Hun Sen: Peace brought by Khmers, not 'foreign hands'

Ben Sokhean | Publication date 26 March 2018 | 17:48 ICT

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Prime Minister Hun Sen signs the Paris Peace Accords in 1991, ending 21 years of civil war in Cambodia. The premier on Monday said UNTAC and the accords were wrongly credited for bringing peace to the country, pointing instead to his 'win-win' policy as helping to end the country's infighting. Gerard Fouet/AFP

Prime Minister Hun Sen on Monday rejected the idea that “foreign hands” or assistance secured a resolution to Cambodia’s civil war in the early 1990s, warning historians to refrain from claiming the international community was responsible for peace building in the country.

Speaking at the groundbreaking of a new road in Battambang Monday morning, Hun Sen said foreign historians had overstated the benefits of the $2 billion United Nations mission in 1992 that followed the signing of the Paris Peace Agreement.

“For this point, the historians should be aware, and most of the historians are foreigners, they write only from a [foreign] perspective. They do not mention about Cambodia’s role even once,” he said. “[They] should not forget the final stages when the war was completely ended by Cambodian hands, not foreign hands.”

The agreement, which was painstakingly crafted to end the country’s civil war and extract foreign influence from the Kingdom in a waning era of Cold War realpolitik, pushed for a government to be elected through democratic polls and espoused the ideals of human rights.

It was the first time four warring factions came together, signing the accords in Paris in 1991. They were the Vietnamese-backed Hun Sen government, the Khmer Rouge, the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, a conservative group headed by Son Sann, and a faction led by Prince Norodom Sihanouk.

Overseeing the rebuilding effort was the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, which organised the first elections in 1993 and spent more than a billion dollars to administer a peacekeeping mission in the Kingdom.

“They write only about the Paris Peace Agreement and the implementation of the Paris Peace Agreement, but they have not written that who brought the last peace,” he said, referring to the CPP-run government.

Political commentator Lao Mong Hay said that without the peace accords or UNTAC’s intervention, the four factions would have continued to fight, and that it was indeed foreign intervention in the 1990s that led to the increasing sidelining of the Khmer Rouge.

“Our Prime Minister's win-win to completely end the war was a valuable finishing touch to kill off the already weak Khmer Rouge,” he said.