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

by Joel Brinkley

  Millions of Cambodians suffered from these and similar symptoms and disabilities resulting from the trauma they experienced decades earlier. The few studies conducted in the country confirmed that fact. Muny Sothara, a psychiatrist in Phnom Penh, described “a household provincial survey in Kampong Cham in 2004 that showed PTSD or symptoms of other psychotic disorders in 47 percent of the population.”

  Left untreated, these people passed their illness on to their children. Nigel Field, a professor at the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology in Northern California, is an expert on what he calls second-generation effects. He studied two hundred children in a Phnom Penh high school and found that the more they knew about their parents’ traumatic experiences, the worse off they were. “Children, seeking approval, parrot their parents’ aberrant behavior,” Fields said. “There’s also a tendency for children to become ‘parents’ for their parents, to try to help quell their parents’ anxieties. These children tend to see danger when there is no danger,” just like their parents. When asked to list the events they knew their parents were exposed to—starvation, torture, near death—“some of them get angry when they talk about it, showing the role reversal. They have higher anxiety, depression. These stresses take a toll on their lives.”

  Muny Sothara, the Cambodian psychiatrist, suggested that parents unwittingly teach PTSD to their children. They do this by “educating the child, warning about dangers. Saying ‘don’t participate; don’t get involved. Be quiet.’” As Reicherter put it, “What we have learned is that if you have a traumatic childhood, you are more likely to get PTSD. So we have children who are growing up with violent parents who are drunk and beat them. That’s the generation that’s coming.”

  That new generation has already arrived. In about 2004 Cambodian officials estimated that one-quarter of the nation’s men frequently beat their wives and children—one of the highest rates in the world. By the end of the decade, as more of the Khmer Rouge victims’ children married and had children of their own, the rate had actually increased, to about one-third of the nation’s families.

  Hinton and Reicherter both reported that therapy helped some Cambodian refugees. But in the 1990s Cambodian psychiatry was not yet even in its infancy. The state had perhaps four or five psychiatrists nationwide. All of them worked for hospitals, dispensing outdated medications. Reicherter said he visited one village where “we saw one man, a schizophrenic apparently, with a dog collar, tied to a tree—how psychiatry was practiced a millennium ago. We gave him a shot. One shot. And they were able to let him go.”

  Members of the government didn’t seem to care, even though many senior officials had the same symptoms. “Mental health is the last priority here,” said Michael O’Leary, head of the World Health Organization office in Phnom Penh. “The ability to provide support is really quite limited.”

  Khieu Kanharith, the information minister, said he suffered a recurring nightmare, a hallmark of PTSD: “I go back to my home and most of my family is on the ground, on their knees,” as they would be just before execution by the Khmer Rouge. Since 1979, “I actually have been back home only once, and it’s in a village just up the road. I wrote on the wall of my house: I am alive! But it’s too stressful to be there. I haven’t been back. PTSD, everyone has it.” The continuing war with the Khmer Rouge only amplified the people’s pain.

  At the same time, even months after the “coup” in 1997, the CPP and Funcinpec fought sporadic battles across the country—utterly heedless of anything but advancing their own positions. The people they were supposed to serve suffered the tortures of the damned. Terrified, tens of thousands of them fled to Thailand once again, just as they had in 1979.

  Nothing could have seemed more discordant to the mood of the state, but Cambodia was supposed to hold national elections in July 1998, just a year after the battles between Ranariddh and Hun Sen. Ranariddh was in exile, and Hun Sen promised to put him on trial for something close to treason if he ever dared to return. Ung Huot, an ineffectual Funcinpec placeholder, had been installed in Ranariddh’s office to carry the party forward until the elections. But how could you have an election with only one major party running for office? Funcinpec had won the last election. But it was the “royalist” party, and without Prince Ranariddh, it stood not a chance.

  Sure, in Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, and countless other authoritarian states the leaders staged one-party elections. But Cambodia was different. It was just four years out from the UN occupation and the national elections. The aid groups had settled into a routine of giving the government about $500 million a year, more than half of the government’s budget. Hun Sen couldn’t risk losing all of that largesse and what little was left of the world’s goodwill.

  In Washington, already, denunciations were flying fast and thick. Brad Adams, the UN official, told a receptive congressional committee, “Funcinpec, a royalist party, now has no members of the royal family in its leadership, rendering the party politically meaningless. Hun Sen has staked out a clear strategy: create the appearance of a constitutional, multi-party government and political system, such as by placing a malleable figure such as Ung Huot in the position of first prime minister, hold elections next year without any semblance of a real opposition, exercise control over all levers of government, dominate the electronic media and wait for the international community to hold its nose and declare the elections minimally free and fair.”

  In the end, the Japanese brokered a deal. Japan was eager for influence in Southeast Asia to counter China’s growing clout and stepped in to help break this impasse. Ranariddh had asked his father, King Sihanouk, to pardon him. But Sihanouk refused—unless Ranariddh apologized. Sihanouk, at least, knew who had started the violence. And now father and son were not getting along too well.

  Ranariddh refused to apologize, saying he was not willing to admit guilt—even though he knew he was, in fact, guilty. (In truth, though, both sides had been brewing for a fight. If Ranariddh hadn’t started it, sooner or later Hun Sen probably would have.) That led to even more complex maneuvering.

  Under the Japanese plan Hun Sen’s courts put on a show trial and convicted Ranariddh of smuggling arms and conspiring with Khmer Rouge guerrillas to launch a coup. The court sentenced Ranariddh in absentia to thirty-five years in prison and fined him $54 million for damages to businesses that resulted from the fighting—and from the looting afterward, even though it was actually done by Hun Sen’s troops. Once the verdict was in, Sihanouk pardoned his son, and Ranariddh came back in 1998. He commenced running for office again, as if nothing had ever occurred.

  Tidy as this plan was, Ranariddh’s image among Cambodians was now something less than pure and clean. This time around he also had a serious competitor in Sam Rainsy. The parliament had finally enacted a political-party law, and in a bold display of his own view of himself, Rainsy was now head of the Sam Rainsy Party.

  All of these factors, by several accounts, made Hun Sen quite nervous. He’d lost the last election, and now he had two formidable opponents. He was not sure he could win. What to do? He fell back on his traditional strategies of intimidation. Soon, assailants began threatening, torturing, and killing Funcinpec officers, just as had happened before the last election. More than a dozen people died in the violence.

  Perhaps the worst example was Thong Sophal, a Funcinpec official found in Kandal Province a month before the vote. His head and face were smashed beyond recognition; his eyes were gouged out, his ears cut away, his fingers chopped off. His legs, from his upper thigh to his feet, were stripped of all flesh and muscle so that only skeletal limbs remained. A grisly photo of this man appeared in the Phnom Penh Post, and a local police official called the death a suicide. Was that not an effective warning to all who dared defy the ruling party?

  No one has ever proved that Hun Sen either ordered or sanctioned this attack, or any like it. But then Hun Sen liked to point out that he was all-powerful. He controlled everything. If he disapproved of these tactics, he cou
ld have stopped the murders and assaults. But he never even spoke out against them—except, oftentimes, to blame the victim for the crime. With all of that, Hun Sen left no doubt in anyone’s mind that he was in fact responsible, and those who know him say he reveled in that.

  The murders carried a clear message: Stand up to me, and look what will happen to you. I’ll gouge out your eyes, cut off your fingers, and then skin your legs before I kill you. Hun Sen had learned this from years of serving the Khmer Rouge and a decade of serving Vietnam. As Paul Grove, a Cambodia specialist at the IRI, put it in his testimony to Congress, “The Chinese have a saying which may best describe the rationale behind these killings: Kill a chicken to teach the monkeys.”

  Although electoral observers complained of voter intimidation—the CPP controlled the village chief in every town across the nation—and vote buying, the overall violence was not as frequent or severe as in 1993. And while human-rights advocates screamed, Hun Sen actually found the beginnings of a valid political strategy that seemed to work for him. I brought you stability, he would say. I have been fighting the Khmer Rouge for you. They are on their last legs now. That tactic played well with the nation’s emotionally wounded population. Stability was more important than anything else. Cambodians most of all wanted peace and quiet, qualities of life they had not seen since the late 1960s. They wanted to be left alone.

  Diplomats complained that the deck was already stacked. More than 80 percent of the people lived in the countryside. In 1998 most of them did not have television or radio. Newspapers did not circulate outside the cities, and most of the rural residents could not read. What news of the campaign they were able to hear usually came from their village chiefs, every one of them a CPP stalwart.

  What’s more, Hun Sen controlled all of the government institutions set up to ensure free elections, the National Election Committee, the Constitution Council, and others. When Grove, the IRI Cambodia specialist, visited the election commission close to election day to see what it was doing to achieve free and fair elections, all that the commission’s functionaries were interested in talking about was the challenge of installing “electric service in the commission’s office,” he told Congress. The Constitution Council, whose mission was to resolve election disputes, had never even been established.

  Still, once again Cambodians embraced the election. More than 90 percent of the people voted, and foreign election observers judged election day to be both fair and free—showing that Hun Sen had learned how to put on the appearance of a clean election. It didn’t matter how much bribery and murder occurred before election day. If the vote itself was judged to be clean, election observers would certify the vote—with at most a note suggesting problems during the campaign period.

  After the 1998 election, international observers dubbed the vote “a miracle on the Mekong.” Yet in later years the International Republican Institute, for one, refused even to participate. “Cambodia is not really worth observing,” said Lorne Craner, the IRI’s president. “The outcome is a foregone conclusion.”

  Ambassadors and other diplomats noted a little less violence, not quite so much vote buying, and usually remarked, “This is the best election so far.” Hun Sen would feast on that, while opposition leaders despaired. Speaking of the United States, Mu Sochua, an opposition parliamentarian, was despondent. “You keep saying ‘progress has been made.’ Yes, but I have only one lifetime. I don’t have 30 lives.” In Phnom Penh, “praise from Washington goes a long way.”

  The results in 1998 were a virtual mirror of the voting in 1993, though the parties opposing Hun Sen split their vote this time. Hun Sen won the most votes, 41.4 percent. His party crowed about that. Funcinpec won 32.2 percent and Sam Rainsy 14.4 percent, most of that from the more educated, urban population. Hun Sen was declared the winner, as Ranariddh had been last time. But by adding Ranariddh’s and Rainsy’s votes, together they held the plurality, almost 46 percent to 41 percent. The opposition could control the government—if only they could form a coalition. The trouble was, Rainsy and Ranariddh despised each other. Rainsy considered Ranariddh a scoundrel in a royal cloak. Ranariddh saw Rainsy as a self-righteous hypocrite. So rather than talk about joining forces, they both used what was becoming the standard strategy for losing candidates: Declare the election rigged and fraudulent.

  As it was, the National Election Committee, after finally figuring out how to turn on the lights, concocted a vote-allocation formula that awarded 53 percent of the seats in parliament to the CPP, even though the party had won only 41 percent of the vote. Still, two-thirds of the voting members were needed to form a coalition government.

  Hun Sen planned to amend the constitution so that only a simple majority was required, now that he nearly had one. When King Sihanouk warned him not to do it, however, he backed off—for the moment.

  Meantime, a parade of foreign political leaders arrived in Phnom Penh, all of them determined to convince Rainsy and Ranariddh to join forces to push Hun Sen out of office. Steve Solarz, now a former member of Congress, “spent an hour in Ranariddh’s house,” Quinn said. “He begged him to join forces with Rainsy.” Solarz said, “I tried my best, but they both refused.”

  In Washington the Senate Foreign Relations Committee called Stanley Roth, the new assistant secretary of state, to testify about the political deadlock. Consistent with the prevailing attitude in the capital, he said, “Some six out of ten voters chose a party other than the ruling Cambodian People’s Party.” To get 60 percent Roth had counted all the smaller parties, some of which did not win even enough votes to earn a seat in parliament. In his view this “clearly demonstrates that efforts aimed at intimidating the Cambodian electorate failed.” Then he told of the State Department’s hope that the parties “negotiate a coalition government which reflects the will of the people as expressed in their vote.” And in their total vote, he noted again, 60 percent of the people voted against Hun Sen.

  The truth was that Ranariddh didn’t seem much interested in forming an opposition coalition. He was far more keen on working something out with Hun Sen that would place him astride the flow of graft money that streamed through senior government offices.

  Negotiations dragged on for six months. All the while Hun Sen’s party managed to peel away one Funcinpec supporter after another by offering lucrative government appointments and cash. Sun Thun, a teacher and prominent Sam Rainsy Party member in Kampong Thom Province, recounted his own experience: “They tried to buy me. They promised they would pay me and give me a position in government. I didn’t accept. But a friend of mine did. They pay him 1 million riel salary. Now he’s a deputy director in the education ministry. And now everybody calls him ‘your excellency.’” In the end, Hun Sen and Ranariddh agreed that Hun Sen would return as prime minister while Ranariddh became speaker of the National Assembly—quite a lucrative post.

  The problem was that this position did not give his many supporters and acolytes the positions they needed in government to buy big houses and put their children through school. Funcinpec was given ministries that offered few financial opportunities—Education, Health, Rural Development, and the like—while Hun Sen clung to Justice, Defense, Interior, Commerce, Construction, Industry, and Planning. But part of the deal Japan brokered offered another avenue to bring party members into the lucre. The state would create a senate. It would have little power—but enough status and influence to curry favor with moneyed interests. Seats would be apportioned according to votes in the last election.

  Throughout the process Rainsy continued to rail about the inequity of it all, so he got nothing in the coalition deal, just his party’s seats in parliament. And to demonstrate that Cambodia held no room for an opposition politician, when he returned from abroad for the opening of the National Assembly, police used clubs and electric batons to beat up several dozen of his supporters who had shown up to greet him. To say he was bitter would be a world-class understatement.

  In September 1998 King Sihanouk
called everyone to his palace in Siem Reap for a ceremonial opening of the new parliament. This entailed a flight, followed by a drive to Sihanouk’s palace. Along the road from the airport, a small group of men hid behind bushes with an RPG-2 grenade launcher. The RPG-2, sometimes called the B-40, was an old, crude instrument—the first rocket-propelled grenade launcher designed in the former Soviet Union and supplied to its allies, starting in 1949. The North Vietnamese fired them at American troops during the Vietnam War. The Khmer Rouge used them. Though deadly, they weren’t very accurate; they featured only a bolted-on iron site for aiming the weapon.

  Soon enough, Hun Sen’s motorcade approached, sirens blaring, and the launcher fired. The grenade missed; it whizzed past just in front of Hun Sen’s windshield and exploded across the road, killing a young boy and wounding several other people. At first Hun Sen and his party did not know what had happened. But by the time they got to the palace for the ceremony, they realized, as Hun Sen put it, “this was a clear attempt on my life,” adding, “They want to kill me, of course.” But he named no names. A diplomat who attended the reception said Rainsy and Sihanouk “both looked ashen” after hearing the news.

  After the party at Sihanouk’s house, the new parliamentarians were sworn in at Angkor Wat. Hun Sen then flew directly back to Phnom Penh. Rainsy and Ranariddh fled the country. “Sure we are worried,” a spokesman for Rainsy told reporters. “It seems like they are claiming this was an assassination attempt on Hun Sen, a free-standing accusation that could be used against anyone.” Ranariddh pointed out that he had been in that convoy. Why would he order an attack when “my own car was very close?” he asked. Hok Lundy, Hun Sen’s police chief and a brutal thug, stepped into the debate and quickly declared: “We have concluded that this was a clear attempt by the political parties that lost the election.”