Kampuchea’s factions begin talks

Press, 18 February 1989, Page 11

Kampuchea’s factions begin talks

NZPA-Reuter Jakarta Kampuchea’s warring factions have begun negotiations to end their 10-year conflict but there is no sign of any early reconciliation. The three guerrilla factions charged the Phnom Penh Government and its backer, Vietnam, with offering useless peace proposals and said plans to withdraw Vietnamese troops had no credibility. “I should point out that when Vietnam talks about withdrawal it does not talk about international supervision,” the Khmer Rouge representative to the United Nations, Thioun Prasith, told reporters. “A unilateral withdrawal is ... useless, not credible.” The second Indonesian talks on the Kampuchean situation, called the Jakarta Informal Meeting, or JIM-2, opened with officials from the four Kampuchean factions, Vietnam, Laos, and the Association of South-East Asian Nations trying to set an agenda for talks among faction leaders starting tomorrow. Phnom Penh repeated its proposals for a ceasefire, the creation of a national council of reconciliation to hold general elections three months after the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops arid the end of foreign support to the resistance coalition. However, it makes no

provision for armed international supervision of the pullout of Vietnamese troops. “We cannot accept such a ploy ... If we accept it’s tantamount to stopping the national resistance ... This is the stumbling block,” said Mr Prasith, who is also acting as a spokesman ' for the factions of Prince Sihanouk and the former Prime Minister. Son Sann. Phnom Penh’s representative, Hor Nam Hong, insisted that if Vietnamese troops were to leave by September the supply of foreign arms to the guerrilla forces must also stop. He said his proposals "were aimed at a comprehensive solution to the problem in Kampuchea and to, promote further progress at JIM-2,” he said. With a wary eye on the chaos in Afghanistan, A.S.E.A.N., grouping Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Brunei, is seeking an end to the conflict by first getting the Kampucheans to agree to stop fighting., Prasith of the Khmer Rouge, which is widely blamed for the deaths of more than one million Kampucheans before it was toppled by Hanoi in 1979, said Vietnam was putting in troops but pretending they were Kampucheans.