Prime Minister Hun Sen left for Beijing Monday to escort Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the former monarch and guerrilla chief who spent 13 years in exile, back to Cambodia.
The 40-year-old premier, who lost an eye while fighting as a youthful Khmer Rouge commander, smiled broadly as he moved down a long line of officials who came to see him off on his historic mission.He chatted amiably with many of his older colleagues, grizzled veterans of 20 years of war and political turmoil in this tiny country between Vietnam and Thai-land.
Twenty minutes after he flew off in a Russian-made Kampuchean Airlines plane, envoys from the United States and Britain arrived at Phnom Penh's airport to mark the Oct. 23 peace treaty signed by Cambodia's four warring factions.
"We believe the comprehensive settlement agreement offers the most realistic way to bring peace to Cambodia, give the Cambodian people the chance to choose their own government and build safeguards against the violence of the past," said Charles Twining, head of the U.S. mission in Cambodia.
British Special Representative David Burns expressed confidence that the Paris treaty, backed up by U.N. peacekeeping forces, could mean an end to war in Cambodia.
Both men will present their diplomatic credentials to Sihanouk after he returns to Phnom Penh on Nov. 14 as head of the Supreme National Council, a reconciliation body made up of the Vietnam-installed Phnom Penh government, the Khmer Rouge and two smaller guerrilla factions.
Twining said the American mission would be upgraded to an embassy after U.N.-supervised elections select a national government.
The Western envoys arrived a day after the first U.N. peacekeeping forces marched off two C-130 transport planes to spearhead a U.N. operation expected to last two years, cost $2 billion and involve 12,000 people.
The Australian soldiers will build a communications network between the factions, the SNC and the United Nations.
Sihanouk and Hun Sen, outspoken enemies for many years, are due to fly back together Thursday.
Sihanouk, picked by the French to be the docile teenage king of their post-World War II colony, became a fervent nationalist and gave up his throne to join the give-and-take of governmental op-er-a-tions. He was prime minister when he was ousted by a U.S.-backed coup in 1970 and joined guerrillas.
When the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975, Sihanouk became their figurehead head of state but quickly ran foul of his one-time allies and was kept under house arrest in the palace in which he once resided as monarch.
Hun Sen was one of the leaders of the final Khmer Rouge attack on Phnom Penh in April 1975. He was seriously wounded in the battle and lay in a coma for eight days before recovering. He lost his left eye.
Hun Sen abandoned the Khmer Rouge in June 1977 after he heard that his family had been put to hard labor and fled to Vietnam.
More than a million Cambodians perished during the 31/2 years of Khmer Rouge rule. Their far-left policies banned money, declared war on all middle-class values and equated the wearing of eyeglasses with treason against the peasantry. Phnom Penh became a ghost town.
The Khmer Rouge began fighting in Khmer-speaking areas of Vietnam, and the Vietnamese invaded on Christmas Day in 1978, driving the Khmer Rouge out of power and installing a government of allies.
Sihanouk fled in the first days of 1979 and subsequently formed a guerrilla army of his own. From his exile homes in China and North Korea, he became the figurehead leader of all the guerrilla forces, including the Khmer Rouge, and was the most outspoken critic of the government that came to be headed by Hun Sen.