Bringing peace to Cambodia was never going to be easy. The country had suffered massive US bombing during the Vietnam War; a right-wing coup by General Lon Nol in 1970 which unseated Prince Norodom Sihanouk, and a civil war in which the radical Khmer Rouge had triumphed – resulting in the deaths of more than one million Cambodians from starvation, persecution and murder in the Killing Fields. In 1978 another invasion followed, this time by the Vietnamese. Then, in 1991, came nearly 16,000 soldiers under the command of Lieutenant-General John Sanderson of Australia, plus 3,359 police officers from 45 developed and developing countries ranging from Austria and Bulgaria to Morocco, Kenya, Argentina, Malaysia and Canada. The United Nations Transitional Authority on Cambodia (Untac) “was a peacekeeping mission, not a peacemaking mission,” says Maurits van Pelt, an attorney who ran Medecins sans Frontieres in Cambodia from 1989 to 2000. “The mandate of Untac was not to forcibly disarm; it was to organise disarmament: voluntary disarmament, as had been agreed. But then if one faction did not disarm then the other did not disarm either and the process was stuck.” And stuck it was. Untac failed to disarm the factions. It also failed to make the Cambodian People’s Party relinquish power when it lost the 1993 elections. As historian David Chandler writes in his 1996 book Facing The Cambodian Past: “What had happened was very strange and very moving: for the first time in Cambodian history, millions of Khmer had voted freely and fairly and a majority had opposed an armed, incumbent regime. In a sense, the vote was a massive statement rejecting politics as usual—the tragedy of Cambodian history—and proposing something different: peace and quiet, for example.” This month, which marks 20 years since Untac oversaw the 1993 assembly, the Australian Embassy is presenting an exhibition of stills from the era, including a collection by acclaimed conflict photographer Tim Page.
(Photos: Tim Page)
