Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The reality couldn't have been more different. Within days of Kevin's arrival in Phnom
Penh, the Khmer Rouge ambushed a south-bound train in Kampot province, massacring
13 Cambodian passengers. They also took as hostages three foreign tourists—a Briton,
a Frenchman, and an Australian. Despite heated negotiations to secure their release, the
three men were executed two months later as the Khmer Rouge base at Phnom Voar
came under attack from government forces. When the base was eventually overrun, their
bludgeoned bodies were found in a shallow grave at the foot of a hill. The hostage crisis
brought home to Kevin just how precarious the UNTAC settlement had been. “People in
Canberra, and I suspect in a fair few other capitals as well, wanted to believe that UNTAC
had solved all the country's problems,” Kevin told me. “It was a completely false pro-
gnosis. I found myself in a very unstable and deteriorating political situation.”
The new coalition government was highly volatile—a political Frankenstein welded
together from three factions that had been at war for more than a decade. First Prime
Minister Ranariddh and Second Prime Minister Hun Sen headed a hybrid cabinet split
awkwardly between their two sprawling party organizations: Funcinpec in control of 11
ministries, the CPP in charge of another 11, and Son Sann's BLDP, which ran third in the
1993 election, occupying the Information Ministry. Control of the important interior and
defense ministries was split between Funcinpec and CPP co-ministers, and at the provin-
cial level, governors from one party were paired with deputies from the other.
It was a bewildering arrangement—and one that concealed wide inequalities of power.
After a decade of Vietnamese tutelage, the CPP remained a cohesive organization with
political networks stretching far into the countryside. It continued to control the military,
the police, the bureaucracy, and the courts. Funcinpec's power, in contrast, existed mostly
on paper. Though the royalists were more urbane and educated than their CPP counter-
parts, they had spent much of their lives overseas and lacked the connections and polit-
ical experience to wield power effectively. “It was very awkward,” said Pou Sothirak, a
former Boeing engineer appointed Funcinpec's minister of industry in 1993. “Everybody
knows you can't have one country, two systems.”
Funcinpec's shortcomings reflected those of its leader. Physically, Prince Ranariddh
was the spitting image of his father, sharing Sihanouk's cherubic grin and high-pitched
voice, which frequently dissolved into peals of laughter. But there the similarity ended.
Ranariddh lacked his father's exquisite political intuition. As prime minister, he was ef-
fete and ineffective, more interested in the perks and baubles of his office—an endless
rota of gala dinners, receptions, and golfing jaunts—than the practical business of gov-
ernment.
As Sihanouk's second-eldest son, Ranariddh had enjoyed a pampered upbringing. Born
in 1944, he had grown up in a sumptuous villa close to the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh,
where he attended the Lycée Descartes. He later studied law in France, earned his doc-
