Cambodia's Curse (17 page)

Then, like every ambassador new on the job, Quinn made the rounds of lunches, dinners, and meetings, “making my calls,” as he put it, getting to know the political, diplomatic, and military communities. “I came away with a sense that one side was going to turn on the other. I went to a dinner put on by a deputy of mine, and I was stunned by the descriptions of the CPP as corrupt and pure evil. This was a totally different picture than what I had been told.”

Twining, Quinn’s predecessor, had come to more or less the same conclusion and had cabled Washington laying out his concerns. But Twining was a far more careful and cautious man. Serving as Cambodia watcher in the spring of 1975, he spoke to scores of refugees who had experienced unspeakable horrors. In his cables to Washington he offered vivid descriptions of individual living conditions. Cambodians, he wrote, “are living a Spartan, miserable existence for people living constantly in fear.” But his cables were light on larger political conclusions.

Quinn had always taken a different approach. Interviewing refugees who crossed the border into Vietnam in 1973, Quinn had offered a far broader, more provocative analysis: The Khmer Rouge, he wrote, were “stripping away, through terror and other means, the traditional bases, structures and forces which have shaped and guided an individual’s life until he is left as an atomized, isolated individual unit; and then rebuilding him according to party doctrine by substituting a series of new values, organizations and ethical norms for the ones taken away.” And this was even before the Khmer Rouge had taken power. Part of Quinn’s analysis had proved to be wrong; he thought only one part of the Khmer Rouge movement was antagonistic to Vietnam when in fact the entire movement was. Still, his airgram had been the first bold, cogent warning of what lay ahead.

Now, in March 1996, once again Quinn showed his penchant for dramatic action. Just thirty days after taking office, he got on a plane, flew back to Washington, and asked for a meeting with Assistant Secretary Lord and his aides. “This is not the positive situation I had expected,” he told them.

Co–prime ministers Hun Sen and Ranariddh weren’t even speaking to one another. Each was building his own personal army, while their bodyguard forces had already begun exchanging occasional gunfire. A few months earlier, Hun Sen had dispatched tanks and troops to arrest Prince Norodom Sirivudh, Sihanouk’s half brother and general secretary of the Funcinpec Party. The prince, widely respected among diplomats and aid workers, had been heard suggesting, probably in jest, that it would be easy to hire thugs to assassinate Hun Sen. He was thrown in jail, tried, and sentenced to ten years in prison—but then deported instead.

The signs were clear: The situation in Cambodia was deteriorating. “This country is heading toward violence,” Quinn warned. As he saw it, Lord and the others “were shocked and surprised.” But then, just as had happened with Quinn’s airgram and Twining’s field reports, Washington did little if anything. They didn’t really care.

 

As all of this transpired, in 1995 Sam Rainsy started a new political organization, the Khmer National Party, practically throwing his contempt for Hun Sen in the second prime minister’s face. The parliament had not yet passed any of the laws needed to form new political parties. That enabled Hun Sen to call the party illegal. Rainsy didn’t care.

He was not going to make Ranariddh’s mistake of leaving the CPP in control of the provinces. So he decided to open his first provincial office. He chose a location near Sihanoukville in the South—“Really, just some guy’s house with a banner on the front,” said Ron Abney, an American who was serving as a political adviser. But Hun Sen saw even this as intolerable.

The day the office opened, in May 1996, two gunmen on a motorbike, wearing the trademark black helmets with tinted faceplates, shot and killed Thun Bun Ly while he was walking to work. He was a senior member of Rainsy’s new party and editor of
Khmer Ideal
, an opposition newspaper affiliated with Rainsy. “They could not have chosen a better time to kill Bun Ly as the killing took place at the exact time we opened our first office outside the capital,” Rainsy declared. “It’s a very clear sign of intimidation. They want to intimidate us and show us we cannot open our offices.” Rainsy’s followers staged an angry demonstration. Large throngs marched through the city’s main streets carrying Thun Bun Ly’s coffin on their shoulders.

Even so, soon after, thugs burned down Rainsy’s new district office, killing a couple of party functionaries. Rainsy was beside himself. He began working the bleachers in earnest, particularly the United States—struggling to stoke international opposition to Hun Sen, whom he routinely blamed for his nation’s “lawlessness and violence.” The occasional expressions of support for the government that came from Washington officials infuriated him. His message for them, distilled, was this: Hun Sen is a vicious, evil dictator. Why can’t you see that? What more evidence do you need?

With a new ambassador, Rainsy again tried to draw the U.S. Embassy into his battle. “He was forever trying to get us to take him into protective custody in our embassy,” Quinn said. “Phoning us, saying, ‘They are trying to kill me. Take me into the embassy.’” Rainsy, American officials believed, thought that if the United States placed a protective umbrella over him, Hun Sen could not touch him or his party. He would be America’s man.

Once, when Rainsy made a particularly vehement request, Quinn said he sent his deputy, Carol Rodley, to deal with him. In fact, she said, “I had that discussion with Sam Rainsy more than once. I remember once delivering him to the French Embassy, and the ambassador was quite unhappy. Absolutely, he wanted to draw the United States into the conflict. It suited him to be America’s candidate.”

Asked about that later, Rainsy vehemently denied it. “It’s ridiculous. It’s wrong. I never asked for asylum. I don’t need protection. I have a French passport. I can leave the country anytime I want to.”
⁵

 

While Rainsy spent a lot of time abroad, trying to convince foreign leaders of Hun Sen’s perfidy, he also held rallies and solicited support at home. Not surprisingly, his campaign platform centered on the venality of his hated enemy. On Sunday morning, March 30, 1997, he called for a rally in a large public park in central Phnom Penh. King Sihanouk’s palace was up the street. The park was a city block wide and a quarter mile long, and Rainsy chose the northeast corner, just across the street from the National Assembly, a grand Asian monument topped with a glittering golden tower and sinuous gilt finials. In that building Ranariddh had offered the motion to have him expelled from the parliament two years earlier. Despite that, Rainsy’s party had formed a tenuous alliance with Funcinpec a few weeks earlier.

From where Rainsy stood, with his back to the assembly building, a large Buddhist pagoda complex was to his right. In front of him, on the far side of the street a block away, splendid residential mansions ran all the way down to the park’s far end. Among the mansions was Hun Sen’s. That street, and the park, ended at Suramarit Boulevard, a few blocks east of the Independence Monument, a memorial to the day the French occupiers left Cambodia. This was a consequential part of town, sort of like the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

The message of the morning’s event was that Hun Sen had taken control of the nation’s court system and turned it into his own personal tool. It was early, eight thirty, before the heat of the day could grow brutal. A vendor pushing a blue cart was doing brisk business selling stalks of sugar cane.

Rainsy stood on a chair and began inveighing against Hun Sen. He told his enthusiastic followers that Prince Norodom Sirivudh’s arrest, conviction, and then expulsion from the country were proof that Hun Sen was using the courts for his own venal ends. Several supporters carried signs saying “Norodom Sirivudh Has Committed No Crime.”

A few Phnom Penh police loitered nearby, far fewer than usually showed up for Rainsy rallies. But several dozen well-armed shock troops from Hun Sen’s personal bodyguard unit, a 1,500-man force feared among his enemies, stood in a tight line about fifty yards away, watching silently. Rainsy noted later that he had never seen any of these bodyguards at his other rallies in Phnom Penh. But then he had never held an event just across the street from Hun Sen’s home.

As always, Rainsy’s target audience was as much the foreigners in the bleachers as the Cambodian voters. To that end he had invited Ron Abney, an American serving as the Cambodian country director for the International Republican Institute (known universally as the IRI), a federally funded organization based in Washington charged with promoting democracy around the world. Abney was an enthusiastic, garrulous fellow who had glued himself to Rainsy. His job, as he saw it, was to be sure Cambodia maintained a healthy and robust political opposition as the government grew increasingly authoritarian. Rainsy was his man.

The IRI leadership in Washington was no fan of Hun Sen. Lorne Craner, the institute’s president, remarked that he thought most Cambodians were afraid of him. “Well, last time he lost an election,” in 1993, “he threatened a civil war. Maybe the people are afraid of retribution” from him if they even say they don’t support him. After all, for many years the centerpiece of Washington policy toward Cambodia had been to throw Hun Sen, the Communist stooge, out of office.

For Abney and his supervisors in Washington, Rainsy was the great hope. Abney now considered him a good friend. “I loved him like a brother.” But he also knew that Rainsy had a lot to learn. “He didn’t realize you couldn’t just be a guy who opposed Hun Sen and get elected. We were very much focused on a setting up a campaign operation.” The next national election was just over a year away. “We were setting up people in each commune” nationwide. But Rainsy, Abney said, “was on a campaign to get Washington to support him.”

Abney showed up late, after the speeches. After all, he didn’t speak Khmer. “When I got there, they were finishing up,” he said. “People were starting to leave. I walked over and got right in front of Rainsy.” Just then, someone threw a hand grenade into the crowd. “It hit me in the hip, and I fell,” Abney said. Another grenade went off. And then another and another. Dozens and dozens of people fell to the ground, wounded or dead. “The scene was unbelievable. People cut in half, kids with their faces blown off.” Thin smoke from the explosions muted the scene and gave off an acrid odor. Victims moaned and cried. Protest placards lay beside them, splattered with blood. The injured looked stunned. For many of them, the assault also brought back painful memories of their horrific experiences during the Khmer Rouge regime. Abney said he looked up and saw several people running away. “They ran through Hun Sen’s bodyguards,” he said. These were not Rainsy party followers, he deduced. Why did he think that? “I assumed they weren’t because they weren’t carrying placards.”

Rainsy survived, thanks, he said, to his bodyguard, who pushed him to the ground, sacrificing his own life. Immediately after the attack, a policeman lifted Rainsy and cradled him in his arms. Rainsy’s blue suit and white shirt were bloodied. The left lens of his glasses was cracked. But Rainsy was uninjured.

 

The grenades killed 16 people and wounded as many as 150 others—most of the people at the rally. No one could immediately figure out where the grenades had come from. In the hours after the attack, several survivors said they saw a white car driving slowly past on
Sothearos Boulevard. A window opened, and someone tossed three or four grenades into the crowd. Other witnesses spoke of a “burly man” on a motorcycle. Still others described men in vests or flak jackets who stood at the perimeter, threw grenades, and then ran through the line of Hun Sen’s bodyguards—perhaps the same people Abney said he had seen.

Ambulances did not arrive for a half hour but then took most of the wounded to Calmette Hospital, which immediately appealed for blood donations. But not enough blood came in time. A thirteen-year-old girl who died from blood loss became the sixteenth casualty. She was just one of several children killed.

Rainsy, bloodied but unharmed, regained his composure quickly and immediately went on the attack. “Hun Sen, the bloody guy,” he growled. He “should be arrested and sentenced.” Within days his ally, the cominister of interior, asked the U.S. Embassy to bring in the FBI since Abney, an American, had been injured. Under American law the FBI can open investigations in foreign countries if an American is a target of a terrorist attack and is injured or killed. The ministry official’s actual request was for an FBI sketch artist to help identify the attacker. But what he did not know was that FBI rules required a sketch artist to be accompanied by at least two special agents. When that became known, the CPP vociferously opposed allowing the FBI in. But, as Rainsy certainly appreciated, that brought America in as a critical player in his latest drama.

Hun Sen denied responsibility. In a radio broadcast later that day, he promised to arrest the attackers but then fell into his normal pugnacious manner, demanding the arrest of the rally’s leaders because “they shared responsibility” for the bloodshed. He didn’t explain how that could be so.

Hun Sen also ordered the Interior Ministry to prevent Cambodians with dual nationality from leaving the country. His target was clear: Rainsy had a French passport. One of Hun Sen’s close aides, Om Yientieng, claimed that it was obvious that Rainsy had ordered
the attack on himself. After all, unlike most of the people, he had escaped unharmed.

 

Newspapers and television stations worldwide covered the grenade attack. FBI special agent Tom Nicoletti happened to see a story about it on CNN. After paddling his canoe off Waikiki Beach and winning his first race with his Hawaiian outrigger team, he was lying on the couch recovering. Even in his late forties he was an active man, not surprising for someone who had been the cornerback on his college football team. He was six foot two and 225 pounds and had spent five years in the United States Marines. Now, in his spare time, he was a kayak and lumberjack-chopping competitor. He was also a nineteenyear veteran of the FBI.