A False Dawn - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 72

Within a year of UNTAC's departure, things were starting to unravel. The UN presence
had helped foster an active civil society and rambunctious press, but the government
still showed little tolerance for dissent. In late 1994 the media was chilled by a series
of violent attacks on reporters investigating official corruption. On September 7, Nuon
Chan, editor of the Samleng Yuvachun Khmer (“Voice of Khmer Youth”) newspaper, was
gunned down in broad daylight in Phnom Penh by two men on a motorbike. Two months
later, Chan Dara, a reporter for Koh Santepheap (“The Island of Peace”), was fatally shot
while driving away from a restaurant in Kampong Cham. Both journalists had written
extensively on corruption, and Nuon Chan had previously received warnings from the in-
formation and interior ministries about his paper's probes into corruption involving senior
Funcinpec and CPP figures. 15 The government promised investigations, but no one was
ever brought to justice. It was to become a familiar pattern.
One of the few to speak out against corruption was the new finance minister, Sam
Rainsy. Along with his wife, Tioulong Saumura, the deputy governor of the Cambodian
National Bank, Rainsy emerged as one of the government's few voices for reform, spear-
heading a campaign to root out corruption, centralize the budget, and introduce a modern
system of revenue collection. Possessed of seemingly inexhaustible reserves of pluck and
self-righteousness, Rainsy positioned himself as a gadfly and a noble dissenter—one of
the few incorruptible politicians in Cambodia.
Like Ranariddh, Sam Rainsy was the scion of a Cambodian political family. His grand-
father had been a leading member of the Democrat Party in the 1940s and his father,
Sam Sary, was a high-ranking member of Sihanouk's government. Described by Time
magazine as “a suave, Paris-educated ladies' man,” 16 Sary served as deputy prime min-
ister and represented Cambodia at the 1954 Geneva Conference, before falling out of Si-
hanouk's favor. In 1959 he was implicated in a right-wing plot against the government
and disappeared after fleeing to Thailand, presumed killed by one of his foreign patrons. 17
In 1965, harassed by Sihanouk's police, Rainsy's mother, In Em, took the family to live
in Paris, where Rainsy would remain for the next 25 years.
Rainsy later described Sary's disappearance and the family's flight to France as a trau-
matizing experience, and a formative one. Even though he was just ten years old when
his father disappeared, he recalled the strong influence of Sary's anticommunist politics.
“My father was in favor of a strict neutrality—that Cambodia should not move closer to
the communist world,” Rainsy told me in 2009. “This has marked my background and
my conviction that communism is oppressive: that freedom is essential and that we have
to fight for [it].” Later on, during a student trip to London in 1968, Rainsy encountered
the writings of the Anglican American pastor Frank Buchman, who had founded the Mor-
al Rearmament movement in the late 1930s. Buchman's revivalist doctrine preached the
importance of having a “clear moral perspective” on life. In his memoirs, Rainsy recalled