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one of her attackers opened a bottle of nitric acid and tipped it over her head. The singer
awoke, kicking and screaming as the acid ate into her flesh. Marina, just 16 years old
at the time of the attack, was left severely disfigured. As she later told journalists from
a hospital bed in Ho Chi Minh City, “I look like a ghost, so I hate myself, detest my-
self. Everyone is afraid of me, including my three-year-old niece. She stopped calling me
mom. She will only touch my fingers.”
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It was hard to imagine what could possibly have justified such an inhuman attack. Eye-
witnesses quickly identified Marina's attacker as Khoun Sophal, the wife of a govern-
ment official who was having an affair with the teenaged singer. A court ordered Soph-
al's arrest, but, as so often, nothing happened. The police claimed Sophal was nowhere to
be found, even though she was reportedly living at home as if nothing had happened. A
decade later Sophal and her husband Svay Sitha divorced, and Sitha admitted his wife's
were ever laid against Sophal—or anyone else.
The cruelty and callousness that allowed jilted wives to order and commit such brutal
attacks on young women also had its echo in history. As the historian Michael Vickery has
written, patterns of sudden and extreme violence had deep roots in Cambodia, especially
against those groups and individuals defined in some way as enemies. Though cruel viol-
ence found its fullest expression under Pol Pot, it long predated Democratic Kampuchea,
stemming from cultural notions of face, honor, and revenge, in which personal grudges
pattern persisted. People like Khoun Sophal continued to commit the most appalling acts
of personal violence, untroubled by remorse and unchecked by effective legal restraints.
For Singapore's prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, Cambodia's leaders were “utterly mer-
ciless and ruthless, without humane feelings”. The historian Margaret Slocomb likened
them to mythical gods:
They do what they like, they exist on another higher plane, they believe they have rights which
usurp the true rights of the masses, they sit up there in Valhalla, eat grapes, love their wenches,
count their money, and occasionally hurl down thunderbolts to remind the masses who they are.
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By the end of the 1990s, things were turning out well for Hun Sen. The 1998 election had
worked its democratic alchemy, giving his seizure of power a pluralistic sheen. Shortly
afterward he flew to New York to reclaim Cambodia's seat at the UN, and, in April 1999,
after nearly two years' delay, the country was finally admitted into ASEAN. For Lee
Kuan Yew, the calculation of outside powers was simple: “no country wanted to spend
admission into ASEAN was a long-awaited trophy of international acceptance, the sort of
recognition he had craved for more than a decade.
