Suspicion of Cambodia’s Hard-Nosed Premier Yields to Cautious Respect

For Hun Sen, the chain-smoking, one-eyed, tough-guy prime minister of Cambodia, survival boils down to a simple premise: Let down your guard or give your enemies room to maneuver and you die. Security, he believes, is the very breath of life. Existence is like a guerrilla war.

He speaks of politics, not chess, when he says, “To kill your enemies, you should know how to move your pawns.” He once told an American diplomat that the United States should relocate its embassy here because “your position is indefensible.” His own position, a fortified compound outside this capital, is very defensible, with dark windows and hidden trapdoors leading to the basement. “I like it here because I feel secure,” he says.

“Hun Sen is a man who wakes up every morning and asks, ‘I wonder who’s going to try and kill me today,’ ” said a Western envoy. “That’s the kind of person who seeks total control and is willing to run roughshod over opponents and intimidate allies. He’s survived three assassination attempts, five battlefield wounds, 14 years in power--a pretty good achievement in a country where only the toughest are left standing.”

He is dismissed as an uneducated thug by some and branded a murderer by Sam Rainsy, Cambodia’s leading opposition figure. But the prime minister--who never made it to high school and refers to himself in the third person, as in “Hun Sen is afraid of no one”--is starting to earn cautious praise as Cambodia enters the second year of a peace he helped stitch together to end a generation of warfare.

The tempered words of support come from even some of his harshest critics, including one from California.

“There is no reason to attack people for what they’ve done in the past, in terms of people participating in the democratic process,” Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) said in January after meeting here with Hun Sen. “I was much more pessimistic looking at the situation from a distance than I am now.”

Until coming to Cambodia and finding that Hun Sen had reinvented himself again, this time as a democratic reformer, Rohrabacher had been one of the prime minister’s most vocal international detractors. Last year, Rohrabacher sponsored a nonbinding resolution in the House condemning Hun Sen as a war criminal for his role as a junior commander in Pol Pot’s murderous Khmer Rouge guerrilla army, which ruled this country from 1975 to 1979 and is blamed for the deaths of more than 1 million Cambodians.

“When Hun Sen put together his coalition government in ‘98, skeptics said, ‘Wait for six months and you’ll see the cracks,’ ” said a Western ambassador here. “Well, we didn’t see those cracks in six months, or after 12 months. In fact, I think anyone would be hard pressed today to say Hun Sen doesn’t have Cambodia headed in the right direction.”

Tourism, which was virtually destroyed after Hun Sen overthrew his co-prime minister, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, in a bloody 1997 coup, soared 41% last year with a record 263,000 visitors. The economy, after flirting with negative territory after the coup, grew 4% in the same period, and several foreign investors have returned to sniff around for bargains.

The 48-year-old Hun Sen is making good on promises to reduce illegal logging operations that have devastated forests and to demobilize a portion of the 130,000-member army, having sent home 30,000 soldiers with $250 each and some farm tools. He is negotiating with the United Nations to set up a tribunal that would try some Khmer Rouge leaders on charges of genocide. And though his core beliefs remain elusive, he is pressing ahead with democratic reforms on several fronts.

“Hun Sen is a Machiavellian prince,” said Lao Mong Hay, executive director of the Khmer Institute of Democracy. “He relies on brawn more than brains, and the promises he makes are only those in his self-interest.

“That said, the human rights situation in Cambodia is better than it was,” Hay said. “He may not believe in human rights and democracy in his heart, but he is smart enough to understand he has to respond to pressures exerted by the international and domestic communities.”

Cambodia’s 11 million people are just coming to grips with the notion that the Khmer Rouge have gone and maybe they’re not coming back. There’s a realization that Hun Sen, a brooding, hot-tempered man more feared than respected, might be capable of securing the peace and restoring a sense of order. Both are sorely needed in a country strewn with land mines, bedeviled by a police force whose main investigative technique is to beat confessions out of suspects, and beset by an economy in which garment workers can earn twice as much as $20-a-month college professors and which $470 million in international assistance keeps afloat.

“I think Hun Sen has surprised everyone by turning out to be something of a closet intellectual,” said an aid agency director who requested anonymity, as did many of those interviewed for this story. “He reads voraciously, he’s mastered French and can get by in English, he is certainly saying the right things about democracy, and I’ve never been to a meeting with him in which he wasn’t extremely well prepared.”

Hun Sen was born in 1951 in Kompong Cham province, the third of six children of tobacco- and rice-farming parents. In 1964, just as the Vietnam War was intensifying and the seeds of revolution were sprouting in Cambodia, he moved to Phnom Penh. He was so poor that he lived in a pagoda that offered him free room and board.

A boyhood friend recounted playing a game that involved tossing bottle caps into a chalked square on the sidewalk. “If you lost, no big deal,” the friend said. “But not Hun Sen. If he lost, he’d want to fight. He’d take on three or four boys. They’d get him down, but they couldn’t get him to surrender.”

By the time he was 19, Hun Sen was a Khmer Rouge company commander, fighting the U.S.-backed government of Lon Nol. Researchers say Hun Sen was no more than an insignificant cog in Pol Pot’s genocidal rule. Hun Sen likes to tell visitors that his fifth and most recent wound--the loss of an eye in 1975--was the result of a U.S. bombing raid. But the Americans had left Cambodia two years earlier. The wound was the result of shrapnel from government artillery. He had a glass eye made.

Hun Sen defected from the Khmer Rouge in 1977 to escape a purge, and he took refuge in Vietnam. He returned to Cambodia the next year with Vietnam’s invading Communist army, which eventually ended Pol Pot’s 44-month reign of terror and sent the guerrillas into the jungle.

Ruling Cambodia for the next decade, Vietnam appointed Hun Sen foreign minister in 1979 and prime minister in 1985.

After Vietnam’s withdrawal, Hun Sen lost a U.N.-organized election to Ranariddh in 1993 but bullied his way into sharing power as co-prime minister. He overthrew the son of King Norodom Sihanouk in 1997, and the next year won a new election. Much to Hanoi’s chagrin, he has turned out to be a lapsed Communist, opening up Cambodia to a Wild West economy and removing any trappings of Marxism from the country’s political system.

At his five-acre, fortified residence in the suburb of Takhmau, Hun Sen works until 2 or 3 every morning, sometimes taking pills to induce sleep. He writes love songs, plays chess and pores over voluminous briefing papers, jotting notes in the margins in red ink, lighting one 555 brand cigarette from the butt of another, as radios tuned to his security network crackle in the background.

Stung by his own lack of formal schooling, and the awareness that he is looked down upon by Cambodia’s elite, he has developed a peasant’s veneration of education. Two of his six children are being educated in France and three in the United States, including a son who graduated last May from West Point.

Hun Sen traveled to New York for the ceremony and found that he liked the United States but hated Western food. “He was hungry the whole time,” said an aide.