Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER FOUR
A False Dawn
New York City, October 1993. Cambodia's two prime ministers walked into the plush
lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue, took the elevator to the thirty-seventh
floor, and each extended a hand to greet the US Secretary of State, Warren Christopher.
The time and place of the meeting were highly symbolic. Throughout the 1980s, the New
York landmark had played host to Prince Sihanouk's sumptuous soirées, at which he plied
guests with champagne and petits fours while rallying support against the PRK. Now two
former enemies, Prince Norodom Ranariddh and Hun Sen, returned as partners of peace,
charged with safeguarding the UN's $2 billion-plus investment in Cambodian democracy.
In front of a large press contingent, Christopher presented Ranariddh and Hun Sen with
the brass plaque that had once been attached to the front of the Cambodian Embassy on
16th Street, re-establishing a relationship that had been in a deep freeze since the US had
run down its flag and evacuated Phnom Penh on April 12, 1975. When the ceremony
was over, “everybody in the room broke out into applause,” recalled Kenneth Quinn, then
serving as US deputy assistant secretary of state.
I thought it was a testimony … that, in fact, Cambodia somehow had been saved and—with all of
the caveats to such a statement about all the problems that could obtain in the future—there was
a moment there in which all the anguish, all of the sacrifice, all of the suffering of the past was
somehow expiated. 1
A similar sense of optimism prevailed elsewhere. In July 1994 Tony Kevin arrived in
Phnom Penh and presented his credentials to King Sihanouk as Australia's new ambassad-
or to Cambodia. Kevin had no previous experience in Asia. His last posting had been in
Warsaw, where he had seen out the collapse of communism and the shaky early presidency
of the trade union leader and Nobel laureate Lech Walesa. Kevin's bosses in Canberra saw
Cambodia in much the same way as they saw Poland and the other ex-communist coun-
tries of Eastern Europe. With communism crumbling, democracy would dawn. All Kevin
would be doing in Cambodia, he was told, was “running an aid program.”
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