Peacemaking in Cambodia: blueprint for a new world order?

Abstract

This thesis examines the peacemaking process as it has unfolded in Cambodia. The end of the Cold War has engendered a new spirit of multi-lateral activism in the international community. Intervention in the domestic affairs of a sovereign country is deemed legitimate, necessary, and desired to secure more worldly goals of peace, stability and respect for human rights. The United Nations-sponsored peacemaking process brought to Cambodia sought to achieve these goals by establishing a cease-fire and setting Cambodia upon the road of a comprehensive political settlement through democratic self determination in the form of elections in May 1993. The analysis of this study has identified the Cambodian peace plan as flawed in content and context as an externally imposed solution to an internal problem entrusted to an institution without the ability to enforce peace and order. The mandate establishing the UN mission in Cambodia simply did not vest it with the proper authority to enforce compliance with the terms of the peace plan. Cambodian political culture possesses a dynamic which is resistent to national reconciliation. The winner-take-all mentality of the Khmer deva-rajas is poor soil for democratic pluralism to take root. Restoring peace and stability and establishing democracy in Cambodia will require more than an eighteen-month lull in the fighting, a single election, and the new constitution that the United Nations can bring to the situation. As such, the UN mandated peacekeeping plan for Cambodia, as it has unfolded, has exposed so many shortcomings of good intentions gone awry that it cannot be adopted as the universal model for a peacemaking process in the new world order.