Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
humorous,” Stone wrote in his memoirs. “I fed him jokes for openers—but he improved
lunching with Hun Sen, Stephen Solarz, a Congressman who had first encountered him
during a visit to Phnom Penh in 1981, commented at the transformation of the “Cam-
bodian bumpkin” he remembered. It was as if Hun Sen had been “shaped up by media
consultants.”
28
In a sense he had. Despite his growing reputation as a reformist, Hun Sen's moves were
always strategic. Multiparty democracy, like Vietnamese-style communism, was just an-
other ill-fitting foreign suit, to be adopted and shed at will. “All my life I regarded myself
as a pragmatic person,” he told the
Washington Post
during his stop in the US capital. “I
stayed under the so-called umbrella of Marxist-Leninism when I had to, but please don't
think everyone … who goes to church has the same beliefs.”
29
But what
did
Hun Sen stand for? While the Fukuyamas of the West hailed the global
triumph of liberalism, Cambodia had no history of democratic government or popular
sovereignty. One appealing model was Singapore, where Lee Kuan Yew had used strong-
handed methods to build a modern, prosperous, and tightly controlled island-state. Lee,
like Hun Sen, had no tolerance for dissent. Along with Malaysia's long-serving prime
minister Mahathir Mohamad, he rejected the idea of individual rights, arguing that “Asian
values” put a greater weight on collective prosperity. “Every time anybody wants to start
anything which will unwind or unravel this orderly, organized, sensible, rational society,
and make it irrational and emotional,” Lee said of modern Singapore, “I put a stop to it
without hesitation.”
30
History also weighed heavily on Hun Sen. He came of political age in a decade when
his government was isolated and punished by an alliance of outside powers more con-
cerned with Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia than the horrific crimes committed by
Pol Pot. Decades of Western double-standards had led Hun Sen to see human rights
and democracy as little more than moral flags of convenience for the advance of super-
power interests. The idea of a universal democratic standard by which all nations could
be judged, usually by leaders in Washington, London, or Geneva, was nothing more than
a self-serving fiction. There were no international standards, he would later argue, “ex-
cept in sports.”
31
On November 14, 1991, after more than two decades in exile, Prince Sihanouk returned to
Cambodia from Beijing. He was accompanied by his wife, his son and an entourage that
included a squad of stony-faced North Korean bodyguards (a gift from Kim Il-sung) and
four Chinese chefs. Standing alongside Prime Minister Hun Sen, he rode into the capital
in a black 1963 Chevrolet Impala convertible—a favorite make from the halcyon days of
