AsiaLIFE

‘Dancing In Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the United Nations In Cambodia.’ Benny Widyono, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2008.

Nearly two decades on, the UN peacekeeping mission in Cambodia remains controversial. Some observers continue to lament its shortcomings, while others praise the effort as the start of the country’s long journey towards a democratic state.

Dancing In Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the United Nations In Cambodia, is the most recent contribution to this debate.It seems strange now to think that a group of foreigners, no matter how well intentioned, thought they could come into another country and presume to administer it effectively. Yet, that is exactly what happened under the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC). Over night the impoverished nation went from almost complete isolation to, as the author puts it, being “invaded” by the world.

Indonesian by birth, a career U.N. diplomat, Widyono had a ringside seat to the events that followed. From 1992 to 1993 he was stationed in Cambodia as the provincial director of Siem Reap, one of 21 international shadow administrators that were supposed to run affairs while an election was being organised. He returned in 1994 as the U.N. Secretary General’s Political Representative or Special Envoy to the new government of Cambodia.

UNTAC emerged after years of international diplomatic wrangling to end the civil war underway since the Vietnamese and their Cambodian allies drove the Khmer Rouge out of power in 1979.This agreement, signed in 1991, stipulated the U.N. would take control of the country’s governance working with a supposedly neutral body that comprised representatives of all the country’s political factions, including the Khmer Rouge. At the time it was the largest peace keeping mission ever undertaken by the U.N. – over 20,000 military, police and civilian personnel from over a hundred countries.

In retrospect it’s easy to be cynical about UNTAC. As a young journalist this reviewer has vivid memories of the streets being clogged with U.N. four-wheel drives and one press briefing at which a U.N. spokesman informed us, completely straight faced, of the latest peace keeping casualty, a French soldier who’d fallen out of a third storey hotel room while on R&R in Pattaya.Much more serious was the soft line taken by the U.N. on the Khmer Rouge in an unsuccessful attempt to get them to participate in the election. This was epitomised by the famous ‘bamboo pole’ incident when UNTAC’s two most senior representatives where prevented from visiting the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Pailin by several young unarmed guerrilla’s who refused to lift a single bamboo pole blocking the road to their territory.

Problems also arose from the fact that Cambodia already had a government, even if it was one the country’s resistance factions. One that many members of the international community chose not to recognise. The State of Cambodia, the precursor to the Cambodian People’s Party, had been in charge since 1979 and, as the author is the first to admit, continued to hold actual day-to-day power regardless of the U.N.’s mandate. The U.N.’s mission did have its successes. An election was organised from scratch, a large number of Cambodian refugees where peacefully repatriated from Thailand, and space was created for the creation of NGOs and a more diverse media.

Widyono’s book is a surprisingly self-reflexive insider account of this period and the years that immediately followed it. He recounts the infighting and intrigue that accompanied what he labels the “intricate dance of governance” between the various players, local and international. As the U.N.’s envoy from 1994 to early 1997, Widyono was privy to and feted by both sides of the dysfunctional coalition government that emerged from the 1993 poll.

Some readers will not like his take on many events. He was not surprised by or particularly critical of the fact that despite being officially dissolved with the formation of the post-1993 government, the CPP continued to call the shots during UNTAC. As CPP’s coalition partner, Funcinpec was effectively marginalised because it was able to insert into the country’s power structure only a few hundred people returning from exile or refugee camps compared to the thousands of civil servants loyal to the CPP. His version of the events surrounding the 1996 defection of Ieng Sary and the tensions arising as both major parties tried to court the former Khmer Rouge foreign minister and troops that went with him, is particularly interesting.