The rise and rise of Hun Sen
By Greg Torode
Hun Sen, as even his detractors admit, is quite simply the shrewdest politician in Cambodia. A man who has been a leader virtually all his adult life, first in Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge and then in the bosom of the Vietnamese invaders, he is now just one step from a rough form of legitimacy and acceptance as the democratically elected prime minister of Cambodia.
As campaigning intensifies before next Sunday's poll, Mr Hun Sen is sitting quietly deep within his fortified "tiger's den" 30 kilometres south of Phnom Penh. Estimates increasingly suggest a very close race, yet he seems content to let his key rivals - Prince Norodom Ranariddh and Sam Rainsy - make all the running.
Since the death of his mother earlier this year he has exuded tranquillity, say those who know him. There have been no flashes of violent rage that have in the past seen him smash television sets and furniture. There are no finger-jabbing rants at foreign television cameras. "I've never seen him like this. Everyone is saying it is like he is on Prozac," one diplomat said, shaking his head with unease at the calm of a recent meeting.
If he loses, Mr Hun Sen says he will stand down quietly, hand over the reins of power smoothly, concentrate on his family and play some more chess. "I will not accept being prime minister if economic issues and the living standards of the people are not made a supreme priority of the new government," he said recently.
Few in Phnom Penh take him at his word. The violence surrounding last year's coupthat drove then First Prime Minister Prince Ranariddh from power showed the extent to which Mr Hun Sen was prepared to go to further enshrine the rule of his Cambodian People's Party.
Opposition sources warn of intensifying violence and intimidation as the polls loom. United Nations monitors are investigating 22 allegedly political deaths since April but no final conclusions have been drawn.
Mr Hun Sen himself has been typically non-plussed, insisting he wants a quiet election. "During the election campaign if a member of a political party is shot they say it's a political murder even though it was robbers or thieves," he said recently. "If it was political violence they wouldn't kill the low level people. They would go after the top leaders - that would be political violence."
Mr Hun Sen controls the purse strings and the key elements of a vast military and police force in a shattered country where little else counts in terms of the ability to snare and keep power. The party - still structured along traditional Communist Party lines - has vast sway over provincial chiefs and village heads and an extensive grass-roots cell network.
A smooth transfer of power should he lose? Not a chance, virtually all pundits agree.
Mr Hun Sen, 46, has arrived at this juncture of possible acceptance by the international community from humble, highly unusual beginnings. It goes a long way to explain some of the more extreme actions, say those who know him. If Mr Hun Sen frequently appears paranoid, it is perhaps because he has much to be paranoid about.
Born into a poor peasant family in Kompong Cham in 1952, he never finished high school. A barefoot pagoda boy, he lived on handouts from monks, drifting to Phnom Penh in the late 1960s where the vigorous ideology of the ultra-Maoists who would later become known as the Khmer Rouge attracted so many listless youths.
Historical debates still rage over what followed given the paucity of Mr Hun Sen's official biography and the extreme secrecy surrounding life in the Khmer Rouge.
Australian scholar Ben Kiernan has noted Mr Hun Sen became involved with the guerillas in the countryside when he was 16, in 1967. Mr Hun Sen himself says it was three years later. He answered the call for resistance from Prince Norodom Sihanouk after he was deposed in a coup led by the Washington-backed regime of Lon Nol, he said.
The Khmer Rouge came to value the "purity" of exploitable young minds and Mr Hun Sen possessed a particularly shrewd and astute one. He rose to command a division and saw considerable action as the Khmer Rouge, inspired by the secret American bombing, converged on Phnom Penh.
In the last of five injuries, he lost an eye in battle. It was two days before the guerillas surged into Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, to start a rule that turned the entire country into a vast labour camp.
As Pol Pot began his radical Maoist experiments, Mr Hun Sen was posted to the eastern part of Cambodia as a field commander.
To this day, no firm evidence has ever emerged linking him directly to purges or atrocities.
Mr Hun Sen has claimed early doubts about policies that forced millions to toil, often murderously, on vast labour projects, and eat in communal kitchens, their family life shattered.
By May 1977, his mind was made up. An increasingly paranoid Pol Pot was ordering highly dangerous and violent attacks on villages in Vietnam. Regional commanders expressed reluctance to move on the feared Vietnamese. Some were rounded up and shot in purges. Mr Hun Sen was ordered to become involved but he defected across the border. So did other men who would play a key role in the years ahead, Heng Samrin and the present chief of Mr Hun Sen's party, Chea Sim.
Up in Hanoi, ever-suspicious Vietnamese cadres quickly warmed to Mr Hun Sen, noting his sharp forceful wits.
His case was helped by his provision of detailed intelligence about planned attacks in Tay Ninh. Here on September 24, 1977, Khmer Rouge forces attacked a village and massacred hundreds of civilians including women and children.
Historians and the few independent observers at the scene painted the starkest of pictures. Some victims were beheaded, others had arms hacked off and eyes gouged. Bellies were ripped open.
It was an act that served as a key catalyst for the events that led to Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia - a move that in turn sparked China's attack on Hanoi's northern borders and shattered for ever all notions of the communist domino theory.
"The Vietnamese respect age in leaders, but Hun Sen was just so clever. He stood out among his fellow countrymen," one source in Hanoi said. After extensive political training in Hanoi, Mr Hun Sen moved in with the invasion forces and was installed as foreign minister of the new Vietnamese-backed regime, the People's Republic of Kampuchea. He was just 27 years old. One way or another, he has been in power ever since.
Soon he was the world's youngest prime minister and ruler of a regime of a crippled country that had become an international pariah - still at war with the Khmer Rouge remnants and at loggerheads with their allies in the American-backed FUNCINPEC coalition headed from exile by Prince Sihanouk.
At an international conference in 1989 to hammer out some sort of future for the country, Prince Sihanouk slammed Mr Hun Sen for being untrustworthy. "You're a former Khmer Rouge after all," the prince said.
"But you," Mr Hun Sen shot back, "you're still the chief of the Khmer Rouge."
That year the Vietnamese withdrew their troops and the People's Revolutionary Party of Hun Sen changed its name and started reforms in order to compete at United Nations-sponsored elections. The new Cambodian People's Party claimed some three million Cambodians as members for the 1993 polls. Just 38 per cent of them voted and the party finished with seven seats less than FUNCINPEC headed by Prince Ranariddh, King Sihanouk's illegitimate son.
The party never recognised the result and, still holding considerable military and administrative power, forced their way into a largely wasteful joint rule.
Now the baggage from such a tumultuous past continues to haunt Mr Hun Sen as he waits for next Sunday. Keeping a low profile at the moment can only help him while the party's extensive rural machine goes to work.
Despite a liberal highly principled agenda, Mr Rainsy publicly refers to him as youn - a derogatory term for Vietnamese - in a bid to link him with his hated former patrons. Mr Rainsy has whipped up larger than expected crowds of peasants with pledges to stop illegal immigration from Vietnam - something he insists Mr Hun Sen cannot do.
Prince Ranariddh plays the race card, too, while going one step further and blurring the monarchy and politics in the minds of the peasants who remain deeply loyal to the throne. "Other parties are offering you gifts," he said, referring to small donations of scarves and packets of MSG given by the CPP to supporters.
"We are not offering you gifts, we are offering you the king."
Mr Hun Sen is unfazed by both charges, his aides and diplomats say. He still holds close and deep ties with Vietnam but has successfully kept official contacts to a minimum. He has slowly made clear to Hanoi he is his own man. He has successfully courted Chinese business, aid and military ties to show his independence.
He has managed to charm the court of the king, sources say. Queen Monique has told foreign envoys that Mr Hun Sen is so "placid and gentle" now while her ever-flighty husband has said he will stay in Cambodia to swear in any coalition with Mr Hun Sen at the top of it.
One aide to Mr Hun Sen said he knows he must keep a low profile to avoid denting any popularity. Dotted throughout Cambodia are 1,200 new school buildings with Mr Hun Sen's signature - many built by favoured businessmen who opposition figures suggest are uncomfortably close to his rule.
When he does work a crowd, Mr Hun Sen comes on more like a stand-up comic rather than a politician. Hand in pocket, he shuffles and loafs about on stage cracking one-liners, often highly political, peppered with roars of his own laughter. He plays on his poor-boy image and pledges more schools and roads. But his ultimate concern for the poor - rather than power itself - often struggles under scrutiny.
The government budget for 1998 is chilling for a country with as many troubles as Cambodia. The allocations for defence and police stand at 43 per cent of the total budget.
Education, health and rural development get far smaller chunks of the pie.
Access to health services is virtually non-existent for the bulk of Cambodia's 11 million people and fears are mounting that AIDS could reach epidemic proportions. Infant mortality, life expectancy and literacy levels are lower than in Southeast Asia or southern China.
Among Cambodians and the array of foreign observers and diplomats converging on Phnom Penh fears are rising that such core issues could all get lost if the election aftermath descends into in-fighting, horse trading - or worse.
Among the most feared scenarios is a result that puts Mr Hun Sen beneath one or two other leaders in any coalition. He would never accept such a deal and it could split his highly secretive party, now comprising far more moderate characters.
The potential for chaos and violence is high, they warn.
"He has had his hands on the wheel for 18 years," one veteran foreign diplomat warned.
"Hun Sen knows nothing else other than power. He studies and thinks and plots. He is interested in nothing. He spends all his days calculating how to get even more of it. A clear victory for him could be the safest thing."