Asian Alliance Agrees to Join Cambodia Peace Talks

The six countries of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations, in a shift from their previous position, agreed Tuesday to attend talks on a political settlement of the Cambodian conflict.

“All the ASEAN countries will participate,” Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas told reporters here. “Only the level (of representation) is being debated.”

The non-Communist ASEAN group initially opposed taking part in the proposed talks, arguing that the 9 1/2-year-old war was a matter to be solved by Vietnam, the government it installed in Phnom Penh in early 1979, and three guerrilla factions opposing that regime.

Changing Climate

“We may draw some encouragement from the changing international climate,” Alatas had said in his opening remarks Sunday to an ASEAN ministerial meeting here. “. . . Indonesia believes that ASEAN should be alert and sensitive to these developments.” The developments include Vietnam’s accelerated troop withdrawal from Cambodia, with 50,000 of its more than 100,000 soldiers to be pulled out this year.

The talks, first proposed last year by Alatas’ predecessor, Mochtar Kusumaatmadja, will take place in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, beginning July 25. Calling them “something that has never happened before in nine years of war,” Alatas told a news conference Tuesday that they will be “informal, a preliminary attempt . . . not yet negotiations.”

Initially, the talks will take place between Premier Hun Sen of the Phnom Penh regime and the heads of the resistance groups--longtime Cambodian leader Prince Norodom Sihanouk, former Prime Minister Son Sann, who now heads the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front, and Khieu Samphan, a ranking official of the Khmer Rouge, which held power in Phnom Penh from 1975 to 1979.

The second stage would bring in Vietnam, the ASEAN countries and Laos, a Communist-ruled ally of Hanoi and Phnom Penh.

Eight-Point Plan

The talks “can proceed very quickly between the two stages, depending on the participants,” Alatas said. The resistance forces have put forward an eight-point plan for withdrawal of the Vietnamese occupation army and a political solution. Vietnam and Phnom Penh have offered no formula yet, although Hun Sen insists that his regime has no intention of being dismantled.

In the past week, Rafeeuddin Ahmed, a special envoy of U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, has been calling on key Southeast Asian capitals, but Alatas said the U.N. diplomat carried no specific peace plan.

Both sides are cautious, despite the apparent momentum toward some sort of solution. “The meeting in Jakarta will be a litmus test of Vietnam’s motives and sincerity,” declared Foreign Minister Suppiah Dhanabalan of Singapore, a hard-liner on the conflict.

“We should know whether Hanoi wants to seriously address the question of a negotiated political compromise, or whether it is part of its bag of tricks.”

U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz arrives in Bangkok today to confer with the ASEAN ministers.