Cambodia's Hun Sen Is No Savior
In an Interview, the Vietnamese-Backed Leader Is Tough and Temperamental
By Lally Weymouth
PHNOM PENH - Hun Sen, this country's prime minister, is the toast of Asia these days. His supporters argue that the 37-year-old leader, installed and backed by the Vietnamese, has turned out to be more than a puppet.
Hun Sen is really a nationalist, capable of breaking away from the Vietnamese and Soviet orbit if he receives Western help, argue some Thai officials and western diplomats. They express what seems to be a growing consensus in Asia that the best way out of the Cambodia conflict is for Prince Sihanouk, the country's former leader, to make a deal with Hun Sen--leaving the ruthless Khmer Rouge faction out in the cold.
But a talk with Hun Sen last week dispelled some of the myths that have grown up about his flexibility and willingness to stray from the Vietnamese orbit.
Sitting in a large room with the curtains drawn, dressed in shirtsleeves with his favourite "555" cigarettes on the table, Hun Sen made clear during a 90-minute interview his opposition to the two ideas that would give his government the legitimacy and credibility he seeks--the presence of an international peacekeeping force to monitor Vietnamese troop withdrawal and the presence of international observers to insure a free and fair election.
The Cambodian leader actually lost his temper at one point during the interview, raising his voice, waving his finger and telling me that I was free to ask questions but not to challenge his answers.
Given such intransigence on Hun Sen's part, it is hard to imagine the outcome of his May 2 meeting with Prince Sihanouk. It's widely hoped that the meeting may pave the way for a diplomatic settlement, following Vietnam's announcement a week ago that it will withdraw its troops from Cambodia in September and Prince Sihanouk's claim that Hun Sen has made two important concessions. But Hun Sen dampened any such speculation about concessions.
"I don't understand what concessions he thinks I made to him," Hun Sen said. "Prince Sihanouk says the French told him I had made two points of accommodation to him, but I never asked the French to tell Prince Sihanouk that I had made concessions to him. Everyone should know what are the concessions of the government of Phnom Penh...the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops without any conditions." (Hun Sen avoided mentioning two quite specific conditions he has set: cessation of foreign assistance to Cambodian resistance fighters, and a right for Hun Sen to request the return of Vietnamese troops if he deems it necessary.)
There were more discouraging words from Hun Sen. Prince Sihanouk, China and the ASEAN countries have called for the replacement of Hun Sen's government (the Peoples' Republic of Kampuchea, or PRK) by a new coalition government made up of Hun Sen's faction and the three resistance groups that have been fighting the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia, including the Khmer Rouge faction that devastated the country when it ruled during the 1970s under Pol Pot. But Hun Sen said: "In no case (will) we accept the dismantling of our government."
Instead of the four-party arrangement, Hun Sen wants a coalition between himself and Sihanouk. "Prince Sihanouk will have a position in our government if he would like to join us. The position may be that of a head of state," he said. But when pressed as to whether he was willing to give real power to Sihanouk, Hun Sen hedged by answering that in his government there were no pro-forma positions.
Hun Sen uses the inclusion of the Khmer Rouge in the four-party proposal to discredit the idea and to promote the alternative of his sharing power with Sihanouk. This would of course leave Hun Sen in the enviable position of being the only party in the alliance with a strong military force. "The people we cannot accept are the Khmer Rouge, and the people easily acceptable to us are people like Prince Sihanouk," said Hun Sen.
Would he be willing to have a free election and give Prince Sihanouk the time to campaign against him? "If we strike a political solution, what we really desire is to have free elections," he said. "If no election has been held, there will be no sharing of power."
The word "election" excites hope, but Hun Sen has very particular ideas about how it should be run. He says the elections will be supervised by a national reconciliation council that he claims will be independent of his PRK government. But he refuses to have neutral international observers of an election. He says any monitoring will be done by an international control commission, which the Vietnamese have suggested would be composed of Poland, India and Canada.
When it is pointed out to Hun Sen that similar international control commissions failed to enforce peace accords in 1954 during French withdrawal from Vietnam and in 1973 during U.S. troop withdrawal, he gets mad and begins waving his finger. His display of temper is a reminder that Hun Sen himself was once a member of the Khmer Rouge.
The question of an international peacekeeping force to monitor the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops meets with the same harsh rejection. Hun Sen bases his opposition to a United Nations peacekeeping force on the dubious grounds that he doesn't know whether "this body will come here to fight the war or to control the situation."
Although some analysts have claimed that there are factions in the Khmer Rouge, some more acceptable than the extremists in the group, Hun Sen said he sees no cracks in "the stubborn Khmer Rouge leadership." And he downplayed the effectiveness of the resistance, claiming that their activities were "confined to the Kampuchean-Thai border or to rural areas and mostly were aimed at civilian targets."
According to Hun Sen, the key to "peace"--by which he apparently means the key to his government staying in power--is for foreign countries to cut off aid to the resistance when the Vietnamese withdraw their troops from Cambodia. He says that China must drop its demand for an internal political settlement--which the United States also wants--and settle for an external settlement only, the withdrawal of the Vietnamese troops.
With some reason, Hun Sen is pinning his hopes on Thai Prime Minister Chatichai Choonhavan, who seems to be emerging as the Oscar Arias of Asia. Since he came to power last August, Chatichai and his left-leaning advisors have attempted to soften the previous Thai policy of supporting resistance against the Vietnamese-backed government of Hun Sen.
"I believe the main key is Thailand," said Hun Sen. "If Thailand would not allow this group (the Khmer Rouge) to stay there, that would be the end of their existence." China and Thailand have a close alliance and the scenario painted by Hun Sen is a very unlikely one, yet he claims to sense a shift in Thai policy.
"I had a feeling that Thailand doesn't like the Khmer Rouge. Even the Chinese...are not going to embrace the Khmer Rouge until the end of their days.... I understand the way they used the Khmer Rouge against us. Therefore we must remove those reasons from them: That is the reason for the withdrawal of the Vietnamese troops.... If after the withdrawal they continue to help the Khmer Rouge, that would be another story."
The last word belonged to an old Cambodian shopkeeper here who had lived through Sihanouk's time, then Pol Pot's and now Hun Sen's. "He is my king," he said passionately when asked about Sihanouk. In a truly free and fair election, he said, Sihanouk would win. For speaking these frank words, he added, he risked being sent to jail without a trail, forever.
Perhaps Hun Sen may, as is rumoured, change the "Kampuchean" flag, its national anthem and its constitution--perhaps even change its name back to Cambodia. But it will take more than such cosmetic changes to make Hun Sen more than a Southeast Asian version of Afghanistan's Najibullah.
[Lally Weymouth writes regularly about foreign affairs for The Washington Post.]