Cambodia's Hun Sen Leads Party to Victory

Kansas City Star ^ | Tue, Jul. 29, 2003 | KER MUNTHIT - AP

[yonif]

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - By leading his party to another election victory, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has cemented his reputation as one of the region's canniest politicians - with a ruthless streak when the need arises.

Some may say that Hun Sen - the son of peasants, a former communist guerrilla and an avid chess player - is on his way to attaining the status of statesman, though he's always relished being called Cambodia's "strongman."

Whether by the ballot or the bullet, Hun Sen has been the master of his country's politics since 1985 when he became the world's youngest prime minister at age 33. He has held or shared or the top job ever since.

Hun Sen's party won Sunday's general elections, but apparently fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to govern outright. With the final votes counted Tuesday, the Cambodian People's Party said it expects to control about 73 of the 123 seats in the National Assembly. Official results won't be announced until Aug. 8, but independent observers agreed with the CPP's assessment.

In the run-up to the vote, the chain-smoking Hun Sen told his supporters that critics would probably call him a dictator.

"Your answer to that should be that it's already a democracy when you have the right to accuse others of being a dictator," was his rejoinder.

Time and again, he has overcome challenges and adversaries, beginning with a U.S.-led diplomatic boycott that isolated his poverty-stricken country during the 1980s.

Among those he has bullied, outfoxed or outgunned include his one-time co-prime minister Norodom Ranariddh, the Khmer Rouge and the United Nations.

Critics accuse Hun Sen of failing to address such problems as corruption and the tacit immunity for lawbreakers with official ties. But even his critics agree that he is intelligent and hardworking, in a country whose politicians are generally noted for indolence.

But when his grip on power was less firm, political opponents feared for their lives. Opposition leader Sam Rainsy once described him as a "murderer."

Influential Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called him "nothing less than a paranoid evil dictator."

At the same time, Hun Sen has rallied the support of the farmers who make up the vast majority of the country 12.8 million people. Cambodia's rural landscape is dotted with schools, temples and roads upon which he has bestowed his patronage.

"I want to develop my country like the other Southeast Asian strongmen did," he told his biographers. More than one-third of Cambodians live on less than $1 per day.

Born on April 4, 1951 to a peasant family in Kampong Cham province, 50 miles east of the Phnom Penh, Hun Sen as a boy worked the rice fields before being sent to the capital to be educated by Buddhist monks.

But when he was 19, Hun Sen responded to a call to arms from King Norodom Sihanouk, then a prince in exile in Beijing after being ousted in a 1970 U.S.-backed coup.

Hun Sen joined the sole organized opposition to the coup-makers, the previously marginal communist Khmer Rouge, who had allied themselves with the ousted Sihanouk. He would lose his left eye in the bitter civil war.

The prince and the peasant boy had little idea that when the Khmer Rouge would take over five years later, they would launch a reign of terror that would claim 1.7 million lives.

Though he attained the rank of regimental commander, there is no reason to believe he played a part in Khmer Rouge atrocities, according to historians. His 1977 escape to neighboring Vietnam made him one of the earliest high-ranking guerrilla defectors.

When Hanoi's army drove the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979, Hun Sen, at age 27, was named foreign minister of a single-party, Soviet-style regime which hosted a Vietnamese occupying army until 1989.

After becoming premier in 1985, he moved to negotiate Cambodia's 1991 Paris peace accords - between his government and a resistance coalition including the Khmer Rouge and royalists - that eventually led to a 1993 United Nations-supervised election.

Although his Cambodian People's Party came in second to the royalist Funcinpec party led by Sihanouk's son, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, Hun Sen used the threat of violence to get himself named co-prime minister.

He took total control after ousting Ranariddh in a bloody coup in 1997. Some of the ablest leaders of Funcinpec were summarily executed after capture.

The events made Cambodia an international pariah state but put Hun Sen in a position of strength from which he was able to cut several deft deals.

He dictated the terms under which the all-but-spent Khmer Rouge insurgents put down their arms, and took credit for bringing peace to his war-ravaged country. Hun Sen's international legitimacy was largely restored when he allowed Ranariddh to return to run in 1998 elections.

Having shattered and terrorized his opposition, Hun Sen's party won the polls with a plurality.

He used the same hard bargaining tactics with the United Nations during five-year negotiations that ended last month to set up a genocide tribunal for the Khmer Rouge. He spurned all compromises until he had his way - a tribunal operated under Cambodian law. It will have to approved by the new National Assembly.

In his years in power, Hun Sen embraced capitalism and invited foreign investment. Cambodia today exports garments worth about $1.5 billion every year.

He and his wife Bun Rany have three sons - one a West Point graduate - and three daughters.