ASEAN intervention in Cambodia: from Cold War to conditionality

Abstract

Despite their other theoretical differences, virtually all scholars of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) agree that the organization's members share an almost religious commitment to the norm of non-intervention. This article disrupts this consensus, arguing that ASEAN repeatedly intervened in Cambodia's internal political conflicts from 1979 to 1999, often with powerful and destructive effects. ASEAN's role in maintaining Khmer Rouge occupancy of Cambodia's UN seat, constructing a new coalition government in exile, manipulating Khmer refugee camps and informing the content of the Cambodian peace process will be explored, before turning to the ‘creeping conditionality’ for ASEAN membership imposed after the 1997 ‘coup’ in Phnom Penh. The article argues for an analysis recognizing the political nature of intervention, and seeks to explain both the creation of non-intervention norms and specific violations of them as attempts by ASEAN elites to maintain their own illiberal, capitalist regimes against domestic and international political threats.

Keywords:

• ASEAN
• Cambodia
• intervention
• norms
• non-interference
• sovereignty

Acknowledgements

For helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper the author is grateful to Andrew Hurrell, Alastair Fraser, Christopher Bickerton, the participants of the Sovereignty and its Discontents workshop on Southern Responses to the New Interventionism (Oxford, November 2006), and two anonymous reviewers.

Lee Jones is a doctoral candidate in International Relations at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. His research focuses on ASEAN and intervention in Cambodia, East Timor, and Burma.

Notes

1 Such remarks were entirely typical (Dibb 2001: 834; Hernandez 1998; Kao and Kaplan 2000; Ramcharan 2000; Sucharithanarugse 2000: 60).

2 The first was supposedly the explicit support lent to Corazon Aquino's government in the Philippines in 1986 and the attendant call for a peaceful political solution to the ongoing socio-political crisis there.

3 As is relatively common in studies of ASEAN, and particularly given the politically sensitive nature of this topic and the lack of secondary material on some parts of the period, it has been necessary at times to rely on newspaper accounts to reconstruct a narrative in the absence of access to government archives. Wherever possible, triangulation was used to help confirm accounts, and multiple sources are often cited. As with any such research, the narrative and conclusions are subject to the subsequent revelation of any more authoritative official documents.

4 There is no space here to fully rehearse the history behind these events. Briefly, the US intervention in and bombing of Cambodia emiserated and radicalized the population, pushing them into the arms of the Khmer Rouge, a Left-wing guerrilla group opposing the US-backed Lon Nol dictatorship. The Khmer Rouge swept to power in 1975 with Vietnamese and Chinese assistance, renaming the Kingdom of Cambodia ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ (DK; ‘Kampuchea’ being closer to the phonetic sound of the country in Khmer – the two names are used interchangeably in this article as they were during the period). But almost immediately after cementing his dominance, Pol Pot, in league with China (which Vietnam had turned against because of Beijing's excessive interference) began attacking Vietnam and persecuting ethnic Vietnamese citizens as part of a genocidal campaign claiming 1.7 million lives. Vietnam was forced into an alliance with Moscow and invaded Cambodia alongside a rebel Khmer Rouge faction that had previously staged an unsuccessful revolt against Pol Pot before fleeing to Vietnam. Hanoi had previously defended the Khmer Rouge regime in international forums, unsuccessfully seeking a modus vivendi with Pol Pot. Its motives in invading were not so much humanitarian (though it clearly had positive results for the Cambodian people), as self-interested – the goal being to remove a dangerous regime that menaced Vietnam's borders constantly with significant loss of life and food security.

5 These notations indicate UN documents. A indicates the General Assembly, 34 indicates the 34th session (1979), PV indicates provisional verbatim record, and the final number indicates the meeting number, followed by the page number.

6 It is important to note, as Robison and Goodman et al. (1996) do, that the growth of urban middle classes in the region did not automatically produce demands for liberal democracy, as mainstream theorists of democratization expected. Often the middle classes were in fact highly bound up in the illiberal power structures that had helped create them via massive state intervention. Nevertheless, these changes generally produced rising demand for political participation in some way, as well as protests against corruption and inefficiencies that hampered middle-class business interests.

7 Some constructivists argue that the goal is in fact to ‘socialize’ China. Johnston (2003) provides the most convincing argument along these lines, but only succeeds in showing that a small office of bureaucrats has been effectively ‘socialized’. In any case such arguments are post hoc rationalizations of the ARF and ASEAN's incapacity to actually use the ARF to solve any concrete problems, ignoring the proximate causes of the ARF's establishment.

8 By the mid-1990s there were over 220 meetings per year under ASEAN auspices. This presents a heavy diplomatic load for any developing country, particularly those targeted for ASEAN membership, which had few officials capable of speaking English (the international language of the region), and sometimes could not afford the initial membership contribution of US$1 million (and then US$750,000 per annum thereafter). Cambodia did not even have embassies in the majority of ASEAN countries by 1997.

9 The military benefited hugely from the black market trade made possible only by continued conflict and the embargo of legitimate cross-border trade. China was also alarmed by the shift and publicly denounced it for fear that it was a prelude to cutting assistance to its Khmer Rouge client and excluding it from the ongoing peace process. Beijing welcomed the 1991 Thai military coup against Chatichai as ‘correct and just’, and coup leader General Suchinda called Pol Pot a ‘nice guy’ (Kiernan 1993: 218; 2002: 488). However, social change in Thailand, including the rise of the middle class and the demise of communism as a threat that could legitimize military rule, meant that the military regime was beaten back and democracy restored by 1993. Although the Thai military continued to assist the Khmer Rouge until at least 1995, with serious consequences for the peace process (Buszynski 1994: 731; Doyle and Suntharalingam 1994: 144–5; Findlay 1995: 4, 94, 166–7; Frost 1991: 130; Heinberger 1994: 2; Jennar 1994: 150), its dominance had been broken and the politics of economic predation superseded the ‘red scare’.

10 The Khmer Rouge had refused to canton and disarm as required by the Paris Agreements, while the Cambodian government and the remaining resistance factions had. When the Khmer Rouge boycotted the 1993 elections and resumed its hostilities, it was thus able to make massive gains, controlling or imperilling up to half of the country by 1994. The renewed civil war cost the Cambodian government US$185 million, a third of its national budget, which was clearly unsustainable (Kevin 2000: 600, n. 9; Peou 2000: 240). While Hun Sen favoured selective amnesties, conditional upon the cessation of military and political activities, to encourage defections from the Khmer Rouge (a scheme that proved most controversial with the West but which had actually achieved its goal by the end of the 1990s), by May 1997 Ranariddh was suggesting bringing the Khmer Rouge directly back into Cambodian national politics. See http://www.geocities.com/khmerchronology/1995.htm

11 This was the account favoured by Western media at the time and much academic writing since (e.g. Moller 1998: 1097; Peou 2000: 298).

12 For instance, to China's delight, ASEAN refused to allow the ARF to discuss directly the emerging territorial conflicts in the South China Sea in 1995. US Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord said this called into question whether the ARF was a ‘credible organization’. Japan was also looking for a forum to actually make progress on Northeast Asian security issues, while the United States even suggested transforming APEC into a defence forum because it was so dissatisfied with the ARF (Buszynski 1998: 572–5).

13 ASEAN claimed to oppose the move, but apparently dared not vote against it, since the UNGA endorsed the compromise without a vote (A/52/PV.76).

14 Singapore's views remained particularly important since it held the chair of the ASEAN Standing Committee, tasked with organizing ASEAN's business, which in this case included the organization of the official membership ceremony for Cambodia.

15 However, Cambodia's long-term emiseration, to which ASEAN's interventions clearly contributed by helping prolong armed conflict, has transformed the country into the ‘playground’ of international NGOs who seek to dictate government policy and manage democratic contestation (Dosch 2006: 141–60; Hughes forthcoming)