The Red Challenge

LUCKY for you," remarks Bin Vanna over his shoulder to a visitor riding in the back seat of his four-wheel-drive vehicle. "Security better now." Along the 188 km of bumpy road between Phnom Penh and this scruffy provincial capital there are invisible landmarks. Here, one is told, is where that German lady lost a leg from a Khmer Rouge attack earlier this year. And there is the site of a robbery by the Khmer Rouge who emerged from those hills over there to ambush travellers, about three months ago.

Bin, now chief of police for Krakor district of Pursat province, was 17 in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge took power. Is he glad that Ieng Sary—Pol Pot라이브 바카라 foreign minister and second in command of the regime under which two million Cambodians perished—has defected to the government? Yes, he replies, "but not 100 per cent. If Ieng Sary does not surrender, I think the war will go on for a long time." "We should kill him," says a motorcycle taxi driver in Phnom Penh, also a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime. "But we have no choice."

Ieng Sary stunned many in August by leading troops loyal to himself in a historic split from the hardline Khmer Rouge, who still follow Pol Pot, and defecting to the government. "We believe that our country will be reduced to nothing if the Khmer (Cambodian) people continue to fight against each other indefinitely," he said in his first public statement on August 28. "For this reason, we decided to break away from that dictatorial group."

On September 14, King Norodom Sihan-ouk, who himself was once a Pol Pot ally, formally pardoned Ieng Sary of all charges related to the Khmer Rouge genocide. (A Vietnamese court had sentenced Ieng Sary to death in absentia in 1980.) The next day the mercurial and quotable Siha-nouk issued a statement angrily accusing two co-prime ministers of having "made public and executed the decree in question without having obtained the prerequisite expressed support of two third of the National Assembly". Any untoward consequences, he said, were "therefore not my fault".

The king was accusing leading politicians, some say correctly, of playing politics with Ieng Sary라이브 바카라 defection. Cambodia is unique in having two ostensibly equal co-prime ministers, an arrangement reached between the FUNCINPEC party led by Sihanouk라이브 바카라 son, Prince Norodom Ranaridh, and the formerly communist Cambodian People라이브 바카라 Party led by Hun Sen, following United Nations-sponsored elections in 1993. Hun Sen is widely understood to hold most of the real power, though his party finished second in the polling.

The uneasy political truce that has held since 1993 may be an important, if unintended, casualty of the new situation that obtains since the Khmer Rouge split. The prime ministers each want to enlist the defectors in an alliance against the other. Prince Ranaridh made a surprise visit to Pailin on October 14 to meet with Ieng Sary. Hun Sen, who met him later, announced that all military units led by Ieng Sary would be integrated into government forces.

Negotiations for integration of the defecting forces into the national army now are proceeding in deliberate slow motion, and a government offensive is said to be in the works against the hardline faction라이브 바카라 last major stronghold at Sisophon. But even now, it remains too soon to predict the end of the Khmer Rouge or of the civil war.

The hardliners "remain a considerable force to be reckoned with", a Western military analyst said in mid-October, with enough arms and ammunition "to create problems for many years to come". In March, many claimed the end was near when government forces seemed on the verge of capturing the Khmer Rouge stronghold of Pailin. That offensive failed and the Khmer Rouge battled on.

The Cambodian civil war, which will continue for a while in some form, is an indicator of a global trend. In many troubled areas today, insurgent armies that began as separatists have degenerated into little more than well-armed bandits. Kashmir, where a low-intensity conflict has simmered and flared since 1989, is one example of this. Cambodia is another: author Robert Kaplan has aptly described the Khmer Rouge as "gradually transforming themselves from ideological warriors of the 20th century to nihilistic road warriors of the 21st".

바카라 웹사이트 Cambodians such as Bin, who live in areas affected by recent Khmer Rouge activity, know the truth of that description at first hand. Yet they believe that the past, for all its atrocities, is past, and they want to believe there exists some concrete grounds for hope that the future might be peaceful. One Cambodian interviewed cited a traditional saying to explain the effects of the long-running civil war. "If an elephant fights with another elephant, it is the ants who get crushed."바카라 웹사이트