Storm Cloud Over Cambodia

Vietnam has begun withdrawing what it says are the last of its occupying forces from Cambodia, nearly 11 years after it invaded its neighbor and ancient adversary. The 1978 invasion, which pitted one Communist regime against another, ultimately cost Vietnam 25,000 dead and brought down on it a decade of international condemnation and political isolation. The invasion did, however, succeed in ending the insane rule of the infamous Pol Pot, the leader of the Cambodian Communist Party, whose three-year reign of terror killed an estimated 1 million Cambodians and produced economic calamity. Vietnam drove Pol Pot from power. What it wasn’t able to do was eliminate him and his Khmer Rouge army as a presence in Cambodian affairs. That presence today casts a long and terrifying shadow over Cambodia’s future.

International efforts to put together a provisional coalition government to run Cambodia after Vietnam’s pullout have failed. Cambodians can’t agree on how to share authority and neither can the outside powers that claim an interest in Cambodia’s affairs. China backs the Khmer Rouge, not least because Vietnam is the enemy of both. The Soviet Union supports Vietnam and its surrogate in Phnom Penh, Premier Hun Sen. The United States wants to see a coalition headed by Prince Norodom Sihanouk--first given power by Cambodia’s French colonial rulers in 1941--but insists there can be no role for the Khmer Rouge. Sihanouk on his part says the Khmer Rouge must be included in any coalition, on the theory that it can be more closely watched if it is inside the government than if it is out.

As the last of Vietnam’s army departs, the threat of a full-scale renewal of civil war swells. The Khmer Rouge has about 50,000 disciplined, experienced and well-supplied men under arms. They may well be capable of fighting their way back into power. If in fact that happens, a revival of the madness and horror that fell upon Cambodia in the late 1970s could not be ruled out.