of the helpless urban population perished. A cam-
paign of genocide was directed against all intel-
lectuals and educated Cambodians who might
have resisted his fanatical communist regime. No
one knows exactly how many hundreds of thou-
sands perished in the notorious killing fields, now
preserved as national shrines. Possibly it was as
many as 2 million, but up to one-third of the pop-
ulation has disappeared; Cambodia’s population
declined from some 7.5 to 5.5 million.
To satisfy their own ambitions the communist
Vietnamese put an end to Pol Pot’s bloodthirsty
regime by invading Cambodia, which had been
renamed Kampuchea, in December 1978 and set-
ting up a government under their control. A large
Vietnamese army occupied most of the country
until 1989, when the invaders at last withdrew. It
had proved a costly intervention, and the puppet
regime was not recognised by the West. It was
true that the Vietnamese could not but be an
immense improvement on Pol Pot’s murderers,
but south-east Asia’s non-communist countries
fear a powerful Vietnam far more than they fear
the Khmer Rouge. Disgracefully, the Khmer
Rouge, part of the Khmer People’s National
Liberation Front, were for a long time recognised
as representing Kampuchea at the United Nations.
The search for a peaceful settlement in
Kampuchea was long and arduous. The opportu-
nity arose only with the ending of the Cold War.
It was now also in China’s and Russia’s interests to
liquidate the civil war in Kampuchea. In January
1990 an Australian peace plan was accepted as a
basis for a settlement by the five permanent mem-
bers of the UN Security Council, including of
course the former Cold War contestants, the US,
China and the Soviet Union. A peace accord
between the Kampuchean factions brokered by
the United Nations was subsequently signed in
Paris on 23 October 1991. It would allow the
genocidal Khmer Rouge to participate in a transi-
tional administration called the Supreme National
Council. Some 400,000 refugees on the Thai–
Kampuchean border were to return home, and
they would swell the support the Khmer Rouge
could claim.
In 1991 Prince Sihanouk returned to his
palace in Phnom Penh and an advance party of
UN officials arrived. The United Nations took on
a supervisory role as ‘transitional authority’ to run
the main ministries, enforce an arms embargo and
ensure the demobilisation of the rival armies – the
35,000 Khmer Rouge guerrillas, the 18,000-
strong Sihanouk National Army and 8,000 troops
of the anti-communist National Liberation Front,
who together formed the ‘national resistance
coalition’. The UN held elections in 1993 but the
Khmer Rouge refused to participate. A huge
international peace effort, which required funding
by the wealthier nations to the tune of over $2
billion, 16,000 UN troops and 5,000 civilians,
was undertaken under the auspices of a UN ‘tran-
sitional authority’. The two largest parties came
to a power-sharing agreement with two co-prime
members until July 1997 when their power strug-
gle ended in fighting in Phnom Penh, the royal-
ist Norodom Ranaddh was driven out and Hun
Sen and the People’s Party assumed sole power.
The events illustrated once again how despite a
tremendous international effort, democracy and
representative government cannot simply be
imposed from above where the culture and
history is so alien to it. It can only be nurtured
over a longer time span. But Cambodia has
become more stable. After Pol Pot’s death in
1998, the Khmer Rouge ceased as an effective
opposition military force. To overcome inter-
national criticism Hun Sen held new elections in
1998, a coalition was formed again with the roy-
alists but Hun Sen remained in firm control. The
people remain attached to their old king who
chose to live in Beijing advising his countrymen
from afar. A country of great contradictions,
Kampuchea is a communist kingdom.600 TWO FACES OF ASIA: AFTER 1949
Laos, Kampuchea and Vietnam, 2000Population GDP per head,
(millions) Purchasing Power
Parity (US$)
Laos 5.3 1,500
Kampuchea 13.1 1,400
(Cambodia)
Vietnam 78.1 2,000