Hun Sen and PRK Repression in the 1980s

Hun Sen and PRK Repression in the 1980s

Prime Minister Hun Sen delivers a speech in Peam Chor district, Prey Veng province, phnompenhpost

Extract from '30 Years of Hun Sen'

Upon becoming Prime Minister on January 14, 1985, Hun Sen assumed, in accordance with chapter 6 of the PRK Constitution, authority over the PRK armed forces, police and other security units. This placed him in charge both of national defense and domestic security.

The units over which he was thereby constitutionally empowered to exercise command were tasked with elimination of three types of opposition to the PRK: armed guerrilla groups, organized but non-violent opposition groups, and individual dissent inside and outside the PRK ranks. The armed insurgents included the Pol Pot-led Khmer Rouge guerrillas and two allied non-Communist resistance groupings, the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia (FUNCINPEC), then led by Prince Norodom Sihanouk, and the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (KPNLF), led by Son Sann.

In both public propaganda and internal analyses, the PRK regarded all three categories of opposition as “objectively” tantamount to “Pol Pot,” tarring the PDK coalition partners FUNCINPEC and KPNLF, as well as individual dissidents, with the Khmer Rouge brush. This aimed to create the false impression that PRK political repression was aimed primarily at “genocidaires.”

The PRK, its armed forces, and the large number of Vietnamese armed forces present in the country were entitled to conduct military operations against armed opposition groups. However, in confronting the Khmer Rouge and imposing one-party rule within Cambodia, the PRK engaged in widespread and systematic violations of human rights in both conflict and non-conflict settings, including large-scale prolonged arbitrary detention without charge or trial; unfair trials; routine torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees; and extra-judicial killings.[141]

Under Hun Sen, the PRK ran a police state. In the mid-1980s, there were an estimated 5,000 political prisoners in the PRK. Arrests by the Cambodian and Vietnamese police, armed forces and intelligence agencies on political grounds were routinely carried out against real and perceived dissidents. Detainees and prisoners were often held indefinitely on the basis of unsubstantiated and exaggerated or plainly false allegations of opposition activity or involvement. These allegations frequently resulted from unreliable evidence elicited through a combination of torture, abusive conditions of incarceration and other forms of duress inflicted on political and other suspects as a matter of course. The Cambodian and Vietnamese police, army and other authorities often seized people on spurious allegations by neighbors with personal vendettas against the accused, such as with regard to extra-marital affairs.

Most detainees and prisoners were peasants or other ordinary people falsely accused of being “enemy links.” Others were alleged “two-faced” elements who had been working for the PRK administration or armed forces at the time of their arrest. These included people arrested for distributing or possessing leaflets or cassette tapes criticizing the government and the Vietnamese, attending meetings at which such materials were handed out, or individually voicing such criticisms. Very few were combatants of anti-PRK guerrilla units.

The security forces followed the long-time Communist Party practice of not specifying to suspects why they had been arrested or producing evidence, instead simply labelling them “traitors” or “enemies” and demanding that they themselves explain to the authorities the reason for their arrest. Those who did not take up this offer to “confess” were subjected to torture or otherwise forced into “confessing,” such that, ultimately, “confession” was their only option for avoiding severe suffering, regardless of whether they were politically opposed to the PRK. Interviews with former prisoners and security force personnel conducted in the 1980s by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and Amnesty International undertaken on the Thailand-Cambodia border suggest that torture was inflicted on at least 60 percent of political detainees.[142]

Torture was facilitated by the fact that many prisoners were held in dark cells while undergoing interrogation in complete isolation from the outside world and even from fellow inmates. Contact with relatives was usually severely restricted throughout a prisoner’s detention. Those who did not break under torture were threatened with being sent to court: they were told that unless they took the opportunity to “confess,” a revolutionary people’s tribunal would sentence them to many years of imprisonment or even to death. Hun Sen’s ultimate political control over the judiciary ensured that such threats could be carried out.[143]

In 1986, the PRK established the “A-3” Combat Police, which Hun Sen characterized as an “intelligence police force” to uproot and suppress alleged Pol Pot partisans operating underground in government-controlled areas.[144] In practice A-3 targeted a wide variety of political opponents, including non-Khmer Rouge insurgents and non-violent critics. In 1989, Hun Sen set up additional specialized police units, including intelligence and border patrol police contingents, to more effectively suppress armed and unarmed opposition in order to strengthen his position in negotiations for a political settlement of the civil war.[145] These would later provide seedbeds for “death squads” deployed after that settlement, the October 1991 Paris Agreements, were signed by Hun Sen and representatives of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, FUNCINPEC, the KPNLF and 18 foreign governments.

Source: HRW