Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
United Nations,” Sihanouk said afterward. “We did not deserve $3 billion—our behavior
is so bad, so bad.”
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In Kratie, a sleepy provincial capital hugging the banks of the Mekong 200 kilometers
northeast of Phnom Penh, there is still one faint echo from the UNTAC days. A few
blocks back from the shaded river promenade, with its arching trees and stuccoed
colonial-era buildings, stands an abandoned warehouse—little more than a large iron
frame open on three sides to a grove of rustling coconut palms. Twenty years on, its rusty
steel gate, slumping inward on its hinges, still bears a thin layer of sky-blue paint and, in
two large white block letters, the UN's double-barreled acronym. During 1992 and 1993,
the site served as the base of operations for UNTAC's Indian and Polish peacekeeping
contingents; today it's a lonely place, strewn with garbage, weeds, and empty beer cans.
UNTAC notched up some undeniable successes in Cambodia. The mission brought
some semblance of order to a shattered nation. It repatriated more than 360,000 Cambod-
ians from the Thai border camps and helped reintegrate them into Cambodian society.
UNTAC's Information and Education Division—one of the few parts of the mission that
employed foreign Cambodia experts and Khmer speakers—played an important role in
neutralizing the poisonous atmosphere that preceded the elections. Radio UNTAC in par-
ticular successfully informed Cambodians about the secrecy of the electoral process, and
gave airtime to opposition parties barred from the SOC-controlled state media. For the
first time in many years Cambodians had access to an unbiased source of information.
UNTAC also prized open a space for the establishment of indigenous human rights
groups and a vibrant free press. Groups like the Cambodian Human Rights and Devel-
opment Association and the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of
Human Rights—usually known by their French-language acronyms, ADHOC and
LICADHO—were founded and began publishing detailed reports on government abuses,
a level of scrutiny that had been unheard of under a succession of regimes. As interna-
tional attention shifted onto new global trouble-spots—to Somalia, Rwanda, and the frac-
turing former Yugoslavia—Cambodia continued to provide a ray of hope for the saving
idea that peace could be engineered, democratic institutions molded, and human rights
implanted in the DNA of nations emerging from bloody conflict. Before moving on to
head the UNPROFOR peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, where his diplomatic diffiden-
ce was partly blamed for UN inaction during the genocidal massacres at Srebrenica in
world that an intractable conflict can be resolved and seemingly irreconcilable views can
be reconciled.” Cambodia, he said, would stand “as a model and a shining example for
other UN member states.”
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