Cambodia's Curse (13 page)

Hun Sen also controlled most of the nation’s radio and television stations, though the UN had its own radio station, which was quite popular. When Funcinpec tried to set up a TV station to compete, Hun Sen’s police seized the transmitter as it was being unloaded at the airport. At a political rally in April, a month before election day, Hun Sen explained, “We have been accused of seizing equipment belonging to two political parties. So I would like to clarify that the equipment has been seized because the parties have acted illegally. They have imported 63 cars without paying taxes, and they illegally set up radio stations in Phnom Penh without applying for proper authorization. And now they are bringing in television equipment without, as before, any permission at all.”

Hun Sen was just beginning to make an art of these facile explanations for his government’s belligerent actions. Of course, he was the acting head of government (even though the UN was supposed to be in charge), and the people who grabbed more than five dozen cars and seized all that broadcast equipment were his own employees following rules and taxation “policy,” published nowhere, changeable at will. Cambodia then was still a pure dictatorship, with a bit of superficial UN oversight. If Hun Sen wanted to blame faceless bureaucrats
following his own unwritten regulations, often invented on the spot, who was to stop him?

T
he Paris Peace Accords had named Norodom Sihanouk, the former king of Cambodia, to be the ceremonial head of state during the UN occupation. At the ceremony in Paris in 1991, he had beamed with delight; this was a wonderful tribute. He was seventy now. But the situation in his country was deteriorating, and he was unwilling to take the blame. To him it was the UN’s fault for failing to give him authority. “I am a dummy, a dancing figure in a religious parade, while they are beating the drum,” he insisted, speaking to a large crowd.

As the violence worsened he grew frustrated. After CPP vigilantes seized a Funcinpec officer and gouged out one eye, Sihanouk left in disgust and flew to Beijing. As soon as he arrived at the grand palace Mao had built for him, he put out a statement saying: “I cannot fail to react when confronted with the increasing acts of political terrorism and the continuation, with absolute impunity, of politically motivated crimes.” The prince said he was no longer willing to work with the UN. There he sat through the rest of the campaign, waiting for someone to tell him how invaluable he was and plead with him to return.

Meantime, Khmer Rouge guerrillas began kidnapping and killing UN workers. The news coverage from Cambodia was simply terrible, filled with nothing but shootings, kidnappings, violence, and intimidation. And so in April 1993, six weeks before the election, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali felt compelled to visit Cambodia and try to salvage this, the most important operation the United Nations had ever undertaken. Just a week earlier, Khmer Rouge guerrillas had shot and killed three Bulgarian soldiers working for the UN.

The secretary-general insisted that UN enforcement had “contributed to reducing the number of violent incidents” and promised that the UN “will deploy its military personnel and police to protect voters
and electoral agents.” There wasn’t much else he could say. Almost nothing was working out as planned. The Security Council had given Akashi and Sanderson far too few people to fulfill their mandate. Hun Sen still controlled the entire Cambodian government; he simply worked around the few UN administrators sent into the ministries. The cease-fire had lasted only a few weeks, and now the Khmer Rouge was threatening to attack polling places. When asked about these and the many other problems, over and over again Akashi would shake his head and acknowledge that “we have failed to achieve a neutral political environment,” paraphrasing a promise in the Paris Peace Accords.

A burst of attention from the United States in July 1990 had gotten this affair started. Secretary Baker had announced that Washington was changing its position, and the UN dove blithely into the process of reconciling Cambodia’s political forces. But Washington had turned away from Cambodia almost as soon as Baker stepped down from the podium. The month after Baker made his Cambodian announcement, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and the Bush administration applied all of its attention and energy to the Gulf War. Soon after that came the 1992 presidential campaign. “People lost interest in Cambodia; they were just going through the motions,” Bolton said.

Solomon was gone; now he was U.S. ambassador to the Philippines. Then in January, a few weeks after Sihanouk left for Beijing, a new Democratic president took office in Washington. With the change from Republican to Democratic control, most everyone with any knowledge of or investment in the UN operation left the government. The United States would have to formulate a new policy. But as Bill Clinton moved into the White House with the nation’s economy in shambles, one thing was certain: It would be months, if not years, before anyone in Washington paid attention to Cambodia again.

Across Cambodia the polls opened the morning of May 23, 1993, and stayed open for six days. Khmer Rouge gunners shelled polling and police stations in Kampong Thom, Kampong Chhnang, Siem Reap, and elsewhere. Election workers fled; several were killed. But
the major national offensive the Khmer Rouge had promised never came to pass, and over the six days more than 4 million Cambodians voted, even including some Khmer Rouge soldiers—90 percent of the eligible voters.

Their decision was clear. Hun Sen lost.

T
he vote was critically important to five different constituencies, and the outcome disappointed almost all of them. Prince Ranariddh was the victor, but his margin was too small. His party won 58 seats in parliament—not a majority, nor even enough to form a coalition with the two smaller parties that together had won 11 seats. Two-thirds of the parliament’s 120 members had to join to form a government.

Hun Sen won 51 seats. He came in second. All of his tactics, murders, maimings, promises, threats, and bribes had failed to do the trick. Now he couldn’t form a government, either. Nonetheless, he was resolute. Trained since he was a teenager to embrace and employ all the tools of ruthless dictatorship, in a country ruled by absolute monarchs since the beginning of time, Hun Sen couldn’t simply give up all his power and slink away.

Khmer Rouge leaders were angry. They despised Hun Sen—a “contemptible puppet,” Pol Pot called him—and while Prince Ranariddh had been close to an ally when they all were fighting Hun Sen and the Vietnamese, he didn’t have the votes to become prime minister. Would that lead to a Ranariddh coalition with Hun Sen, Pol Pot’s hated enemy?

Sihanouk was upset, too. More than anything else, he wanted to be the all-powerful king again; he had enjoyed his latest taste of power, serving as ceremonial head of state. And his son had more or less promised that he would take the throne again. In rallies toward the end of the campaign, Ranariddh had repeatedly said, “Funcinpec was
established by Sihanouk, and I am his son. If Funcinpec wins, it means the whole nation wins, and Prince Sihanouk will come back to rule the country as before.” Certainly, that was an election stratagem; his son was playing off his father’s continued popularity. But Sihanouk intended to hold him to it.

Only one party came out of the election a clear winner: the United Nations. For all the UN’s shortcomings, mistakes, and failures, it had pulled off a successful election, despite threats, boycotts, and violence. It had repatriated 370,000 refugees who had been living on the Thai border. In New York the secretary-general’s office quickly put out a news release saying the election was “a credit to the men and women of UNTAC”—in other words, to itself. In Phnom Penh Akashi was more generous, and accurate, when he said the Cambodian people “were the true winners in this election.” The Cambodian people, in fact, saved him.

From that day forward the UN proclaimed its Transitional Authority in Cambodia a glittering success. They seemed to be saying, “Forget everything that happened before: the failure to disarm the parties, the violence, murder, and mayhem.” The election was all that mattered. Even so, the UN never again took on an operation as ambitious as this one.

The problem for all of them now was that Cambodia had no election law. The new government, once it formed, was supposed to write one. In the meantime, neither the Cambodians nor the UN had rules for settling this. Maybe they could stage a run-off election? But Cambodia had no law or precedent for that, either. In fact, it had few precedents for elections of any kind, aside from the heavily manipulated parliamentary elections Sihanouk had staged when he was king. The only possible solution was a coalition government of some sort between Hun Sen and Ranariddh. The UN pushed this, but neither man would agree. They hated each other.

Hun Sen immediately stepped in to fill this regulatory void by declaring the election invalid because, he asserted, there had been so
many irregularities, including ballot switching, insufficient ballotbox security, and fraud by the UN, which, Hun Sen’s party charged, had run the elections hopelessly biased against him. The UN, his party said, was “directing propaganda to the Cambodian people to malign the CPP”—an odd charge given the volumes of “propaganda” Hun Sen’s party had disseminated using all of its state-run television and radio stations and party officers in every one of the country’s villages, towns, and provinces.

Hun Sen wanted to restage elections in five provinces. These happened to be the provinces where Ranariddh won. If that happened, certainly this time the CPP could make sure that the vote turned out right. Hun Sen made it clear that he would simply refuse to hand over power until his grievances were addressed.

Into this quandary stepped Sihanouk. Hun Sen sought him out in secret, and the former king, ever magnanimous, offered to climb back onto the throne. Both Ranariddh and Hun Sen could serve as his vice ministers. Hun Sen agreed, and Sihanouk announced the deal—but without having told his son.

Ranariddh immediately objected. Wait a minute, he told his father in a faxed letter. I won this election! What’s more, you would bring into the government certain CPP officials directly implicated in the killing of Funcinpec officers during the campaign. He was talking primarily about his own half brother Prince Norodom Chakrapong. (A man whose father had lived with two wives and uncounted concubines was bound to have a half brother or two.) Chakrapong was now Hun Sen’s deputy prime minister and was reputed to be an utterly ruthless enforcer. During the campaign he had called his brother “a foreigner” who is “afraid to live in Cambodia.” Ranariddh, forty-nine, was just twenty months older than Chakrapong, but they had been hateful rivals most of their lives. In fact, in the letter, Ranariddh asked his father, “How can I work with Prince Chakrapong who holds no other thought than to kill me?”

When the United Nations had arrived in Cambodia, the United States opened a mission—not quite a full embassy, but America’s first
diplomatic presence in Phnom Penh since 1975. Charles Twining, the State Department’s Cambodia watcher, was appointed chief of mission, and with growing dismay he observed Sihanouk and the others trying to manipulate the results of a free election to their own advantage. Almost as soon as Sihanouk announced his deal, Twining’s mission put out what came to be called a “nonpaper” because it was not official American policy, approved at the top. Still, it lambasted Sihanouk’s deal, calling it “a violation of the Paris Peace Accords and the spirit of the successful elections,” adding that it “would undermine the entire electoral process and the transition to democracy.” Nonpaper or not, everyone took notice. Very quickly, Sihanouk withdrew his offer, then took to his bed and professed to be ill.

A few days later came a new stratagem, this one from Prince Chakrapong, Hun Sen’s deputy prime minister, along with several generals from Hun Sen’s army. They announced that they could not accept the election results. As a result, they were creating an autonomous region in the East, seven provinces that together comprised 40 percent of Cambodia’s territory. These provinces were seceding. Hun Sen professed to have nothing to do with this, though the ringleaders were senior members of his own government, his army, and party stalwarts who governed all of the provinces in question.