40 Reported Executed Since Cambodia Coup

At least 40 soldiers and civilians have been executed since Second Prime Minister Hun Sen seized power 10 days ago, and arrests and killings of his enemies are continuing, U.N. human rights workers said Tuesday.

The bodies of four guards to the top general loyal to ousted First Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh were left on a provincial street July 6 with their eyes gouged out, according to witness reports cited by the U.N. workers. Other victims have been found executed with bullets to the head and their hands tied, the sources said.

In the most recent deadly incident, which occurred Monday, three men described as bodyguards were pulled from a taxi in Kompong Chhnang province, executed and thrown into a river, the U.N. workers said. It was not known whom the bodyguards were working for or who killed them.

“[We are] willing to confirm at this point at least 40 extrajudicial killings,” a U.N. investigator said. “We are discovering new things pretty quickly, so we would expect the number to be substantially higher.”

Human rights activists have said that while there is no evidence Hun Sen has ordered a campaign of retribution, as commander in chief of the army and sole leader of the country he is responsible for any abuses by his forces.

In the capital, witnesses reported seeing soldiers and military police loyal to Hun Sen conducting house-to-house searches, and in at least one case extorting money from those they visited.

Other human rights workers and diplomats could not immediately confirm or refute the reported killings. Some had reports of many arrests, while others said they had no evidence of purges.

They said it is not clear whether the reported abuses are the result of personal revenge and score-settling in the aftermath of the fierce fighting earlier this month, or the herald of a brutal and repressive dictatorship to come.

But observers agreed that if the bloodshed continues, the international community may find it difficult to accept the Hun Sen government as legitimate, even if he holds elections as promised next year.

“I’ve had no report of 25 executions and no evidence can be seen,” Hun Sen said in an interview with the Voice of America late Tuesday, responding to an earlier report of the death toll.

Hun Sen expressed regret over the killing of Ho Sok, a security official from Ranariddh’s royalist FUNCINPEC party who the government admits was executed by forces loyal to Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party.

Hun Sen also promised that a new first prime minister from FUNCINPEC will be elected and that the long-deadlocked National Assembly will convene July 28.

In remarks that were at odds with his earlier accounts of the fighting that began July 5, Hun Sen said he was vacationing at the beach in Vietnam from July 1 through 6 and did not know of the battles until he heard Ranariddh on the radio accusing him of staging a coup. Hun Sen said CPP forces were ordered out to defend the capital in response.

Previously, Hun Sen had described the fighting as a preemptive strike to foil an alleged plot by Ranariddh to attack him using Khmer Rouge guerrillas smuggled into the capital for that purpose. The Hun Sen camp had maintained that troops loyal to FUNCINPEC fired on CPP forces that had come to disarm them.

International and Cambodian human rights groups on Tuesday sent teams into the provinces to check out the reports of abuses that have ripped through an anxious Phnom Penh. As always in Cambodia, they said, excavating the truth will not be easy and could take weeks or months.

A source at one nongovernmental organization said security concerns and frightened witnesses have prevented investigators from collecting information in some areas and that they had been denied access to other places where prisoners are rumored to be held.

A Western diplomat said it is impossible to know whether people who have been reported missing are under arrest, in hiding or dead. The chief of the local International Committee of the Red Cross said only that her group had been allowed access to about 450 prisoners held by Hun Sen’s forces in three locations and that those prisoners were being treated “correctly.”

The U.N. workers provided extensive details from what they termed “credible field reports.” Among them:

* On July 6, three FUNCINPEC soldiers agreed to surrender in front of the Hun Sen Library near Pochentong airport in Phnom Penh and were executed while their hands were in the air.

* On July 7, the bodies of four men believed to have been bodyguards of Chau Sambath, a top FUNCINPEC intelligence advisor, were found dead with marks on their wrists suggesting that their hands had been bound. One had a gag in his mouth. Chau Sambath also was killed last week.

* A Khmer-Canadian photographer was shot while taking pictures of Hun Sen’s soldiers. “They challenged him, then they shot him in the leg, then they shot him to death,” said a U.N. source, adding that a relative of the victim had witnessed the event.

* About 500 to 600 people, including about 100 to 200 civilians, have been arrested. That figure includes about 100 soldiers captured during recent fighting in Siem Reap province. A Cambodian human rights source said that most, if not all, of those soldiers were released.

Meanwhile, a rift has broken out here between some diplomats who believe that their countries must be realistic and work with the Hun Sen regime, and other diplomats and human rights groups who believe that the international community should demand that he ensure respect for the Geneva Conventions and the civil liberties guaranteed by Cambodia’s 1991 Paris peace agreement.

The two sides have been sniping at each other in anonymous statements to the media. The increasingly emotional debate over how hard a line to take with the Hun Sen regime is reportedly being conducted both inside Western embassies here and in Washington and other capitals.

“I hope that the international community--well, at least the European community--will try to bargain” for good behavior in exchange for continued foreign aid, said a European diplomat.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns, reacting to the reports of violence, said there would be no justification for any use of force by Hun Sen’s troops.