[Tlc] C-book review

[justinm at ucr.edu]

Forwarded from Benny Widyono:

Dear Relatives and Friends,

Please find attached a favorable review by David Chandler, one
of the world"s foremost authors on Cambodia which appeared
recently in the Phnom Penh Postm, the world's leading
periodical on Cambodia: 

Shadow Boxing

The anxious exhilarating UNTAC days: Successes and failures.
Reviewed by David Chandler
Benny Widyono, Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge
and the United Nations in Cambodia. xxxii+ 312 pp. Foreword by
Ben Kiernan., Lanham and Boulder, Rowman and Littlefield, 2008.

The sub-title of this absorbing memoir promises more than the
book is able to deliver. Dr Benny Widyono, a career official
with the United Nations, has very little to say about Sihanouk
or the Khmer Rouge as long-term political phenomena. He also
fails to summarize the multi-faceted activities of the UN in
Cambodia since the early 1990s.

Instead, what we are given and should be grateful for is an
insightful record of a tumultuous period of Cambodian history
in which Widyono was an astute participant-observer. Between
1992 and 1997 Widyono worked with the United Nations
Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) and as the UN
Secretary General's special representative in Phnom Penh.
These positions allowed him to observe the UNTAC operation and
the unfolding opera of Cambodian politics at close range.
Fourteen photographs and seven maps enhance his appealing text.

Widyono arrived in Phnom Penh in April l992 and soon became
aware, as many did, that the Paris Peace Accords of 1991,
which had established UNTAC, had barely papered over
irreconcilable differences among the powers that signed them.
They had also set unachievable agendas and ignored the
animosities of the Cambodian political actors.

The Accords, Widyono reminds us, also placed some heavy
burdens on the UNTAC operation. The first of these, pressed by
the United States, China and their allies, was that the
Democratic Kampuchean "faction" was to play a legitimate role
in Cambodian politics. To smooth the path, references to
"genocide" or the other horrors of the Khmer Rouge era were
whited out of the Accords.

Secondly, the Accords enjoined UNTAC to oversee the day-to-day
governance of Cambodia, an impossible task for people who knew
next to nothing about the country, had little experience with
such tasks and had no full time employees who were fluent in
Khmer. In any case, those who held power in the country,
namely the Khmer Rouge and the State of Cambodia (SOC) were
unwilling to relinquish it to the UN.

Finally, the four factions in Cambodian politics who had been
roped together to form a Supreme National Council (SNC)
despised each other and had no interest in working
constructively together or in allowing UNTAC to succeed.
Prince Norodom Sihanouk, at the apex of the SNC, distrusted
the factions and hoped to negotiate some power for himself.

With understandable trepidation, therefore, the largest UN
operation in its history got underway, damaged at birth by
conflicting mandates, exaggerated hopes, UN inexperience and
intransigent, suspicious political actors.

In June 1992, Benny Widyono became the UN's "shadow governor"
in Siem Reap. He had asked for this challenging job in New
York, and for the next 13 months he performed a multitude of
tasks in the run up to the elections with inventiveness and
brio. The chapters that deal with this period stylishly convey
the ups and downs of those anxious, exhilarating times.

In judging the UNTAC experience, Widyono agrees with most
observers that its successes lay in the fields of refugee
repatriation and organizing the elections.

He locates UNTAC shortcomings in the areas of disarmament,
governance and its timidity vis-a- vis the Khmer Rouge.

Disarmament failed because the Khmer Rouge refused to disarm,
triggering the SOC's refusal to follow suit. These refusals
guaranteed the continuation of warfare between the two, which
lasted until the Khmer Rouge movement collapsed in 1997-1998.

Governance never worked because UNTAC was unable to administer
the country, and because the SOC and the Khmer Rouge (the
factions controlling Cambodian territory) never relinquished
any administrative control.

UNTAC's timidity sprang from the fact that none of the
participating powers (except, perhaps, the French) were
willing to take the casualties they feared might be inflicted
on them by the Khmer Rouge.

In the elections of May 1993, more voters voted for the
royalist faction, FUNCINPEC, than for the Cambodian Peoples'
Party (CPP), which had governed Cambodia since 1979. For the
first time in Cambodian history, a majority of the population
peacefully rejected the political status quo. What they
expected or hoped for in its place was unclear. In any case,
the SOC refused to accept to results of the election and for a
few days the entire UNTAC operation seemed destined to collapse.

At this point Sihanouk, encouraged by the French, engineered a
bizarre political arrangement whereby FUNCINPEC and the CPP
agreed to enter a power sharing relationship with Hun Sen as
the "second" prime minister, alongside the "first" prime
minister Sihanouk's son, Prince Rannaridh, the chairman of
FUNCINPEC.

Widyono returned to New York in late 1993, but became
impatient with bureaucratic work, and in April l994 came back
to Phnom Penh as the UN Secretary General's personal
representative, tasked with monitoring the aftermath of UNTAC.
The "national interest" of the UN is hard to define, but the
position gave Widyono an ideal vantage point from which to
observe the Rannaridh-Hun Sen "alliance" and the first few
years of the newly renamed Kingdom of Cambodia. His
assessments of personalities and events in this period are
often shrewd and persuasive, and buttressed by observations
made in the course of later visits to the country. Cambodia
watchers will be aware that most of the problems raised in the
book remain unsolved and most of the political actors in
1993-1997 remain on stage, so Dancing in Shadows has an
up-to-date "feel". Widyono left in April l997, shortly before
the "events " of July, so his reportage on them is necessarily
second-hand.

Throughout the memoir, Widyono's writing is brisk, perceptive
and accessible, although it's marred here and there by small
historical gaffes and typographical errors. On balance, his
insider's narrative is a valuable addition to literature about
Cambodia's recent past.

In closing, however, it needs to be said that Ben Kiernan's
gnomic 9-page foreword to Dancing in Shadows mentions Widyono
only once and says almost nothing about the period of history
dealt with by the book.

David Chandler is the author of Brother Number One: A
biography of Pol Pot and other books about Cambodia. He is
currently affiliated with Monash University in Australia.

On sale at Monument Books

______________
Dr. Justin McDaniel
Dept. of Religious Studies
2617 Humanities Building
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
951-827-4530
justinm at ucr.edu