Hun Sen: Portrait of a Wild Man

In the wake of the 1993 election, Second Prime Minister Hun Sen consolidated power in moves that would culminate in a seething 1997. A new book examines the extraordinary makings of Southeast Asia’s most infamous ‘Strong Man’. Exclusive preview, only in the Advisor. 

AFTER TWO YEARS IN OFFICE, Prince Norodom Ranariddh found himself in a precarious position. His imaginary empire, founded on a remarkable victory at the election organised by the United Nations in 1993, was eroding away on every front. Royalist ministers now found themselves sitting in empty offices, “shuffling meaningless documents, attending vacuous meetings, reading newspapers.” Other officials from the Funcinpec party were growing unhappy at the fact their bosses had fewer jobs and posts to distribute than their counterparts in the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), which had come second in the election but continued to hold effective power.

The party’s crisis peaked in November 1995, when Funcinpec Secretary-General Prince Norodom Sirivudh was arrested in connection with an alleged plot to assassinate Hun Sen, of the CPP. The charges against Sirivudh were dubious. Speaking with a journalist at a cocktail party, the jovial prince had reportedly joked about attacking Hun Sen’s motorcade with a grenade launcher. A few days later Sirivudh awoke to find his party chatter splashed across the front page of the New Angkor newspaper. Troops were deployed and Sirivudh was arrested at tank-point.

The National Assembly hastily convened for a closed-door session and stripped the prince of his parliamentary immunity. The vote was a unanimous 105 for and zero against; at Ranariddh’s request, every Funcinpec member present voted to condemn Sirivudh, who was locked up pending trial. Ranariddh later argued that he denounced his colleague and uncle in order “to save the Kingdom of Cambodia”. But the Sirivudh affair showed how powerless First Prime Minister Ranariddh had become, and how far he now had to bend in order to appease Hun Sen, who had blustered and bullied his way into equal billing as ‘second’ prime minister after the election and was now effectively in control of the government.

Hun Sen wasn’t in a mood for joking around. For much of the past year he had been cooped up in his heavily fortified compound at Tuol Krasang, close to the town of Takhmao, ten kilometres south of Phnom Penh. Here Hun Sen reportedly worked late into the night, chain-smoking 555-brand cigarettes, trusting few people outside his family and close circle of advisors. In a 1995 cable from the US Embassy, Ambassador Charles Twining described Hun Sen’s “near-obsession” with security. Even before the Sirivudh affair, he travelled about the country with around 60 armed bodyguards – more than any other government official.

By 1996 Hun Sen’s bodyguard unit had grown into a personal army of more than 1,000 men backed by tanks, armoured personnel carriers and helicopters. Up to 800 of these troops were based at Tuol Krasang – dubbed the ‘Tiger’s Lair’ by foreign journalists – who were supplemented by several hundred more men at a special CPP complex located behind his villa in the capital. Though technically part of the elite Brigade 70 of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF), Hun Sen’s bodyguards existed outside the military chain of command. In return they received salaries of around $300 per month – far in excess of the $13 received by normal soldiers.

In part, Hun Sen had built up his forces as insurance against Ranariddh, his nominal coalition partner, who commanded a formidable personal security force of his own. But Hun Sen’s bodyguards also provided him with insurance against challenges from within his own camp. Despite the CPP’s outward appearance of unity, its internal balance of power remained in flux. Though the 1993 election had marked a distinct shift from the faction of the CPP surrounding party president Chea Sim to a younger group of officials close to Hun Sen, his old party rivals retained much of their power. Chea Sim continued to control the National Assembly, and his brother-in-law Sar Kheng remained in charge at the Ministry of Interior. Both were closely linked to the RCAF commander-in-chief, General Ke Kim Yan, who had risen through the ranks in Battambang and was related to Sar Kheng by marriage. This web of alliances, rooted in the security forces and provincial administrations in Prey Veng and Battambang, posed a potential rearguard threat.

The discontent in the CPP came briefly to the surface on July 2, 1994, when armoured personnel carriers carrying around 300 troops based in Prey Veng were deployed westward toward Phnom Penh. Around 30 kilometres from the capital, the column was stopped by government forces and forced to return to barracks. Not a single shot was fired, but soldiers were deployed in Phnom Penh and the government immediately announced it had quashed an attempted coup. It later emerged the plot was spearheaded by General Sin Song and Prince Norodom Chakrapong, two CPP renegades who had languished on the political fringes since leading a secession of Cambodia’s eastern provinces in 1993. They found another willing co-conspirator in Sin Sen (no relation to Sin Song), who had commanded the ‘A-Team’ attack squads which had terrorised the CPP’s opponents under Untac. He, too, was apparently piqued at having been sidelined in the new government.

The aim of the coup was never entirely clear, but the foiled plot had significant political aftershocks. In the immediate aftermath, Hun Sen moved quickly against his factional rivals. Sin Song and Sin Sen were taken into custody. After an armed stand-off at a Phnom Penh hotel, Chakrapong was allowed to go into face-saving exile in Malaysia. Instead of deploying CPP forces to quash the coup, Hun Sen used Funcinpec and KPNLF men, and failed to notify Sar Kheng at the Ministry of Interior – both moves that suggested his lack of trust in his own party’s forces.

Implying their involvement in the coup, Hun Sen insisted to Chea Sim and Sar Kheng that he be allowed to nominate the next chief of the national police, a powerful institution which had been under Chea Sim’s control since 1979. The figure he chose was Hok Lundy, an old ally from Svay Rieng, who, after his appointment in September 1994, would report directly to Hun Sen. At the same time, Hun Sen’s small security detail began to expand into a personal army which lay outside the control of any state institution. It was a decisive turning point. Backed by the threat of ruthless force, Hun Sen now had the clout to reshape the Cambodian political landscape to his liking.

Within Funcinpec, Sirivudh’s arrest was the last straw. In January 1996, the party held a closed-door meeting in Sihanoukville at which it resolved to press for a larger share of power and begin building up its military wing to match Hun Sen. Characteristically, Ranariddh overcompensated. At the next Funcinpec party congress in March, he launched a blistering attack on the CPP, denouncing the coalition government as a “slogan”, an “empty bucket” that was beaten in the name of democracy. If the CPP didn’t make more concessions, Ranariddh threatened to dissolve the National Assembly and hold a new election “before the end of 1996”. The Funcinpec leadership failed to anticipate Ranariddh’s outburst. “It came out spontaneously,” one former royalist minister said. “He couldn’t bite his tongue.”

The CPP responded by accusing Funcinpec of using the issue of power-sharing as a pretext to create ‘political instability’ and confuse public opinion. CPP-controlled media outlets excoriated Ranariddh and began speaking of a ‘royal plot’ against Hun Sen. In a speech on April 27, Hun Sen ominously pledged to use force against any “coup to destroy the Constitution”. In contrast to Ranariddh and Sam Rainsy, leader of the opposition Khmer Nation Party (KNP), who both held dual French-Cambodian citizenship, Hun Sen painted himself as a true Khmer, a son of the soil who stood by the people and wouldn’t board a plane to Paris at the first sign of trouble. At the same time he threatened to pass legislation disqualifying dual nationals from public office. He warned his opponents: “Don’t say you are Khmer when it is easy and American when it is difficult.”

Just as the coalition began to fracture, a volatile new element was added to the mix. On August 9 Hun Sen announced that Ieng Sary, Pol Pot’s brother-in-law and the former Khmer Rouge foreign minister, had defected to the government, bringing with him not only a large portion of the Khmer Rouge fighting force – including the commanders Y Chhean (in charge of Division 415) and Sok Pheap (Division 450) – but also the gem- and timber-rich areas around the town of Pailin. After fighting on with Chinese backing throughout the 1980s, the Khmer Rouge had been in a slow decline since Untac. The movement was outlawed in mid-1994, and the Thai government finally began cracking down on exports from Khmer Rouge zones, choking off its finances. All the while, a steady trickle of defections turned into a cascade, as soldiers and their commanders, worn out from years of fighting, cut deals with the government.

Ieng Sary had always been the most flexible and slippery of the Khmer Rouge top brass; the one who most easily shed old revolutionary convictions. Sary had a taste for the finer things, like lobster thermidor, cognac and French perfume, which he indulged even as Cambodia suffered through years of civil war. Throughout the 1980s, he had enjoyed prominence because of his close ties with Beijing, but had lost influence when Chinese aid came to an end in 1991. The Khmer Rouge leadership in Anlong Veng were also suspicious of the great wealth he had amassed from Pailin’s gem mines and timber concessions. Faced with the enmity of his old comrades, Sary put out feelers to the government. On August 7, after word of the negotiations leaked out, Khmer Rouge radio denounced Sary as a ‘traitor’ who had embezzled millions in Chinese aid and collaborated with the ‘Vietnamese aggressors, annexationists, and race-exterminators’.

The defection dealt the Khmer Rouge a body blow; Sary took more than 3,000 soldiers with him, delivering to the government two base areas – Pailin and Malai – that years of armed offensives, including another RCAF loot-and-pillage mission during the 1996 dry season, had failed to secure. Sary’s reward consisted of a royal amnesty that overturned a death penalty handed down by a People’s Revolutionary Tribunal in 1979. His forces were incorporated into the national army and he was allowed to retain control of Pailin, where he returned to augmenting his vast and hidden wealth. Now just 2,000 Khmer Rouge remained in Anlong Veng, a remnant of bedraggled diehards professing loyalty to the triumvirate of Pol Pot, Nuon Chea and Ta Mok, a one-legged military commander who had led the purges of Democratic Kampuchea’s Eastern Zone in 1977 and 1978.

Pol Pot himself continued to live a will-o’-the-wisp existence. After government offensives in 1994, he had relocated to Kbal Ansoang, perched on the crest of the Dangrek Mountains, eight kilometres north of Anlong Veng. As his movement crumbled, Pol Pot retreated into the past, restaging his old revolution in a new form. Buddhist pagodas and markets that had opened in Khmer Rouge areas were shuttered. Trade with neighbouring areas was banned. Local farmers were rounded up and subjected once again to the miseries of collectivisation. In this way, Pol Pot tried to mimic the austere conditions that had led to his seizure of power in April 1975. Facing defeat, he hoped to conjure up a repeat of the movement’s lone triumph.

Ieng Sary’s defection also played into the fragile balance of power in Phnom Penh. For Funcinpec and the CPP, an alliance with the defecting Khmer Rouge forces suddenly loomed as a rich prize, a means of tipping the scales of power decisively in their favour. In late 1996 both prime ministers choppered into Pailin to woo Sary’s support. Hun Sen’s trip in October was a highly publicised affair in which the two former enemies grasped each other’s hands like long-lost friends and prayed together at a local pagoda. Hun Sen then laid on a feast at which government soldiers and their Khmer Rouge counterparts ate, drank and danced the lambada – a surreal coda to years of bloody conflict.

As 1997 dawned, Hun Sen’s relationship with Ranariddh reached another low. Horse-trading and alliance-building proceeded at a frenzied pace, as both parties cast an eye toward national elections due in mid-1998. Ranariddh announced the formation of a new political alliance with Rainsy and Son Sann, which he dubbed the National United Front. Two years after throwing Rainsy out of his party, Ranariddh now described him as “respected” and “beloved”. Rainsy didn’t much trust the prince, but described him as “the lesser of two evils” next to Hun Sen, who was “like someone from a different planet,” a “wild man” who trampled on democratic norms.

The Ranariddh–Rainsy–Son Sann axis was a potentially formidable bloc, a resurrection of the anti-Vietnamese and anti-communist alliance of the 1980s. The royalists, for all their failures, still drew on a deep well of support for Sihanouk, while the KNP’s support was soaring on the back of Rainsy’s anti-Vietnamese agitations and the party’s strong roots in a nascent labour union movement. As the political temperature rose, threats flew back and forth between the two prime ministers and skirmishes broke out between their personal bodyguard armies. In February, factional forces clashed in Battambang, leaving 14 CPP and two royalist soldiers dead. The two sides hovered on the edge of open warfare.

On the morning of March 30, 1997, Im Malen and two of her sons left their home in Phnom Penh and joined a group of KNP supporters in a march on the National Assembly. Malen was 55 years old. She was a nurse who ran a small clinic and pharmacy in a suburb of Phnom Penh. She had been a member of Sam Rainsy’s party since 1995 and admired the leader for standing up to the sorts of official corruption she had encountered while working at the Ministry of Health in the 1980s. The rally on March 30 wasn’t much different to others Malen had taken part in previously. Several hundred people gathered at KNP party headquarters and then proceeded on foot toward the parliament. Malen walked behind Rainsy as the crowd marched down leafy Street 240 behind the Royal Palace, coming to a stop in the park across the road from the National Assembly. It was a hot morning; the building’s spired roof rose to a pinnacle against a blue sky. Protesters held blue banners emblazoned with the words ‘Down with the Communist Judiciary!’

Rainsy began to speak, denouncing corruption in the courts. At around 8:25am, he finished his speech and handed the microphone to a female garment worker. A few seconds later there was a deafening explosion. Malen was thrown to the ground as three more blasts ripped through the crowd. “At first I didn’t realise I’d been hurt,” Malen told me. “I saw Mr Sam Rainsy, he escaped and got up. But what had happened to me? When I touched my back I felt a lot of blood.” Malen looked around. The dirt around her was streaked with red. Torn placards covered mangled bodies. Malen tried to get up but her legs didn’t respond. The police stood back. Why weren’t they doing something? One of her sons appeared. He had a gash on his cheek but was otherwise unscathed. He picked her up and took her by cyclo to hospital, steering the rickety pedicab through the traffic after its driver fled the scene in fear.

In the space of 15 seconds, four American-made M33 fragmentation grenades had transformed a peaceful gathering into a scene of carnage. The attack killed 16 people and injured more than 100. Some of the worst carnage took place around a sugarcane cart, where people had gathered to slake their thirsts in the rising morning heat. The target of the attack was Rainsy, who survived when one of his bodyguards shoved him to the ground and took the full force of the blast, which killed him instantly. After escaping the park, Rainsy held an impromptu press conference. “Hun Sen is behind this,” he declared, his suit still covered with blood and broken glass. “He is a bloody man. He will be arrested and sentenced one day.”

Hun Sen immediately denounced the grenade attack, but then went on to accuse Rainsy and the KNP of staging it themselves in order to smear the government. The police, he said, should “drag the demonstration’s mastermind by the neck to court”. At the rally, however, eyewitnesses reported the presence of around 15 heavily armed members of Hun Sen’s bodyguard unit, who were not usually deployed on such occasions. Not only did the troops fail to help the wounded; they also let the assailants pass through their cordon and flee to the CPP compound behind Hun Sen’s villa, blocking those who tried to pursue them. Similar claims were later echoed by the UN and human rights groups.

To satisfy international demands for an investigation, the government formed a committee filled with squabbling Funcinpec and CPP officials. Few people expected much to come of it, but there were hopes for a proper investigation from another direction. During the attack, Ron Abney, an American citizen and friend of Rainsy who headed the local office of the International Republican Institute, had been injured by a piece of grenade shrapnel. Under US law, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was authorised to probe any terrorist attack that killed or injured US citizens abroad. The FBI decided to become involved. It dispatched a team headed by Agent Thomas Nicoletti, who arrived in Cambodia on April 17. Within a month Nicoletti and his team had interviewed several dozen sources and identified three suspects. All the signs pointed to Hun Sen’s bodyguards.

For US officials, however, the case posed a political conundrum. Putting Hun Sen’s men on trial in the US could have explosive diplomatic ramifications. Kenneth Quinn, who succeeded Twining as ambassador in 1995, was particularly uncomfortable with pointing the finger at the CPP. He had a close relationship with Hun Sen dating back to the peace talks of the early 1990s. Like many other diplomats posted in Cambodia at the time, Quinn saw Hun Sen as a man who could get things done in Cambodia. Quinn spoke with Hun Sen in Vietnamese and felt he had a good rapport. As he later said, Hun Sen “had a lot of power and influence… he was somebody, along with others, who you would hope to shape”. Where the grenade attack was concerned, Quinn was anxious about the US burning its bridges with the CPP or getting sucked into Cambodia’s internecine political struggles.

Declassified files released under Freedom of Information laws and published by the Cambodia Daily in 2009 showed that at least one FBI official shared his concerns, fearing the probe could embroil the agency in a combustive political fight and jeopardise its relations with the CPP. So the FBI decided to pull the plug. Before he could complete his investigation, Nicoletti was ordered out of Cambodia. Political tensions between the CPP and Funcinpec had made his work difficult. Quinn also warned Nicoletti that his life had been threatened, supposedly by the Khmer Rouge. The withdrawal was supposed to be temporary, but Nicoletti was never sent back to finish the job.

Nicoletti later confirmed that his team had gathered “substantial” though incomplete evidence pointing to the involvement of the CPP’s security apparatus in the grenade attack. Declassified files provided further confirmation: key witnesses interviewed by Nicoletti all told similar stories about Hun Sen’s bodyguard soldiers, their deployment and the fact assailants were allowed to escape into the nearby military compound. But the results were never publicly released. When the FBI reported to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in November 1998, it assigned no blame. According to additional files obtained by the Cambodia Daily, the most sensitive allegations were whited out of the FBI’s report after consultations with the Justice Department and the US Embassy in Phnom Penh. Congressional Republicans and Rainsy allies cried foul, but the FBI was not forthcoming. In 2005 the case was quietly closed.

Im Malen, meanwhile, never walked again. Now a withered 71-year-old with short-cropped silver hair, she moves about in a wheelchair donated by a Christian NGO, pushed by her grandson. Lacking an income of her own, Malen has been forced to survive on the charity of family and neighbours and a small monthly pension from Sam Rainsy’s party. Each year, like many others, she attends an annual ceremony commemorating those who died in the grenade attack, which transformed a call for impartial courts into a symbol of Cambodian injustice. “We didn’t have any arms,” she said. “We just came with paper banners.”

The grenade attack marked a steep deterioration in the political situation. By the middle of 1997, Australian Ambassador Tony Kevin recalled, Phnom Penh “was on a hair-trigger, just waiting for something to set it off”. Senior officials from both parties travelled through the city with motorcycle outriders armed with AK-47s and rocket launchers. Their homes were watched around the clock by armed guards, who eyed passers-by warily from machine-gun nests and barricades of sandbags. The government had virtually ceased to function, as the two premiers plotted out chess moves inside fortified compounds.

The final end-game revolved around the unfolding drama in Anlong Veng. After Ieng Sary’s defection, the remaining Khmer Rouge were still divided over whether to keep up the fight or seek accommodation with the government. The allegiance of those wishing to defect now became the subject of a new political courtship. In the meantime, Hun Sen redoubled his attacks on the royalists, attempting to bribe Funcinpec members of parliament to oust Ranariddh as first prime minister and put a more “friendly” figure in his place. In April, 12 renegade parliamentarians split from the party and declared for the CPP. The next month, troops loyal to the CPP seized a Polish arms shipment supposedly destined for Ranariddh’s bodyguard unit, triggering further fusillades of accusations.

As Funcinpec and the Khmer Rouge neared a political deal, the movement imploded. At midnight on June 9, seized by a final reflex of paranoia, Pol Pot ordered the killing of his defence chief, Son Sen, accusing him of treason. Son Sen was assassinated along with his wife, Yun Yat and 12 other people, including several small children, whose bodies were then run over with trucks. Pol Pot’s night of the long knives threw a diminished movement into turmoil. Angered by the brutal killings, Ta Mok rallied his forces at Anlong Veng and led a rebellion against Pol Pot, who was captured after he tried to escape into the jungle with a handful of supporters. Six weeks later, Pol Pot was put on trial by Ta Mok and sentenced to life imprisonment for the killing of Son Sen and other crimes against the leadership. The outdoor trial north of Anlong Veng was a bizarre spectacle, a phantasmagoric throwback to the grim mass meetings of the DK years. Groups of peasants raised their fists in unison, chanting ‘Crush! Crush! Crush! Pol Pot and his clique!’ as cadres lined up to denounce their old boss through a crackly loudspeaker wired to a car battery.

Nate Thayer, the one foreign journalist invited to witness the event, later described the Robespierre of Cambodian communism as a stooped shadow of a figure, drained of the charm and magnetism that had beguiled generations of disciples: “Slumped in a simple wooden chair, grasping a long bamboo cane and a rattan fan, an anguished old man, frail and struggling to maintain his dignity, was watching his life’s vision crumble in utter, final defeat.”

After Pol Pot’s arrest, Funcinpec and the remaining Khmer Rouge resumed their alliance talks. On July 4, when news leaked out that the two sides had finally reached a deal, Hun Sen took decisive action. At dawn the following day, his forces unleashed a lightning strike against the royalists. Pochentong airport was secured. Tanks growled along the capital’s wide boulevards. Gas stations were set ablaze and buildings across the city were damaged as the two sides traded artillery and tank fire. Thousands of residents fled the city in panic, while rattled opposition members scrambled to board flights out of the country or sought sanctuary at the homes of Western diplomats.

Hun Sen, vacationing at the Vietnamese beach resort of Vung Tau, returned to Phnom Penh to “take control” of the situation. The fighting came to a quick end after his arrival. By the afternoon of July 6, the Funcinpec headquarters and Ranariddh’s residential compound were both in CPP hands. Victory was followed by a wave of looting. Frightened civilians looked on as the military and police combed the city for booty, carting off cars, motorbikes, televisions and other appliances from shattered shop fronts. Even the departure halls at Pochentong airport were picked clean, right down to the departure ramps. The fighting caused an estimated $50 million in damage and gutted a tourist industry just recovering from years of chaos.

As the smoke cleared over the capital, Hun Sen stood alone…

Hun Sen’s Cambodia, by Sebastian Strangio, is due to be pulished on October 31 and will be available at Monument Books.