The Kampuchean Conflict

The late Adam Malik, Indonesia's former vice president and foreign minister, was one of Southeast Asia's most respected statesmen. A few months before his death in September 1984, he took the broad view of what has become perhaps his region's most intractable diplomatic and political problem, i.e., the Vietnamese military presence in Kampuchea. Speaking at an Asian Press Foundation meeting in Hong Kong, Malik declared that attempts by ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, founded in 1967, and now comprising Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand) apply pressure on Vietnam in order to resolve the Kampuchean question, were no longer useful. Henceforth, ASEAN ought to abstain from its previous policies, which would only put Vietnam in a corner, Malik said, and immediately should take the initiative in bringing together People's China, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam for the purpose of reaching a Kampuchean settlement.' Malik particularly stressed the pivotal role of Beijing in such a settlement. In this connection, he seemed to be holding out a normalization of Sino-Indonesian diplomatic relations as a possible inducement to bringing Beijing to a conference on Kampuchea (Sino-Indonesian diplomatic relations have been suspended though not formally broken since 1967, mainly because of Jakarta's belief that China was involved in the abortive 1965 coup attempt in Indonesia)

Political science · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies