Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the United Nations in Cambodia - Reviewed by Stephen J. Morris

December 5, 2008
Reviewed by Stephen J. Morris
Far Eastern Economic Review

"Unfortunately, what could have been a shorter and less controversial memoir of events, has extended itself unnecessarily into a work of advocacy for the current dictatorship that rules Cambodia"

Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the united nations in Cambodia
by Benny Widyono
Rowman and Littlefield,356 pages, $29.95

In the sad history of 20th century Cambodia, a bright light of hope for its long suffering people came from the peace plan, adopted by the United Nations Security Council in 1990, and signed by the warring Cambodian parties in Paris in October 1991. That plan authorized the holding of free elections in a “politically neutral environment,” under the supervision of U.N. peacekeepers and a United Nations Temporary Administration in Cambodia. The primary purpose of the Agreement was to end the war between competing Cambodian factions, two of which were rival communist organizations, and two of which were noncommunist. The second purpose of the plan was to give the Cambodian people the chance to determine their own future in a nonviolent way, by creating a culture of tolerance and social pluralism, and a set of liberal democratic political institutions.

It is now clear that while armed conflict eventually ended in 1999, it was not because of the Paris Agreement that had been applied in 1992-93. It is also clear that the will of the Cambodian people, as expressed in the victory of the noncommunists in the elections of 1993, was ignored. The election’s loser—the communist Cambodian People’s Party—bullied its way into retaining real power with threats of massive violence. Prince Norodom Sihanouk and the force-averse U.N. “peacekeepers” caved in to Hun Sen’s demand for an ostensible but in fact bogus “coalition” with the election’s winners. Consequently, Cambodia did not then and does not now have a government freely chosen by its people.

Why this U.N. failure was allowed to happen has never been systematically analyzed in a sober and objective way. However, the appearance of a memoir by Indonesian-born U.N. diplomat Benny Widyono is welcome. Mr. Widyono’s book mostly recalls his personal experiences as the senior UNTAC official in Siem Reap province during the election preparations, campaign and balloting of 1992-93, and as the U.N. secretary general’s personal representative in Cambodia from 1993-97.

For the already well informed and objective scholar, Mr. Widyono’s account has several things to recommend it. He ably describes the profound failings of the UNTAC administration as he witnessed them at the local level. UNTAC was expected, by the terms of the Paris Agreement, to exercise control over the key ministries of the existing administration of Cambodia. But Mr. Widyono shows how hopelessly understaffed UNTAC was for the designated task. It was also ill equipped linguistically, with most of the few Khmer speakers assigned to the Information Division. The UNTAC leadership itself was in disarray at the beginning of the operation. UNTAC was unable to ensure that the CPP-controlled government did not finance the CPP’s political campaign, and UNTAC would not stop partisan violence during the elections.

But while informed scholars can glean many interesting details of the failings of UNTAC from Mr. Widyono’s account, it is defective as an overall objective analysis for either scholars or the broader public.

First, Mr. Widyono clearly has preferences between the various contenders for political power. He exposes the many political and personal flaws in the leader of the royalist funcinpec party, Prince Ranariddh: his vacillation, his weakness and his corruption. The royalist funcinpec party is treated with derision. Most of Mr. Widyono’s charges against the royalists, especially Ranariddh, have long been known to astute observers of Cambodia.

At the same time, Mr. Widyono applies different standards in his treatment of the CPP and its government structure, the State of Cambodia. Though not uncritical of the CPP, the author gives CPP strongman Hun Sen and his regime a fairly gentle evaluation.

For instance, Mr. Widyono ignores evidence of the Hun Sen regime’s direct involvement in drug trafficking, human trafficking and forest defoliation. In a cover story entitled “Medellin on the Mekong?,” which appeared in the REVIEW in 1995, former review and Washington Post journalist Nate Thayer explained the close link between political figures and criminal syndicates in Cambodia. Mr. Widyono quotes the review often, but not for this revealing analysis.

Moreover, he accurately describes the notorious head of the National Police, Hok Lundi, as “one of the most feared men in Cambodia,” but the details are not spelled out. Nowhere in the book does Mr. Widyono hold Lundi (who died in a helicopter crash last month) responsible for the torture and murder of the political opposition, or for his continuing involvement in human trafficking.

Or consider Mr. Widyono’s coverage of the May 1997 grenade attack on a peaceful political rally by opposition leader Sam Rainsy, which killed 19 people and wounded 150. The author suggests that the culprits for this atrocity were not obvious; he tries to muddy the evidential waters by claiming that different parties had been blamed. Yet despite Mr. Widyono’s agnosticism, numerous analyses by journalists since that event have provided compelling evidence that the Hun Sen regime was directly involved in the atrocity. Hun Sen is always portrayed as a tough and wily politician, but not as a ruthless dictator.

At the beginning of the book, Mr. Widyono writes that the whole peace process was flawed because the Khmer Rouge was part of it. But one is compelled to ask how there could have been a peace process without one of the main belligerents? Mr. Widyono’s illogical view was precisely the political position of the Hun Sen regime and its foreign supporters up until the moment it agreed to sign the Paris Peace Agreements. No wonder then that when Mr. Widyono’s time was up as U.N. representative in Cambodia in May 1997, Hun Sen begged the U.N. secretariat to allow him to stay on.

The informed observer could have guessed where Mr. Widyono’s sympathies lay from his choice of Ben Kiernan to write his foreword. Mr. Kiernan was a devoted supporter of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge from 1975-77 who subsequently became a propagandist for the Heng Samrin-Hun Sen led faction of Khmer Rouge’s defectors, now known as the CPP.

Unfortunately, what could have been a shorter and less controversial memoir of events, has extended itself unnecessarily into a work of advocacy for the current dictatorship that rules Cambodia. But even as a piece of advocacy it has its value, for it gives us insight into the thinking of some U.N. bureaucrats who performed so poorly. And by exposing his own prejudices in favor of the CPP dictatorship, Mr. Widyono inadvertently illuminates one reason why the 1991 Paris Agreements failed to bring peace or democracy to Cambodia.

Stephen Morris is a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington D.C., and author of Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia (Stanford University Press, 1999).