Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 20, 1990 TAG: 9007200665
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/1 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: BARRY SCHWEID ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The question now is whether he acted in time.
The Khmer Rouge, which massacred hundreds of thousands of Cambodians when it ran the Southeast Asian country from 1975 to 1978, is advancing toward the capital, Phnom Penh.
The Khmer Rouge poses a far more serious threat to the Cambodian people than the pro-Vietnam government the United States has been trying to upset with millions of dollars of aid to insurgents, some of it covert.
Bush's decision, which was urged on him by Secretary of State James Baker, means talking to the Vietnamese about holding multi-party elections in Cambodia.
It also may lead to U.S. recognition of Vietnam, a lowering of a 15-year trade embargo and perhaps a slowdown of the tragic exodus of "boat people." Many of these Vietnamese economic refugees, if they survive, reach Malaysia or Hong Kong only to be pushed off.
Those are some of the practical steps that could follow this latest decision by a practical president who won the White House disguised as a conservative ideologue but mostly is a politician who keeps his ear close to the ground.
Another step could be to encourage Vietnam, which has sent troops and advisers back into Cambodia after last year's pullout, to step up the pressure on the Khmer Rouge.
Whether Bush takes that nervy last step remains to be seen.
But for now, at least, he has stopped trying to isolate Vietnam diplomatically. Even though he isn't ready to normalize relations with Hanoi or authorize talks with the Cambodian government, Bush is no longer shunning the two countries as puppets of Moscow.
The policy shift is hardly unprecedented.
Bush has switched on taxes. He has dropped his suspicions about Mikhail Gorbachev. And, most of all, he has concluded the Cold War is over and is making military decisions accordingly.
Pressure from Congress played a part in these turnabouts. And Congress was moving to choke off aid to the Cambodian guerrillas when the policy shift was hatched last Friday at the White House.
But Bush and Baker, his pragmatic adviser, also were guided by other practical considerations. One was successful cooperation with the Soviet Union in other regional disputes. The next dividend could be an agreement on how to end the 12-year war in Afghanistan.
The most practical reason of all, however, was to try to stanch the bloodletting in Cambodia.
The guerrillas were unable to contain the Khmer Rouge, Baker said in announcing the policy shift Wednesday in front of the U.S. Embassy in Paris. "The fighting continues," he said. "Cambodians continue to suffer and Cambodians continue to die."
So Bush has put aside two decades of U.S. hostility toward Hanoi and has effectively withdrawn diplomatic recognition of the rebels trying to overthrow Prime Minister Hun Sen in Phnom Penh.
The Khmer Rouge are by far the most powerful of the three guerrilla factions. Until now, the Bush administration hoped the coalition with the factions headed by Prince Norodom Sihanouk and Son Sann would be able to defeat the Cambodian army or at least fight it to a draw, thereby bringing about elections.
This scenario depended also on the Khmer Rouge playing a benign role in the transition to a new government.
But the history of the Khmer Rouge provides no evidence of restraint or of submission to popular will. The massacres they conducted in the name of agrarian reform when they ran the country matched the worst holocausts of the century.
Jeremy Stone, president of the Federation of American Scientists, has been campaigning for the policy shift for a long time.
"It was probably inevitable," he said Thursday. "The one question smart guys all over town have been asking the administration was what if your coalition wins? At some point before a Khmer Rouge victory the State Department had to come to its senses."
Stone is convinced that Vietnamese military advisers combined with Cambodian forces can stop the Khmer Rouge. And, he said, "we've got to stop threatening the Phnom Penh government so it can hold the multiparty elections it has already agreed to hold."
by CNB