Cambodia Regime’s Intimidation of Foes Fuels Fear, Despair

At a reeducation camp on the outskirts of town, dozens of captured soldiers are learning the lessons of the losers of war.

They sit in listless clusters in a pavilion aerated by jagged holes blown in the wall by tanks, listening to the drone of a victorious commander reciting what they are now to believe.

“They told us it was not a coup,” one soldier said of the bloody uprising that toppled Cambodia’s co-premier earlier this month, leaving Second Prime Minister Hun Sen in sole power. “And they told us we must obey the government.”

The soldier and 31 others were tortured before they came here, they said, until they agreed that what happened didn’t and that they are what they are not.

The process of indoctrination, intimidation and denial is occurring all over Phnom Penh, the capital, nearly three weeks after Hun Sen’s military overthrow of his former coalition partner, First Prime Minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh. Political opponents have been executed, dissidents forced out of the country or into hiding, journalists silenced--citizens have even been warned not to listen to local broadcasts of the Voice of America.

The result is an intense climate of fear and despair not felt since the genocidal era of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot two decades ago.

“We are shattered,” said Lao Mong Hay, executive director of the Khmer Institute of Democracy, an independent group that promotes political openness. “The feeling is that we are returning to the old era. Everything we have worked for--democracy, human rights, rule of law--is in question, and it affects the society from the top to the bottom and in every layer across.”

The detained soldiers, troops loyal to Ranariddh’s FUNCINPEC party who were training to be royal bodyguards, were obvious first targets. Captured west of Phnom Penh while trying to flee fighting on July 5 and 6, the group of 32 was imprisoned and tortured at another camp until its members’ “confessions” backed up the official line: that Hun Sen was merely protecting the country from feared Khmer Rouge guerrillas brought by rival Ranariddh to overthrow him.

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“They beat us until we said we were Khmer Rouge,” said one soldier who did not want his name published. Human rights and international medical groups who have visited the reeducation camp at Tang Krasaing military base confirm that the soldiers held there are not from the Khmer Rouge, the hard-line faction of jungle fighters responsible for more than 1 million deaths in the late 1970s under Pol Pot.

The soldier and five others in his group displayed sores on their arms, legs and backs from bathing in and drinking sewer water while imprisoned at the other camp. And they described being tortured with electric cattle prods and metal finger clamps over a period of 10 days. “When we said we were Khmer Rouge, they stopped,” the soldier said.

In the days after the coup, at least 40 political opponents were executed, according to the United Nations’ Center for Human Rights in Phnom Penh, which has documented each case and expects to release details of additional killings soon. Some victims were killed, then left on the street with their eyes gouged out. Interior Minister Ho Sok was hunted down by Hun Sen’s forces and slain with a bullet to the head.

On Thursday, a grenade blast ripped through the house of an Interior Ministry official in the capital, and outside the city, human rights workers exhumed the bodies of two people believed to be opposition party members, both of whom had been bound and shot.

“That sends a clear message to people,” said Lao Mong Hay of the democracy institute. “It is the elimination of past enemies and intimidation of future ones.”

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Cambodians quickly got the message: More than 4,000 are believed to have fled the country, including embassy employees, journalists, aid workers and 23 ministers and opposition party members. Nineteen newspapers have stopped publication in Phnom Penh. “There are no opposition journalists anymore,” Pin Sam Khon, head of the Khmer Journalists Assn., said from Bangkok, Thailand, where he fled with eight other journalists. “I was the last one.”

Hun Sen has acknowledged the assassination of Ho Sok but dismissed other reports of politically motivated killings. “People die in warfare,” he said, shrugging.

Speaking at a dinner Tuesday night to reassure investors that Cambodia was back to business as usual after the July 5-6 coup, he apologized for $10 million in damage and looting done by his own forces and said he has dealt with the “extremists” who caused political chaos.

But the reprisals have trickled down to the most basic levels, and human rights investigators say they are not over yet. Members of groups other than Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), civil servants, local aid workers and political activists have been driven into hiding by political intimidation and harassment.

For many, the exodus of friends and relatives and the resurgence of repression revive bitter fears from the devastation of a not-too-distant past.

“Reeducation” and split families are an echo from Khmer Rouge rule. “A lot of countries have this kind of violence but not this level of fear,” said Brad Adams, a director of the U.N. Center for Human Rights. “People here have experienced this before, and the terror is not too far beneath the surface.”

While the flurry of killings has slowed or stopped, Adams said, incidents of political intimidation are “definitely increasing.”

Interviews with people from the provinces and from Phnom Penh who have gone underground reveal that the new pressures are felt in ways large and small. Soldiers have used house-to-house searches for illegal arms as a pretext to root out opposition members; officials have removed the opposition’s signboards, replaced them with CPP placards and coerced people to switch to Hun Sen’s party. Political activists have been followed, watched and replaced at their jobs by CPP members.

“The Communist method,” said one man, who declined to reveal his name, “is that when they destroy anything, they destroy it up to the roots.”