Propaganda, Politics and Violence in Cambodia

Democratic Transition Under United Nations Peace-Keeping

Steve Heder, Judy Ledgerwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315285870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Asuntos públicos y administración

Describes and analyses the propaganda and violence of the four Cambodian parties to the 1991 Paris peace agreements. This volume explores Cambodia during the UNTAC period and sets the events within the larger context of Khmer politics, history and culture.

1
Politics of Violence: An Introduction

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Steve Heder and Judy Ledgerwood

For three hundred years, the territory that is now Cambodia has experienced repeated episodes of local violence, external control, and severe isolation, a fate David Chandler has called the tragedy of Cambodian history.¹ The recent chapters of this history have included a period during which more than a million Cambodians died from execution, starvation, and disease as a result of the policies and practices of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), commonly known as the Khmer Rouge, as well as two periods during which national sovereignty was effectively lost, first to Vietnamese domination and then to a United Nations peacekeeping mandate.

The violence and propaganda that marked Cambodia during the UN mandate are the subject of this book. The UN peacekeeping mandate officially began on 23 October 1991 with the signing of the Agreements on a Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia Conflict, commonly known as the Paris Agreements.² It ended in September 1993 with the promulgation of a new Cambodian constitution and formation of a Cambodian government, following elections in May of that year organized by the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC).

The polities that existed within the territory of present-day Cambodia in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries were weak compared to rivals based in Vietnam and Thailand. Cambodian kings attempted to rule over a society with few elaborate social institutions beyond kinship networks and village-based monasteries, or vat. Invading armies preyed on Cambodia, engendering further social breakdown, economic disruption, and death. The French colonialism of the 1860s and 1870s had the same impact. Its imposition of a protectorate on a fragile Cambodian “kingdom” exacerbated splits in the elite. Uprisings led by elite and millenarian figures mobilized large numbers of peasants to oppose the new intruders, but at the cost of further loss of life. Eventually, however, with their military might and administrative superiority, the French were able to stabilize the situation enough that the protectorate became a relatively quiet backwater in the colonial creation of Indochina. Within that creation, most economic, infrastructural, and educational investment was in what emerged as Vietnam. While capitalism, transportation networks, and new school curricula transformed Vietnam, Cambodian social and political structures, like those in Laos, were preserved as curiosities or left to degenerate.

Largely for this reason, nationalism developed later in Cambodia than in Vietnam, and indeed later than in most other parts of Asia; there was virtually no organized anticolonial political activity in Cambodia before World War II. Moreover, in contrast to what occurred in many other places in Asia, the Japanese forces that came to Cambodia during the war did not seriously promote local opposition to the French. Instead, they preserved the status quo. When World War II ended, Cambodia’s colonial administrative infrastructure remained meager compared to counterparts elsewhere, and the nationalist movement remained embryonic. With the Japanese defeated and the French severely weakened, however, Cambodia could no longer be kept isolated from nearby events. Thai and Vietnamese politicians promoted opposition to a reimposition of the French protectorate over Cambodia, and the fluid situation immediately following the Japanese surrender allowed them to link up with the Cambodian protonationalists who had been emerging among secondary school students, low- and middle-ranking civil servants in the colonial administration, and Buddhist monks and achar (lay preceptors). Out of this grew two streams of opposition to the French, the armed Khmer Issarak (Emancipated Khmer, or Free Khmer) movement, and the parliamentary Democrat Party. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the latter dominated urban politics in Cambodia, and the former spread to many parts of the countryside. The Issarak themselves split between those who accepted Vietnamese communist tutelage and support and those who either relied on Thai politicians for assistance or attempted to remain independent.

Together the Khmer Issarak and the Democrat Party presented a serious challenge not only to the French but also to senior Cambodian civil servants who had come up through the ranks of the bureaucracy, and to the country’s French-anointed king since 1941, Norodom Sihanouk. Sihanouk resented Issarak and Democrat Party criticisms of his subservience to the French. He feared the political threat they represented to the stability of the social hierarchy but came increasingly to agree with their goal of full-fledged independence from France. Meanwhile, bitter and violent conflict for control of the countryside caused greater damage and left deeper social and political scars than is often realized. Hundreds of thousands were displaced, and tens of thousands killed. In the end, faced with a deteriorating situation in Cambodia and a disastrous situation in Vietnam, the French became amenable to Sihanouk’s insistent demands that they grant independence to Cambodia. In 1953, Sihanouk thus became “the Father of Cambodian Independence.”

Over the next ten years, after abdicating the throne in order to play politics more directly, Sihanouk used the administrative apparatus and security forces bequeathed to him by the French to destroy the Democrat Party and Khmer Issarak organizations. As a result, in contrast to many other postcolonial nations in Southeast Asia, the Cambodian postcolonial state was not leavened by marriage to an anticolonial movement with linkages to social forces mobilized in the struggle for independence. Like some other countries in the region, however, Cambodia was run as a neopatrimonial autocracy.³ Sihanouk’s personalized rule maintained and reproduced a social structure and political system based on interlocking pyramids of patron-client networks that kept his subjects in their place and provided rewards to those who served him loyally.

Meanwhile, Sihanouk pursued a neutralist foreign policy, which antagonized the United States and its allies in Bangkok and Saigon but pleased China and the communist leadership of North Vietnam. Fearing a U.S. attempt to overthrow him and wary of the disruptive social and political consequences of Western aid and trade, Sihanouk increasingly isolated Cambodia from the West. As during the French protectorate, Cambodia stood relatively still while other parts of Asia were increasingly transformed by capitalism and by the political and cultural forms that it took. This isolation, however, could not prevent or postpone the socioeconomic crisis that stirred rural and urban dissatisfaction. Many peasants and urban intellectuals questioned the authority of those they perceived as corrupt and as arbitrary violators of patrimonial norms. And Sihanouk’s tilt toward Beijing and Hanoi resulted in the increasing use of Cambodian territory as a sanctuary by Vietnamese communist armed forces fleeing the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. The resulting loss of administrative control over some border areas was acutely felt in many quarters and added weight to the ongoing political crisis.

This came to a head with the overthrow of Sihanouk in 1970 in a coup that initially enjoyed considerable support among urban Cambodians but aroused suspicion and fear in the countryside, where despite patterns of immiseration rooted in long-term stagnation, Sihanouk continued to enjoy a populist legitimacy. The new political situation created favorable circumstances for the Cambodian communist movement. Led by Pol Pot and Nuon Chea and based on a cadre structure amalgamating former Khmer Issarak with more recent recruits among students, teachers, and other self-styled “intellectuals,” the Khmer Rouge received the full support of the Vietnamese and Chinese Communists, and Sihanouk’s patronage as well. While the CPK remained clandestine, Vietnamese military thrusts, Chinese arms and ammunition, and recruiting appeals by Sihanouk soon gave it control over a large proportion of the national territory and population. This gave it a base from which to prosecute a civil war against the United States-supported Khmer Republic formed by those who had overthrown Sihanouk, and to win that war despite heavy U.S. bombing from 1970 to 1973 and Khmer Republic bombing thereafter.

The ground and air wars had left much of Cambodia devastated when the CPK assumed power in April 1975. Pursuing policies of wholesale execution and urban evacuation, it proceeded to destroy the state apparatus built up by the French and maintained by Sihanouk and the Khmer Republic. A parallel policy of rapid collectivization of agriculture had an equally destructive effect on many rural social relationships. At the same time, policies of strict autarky isolated Cambodia, renamed Democratic Kampuchea (DK), from most of the outside world. The breakneck program to build socialism, which CPK leaders believed Cambodia must pursue in order to remain independent, failed to make the country prosper and instead caused large-scale deaths from starvation and disease. Rather than recognize this, Pol Pot and Nuon Chea accused the Communist Party apparatus, which had brought them to power, of sabotage and treason and launched a series of purges. These purges extended to the armed forces, which had meanwhile been ordered to launch raids deep into Vietnam in order to compel Hanoi to accept the DK interpretation of the “existing frontier” between Cambodia and Vietnam “recognized” by the Vietnamese Communists in the late 1960s.

After Hanoi reacted to these raids with a large-scale invasion in late 1978, the DK regime collapsed. In its place, the Vietnamese established the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), based on a modified version of the Vietnamese communist administrative model of bureaucratic socialism.⁴ In so doing, they initially relied upon a small group of former Khmer Issarak who had spent most of their lives in Vietnam, and on former DK cadre who had fled across the border to escape purges in 1977 or 1978. Together, the Vietnamese and these Cambodians built the PRK from the top down by recruiting among those Cambodians who most strongly opposed the return of the DK and who expressed willingness to work within the political parameters set by the Vietnamese. Many of these administrative cadre, however, did not genuinely accept the socialist and proletarian internationalist tenets espoused by those who recruited them. The Vietnamese and their Cambodian comrades also gradually recruited an army and formed a Communist Party organization, known as the Revolutionary People’s Party of Kampuchea (RPPK), to maintain political control over the state and the armed forces. This latter project was undermined by the lack of ideological fervor that was characteristic of many who joined the party apparatus. Over time, the bureaucratic-socialist forms of the new regime were increasingly filled with a neotraditionalist social and political content in which personal and patron-client relations counted for more than doctrinal purity.⁵ The simultaneous dilution of its Marxist pretensions meant the PRK became less a Leninist regime and more an ideologically nondescript authoritarian one.⁶

The PRK’s efforts to consolidate control over Cambodia were opposed by the remnants of DK, which were saved from oblivion and then revived by Chinese aid passed through Thailand. This revival was backed by the United States as a way of opposing Vietnam’s political and military predominance in Cambodia. Meanwhile, other Cambodian opposition to this predominance and to the PRK’s communist-style policies and practices also emerged in the form of dozens of small-scale armed political movements in various parts of Cambodia. Most of these were eventually amalgamated either into the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (KPNLF), founded in 1979 by Son Sann, a one-time premier under Sihanouk, or into the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful, and Cooperative Cambodia (FUNCINPEC), founded in 1981 by Sihanouk himself. The KPNLF espoused a vague sort of republicanism and FUNCINPEC a nostalgia for an idealized version of Sihanouk’s supposedly benevolent rule. Both the KPNLF and FUNCINPEC were organized on military lines, and the political structures that connected them to the movements on which they were based were increasingly transformed into support networks for guerilla warfare. Under intense Chinese, U.S., and ASEAN pressure, the KPNLF and FUNCINPEC in 1982 joined the DK remnants in establishing the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK), and from this point the DK remnants became known as the Party of Democratic Kampuchea (PDK). In the coalition, each of the factions maintained a separate army and administrative structure, and beneath a facade of unity, conflict was frequent and suspicion remained deep. Under the arrangement reached, Sihanouk became titular president of DK, and the PDK’s nominal leader, Khieu Samphan, became vice president in charge of foreign affairs, while the KPNLF’s Son Sann became prime minister of the CGDK. Its main armed strength, nonetheless, continued to lie in the National Army of Democratic Kampuchea (NADK), the armed wing of the PDK.

Despite its artificiality and the presence within it of leaders responsible for mass murder, the CGDK represented Cambodia, as DK had done before it, at the United Nations. Conversely, despite its control of most of the country, the PRK was embargoed by the United States and denied not only recognition but also development aid by the United Nations. For ten years after 1979, therefore, Cambodia suffered another period of war and isolation. The PRK established minimal normalcy but had to contend with war and externally imposed deprivation, as well as with a lack of nationalist legitimacy.

Over the years, the CGDK managed to make some military gains at the expense of the PRK, but never enough to threaten it seriously. The PRK, backed by the Vietnamese army, occasionally inflicted severe blows on the CGDK, but these were never fatal. Starting in the late 1980s, both the CGDK and PRK probed to see whether the military stalemate could be upset or sidestepped by some sort of political deal, but these initiatives came to naught. The CGDK demanded a share of power that was not justified by its battlefield position, whereas the PRK attempted to detach Sihanouk and possibly FUNCINPEC and the KPNLF from the CGDK but never offered them enough to convince them to switch sides. At the same time, the pattern of superpower and regional power confrontation was such as to promote conflict rather than compromise among their Cambodian allies.

The situation was fundamentally transformed, however, as Vietnam began the withdrawal of its armed forces from Cambodia, which it completed in September 1989.⁷ The CGDK hoped and believed that this would reveal a PRK so weak that it would have to accept power-sharing on a basis that would leave it in control of as little as one-quarter of the administration. This was the position pushed by the CGDK at the First Paris International Conference on Cambodia in July and August of 1989.⁸ Developments on the battlefield in 1990 and 1991 showed, however, that although the Vietnamese withdrawal made possible some shifts, it did not result in a fundamental change in the balance of military power. Meanwhile, China and the United States on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other had decided that they now wanted a compromise solution. Working with the other two permanent members of the United Nations Security Council on the basis of a plan originally elaborated by Australia, they produced in August 1990 a “framework” for such a solution. It rejected the concept of power sharing in favor of establishing a United Nations transitional authority to neutralize existing political structures and disarm existing armed forces in preparation for elections, which this UN body was to conduct. The main opposition to this plan came from the State of Cambodia (SOC), the name adopted by the PRK in 1989. SOC had the most to lose from the plan because it administered most of the country, almost all of the population, and possessed an army much larger than the combined forces of its opponents. Its objections to the framework were, however, ignored by the Permanent Five Members of the Security Council when they elaborated the framework into a draft agreement in November 1990. Indeed, the prov...