Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER SIX
The Peasant King
We heard Hun Sen's helicopter long before we saw it—a sleek black dragonfly roaring
over the tree line. Old peasant women shielded their faces with
kramas
as the craft turned,
banked in a blue sky, and descended in its maelstrom of dust. As soon as it touched down
a door swung open and Cambodia's prime minister stepped into the sunshine. He was
dressed in grey military pajamas. He wore gold glasses perched beneath neatly parted
hair. The screech of the rotor blade gave way to triumphant music as Hun Sen smiled and
walked forward into a confected carnival scene celebrating his arrival. “Welcome Sam-
dech Hun Sen!” a voice intoned over the music, employing his official honorific. “Long
Live Samdech Hun Sen!” Students and rural folk who had waited for hours under plastic
marquees rose respectfully for the Cambodian national anthem, a scratchy recording made
in Sihanouk's time. Monks droned and chanted. Hun Sen mounted the stage and gripped
the lectern. The master of ceremonies announced, “We are all very fortunate to live in the
Samdech Techo era!”
In the Svay Antor district of Prey Veng, a hot dry heartland stretching from the Mekong
to the Vietnamese border, Operation Hun Sen was more exciting than anything that had
been seen in a long while. All morning local people had bumped along dusty village roads
to see him cut the ribbon on a new Buddhist
wat
—a candy-colored structure rising from
a nearby hill. Security was tight. Police and other heavies with curly earpiece radios set
up a cordon, using airport hand-scanners on grizzled rice farmers and barefoot children in
Angry Birds T-shirts. One district official stood nearby, wearing a white CPP baseball cap
and holding a two-way radio. He explained that the trip took a week for local authorities to
prepare, during which marquees were assembled and billboards of Hun Sen were erected.
“Prime Minister Hun Sen came once before, in 1998,” he remembered, “and every com-
mune got a school.”
Pich Ran, a 62-year-old rice farmer with a mouth half-full of gold teeth, drove his beat-
up Daelim scooter six kilometers to attend the event. “I wanted to see him for real, not
only on TV,” he said as we crouched in the shade, waiting for Hun Sen to descend. When I
