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the stamp of Hun Sen's lawyers. “The investigating judge was so pale, he was like he had
almost fainted for handling these cases,” Virak later told me. While he was being ques-
tioned, a police officer poked his head through the door and asked the judge if Virak's
wife could come in and say goodbye to her husband. The judge hadn't yet announced
whether Virak would be jailed and tried, but it was now clear that everybody was reading
from a prepared script. The decision to lock him up had already been made.
Civil society leapt to the defense of the five dissidents. Rights activists formed an Al-
liance for Freedom of Expression and yellow ribbons were handed out and worn in solid-
arity. Western diplomats made public statements conjuring up the specter of Burma-style
isolation and pariah status. Since UNTAC, Cambodia's flourishing civil society had been
mostly insulated from government attacks. Now Hun Sen had apparently crossed a red
line. “It is bad news for Cambodia, and will affect it both in the field of tourism and in
was more outspoken: “When governments are afraid they do stupid things,” he told the
press, “and to do this is really stupid.” Cambodia, he later said, had to “decide whether
it's going to be a real democracy or whether it's going to move inexorably toward a one-
party state.”
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As the international pressure mounted, Hun Sen appeared to relent. A few days after
Mussomeli lashed out at the arrests, US officials learned that Hun Sen was willing to re-
lease the group of activists. All he needed, Mussomeli later told me, was “a pretext to
back down. We were eager to help him find one.” The timing was good. Two weeks later
US Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill was scheduled to visit Phnom Penh to
inaugurate a new $47 million US embassy compound in Phnom Penh. When Hill arrived
he met Hun Sen and warned him that if he didn't release the shackles, people in Wash-
Hill ended, Mussomeli said, “Hun Sen immediately informed us that he would release the
three activists as a 'gift' for the new embassy. They were released within an hour.”
Overnight the political climate thawed. Sam Rainsy sent letters to Ranariddh and Hun
Sen expressing regret for his “defamatory” comments and promising to stop blaming Hun
Sen for the 1997 grenade attack. In return he received a royal amnesty and was mobbed
by supporters at the airport when he returned on February 10, 2006. Cheam Channy was
released from prison, and the charges against the five civil society leaders were dropped
after they wrote their own letters of “apology.” Observers scrambled to explain the gov-
ernment's apparent about-face. Had Hun Sen capitulated to Western and US pressure?
Had he finally decided to loosen his grip? The reconciliation had gone farther than even
many government critics had expected. Rainsy himself hailed a “new chapter in Cambod-
ian history” and said his country's politicians were finally “seeing the light.”
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