The cancer within and without

 

Hun Sen, far left with Heng Samrin, Chea Sim, Pen Sovan posed with Vietnamese leader [Middle].

 

 

 

Editorial by School of Vice

 

If one were to write of Hun Sen’s vices and wiles, it would take one for ever to account for all these deeds. Nevertheless, it should always be remembered that for all of his crimes and acts of treason he has committed in the name of power, he could not and would not have possibly achieved what he wanted all by himself and without the helping hands of his patrons and masterminds in Hanoi. 

In the wake of Vietnam’s invasion launched on Christmas day in December 1978 [time chosen to enable that invasion to take place as discreetly as possible while the world’s attention focussed elsewhere], Hun Sen was virtually a ‘nobody’ even in the Vietnamese’s scheme of things except as a lower rank captive KR military commander who fled across the border and into their welcoming arms, viewed, perhaps, as their insurance option with a measure of caution and distrust; a potential future ruling candidate should circumstances make such a candidacy necessary for them. 

 

He was also still in his early 20s unlike most of other men the Vietnamese had in the pipework to rule the country on their behalf such as Pen Sovan, Chan Si and other ‘Khmer Vietminhs’ who had been inducted and reared by the Vietnamese at an even younger age in their lives than his. These were men who would have been young boys still in the 1940’s and would have spent all of their youth and much of adulthood in Vietnam, replete with having been married to a Vietnamese woman to consummate their allegiance and ties to the host country. 

 

Until the Geneva conference in 1954, France was still ruling Indochina as colonial power, and the prospect of a brutal, radical Maoist movement that eventually became known as “Red Khmers” was a far distance away, but the stage and its foundation that would give rise to the emergence of that movement had already been set and planted even prior to 1954. This tells us that the event taking place in December 1978 and the horror few years preceding were anything but a coincidence and unforeseen by Hun Sen’s patrons and schemers in Hanoi. It should also be instructive that over four decades later Hun Sen the political delinquent and charlatan is still the one constant in Cambodia’s political equation and landscape while all of his party rivals – all of whom were senior to him by virtue of rank and hierarchy – have all been side-lined and silenced by him along with their proteges now effectively marginalised onto the fringes of the CPP. 

Another notable constant is Hun Sen’s unscrupulous ways which have hardly changed or diminished since his tender formative years in the 1970’s and 1980’s; traits of an exceptional pupil so beloved and prized by his like-minded and equally – if not more so! – unscrupulous mentor-patron. 

Conversely, that these remain a constant today also reveal to us as to those vanquished rivals’ lingering patriotism, nationalist conscience and core attachment to their own people and birth place, something that is all the more admirable despite all those years spent away from their homeland as well as their hosts’ best effort to mould them into pliable instruments. Indeed, as they have since largely achieved otherwise and almost without trying with Hun Sen.

  

Merry Christmas…