The Wages of Peace - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 51

Also waiting in the wings was Prince Sihanouk, who had scores of his own to settle.
During his years of exile the prince had stewed over the coup that had removed him
from power in 1970. Dividing his time between Beijing and Changsuwon, his sprawling
palace in the alpine hill-country north of Pyongyang, Sihanouk dreamt of sweeping back
to Cambodia to rescue his “children” and gather them in the embrace of a reconstit-
uted Sangkum regime. Sihanouk, too, saw the coming international intervention as an
obstacle—a rerun of the French protectorate, whose aims he would end up frustrating just
as surely as he had those of the French colonial officials who placed him on the throne in
1941.
The Paris Agreements, brokered by foreign governments that had grown tired of their
bloody Cambodian proxy war, thus created an accord which its main Cambodian signat-
ories had little real intention of honoring. The tectonic pressure of shifting geopolitical
interests was enough to get the Cambodian factions to the table, but as subsequent events
were to show, it was not enough to force them to work together constructively. The ambi-
tions of Sihanouk, Pol Pot, and Hun Sen all pulled in different directions. None of them
was interested in reconciliation—only in using an “indecent peace” to prosecute the old
war by new means.
A decade in the cockpit of international diplomacy had made a statesman of Hun Sen. By
1991, Cambodia's “puppet” leader had become far more polished. The scrawny political
novice of the early 1980s had put on weight and now dressed in French double-breasted
suits. Even Hun Sen's glass eye, part of a set of six custom-made in Japan, looked more
like the real thing. As the peace talks proceeded, the Western press suddenly began to take
notice of the serious 37-year-old who strode confidently in and out of official meetings.
In mid-1989 Hun Sen was the subject of profiles in the New York Times and the Washing-
ton Post , which charted his metamorphosis from “puppet” minister to key player in the
Cambodian imbroglio. 9
Hun Sen's opponents still saw him as a traitor and Vietnamese stooge, but what had
been clear to Le Duc Tho and the Vietnamese leadership was now becoming clear to
the rest of the world: puppet or not, Hun Sen was among the most astute and hardwork-
ing politicians involved in brokering a solution to the “Cambodian problem.” During the
peace talks of the late 1980s, he reportedly made do with as little as two hours sleep per
night, a schedule that may have led to his hospitalization in Tokyo in 1991. 10 His inter-
national prominence was such that diplomats who once spoke of the PRK as “the Heng
Samrin regime,” after the party's cardboard general secretary, now started referring to it
as “the Hun Sen government.” 11
With more exposure came more scrutiny. Many details from Hun Sen's past remained
obscure, particularly his years with the Khmer Rouge. In 1989, Thach Saren, a former