Meeting of Cambodian Council Goes Nowhere

A meeting of Cambodia’s reconciliation council, the body that is supposed to help the United Nations steer the country to a durable peace, foundered Saturday after three of its members failed to attend.

“It was awful, tedious,” said one independent observer at the meeting who did not want to be identified. “It just went round in circles. There was no agreed agenda. It was quite unstructured.

“It was not acrimonious, they just did not make a great deal of headway. It’s no reason to think the whole thing’s falling apart and give up, but they really have to get their act together.”

The Supreme National Council has been plagued by difficulties since agreeing to make Phnom Penh its headquarters under U.N.-sponsored peace accords signed in October.

The council is made up of representatives of the government in Phnom Penh and three guerrilla factions that fought for more than a decade to overthrow it.

It is intended to represent Cambodian sovereignty and coordinate with a U.N. peacekeeping and administrative force until U.N.-supervised elections due in 1993.

Some guerrilla officials and diplomats have expressed concern about the council’s inability to turn itself into a properly functioning body.

The latest meeting confined itself to issuing vague general statements, the observer said.