Finding the Way Out of Kampuchea

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Despite the sustained international effort for the past two-and-a-half years to persuade the Vietnamese to withdraw their forces and end their military occupation of Kampuchea, Hanoi is not in the least interested in a positive response. Instead, it persists in continually arguing that the existence of the makes it impossible to effect any change in Vietnam's current'position over Kampuchea. The rationale that follows, as expounded by Deputy Foreign Minister Vo Dong Giang in his meeting with Thai Deputy Foreign Minister Arun Panupong in Rangoon in June 1981, is that the Vietnamese military presence will continue indefinitely to prevent any possible recurrence of the Chinese threat via Kampuchea. In the face of mounting world pressure, Vietnam has endeavoured to adopt a seemingly more accommodating posture, appearing to make an earnest attempt to co-operate with the countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in searching for a solution to the problems of peace and stability in Southeast Asia. The Vientiane Statement of July 1980, the Ho Chi Minh City Statement in April, and most recently, the Phnom Penh Statement issued on the eve of the fourteenth ASEAN Foreign Ministerial Meeting in Manila in June 1981, seem to have completed the cycle of Vietnam's effort to shift the focus from the Kampuchean problem by insisting that the issue at stake, at present, is really how to order relations between Indochina and the ASEAN countries. This, then, is the gist of the question of regional peace and stability. Privately, Vietnamese leaders, in their attempt to portray their earnestness and candour at finding an end to the confrontation between Vietnam and the ASEAN countries over the Kampuchean problem, have clarified further that while they see the main issue as arising from China's expansionist designs on the Indochina countries and eventually, the rest of Southeast Asia, Vietnam nevertheless has no intention of transgressing against ASEAN, particularly Thailand. Therefore, there is 235