Cambodia's
Plight Is Not the End
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON-- Those who sweated blood and tears to bring peace
to Cambodia six years ago can be forgiven if they now say
they see very little causal relationship between the
magnitude of their efforts and the result now at hand--the
coup d'etat by Hun Sen and the effective suspension of civil
liberties.
The Cambodian veterans and the rest of those who labor
wearily in the vineyard of peacemaking are manifestly at a
loss what to do next. It is somewhat of a cruel irony that
the Secretary-General of the United Nations has deployed as
his envoy to Cambodia Thomas Hammarberg who for years, as a
brilliantly effective secretary-general of Amnesty
International, did much to focus the spotlight of global
attention on the gruesome details of the Cambodian genocide.
Now it is if, in a perverse retribution for those days, he
has to pay personal penance and go back and watch, perhaps,
a new round of the ``killing fields,'' this time only to
wring his hands on behalf of an impotent international
community.
But Mr. Hammerberg, like most of those in the
peacemnaking industry, is of patient disposition. He knows
full well that the relationship between external
intervention and the outcome of a conflict is an uncertain
science. What we do know, alas, is that negotiated
settlements have led to renewed warfare within five years in
about 50% of cases. Most civil wars in history have ended
with the outright military victory of one side over another.
And the most stable peace settlements in civil wars have
been those achieved by military victory, rather than by
negotiations. If it weren't for the fact that these military
victories usually come with wide-spread human rights abuses,
atrocities, genocide and environmental degradation, then we
should probably just let nature run its course. Indeed, this
was effectively the outside world's attitude during the
recent crisis in Zaire, as it was not so long ago in Uganda
and, more recently, in Ethiopia, both now, as it happens,
very successful economic recovery stories.
Nevertheless, in eight out of ten cases the results of
military victory are not as in Uganda or Ethiopia. It is
on-going murder and mayhem, as it is right now in Zaire,
Rwanda and Afghanistan and, as it shows all the signs of
being, in Cambodia.
If peacemaking is an infant industry, all the more reason
to try and fashion some new tools--what Georgetown
University professor, Charles King, calls antidotes to ``the
array of incentives to continue the violence.'' While
outsiders have little leverage over the central elements of
irrationality, contested values and identities that propel
the conflict, they can work at the margins to build
incentives that will dampen the violence. In this way it is
possible to influence the calculations of belligerents on
the pluses of a negotiated settlement.
Of course, as Clausewitz wrote, everything in war is
simple, but the simplest thing is very difficult. Applying
the above approach to a situation as complex and bloody as
Cambodia is never going to be straightforward. But, to
paraphrase Clausewitz again, war is not just an act of
senseless passion. Belligerents often calculate the relative
costs of continuing the conflict versus reaching some kind
of compromise settlement. This certainly seems to fit the
case of Hun Sen who was ready to live with the compromise of
the last elections, as long as he got more than his 50%
share out of it.
This is why outsiders must stay engaged with Cambodia.
Already the threat of a cut-off of foreign aid has seemed to
have had a sobering effect on Hun Sen, despite all his
bluster. He has now promised new elections.
The post-Cold War international community should take
heart not just from this new commitment by Hun Sen but from
its recent string of negotiating successes. Since 1988 major
civil wars in Namibia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mozambique,
Guatemala and South Africa have been wound up, all, apart
from South Africa, because of direct outside assistance. The
actual number of hot wars--both inter-state and
intra-state--has decreased considerably since 1989. Without
a shadow of doubt the new environment of international
cooperation has produced a more benign world than existed in
the dark days of the Cold War. No superpower is there to
stir things up in order to throw mud in its rival's eyes.
According to a 1996 U.S. government report the number of
persons threatened by on-going wars is now down to 42
million. Despite Rwanda, despite Zaire, Afghanistan,
Liberia, Bosnia and Cambodia, and all the other places that
grabbed the headlines, only around 0.7% of humanity is being
hurt by war at the present time, the lowest figure in its
recorded history.
This suggests that this is not the moment to give up on
Cambodia. The most intractable of all the civil wars now in
process, it may well be. Hun Sen's military victory may be
indeed the quickest road to peace, as the thin science of
peacemaking suggests. But the international community has
leverage to demand more than peace as the absence of war.
Democracy and human rights must be allowed to flourish in
Cambodia once again. We must keep muscling in on that until
we get it.
July 16, 1997,
LONDON
Copyright © 1997 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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