The Second Revolution - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 38

Bill Herod, an American aid worker with the Church World Service (CWS), was “quite
taken with how bright he was, and what a quick study.”
Hun Sen's keen intellect was matched by an equally combustible temper. In the early
years he went everywhere armed, and reputedly shot out an air-conditioning unit in a fit
of rage during a cabinet meeting in the early 1980s. 28 Another spiteful encounter took
place in the early months of 1979. After he received false reports that his wife Bun Rany
had been killed by the Khmer Rouge, 29 several sources claim that Hun Sen became en-
gaged to a young woman who worked in his ministry. But when Rany returned to Phnom
Penh in February 1979 with the couple's infant son, Hun Sen broke off the engagement.
“I don't think he really wanted to go back to the first wife, but there was pressure from
the old [party] people and the specialists who worked in the ministry,” said Kong Korm,
an official who worked in the Foreign Ministry throughout the 1980s before defecting to
the opposition. Korm said there was an acrimonious scene at the ministry when Hun Sen
broke the news to the young woman. When she protested, he became enraged and threw
his pistol on a table nearby. Soon afterwards Hun Sen shipped her off to serve at the PRK
embassy in Hanoi. *
From its very first days in power, the PRK faced a fight for its survival. The aim of “build-
ing socialism,” trumpeted in official propaganda, immediately took a back seat next to
feeding the population, fighting the civil war, and reconstituting a broken society. Im-
provization was the order of the day. To stave off starvation, the government disbanded
the communal worksites and encouraged a return to the family economy of small rur-
al landholdings, while a new program of partial collectivization—the gathering of peas-
ant smallholders into krom sammaki , or “solidarity groups”—never really got out of first
gear.
The authorities also turned a blind eye to the re-emergence of small-scale private enter-
prise. Phnom Penh came back to life. The streets soon filled up with food sellers, bicycle
repair-men, and other petty traders. 30 Until the introduction of a new Soviet-printed riel
currency in March 1980, transactions were conducted in Thai baht, Vietnamese dong, and
gold retrieved from personal stashes buried during the civil war years. Smuggling across
the Thai border thrived and the influx of consumer contraband—food, beer, clothing, mo-
torcycles, and electronics—formed one of the country's few bridges to the West.
Throughout the 1980s, Cambodia remained closed to most of the noncommunist world.
Foreign visitors invariably wound up at the Sammaki, an expatriot melting pot where
Cuban diplomats and Russian KGB officers rubbed elbows with occasional aid work-
ers and even the odd Western celebrity. (Julie Andrews visited on an orphanage tour in
1982.) 31 Most of the capital remained in a state of decay. Visiting for the first time in late
1980, Herod described Phnom Penh as a Spartan city with no power or running water,