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

by Joel Brinkley

  It is a testament to the peculiar character of Cambodia that neither Ranariddh nor anyone else said anything about that little boy who was killed. How would the United States, or France, or Finland, or Japan treat a little boy, an innocent bystander, killed in an attempt to assassinate the head of state? Everyone would know all about him. Not so in Cambodia. The nation’s leaders were so focused on themselves that he was irrelevant—collateral damage worthy not even of acknowledgment.

  Like all the rest of these episodes, no one ended up being arrested. Rainsy and Ranariddh eventually slipped back into town, and everything went on as before—although now, for the first time, Hun Sen was the uncontested leader of his nation.

  Hun Sen’s hold on power drew on many strengths and strategies. Among them were nepotism and intermarriage. His brother Hun Neng was governor of Kampong Cham Province, and the governor’s daughter was married to the deputy commissioner of police. Hun Neng’s son Hun Seang Heng was married to Sok Sopheak, the daughter of another deputy commissioner of police. Hun Sen’s son Hun Manith was married to Hok Chendavy, the daughter of Hok Lundy, the National Police commissioner until he died in a helicopter crash in 2008. After that, Hun Sen appointed his nephew-in-law to the job. He appointed his daughter, Hun Mana, as a senior assistant in his office. Another of Hun Sen’s sons, Hun Many, was married to Yim Chay Lin, daughter of the secretary of state for rural development, while one of the prime minister’s daughters was married to Sok Puthyvuth, the son of Sok An, the deputy prime minister.

  That is just a taste; the government was riven with marital and professional nepotism. In a nation where no one trusted anyone else and everyone looked out only for himself, the family stood as the only social grouping in which people confidently relied on one another.

  Hun Sen’s friends called him clever, wily, and smart. His enemies, a far larger group, called him cunning, ruthless, and diabolical. But on one fact everyone agreed. He would accept nothing short of complete, unfettered control of his nation, just like the kings of yore. Now he had it and liked to brag about that. “I wish to state it very clearly this way,” he said in a major speech. “No one can defeat Hun Sen. Only Hun Sen alone can defeat Hun Sen.” But he once also protested: “Don’t accuse me of loving power. The people gave it to me.” Actually, it was Truong Chinh, the Vietnamese leader, who placed him in office during the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia in the 1980s.

  Hun Sen was born in 1952 in a tiny village in Kampong Cham Province, north of Phnom Penh. His parents were uneducated peasant farmers, and by his own account he studied at one of those village pagodas where the monks taught scripture and perhaps how to read and write. He says he then moved to Phnom Penh to continue his studies in a French school, the Lycée Indra Devi, though it was never explained how a peasant child managed to accomplish that. But the nation was at war, and when Hun Sen heard Prince Sihanouk urge young people to join the Khmer Rouge, that’s exactly what he did, in 1970.

  Most Cambodians have come up with accounts to explain their lives during the Khmer Rouge era. Millions of victims, of course, have terrible stories to tell. But many of the former Khmer Rouge soldiers and officers have crafted tales of their own. In their telling, they lived in the forest or worked as a Khmer Rouge slave in a remote area—stories that cannot be proved or disproved.

  Unlike these Khmer Rouge veterans, Hun Sen has never talked publicly about his time as a Khmer Rouge soldier. He was promoted quickly, which suggests that he must have followed Pol Pot’s doctrine quite faithfully. He fought in the battle to take Phnom Penh in 1975—and lost one eye. By 1978 he was a commander stationed in eastern Cambodia. When Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese troops began exchanging fire across the border—Vietnam briefly invaded eastern Cambodia in 1977—Pol Pot began seeing collaborators everywhere. All soldiers working on the border were presumed to be traitors. In this climate of suspicion it was just a matter of time before his Khmer Rouge superiors began to suspect him.

  One day the regional office called Hun Sen in for a talk. People working in border areas knew they could be killed at any time. Whenever the central office called them back for interviews, they never returned. Hun Sen went to the meeting, he said, but put a pistol in his bag. A senior officer questioned him about his loyalty, and as the interview came to an end, Hun Sen put his hand on the pistol in his bag. But they let him go. Outside, he cut the office’s communications lines, then took off for the border and defected to Vietnam. The Vietnamese put him in jail at first but then let him out and brought him into the planning for the invasion. Once Vietnam had seized Phnom Penh, they made him foreign minister.

  Hun Sen seems to live up to every one of the descriptions his allies and enemies offer. He is undeniably smart. How else could he have outwitted so many of his political rivals, every one of whom was just as diabolical as he is, for so many years? He is ruthless, having allowed his government, or his party, to murder hundreds of political opponents over several decades. He is also cunning, as Christopher Hill discovered firsthand. In 2006 Hill was assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs, the same job Solomon and Lord had held before. He was in Phnom Penh for meetings. A few days earlier the government had arrested two prominent human-rights activists on trumped-up charges. When Hill met Hun Sen, “I told him: ‘I don’t really know Cambodia, but I do know Washington. And if you do things like this, pretty soon people are going to begin seeing you as another Burma.’ Hun Sen huddled with his aides for a minute, then said: ‘How about if we let them out at 2 p.m.?’

  “‘Well, that would be good,’ I said.

  “‘But you didn’t pressure me, right?’ Hun Sen insisted. ‘You’re not going to say there was any pressure?’”

  No, Hill told him. “I won’t say there was any pressure.”

  “‘Well, then,’ Hun Sen said, ‘I am releasing them as a gift to you.’”

  Hill thanked him and left. Later, Joseph Mussomeli, who was the U.S. ambassador at the time, pointed out, “Yes, he made that promise to Chris Hill. But before Hill got there, Hun Sen had already promised to release them.”

  But Hun Sen is not all cunning and bluster. He is also a troubled man. By several accounts from people who know him well, Hun Sen suffers panic attacks. “He could be shaken, rattled, panicked,” Quinn said. “When that happens, he can seem to lose touch with his surroundings and says things like ‘What’s going on, what’s happening?’”

  When confronted with options he does not like, Hun Sen often speaks of his fears of instability and war. He is zealous about protecting himself and his family. After the murder of Thun Bun Ly, the opposition newspaper editor, in 1996, angry Rainsy supporters paraded his coffin through the streets. Hun Sen called Quinn and pleaded with him to send protection for his two children who were in school in the United States. The State Department was not eager to cooperate with his request, but local police did send squad cars to check on the two. For that, Hun Sen was quite grateful.

  For Hun Sen and people like him, “their background leaves them constantly afraid,” Quinn said. “That fear of losing control constantly permeates them.”

  Assessing all this, Reicherter, the psychiatrist, said: “He definitely sounds like someone with anxiety. This is not the normal behavior of a leader, thinking that power could be taken from him at any time, which is a symptom of PTSD.”

  In 1999 Quinn had been in Phnom Penh for more than three years. The State Department appreciated his work, but his relationship with Hun Sen had made him a polarizing figure. Some senior Republican members of the Senate held a strong interest in Cambodia and “realized this was something they had to keep an eye on,” Ron Abney said. “They did it through us”—Abney and his colleagues at the IRI. The picture these senators received focused sharply on the dysfunctional political situation because the institute was a focal point for the animus toward Hun Sen—and deep suspicion of Ambassador Quinn.

  After Abney was injured in the grenade attack, the institute’s fixation on Hun Sen blossomed
. Grove had served in Cambodia during the mid-1990s and then had become the IRI’s Cambodia specialist. Like others at IRI, he was a Rainsy fan. “Every time he came to town,” Grove said, “we made sure he got up on the Hill to talk to people.” Abney often went with him, and, as he watched, “Rainsy could really get congressmen excited,” he said. “He was like the Aung San Suu Kyi of Cambodia, talking to them about all this inside stuff in Cambodian politics. They loved it!”6

  At the end of the decade Grove took a new job as a senior aid for Republican senator Mitch McConnell, who happened to be chairman of the Senate Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee—a body that held significant influence over how American money was spent abroad. McConnell was from Kentucky, where he had previously served as a county administrator. He had been in the Senate since 1985. The senator hadn’t held especially strong opinions about Cambodia—until he hired Grove. Prior to 1998 he spoke about the state rarely. After Grove joined his staff McConnell visited the country, wrote op-eds denouncing Hun Sen, and was quoted widely. “Staff was able to bring issues to his attention,” Grove modestly observed.

  When the Clinton administration nominated Quinn’s successor as ambassador to Cambodia in January 1999, McConnell put a hold on it, as senators can do. His nomination could not go forward unless and until McConnell lifted the hold. The senator had no particular problem with the nominee, Kent Wiedemann, a career diplomat who had most recently been chargé d’affaires in Burma. No, the goal of McConnell and his Republican allies was simple and straightforward: regime change. Hun Sen had to go. What better way to make that point than to refuse to send an ambassador? Whose idea was this? Sam Rainsy’s.

  Wiedemann’s foreign-service career had been long and distinguished. He had served in Israel, Singapore, Poland, Taiwan, and China. The debate was not about him, and he knew it. “Not sending an ambassador was a very effective way of showing our distaste,” he said. “And, yes indeed, Sam Rainsy was their client. He traveled to the U.S. and very successfully gained the support of some of these Foreign Relations Committee staffers. And most importantly, the people at IRI very early on saw Sam Rainsy as a better champion of democracy.”

  Rainsy, of course, denied he had done any of this. “I don’t understand things in Washington,” he averred. “It would be too demanding for me to try to influence things on the Hill.” (Given a chance later to explain this and other lies, Rainsy declined.) Another McConnell staffer told the senator that Wiedemann was not tough enough on the regime when he was chargé d’affaires in Burma. That also played into Wiedemann’s problems.

  Quinn said the State Department asked him to remain in office as the nomination debate dragged on, month after month. He agreed, and with obvious glee he called Rainsy to tell him, “I would be happy to stay indefinitely.” That, of course, was just about the last thing Rainsy wanted to hear. As Quinn saw it from Phnom Penh, eventually “Rainsy called it off, and soon enough Wiedemann was confirmed.”

  In fact, cooler heads prevailed in the Senate. “John McCain and Chuck Robb weighed in,” Wiedemann said. Friends and supporters told Rainsy that “things were moving in the direction of acceptance of having an ambassador, so he dropped his opposition.” McConnell lifted his hold.

  Wiedemann stepped into his new position on August 1, 1999. His attitude and the environment around him were wholly different from what they had been for either of his predecessors. Twining and Quinn had both had direct encounters with the horrors of the Khmer Rouge years. Both of them played important roles in the UN occupation. They had come to the job with a deep sympathy for the Cambodian people and cautious optimism about the nation’s future after the United Nations had given it a major lift. The American mission during their tenures was hopeful: to help Cambodia create a democratic government that would heal the wounds of the Khmer Rouge era, lift its people out of poverty, and join the modern world.

  Wiedemann, in contrast, had served in Burma, China, Israel, and Washington, among other places. He was dealing with Asian and Latin American affairs during the Khmer Rouge years and beyond. He, of course, had followed the news and felt sympathy for the Cambodian people—as did most everyone around the world. But he had no particular attachment to the country or its people, no personal stake in the United Nations’ mission. And by the time he got there, most of the world had already concluded that the UN mission had failed. No one was left in government who had a strong interest in the state, like Solomon or Quinn—someone who could be an advocate for Cambodia while the rest of the government focused on higher priorities.

  Now, the atmosphere for the American ambassador in Phnom Penh was also quite different. “It was still a very difficult time because the U.S. had seen the ’97 events so negatively,” he said. “We cut off aid, downsized the embassy.” As a result, Wiedemann had an adversarial relationship with Hun Sen beginning the day he set foot in the country. Unlike Quinn, Wiedemann was able to establish only “a decent working relationship with Hun Sen, though a very prickly one. Especially when I would go in to protest something, like impunity or the murders. I would go into his office, and I could sense the anger he felt. His answers were short and abrupt. You could see him kind of twitch.”

  With all of that the United States was adopting a new mission in Cambodia. Actually, it abandoned any real sense of mission. “The reality is, at the State Department we are awfully busy doing China, doing North Korea nukes, doing Sudan,” Wiedemann explained. “We don’t really have much time to deal with Cambodia, Burma, the little countries. We don’t have any major national interests there. So we let the human-rights folks handle it. We say, ‘Let’s make human rights the principal or perhaps the only foreign-policy objective.’ So we bring all the human-rights groups into the tent. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the IRI.” These groups began to play “huge roles. And they all had an extreme and focused antipathy toward Hun Sen. In IRI’s case, while I was there, their principal aim was promoting Sam Rainsy. Hun Sen, he was absolutely illegitimate. He has to go. He needs to come down.”

  That meant the U.S. government was taking the de facto position as Hun Sen’s avowed and determined enemy. Hun Sen’s government didn’t really know how to handle that. On advice, they hired a lobbyist in Washington. But that didn’t work out. “We paid him $1 million, but he cheated us,” said Khieu Kanharith, the information minister. “He was Cambodian. We decided we didn’t want to have a lobbyist anymore.” With or without a lobbyist, Hun Sen’s government continued providing his antagonists new ammunition to use against him, month after month after month.

  Hun Sen, left, and Ranariddh, when they were pretending to get along.

  Sam Rainsy

  Prince Norodom Sihanouk

  Farmers planting rice more or less as their forebears did 1,000 years ago.

  Tuy Khorn tries to dig furrows by tying a heavy rock to her primitive plow.

  This twelfth-century Bayon temple carving shows an oxcart nearly identical to those used today.

  Residents, including a land mine victim in the hammock, watch their village’s only car-battery-powered television.

  When a charity gave out free rice, Chan Yat, 76, was almost the only one who got any.

  Farmers ferry live pigs to market.

  School teacher Kdep Sokhin, 26, fears he will soon have 143 students, all by himself.

  A mother, a bit of blood on her blouse, recovers from a C-section at Battambang Hospital.

  A woman recovers from childbirth at Pailin Referral Hospital. At the room’s other end is the nurse with the slightly crossed eyes and the “Duty Room,” where the nurses sleep.

  Mith Ran tells the sorrowful story of his wife’s death at Pailin Referral Hospital.

  Let Ting, 22, was widowed after a military officer burned her husband to death.

  Sam Nhea sits with his two barely-conscious children, one of whom is out of frame, in the Andong evictee camp.

  Police man a checkpoint in Pursat Province where they stop drivers and demand bribes
.

  Pol Pot’s younger brother, Saloth Nhep, 84, reflects on his life a few months before he died.

  Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, sits before a shrine holding skulls of Khmer Rouge victims.

  Chhay Sareth, Pursat Province council chief, complained about the province’s corrupt prosecutor.

  Prime Minister Hun Sen’s new mansion, theoretically built with money from his salary, has a heliport on the roof.

  Deputy Prime Minister Sok An’s house is the size of a small hotel.

  Millions of Cambodians live in houses much like Mith Ran’s simple abode.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It’s hard to overstate how important trees are to Cambodians. Since the beginning of human habitation of this bucolic state, people have built their homes from tree trunks, limbs, and branches—even making use of the leaves. They’ve taken food from the fruit trees, burned tree limbs to cook their food, lived in the shade of trees as protection from the brutal heat, tapped tree resin to seal the hulls of their fishing boats, and much more. That is why so many people looked on with genuine distress as the Khmer Rouge, after their defeat, denuded northwestern Cambodia of vast forests and sold the lumber to Thai generals.