The Paris Peace Accords of October 23, 1991 — formally the Agreement on a Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia Conflict — were signed in Paris by the four warring Cambodian factions and by nineteen other countries, providing for the end of the Cambodian-Vietnamese War, the withdrawal of Vietnamese forces, the demobilization of the warring factions — the holding of internationally supervised elections. The accords were the diplomatic conclusion of a conflict that had run, in various forms, since the 1975 Khmer Rouge takeover and were the foundation for the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) and the May 1993 elections.
The diplomatic process that led to the accords had three phases. The first was the Jakarta Informal Meetings of 1988–1989, in which the four Cambodian factions — the ruling State of Cambodia (formerly the People’s Republic of Kampuchea) of Heng Samrin and Hun Sen, the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful, and Cooperative Cambodia (FUNCINPEC) of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (KPNLF) of Son Sann, and the Party of Democratic Kampuchea (the Khmer Rouge) — were brought together for the first time in roughly a decade. The meetings were convened by the Indonesian foreign minister Ali Alatas and produced a procedural framework for the later negotiations.
The second phase was the Five-Power Permanent Members’ Framework of 1989–1990. The P5 — the United States, the Soviet Union, China, the United Kingdom, and France — agreed, in meetings in New York, Paris, and Jakarta, to a framework for the settlement that combined withdrawal of Vietnamese forces, the establishment of a UN-supervised transitional administration, the demobilization of 70 percent of all Cambodian factional forces, the return of refugees, holding of elections. The framework was formally endorsed in UN General Assembly Resolution 45/3 of October 15, 1990, and UN Security Council Resolution 668 of September 20, 1990.
The third phase was the Paris International Conference on Cambodia, which opened on August 30, 1990 and ran in fifteen months of talks chaired by France and Indonesia. The 1991 accords were signed on October 23, 1991 by representatives of the four Cambodian factions, the P5, the six ASEAN states, the UN Secretary-General, the European Community, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and several other countries. The nineteen signatories included the United States (represented by Secretary of State James Baker), the Soviet Union (represented by Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh), and China (represented by Foreign Minister Qian Qichen).
The substantive provisions of the accords were four. The first was the withdrawal of Vietnamese forces, which was in fact completed before the accords were signed — Vietnam had completed its withdrawal in September 1989. The second was the cessation of foreign military assistance to the Cambodian factions. The third was the demobilization of 70 percent of all Cambodian factional forces within 90 days of the start of the transitional period. The fourth was the holding of elections in May 1993 for a constituent assembly that would draft a new constitution and form a new government.
The accords were implemented by UNTAC, established by UN Security Council Resolution 745 of February 28, 1992. UNTAC was the largest UN peacekeeping operation in history to that date, deploying 22,000 personnel from 33 countries at a cost of $1.6 billion for the 1992–1993 fiscal year. It assumed control of the country’s foreign affairs, defense, finance, and public security. The Khmer Rouge refused to disarm and boycotted the elections, and the security situation in the northwestern and central provinces was poor, but the May 23–28, 1993 elections went ahead and produced a 90 percent voter turnout. The election returned FUNCINPEC’s Prince Norodom Ranariddh (45%) and the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) of Hun Sen (38%) as the two largest blocs, leading to a power-sharing agreement in which both became co-prime ministers under the new constitution of September 21, 1993.
The Paris Peace Accords are the principal case of a successful UN-organized transition from civil war to electoral democracy in the post-Cold-War period. Their institutional innovations — the assumption of state functions by a UN mission, the international supervision of elections, the demobilization of factional forces — were later imitated in Namibia (UNTAG, 1989), Mozambique (ONUMOZ, 1992), El Salvador (ONUSAL, 1991), and Liberia (UNMIL, 2003). The Cambodian case is also the principal example of an Asian Cold War proxy war that ended in internationally supervised peace rather than a victory by one side. For more on the Cambodian-Vietnamese War article and the proxy wars overview.