The Second Revolution - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 46

Cambodian problem. In November 1989 Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans is-
sued a proposal for a UN-supervised interim administration of Cambodia pending elec-
tions. Sihanouk and Hun Sen both agreed, as did the Vietnamese. In July 1990 the US
dropped its long-standing support for the CGDK and by the following month the perman-
ent five members of the UN Security Council—the US, Britain, France, China, and the
Soviet Union—had drafted a framework agreement that sketched out the basic elements
of the peace accord that was eventually signed in Paris on October 23, 1991. Chinese
and US pressure ensured that the Khmer Rouge remained a legitimate party to the peace
plan—something that would create serious problems farther down the road. But with the
Cold War beginning to thaw and the UN's blue helmets on the way, there was hope that
peace was at last within reach.
On September 26, 1989, more than a decade after their arrival, the last Vietnamese troops
withdrew from Cambodia. The occasion was marked by lavish Vietnamese-orchestrated
celebrations in Phnom Penh and other provincial towns. Soviet-built T-54 tanks rolled
past the former Royal Palace watched by crowds clutching hundreds of small Vietnamese
and Cambodian flags. Departing officers weepily embraced their Cambodian counter-
parts in the streets, as jeeps filled with cheering troops coursed past, flying red pennants
bearing the words quyet thang , meaning “victory”—a generous assessment of the long
occupation, perhaps, but one that unconsciously reflected Hanoi's relief at its extrication
from the Cambodian quagmire.
Vietnam's “Vietnam” had taken a harsh toll. Around 23,000 Vietnamese soldiers lost
their lives during the occupation—four times the number the US would later lose in Iraq
and nearly half the number killed during the Vietnam War. An additional 55,000 were
wounded. 59 Though it was never undertaken on humanitarian grounds, the Vietnamese
invasion and occupation of Cambodia had delivered the country from one of the darkest
periods of a dark twentieth century. Hanoi paid a high price in blood and treasure to help
its Cambodian client state establish itself on the ruins of Pol Pot's rule. Without the pro-
tection of the Vietnamese troops, it's likely that the Khmer Rouge, fed and armed by Ch-
ina, would have returned to power, ready to restage the horrors for a second time.
Aside from the scattered bones of as many as 10,000 soldiers missing in the jungles of
western Cambodia, the departing forces left little behind. A Cambodia-Vietnam Friend-
ship Monument, built to commemorate the “fraternal” ties between the two countries, still
stands in a Phnom Penh park along the thoroughfare once known as Lenin Boulevard—a
controversial symbol of the Vietnamese occupation. At Tuol Tompong Market in the
south of the city, nicknamed the “Russian Market” after its popularity with Soviet expat-
riates in the PRK years, it is occasionally possible to turn up some banknotes or postage
stamps from that period, with their depictions of toiling peasants, drifting Soviet cosmo-