Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
boy with the ability to convince others. “He was different from other children. Bunnal
always came before class, never late. He was always an upright person … When he said
something, he would do it.”
It was an indication of the esteem with which Bunnal's parents regarded their youngest
son that they chose him to send downstream to continue his schooling in Phnom Penh.
They had little money, so the 13-year-old Bunnal boarded at Wat Neakavoan, a Buddhist
pagoda in the city's north, while attending the Indra Devi High School. To pay his
board, he served as a “pagoda boy,” carrying food and running errands for the resident
monks—an episode of hardship that would later become a much mythologized part of
Hun Sen's life story. It was here also that a teenaged Bunnal first became involved in
politics. Hun Sen later told the historian Ben Kiernan that he worked under the tutelage
of an older cousin, running small errands for the communist underground and delivering
loaves of bread stuffed with secret communications.
5
According to his official biography, Bunnal left school in 1969 and joined the com-
munist rebellion on April 14, 1970, shortly after hearing Sihanouk's broadcast call to
arms from Beijing. Hun Sen (he adopted the name in 1972) thrived in the rough condi-
tions of the
maquis
. He went about his missions with single-minded dedication, finding
purpose in the routines and discipline of military life. One of the few surviving photos
of Hun Sen from the Khmer Rouge years shows a skinny 19-year-old youth clad in dark
shirt and military beret, a pistol strapped to the side of his gaunt frame. He stares skep-
tically at the camera, his right hand poised as if ready to draw. Hun Sen climbed quickly
through the ranks. By the time of the fall of Phnom Penh in April 1975, he was serving as
an officer in the Special Forces regiment of Region 21, which commanded a 50-kilometer
stretch of the Vietnamese border. Before his defection, he would rise to become its deputy
commander.
6
Hun Sen fled to Vietnam much earlier than most of his colleagues. In June 1977, as
the purges of the Eastern Zone threatened to engulf his regiment, the young commander
crossed the border on foot with four companions, leaving behind his pregnant wife, Bun
Sam Hieng (later known as Bun Rany). For the first few months Hun Sen and his fellow
defectors were imprisoned and grilled by Vietnamese interrogators. Hun Sen, who took
the Vietnamese name Hai Phúc in a gesture of solidarity, soon won over his captors by
later told his biographers Julie and Harish Mehta that he forged a close relationship with
General Le Duc Anh, the Vietnamese general who would go on to lead the Vietnamese
military effort in Cambodia throughout the 1980s. Anh put Hun Sen in charge of forming
position in the Front that invaded Cambodia with the Vietnamese military. Now, walking
