When the War Was Over (99 page)

Without question, Hun Sen had the home team's advantage in the election. His party ran the country down to the village level and was willing to use every sort of intimidation, including violence, to win. No matter what was written in the Paris Peace Accords, the foreigners were incapable of controlling his party machine. But Hun Sen and his party were known for all their corruption and repression as well, which played to the advantage of the newcomers. Ranariddh, who had lived abroad since 1974, had the allure of the association with his father and that distant past people now preferred to remember as a golden democratic age. At forty-seven years of age, Ranariddh looked more like the Sihanouk the people remembered than Sihanouk himself. Son Sann's Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party had an appeal among students and city intellectuals.

The Khmer Rouge boycotted the elections. Early into the mission they began pulling back. They had expected the UN to neuter the Phnom Penh government. When it became evident that would never happen, the Khmer Rouge stopped cooperating. In the summer of 1992 they refused to disarm with the other armies. When Pol Pot balked at disarming, so did Hun Sen. At the same time, they also excluded UNTAC officials from entering their zones. By then UNTAC intelligence had figured out that the Khmer Rouge controlled only one percent of the population, and while their zones along the Thai border contained lucrative gem mines and forest, which they exploited mercilessly, the Khmer Rouge did not control a single province in the country. By 1993 UNTAC decided elections could be held without the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge promised to disrupt the balloting.

Election preparations went ahead. Some 4.8 million voters were registered. But the CPP proceeded with its secret plan of sabotage. While the Khmer Rouge could only intimidate voters near their zones, the CPP could target Ranariddh's FUNCINPEC party throughout the country, disrupting campaigns, destroying headquarters, and killing over 100 FUNCINPEC party members. The UN never figured out how to bring CPP under effective control.

As the May 1993 election date drew near, the final problem arose in the form of Prince Sihanouk. The prince had spent more time in China than
Cambodia during the peacekeeping mission and had alternately applauded and condemned the UN. He now seemed to be favoring his old allies the Khmer Rouge. He planned to sit out the elections and remain in his Beijing mansion, promising to form a four-party government including the Khmer Rouge if something went wrong during the elections. It took last-minute pressure from French President François Mitterrand and the UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to convince Sihanouk to be in Cambodia for these extraordinary elections. He arrived with only one day to spare. A thunderstorm broke out on the night before balloting and many Cambodians feared for a few minutes that the Khmer Rouge had launched an attack.

On Sunday, May 23, the foreigners arose to a sunny morning and went to observe the balloting in their various roles as monitors, soldiers, and diplomats. What awaited them was not an election day but a celebration. Cambodians were dressed in their best sarongs. Families brought picnics. Nearly 90 percent of the eligible voters showed up. The rosiest of predictions proved remarkably cynical. Cambodians wanted to elect a government. The party they chose was Ranariddh's FUNCINPEC. It won 45 percent of the vote and fifty-eight seats in the National Assembly. Hun Sen's CPP won 38 percent and fifty-one seats.

Then Sihanouk moved against his son. Hun Sen had no intention of handing power over to Ranariddh. He sent emissaries first to Princess Monique, then to Sihanouk, asking that the prince arrange a “national reconciliation” that would allow Hun Sen to share power with Ranariddh. Perhaps for fear of his own safety, Ranariddh had left Cambodia and from abroad had refused to answer invitations from his father to come back to Phnom Penh and negotiate a compromise.

In the meanwhile, Hun Sen asked Sihanouk to assume all power. On June 3 Sihanouk decided to accept the invitation and become the head of state, prime minister, supreme commander of the armed forces and police, with Hun Sen and Prince Ranariddh reduced to deputy prime minister positions. When he heard of this, Ranariddh expressed “great surprise” in a letter to his father that ended the short-lived experiment.

Hun Sen didn't give up. The next theatrics involved another member of the royal family, Prince Chakrapong, who declared he would establish an “autonomous zone” in the east. Hun Sen used this threat, announced in a June 12 communiqué, to demand power. The next day Ranariddh returned to Phnom Penh, and on June 16 Sihanouk, with the backing of Mr. Akashi of the UN, proposed that Ranariddh and Hun Sen be named co-prime ministers, with Ranariddh the first prime minister. The son agreed to his father's
proposals. Sihanouk was crowned king. And Hun Sen was able to keep most of his government intact, sharing the top posts with Ranariddh, creating a purported unified military but keeping his own people in positions throughout the countryside. His CPP still effectively controlled Cambodia.

All this while the Khmer Rouge had tried unsuccessfully to drive out Hun Sen and the UN mission through guerrilla warfare. Still, they had not been penalized for pulling out of the peace plan or for trying to disrupt the balloting. They continued to fight from their own areas and watched as a new constitution was enacted in Phnom Penh, as Cambodians tried to force the government to end its corruption and adhere to the promise of human rights and liberty.

Prince Ranariddh had offered Khieu Samphan membership in the new government but he declined, saying he could act as an advisor instead. The Khmer Rouge understood by 1994 that their only hope of enjoying any power in the country was to become a legitimate political party again. But the whole landscape had changed. Soldiers and their families were defecting to the government side to escape the sad, cruel regimentation of the Khmer Rouge. While life on the other side was plagued by corruption and political repression, it offered choices, wealth, and far greater freedom. Together Ranariddh and Hun Sen succeeded in rallying thousands of Khmer Rouge soldiers to their side. Then in 1996 Ieng Sary brokered a deal with Hun Sen, approved by Ranariddh, to switch sides. Ieng Sary was allowed to keep most of his soldiers and citizens and rule the Pailin area as a provincial leader.

That defection helped ignite political realignments everywhere. Ranariddh and Hun Sen saw the chance to break up the Khmer Rouge entirely and began separate negotiations with several top leaders around Pol Pot, including Son Sen, who had been Pol Pot's target in 1978 just before the Vietnamese invasion. But Pol Pot got wind of these talks and in June 1997 ordered the brutal murder of Son Sen and his family.

That, in turn, fueled the explosive rivalry that had grown between Hun Sen and Ranariddh, with each prime minister trying to win the loyalties of the very top Khmer Rouge figures. By the end of June it appeared as if the remaining Khmer Rouge leaders might turn over Pol Pot himself. Ranariddh's top general received permission to visit Pol Pot in distant Anlong Veng, the Khmer Rouge headquarters near the Thai border. His was the first sighting of Pol Pot since 1981. The Clinton administration,
which had made criminal prosecution of the Khmer Rouge a priority, began preparations for a trial, asking for help from Canada and Thailand.

Then Hun Sen made his move. Even though he had recruited more Khmer Rouge defectors than Ranariddh, Hun Sen accused the prince of creating an alliance with the Khmer Rouge and effectively staged a coup d'état. Alerted to the possibility, Ranariddh had left the country for France—a weakness he shared with his father—battles erupted in Phnom Penh, and Ranariddh's forces were overrun. Initially Sihanouk approved of Hun Sen's coup but after international condemnation, the king declared that his son the prince should be returned to office.

Instead, Hun Sen installed another Cambodian as the FUNCINPEC prime minister, and it would be a year before Ranariddh was able to return to Cambodia, thanks largely to international pressure.

And Pol Pot was lost. Hun Sen's coup d'état ended all cooperation for the handover of the Khmer Rouge leader to an international tribunal. Ill from malaria, Pol Pot was shown in public in a show trial orchestrated by his fellow Khmer Rouge leaders. They invited Nate Thayer of the
Far Eastern Economic Review
who filmed the proceedings.

Later that year, in October, Thayer was allowed to interview Pol Pot at Anlong Veng but the Khmer Rouge leader had repented nothing and repeated the allegations against the Vietnamese he voiced in his only previous interview, when he was still in power and spoke to me in Phnom Penh.

By then the Khmer Rouge holdouts had dwindled to little more than 1,000 soldiers. Ta Mok, Nuon Chea, and Khieu Samphan were still with Pol Pot but desperate to figure out how to escape arrest, trial, or execution. And Hun Sen wanted more defectors. In March 1998 he succeeded in bringing over the remaining group of soldiers who sided with Pol Pot and were under the figurehead control of Kae Pok, the surviving Khmer Rouge most directly responsible for the 1978 massacre of Hun Sen's former comrades in the Eastern Zone. Those soldiers became Hun Sen's advance party for the final assault on Pol Pot and his hideout.

With Hun Sen's soldiers backing them, the new defectors easily surmounted the defenses they themselves had helped erect and were in striking distance of Pol Pot. Ta Mok quickly evacuated the encampment and escaped deeper inside the forest, forcing the now desperately ill Pol Pot to travel with him, up steep hills and through treacherous jungle. When word reached the outside world that Pol Pot was on the move again, the Clinton administration immediately approved a last-ditch effort to capture the leader and bring him to trial. But it was too late. On the evening of April 15,
1998, Pol Pot died of a heart attack in his sleep, or so his captors said. An autopsy was not allowed, although foreign journalists did view the body and film it, proving without a doubt that this was Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge movement was dead. The Clinton administration continued to pursue a trial of the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders.

Before he died Pol Pot had admitted to one of his supporters that he knew “that many people in the country hate him and think he's responsible for the killings,” according to Stephen Heder, who interviewed the supporter. “He said that he knows many people died. When he said this he nearly broke down and cried. There were people to whom he felt very close, and he trusted them completely. Then in the end they made a mess of everything.”

On April 17, 1998, Pol Pot's body was cremated on a pyre ignited by tires at a clearing just inside Cambodia on the Thai border.

Pol Pot's death effectively ends the Khmer Rouge movement, but what he wrought still haunts the country. The consequences continue from the leadership by the men who became adults under the Khmer Rouge movement—Hun Sen best exemplifying the phenomena—to the deformed society that requires at least another generation to recover.

Hun Sen, Prince Ranariddh, and King Sihanouk still struggle over control of Cambodia and their lives will be chronicled in the press. It seems appropriate to conclude a summary of what has happened to some of the other people who figured prominently in these pages.

Komphot in a sense ended up representing the lost generation of Cambodians who were young leaders when war broke out and were disenfranchised ever since. He became one of the half million Cambodians who fled their country and spread across the globe. He left Cambodia at the time of the Vietnamese invasion and reached the Thai border in May 1979, after a fourmonth trek across the country. “My mistake was I thought I would be greeted with open arms,” Komphot said. “That the outside world would be sympathetic to us.”

Fortunately, the Canadian embassy accepted him as a refugee and he escaped being returned to Cambodia. (In June 1979 the Thai army forced 40,000 Cambodians back across a dangerous area of the border, and many perished. Soon afterward the international community convinced the Thais to take a far more humane attitude toward the Cambodian refugees.)

While waiting to leave, Komphot volunteered to act as a translator for Cambodians applying to enter the United States. At year's end he left for Montreal. He became a Canadian citizen and has been working there ever since as a banker specializing in international economics. He helped his cousin's family resettle in Los Angeles.

These two became haunting symbols of the many victims of the Khmer Rouge. Before she was murdered at Tuol Sleng, Bophana wrote to her beloved husband, Deth, that she would stick it through, that she wanted to “see the black and white of this story, how it will end.” Her wish was granted posthumously. Rithy Panh, himself a Cambodian refugee who had settled in France and become an award-winning filmmaker, picked up this book in French translation and was captivated by the story of Bophana. His feature film,
Neak Sre,
or
People of the Rice Field,
had just won a Palme d'argent at Cannes Film Festival—the first Khmer-language film to win such an honor. Rithy contacted me and I freely gave him permission to use my material for a film about Bophana and Deth. The resulting movie,
Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy
, became the first Khmer-language film on the Cambodian holocaust. It was shown at the Venice Film Festival and won a top award at the 1996 International Documentary Film Festival in Marseilles.