End of the Khmer Rouge

The surrender of the Khmer Rouge brings to an end more than 30 years of civil war in Cambodia that began with the Marxist guerrillas’ insurgency against the government in Phnom Penh in the late 1960s. Not included in the surrender deal, however, were the Khmer Rouge’s three top survivingleaders, Tak Mok, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea. Pol Pot died in April this year. The Cambodian government and the United States has expressed a desire to capture all three and make them stand trial for genocide and crimes against humanity.

Khem Nuon, Tak Mok’s chief of staff who negotiated the surrender with government officials, said simply, they are “retired” and are not part of the deal. He refused to go into details about them, Thayer said.

Khem Nuon claimed he was negotiating on behalf of 5,000 remaining ragtag troops and 15,000 civilians living under Khmer Rouge control. Thayer said, however, that he believed the estimate of fighting men was inflated, and that many of the civilians are living in the Phu Noi refugee camp in Thailand.

“There must be unity. There is no other way. There is no way for a military solution. No weapons. Only political struggle,” Thayer said Khem Nuon told him in a telephone interview.

The government was represented at the negotiations by Meas Sopheas, deputy chief ofstaff of the Cambodian military. Under the agreement, the remaining guerrillas will join the government army and the civilians will return to Anlong Veng, the guerrillas’ former stronghold in the north.

While it is possible there are some tiny bands of guerrillas still wandering the jungles, Thayer said he knew of no sizable Khmer Rouge fighting force that could pose a viable threat to the government.

The surrender comes less than a month after Cambodian strongman Hun Sen and Prince Norodom Ranariddh, whom he ousted as co-prime minister in a bloody 1997 coup, struck their own deal to end the country’s deadlocked political conflict and form a working government.

With the Khmer Rouge laying down their arms and Hun Sen and Ranariddh working together, the country is poised to begin perhaps its most stable period in decades.

The Khmer Rouge came to power in April 1975 by overthrowing the US-backed Lon Nol government.

Under the leadership of Pol Pot, they emptied out the cities and attempted to turn thecountry into an agrarian utopia by herding the population on to collective farms.

The experiment was a disaster economically and in human terms. Famine soon affected many parts of the country. Those suspected of harbouring opposing views, or merely of being educated, were put to death.

Nearly two million people died of execution, overwork, starvation or disease under the Khmer Rouge until they were ousted from power by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979.

They fought a guerrilla war against successive governments ever since, but wings of their movement began defecting to the government starting in 1996, leaving only the hardliners in the north to carry on their struggle.

That struggle ended yesterday.