Newsgroups: bit.listserv.seasia-l
Date:         Wed, 11 Nov 1992 10:38:52 -0500
From:         Nhan Tran <tran@PEORA.SDC.CCUR.COM>
Subject:      CAM: peace talks end in failure in Beijing

11/08

CAMBODIAN PEACE TALKS END IN FAILURE IN BEIJING

    By Andrew Browne
    BEIJING, Nov 8, Reuter - International talks on salvaging Cambodian peace
accords collapsed on Sunday, throwing a United Nations peace-keeping operation
into disarray and raising the prospect of renewed bloodshed.
    The talks in Beijing were seen as crucial in the effort to persuade the
radical Khmer Rouge to lay down its arms and comply with the Paris peace
accords it signed in October 1991.
    But the Maoist guerrillas refused to budge.
    The Foreign Ministers of France and Indonesia, chairmen of the Paris Peace
Conference, suggested the accords would have to be at least partly rewritten
after they reported on the outcome of the meeting to the U.N. Security Council
before November 15.
    Roland Dumas and Ali Alatas made clear U.N.-supervised elections would go
ahead, with or without the Khmer Rouge rebels who ran the Cambodian killing
fields in which more than one million people died in the 1970s.
    But rival Cambodian factions have threatened to rearm unless the Khmer
Rouge steps into line, which would reverse one of the most important
achievements of the U.N. operation and threaten renewed civil war.
    Western diplomats said without Khmer Rouge participation Cambodian
elections were unlikely to be held as planned in May -- if at all.
    Neither Dumas nor Alatas elaborated on how the peace accords would be
changed. The United Nations would need a new mandate to organise a vote
excluding the Khmer Rouge.
    "It is true the Khmer Rouge is hostile to the continuation of the peace
process," Dumas told a news conference at the end of the talks.
    Alatas said: "Now we have been unable to reach agreement...some appropriate
adjustments must be made to the Paris agreements."
    The Khmer Rouge was armed and backed by China during the 13-year Cambodia
civil war and is still the most powerful among the rival factions. China helped
drag the Khmer Rouge to the negotiating table and is committed to the U.N.-
plan, but Beijing no longer calls all the shots with its former clients.
    Troops and other personnel from 44 countries have come together in the
22,000-strong U.N. Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), the largest
operation of its kind costing billions of dollars.
    UNTAC officials have said the Security Council could impose economic
sanctions against the Khmer Rouge aimed at cutting off its lucrative sales of
gems.
    Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan joined the talks on Sunday at the private
residence of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, chairman of the Supreme National Council
(SNC), an umbrella grouping of all Cambodian factions.
    At a news conference after the session he repeated Khmer Rouge demands that
the Vietnamese-installed government in Phnom Penh should be dismantled and
power transferred to the SNC and UNTAC before elections.
    He again charged that Vietnemese troops were still in the country, some
slipping in with a wave of civilians who he said were sent by Hanoi as
colonisers.
    "We cannot participate in elections in the prevailing conditions," he said.
A vote now, he charged "would not be basically different from those staged in
the past by Vietnam and its puppets."
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