Potemkin Democracy - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 98

gressmen like Dana Rohrabacher. In addition to receiving financial support from Khmer
communities in Long Beach and Massachusetts, the Cambodian opposition enjoyed the
political backing of the International Republican Institute (IRI), an arm of the Nation-
al Endowment for Democracy set up by the Reagan administration in 1983 to promote
the global spread of democracy. Unlike other US-funded democracy promotion groups,
which claimed to be neutral and nonpartisan, the IRI made no attempt to hide its pref-
erence for the SRP. Funding, advice, and technical assistance were channeled solely to
Rainsy's party, which IRI described, in Burma-fashion, as “the democratic opposition.” 24
During a visit to Washington in September 2002, Republican Senator John McCain, IRI's
chairman, presented Rainsy with the IRI-Heritage Freedom Award, describing him as “a
genuine hero.” 25
But the SRP leader had many different guises. At international donor meetings, Rainsy
was a Western-educated technocrat, making principled calls for fiscal responsibility. To
his friends in Washington he was a democratic dissident and freedom crusader, a Khmer
avatar of Vaclav Havel or Aung San Suu Kyi, who stood with humility on the right side
of history. But in front of a Cambodian crowd—whether in suburban Long Beach or rural
Kampong Speu—he struck a more traditional pose. Like his father, Rainsy was a patriot,
fighting to free his country from the clutches of the historic enemy—Vietnam.
This was the predominant theme during Rainsy's election campaign stops in 1998,
when he gave fiery speeches branding Hun Sen a “Vietnamese puppet” and pledged to
“send the yuon immigrants back.” 26 Rainsy's speeches drew little distinction between il-
legal immigrants, the Vietnamese government, Vietnamese business interests, and ethnic
Vietnamese who had lived in Cambodia for generations. All were simply “ yuon .” At the
postelection Democracy Square rallies, Rainsy denounced the CPP as yuon and thmil (un-
believers), and told a crowd that he would “not form a coalition with one who has a yuon
… head and a Khmer body,” a statement that could easily have come from Pol Pot. 27 At
one demonstration a riled-up mob scaled the Cambodia-Vietnam Friendship Monument
near the Royal Palace and tried to set it on fire, while chanting anti-Vietnamese and an-
tigovernment slogans. 28 During the postelection protests, at least four ethnic Vietnamese
were killed by angry mobs. 29
All the while, the pro-SRP press churned out stories scapegoating the Vietnamese for
everything from outbreaks of food poisoning in Phnom Penh to a fuel leak on a plane
scheduled to carry Sihanouk to Beijing in 2000. 30 Rainsy wasn't the only figure to em-
ploy racial rhetoric, but for a self-proclaimed liberal democrat it was clearly problematic.
To many otherwise sympathetic foreign observers it sent the message that he was more
interested in playing the firebrand than in working constructively with the government.
“The impression you had [of Rainsy] was very little flexibility, very little compromise,”
recalled another former diplomat. “It was hard to take him seriously sometimes.” But