Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
On January 11, 1979, four days after the fall of Phnom Penh, two American-made
Dakota aircraft bounced down on the cratered runway at Pochentong airport, carrying the
known about the four men who walked across the tarmac toward the dilapidated terminal
building. One of them was Pen Sovan, austere and steely, who had spent most of his 42
years steeped in the study of Marxist dialectics and theories of class struggle. Sovan, ap-
pointed the PRK's first prime minister in 1981, had joined the struggle against the French
as a teenager and was one of a large number of Cambodian revolutionaries who departed
for Vietnam after the 1954 Geneva Conference. After spending much of the past 20 years
undergoing political and military training in Hanoi, these “Khmer Viet Minh” (as Sihan-
ouk derisively termed them) were deployed to Phnom Penh with the expectation that they
would remain loyal to Vietnamese interests.
The other three men on the aircraft were part of a second group that had remained in
Cambodia, served DK, and then fled to Vietnam to escape Pol Pot's purges in 1977 and
1978. One of these was the new head of state, Heng Samrin, a slight former military cadre
who had served as a division commander in the Eastern Zone before fleeing to Vietnam in
October 1978. Two months later, Samrin surfaced at the head of the Kampuchean United
Front for National Salvation (KUFNS), the Vietnamese entity set up to act as a Cambod-
ian spearhead for Hanoi's assault against the Khmer Rouge. The third was Chea Sim, a
47-year-old who had begun his revolutionary career in the 1940s as an organizer among
the monkhood and rose to the post of district chief in the Eastern Zone. After defecting in
mid-1978, he became the PRK's first interior minister and soon carved out a prominent
niche in the new regime.
The last of the four wasn't much to look at. After years of living rough in the
maquis
,
Hun Sen was as thin as a rake, his frame worn away by chronic disease and malnutrition.
Despite having been appointed foreign minister, at just 26 years of age, Hun Sen seemed
uncomfortable in public settings, and his cheap glass eye, fitted in his left socket to re-
place the eye he lost during the final assault on Phnom Penh in April 1975, gave him an
occasional look of confusion. Ouk Bunchhoeun, a fellow DK defector who first met Hun
Sen in Vietnam in 1978, echoed what was probably a common view at the time: “I didn't
think he was really that important … I didn't think he would ever do anything very signi-
ficant like he has.”
3
Hun Sen, like many of the PRK leadership, came from humble beginnings. He was
houses spread along the Mekong north of Kampong Cham. He grew up in a small house
surrounded by clusters of bamboo, the youngest son of a family that farmed rice and
tobacco. Even as a schoolboy, villagers in Peam Koh Snar remembered young Bunnal
standing out from his peers. Ros Thorn, a former schoolmate, described him as a clever
