Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Transport and Communications Minister Ros Chhun, a nephew of Chea Sim. As the
New
York Times
reported,
hundreds of people poured out of the slums and took revenge. They hauled the furniture out of
the house and built a bonfire. Then they set fire to the Jeep parked outside. They threw stones
through the windows and ripped new white tiles off the walls. The police were called, but most
of them had not been paid in months, so they just watched.
40
Tensions escalated the next day when police shot into crowds of protestors, killing at least
six and injuring many more. As protests swept through the tree-lined streets, the SOC au-
thorities banned demonstrations and deployed the police. Ung Phan, who had formed a
new political party after his release from prison, was attacked by unidentified gunmen as
he was driving on the outskirts of Phnom Penh in January 1992. Two bullets grazed his
back and a third lodged in his neck. He survived, but others were less lucky.
41
The violence in Phnom Penh underscored the fragility of the political settlement that
underpinned the Paris Agreements. As the protests and shootings spread, the UN's ad-
vance military mission, UNAMIC, remained silent. UNAMIC had no particular mandate
to intervene to halt the deterioration of the political situation, but its inaction undermined
the hope of many Cambodian protestors that foreign nations were committed to change.
42
As a curtain-raiser for the main UN mission, it boded ill.
The first UNTAC personnel arrived in the tense Cambodian capital at the beginning of
1992. The streets were soon filled with a multinational contingent from the four corners
of the globe. UNTAC employed 20,600 military, police, and civilian personnel from
over one hundred countries, who replaced the Vietnamese and Eastern bloc advisors
who had by then returned to their own collapsing countries of origin. Few UNTAC
staffers—“UNTACists,” in Sihanouk's coinage—had any previous experience of Cam-
bodia. They found themselves adrift in a scarred country still shaken by decades of war
and revolution. The two sides “found no common language, literally or figuratively,”
wrote
New York Times
correspondent Henry Kamm. “The foreigners tended to treat or-
dinary Cambodians with amused, somewhat condescending indulgence, and were content
to find congenial company among the other foreigners.”
43
Cambodia, isolated for a generation, suddenly found itself in a maelstrom of high
hopes and easy money. Villas and apartments, recently appropriated by senior govern-
ment officials and their cronies, were happily rented out to the UN and international
NGOs at astronomical rates. One ramshackle hotel in Stung Treng near the Laotian
border fetched $14,000 per month and provided only the barest amenities for UN staff.
44
UNTAC officials went about the country in a fleet of white cars, white helicopters, and
white troop transports, pouring millions of dollars into a moribund economy that could
