Still A Killing Field

By STANLEY W. CLOUD

In a spacious and sunny Washington office, an anonymous senior Administration official sits and discusses U.S. options in Indochina. "The simplest approach in Cambodia," he theorizes, "is to let the military situation play itself out."

On the other side of the globe, in a military ward of a hospital in the Cambodian town of Kampong Spoe, 25 miles southwest of Phnom Penh, a soldier named Neh Kon, 30, lies on a wooden pallet. He has lost both legs -- one just above the knee, the other just below. The stumps are wrapped in flyspecked, blood-soaked bandages. Neh Kon's wife sits beside him, holding their young child. Two weeks earlier, on patrol in Khmer Rouge territory, Neh Kon stepped on a mine. "By the time we get peace," he says, "a lot of people won't have legs."

In another ward of the same hospital lies a civilian woodcutter named Top Sakhan, 44. He is the father of a boy, 10, and a girl, 7. A week before, Khmer Rouge guerrillas jumped him in a nearby forest. For no particular reason, they shot him in both legs with an AK-47 and left him lying there. "I called after them, 'Why don't you just kill me?' " Top Sakhan says. "But they didn't answer." Doctors saved his right leg and amputated the left. "His life is finished," whispers the hospital administrator.

This is what is meant by letting the military situation "play itself out." Such cool foreign-policy analysis rarely takes into account the suffering of people like Neh Kon and Top Sakhan. Nowhere is this truer than in Cambodia, whose modern misfortune has been to act as buffer and bargaining chip to nations more powerful than itself. Like Blanche DuBois, modern Cambodia has always depended for its survival on the kindness of strangers -- and the strangers have not always been kind. While diplomats negotiated their shameful and shameless deals, Cambodians were paying a fearful price: hundreds of thousands died between 1970 and 1975, when Cambodia became a theater of the Vietnam War, a million or more (out of a population of 7 million) in the Khmer Rouge's ensuing four-year reign of terror.

The Vietnamese occupation of Phnom Penh in 1979 forced the Khmer Rouge from power and replaced them with a pro-Hanoi and pro-Soviet government currently headed by Prime Minister Hun Sen, 39, a poorly educated but extraordinarily bright former Khmer Rouge officer who lost an eye during the 1970-75 Cambodian war. Since that government took office, the toll in the country has been markedly lower: a few dozen or so limbs and lives lost each week as the deposed Khmer Rouge and other Cambodian factions -- each representing combinations of outside support -- fight to regain power. Vietnam ostensibly withdrew the last of its 150,000 troops in September, but attempts to negotiate an end to this new war are stymied, and the violence has escalated.

Moreover, it is not true that Vietnam has completely left Cambodia. A well- informed intelligence source in Indochina acknowledges that several hundred Vietnamese military advisers are still attached to Hun Sen's army, as are two understrength Vietnamese regiments of about 1,000 troops each. Two Vietnamese- speaking soldiers in Cambodian uniforms were aboard a recent flight from Phnom Penh to the provincial capital of Siem Reap, and interviews with residents there confirmed that many Vietnamese-speaking troops are assigned to government units in the area.

But that is a far cry from the armored units that had been fighting in Cambodia. Even with a lingering Vietnamese presence, the Hun Sen government is basically on its own at last. Although the government's international isolation continues -- only the Soviet Union, its allies and India confer full recognition -- Hun Sen's record so far is pretty good. On the battlefield, government troops have rolled back most of the border-area gains made by rebel forces earlier this year. And despite rising public anger at official corruption, political and economic reforms on the Vietnamese model have had a dramatically positive effect.

Phnom Penh, once the loveliest capital in Southeast Asia, looks dusty and exhausted after years of war and atrocities, but it is beginning to regain some of its old spirit. Rice and other foodstuffs are fairly plentiful again in the large central market, as are Heineken beer, gold jewelry and Casio calculators. Prices tend to fluctuate with rumors of peace. But, says Le Hor, a proprietor at one of the market's stalls, "here we are relatively safe and don't think the Khmer Rouge are dangerous." Then he adds, "I'm not sure they feel so confident in the ((western)) border areas."

The farther one gets from the capital, the more the picture darkens. A lack of proper irrigation machinery severely limits rice production. On Route 1, in the arid border area between Vietnam and the Mekong river, there is virtually no fighting, but poverty is so acute that beggars line the road and try to flag down the occasional passing car. The area just to the north is more prosperous, but government troops at checkpoints along Route 7 often demand money or cigarettes from travelers for permission to continue on a road that is in such disrepair as to be all but impassible anyway. To the south, west and northwest of Phnom Penh, reminders of the never ending war are abundant. Not long ago, a handful of adventuresome American tourists at the fabled Angkor Wat ruins in the northwest were startled to see an army truck speed by, carrying wounded from the front in Oddar Meanchey province, a Khmer Rouge stronghold only about 35 miles away.

How does the U.S. Government fit into this mixed picture of revival and suffering? Unfortunately, in Cambodia now as in the past, the U.S. is part of the problem, not part of the solution. During the 1960s, American diplomats used to belittle the attempts by Cambodian leader Prince Norodom Sihanouk to keep his country out of the Vietnam War. They also criticized Sihanouk's enforced willingness to look the other way while North Vietnamese troops used his border areas as sanctuaries and staging grounds for attacks into South Vietnam. In 1969 the Nixon Administration began the secret U.S. bombing of the sanctuaries. Then in April 1970 it joined South Vietnam in an invasion to clean them out. Just before the assault, Sihanouk was overthrown by a pro-U.S. junta led by Prime Minister Lon Nol, and Cambodians were suddenly engulfed in war against North Vietnamese and their then allies the Khmer Rouge, while U.S. bombs rained from above.

Within two years, the Lon Nol forces were plainly losing. The Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, two weeks before the fall of Saigon. Under the insanely radical policies of Communist Party Secretary Pol Pot, the new government began butchering its own citizens. The xenophobic Pol Pot also made territorial demands against Vietnam and ordered attacks on Vietnamese villages. Faced with all this, Hanoi invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Pol Pot regime on Jan. 7, 1979.

China's leaders, staunch backers of the Khmer Rouge, saw the invasion as an attempt to extend Vietnamese and Soviet "hegemony" over the rest of Indochina and thus box them in. Vowing to teach Hanoi "a lesson," they sent 85,000 troops across the border into Vietnam on Feb. 17, 1979. After ferocious fighting, the Chinese withdrew 16 days later, but it was unclear just who had taught whom a lesson.

Meanwhile, the Carter Administration, determined to normalize relations with Beijing, denounced Vietnam's invasion but only tsk-tsked at China's (which National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski privately applauded). Most startling of all for an Administration that championed human rights, the State Department, in its anger at Vietnam, recognized the legitimacy of the Khmer Rouge's claim to Cambodia's U.N. seat.

That remains U.S. policy today. When the Khmer Rouge in 1982 allied with two less powerful, noncommunist rebel groups (one loyal to Sihanouk, the other led by aging Cambodian democrat Son Sann), Washington extended its recognition to the umbrella organization. The U.S. also provided "nonlethal" aid to the noncommunist members of the coalition. The U.S. thus lines up with China and the Association of South East Asian Nations (led in this case by Thailand) against Vietnam and the Soviet Union.

The current U.S. position is based on what a senior Bush Administration official calls "three fairly simpleminded propositions": the demand for complete withdrawal of Vietnamese forces, opposition to the Khmer Rouge's return to power, and calls for free elections to determine a new government. The U.S. argues that Hun Sen's government is illegitimate because it was installed by force and because Hun Sen and his President, Heng Samrin, were Khmer Rouge officers who did not desert until Pol Pot began devouring his own followers. Yet Hun Sen's government, while still nominally communist, has shown no Khmer Rouge tendencies in eleven years and has significantly broadened its base to include representatives of virtually all political persuasions.

The problem with the U.S. position is that its various parts don't mix. How, for example, can Washington recognize the Khmer Rouge as legitimate, if tainted, participants in the political process while also insisting that they must be prevented from returning to power? If Pol Pot and other top Khmer Rouge leaders are guilty of genocide, shouldn't they be excluded from all negotiations -- and even be tried as criminals? How can the U.S. criticize the Khmer Rouge's record and yet reserve its bitterest invective for Vietnam's use of force to oust Pol Pot?

The illogic of the U.S. position has infected the entire peace process. No one wants the Khmer Rouge to return to power, but their military strength, many believe, makes them impossible to ignore. Various highly complex peace proposals have been offered by the governments of Australia and Thailand, and by the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. Under some of these plans, the Khmer Rouge would even be permitted to serve in an interim coalition, pending elections. In all of them, Pol Pot's party has been given effective veto power -- with predictable results. A peace conference in Jakarta earlier this year failed basically because of Khmer Rouge opposition. Says Cambodia's Deputy Foreign Minister, Sok An: "If the international community continues to allow the Khmer Rouge to thwart the will of the conference, then we cannot have an agreement."

Is there no other way? Many think there is, including former Carter Administration Secretary of State Edmund Muskie. "It is time to change U.S. policy," said Muskie recently. He suggested direct contact between the U.S. and the Hun Sen government, an end to Washington's "implicit" support for the Khmer Rouge, and separate verification of Vietnam's withdrawal as first steps toward a long-term political solution. This would shift the U.S. focus away from the rebel coalition that includes the Khmer Rouge and would require the U.S. to abandon its unyielding opposition to Hun Sen. As Muskie put it in a speech last December, "When we finally left Vietnam, we opened the way for the historic conflict between Vietnam and China to re-emerge. Vietnam went on to invade Cambodia, and China invaded Vietnam. In these conflicts, we took the side of China. Now that phase of their history, and of ours, is over. Or, at any rate, it will be over once we are prepared to let it be."

Conditions seem right for the kind of reassessment Muskie recommends. But would the Bush Administration be willing to risk political flak, particularly from the right, if it seemed to be moving toward normalization with Cambodia, let alone Vietnam? The answer to that question will go a long way toward determining whether the bones will continue piling up in Cambodia's killing fields.