The Second Revolution - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 45

It took an unusual sequence of events to break the deadlock. In December 1987 Hun
Sen met with Prince Sihanouk at Fère-en-Tardenois, a small town north of Paris. The
grandeur of the converted thirteenth-century castle, built by a grandson of King Louis VI,
was an apt setting for a meeting that was the product of years of backroom maneuver-
ings. Jean-Jacques Galabru, a French diplomat who met Hun Sen in 1983 while Galabru
was serving in Angola, acted as his go-between with Sihanouk, since Galabru's Cam-
bodian wife, Pung Chhiv Kek, enjoyed close connections to Sihanouk's camp in Beijing.
The meeting was opposed by most of the CGDK's superpower backers, who feared a Si-
hanouk-Hun Sen rapprochement would undermine the resistance coalition. The Chinese
were particularly worried that their PDK proxies would be cut out of a political set-
tlement. Even the French were cool to the idea, refusing to provide Hun Sen's delega-
tion with cars and accommodation for the duration of its stay. (Transport was eventually
provided by the Soviet embassy in Paris.) 55
The meeting at Fère-en-Tardenois went well. Hun Sen clearly impressed the gray-
haired monarch. As the French sociologist Serge Thion wrote, Hun Sen approached his
meeting with Sihanouk like a long-lost son, flattering the prince with the assurance that
his removal from power in 1970 was the root cause of Cambodia's current problems. 56
On December 4 the pair signed a communiqué pledging a political solution to the conflict
involving all four Cambodian factions. It was only a first step—Sihanouk backtracked
soon afterward under Chinese pressure—but it marked a decisive turn toward a solution
to the Cambodian crisis. 57 Sihanouk knew that he would eventually be forced to deal
with the PRK, the only faction that held real power in Cambodia. Only pressure from
his Chinese patrons, and the continued presence of Vietnamese troops in Cambodia, pre-
vented him from severing his ties with the Khmer Rouge and cutting a deal directly with
Phnom Penh. 58
Over the next three years, a flurry of meetings across Asia edged the Cambodians
closer to a settlement. Starting in July 1988, three rounds of talks in Indonesia—the so-
called Jakarta Informal Meetings (JIMs)—brought the four factions into the same room
for the first time. The JIMs proceeded in fits and starts, deadlocking on issues such as the
disputed presence of Vietnamese settlers in Cambodia and the PDK's opposition to any
use of the word “genocide” to refer to its past policies. In the improved regional environ-
ment, however, the question was less whether there would be a settlement than what form
it would take. In January 1989, Vietnam announced that it would withdraw its forces by
September. The same month, Hun Sen traveled to Bangkok for meetings with Thai Prime
Minister Chatichai Choonhavan, who famously pledged to turn Indochina's “battlefields
into marketplaces.”
As the Soviet empire began to crumble, normalization of Sino-Soviet ties, and a gradu-
al warming between Hanoi and Beijing, created the conditions for a resolution to the