, Vietnam announced that it would withdraw from Cambodia 50,000 of the estimated 120,000 occupation troops it has there and would place half the remaining “volunteers” under the command of the Communist regime it installed in Phnom Penh in early 1979.

-- Last week, in his meetings with Siddhi, Thach declared that Vietnam would join informal “cocktail party” talks on a Cambodian political solution tentatively scheduled for late July in Jakarta, Indonesia.

“There is no doubt that I will be there,” Thach told reporters.

-- On Thursday, Do Muoi, newly named premier of Vietnam, told a session of the National Assembly in Hanoi that the Communist government will try to break out of international isolation by solving the Cambodian problem. “To widen cooperation, first of all, it is necessary to maintain peace and security,” Muoi said in a radio broadcast monitored in Bangkok. “Vietnam is striving to solve the Kampuchean (Cambodian) issue.”

A Gathering of Factions

The “cocktail party” was proposed last July by Mochtar Kusumaatmadja, then Indonesia’s foreign minister, and endorsed by Thach at a meeting in Ho Chi Minh City. The idea was to get the competing Cambodian factions together to explore steps toward a political settlement of Cambodia’s nearly 10-year-old guerrilla war.

“Only the Cambodians can solve their problems” was the diplomatic rallying cry. But the initial enthusiasm waned amid bickering between the feuding factions and outside parties over the degree of involvement required of Vietnam.

Hanoi took the position that it was not responsible for the war, while the Cambodian resistance and the vast majority of outside nations insisted that, to the contrary, Vietnam’s 1978 invasion and subsequent occupation was the prime cause and that Hanoi should be held accountable and participate fully in any peace talks.

Revived by Indonesia’s new foreign minister, Ali Alatas, the talks will follow the formula laid out by Mochtar in Ho Chi Minh City. The initial round will be limited to the Cambodians, with Vietnam and possibly Thailand joining later.

If it comes off, the conference will bring the Vietnamese face to face with their old nemesis, the Cambodian Communist Khmer Rouge, whose tyrannical rule was displaced by the Vietnamese invasion. The Khmer Rouge, still led by the infamous Pol Pot, is the bete noire of the Cambodian equation.

Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the longtime Cambodian leader and president now on self-imposed leave, describes the resistance Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, a paper alliance including the Khmer Rouge, as “a national resistance movement . . . credible as long as, parallel to its armed struggle, it fully respects the human dignity of its people.”

What he calls “Pol Potism” does not, he said.

Vietnam’s Foreign Minister Thach, assessing the Khmer Rouge and the prospects for peace on his visit here, said: “If you have the determination to disarm them and to prevent them (from returning to power), then it is very easy. Without such determination, it is very difficult.”

Besides Sihanouk’s followers and the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian factions include the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front, led by Son Sann, and the Vietnamese-installed regime headed by President Heng Samrin and Premier Hun Sen.

Hun Sen and Sihanouk held two rounds of inconclusive talks outside Paris last winter, but Sihanouk refused a third session, declaring Hun Sen a Vietnamese mouthpiece.

Still Called ‘Prince’

Hun Sen, for his part, still refers to Sihanouk as samdech , or prince; it is in his regime’s interest to woo Cambodia’s one-time leader in an attempt to fracture the resistance coalition.

If peace talks ever evolve to the point of national elections to establish a new government, diplomats agree, Sihanouk and Hun Sen will be the most popular candidates. But for now, Hanoi’s man does not anticipate an electoral free-for-all for power.

“We are not so naive or venturesome as to seek a solution which might lead to the abolishment of the regime and the state of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea,” he declared recently in an interview with a Vietnamese journal.

Both the Vietnamese and their Phnom Penh allies say no political deal can be struck with the Khmer Rouge unless the “Pol Pot clique” is removed.

An unconfirmed American press report said that China, the primary backer of the Khmer Rouge over the years, has offered Pol Pot asylum, and his faction is expected to be represented by the more acceptable Khieu Samphan at Jakarta. On Thursday, a Chinese government spokesman in Beijing branded the American report “irresponsible and groundless,” and denied that China planned to shelter Pol Pot.

But who speaks for the Khmer Rouge at a political meeting is of less importance than its guerrilla army in the struggle for Cambodia. Pol Pot’s forces remain the strongest resistance group. If the Vietnamese withdraw 50,000 troops this year and the remaining 70,000 by the end of 1990, as pledged, only Hun Sen and Hanoi profess to believe that the Khmer Rouge can be kept out of Phnom Penh.

By most accounts, the fighting in Cambodia remains at a hit-and-run level. But the powerful Vietnamese winter offensive of 1984-85, which smashed resistance camps along the Thai border, and the subsequent establishment of a defensive wall to deter infiltration, have not diminished Khmer Rouge activity.

Bangkok-based diplomats say that Pol Pot’s guerrillas are well armed, primarily by the Chinese, well funded and as ruthless in their tactics as they were in 1975, when they toppled the U.S.-backed Lon Nol regime in Phnom Penh. Repeated Vietnamese offensives have failed to dislodge the Khmer Rouge fighters from redoubts in the Cardamon Mountains near Thailand’s eastern border. In recent months, few days have passed without reports of a stray Vietnamese shell killing some Thai farmer and his water buffalo on this side of the frontier.

U.S., Soviet Role Suggested

“No doubt this is a big trial for the Kampuchean army and people,” Hun Sen said of this year’s planned Vietnamese withdrawal. The bigger test will come in 1990 if the Vietnamese withdraw their remaining troops before a political settlement is reached.

In their talks here, the Vietnamese and Thai foreign ministers suggested that any political deal would include the Soviet Union and the United States as guarantors, as in Afghanistan. China, seeking to improve its relations with both superpowers, might be expected to go along. But one diplomat here doubts that Beijing would forswear its support of the Khmer Rouge, for the Chinese have shown no inclination to make up with Hanoi.

“There is no change,” the diplomat said of China’s support for the Khmer Rouge. “It would be staggering if there was.”