When the War Was Over (93 page)

The year began with Hun Sen announcing that the date for Vietnam's full withdrawal from Cambodia would be moved up. The Vietnamese would be out by September if a peace accord was reached that summer. And without one, the Vietnamese still would leave by December. Hun Sen's announcement that cool January day was issued as a challenge, not a concession. He was finding his way in international politics, displaying the cocky defiance he was known for in his own country. Now it was up to all the armies and nations on the other side—to the resistance coalition including Prince Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge, and to the United States, ASEAN, China, and Japan—to match his moves if they were going to arrive at that peace they kept saying he and the Vietnamese were blocking.

Out of the blue, Thailand answered Hun Sen's challenge. The country's new prime minister Chatichai Choonhaven and his band of young advisors had dropped plenty of hints since coming to office the summer before that they wanted to shatter Thailand's old image as a pliant military power reliably
loyal to the United States. But few people took them seriously. Chatichai may have benefited from one of Thailand's most democratic elections but no one expected that this new leader would seriously alter Thailand's position in the world. Besides, Chatichai himself was flamboyant but hardly a revolutionary. A former diplomat and wealthy businessman worth millions, he was a senior politician and a once brilliant military officer who was supposed to understand that whenever a leader stepped too far out of bounds the Thai generals overthrew him in a coup d'état. Chatichai may have had a gambler's reputation and a reputation for corruption to underwrite his high living, but he wasn't expected to rock the boat.

The first clue to the contrary was his new inner circle of advisors. They were all young, well-educated professionals with more than a hint of unusual if not radical views. At the center was his son Kraisak Choonhaven, and in charge of foreign policy was Pansak Vinyaratn, an American-trained political scientist and journalist who was jailed following the bloody coup of 1976 for his leftist ideas. He went into exile in the United States, and then returned in 1980 with a sophisticated understanding of American politics and a fat list of sympathetic journalists and politicians in the United States and Europe.

Chatichai told these two young advisors that he wanted to “be in Cambodia in one year,” according to Pansak. The reason behind that wish was a desire to reassert Bangkok's role as the hub of Southeast Asia and to put Singapore on notice that Thailand planned to replace it as the economic center of the region. The eighties had been boom years for all the ASEAN countries that were supposed to have fallen to communism, but Singapore's success had been the most impressive. By 1989 it was outpacing European nations in several ways. Indeed, it enjoyed a higher per capita income than Great Britain, Singapore's colonial master until 1957, and it had a lower infant mortality rate than the United States. A small city-state, Singapore had become the envy of the region. Through its majority Chinese population, Singapore was among the first countries to take advantage of the opening of the China market in 1985, making major investments there. But unlike other overseas Chinese business groups, the very modern Singapore Chinese never sacrificed their access to the West in favor of China. In 1989, for example, Singapore exported $9 billion in goods to the United States—twice Thailand's $4.4 billion. This rankled Chatichai, and he figured the one way to bolster the Thai position was to extend its reach to neighboring Indochina, bringing Vietnam and Cambodia back into the fold. To do that required ending the war in Cambodia.

To that end, Chatichai said in one of his first pronouncements upon taking office that he wanted to transform Indochina “from a battlefield to a trading market.” This was literally revolutionary. Thailand was the staging ground for the war. The new prime minister couldn't just change sides like that. When the uproar died down, Chatichai said he simply wanted to emphasize that economics were becoming more important and he wanted Thailand to be the hub of the growth of mainland Southeast Asia. He erased the “battlefield to market” goal from his final statement delivered to the Thai parliament.

Then he went underground, secretly laying the groundwork to change Thai policy toward Vietnam and Cambodia. In December he quietly sent the supreme commander of his armed forces to Laos, with which Thailand always has had normal diplomatic relations. There the commander conferred in private with Hun Sen. Then in January Chatichai started his shock treatment approach to Indochina. He sent his conservative foreign minister Siddhi Savetsila to Hanoi with a seventy-person entourage, breaking decades of antagonism. Since the 1960s Thailand had backed the enemies of Hanoi—giving the United States bases on Thai soil to bomb Vietnam and now giving the Khmer Rouge and other Cambodian resistance groups bases in Thailand as well as full rights to operate in and out of the country. Without Thai complicity there could be no resistance to the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. With Siddhi's visit to Hanoi the rules of the game in Cambodia began to shift.

Then, at the end of the month, Chatichai invited Hun Sen himself to Bangkok as a personal guest of the prime minister. Few moves could have given a greater jolt to the resistance and their supporters. Huge black newspaper headlines screamed: “Hun Sen to Meet Chatichai Today,” “No Turning Back for Thailand in the Cambodian Conflict,” “Scoring a Cambodian Goal in Final Round,” “Let's Have a Public Debate on Cambodia,” and “Hun Sen Visit Divisive.”

Thailand, the key country of ASEAN, which the United States said it was following, had stepped out of the pack. Chatichai was literally dining with the enemy. Hun Sen and his entourage were photographed around town as tourists at the Temple of the Emerald Buddha and as foreign dignitaries in formal poses with the prime minister. Pansak, one of Chatichai's advisors, said of the visit: “For the first time, Thai policy is moral and realistic. We want to be a catalyst, to restrain violence.

Hun Sen was on his best behavior. “I'd like to stress that the important thing of the talks between us is to stop the killing, to reach an end to the war in Kampuchea,” he said repeatedly.

The Cambodians reached several trade agreements with the Thais, who immediately sent an unofficial team to Cambodia to assess the potential for trade and investment. Chatichai the businessman saw tremendous opportunities for Thai businesses in exploiting Cambodia's forests, gem mines, and fish-laden lakes, an idea put in more elegant terms by his spokesman Likhit Hongladarom: “The message our prime minister put across is that the real enemy of Kampuchea is poverty.”

The Thais, already reaping a small fortune in illegal cross-border trade, were getting first crack at the real money to be made in Cambodia once the war ended. There was a method to Chatichai's seeming madness. His advisors may have been criticized for acting like overgrown graduate students and he for his rich living complete with dancing girls at official lunches, but underneath he was dead serious. He wanted Thailand's economy to grow at a double-digit rate like Singapore's (it did reach 13 percent under his premiership) and he wanted an end to Thailand's support for the Cambodian War, especially for Pol Pot—“that Marxist maniac,” as he called him.

Already, Thai military intelligence reporting had convinced Chatichai that for all of the fear and bravado surrounding the Khmer Rouge, they had little chance of taking over Cambodia again. But the army of Hun Sen was sufficiently awful that it would never eliminate the resistance and its ability to disrupt the country. More fighting wouldn't solve anything. And, if worse came to worst, Chatichai knew that “no one was prepared to land their marines in Cambodia if the Khmer Rouges threaten Phnom Penh—not the U.S. and not China.”

That left Thailand once again in the unenviable position of hosting a big-power catastrophe.

So Chatichai decided to convince various players, especially the United States, not to “think of Southeast Asia and Indochina in political military terms, but in political economic terms. We need Cambodia solved soon.”

After the Hun Sen visit, the Thai prime minister continued on his crusade and went to Beijing to see Deng Xiaoping and talk to the real power behind the resistance. The Chinese leader “went wild lecturing Chatichai,” Pansak said. “He was furious. But Chatichai stopped him in the middle of his lecture, at the part about Soviet aggression, and said, ‘That is the past. We've tried squeezing Vietnam and Cambodia for eleven years and it hasn't worked. This is not the way to have relations in the region.'”

Then Chatichai added, “China may be able to wait ten years for a solution in Cambodia. We cannot.”

But for all his anger at Chatichai, Deng had begun preparing the way for China's own démarche with Indochina. Just before Hun Sen's dramatic visit to Bangkok, the Chinese had invited Vietnam's deputy foreign minister to Beijing for the first talks between those two countries in a decade.

A few weeks later, on February 2, 1989, Shevardnadze arrived in Beijing for three days of talks that led to a formal invitation to Gorbachev to visit China and an official acknowledgment that Vietnam would withdraw from Cambodia in 1989.

The rival Cambodians met again in Jakarta for another JIM but little was accomplished. All sides realized that the great countries that would attend the summer's peace conference would fight it out for them. The only big change was a victory for Hun Sen, who got the group to agree to the “prevention of the recurrence of genocidal policies and practices of the Pol Pot regime.”

Then on April 5 Vietnam announced it would withdraw without conditions on September 30. But the Vietnamese news was drowned by news from other nations of equally jolting changes, news that grew exponentially as the months progressed and eventually marked 1989 as a year that profoundly altered political history.

There had been a change of government in the United States with George Bush elected president in November 1988 and inaugurated in January 1989. He could not have come to office at a more extraordinary moment. On February 15 the Soviets withdrew their last troops from Afghanistan. When President Bush's new Secretary of State James Baker III met Shevardnadze in Vienna for the first time in March, Eastern Europe was in a foment. On May 2, Hungarian soldiers began tearing down the barbed wire fences along the common border with Austria, the first real breach of the Iron Curtain.

It was this side of the cold war equation that preoccupied Baker when he traveled to Moscow a few days later on May 10 for talks with Shevardnadze and Soviet leader Gorbachev. Asia was not on his mind or his agenda. Even though Gorbachev was about to travel to Beijing and put an end to three decades of Sino-Soviet hostility, Baker raised three different issues at the meeting: general improvement of relations between the two countries, arms shipments to Central America, and upcoming summits between the two leaders. They also discussed removing tactical nuclear weapons from Eastern Europe, other arms control matters, and the upcoming NATO summit. Baker said he left this first session with Gorbachev worried that “unless we could come up with a bold and politically imaginative proposal for the
NATO Summit, which was now less than a month away, George Bush risked being upstaged diplomatically by Gorbachev.”

As it turned out, within one week Gorbachev would be upstaged not by a major world leader but by thousands of Chinese dissidents demonstrating in Tiananmen Square.

The cold war in Asia confounded most Americans, who were far more familiar with the European theater. It was relatively easy to conceptualize the classic Soviet Union versus United States standoff in Europe. On one side was the West, with a democratic, capitalistic system tying Western Europe to the United States in the military NATO alliance. On the other side was the East, the states of Eastern Europe forced into the communist authoritarian system with the Soviet Union and the military alliance of the Warsaw Pact. A wall divided Berlin. By 1989 it was clear that the capitalistic market system was winning out and that the citizens of the East were in favor of democratic changes. The thaw in the cold war in Europe could be grasped in scenes like the Hungarian border guard cutting open a barbed wire fence into Austria.

Asia was not at all so simple.

By 1989 the cold war in Asia no longer pitted capitalist nations against communist ones. It had become a rivalry between two communist powers, China and the Soviet Union, with the United States firmly joining China's side in 1979 after normalization of relations under President Carter. Once the United States took China's side, Japan and the countries of Southeast Asia followed suit. Originally a question of power politics—fears of the Soviet Union aims after its invasion of Afghanistan and Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia—it had been reduced to political maneuverings. This was not a question of communism versus capitalism. As in the Soviet Union, a capitalist, open market system was taking hold in communist Asia, with China and Vietnam overseeing fundamental changes in their economy, if not their political systems. Travel to and from the communist nations was opening up. Hong Kong was no longer the lonely outpost of the free world into China but its economic gateway, its banks the source of more than half of the foreign investment pouring into the country. The decades of Asian nations standing off against each other—fighting the bloodiest of all the cold wars in Indochina and Korea—wasn't exactly coming to an end. Communism, in its newest transmutation, was firmly in place in China, Vietnam, and North Korea. What had been decided was that the nations, whatever
their politics, were ready to open up to one another, or, to borrow Chatichai's political sound bite, to turn the whole continent from a battlefield to a marketplace.