Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Lon Nol army commander, wrote a letter to the
Washington Post
accusing Hun Sen's
troops of throwing hand grenades into occupied homes and slitting the throats of patients
at two hospitals in Kampong Cham in 1973. He also accused Hun Sen of taking part in
the massacre of rebellious Cham Muslims in September 1975 and commanding the cross-
Hun Sen merited “a circle of hell only a short rung removed from that reserved for Pol
Pot and his politburo.”
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What role did Hun Sen play under the Khmer Rouge? In his early years he served the
revolution enthusiastically, probably more so than he has since been willing to admit. Hun
Sen claims he remained in school until 1969 before joining the
maquis
at Sihanouk's re-
join the communists. According to Ben Kiernan's research, Hun Sen left the city in 1967,
and became a courier for insurgents in Memot district, close to his hometown in Kam-
Vietnamese biography deposited in the Central Stasi Archives in Berlin claims that Hun
Sen dropped out of school even earlier, in 1966.
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Hun Sen's official biography is notably silent about these early forays into political
activity, an occlusion probably intended to counter accusations that he was ever an eager
servant of the Khmer Rouge. The Cambodian leader has repeatedly denied having any
sympathy for Pol Pot's cause. “I had simply responded to the appeal of Prince Sihanouk,”
he later told his biographers. “I realized only in 1974 that it was not Sihanouk but the Kh-
Hun Sen claims he told superiors that his regiment was riddled with malaria and that he
was due back at hospital for treatment on his injured eye socket. In early 1977, as Pol
Pot began ordering bloody raids into Vietnam, Hun Sen again says he made only “token”
hard to believe that Hun Sen's hands are entirely clean, but historians have found little
evidence to contradict his version of events.
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As his international profile rose, Hun Sen moved to distance himself from his com-
munist past. In the late 1980s he had emerged as one of the PRK's most vocal advocates
for economic liberalization and was a driving force behind the constitutional reforms of
1989. If the party didn't bend, Hun Sen realized, it would break, like its counterparts in
Eastern Europe. A carefully managed tack toward the center, on the other hand, had many
benefits. It would win the regime sympathy in the West, and bolster the party's politic-
al position ahead of the coming peace. A resurgent capitalism, Hun Sen argued in 1988,
would help “develop the country, raise the standard of living of the people, and deprive
the far right of a weapon.”
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