Is Pol Pot on the way back in?
Socialist Outlook newspaper1990sPaul ClarkeTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
THE RESULT of the UN-organised elections in Cambodia could bring Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge guerrillas back into a coalition government, despite their refusal to participate in the elections.
Four million people voted, 85 per cent of registered electors. This was a victory of the UN task force Untac, and Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party government.
But although the Khmer Rouge failed to disrupt the elections, so far it is the Funcinpec coalition led by former ruler Prince Norodom Sihanouk which is leading the count. Sihanouk's support is particularly strong in the capital Phnom Penh.
Sihanouk is pledged to 'national reconciliation', which decoded means bringing the Khmer Rouge into a coalition government. It would be an obscene result if the mass murderers led by Pol Pot came back into the government.
The Khmer Rouge have been treated with great respect by the United Nations which refers to them by their official name – the 'Democratic Forces of Cambodia'. Pol Pot has only survived because of the aid lavished on his soldiers by the United States, Britain and China.
Cambodia is littered with land mines, mainly laid by the Khmer Rouge; they have resulted in tens of thousands losing limbs. The instructors who taught the Khmer Rouge this form of warfare were from Britain's SAS, a fact that the government has persistently tried to cover up.
The elections, held in conditions of virtual partition of the country between different armed factions, have been forced on Cambodia by the 'international community'.
Blockade
Through most of the 1980s the US ensured a virtual economic blockade because of the presence of Vietnamese troops, and its characterisation of the Hun Sen government as a 'puppet' of the Vietnamese.
It was those same Vietnamese that by their 1979 invasion which crushed Pol Pot's genocidal regime.
The Cambodian Peoples Party has asked the UN to stop declaring election results because of 'irregularities' in the counting. This is a sure sign that they expect to lose. If they do, it will be because of Sihanouk's promise to end the fighting; the appeal to 'peace' has a tremendous impact in a country so war-weary – in the same way as it did in the 1991 election in Nicaragua.
But if the result is contested or a Funcinpec victory there is no guarantee that the CPP will accept it. A return to all-out war, and western aid to Pol Pot would be the probable result.
The irony is that Sun Hen's government is very clear in its willingness to accept a market economy and the diktats of the IMF and World Bank. But in US eyes must be ditched because of his former alliance with the Vietnamese.