The Wages of Peace - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 62

agent of Hanoi. Nothing short of a UN-directed campaign of ethnic cleansing would suf-
fice.
Where UNTAC “failed” to act, the PDK took matters into its own hands. On March 10,
1993, PDK soldiers descended on Chong Kneas, a floating village on the Tonlé Sap lake
in Siem Reap, and massacred 33 unarmed Vietnamese fisherfolk, including more than a
dozen children. The other three Cambodian factions showed little concern for the cold-
blooded killings of unarmed civilians. Vietnam was, after all, “a very sensitive issue,” one
Funcinpec representative said. The BLDP issued a rote condemnation of the bloodshed,
but followed it with calls for Vietnam “to immediately call upon her citizens currently
living illegally in Cambodia to return to their homeland”—what it considered to be the
main problem. 67
Even the CPP, scared of demonstrating pro-Vietnamese sympathies, refused to deploy
its police to protect Vietnamese civilians. In an interview with the Bangkok Post , Akashi
quoted Hun Sen as saying that he did not want his government to be seen as “protectors
of the Vietnamese,” arguing that it would be “political suicide” before the election. 68 In
a replay of the pogroms of the early 1970s, nearly 200 Vietnamese were killed in the six
months leading up to the May 1993 elections, and 20,000 more fled back to Vietnam, in-
cluding many whose families had lived in Cambodia for generations. 69
Again, UNTAC was found wanting. Despite the PDK's advance notice of the attacks,
UN forces did nothing to protect Vietnamese communities, or to notify them of impend-
ing violence. UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali later took refuge in the letter
of the Paris Agreements, arguing that protection was the responsibility of the local au-
thorities—that is, the SOC—and that “appearing to make exception to the mandate” to
protect the Vietnamese would have further discouraged the Khmer Rouge from taking
part in the election. 70 But by this point PDK cooperation was a hopelessly slim chance,
meaning that the Vietnamese were sacrificed in a vain attempt to keep the mission on the
rails. It was, as David Rieff later said of the UN mission to Rwanda, “a triumph of form
over substance, legalism over reality, hope over experience.” 71
In this context, the peacefulness of the election—held over a week during May
23-28—came as a surprise. The PDK, which had been threatening a violent campaign to
derail the polls, mysteriously held its fire, and an astonishing 89.5 percent of Cambod-
ia's 4.7 million registered voters turned out bravely to vote. In some provinces, so many
voters came on the first day of the election that polling stations stood nearly empty for the
rest of the week. Widyono described the scenes that greeted him as Cambodian villagers,
clutching their prized voter registration cards, lined up to have their say in the country's
first multiparty election in a generation:
Dressed in their nicest clothes and beaming, they looked as if they were going to a carnival. Most
came from up to twenty kilometers away—by foot, by bicycle, or trucks provided by the SOC or