A False Dawn - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 80

armed offensives, including another RCAF loot-and-pillage mission during the 1996 dry
season, had failed to secure. Sary's reward consisted of a royal amnesty that overturned
the death penalty handed down by the PRK in 1979. His forces were incorporated into
the national army, and he was allowed to retain control of Pailin, where he returned to
augmenting his vast and hidden wealth. Now just 2,000 Khmer Rouge remained in An-
long Veng, a remnant of bedraggled diehards professing loyalty to a triumvirate of Pol
Pot, Nuon Chea, and Ta Mok, a one-legged military commander who had earned the nick-
name “The Butcher” during the purges of the Eastern Zone in 1977 and 1978.
Pol Pot himself continued to live a will-o'-the-wisp existence. After the government
offensives of 1994, he had relocated to Kbal Ansoang, perched on the crest of the Dan-
grek Mountains eight kilometers north of Anlong Veng. As his movement crumbled, Pol
Pot retreated back into the past, restaging his old revolution in a new form. Buddhist pa-
godas and markets that had opened in Khmer Rouge areas were shuttered. Trade with
neighboring areas was banned. Local farmers were rounded up and subjected again to the
miseries of collectivization. In this way, Pol Pot tried to mimic the austere conditions that
had led to his seizure of power in April 1975. Facing defeat, he hoped to conjure up a
repeat of the movement's lone triumph.
Ieng Sary's defection also played into the fragile balance of power in Phnom Penh.
For Funcinpec and the CPP, an alliance with the defecting Khmer Rouge forces suddenly
loomed as a rich prize, a means of tipping the scales of power decisively in their favor. In
late 1996 both prime ministers paid visits to Pailin to woo Sary's support. Hun Sen's trip
in October was a highly publicized affair in which the two former enemies grasped each
other's hands like long lost comrades and prayed together at a local pagoda. Hun Sen
then laid on a feast at which government soldiers and their Khmer Rouge counterparts
ate, drank, and danced the Lambada—a surreal coda to years of blood-soaked conflict. 52
As 1997 dawned, Hun Sen's relationship with Ranariddh reached another low. Horse-
trading and alliance-building proceeded at a frenzied pace, as both parties cast an eye to-
ward national elections due in mid-1998. Ranariddh announced the formation of a new
political alliance with Rainsy and Son Sann's faction of the BLDP, which he dubbed the
National United Front (NUF). Two years after throwing Rainsy out of his party, Ranar-
iddh now described him as “respected” and “beloved.” 53 Rainsy didn't much trust the
prince, but described him as “the lesser of two evils” next to Hun Sen, who was “like
someone from a different planet,” a “wild man” who trampled on democratic norms. 54
The Ranariddh-Rainsy-Son Sann axis was a potentially formidable bloc, a resurrec-
tion of the anti-Vietnamese and anticommunist alliance of the 1980s. The royalists, for
all their failures, still drew on a deep well of support for Sihanouk, while the KNP's sup-
port was soaring on the back of Rainsy's anti-Vietnamese agitations and the party's strong
roots in a nascent labor union movement. As the political temperature rose, threats flew