When the War Was Over (94 page)

In Asia's twisted version of the cold war, the two communist giants had to make peace with each other before the illusive “bamboo curtain” could fall. That was the intent of Gorbachev's journey to Beijing in May 1989.

Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in Beijing on May 15, 1989, and the first question on many minds was “Why hadn't the summit been postponed?”

Already tens of thousands of student demonstrators had taken over Tiananmen Square where Gorbachev was to have been officially welcomed. Chinese students had moved up their celebrations of Youth Day to mourn the sudden death of Hu Yaobang, one of the party's chief reformers. “Democracy, We Want Democracy,” they had chanted and shouted up and down the Avenue of Heavenly Peace on their way to Tiananmen Square. They had won ever more support from citizens of all parts of the society, from laborers to professionals, who gave them food and water or joined them on the square. Soon they had formed the largest civil demonstration in the history of communist China by making that one demand to include democracy in China's ambitious modernization program.

Gorbachev, who had done just that by including
perestroika
in the Soviet Union's plans for modernizing, arrived at the worst possible moment. The dissidents hailed him as a hero. His hosts, with whom he was to hold an historic summit, thought his ideas of democracy within communism were ruinous. Banners on Tiananmen Square may have described Gorbachev as the “Ambassador of Democracy” but he was not allowed to see the banners or the student hunger strike or the tents pitched in the massive open-air square. Instead, at the last minute, his official welcoming ceremony was moved to the airport tarmac in a clumsy affair that lacked even a red carpet.

The grand moment of Deng's diplomatic triumph was to take place on the second day of Gorbachev's three-day visit, at the Great Hall of the People where the two men would establish normal relations between their nations after thirty years of the treacherous Sino-Soviet split. But the Great Hall was under siege by the students. Again at the last minute the Soviet leader had to be whisked into a side door on the square for his meeting with Deng. Gorbachev had signed an eighteen-point communique with Deng, with Cambodia prominent in the list of accomplishments. The Chinese leader was invited to Moscow.

On the next and last day of his visit Gorbachev was to brief the huge international press corps that had gathered for the historic event but the news conference was nearly canceled when Gorbachev's motorcade was blocked by a sea of demonstrators en route to the Great Hall. Once the demonstrators realized who was in the car and his mission, they opened a path for Gorbachev and he arrived, cheered on by the students, but wary of alienating his hosts. Once inside, Gorbachev told his Chinese hosts that the protesters were moving too quickly. “We, too, have hotheads who want to renovate socialism overnight,” he said. “But it doesn't happen like that in real life. Only in fairy tales.”

Then the Soviet leader left, and the Chinese leaders were free to let the crisis run its course. Demonstrations in favor of democracy had broken out in provincial cities around the country and many members of the press corps stayed on to report. Live television and radio broadcasts were beamed from Tiananmen. Over one million people had taken to the streets to support the hunger strikes. Less than two days later, on May 20, Deng made his move. The government declared martial law in parts of Beijing and ordered army troops into the capital to “keep order.” Over the next tense week, the students waited for an attack that never seemed to come. Their numbers began to diminish as conditions in the square became squalid and many of the protesters succumbed to one illness or another. Then shortly after midnight on June 3, Deng ordered the troops to attack. They had to push their way through Beijing's crowded streets, suffering the taunts of the citizens who were loath to call them the “people's army” and who slashed their tires. By the afternoon a full-scale military operation to crush the movement with lethal force was under way. Fighting had erupted in several parts of the city, with troops using tear gas and beating students. As many as 300,000 soldiers were said to be massed in and around Beijing. At 6:30 P.M. the government ordered everyone off the streets.

The killing began at 10 that night with troops moving in from the west. Barricades of burning buses and cars did not stop them as they pushed their way toward the square, gradually coming from several directions. Using live ammunition, the troops shot directly at demonstrators and at crowds who had disobeyed orders to stay inside. The streets became filled with blood as soldiers fired their AK-47s, and threw grenades and tear gas canisters to push their way into Tiananmen. “Look at what you've done to your brother,” a student shouted at a soldier to no effect. This brutal attack by the government against its unarmed citizens was broadcast around the world.

Army sharpshooters picked off protesters in the first line of marchers, then armored personnel carriers and tanks moved in and crushed whatever
stood in their way. The Chinese People's Army murdered thousands of citizens without remorse. By 6 A.M. on June 4 bodies littered the square and nearby streets. Black smoke rose from pyres of burning buses and tanks. The death toll was somewhere between 2,000 and 6,000 civilians and nearly 1,000 soldiers. The military declared victory over “the scum of society.” The rest of the world called it the Tiananmen massacre. In its own fashion, Tiananmen became the ambiguous symbol of the ending of Asia's cold war.

In the middle of this political earthquake, Claude Martin arrived in Beijing, and on June 3 he found a small plane to fly him directly to Qingdao, where Prince Sihanouk was safely ensconced. He said his mission was to “personally carry the letter of invitation to the international conference on Cambodia to the prince.” He was also able to assess how the turmoil would affect the prospects of peace. Already the Chinese were upset about foreign influences, especially what they saw as American provocations in supporting the democracy movement. China was the key to getting all the Cambodian parties to agree to a settlement, and the Chinese were in no mood to be conciliatory.

When Martin saw Sihanouk he said he told the prince, “Look at what's happening in China. China has to follow you. Do what you judge wise. China is in the chaotic condition.”

Sihanouk answered him, “China is capable of maintaining a severe face to the outside world.” And when he left China for the peace conference, Sihanouk announced that he was only going to please France.

The United States had immediately imposed sanctions on the Chinese for the massacre. But unbeknownst to Martin, the United States secretly sent two top emissaries to Beijing in July to assure the Chinese that the United States may condemn the massacre but wanted to maintain diplomatic ties to China. Secretary of State Baker was the last statesman to accept the invitation to the Cambodia conference and he had left most of the planning to his assistant secretary of state for East Asia, Richard Soloman, a Sinologist like Martin and Rogachev. Around the corridors of the State Department, Baker took to calling Soloman his assistant secretary of state for Cambodia since that problem was eating up most of Soloman's time.

Baker and the rest of the Bush administration were focusing on the astonishing movement in Europe. On June 6 the Polish communist prime minister resigned, opening up a full power struggle. In July President Bush visited Hungary, where he was given a piece of the “iron curtain” in a glass
display case, signaling that country's determination to tear down their wall, letting in thousands of refugees from East Germany. That same month, Gorbachev visited the European parliament in Strasbourg and declared that the cold war was about to become “consigned to oblivion.”

In this mixed atmosphere of Chinese intransigence and European optimism, the Cambodian peace conference was convened in Paris at the end of that month with French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas and Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas as co-conveners. It loosely mirrored the Gorbachev-Deng summit, since a successful conference required that the two communist enemies agree to end fighting each other—Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, supported by China, and Hun Sen's People's Republic of Kampuchea, supported by the Soviet Union. There the comparison ended. Other players were critical. The world's most powerful nations were convening to settle the problem of one of the world's weakest countries. Prince Sihanouk represented the critical swing vote of the non-communist world, including the United States. Although he was outclassed by his Cambodian rivals in terms of foreign supporters, Hun Sen had actual control over Cambodia—the one prize all parties were after.

The Cambodians arrived first for preparatory meetings at the chateau of La Celle-St.-Cloud in the Paris suburbs. Dumas welcomed Hun Sen, Prince Sihanouk, Son Sann, and Khieu Samphan, and said he hoped peace would come to Cambodia after twenty years of war, “of a veritable genocide, and of an invasion by a foreign army.” Hun Sen announced exact dates for the Vietnamese withdrawal from September 21 through September 26, but the talks broke down over how the group would be seated—as four parties of one country or two rivals. The one-country seating prevailed and the conference opened on July 30 at the elegant Kleber Center in Paris.

Twenty nations sent their ministers of foreign affairs, including China's Qian Qichen in his first international appearance since the Tiananmen massacre. The major powers gave speeches over two days, offering the outline of a consensus. Baker's statement was stronger than previous American positions, saying the “Khmer Rouge should play no role in Cambodia's future,” a sentiment amplified, surprisingly, by Qian Qichen, who never mentioned the Khmer Rouge by name and failed to demand that they play a dominant role in any new government.

Instead, his speech seemed to track with that of Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze, who said the conference should resolve the issues in its power: the end of foreign interference and assistance to the warring parties
and the establishment of international peacekeeping in Cambodia to prepare for general elections. Behind the scenes the Chinese were also helpful. At the insistence of Dumas, they held a dinner at their embassy for the Khmer Rouge and other resistance leaders at which they told the Khmer Rouge to drop any idea of demanding a condemnation of the Vietnamese invasion. They acquiesced.

After Qian Qichen's private diplomacy with the Khmer Rouge and his conciliatory speech, he was rewarded by Baker. The American secretary of state met the Chinese foreign minister at the conference, the first public high-level contact since Tiananmen.

The odd man out was Sihanouk. With circles under his eyes and his alto voice more voluble than usual, the prince reverted to his strongest defense of the Khmer Rouge. There was only one problem in Cambodia, he said, and that was the Vietnamese occupation. “There has not been and there is not ‘civil war' in Cambodia,” he said. Then he turned upside down his own comparison of the Khmer Rouge to the genocidal Hitler regime and compared the Vietnamese to Hitler's Nazis.

“To pretend that, in Cambodia, there is, currently a ‘civil war' is like suggesting that the war undertaken by the armed forces of ‘Free France' during the Second World War was not against Hitlerian Germany but against the French collaborators.”

Then, after declaring himself the Father of Cambodian Independence, Sihanouk argued for the inclusion of the Khmer Rouge in a four-party government, with Hun Sen's government receiving only one of the seats. If this idea was rejected, he said, then Vietnam “will continue to assume all responsibilities for the continuation of the war and other difficulties in Cambodia.”

By the first week of August, the conference had agreed on a blueprint for an international peace accord but the Cambodians never accepted it. Their chief foreign sponsors had departed Paris immediately and, left to their own devices, they squabbled over the next three weeks of nonstop meetings, including a UN fact-finding mission to Cambodia.