Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Even the US, long one of Hun Sen's strongest critics, learned to stop worrying and
love (or at least tolerate) the strongman. In the aftermath of July 1997, when Congress
froze direct aid, the US State Department paid little attention to Cambodia. Policy was
controlled informally by a small group of human rights activists, democracy evangel-
ists, and Congressmen united by their strong animus against Hun Sen. At the center of
this nest of “Cambodia hawks” was Dana Rohrabacher, the California Republican who in
1998 had described Hun Sen as a “new Pol Pot” and called for his indictment on geno-
cide charges. Another was his fellow Republican Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority
whip and chairman of its Foreign Operations Subcommittee. In June 2003 McConnell in-
troduced the Cambodia Democracy and Accountability Bill, which promised the country
an additional $21.5 million in development assistance provided that “new leadership in
Cambodia has been elected in free and fair elections, and that Prime Minister Hun Sen is
no longer in power.”
The bill didn't pass, but its clear double-standard—that the only legitimate election was
one that selected the candidate preferred by the US—grated on many officials in Phnom
Penh. One of them was the new US ambassador Charles Ray. After the “hanging chads”
and the 2000 election fiasco in Florida, McConnell's attitude struck Ray as hubristic. “It
took us more than 200 years to get close to democracy,” he told me. “To expect a country
that's never had it to do it overnight, that's a bit—that's a reach.”
Ray's background and outlook were military. He grew up on a farm near Center, a
speck on the map of eastern Texas, close to the Louisiana border. His childhood ambition
echoed the old US Army pitch—to “see the world.” He signed up, served two tours in Vi-
etnam, and was decorated twice, before joining the State Department. When Ray arrived
in Phnom Penh in late 2002 as the first African-American ambassador to Cambodia, his
first impression was that it resembled Bangkok in the 1960s, except that the traffic was
lighter and “there wasn't quite as much street hustling.” The legacy of Vietnam also con-
tinued to color attitudes towards Cambodia back in Washington. Under the influence of
McConnell and Rohrabacher, Hun Sen remained a pariah, and ambassadors who tried to
argue for engagement were cast as apologists.
A particularly influential member of this circle was Paul Grove, McConnell's chief
aide and a staff director on the Senate Foreign Operations Subcommittee. Grove harbored
a fierce animosity toward Hun Sen. In the mid-1990s he had worked in Cambodia with
the International Republican Institute, which offered close support to Sam Rainsy's party.
During the March 1997 grenade attack, Grove's friend and successor at IRI, Ron Abney,
was injured by a piece of shrapnel—an event that triggered the FBI's aborted investiga-
tion into the attack (see Chapter 4). Like Abney, Grove was close with Rainsy and resen-
ted Hun Sen's ruthless consolidation of power. The only acceptable option for the US, he
and McConnell argued in a series of newspaper op-eds in 2002 and 2003, was “regime
