Cambodia's Curse (23 page)

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.”

I
n 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!”
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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.