Page 1 of 2 To live and die with Hun Sen
By Paul Vrieze
PHNOM PENH - Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen recently marked his 25th
anniversary as the Southeast Asian nation's leader. First appointed by the
Cambodian National Assembly on January 14, 1985, he became at 33 years old the
youngest prime minister in the world.
Hun Sen's journey from a communist leader to an elected head of government
spans a quarter of a century of civil war, domestic and international upheaval,
a negotiated peace and transition to democracy through which he and his
Cambodia's People's Party (CPP) have imposed themselves as the country's
deliverers of stability and order.
By retaining the helm in Cambodia's fractious politics for 25
years, he now stands among a unique category of leaders, ranking as the
11th-longest ruling leader in the world. In Southeast Asia, only the Sultan of
Brunei, the number one longest-serving government leader since assuming office
in 1967, has been in power longer than Hun Sen. Of the other nine
longer-serving leaders, five are heads of governments in Africa and four are
from the Middle East.
Hun Sen reflected on his long political career and humble beginnings in a
speech at the National Institute for Education in Phnom Penh on January 12. "I
became [foreign] minister when I was 27 years old, deputy prime minister when I
was 29 years old and prime minister at 33 years old," Hun Sen said of his
appointments in the People's Republic of Kampuchea - the communist state set up
by Vietnam in 1979 after it toppled the Khmer Rouge, whose bloody regime caused
the death of about 1.7 million Cambodians.
He recalled how he joined the anti-republican maquis, a movement which
consisted of several resistance groups including the Khmer Rouge, in April
1970, explaining his move was "based on an appeal from King [Norodom]
Sihanouk", Cambodia's monarch who had been ousted in a coup d'etat earlier that
year. "Throughout 40 years, I have known all kinds of tastes. I knew how my
commander commanded the troops and I knew how to make tea for him. I knew how
to wash clothes for him," Hun Sen said in his now trademark plain-speaking
public-address style.
The prime minister went on to talk about his political future, confirming his
intention to run in the next election in 2013. "The party conference announced
my candidacy for the future prime minister and ... last week Chea Sim
[president of the CPP] also reconfirmed my nomination for the premiership," Hun
Sen said before taking aim at opposition parties.
"Please do not try to limit the mandate of the premiership. You want the
mandate limited because you are worrying you will lose to me," he said, while
also reminding the audience he still had another three-and-a-half years in
office under the mandate of the 2008 election, which his party, the CPP, won
with a two-thirds legislative majority.
Hun Sen started on his political path in 1978, when he became a founding member
of the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation after fleeing to Vietnam
in 1977 to avoid Khmer Rouge purges in the Eastern Zone, where he had been a
Khmer Rouge regimental commander. The Front consisted of former Khmer Rouge
cadres who were prepared by Vietnamese officials to become Cambodia's new
leadership after the removal of the Khmer Rouge government.
The Vietnamese army and the Front brought down the Democratic Kampuchea regime
on January 7, 1979, in reaction to bloody raids by Khmer Rouge forces into
Vietnamese territory in 1978. As the Front's leaders assumed their positions in
the new PRK government after the Khmer Rouge regime was toppled, Hun Sen became
foreign minister.
The early years
Current and former government officials and people who knew Hun Sen in his
youth or as a budding young communist leader said his rhetorical talents and
ability to lead, learn, adapt and survive the changing political and
ideological terrain in Cambodia were apparent from the start in his
personality.
Hun Sen was born as Hun Bunnal on August 5, 1952, in Peam Koh Snar in Kompong
Cham province, a village of tobacco farmers located on the banks of the Mekong
River. Local villager Chhe Noeun, 61, who claimed to be a childhood friend of
the premier, said during a visit to the village that he spent much time
listening to his younger friend talk. "He was one of the kids who was smarter
than the others. His speaking, his rhetoric, was very good. During farm work,
he liked to chat a lot, he made a lot of jokes," he said.
Noeun said Hun Sen left the village to stay in a Buddhist pagoda in the capital
when he was about 16 years old. The Hun family, he said, had left the village
in about 1963 to move to Memot district, located on the Vietnamese border, but
they returned in 1969 after the start of the American bombing campaign in east
Cambodia.
After Hun Sen left the village, Noeun said, he did not see him again until 1974
when he showed up on a motorbike at a local primary school as a Khmer Rouge
cadre carrying an AK-47 rifle. Hun Sen told his friend, "I just came again
today and I don't know when I will come back or if I will die."
Veteran CPP lawmaker Cheam Yeap said during an interview last week that he
remembered Hun Sen exhibited leadership qualities and a capacity to learn
quickly early in his career. These skills, Yeap said, allowed Hun Sen to gain
loyalty from his staff, to impress officials from Vietnam, whose military
remained in Cambodia from 1979 to 1989, and to sway members of the Khmer
People's Revolutionary Party - the previous name of the CPP.
"I met him in 1979 ... He was the youngest foreign minister in the world," Yeap
recounted. "Even though he was five years younger than me, I saw he was hard
working," he said. "[Hun Sen] only finished grade 3 or 4, before joining the
resistance movement. Even though he studied a little bit, he learned very
fast," Yeap said. "He liked to communicate with people, especially with those
with more experience."
One man who takes a darker view of the young Hun Sen and his rise to power is
Pen Sovann, the first prime minister of the PRK, who served as premier for only
a few months in 1981 before being arrested and held under house arrest in Hanoi
for nine years by the Vietnamese government. "Vietnam ordered me to be arrested
by 12 armed soldiers. Hun Sen was there to read the charges against me," Sovann
said during an interview at his Takeo province home. Sovann said he was purged
by the Vietnamese authorities because of his independent political leadership
and his opposition to a number of government policies proposed by Vietnam.
He claimed Hun Sen was appointed prime minister in 1985 because "[Vietnamese
authorities] believed and depended on Hun Sen as they believed he would do
everything for Vietnam." The former prime minister, who knew Hun Sen from the
time he joined the Front in Vietnam, characterized him as smart and a talented
public speaker, but also as an authoritarian with few scruples.
"He learns very fast and then he can lecture [on a topic] later on," he said.
"Hun Sen has outstanding capacities. His intellect is strong, but he has no
morals to go along with it." Sovann said he was "not surprised" by Hun Sen's
world-beating political longevity. "Hun Sen likes power; he wants to increase
his power. He doesn't listen to anyone ... If anyone criticizes him, he will do
anything to defend his power."
Following the Paris Peace Agreements in the early 1990s and the subsequent
United Nations-supervised transition from a Vietnamese-backed communist
government to a fledgling democracy, Hun Sen quickly showed he was a clever
politician who could woo Cambodia's largely rural and uneducated electorate. By
the end of the decade, he had also managed to disband the Khmer Rouge step by
step by offering amnesty to defectors.
Despite his political skills, Hun Sen did not shy away from using violence
against political opposition. In 1997, he took over the government by force and
the ensuing fighting killed about 100 people, mostly from the rival Funcinpec
Party, according to a 2008 US Congressional Research Service (CRS) report,
which referred to the takeover as an "unlawful seizure of power".
Before the military takeover, a grenade attack hit a peaceful opposition rally
in Phnom Penh, which killed 16 children, men and women and wounded more than
100 others. Recent disclosures of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation's
(FBI) probe into the attack, which was conducted because an American citizen
was injured in the blast, were made under a Freedom of Information Act request
filed by The Cambodia Daily, a local English-language newspaper.
The investigation, which was cut short due to intensifying threats to the FBI
agent, found evidence that directly implicated Hun Sen's bodyguard unit and the
CPP, while highly placed witnesses declined to cooperate with the FBI,
according to the records disclosed to the newspaper. The US government reacted
to the violent events of 1997 by banning direct aid to Cambodia for a decade.
As the US Congressional Research Service noted, "The autocratic tendencies of
Prime Minister Hun Sen have discouraged foreign investment and strained
US-Cambodian relations."
Mixed reviews
Although opinions vary among researchers and observers on Hun Sen's
accomplishments during his 25-year reign, most acknowledged the transformation
of war-torn Cambodia into a stable, peaceful country with an open and growing
economy as his principal achievement. Before economic growth came to a halt
last year due to the global economic crisis, Cambodia's economy grew an average
9.5% per year from 2002 to 2008, according to a recent World Bank report.
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