Cambodia: Baring the Differences

Nobody walked out: That may be the real achievement of the so-called “cocktail party” that brought together, face to face, all the parties to the Cambodian crisis in an Indonesian palace. Thanks to the nimble diplomatic skills of Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas, the representatives of three Cambodian guerrilla factions that have fought the powerful Vietnamese army to a standstill managed to hold their tempers and their tongues long enough to discuss Cambodia’s future with envoys from Hanoi and from the puppet government that Vietnam installed in Phnom Penh. They produced no communique and precious little consensus about how to bring peace to beleaguered Cambodia, but at the very least they bared all their differences.

Those differences seem every bit as formidable as they were in late 1978, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia to oust the murderous Khmer Rouge regime, which had killed more than a million Cambodians in four years and had made endless trouble for its neighbors. Vietnam, with its own economy now in a shambles, wants to cut its losses, withdraw its 100,000-man occupation army from Cambodia by 1990 and leave in place the government that Vietnam hand-picked for Cambodia. The three resistance factions, regarding officials of that government as collaborators, insist that Vietnam cannot dictate Cambodia’s future and doubt that it will ever fully disengage. Whatever Vietnam’s ultimate designs for Indochina might be, its anxiety about what would happen in the power vacuum created by a troop withdrawal is understandable: The Khmer Rouge, loathed not only by the Vietnamese but by most Cambodians as well, command by far the largest guerrilla army.

With the parties locked into fixed positions, there was agreement only that Vietnam must pull back its forces, that the genocidal policies and practices of the Khmer Rouge cannot recur and that, by December, a working group of diplomats will convene another conference on Cambodia’s future. On such fundamental issues as how to share power and what role, if any, to give to the Khmer Rouge in some future government, the parties are still far apart. It is not even clear that everybody who attended the cocktail party fears another civil war: The Khmer Rouge indeed might welcome it. Another wild card is the mercurial former Cambodian monarch, Norodom Sihanouk, the West’s favorite candidate to lead Cambodia though his temperament hardly suggests the kind of stability that the nation needs; he boycotted the cocktail party until, in its final hours, it came to him.

Nonetheless, the parties are being pushed toward some kind of compromise, not only because of their own casualties and ambitions but also because China and the Soviet Union want the war resolved. China’s support for its long-time protege, the Khmer Rouge, is waning, and the Soviet Union apparently is weary of the economic drain of supplying the Vietnamese army. Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev longs for a summit meeting with China’s Deng Xiaoping, and the Chinese have let it be known that Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia is the chief remaining obstacle to such talks. The niceties of Communist protocol make it impossible for either China or the Soviet Union to order around fraternal states. But last week, when the two Communist giants announced a coming bilateral meeting on Cambodia, the signal must have been understood throughout Indochina.