Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
tration with friends from the DK years. The prime minister also had a foothold in Svay
Rieng due to the presence of another defector ally, Hok Lundy. In 1990 Lundy, later to
become Hun Sen's feared national police chief before his death in a helicopter crash in
2008, was appointed mayor of Phnom Penh, bringing the capital and its resources into the
prime minister's orbit.
46
The Chea Sim wing of the party was strongest in Cambodia's second city, Battambang,
where his nephew Ung Samy served as party secretary. Another of his allies headed the
party administrations in Banteay Meanchey and Siem Reap. Along with his control of
the police—Sin Song, the interior minister in the late 1980s, was a close associate, while
his brother-in-law Sar Kheng served as head of the Party Secretariat, which oversaw the
security apparatus—Chea Sim was able to wield power through official and unofficial
channels.
47
Marx never had many foot-soldiers in the PRK, but by the mid-1980s the nominally
socialist state had been subsumed under a tangle of personal patronage networks inde-
pendent of central control. The old patterns of Cambodian politics had begun to reassert
themselves. As under Sihanouk and Lon Nol, government posts began to be valued ac-
cording to their potential to generate income, while the power of higher-level officials
depended on their ability to distribute those positions. As Evan Gottesman wrote in his
detailed study of the PRK, “authority was handed down; money was passed upward.”
48
Those who couldn't play the patronage game saw their influence eroded. Pen Sovan
and the rest of the Hanoi veterans suffered due to their lack of a personal power-base.
Heng Samrin, who replaced Pen Sovan as the KPRP's general secretary in late 1981, also
faded from view. By the end of the decade he had become little more than a commun-
ist waxwork, wheeled out to press the flesh in eastern-bloc capitals and deliver rambling
speeches in a stilted socialist jargon soon destined, like the Soviet empire itself, for the
dustbin of history.
49
As politicians maneuvered in Phnom Penh, diplomatic initiatives to end the civil war
inched forward. Throughout the 1980s, the “Cambodian problem” centered around two
conflicting imperatives: the threat of a return of the Khmer Rouge to power, and the need
for a withdrawal of the Vietnamese occupation force. The PRK, with support from Hanoi
and Moscow, refused to recognize the Khmer Rouge as a legitimate party, demanding
diplomatic recognition and an end to Chinese support for Pol Pot as a precondition for the
withdrawal of Vietnamese troops. For China, the US, ASEAN, and their allies, the Viet-
namese military presence in Cambodia had to be addressed before any concessions would
be made in relation to the Khmer Rouge. In the acrimonious atmosphere that prevailed,
neither side was willing to give any ground. Both held out hopes that a battlefield victory
would tip the balance in their favor.
