Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land

by Joel Brinkley

  Phnom Penh, once one of the region’s most beautiful colonial cities, was now crowded with shanty towns crammed into almost every open space. Beggars and cripples lay about the streets; thousands of Cambodians had lost one or both legs to land mines. With no toilets or trash collection, fetid sewage and garbage lay in wait of the rainy season to carry it away—somewhere. Young children played in the trash, often naked because their parents could not afford diapers or clothes.

  The government was doing nothing for its people. The statistics that limned their lives remained bleak and were growing worse. The life span for an average Cambodian was barely fifty years, a statistic pulled down by the depressing fates of mothers and their newborn children. Almost 20 percent of all newborns died before they reached age five. One mother in ten did not survive childbirth—among the worst rates in the world. Outside Phnom Penh, maternal care was almost nonexistent.

  Hun Sen traveled the nation dedicating new schools, usually named for him and paid for by friends in business as thanks for the access the second prime minister gave them to government largesse. But, just like Sihanouk’s school-building program in the 1960s, most of these new schools had no educated teachers. A school was lucky to have a teacher who had completed third grade. Even then, their pay was so low that teachers continued demanding daily bribes from their students. Only about two-thirds of the children even started school, and most of those dropped out after the second or third grade. For Hun Sen, each new school building was a onetime cost paid by someone else—and a magnificent gift for the voters. But Hun Sen, like Sihanouk before him, was nowhere to be seen when the uneducated teachers were taking cash from their students and trying to educate them in subjects they did not understand themselves.

  Education was hardly the only problem. People who lived outside the major cities—in other words, almost everyone—had access to nothing but noxious, dysentery-inducing drinking water. Fewer than one Cambodian in ten had a toilet. Malaria, dengue fever, encephalitis, hepatitis, meningitis, pneumonia, tuberculosis, typhoid, and dysentery all were commonplace, and the HIV/AIDS rate was growing so fast that it set off alarms around the world. “I heard about it in Fiji!” said Dr. Michael O’Leary, a World Health Organization (WHO) official based there in the 1990s.

  Government leaders, when they even heard about their society’s growing list of afflictions, tried to foist blame. Henry Kamm, a New York Times reporter, asked Om Radsady, chairman of the parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, about the state’s burgeoning dysfunction, and he blamed the West. “The big powers should take responsibility,” he said. “When you buy a car, you get a service guarantee. Maybe we drove the car badly, but you should share responsibility.”

  Even so, in the West the nations that put up all that money for the UN operation clung to the conviction that their funds had been well spent. All told, the United States contributed $1.2 billion, and both Washington and the United Nations continued talking up the Cambodia operation as a great success.

  When Clinton’s secretary of state, Warren Christopher, visited Phnom Penh in August 1995, as part of a larger regional tour, he told Cambodia’s leaders, “I have come here to salute the progress the Cambodian people have made with such dignity and courage toward peace and freedom. No people in the world more deserve these blessings of peace and prosperity and freedom.” On the fifth anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords in 1996, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali congratulated Hun Sen for his “statesmanship.” Winston Lord, the new assistant secretary of state for the region, called Cambodia “a model UN success story,” and his deputy cheerily reported that the concept of human rights “has permeated” the government.

  Twining, the ambassador, was also inclined to be generous. He believed that most of the people in government had a steep learning curve, and no one should expect Cambodia to become a Jeffersonian democracy overnight. Twining had little pressure from Washington to step into the nation’s intramural battles. As usual, the State Department didn’t really care. “It’s fair to say they had other fish to fry,” Twining said. “There was some relief that the country was finally at peace. I think the view was that Cambodia needed sustenance but not a lot of attention. There were other things going on. For example, the Somalia debacle. As for Cambodia, it was considered a little better off than it had been before.” And for Washington, that seemed to be enough.

  But over time Washington also began adding modest cautions. In the fall of 1995 Lord told Congress, “Cambodia’s emerging democracy continues to show impressive endurance. The Royal Cambodian Government has begun the process of building political and economic institutions suitable to the country’s current needs.” But Lord also felt compelled to offer a gentle warning: “As a friend, the U.S. has been candidly telling Cambodia’s leaders in recent months of our concerns over recent trends, especially in cases involving freedom of expression and of the press, and how those trends might jeopardize international support for the process of change in Cambodia.” At the annual donors’ conference a few months earlier, Cambodia had received pledges of $500 million. That money made up more than half of the nation’s annual budget. But Lord had warned that if the nation’s leaders did not change their ways, they might not get so much money the next year.

  Rainsy, who was starting a new political party, loudly urged the donor nations to “impose conditions,” including “the establishment of a true rule of law, the strengthening of democratic institutions and mechanisms, and guarantees that fundamental human rights will be respected.” And, of course, he added his signature issue: an end to corruption. All of this played well abroad. The New Republic called him “Cambodia’s stubborn saint.” But as always, others in government saw him as a dangerous scoundrel. A year earlier he’d been booted out of the Finance Ministry. Now Rainsy had so many friends and admirers abroad that Hun Sen and Ranariddh grew quite worried about his ability to dissuade donors from giving.

  Hun Sen blasted him. “In the past, there was the Khmer Rouge blocking all kinds of aid to Cambodia, now we have a second Pol Pot against aid to the Cambodian people,” he told reporters. Then that summer, Ranariddh offered a motion to expel Rainsy from the parliament. Rainsy’s friends in the bleachers howled. Human Rights Watch, the British House of Lords, Amnesty International, the International Parliamentary Union, and several U.S. congressmen warned of dire consequences and questioned the expulsion’s legality. No matter. The parliament voted him out, nearly unanimously. Rainsy was a private citizen again. Soon after that he came by the U.S. Embassy one afternoon and asked Twining if he could reside there for a while. He cited threats and dangers to his person. But living at the embassy would also give him the certain imprimatur of strong support from the U.S. government. “When he left government, he began looking elsewhere for support,” Twining said, in part because “he often spoke out a bit more forcefully than the traffic would bear. Once he came by and asked whether he could stay a bit. I persuaded him to go home and said we would protect him.”

  In the months leading up to the 1996 donor meeting, Ranariddh repeatedly vowed to speed up work on an anticorruption law, the one Hun Sen had promised to enact, and move it to the parliament for a vote. Cambodia’s new ambassador to Washington, Var Huoth, wrote a letter to the New York Times protesting a critical story about his government. “An anti-corruption law is being drafted to be submitted to the National Assembly for adoption,” he wrote, adding, “I do not have to remind you that Cambodia still suffers from the aftermath of the mass murder, starvation and destruction by the Khmer Rouge.” At the same time Rainsy continued his public attacks, harping on corruption again and again. By the time of the meeting in July, no new law had even been introduced, but the donor nations gave Cambodia $518 million anyway, a 4 percent increase. Ranariddh was jubilant—particularly since the donors obviously had paid no attention to Rainsy. “He looks ridiculous now,” Ranariddh said with obvious glee.

  If Ranariddh and Second Prime Minister Hun Sen were thinking analytica
lly, then no doubt a recent metaphor came to mind: the leaders of the UN occupation force turning away after that Khmer Rouge child soldier, standing at the bamboo-pole checkpoint, refused to let them pass. Now, these donors were every bit as toothless. Once again Jupiter was throwing no thunderbolts from the mountaintop. Whatever Ranariddh and Hun Sen said, whatever they did, the donors would come through anyway. Cambodia had found a new and reliable patron. Undoubtedly, each of them was also plotting how he might end the democratic charade, knock the other guy off, and place himself at the top of the government—as each of them had intended all along.

  As Twining left office at the end of 1995, after four brutal years he had lost much of his optimism. “We all wanted to keep things moving forward,” he said. “But I sent a cable to Washington saying I wasn’t sure how long this government would last.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  In 1996, as Twining’s term as ambassador was winding down, the Clinton administration choose Ken Quinn to replace him. Just like Twining, Quinn’s background gave him a deeply sympathetic view of the state. In fact, at his confirmation hearing, he told the senators that the climb with his fiancée up that South Vietnam mountain in 1973 had changed his life. “My involvement with Cambodia began on a hot and humid Mekong Delta afternoon in June 1973, when I climbed to the top of Nui Sam Mountain along the Vietnamese-Cambodian border and witnessed a spectacle that would forever change Cambodia and reorient my professional career,” he said, sitting at the witness table, looking up at the panel of senators on the Foreign Relations Committee. “From that vantage point at the top of Nui Sam, as far as the eye could see, every single one of the dozens of hamlets that dotted the lush green Cambodian plain was ablaze. Thick black smoke billowed from every cluster of thatched dwellings in which thousands and thousands of Cambodian rice farmers and their families lived. I was stunned.” He easily won confirmation and took office in early 1996 filled with a warm sense of honor and purpose. “I was thinking that what we were doing was noble,” he said. “We didn’t have any defense interests, any economic interests or intelligence interests. We were doing this because it was the moral thing to do.”

  Then, like every ambassador new on the job, Quinn made the rounds of lunches, dinners, and meetings, “making my calls,” as he put it, getting to know the political, diplomatic, and military communities. “I came away with a sense that one side was going to turn on the other. I went to a dinner put on by a deputy of mine, and I was stunned by the descriptions of the CPP as corrupt and pure evil. This was a totally different picture than what I had been told.”

  Twining, Quinn’s predecessor, had come to more or less the same conclusion and had cabled Washington laying out his concerns. But Twining was a far more careful and cautious man. Serving as Cambodia watcher in the spring of 1975, he spoke to scores of refugees who had experienced unspeakable horrors. In his cables to Washington he offered vivid descriptions of individual living conditions. Cambodians, he wrote, “are living a Spartan, miserable existence for people living constantly in fear.” But his cables were light on larger political conclusions.

  Quinn had always taken a different approach. Interviewing refugees who crossed the border into Vietnam in 1973, Quinn had offered a far broader, more provocative analysis: The Khmer Rouge, he wrote, were “stripping away, through terror and other means, the traditional bases, structures and forces which have shaped and guided an individual’s life until he is left as an atomized, isolated individual unit; and then rebuilding him according to party doctrine by substituting a series of new values, organizations and ethical norms for the ones taken away.” And this was even before the Khmer Rouge had taken power. Part of Quinn’s analysis had proved to be wrong; he thought only one part of the Khmer Rouge movement was antagonistic to Vietnam when in fact the entire movement was. Still, his airgram had been the first bold, cogent warning of what lay ahead.

  Now, in March 1996, once again Quinn showed his penchant for dramatic action. Just thirty days after taking office, he got on a plane, flew back to Washington, and asked for a meeting with Assistant Secretary Lord and his aides. “This is not the positive situation I had expected,” he told them.

  Co–prime ministers Hun Sen and Ranariddh weren’t even speaking to one another. Each was building his own personal army, while their bodyguard forces had already begun exchanging occasional gunfire. A few months earlier, Hun Sen had dispatched tanks and troops to arrest Prince Norodom Sirivudh, Sihanouk’s half brother and general secretary of the Funcinpec Party. The prince, widely respected among diplomats and aid workers, had been heard suggesting, probably in jest, that it would be easy to hire thugs to assassinate Hun Sen. He was thrown in jail, tried, and sentenced to ten years in prison—but then deported instead.

  The signs were clear: The situation in Cambodia was deteriorating. “This country is heading toward violence,” Quinn warned. As he saw it, Lord and the others “were shocked and surprised.” But then, just as had happened with Quinn’s airgram and Twining’s field reports, Washington did little if anything. They didn’t really care.

  As all of this transpired, in 1995 Sam Rainsy started a new political organization, the Khmer National Party, practically throwing his contempt for Hun Sen in the second prime minister’s face. The parliament had not yet passed any of the laws needed to form new political parties. That enabled Hun Sen to call the party illegal. Rainsy didn’t care.

  He was not going to make Ranariddh’s mistake of leaving the CPP in control of the provinces. So he decided to open his first provincial office. He chose a location near Sihanoukville in the South—“Really, just some guy’s house with a banner on the front,” said Ron Abney, an American who was serving as a political adviser. But Hun Sen saw even this as intolerable.

  The day the office opened, in May 1996, two gunmen on a motorbike, wearing the trademark black helmets with tinted faceplates, shot and killed Thun Bun Ly while he was walking to work. He was a senior member of Rainsy’s new party and editor of Khmer Ideal, an opposition newspaper affiliated with Rainsy. “They could not have chosen a better time to kill Bun Ly as the killing took place at the exact time we opened our first office outside the capital,” Rainsy declared. “It’s a very clear sign of intimidation. They want to intimidate us and show us we cannot open our offices.” Rainsy’s followers staged an angry demonstration. Large throngs marched through the city’s main streets carrying Thun Bun Ly’s coffin on their shoulders.

  Even so, soon after, thugs burned down Rainsy’s new district office, killing a couple of party functionaries. Rainsy was beside himself. He began working the bleachers in earnest, particularly the United States—struggling to stoke international opposition to Hun Sen, whom he routinely blamed for his nation’s “lawlessness and violence.” The occasional expressions of support for the government that came from Washington officials infuriated him. His message for them, distilled, was this: Hun Sen is a vicious, evil dictator. Why can’t you see that? What more evidence do you need?

  With a new ambassador, Rainsy again tried to draw the U.S. Embassy into his battle. “He was forever trying to get us to take him into protective custody in our embassy,” Quinn said. “Phoning us, saying, ‘They are trying to kill me. Take me into the embassy.’” Rainsy, American officials believed, thought that if the United States placed a protective umbrella over him, Hun Sen could not touch him or his party. He would be America’s man.

  Once, when Rainsy made a particularly vehement request, Quinn said he sent his deputy, Carol Rodley, to deal with him. In fact, she said, “I had that discussion with Sam Rainsy more than once. I remember once delivering him to the French Embassy, and the ambassador was quite unhappy. Absolutely, he wanted to draw the United States into the conflict. It suited him to be America’s candidate.”

  Asked about that later, Rainsy vehemently denied it. “It’s ridiculous. It’s wrong. I never asked for asylum. I don’t need protection. I have a French passport. I can leave the country anytime I want to.”5

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p; While Rainsy spent a lot of time abroad, trying to convince foreign leaders of Hun Sen’s perfidy, he also held rallies and solicited support at home. Not surprisingly, his campaign platform centered on the venality of his hated enemy. On Sunday morning, March 30, 1997, he called for a rally in a large public park in central Phnom Penh. King Sihanouk’s palace was up the street. The park was a city block wide and a quarter mile long, and Rainsy chose the northeast corner, just across the street from the National Assembly, a grand Asian monument topped with a glittering golden tower and sinuous gilt finials. In that building Ranariddh had offered the motion to have him expelled from the parliament two years earlier. Despite that, Rainsy’s party had formed a tenuous alliance with Funcinpec a few weeks earlier.

  From where Rainsy stood, with his back to the assembly building, a large Buddhist pagoda complex was to his right. In front of him, on the far side of the street a block away, splendid residential mansions ran all the way down to the park’s far end. Among the mansions was Hun Sen’s. That street, and the park, ended at Suramarit Boulevard, a few blocks east of the Independence Monument, a memorial to the day the French occupiers left Cambodia. This was a consequential part of town, sort of like the National Mall in Washington, D.C.