Cambodia Fuels Doubts About Peacekeeping

The collapse of the multibillion-dollar global effort to implant democracy in Cambodia--an effort once widely perceived as a success--has shaken Western policymakers and raised questions about the current approach to international peacekeeping, including the NATO undertaking in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

In particular, there are questions about the Clinton administration’s policy of setting strict conditions for peacekeeping missions, especially its demand--fueled in part by strong pressure from Congress--that each one have a firm deadline for the departure of troops.

It is a policy that affects all global peacekeeping efforts because it requires the United States to invoke its United Nations Security Council veto on U.N. missions that have no such deadline, even those in which no U.S. forces are involved.

“The United States keeps insisting on deadlines for getting out, and I can understand they don’t want to stay forever, but there are times commitments must be made,” said Philip Gordon, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “In societies like Cambodia, Angola or Bosnia, the lesson may be that you have to know you are getting in for five, maybe 10, years.”

Gordon points to the situation in Cyprus, where a U.N. peace mission on the divided Mediterranean island is now in its third decade but consists of only about 1,200 troops separating Greek and Turkish communities. And he questions the conventional wisdom about that commitment.

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“People worry about places like Cyprus, but is Cyprus that bad?” he asked. “Price it out. Which is better: what exists on Cyprus or having things fall apart in a place because forces pull out before they should?”

The relevance of the Cambodia failure is enhanced by the fact that until the coup in which co-Prime Minister Hun Sen ousted his power-sharing partner, the effort was widely viewed not just as one of the U.N.’s most ambitious nation-building projects but also its most successful--a model to be studied and emulated.

The infamous Khmer Rouge, which carried out an Asian holocaust that resulted in the “killing fields” of the late 1970s, was eliminated as a military threat. Nearly half a million refugees were re-integrated into Cambodian life, the basic building blocks of a democratic society--including a free press, an independent judiciary and a legislature--had begun to emerge, former enemies had gone into a coalition government and an open economy was beginning to evolve.

With its clearly defined goals and 18-month timetable, the Cambodia peacekeeping mission in the early 1990s also fit in with the Clinton administration’s 1994 policy directive on such efforts, developed in the wake of the abortive Somalia operation, in which the U.S. found itself in an ever-expanding and eventually deadly mission.

But there were shortcomings to the Cambodia mission. It was terminated according to its timetable, despite the operation’s failure to achieve some key goals. One of these, disarming the country’s warring political factions, eventually proved the mission’s undoing.

“I always thought that Cambodia suffered from ‘country of the year’ syndrome,” said Lorne Craner, president of the International Republican Institute, a Washington-based organization that supports nation-building and monitors elections.

Cambodia’s year, Craner said, spanned 1991-92. “You can’t just throw money at a country for a year and expect it to grow into a Jeffersonian democracy,” he said. “The result is, we’re spending a lot of money and not achieving much.”

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The U.N. mounted its mission to Cambodia to carry out the 1991 Paris accords that ended the civil war in the Asian nation. The operation, which cost about $2 billion, deployed 16,000 troops and 6,000 police and civilians throughout the country to prepare the Cambodians for elections and reconstruction.

In May 1993, 90% of the country’s registered voters defied a Khmer Rouge call for a boycott and cast their ballots. Prince Norodom Ranariddh, whose FUNCINPEC party won 45% of the vote, and Hun Sen, whose party won 39%, formed a coalition. Ranariddh fled the country in advance of Hun Sen’s weekend coup.

After the May vote, almost the entire U.N. operation left as scheduled.

The Clinton administration has set a June 1998 deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Bosnia, even though many European officials believe that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led forces must remain longer. Many experts, such as Gordon, view such constraints as unworkable and counterproductive.

Others believe that more deep-seated changes are needed before the international community can deal effectively with crises such as those in Cambodia, Bosnia or Angola, where the United Nations has just decided to replace a 4,000-strong peacekeeping force with an observer group of less than 100 military officers and a few hundred police officers.

“There are lessons [to learn from Cambodia’s collapse], but the domestic lack of consensus won’t let us heed them,” said Charles Maynes, director of the Eurasia Foundation and former editor of Foreign Policy magazine. “There just isn’t the political support for the kind of extended engagement we need to resolve these kinds of issues. If Clinton had asked Congress for a five-year commitment in Bosnia, what would have been the chances of getting it through Congress?”