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A moment in the sun for Cambodia's Hun
Sen
By Tom Fawthrop
 Cambodia’s hosting of the
8th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
Summit earlier this month marked a personal triumph for
Hun Sen, once reviled as the "illegitimate prime
minister" in the Vietnamese-backed government in the
1980s. He presided with aplomb over the gathering of the
major countries in the region, including China and
India.
Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir
Mohamad was among those ASEAN leaders in the 1980s who
belittled Hun Sen as a mere "Vietnamese puppet" when he
was appointed the world's youngest prime minister at age
33 in 1985. Little did he suspect that 17 years later he
would be congratulating the same man for his role as
chairman of the 10-nation summit.
Not
surprisingly, Hun Sen exulted in his moment of glory,
calling the staging of the summit by Cambodia as the
making of history. "It was not simple history," he
declared, "it was great history. Great achievements were
made, and it should be a source of great pride for every
Cambodian."
The son of a poor peasant family
from Kompong Cham province, and a former Khmer Rouge
soldier with little formal education, no one could have
predicted that one day Hun Sen would rise to the top as
an elected prime minister. As a 17-year-old Khmer Rouge
fighting to overthrow the US-backed Lon Nol military
regime, he was wounded four times, and on the last
occasion shrapnel hit his eye just two days before the
fall of Phnom Penh in 1975. Later on, Soviet specialists
would provide him with a sophisticated glass eye, only
detectable at very close range.
In spite of his
handicap, it appears that he was not blinded to the
evils of the Pol Pot regime. In 1977 he led a group of
dissidents to seek refuge and support in neighboring
Vietnam. Cambodian refugees numbered more than 100,000
in Vietnamese camps by 1978 and many of them urged Hanoi
to intervene against the murderous Khmer Rouge.
After Vietnamese troops toppled Pol Pot, Hun Sen
- Khmer Rouge dissident leader and refugee - was able to
return to Phnom Penh. The six-member ASEAN grouping of
the Cold War era demanded immediate Vietnamese
withdrawal from Cambodia and refused to have any
dealings with Hun Sen and the Vietnamese-installed
government. The ending of the Khmer Rouge mass killings
did not bring an end to Cambodia’s suffering. The
shattered nation was not left in peace to rebuild and
recover, but subjected to guerrilla war launched from
the Thai border and backed by ASEAN with the intent of
forcing a Vietnamese withdrawal.
Hun Sen’s entry
into government was a baptism of fire. He had little
formal education to help him cope. He was the world’s
only foreign minister who had no access to the United
Nations. The UN General Assembly in 1979 recorded an
extraordinary vote in favor of the defunct Pol Pot
government, thus depriving Cambodians of any effective
representation at the UN. Those who had murdered
Cambodians continued to represent them at the UN. The
perversity of this diplomacy bothered neither Western
countries nor ASEAN at the time.
India was the
only nation outside the Soviet bloc to host the new
foreign minister. The ASEAN countries put up a
diplomatic wall to isolate the Phnom Penh leadership.
The daunting task of rebuilding a shattered nation had
to be undertaken in the face of regional hostility from
Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia - the key players in
ASEAN’s Cambodia strategy.
Few ASEAN leaders
could ever have imagined that the prime minister they
had previously shunned would one day be hosting them in
Phnom Penh. Contrary to most expectations, Hun Sen has
survived many changes both in Cambodia and the wider
world. Soviet aid to Phnom Penh dried up and Vietnamese
troops withdrew in 1989, but Hun Sen's government did
not collapse.
Peace and reconciliation overtures
initiated by Hun Sen eventually paved the way for the
first Cambodian summit meeting with Prince Norodom
Sihanouk, the president of the Coalition of Democratic
Kampuchea, in Paris.
Hun Sen first met the
father of the nation, who had gained independence from
French colonial rulers, in 1987. The poor peasant boy,
whose first education was in a Buddhist temple because
his parents could not afford to pay his school fees,
charmed his royal host. It was the first time in
Cambodian history that a man of such humble origins had
earned the right to a place at the royal table, to
negotiate with a prince, and to partake of a Parisian
banquet.
Since the UN peacekeeping operation
which ushered in a new era after the first democratic
election held in 1993, it is clear from reading
Cambodia's free press that Hun Sen arouses strong
passions in both his supporters and opponents.
Opposition newspapers accused Hun Sen of
masterminding a coup that ousted co-prime minister
Prince Norodom Ranariddh in 1997, resulting in two days
of fighting in the capital between rival army factions.
Cambodia's application to become a full ASEAN member was
set back by the turmoil and bloodshed in Phnom Penh.
The caricature of Hun Sen as a power-hungry and
corrupt dictator suspected of killing political
opponents is the dominant perception in the US media and
some Cambodian opposition circles.
But this
one-dimensional view of the controversial leader does
not entirely square with the reflective, chess-playing
premier, who writes popular songs and interrupts his
dinner to scribble notes about his new ideas and
inspirations. Not does it do justice to his abilities as
a prime minister who has long impressed diplomats.
Verghese Mathews, Singapore's ambassador in Phnom Penh,
regards him as "probably the most astute politician in
ASEAN". "He is fast in digesting new information, he
demands the facts … he is always well prepared for every
meeting, whatever the subject," he says.
The
self-taught leader who never finished his secondary
schooling published his first book, Kampuchea: 10
Years, in 1988, and followed it up in 1991 with a
thesis on economic development, Cambodia: 130
Years, which has become the basis of his ruling
Cambodian People Party's free-market policies.
This endorsement of privatization and the free
market has been welcomed by the World Bank and Western
donor governments, but the people who have suffered most
in recent years, according to non-governmental field
research, are the poor farmers, the disabled, and others
who have been marginalized. The prime minister who was
born into their ranks seems to have forgotten their
plight. These days Hun Sen revels more in playing golf
with rich businesspeople and ASEAN heads of state than
in listening to the bitter complaints of Cambodian
farmers.
He has also failed to curb rampant
destruction of Cambodia’s fast-dwindling forests, with
many military officers running their own logging
fiefdoms in conjunction with rapacious foreign timber
companies.
On the one hand, his personel odyssey
from a Khmer Rouge dissident to the young prime minister
that kept the Khmer Rouge out of power in the 1980s and
eventually eradicated their insurgency in the 1990s
ranks him as an impressive leader of his nation. But the
man who steered Cambodia into its first era of peace
since the 1970 Lon Nol coup has so far not matched peace
with any real measure of justice.
The ASEAN
summit represents a peak of his diplomatic achievement.
But unless he listens more closely to the millions of
poor Cambodians, social justice is not something that
Hun Sen is ever likely to deliver.
(©2002 Asia
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