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visit each year to marvel at the great temple-city of Angkor Wat, one of the wonders of
the premodern world. Today's visitor encounters a friendly people and a small country
rushing to catch up with the future, seemingly impatient to leave a horrific past behind.
Cambodia's journey to the present has been tumultuous. For two decades after their
overthrow by the Vietnamese army in 1979, the Khmer Rouge lived on. Throughout the
1980s, China, the United States, and their Southeast Asian allies cynically preserved the
movement as a bulwark against the new Soviet-aligned regime that had replaced it in Ph-
nom Penh. The ensuing civil war dragged on for more than a decade. Then, as the Cold
War thawed and a new international order dawned, Cambodia was repackaged as a demo-
cracy. A peace plan was signed and the country became the subject of one of the most am-
bitious and expensive United Nations peacekeeping missions ever mounted. After years
of isolation, Cambodia opened to the world. Nongovernmental organizations and char-
ities mushroomed. Foreign aid typhooned in. A victim of Cold War power politics was
offered the blessings of a global community newly confident in its ability to plan and en-
gineer democratic government.
But the democratic renaissance, such as it was, was short-lived. The government that
took office following the UN-organized 1993 election was an unsteady coalition between
Hun Sen of the Cambodian People's Party (CPP), which had ruled the country since 1979,
and Prince Norodom Ranariddh, the son of Norodom Sihanouk, who had led Cambod-
ia to independence in 1953. Neither leader had much interest in democracy. Cambodians
had lived under authoritarian leaders since the time of Angkor, and it wasn't long before
the old patterns reasserted themselves. In 1997 Hun Sen ousted Ranariddh by force and
seized power for himself, leaving the UN's democratic plans in tatters.
The CPP's stabilizing power brought decades of war to an end and opened Cambodia
to economic development and investment from abroad. When the Khmer Rouge finally
withered in the late 1990s, a new chapter in the country's history began—an era of peace
and economic advancement. But beneath a surface sheen of modernity and pluralism,
Hun Sen continued to rule in the old way, through guile and force, through gifts and
threats, through an intricate hierarchy of status and power. He has been in power ever
since.
I came to this story in early 2008, arriving in Cambodia as a reporter for the Phnom Penh
Post , one of the country's two English-language newspapers. The Post had an interest-
ing history. Its long-time editor-in-chief Michael Hayes had founded the paper with his
wife in July 1992, a few months into the UN mission. For its first five years, the paper
was printed in Bangkok and the new editions flown in by air every two weeks. Hayes,
a laconic American who always wore a crisp short-sleeved shirt and long pants despite
the steamy tropical heat, had captained the publication through 16 tumultuous years, and
the paper's front pages had captured all the landmark events of Cambodia's recent past:
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