Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
to journalists that “mistakes” had occurred under DK, but rejected accusations of geno-
cide or mass killings. “To talk about systematic murder is odious,” he said. “If we had
really killed at that rate, we would have no one to fight the Vietnamese.”
19
Few were convinced by the rebranding exercise. In June 1982, at the urging of their
foreign backers, the three Cambodian resistance factions came together in Kuala Lumpur
to form a unified “resistance coalition” to oppose the Vietnamese. Like Sihanouk's alli-
ance with the Khmer communists in the early 1970s, the Coalition Government of Demo-
cratic Kampuchea (CGDK) was the offspring of expedience, incorporating the Khmer
Rouge within a diplomatically palatable front that would occupy Cambodia's seat at the
UN. Sihanouk, based in Beijing and Pyongyang, became the coalition's traveling spokes-
man. When the UN was in session he put on grandiose soirées at the Waldorf-Astoria
Hotel, where the champagne flowed freely and the prince occasionally serenaded guests
to the backing of a Khmer band flown in from Paris.
20
From the start the CGDK was an unstable fiction. As John Pilger wrote, it was “neither
only thing that rivaled the three factions' hatred of Vietnam was their hatred for each oth-
er. Sihanouk was understandably uneasy about remaining yoked to the DK leadership, but
between the Vietnamese occupation and the desires of his Chinese backers, saw it as his
only choice if he wanted to retain a role in Cambodian affairs. “He had to walk a very fine
line on this issue,” said Prince Sisowath Sirirath, Sihanouk's representative at the UN.
“We needed the Khmer Rouge as a bargaining chip.”
22
Behind the coalition's facade of parity, the PDK was by far the most significant milit-
ary force, fielding as many as 35,000 troops compared with 11,000 for the KPNLF and
soldiers were more motivated and more disciplined than those of the other factions, and
conducted most of the fighting against the Vietnamese. The PDK faction also controlled
the all-important foreign affairs portfolio, meaning that it continued to occupy Cambod-
ia's seat at the UN. For Western powers the CGDK was the perfect diplomatic fig-leaf,
deflecting criticisms of Western and Chinese support for the Khmer Rouge while allow-
ing Pol Pot's forces to keep the Vietnamese army bogged down in its own unwinnable
“Vietnam.”
At first, the Vietnamese were unimpressed with the men they had selected to lead their
satellite government in Phnom Penh. Chea Sim was “conciliatory, craven, and unde-
cided,” read one biographical sketch compiled and translated for East German intelli-
gence in 1979. Heng Samrin had “a low education, does not talk a lot, and sometimes
young foreign minister, however, was another story. To be sure, Hun Sen was an awk-
