CAMBODIA-UN: Sihabouk Distances Himself from Ranariddh

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 12 1997 (IPS) - A decision by Cambodia’s King Norodom Sihanouk, to approve the U.N. credentials of the country’s ruling junta is the latest blow to the ousted First Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh – the King’s son.

Since his overthrow on June 6, Prince Ranariddh had lobbied the United Nations and government leaders to treat him as the legitimate, elected leader of Cambodia, instead of Second Prime Minister Hun Sen, who led the coup.

Sihanouk, however, dashed these hopes by sending a letter to the United Nations recognising Hun Sen and his newly-selected ally, Prime Minister Ung Hot as leaders of the Cambodian government delegation to the world body. Ung Huot leads a dissident faction of the royalist FUNCINPEC party, which won the country’s 1993 polls, and which is still officially headed by Ranariddh.

In another letter, sent to Ranariddh on Sep. 10, Sihanouk acknowledged that he had been roundly criticised for accrediting Hun Sen and Ung Huot.

“I accept with humility all the criticisms which the anti-Hun Sen Khmer officials level at my action,” Sihanouk declared. But he added that, regardless, “it is not possible for me to write a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to invalidate in whatever way my (earlier) signature.”

As a result, the king – the country’s official head of state, although limited in powers – is sticking to his designation of Hun Sen and Ung Huot as the new joint heads of government. They are scheduled to appear at the U.N. General Assembly session on on Sep. 29 – as is Ranariddh, who declared he will attend the Assembly.

The United Nations, therefore, will be in the sticky position of facing two competing factions, with little guarantee that either one will be officially designated by the U.N. Credentials Committee before the scheduled Sep. 29 session.

“There seems to be some dispute as to who is coming,” U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson conceded this week. He said Washington had not made any decision to prevent either of the delegations from appearing, and he – like most diplomats – deferred the matter to the Credentials Committee’s decision.

The committee will not even begin to take up the matter until the 52nd session of the General Assembly officially begins next Tuesday. After that, U.N. officials say, it could take weeks or even months before a broad consensus emerges among U.N. member states over which delegation should be recognised.

What that implies, said one U.N. official, is that one of the competing Cambodian heads of government may speak even before the credentials dispute is decided formally.

“It’s happened before,” he said, noting that in past sessions, some Israeli officials, among others, spoke at the Assembly before their credentials had been approved by committee. For now, however, Ranariddh’s efforts to keep his image as the Cambodian first prime minister afloat have suffered an obvious genuine setback.

“Your high agreement to accredit the couple (of) Hun Sen (and) Ung Huot saved them politically and diplomatically, but for the royalist and democratic resistance, it is very catastrophic,” Ranariddh wrote Sihanouk this week.

The ousted prince added that it could be preferable if Sihanouk could either leave the final decision on the legitimacy of the delegations to Annan, or to show up at the United Nations himself to appeal for Cambodian unity.

Sihanouk, however, rejected this option and also has threatened to abidicate – which he has often done in the past to win concessions from squabbling politicians.

Some FUNCINPEC officials remain hopeful that, the king’s actions notwithstanding, they can still maintain international legitimacy as Cambodia’s elected government – unlike Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), with which they formed a unity government after winning 1993 elections.

“We cannot allow coup leaders who lost the elections to succeed,” Prince Sisowath Sirirath, a FUNCINPEC official who remains Cambodia’s U.N. representative, said Friday. Sisowath added that the king’s decision need not prove decisive, since Ranariddh had also written to Annan, on Aug. 25, conferring the necessary U.N. credentials to the royalist side.

Ultimately, Sisowath said, the Credentials Committee would have to judge which letter to accept. He acknowledged his delegation faced an uphill struggle and, after the General Assembly’s 51st session wraps up Monday, he will voluntarily refrain from sitting as Cambodia’s U.N. ambassador. His deputy, CPP loyalist Ouch Borith, has agreed to do the same until credentials are decided.

“Cambodia will only have one (diplomatic) seat, like any other nation has,” Sisowath declared. But the chances of that happening soon may be slim – some nations are undecided over which side to support, and may withhold recognition until the country’s next elections, slated for May 1998. Others could be content simply to leave the dispute festering, as it did when the authoritarian Khmer Rouge held the seat for more than a decade after being ousted by the CPP and its Vietnamese supporters in 1979.