A False Dawn - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 86

Sen had boosted the size of his bodyguard to 1,500 men, and had equipped them with
heavier weapons. 76 During the killing there were virtually no CPP casualties. But it was
also true that Ranariddh's policies had done much to ratchet up the tension. One former
royalist minister recalled that Ranariddh had surrounded himself with “daredevil” army
men who fed him the idea that the power he craved could be achieved by force. In real-
ity, the fighting was the culmination of months of mutual escalation between two rival
centers of power bent on maximizing their own control. “It was a mini-civil war,” said
Gordon Longmuir, then Canada's ambassador to Cambodia. “It was no coup, not in the
ordinary sense.”
Coup or not, Hun Sen's act of force majeure left the Paris Agreements in tatters. On July
11, 1997, five days after the fighting had ended, foreign embassies in Phnom Penh re-
ceived a letter from the Cambodian parliament. To help repair the damage caused by the
fighting, it read, “We appeal to you to give us humanitarian assistance, either financial
or material.” The smoke had barely cleared on a city looted and destroyed by Hun Sen's
troops. Now he was asking for help to pay for the damage. Diplomats were astounded.
One European envoy described the demand as “insulting.” 77 Foreign investment nose-
dived. Some governments suspended aid. Cambodia's seat at the UN was vacated un-
der American pressure and the country's long-awaited admission into ASEAN was post-
poned.
The reaction was especially strong in Washington, where conservative figures lined up
to put their boots into “Saddam Hun Sen.” 78 Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican Congress-
man representing a large Khmer diaspora community in California, denounced the viol-
ence and criticized Ambassador Quinn for trying to appease Hun Sen. Quinn and the State
Department, he said, had failed in their responsibility “to deter Hun Sen and his forces
from violence.” Rohrabacher's aide Al Santoli, an author and decorated Vietnam veteran,
went further, attacking Quinn for kowtowing to “a little murderous dictator.” 79 These crit-
ics in Congress combined the democratic triumphalism of the post-Cold War years with a
hangover from the US humiliation in Vietnam. Hun Sen, in their view, was a dictator and
a war criminal. Not only had he been installed by communists, but he had been installed
by Vietnamese communists. Rohrabacher later dubbed him “a new Pol Pot.” 80
Aware of his government's need for foreign aid and legitimacy, Hun Sen went to great
lengths to maintain a mirage of constitutionality. In Washington, the CPP assembled a
crack team of lawyers and corporate strategists to counter the criticisms coming from
Congress and advance its own version of events. (The party would eventually spend
$550,000 on Beltway spin-doctors.) 81 In Phnom Penh, the coalition government was kept
intact; Hun Sen remained “second” prime minister. Ranariddh was removed and replaced
with a pliant Funcinpec colleague named Ung Huot, who had directed the party's 1993