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

by Joel Brinkley

  The message of the morning’s event was that Hun Sen had taken control of the nation’s court system and turned it into his own personal tool. It was early, eight thirty, before the heat of the day could grow brutal. A vendor pushing a blue cart was doing brisk business selling stalks of sugar cane.

  Rainsy stood on a chair and began inveighing against Hun Sen. He told his enthusiastic followers that Prince Norodom Sirivudh’s arrest, conviction, and then expulsion from the country were proof that Hun Sen was using the courts for his own venal ends. Several supporters carried signs saying “Norodom Sirivudh Has Committed No Crime.”

  A few Phnom Penh police loitered nearby, far fewer than usually showed up for Rainsy rallies. But several dozen well-armed shock troops from Hun Sen’s personal bodyguard unit, a 1,500-man force feared among his enemies, stood in a tight line about fifty yards away, watching silently. Rainsy noted later that he had never seen any of these bodyguards at his other rallies in Phnom Penh. But then he had never held an event just across the street from Hun Sen’s home.

  As always, Rainsy’s target audience was as much the foreigners in the bleachers as the Cambodian voters. To that end he had invited Ron Abney, an American serving as the Cambodian country director for the International Republican Institute (known universally as the IRI), a federally funded organization based in Washington charged with promoting democracy around the world. Abney was an enthusiastic, garrulous fellow who had glued himself to Rainsy. His job, as he saw it, was to be sure Cambodia maintained a healthy and robust political opposition as the government grew increasingly authoritarian. Rainsy was his man.

  The IRI leadership in Washington was no fan of Hun Sen. Lorne Craner, the institute’s president, remarked that he thought most Cambodians were afraid of him. “Well, last time he lost an election,” in 1993, “he threatened a civil war. Maybe the people are afraid of retribution” from him if they even say they don’t support him. After all, for many years the centerpiece of Washington policy toward Cambodia had been to throw Hun Sen, the Communist stooge, out of office.

  For Abney and his supervisors in Washington, Rainsy was the great hope. Abney now considered him a good friend. “I loved him like a brother.” But he also knew that Rainsy had a lot to learn. “He didn’t realize you couldn’t just be a guy who opposed Hun Sen and get elected. We were very much focused on a setting up a campaign operation.” The next national election was just over a year away. “We were setting up people in each commune” nationwide. But Rainsy, Abney said, “was on a campaign to get Washington to support him.”

  Abney showed up late, after the speeches. After all, he didn’t speak Khmer. “When I got there, they were finishing up,” he said. “People were starting to leave. I walked over and got right in front of Rainsy.” Just then, someone threw a hand grenade into the crowd. “It hit me in the hip, and I fell,” Abney said. Another grenade went off. And then another and another. Dozens and dozens of people fell to the ground, wounded or dead. “The scene was unbelievable. People cut in half, kids with their faces blown off.” Thin smoke from the explosions muted the scene and gave off an acrid odor. Victims moaned and cried. Protest placards lay beside them, splattered with blood. The injured looked stunned. For many of them, the assault also brought back painful memories of their horrific experiences during the Khmer Rouge regime. Abney said he looked up and saw several people running away. “They ran through Hun Sen’s bodyguards,” he said. These were not Rainsy party followers, he deduced. Why did he think that? “I assumed they weren’t because they weren’t carrying placards.”

  Rainsy survived, thanks, he said, to his bodyguard, who pushed him to the ground, sacrificing his own life. Immediately after the attack, a policeman lifted Rainsy and cradled him in his arms. Rainsy’s blue suit and white shirt were bloodied. The left lens of his glasses was cracked. But Rainsy was uninjured.

  The grenades killed 16 people and wounded as many as 150 others—most of the people at the rally. No one could immediately figure out where the grenades had come from. In the hours after the attack, several survivors said they saw a white car driving slowly past on Sothearos Boulevard. A window opened, and someone tossed three or four grenades into the crowd. Other witnesses spoke of a “burly man” on a motorcycle. Still others described men in vests or flak jackets who stood at the perimeter, threw grenades, and then ran through the line of Hun Sen’s bodyguards—perhaps the same people Abney said he had seen.

  Ambulances did not arrive for a half hour but then took most of the wounded to Calmette Hospital, which immediately appealed for blood donations. But not enough blood came in time. A thirteen-year-old girl who died from blood loss became the sixteenth casualty. She was just one of several children killed.

  Rainsy, bloodied but unharmed, regained his composure quickly and immediately went on the attack. “Hun Sen, the bloody guy,” he growled. He “should be arrested and sentenced.” Within days his ally, the cominister of interior, asked the U.S. Embassy to bring in the FBI since Abney, an American, had been injured. Under American law the FBI can open investigations in foreign countries if an American is a target of a terrorist attack and is injured or killed. The ministry official’s actual request was for an FBI sketch artist to help identify the attacker. But what he did not know was that FBI rules required a sketch artist to be accompanied by at least two special agents. When that became known, the CPP vociferously opposed allowing the FBI in. But, as Rainsy certainly appreciated, that brought America in as a critical player in his latest drama.

  Hun Sen denied responsibility. In a radio broadcast later that day, he promised to arrest the attackers but then fell into his normal pugnacious manner, demanding the arrest of the rally’s leaders because “they shared responsibility” for the bloodshed. He didn’t explain how that could be so.

  Hun Sen also ordered the Interior Ministry to prevent Cambodians with dual nationality from leaving the country. His target was clear: Rainsy had a French passport. One of Hun Sen’s close aides, Om Yientieng, claimed that it was obvious that Rainsy had ordered the attack on himself. After all, unlike most of the people, he had escaped unharmed.

  Newspapers and television stations worldwide covered the grenade attack. FBI special agent Tom Nicoletti happened to see a story about it on CNN. After paddling his canoe off Waikiki Beach and winning his first race with his Hawaiian outrigger team, he was lying on the couch recovering. Even in his late forties he was an active man, not surprising for someone who had been the cornerback on his college football team. He was six foot two and 225 pounds and had spent five years in the United States Marines. Now, in his spare time, he was a kayak and lumberjack-chopping competitor. He was also a nineteenyear veteran of the FBI.

  Agents are given one chance in their career to choose a duty station. When Nicoletti’s turn came up, he chose Maui, Hawaii, which had a station manned by just one agent. It was perfect. He could paddle almost anytime he wanted. Nicoletti got the job, but after he arrived in Hawaii and the special agent in charge learned of his background—he’d been the SWAT team leader in Washington, supervisor of undercover surveillance, and a member of the International Joint Terror Task Force, among other choice assignments—he was given a different job. He wasn’t going to be able to loll around on the beach in Maui. He was put in charge of all the terrorism investigations involving American citizens in Southeast Asia. So much for a relaxing job.

  When Nicoletti saw the story about the grenade attack, he realized: Here’s work. “I immediately called the Strategic Information-Operations Center at FBI Headquarters,” he said. “‘There’s been a grenade attack on an American citizen in Cambodia.’ They hadn’t heard about it. It took three or four days to get approval, but then I flew to the region.” He needed to speak to the American victim first.

  When Abney arrived at Calmette Hospital in Phnom Penh with a grenade fragment in his thigh, he looked around, aghast. “That place, it looked like an old Civil War hospital from the movies.” The emergency room had scant equipmen
t, all of it primitive by Western standards. “People were lying everywhere, and some of them were really hurt.” A few hours later the IRI flew Abney to a hospital in Singapore. Doctors removed a jagged piece of shrapnel about the size of a grape. He stayed there four days.

  On the third day, when he woke up he saw a big man, an American, standing over him. “He looked like John Wayne, even talked like him.” The man introduced himself as Tom Nicoletti, a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. True to type, he told Abney: “We’re here to get the guys who did this.” He then asked, “Do you think you were a target of opportunity in this attack?”

  “Yes,” Abney told him, “a target of opportunity, but not the target.” They talked for about an hour, and Abney said Nicoletti stood there over his bed the entire time. He gave not even the slightest indication of what he was thinking about the investigation, any theories he might have held about who was behind the attack, Abney said. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  The piece of shrapnel lay in a dish beside Abney’s bed, and just before he left, Nicoletti asked if he could take it, as evidence. Yes, Abney said, “but you have to give me a receipt. I want it back.” So Nicoletti pulled out one of his business cards and wrote on the back: “4/4/97. Received one small grenade fragment to be analyzed by FBI lab—to be returned to Mr. Abney when investigation completed. T. E. Nicoletti.” Abney still has the card. He is still waiting. (Much later, Nicoletti admitted that the FBI office in Honolulu had lost or misplaced it, but he was too embarrassed to tell Abney.)

  Nicoletti flew to Bangkok and wanted to move along to Phnom Penh right away. But the bureau wouldn’t let him go. Getting clearance from Phnom Penh seemed to take forever.

  The CPP was fighting hard to block the request. He also learned later that Ralph Horton, the senior FBI agent responsible for the region (the legal attaché, or legat, in FBI parlance), “had personal issues with Rainsy.” He “didn’t like him.” Two weeks later, the bureau finally let him go. Nicoletti departed for Phnom Penh wondering, “What was I supposed to do? This was a postbomb investigation, and I was sent there seventeen days after the blast.” It took ten more days before another agent, Peter Hoffman, and a sketch artist, Myke Taister, joined him in Phnom Penh. The three of them were stepping into a classic Cambodian hall of mirrors.

  Almost every foreigner and opposition figure in Cambodia naturally assumed Hun Sen and his political party were behind the attack. For most foreigners Hun Sen remained Cambodia’s bogeyman. Western news stories still referred to him as the “former Communist leader.” Many policy makers in Washington, in particular, held the view that there was no such thing as a former Communist. He was widely hated in Congress and among other policy makers. The IRI, Abney’s federally funded employer, held a particular animus for Hun Sen. With the - grenade attack and Abney’s injury, that animus blossomed into a positive loathing. For the International Republican Institute and most everyone in Washington who was paying attention, this wanton assault perfectly fit the profile of Hun Sen all of them held in their heads.

  The Cambodian People’s Party had a history of attacking political opponents, often with hand grenades, and Rainsy had been taunting Hun Sen for months. The government and the municipality had granted Rainsy permits for the rally, even though they had grown into the habit of denying rally permits for opposition parties—as they had for the Buddhist party months earlier. And a phalanx of Hun Sen’s personal bodyguards had been standing nearby—to abet the attackers? Otherwise, the regular police presence was unusually light compared to previous Rainsy rallies.

  But then, as was so often the case, some other facts did not fit as neatly. In the first days after the attack, most witnesses said the grenades were thrown from a white car, or a man on a motorbike, or the men on foot who ran away. Only over time did the story coalesce into a single version. By the time the FBI agents began asking questions, all of Rainsy’s staff and followers were saying it was men on foot who threw the grenades and then ran through the cordon of Hun Sen’s bodyguards standing nearby. Now, the story went, several of the victims, apparently unharmed, managed to get up off the ground and chase the apparent attackers. When these people rushed toward the bodyguards, the unit closed ranks, pulled out their weapons, and would not let them pass.

  But then, grenade throwers on foot were not the CPP’s signature assailants: two men on a motorbike wearing black helmets with tinted faceplates. And although one Chinese journalist was injured, Abney was the only attendee whose injury could trigger an FBI investigation. He arrived just as the rally was ending when people were leaving. In that case, why had the attackers waited until just then to throw their grenades?

  The narrative was becoming complex. As Seth Mydans of the New York Times put it in his story the next day, “Although Mr. Hun Sen appears to have been behind previous smaller attacks on opposition politicians and journalists, one Western political analyst cautioned that it was not clear who had ordered today’s attack. ‘I don’t know whose interests are served by this,’ said the analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ‘It’s a murky situation. This would be exactly the kind of thing Hun Sen’s advisers have been advising him not to do.’” Even Abney, who was utterly convinced that Hun Sen was responsible, admitted, “I thought he was too smart to do something like that, right in front of the National Assembly building, down the street from the palace.”

  So if it wasn’t Hun Sen, then who could have done it? Ranariddh and Rainsy were now allies of sorts, so Ranariddh would have little motivation to do such a thing. Actually, the person who gained most from the attack was Rainsy himself. Even with the terrible carnage, the attack was a huge political gift, one he would draw on for years to come. He was a victim. And had there ever been more powerful proof of Hun Sen’s evil? Demonstrating that fact to the West was Rainsy’s single-minded goal. He was obsessed, and this attack made the point better than anything ever before. As Rainsy put it that day, “I think, since the UN election, this is the worst attack.”

  At the same time, it is hard to see how any politician, anywhere, could be so savage and cruel that he would allow a murderous attack on his own people, killing a score of them, just to make a point against his political opponent—and simultaneously so brave that he was willing to risk his own life to make that point. Both suppositions were hard to accept. As Nicoletti put it, “Rainsy is no General Schwarzkopf. I don’t think he is going to stand there while people are throwing grenades near him.” So who did it?

  Shortly after the FBI team arrived, Rainsy’s office gave them typed statements from some of the survivors, describing what they had seen. Nearly all of them spoke of the phalanx of Hun Sen’s personal bodyguards in riot gear who, they said, stepped aside so the attackers could pass.

  The government set up an inquiry called the Joint Investigation Commission. Nicoletti and the other agents were supposed to be a part of that. But they were learning a lot on their own. Midway through the investigation they realized, as Nicoletti put it later, that the Cambodian investigators were pursuing “deliberate, deceptive and delaying actions” to impede the inquiry. Each political party’s police officers were leaking information to their political leaders and sometimes to the news media. The Cambodian authorities were turning up no new information and “seemed reluctant to initiate any investigative efforts that might anger” Hun Sen, Nicoletti said.

  So the FBI agents pursued the case on their own, interviewing people in hotel rooms and other private locations. They spoke to dozens and dozens of people, and soon they got a big break. Their sources gave them copies of police photos of the attack. The material did in fact show that “Hun Sen’s bodyguard unit had formed a perimeter around the people at the rally,” Nicoletti said, and that “a major in the unit made an opening in the line for the people who threw the grenades to go through. The bodyguard unit let people through the lines. Not more than 4 or 5 people. It seemed pre-arranged.” Just as many people at the rally had said, when Sam Rainsy’s followers ha
d tried to chase the attackers, the bodyguards closed ranks, pulled their weapons, and would not let them through. With this in hand the agents went to see the major they had seen commanding the bodyguard unit in those photos.

  They met at police headquarters, and a group of police from the Joint Investigation Commission was there, too, including the major general in charge. Also present were an army major general from Hun Sen’s bodyguard unit—and the major Nicoletti and his fellow agent Hoffman had identified in the photos.

  Hoffman started the questioning, asking the major, “When the grenade throwers were running toward your position, how many people were chasing them?”

  “I have no intention to count how many people were chasing the throwers, and I have no knowledge that those people are the grenade throwers,” the major said. (Reporters for Mother Jones acquired FBI tapes of this interview.)

  “Do you have good eyesight?” Hoffman asked.

  “No, no problem with the eyes. The reason is that there are a lot of demonstrators.”

  “So three or four people throw grenades into a crowd,” Hoffman asked, “and you didn’t see anything?”

  “I see nothing.”

  Hoffman pushed the major harder: “You were briefed very clearly on who was allowed to come through the line.”

  “My briefing was that no one was allowed to run through the line.”

  Hoffman was growing exasperated. “Are these grenade throwers supermen? Can they just click their fingers”—he snapped his own fingers—“and they disappear?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Now Hoffman was angry. He pounded the table and declared, “If this country is going to move to freedom and democracy and away from dictatorship and communism, then you have to have people be allowed to speak freely! You have to have that, otherwise a democracy is just pretend.”