The Wages of Peace - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 55

respite from the political warfare that raged between the four Cambodian factions. After
so many years of exile, the prince still retained his symbolic power. Many Cambodians,
especially those of the older generations, saw Sihanouk as the nation's best and perhaps
only hope for peace after decades of violence. Standing on the banks of the Tonlé Sap,
Sihanouk presided over the annual Water Festival—the first royal to do so since his over-
throw in 1970. He watched a performance of the reconstituted Royal Ballet, and then par-
ticipated in a ceremony in which the achars , the white-robed Buddhist laymen, read the
future of the crops in the wax of melted candles.
The tranquil atmosphere didn't last long. Two weeks after Sihanouk's homecoming,
another famous exile made his return to Phnom Penh. Instead of cheering crowds, the
PDK's Khieu Samphan was welcomed by a government-organized lynch mob that ran-
sacked his apartment and cornered him in an upstairs room, along with PDK defense chief
Son Sen, while Hun Sen materialized in an adjacent building with a megaphone call-
ing for “calm.” It was only after protestors began stringing up a wire noose in the street
that police intervened and bundled Samphan, “his bleeding head ignominiously bandaged
with a pair of Y-fronts,” into a waiting car and put him on a flight back to Bangkok. 33 His
return had lasted just eight hours.
The “spontaneous” attack on Samphan, who had returned to Cambodia to take his seat
on the SNC, gave some indication of how the SOC was approaching the coming of free
elections. Charles Twining, who had returned to Cambodia two weeks earlier as the head
of a new US mission operating out of a suite at the Cambodiana Hotel, said the country's
sudden opening had clearly “discombobulated” the SOC. Government institutions were
weak, with just “two or three capable people” in each ministry. “The international pres-
ence coming in, which was supposed to create a level playing field, would be a threat to
[the SOC's] survival, unless they found a way to play along with it.” 34 Forced by the su-
perpowers to accept multiparty elections, Hun Sen and his colleagues were determined to
give themselves a head start.
The first order of business for the SOC was to sweep away the last trappings of an un-
popular communism. In August, as Soviet power crumbled in Moscow, the government
had removed statues of Lenin, Marx, and Cambodian revolutionary heroes from ministry
buildings and public places. References to Marxism-Leninism were scrubbed from offi-
cial documents, and the KPRP's red party insignia was exchanged for a blue logo featur-
ing a devada , a Buddhist angel, sprinkling divine gifts.
The rebranding was completed at the Sixth Party Congress in mid-October, just before
the signing of the Paris Agreements. The KPRP renamed itself the Cambodian People's
Party (CPP), and announced the creation of a system of political pluralism. It released
some 2,000 political prisoners—including those arrested during the Ung Phan purge of
May 1990—and pledged to respect human rights and the formation of independent polit-