Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 21, 1990 TAG: 9007230285
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Instead, the United States will open direct talks with Vietnam, patron of the Phnom Penh government that is resisting the rebels.
The policy shift is overdue, way overdue. At long last, a fundamental point seems to have penetrated the skulls of U.S. policy-makers: The Khmer Rouge are armed and should be considered extremely dangerous.
The Khmer Rouge rebels may be ragtag. But they are supplied by China, and they are ruthless. Their leaders, associated with the mass murder of a decade ago, have nothing to lose. The rank and file, typically young peasants recruited or kidnapped from remote regions, often fight in the erroneous belief that it was the enemy and not the Khmer Rouge who killed their parents.
The Khmer Rouge may be in uneasy alliance with a couple of factions more presentable in polite society. But as the resurgent rebels advance toward the capital from their bases in the northwest mountains, there is absolutely no reason to expect they'd be any kinder in power to anyone, including their current coalition partners, than they were in the late '70s.
Then, the Khmer Rouge killed in cold blood as much as 20 percent of the Cambodian population, in accord with a peculiar strand of communism that seeks to "cleanse" the nation of all modern and foreign influences.
Vietnam is no model of democracy and human rights. But it was only by virtue of the Vietnamese army's 1978 invasion that the Khmer Rouge were ousted and the genocide brought to an end. The Vietnamese were aided by Cambodians who had fled the chaos, including some former Khmer Rouge such as Hun Sen, who now heads the Cambodian government.
The prospect of a Khmer Rouge return to power no doubt has prompted the Bush administration belatedly to change course. But what has been happening with Hun Sen's government also gives cause for concern.
Until last month, his government was following a path of liberalization that showed promise of eventually reaching democracy. Freedom of religion had been reintroduced, as had the concept of private property; non-communists had been brought into the government; a freer economy had helped restore rice self-sufficiency; the bulk if not all of the Vietnamese army had been withdrawn.
But a few weeks ago, with the Khmer Rouge threat growing more serious, hard-liners suspicious of Hun Sen's reforms apparently got the upper hand. Several dozen officials were dismissed from their posts, and some of them jailed. Among those dismissed was Khieu Kanharith, editor of a semiofficial weekly newspaper who in November 1989 had impressed a visiting group of American editorial writers with his candor and realism.
Candid and realistic is precisely what American policy on Cambodia, until now, has not been.
It has not been candid about the fact that support of Khmer Rouge allies, however democratic they claim to be, translates into support of the Khmer Rouge. And it has not been realistic in assessing the danger posed by the Khmer Rouge, the nature of the Chinese regime that arms the rebels, or the inevitability of Vietnamese influence over a crippled neighbor, unseparated by geographic barriers, that is only one-tenth Vietnam's size.
American policy toward Cambodia has been naive; worse, it has been naive while trying to be clever. Part of the problem has been obsequiousness toward the Chinese, the backers of the Khmer Rouge. Part of the problem has been an aversion to dealing with Vietnam, the only nation to defeat the United States in war.
So now the terrible Khmer Rouge are advancing. Hun Sen's liberalizing reforms, which a more timely policy shift could have bolstered, are in retreat. And fearful Cambodians along with the rest of the world must hope the Bush announcement isn't so overdue that it's meaningless.
by CNB