Meanwhile, negotiations between the two gathered momentum. Some of the pressure for these negotiations came from France, Australia, and Indonesia, which were eager to break the logjam imposed by China, Thailand, and the United States. These patrons, in turn, put pressure on the coalition to reach some sort of compromise with the government in Phnom Penh, whose prime minister, Hun Sen, had drawn a good deal of support—albeit reluctantly at first—from the Cambodian émigré community.

By 1989 it was customary to think of Cambodia as involving four factions capable of negotiating among themselves rather than two “governments” conducting an open-ended civil war. Vietnamese advice to Phnom Penh seems at first to have been to wait out developments, as Vietnam itself was doing. In effect, this meant working to dismantle the coalition and continuing to demonize Pol Pot. The DK faction, in turn, worked to delay a political solution until its forces had made inroads in rural areas. The stalemate was broken in 1990-1991, however, when the unravelling of communism in Europe encouraged Vietnam and China, which remained Communist, to press their warring Cambodian clients to accept a compromise that would give some power to China’s clients and would not endanger the continuing existence of a Communist regime in Vietnam.

Between 1987 and 1990, conferences and meetings were held by faction members at sites in France, Thailand, and Indonesia. Pressures mounted on the four Cambodian factions to reach some kind of agreement. Sihanouk’s faction and the Red Khmer were pushed to abandon an open-ended civil war that might have ended in their favor. Son Sann’s anti-monarchic, anti-Communist faction was forced to cooperate further with people whose ideological positions it found difficult to accept. The State of Cambodia, as the regime in Phnom Penh now called itself, had to abandon its demonization of the DK regime, for the time being, and relinquish some of its national sovereignty to the United Nations. In this fast-breaking game, Pol Pot said nothing in public, although he seems to have surfaced briefly in June 1991 when negotiations between the factions in Pattaya, Thailand, reached a crucial stage. His presence there, while hidden from outsiders, indicated that his subordinates (including his ostensible superiors like Khieu Samphan) were unable or unprepared to make important decisions without consulting him. Democratic Kampuchea abandoned its flag and shelved its bloodcurdling national anthem; the People’s Republic of Kampuchea changed its name to the State of Cambodia and altered its flag. The Permanent Five members of the United Nations Security Council (France, China, the USSR, the United States, and Great Britain) promised their support for a political compromise, and the United Nations offered to dispatch a team to Cambodia to monitor the transition to an elected, pluralistic government. In 1991 a Supreme National Council for Cambodia was formed whose members came from the three coalition factions and the State of Cambodia. It was envisaged that the council would take up residence in Cambodia, pending national elections and under UN protection, toward the end of 1991. These arrangements gathered momentum following the multinational Cambodian Peace Agreement, signed in Paris in October 1991. In the midst of the turmoil, if defectors’ reports are to be believed, Pol Pot was guardedly optimistic, “smooth and clean,” and unperturbed.