The Peasant King - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 121

sionism has identified sixteenth-century Cambodia as both a military powerhouse and—a
more jarring claim—the global birthplace of democracy. Sdech Kan's death then kicked
off centuries of instability that lasted until the late 1990s, when Hun Sen defeated the Kh-
mer Rouge and finally united Cambodia under a single government. 19 Sihanouk and his
achievements remain objects of secondary official praise, but it was only Hun Sen—the
Peasant King reborn—who brought true peace and unity.
According to the Swedish political scientist Astrid Norén-Nilsson, the Sdech Kan myth
has been disseminated widely by the joint efforts of academics, businessmen, and CPP-
controlled media outlets. Obsequious tycoons have commissioned statues of Kan bearing
what is clearly the prime minister's face. 20 Hun Sen has funded research into the location
of Sdech Kan's supposed capital, which was identified as a temple site in Kampong Cham
that has become the subject of extensive redevelopments and infrastructure works. 21 A
new topic on Sdech Kan was published in 2006 and the National Bank of Cambodia
has issued commemorative coins modeled on the sixteenth-century sloeung currency. 22 A
dramatic retelling of the story has even been staged by performers attached to Hun Sen's
personal bodyguard unit. 23
Hun Sen is not the first Cambodian leader who has looked to history for validation.
Sihanouk rooted himself in the Angkorian era, finding in its great temple-building sprees
a model for the “socialism” of his rule. Democratic Kampuchea, too, harked back to
Angkor's mass-mobilization of human resources, a foreshadowing of its own forced labor
practices. One CPP official described Hun Sen's adoption of the Sdech Kan myth as an
expression of his pride that “a normal peasant like him became much more powerful than
the king himself.” By rooting Hun Sen's rule in Cambodian traditions of kingship, the
Sdech Kan story depicted him as the legitimate leader of the country, displacing the le-
gitimacy of Sihanouk and the Cambodian royals once and for all. In another sense, it was
also an attempt to give his rule an aura of predestination, to fully subsume his country's
social and political life within a self-sustaining cosmology of power.
The Peasant King eventually even got his own “palace”—a massive block of concrete
and jet-black glass set on Russian Federation Boulevard near Phnom Penh's Art-Deco
railway station. The Peace Palace, as it soon became known in English, was unveiled in
time for the 2012 ASEAN summit and housed Hun Sen's offices and the Council of Min-
isters. 24 Built in a neofascist idiom of dominating size and symmetry, the Peace Palace
spoke of remote and unaccountable power. Towering over passers-by, it was the perfect
fit for the bloated symbolism and smothering consensus of Cambodia under Hun Sen.
On January 7, 2009, the CPP marked the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of Pol Pot with a
lavish ceremony at the Olympic Stadium in Phnom Penh. Fifty thousand people crammed
the concrete bleachers as dancers danced, singers sang, and a brass band marched around