A Cambodian human-rights group first discovered the problem. The United Nations had helped form the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights in 1992 as part of the UN effort to create strong, private civil-society advocates for the people. Since the group’s name was a mouthful, it quickly became known by its French-language acronym: Licadho. In 2001 two mothers visited the Licadho offices in Phnom Penh asking for help. They were divorced and impoverished, and both said a kind man had come to them, promising to help. He offered to take their babies—one was six months old, the other just four days—to a children’s center that would care for them until the women got back on their feet. The mothers could visit their babies as often as they wanted. He gave each of them a bit of cash and took the babies away. But once they had given up their babies, the mothers were not permitted to see them. Licadho investigated and found that the children had been taken to “an orphanage run by an adoption facilitator who caters to the U.S. market,” the group reported. And this was no isolated incident.
Across Cambodia hundreds of women were being tricked or coerced into giving up their babies. The children effectively were being sold to Americans. They were eager to adopt Cambodian children and did not know the babies had been stolen. Fees for such a service generally ran up to about $10,000. But the scam didn’t simply end with unscrupulous baby brokers. For these babies to leave the country, each had to have a passport issued by the Ministries of Interior and Foreign Affairs. Officers in both ministries were demanding rich bribes from the brokers, and as usual they were passing part of the proceeds up to their superiors. Since nearly all of the children were being taken to the United States, the embassy got involved. When American officials began to get a whiff of the scam, they contracted with Licadho and a similar group, the Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association,
to investigate the problem. The results were startling. “Some women turned away in the marketplace for a second to buy some fish, and when she turned around her baby was gone,” Ambassador Wiedemann said. “Sometimes a woman would have a difficult birth, and someone would agree to treat her in the hospital—and take care of the baby. When she woke up, they’d say, ‘Baby? What baby?’ The babies were taken to warehouses of sorts. They might have fifty babies at a time. I visited a number of them.”
With American backing, the investigators were able to question deputy ministers and other senior officials in both the Interior and the Foreign Affairs ministries. It could not be proved, but the investigators came away convinced that even the senior ministers were involved. In spite of the ministers’ denials, Wiedemann does say, “This was run with official complicity up to very high levels. But I don’t think Hun Sen knew about it. I told Hun Sen there was obvious government complicity. They knew it was going on, and they were being paid off.”
Hun Sen responded well, Wiedemann said, and ordered the racket shut down. The United States refused to grant any more visas for Cambodian babies—infuriating Americans desperate to have children. “When we declared an end to adoptions,” Wiedemann said, “I was hammered, terribly”—this time, for once, by Americans, not Cambodian officials.
In Washington, this news only heightened the hatred of Hun Sen. Senators and others were furious: He had ordered the grenade attack on Rainsy, their golden boy. He had engineered a coup to seize full, unfettered power. Now his people were stealing babies. Hun Sen was spitting in the face of the United States and all those other countries that had spent billions of dollars to give the Cambodian people a new life.
The political landscape in Cambodia was, nonetheless, changing. In 1998 Pol Pot died. The next year Cambodian police arrested Ta Mok, the very last Khmer Rouge commander. He had refused to accept amnesty. With that the Khmer Rouge movement was dead. The war
was over. For the first time in more than thirty years, Cambodia was at peace. Hun Sen could no longer use the war as an excuse, though he could—and did—boast, with some justification, that he had defeated the Khmer Rouge.
In the meantime, as an indirect result of their decision to ignore Cambodia, the State Department had essentially turned relations over to human-rights groups. This meant that more and more negative information poured from these groups into the offices of the senators who remained obsessed with Hun Sen. The American press joined the hate feast. An editorial in the
Washington Post
labeled the prime minister “Saddam Hun Sen.” The
New Republic
called him “Hun the Attila.”
Senator Mitch McConnell was openly calling for regime change, and he began writing op-ed pieces in which his animus was on full display. The first one, in the
Boston Globe
in 2001, began with a swipe at Hun Sen. “Thirty years later, Cambodia has yet to recover from the genocide and social upheaval caused by the Pol Pot regime,” he wrote. “Today, former Khmer Rouge cadre occupy senior levels of government, including Prime Minister Hun Sen, who defected to Vietnam in 1978 and marched into Phnom Penh with invading Vietnamese forces. In 1985 Hun Sen was tapped by Vietnam to be prime minister, a position he has managed to retain for 16 years through aggressive political intimidation, a bloody coup d’état, election chicanery, and fraud.”
Soon McConnell introduced a bill that would increase aid to Cambodia by 50 percent—but only if Hun Sen was voted out of office. In the meantime, his subcommittee was considering a bill that would reduce aid to Cambodia’s central government (nearly all had already been cut off after the “coup” in 1997) and provide $7 million to what it called the “democratic opposition,” that is, Sam Rainsy. That prompted Khieu Kanharith, the information minister, to quip, “They say, ‘Choose your leaders in a democratic way,’ and then they go and say this?” But those bills went nowhere.
In Phnom Penh Wiedemann stood up for Rainsy, but he was a bit wary of the man. After all, Rainsy had helped convince Senator McConnell to put a hold on his own nomination. But Wiedemann was well aware that if the United States wanted to support a democratic opposition in Cambodia, Rainsy was the face of that opposition. “He was chosen by the human-rights groups, Amnesty International, IRI, and the others,” Wiedemann said. “They picked him. He worked them very hard.” So Wiedemann occasionally attended his rallies and sat next to him on the podium, if only to show that the United States was not going to let anything happen to him.
The ambassador was more dubious when it came to Rainsy’s political abilities. He and Ranariddh, Wiedemann said, “lacked the personal dedication, perseverance, and understanding of postwar Cambodia to compete effectively” against Hun Sen. “I was surprised when Ranariddh and Sam Rainsy for months on end would simply abandon the field of competition in Cambodia and return to France—or, in Rainsy’s case, to campaign mainly in the U.S., France, Australia, and a few other places.” And besides, Rainsy “is not a country guy. He’s not very comfortable out there in the provinces.”
Still, just as Rainsy had with his predecessors, he called Wiedemann occasionally, complained that his life was in danger, and in his best wheedling tone asked to take up residence in the embassy. Wiedemann would dutifully meet with him and try to calm him down. But over time, he said, “I often had the impression, when Sam Rainsy called me saying, ‘I am just about to be attacked by a squad of goons,’ that he was crying wolf, that he did it to convey to us that he is sort of the hero in the current political scene in regard to democracy, and he is facing this horrible, venal enemy, and we should keep him under our wing.”
Flawed as Rainsy was, there was no one to take his place. “One of the great tragedies of Cambodia was that from 1993 on, no new leadership has emerged,” Wiedemann said. “It’s the same players since back in the early 1990s. Most are venal, and most are engaged in a battle among themselves rather than for the good of the country.” As
Carol Rodley, deputy chief of mission when Ken Quinn was ambassador, observed, “Cambodia needs a hero.”
But as the Hun Sen haters in Washington continued to throw barbs at the illegitimate prime minister, the Communist stooge, the murderer, the coup leader, the baby stealer, Wiedemann did take it upon himself to make inquiries about the supposed “coup,” that seminal event in the nation’s recent history. “I looked into it very closely, talked with lots of Funcinpec people, including Nhiek Bun Chhay,” the Funcinpec secretary-general. “And from everything I learned, yes indeed, Funcinpec launched it. They admitted it to me. And they would have won but for the simple fact that Hun Sen was better organized and had better intelligence.” Even with that, the conventional wisdom held fast in Washington and around the world. There was no debate. Hun Sen alone was guilty.
Elections were coming up in 2002 for new communal governments. Whereas Cambodian provinces were equivalent to American states, communes were similar to counties. Since the fall of the Khmer Rouge every single leader of Cambodia’s 1,621 communes had been appointed by Hun Sen’s government. In fact, Cambodia had never before held open local elections of this sort. The UN election agreement had called for them in 1993, but political and military turmoil had so consumed the nation that more elections had not seemed possible until now. Of course, the same players were putting up candidates: Hun Sen, Norodom Ranariddh, and that darling of the Americans, Sam Rainsy. And all of them played true to form.
A collection of civil-society elections groups, including the Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia, sat down with the three parties eighteen months before election day and proposed several changes that, they all believed, would produce a more equitable vote. First, they suggested, voters should be allowed to pick among individual candidates instead of political parties. Behind that, of course, was the fact that Hun Sen’s party had an unmatchable monopoly of local
officials nationwide. Rainsy and Ranariddh immediately embraced the idea. Hun Sen said he kind of liked it but was not sure “as to how it could be implemented in technical terms.” So it was not done.
The private groups said they wanted to find a way to ensure that more women stood as candidates. Once again, while Rainsy and Ranariddh endorsed the proposal, Hun Sen said this sounded like a good idea but worried that it clashed with the constitutional provisions for equality between men and women. Nothing was done.
Rainsy and Ranariddh both leaped at the suggestion to restructure the National Election Committee, which was an organ of the CPP. (This was the agency that had come up with the 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.) Hun Sen said fine, but not until 2003, after the elections, because that’s when the present commissioners’ terms expired. Naturally, nothing was done in 2003—or in the years following.
In the meantime, when the National Democratic Institute sponsored candidate debates around the country, the elections commission ruled that television networks, all of them state controlled, would not air them. The stations did, however, offer copious coverage of vote buying—CPP officials handing out sarongs and household goods en masse to voters in rural villages.
The commune elections were the third since the UN occupation, and by now the parties had settled into a routine. Rainsy and Ranariddh spent much of their time abroad. Rainsy, particularly, behaved as if he were running for office in the United States. “Rainsy shrewdly exploited Western sympathy by not only noting but often exaggerating CPP human-rights abuses,” Wiedemann said. But, the ambassador added, “Rainsy was undoubtedly more deft in generating sympathy and support in Washington than he was in Phnom Penh or in the Cambodian hinterland.”
Meantime, Hun Sen deployed his vast network of party officials and local officers in every village, commune, and province to do what they
could to ensure a CPP victory. After two elections, they had refined their strategies. Now, their third time up, they knew just what worked.
The United Nations sent a special representative to report on the election, which was to take place in February 2002. Almost as soon as he arrived, he learned that fifteen campaign officials had already been killed, and the elections were still two months away. “Twelve of the murders were from shootings,” he said in a report to the UN. Of the remaining cases, at least two involved victims being beaten to death. “In only one case is there uncertainty about the cause: The body of Funcinpec candidate Ros Don was found in a ditch beside the road.” And every one of the victims was an active worker for either Funcinpec or the Sam Rainsy Party. Not one CPP worker was killed. “Police investigations of such incidents and subsequent judicial processes show serious shortcomings,” the UN found. “Investigating authorities remain reluctant to probe political motives, afraid they would be killed if they assigned blame to governing-party operatives.” Cases brought to the National Election Committee sat in the in-box, never to be pursued.
But the CPP also used strategies that stopped short of murder. Village chiefs in many areas told tens of thousands of villagers that they had to hand over their voter-registration cards. The chiefs generally kept the cards for a few days and then gave them back, leaving the villagers with the impression that the chiefs would be able to check and see how they voted. Other village chiefs called all their villagers to the town square and urged them, en masse, “to swear oaths of allegiance to the ruling party,” the UN said.
Several human-rights groups and newspapers reported on the murders and intimidation on a daily basis. The government routinely denied any responsibility. In fact, at the end of the campaign, the Ministry of the Interior, which managed the nation’s police, issued a news release that proudly proclaimed that the ministry “has the honor to announce that since the beginning of the electoral campaign until the present, there has been no politically motivated crime.”