Making of a strongman: Hun Sen takes control
elevate those who backed the prime minister in the fighting, channelling the ruling party’s immense power increasingly into their fiefdoms, while slowly sidelining – but never eliminating – the once morepowerful competing voices in the CPP that had urged restraint in 1997.
A one-man crusade
Tensions had been building long before July 1997, with Ranariddh and Hun Sen – as “first prime minister” and “second prime minister”, respectively, under their coalition after the 1993 UN-run elections – tussling for power, with many in Funcinpec, which had won the popular vote, feeling sidelined.
At the same time, both parties were actively courting the support of the remaining and heavily armed Khmer Rouge guerrillas still holding out along the Thai border in today’s Pailin province and Anlong Veng district in Oddar Meanchey province.
Hun Sen in August 1996 had successfully courted the forces in Pailin led by Khmer Rouge Foreign Minister Ieng Sary, while Ranariddh was sending Nhek Bun Chhay, his top general, to Anlong Veng for talks with former Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan.
As time went on, relations between the prime ministers were only worsening, wrote Benny Widyono – the UN’s top representative in Cambodia from April 1994 until May 1997 – in his 2008 book Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge and the United Nations.
In January 1996, Ranariddh held a private meeting of 200 Funcinpec officials in Sihanoukville. There, he unveiled plans to push the CPP to hand over more state positions and agree to early elections before July 1998, allegedly to court the remaining Khmer Rouge forces in Anlong Veng by publicly raising strong anti-Vietnam feelings.
However, Sar Kheng, the CPP interior minister, and brother-in-law of Chea Sim, had already tried to address the complaints by Funcinpec officials, many of whom had sold their belongings to campaign in 1993 and were angered when they did not get positions within the government, according to Widyono,
Shortly after Ranariddh’s blame-stoking conference, Kheng revealed to the press “that he had already submitted a list of district-chief positions to be handed over to FUNCINPEC”, Widyono wrote. It was Kheng’s Funcinpec co-interior minister under the 1993 coalition, You Hockry, who stalled in filling the positions, according to Widyono, allegedly trying to sell them to the highest bidders.
Hun Sen in April 1996 told Widyono during a two-hour meeting at his compound in Takhmao that he had acquired a transcript of Ranariddh’s speech to his party in Sihanoukville in January and was not impressed.
“Hun Sen outlined the prince’s tactical errors in speaking out against the Vietnamese and the CPP and sketched his response to possible outcomes. With his statements, Hun Sen said, Ranariddh had unleashed the extremist forces within his own party,” Widyono wrote.
“Two days after my interview with him, Hun Sen issued a public threat,” he wrote. “In a speech to medical students, he warned that he would have no compunction about using military force against anyone moving to dissolve the National Assembly and the constitution.”
“And I have forces to do it, don’t forget,” Hun Sen said in the speech, according to the diplomat.
At an April 30 meeting of CPP leaders, Hun Sen proposed a strike at Funcinpec’s “machinery” before Anlong Veng forces could strengthen the royalists, or the arrest of Prince Ranariddh for negotiating with the guerillas, according to Brad Adams, who in 1997 was an official at the UN human rights office in Phnom Penh, and who wrote a piece in 2007 marking the 10th anniversary of the fighting.
Yet others in the CPP – barely five years out of the gruelling civil war that followed their 1979 installation by Vietnam after the overthrow of Pol Pot’s regime – were less keen for any military standoff, and then-military commander Ke Kim Yan rebuffed Hun Sen’s demands.
In fact, Hun Sen’s proposal, according to Adams, “was reportedly opposed by most CPP leaders, including Ke Kim Yan, Chea Sim and Sar Kheng. General Pol Saroeun, Kandal Deputy Governor Kun Kim and Phnom Penh Deputy Governor Chea Sophara were reported to support Hun Sen.”
Coup de force
While Ke Kim Yan had the power as military commander to rebuff Hun Sen’s proposals to attack Funcinpec in April 1996, in the background the second prime minister was steadily building up his own personal forces within both the country’s police and the military.
After an attempted July 1994 coup against him from within the CPP – led by former Interior Minister Sin Song and his deputy Sin Sen, who both had deep ties in the National Police – Hun Sen had his loyalist Hok Lundy appointed as National Police chief.
“Until then internal security had been Chea Sim’s domain,” wrote Adams, who is now the Asia director of Human Rights Watch. “Hok Lundy reported directly to Hun Sen despite the fact that his formal boss was Sar Kheng – a close confidante of Chea Sim and an internal party opponent of Hun Sen.”
Hun Sen was, by the events of 1996, already strengthening his Bodyguard Unit, wrote Lee Morgenbesser, a researcher on authoritarian regimes at Australia’s Griffith University, in an academic paper published in the journal Democratiza- tion in January this year.
Starting with “around 60 bodyguards in the mid-1990s”, Hun Sen quickly built up his Bodyguard Unit into what is today “a paramilitary architecture equivalent in size to the national militaries of Senegal, Somalia, or Zambia” – not to mention one of the most elite units in Cambodia’s army - Morgenbesser wrote.
In May 1997, Funcinpec’s Nhek Bun Chhay had reportedly come to a deal with Khieu Samphan for the Khmer Rouge in Anlong Veng to follow Ieng Sary’s Pailin forces to reintegrate into the Cambodian military – but this time allied to the royalists rather than to Hun Sen’s CPP.
By June 17, 1997, any tensions that had been kept in check the previous year were now boiling over, with a 90-minute firefight breaking out in the middle of the city – on the corner of Norodom Boulevard and Street 200 – between bodyguards of Prince Ranariddh and bodyguards of Hok Lundy. Two of Ranariddh’s bodyguards were killed by the National Police chief ’s bodyguards, while a rocket – one of 14 fired during the skirmish – landed in the garden of the US ambassador’s nearby residence.
And in July, when Ranariddh was accused of moving forces out of Anlong Veng with plans to launch his own coup, he did not need the support of the rest of the party – even if Chea Sim, Sar Kheng, Ke Kim Yan and Defence Minister Tea Banh still opposed a battle.
Whether the broader CPP leadership and generals like Kim Yan opposed Hun Sen’s battle plans remains up for debate, but it is widely believed that they did, said Sophal Ear, an associate professor of world affairs and diplomacy at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
“I believe it,” Ear said. “The reason is Ke Kim Yan was alleged to have refused to partake even earlier - back in 1996 when he was told to send the tanks out. When questioned by Hun Sen as to where Ke Kim Yan’s [epaulette] stars came from, Ke Kim Yan allegedly said ‘the King’.”
Yet whatever formal powers then-King Norodom Sihanouk had as the military’s supreme commander-in-chief, Hun Sen by 1997 had enough firepower behind him to defeat Funcinpec alone – thanks in part to his police chief, Hok Lundy, as well as then-Deputy Military Commander Sao Sokha, according to Brad Adams’ account.
“Even without the support of much of his party, Hun Sen was able to put together enough military power to succeed. On July 5-6 his ad hoc forces, led by loyalists including Kun Kim, Mol Roeup, Sao Sokha, Hok Lundy, and Keo Pong, defeated the FUNCINPEC forces,” Adams wrote.
In fact, Hun Sen’s forces won in a rout, setting off a series of violent anti-royalist reprisals.
“In many cases it was clear who carried out these killings. One unit in particular, the ‘911’ parachute regiment under Colonel Chap Pheakadey, was clearly responsible for a series of executions and torture,” he said.
An August 1997 report compiled by the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Human Rights, Thomas Hammarberg, confirmed at least 41 cases of political executions of Hun Sen’s political opponents, including Interior Ministry Secretary of State Ho Sok, who was shot in the neck inside the ministry.
The findings did not seem to bother Hun Sen – and in a documentary aired on the BBC in November 1997, he told the Welsh journalist Phil Rees as much.
“There are probably no more than 50 people in Cambodia who have read the report. There are 11 million people in Cambodia,” Hun Sen said, smoking a cigarette as he drove an SUV into his Takhmao compound.
“They don’t understand what the human rights report is about,” the premier said, dismissing the report with a laugh. “What the UN says doesn’t bother me. The problem is my people, and whether they support me.”
Consolidating the forces
Hun Sen often compared himself to the historical fig- ure Sdech Kan, who, like Hun Sen, was a simple peasant and pagoda boy born in the Year of the Dragon – and who joined the Cambodian royal court eight years before usurping the throne in 1512 in an ultimately failed decade-long attempt to start a new dynasty.
Yet Hun Sen’s reign as the supreme leader has lasted far longer than Sdech Kan, with the viciousness of the events 20 years ago only helping him to further cement his rule – both in the country, and within his party.
After the smoke from 1997 had cleared, Hun Sen coaxed Prince Ranariddh back from self-exile to contest, and lose, the July 1998 national elections, and in December of the same year, the CPP-led government was given back its UN General Assembly seat, which had been vacant since September 1997.
Now legitimised as Cambodia’s sole leader, Hun Sen on January 28, 1999, named Ke Kim Yan as commander-inchief of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces – but with two new deputies, Hun Sen loyalists Pol Saroeun, the new chief