Quayle to Hold Talks on Cambodia Policy

Vice President Dan Quayle, winding up a two-week tour of Asia that concentrated on U.S. security issues, plans to meet today with officials of four Southeast Asian nations in a bid to revive U.S. policy toward Cambodia.

Quayle will meet with representatives of Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia shortly after arriving in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital, a senior U.S. official traveling with the vice president said.

“The reality is, we don’t know very much about what’s going on inside Cambodia,” the official said. “The function of the meeting will be to get their views about exactly where we stand.”

Quayle also plans to meet with Malaysian officials to soothe feelings ruffled last month when officials of neighboring Singapore suggested that they might be willing to play host to U.S. naval facilities now in the Philippines.

Malaysia and Singapore have had troubled relations in the past, and Malaysian officials are not eager to have their neighbor playing host to a major military installation.

The future of the U.S. bases in the Philippines dominated the past two days of Quayle’s trip.

On Wednesday, Quayle presented President Corazon Aquino with a letter from President Bush formally asking that negotiations over the future of the bases begin in December. In a reply letter to Bush, Aquino agreed to the proposal.

“I, too, envision fruitful discussions in the spirit of amity that has marked our long relationship,” Aquino wrote.

While negotiations over the bases promise to be difficult, advancing U.S. policy in Cambodia has proven all but impossible for a decade.

One Goal Realized

In recent weeks the United States has seen one goal realized--the withdrawal from Cambodia of Vietnamese troops. But the broader goal espoused by the U.S. government and its Southeast Asian allies has proven elusive.

The goal has been to free Cambodia from Vietnamese domination without restoring to power the brutal Khmer Rouge, blamed for the deaths of more than 1 million Cambodians by disease, starvation and execution during a 3 1/2-year rule that ended with the Vietnamese invasion of late December, 1978.

As an alternative to both the Communist Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese-backed government headed by Hun Sen, the United States has pushed a coalition of non-Communist resistance groups. Earlier this year, Quayle helped lobby through Congress a bill authorizing military assistance to those forces.

But aid to the resistance remains controversial, because the non-Communist groups are allied, at least for now, with the Khmer Rouge.

With the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops, and the collapse last month of Paris talks on a Cambodian settlement, further fighting is expected between Cambodian government troops and the three-party resistance forces.

Quayle hopes that the ambassadors he meets will offer some ideas about steps that might stave off renewed large-scale fighting in Cambodia. He also would like to see a new endorsement of the policy of aiding the non-Communist rebels.

The policy disturbs some Administration officials and many in Congress because it runs the risk of returning the Khmer Rouge to at least partial power.