More Killing Fields?

The Paris talks on the future of Cambodia are likely to disappear from the headlines for a few weeks. The foreign ministers of the 19 countries participating in the negotiations headed home Tuesday, leaving behind “working groups” who will spend August in a vacation-emptied Paris trying to piece together an agreement. Their goal is to form a coalition that will hold the fractious country together long enough to elect a new government after the Vietnamese withdrawal in September. This may seem like a modest goal, but reaching it would be something of a miracle.

The Cambodian track record on coalitions is not good. They have a saying that when two Cambodians share a bed, they argue about who sleeps in the middle. Today’s factions--the current Vietnamese-backed government of Hun Sen, the U.S.-backed non-communist rebels led by Son Sann, Prince Norodom Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge--have been fighting for space for years.

The central question for negotiators is whether “the enemy,” the Khmer Rouge, will be more dangerous inside the coalition or outside the coalition. The former regime is responsible for the deaths of one million Cambodians before their three-year reign of terror ended with the Vietnamese invasion in 1978. They are more heavily armed than the other factions and by far the most coherent, in part because they are the most fanatical.

Washington has insisted that the Khmer Rouge play no role in a future Cambodian government, but the U.S. choice for coalition leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, strongly insists that the Khmer Rouge be invited inside the tent. The Communist leader Hun Sen, who has sometimes been derided by U.S. diplomats as a Vietnamese “puppet,” upheld the U.S. stand. A tentative compromise was agreed upon earlier this week whereby the Khmer Rouge can sit inside thetent during an interim government but must go outside once a “permanent” government comes into being.

But all parties are aware that the Khmer Rouge will remain a factor in Cambodia regardless of its position within or without the tent. A political agreement can not negotiate them out of existence or moderate their adherence to terror. Sooner or later some faction or government that abhors their methods will fight them again. No matter how successful the Paris session may be, the war will not be over in Cambodia any time soon.