1991 Cambodian peace treaty - 25 October 1991

I don't suppose Cambodia means much to European listeners but to half the world Thursday morning's news must have been a shocker. A shock of relief, tempered by fright. Four parties that have, since 1978, fought a civil war with a ferocity remarkable even for our brutal century, they concluded in Paris, along with 15 other signatories, a peace treaty.

The good news is the treaty is the creation, the invention of the United Nations and how heartening it is to see in the past two years the United Nations become the effective force in doing what it was always intended to do, to maintain international peace and security. This end to 13 years of wholesale massacre, guerrilla warfare, rapine and slaughter would not have been possible if, another welcome novelty, the agreement had not been approved, put together, brokered by the United States, the Soviet Union and China acting together.

The bad news is that the dreaded Khmer Rouge and its leader in hiding, Pol Pot, he's not been seen in public for 10 years, together in three years were responsible for the starving or murdering of 1,000,000 of the 7,000,000 Cambodians. Well, in the treaty of peace he and his are recognised as legitimate political leaders, There's no mention of punishment or reparations, his guerrillas will not be disarmed. The Khmer Rouge, in fact, becomes an equal partner in a coalition government and the other parties, including the 15 sanctioning powers are left to hope that Pol Pot has decided to abandon his ambition to return to absolute dictatorial power.

Talking of Marxist dictators, let us consider now the brave, sad condition – posture, I suppose is the proper buzzword – of Fidel Castro. He was down in Mexico this week, not orating, not bombasting in his inimitable fashion. A ceremonial speech of Castro's can take anywhere up to five, six hours, a little pep talk only two. He was sitting down with the presidents of Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia and listening, a rare event. He needs help, he needs money, goods, most urgently, oil, which the Soviet Union has announced it will soon stop supplying at cut-rate prices. Moscow will also stop, because it has to, its massive annual subsidy for arms.

The three presidents made clear to Castro at the beginning that they were not there to help a Communist Cuba, unless it began to make drastic reforms and Mr Castro replied that that's just what he had proposed at a party congress only last week. He was painfully reminded that what he calls reforms are minor adjustments of Communist Party doctrine, not breakaways from it. In the only public ceremony at which he could make a speech, Mr Castro responded by declaring, in the old rousing tones, that one thing must be understood: Communism had not failed in Cuba. He's reduced to boasting to his own people, that in a crumbling world, Cuba remains the one Communist beacon of hope because it has not succumbed to the chaos and the greed of capitalism.

In private, it was plain what he meant was, that Cuba is sending out distress signals to any neighbour who will pay attention. The three countries – Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia – told Castro that he's not going to get subsidies, economic subsidies, to make up for the withdrawal of the Soviet props. These three have been inclined in the past to pacify Castro, even praise such things as his health and school systems, but this was always done by pacifying too, or rather pacifying in the first place, their own leftist malcontents at home. Now like many another country with a threatening leftist element, they see that element distraught and fractured by the collapse of European Communism.

Mexico and Venezuela in particular are overhauling their economies with the promise of vigorous foreign, especially American, investment and though they may deplore the severity of America's policy towards Cuba – the almost complete trade blockade that's been going on for 30 years, it's still a punishable act for Americans to bring Cuban cigars into the United States – these two especially don't want to alienate the United States. What came out of Mexico was the usual bland communiqué, pledging understanding and cooperation and a glaring awareness that Castro is rattling a tin cup and nobody's paying much attention.

But if the rehabilitation into respectability of the atrocious Pol Pot is a surprise and the transformation of Fidel Castro into Oliver Twist, how about the pictures on the tube this week of one famous dictator who, a year ago, we would have sworn would by now be executed or have flown into exile. But there he was, I'm looking at him now, ruddy, beaming, standing very tall in front of a line of upstanding officers, leaning down and hanging across their chests sashes and dispensing gleaming swords and pinning on their proud breasts so many medals that when the sun caught them on the turn, it was enough to make a bystander sneeze. It took an hour and a half to perform this historic ceremony.

The medals and sashes and the rest were being given out for conspicuous bravery in what the big man himself, name of Saddam Hussein, called the Mother of Battles. Fade in to a more solemn general, I guess he's a general, about to talk to his nation and Mr Ibrahim, the vice-chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council warned us to make no mistake, Saddam Hussein is Iraq and Iraq is Saddam Hussein.

Well, Mr General Saddam does not talk diplomatic mush. Iraq, he said, is like the woman who would rather be killed than submit to rape. Iraq's honour had been besmirched, all the ultimatums that the United Nations had forced on the country since last winter. Never despair, Saddam would provide. This brilliant, barefaced ceremony reminded me of the wonderful pageants that Leni Riefenstahl choreographed for the Nazis. I'm not thinking of the huge Nuremberg rallies, but the smaller, not less brilliant shows, Hitler embracing small boys in uniform, that she managed to mount towards the end when the Nazi prospect was dire. Saddam Hussein was, in effect, preparing his people for a very bleak winter.

He confounded most people, certainly the United Nations team, this week, by suddenly admitting that he had lied, that the United Nations seized documents were true, that he had indeed been working on nuclear weapons. This confession apparently marks a big turn in strategy. The word from the United Nations is that sanctions are really beginning to put the squeeze on him. I should say, much to our embarrassment, on starving and sick children.

Saddam is well aware that the winter could cause food riots and there is always the threat of a coup. He wants, therefore, before everything else, to concur with the United Nations, so as to make its sanctions seem cruel and unnecessary and apart from his policy with his own people, he's cultivating not any particular Arab country, certainly not the ones that joined the UN allied coalition, but opposition parties, political and intellectual propagandists, who might be persuaded to echo Saddam's daily chant that Iraq is a pitiable example of how the detested West can insult Arab pride and mock its human dignity by staving its children.

Among all the great and the humble who died recently, I noticed a short item, half a single column in the New York Times on Thursday about a man I'd never heard of, one Timothy Cook, without an 'e'. The subheading defined him crisply as,"ex-civil rights aide who set off a storm" and further down we learn that he blew up a storm against President Reagan's attorney general and assistant attorney general in 1983. I only vaguely remember it but the paper reminds me that this man accused the justice department of doing nothing or rather of doing their utmost to thwart the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which required the government to make special provision for employees of the federal government who were disabled in one way or another.

Mr Cook suffered from fused knee joints which had been caused by a childhood illness, so he was himself disabled and when, after he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, he got into the civil rights division of the Justice Department. He devoted his remarkable energies to whipping the department's lawyers into enforcing the rights of handicapped people. In one of the last cases he argued, he compelled the foreign service to hire blind people and I see that he, more than any other person, was responsible for those little symbols of a man in a wheelchair that you see everywhere, I hope you see them where you live, which in this country signify that in all government-supported public transportation, a place is kept, a parking place or room on a bus, for people in wheelchairs. Mr Cook died of a stroke. He was only 38 but he managed to do something we should all envy, he left things a little better than he found them.

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