Happy 30th Anniversary to Cambodian Prime Minister HE!

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Happy 30th Anniversary to Cambodian Prime Minister HE!

Post by CEOCambodiaNews »

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Thirty years ago today, HE, then 33, was appointed prime minister by the National Assembly of the socialist People’s Republic of Kampuchea, becoming the world’s youngest head of government.

For the former Khmer Rouge regiment commander, who had fled to Vietnam in June 1977 amid a wave of purges by Pol Pot, it was the start of a reign in which he would traverse almost constant upheaval to impose himself as the unrivaled ruler of Cambodia.

Now the world’s sixth-longest serving leader, slightly behind Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Mr. HE has co-opted or crushed every major challenge to his leadership over the past 30 years.

The rise of the U.S.- and China-backed resistance in the 1980s, the U.N.-administered transition to democracy in the early 1990s, and the return of popular rivals such as King Norodom Sihanouk have each become mere blips punctuating Mr. HE’s rise.

A Young Communist

Born in Kompong Cham province’s Stung Trang district in August 1952, Mr. HE says he joined the Khmer Rouge maquis in 1970 upon the appeal of then-Prince Sihanouk, whom the National Assembly ousted as chief of state that year and replaced with Lon Nol.

Losing his left eye during the April 1975 battle for Phnom Penh that led to Khmer Rouge victory, Mr. HE rose through the ranks of the Eastern Zone before fleeing the purges of zone cadre that coincided with mounting Khmer Rouge raids across the border into Vietnam.

When Vietnam launched an invasion of Cambodia and overthrew Pol Pot in January 1979, Mr. HE, then 29, was named foreign affairs minister in the Vietnam-installed regime led by Heng Samrin, which justified its rule in its defeat of Pol Pot’s “genocide.”

“We will probably never know how much ‘the savage genocidal orders aimed at the Cambodian people’ displeased HE,” wrote The Bangkok Post’s Cambodia correspondent, Jacques Bekaert, four days after Mr. HE was named prime minister on January 14, 1985.

“But there is little doubt that indeed HE felt very uncomfortable indeed with the strongly anti-Vietnamese attitude of some of the most prominent members of Democratic Kampuchea,” he wrote.

“HE is still young, already brilliant, learning fast and traveling a lot. Some sources claim he is trusted by Vietnam more than Heng Samrin who, says one source, is not even any longer allowed to meet foreigners alone,” Mr. Bekaert concluded in the piece.

Mr. HE’s close association with Vietnam—he fast became a fluent speaker of Vietnamese, and to this day strongly defends the decade-long occupation of Cambodia by Vietnam—would become a major line dividing his supporters and enemies.

“HE rose to power during the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia, but I think it’s very unjust—and insulting—to call HE a ‘Vietnamese puppet,’” said Chhang Song, an information minister for Lon Nol who fled to the U.S. upon the 1975 Khmer Rouge victory.

Mr. Song in the 1980s became one of the very few former Lon Nol officials to support Mr. HE, seeing him as a bulwark against the return of Pol Pot despite the regime’s adherence to communism.

“During the Vietnamese occupation, [Mr. HE] had to also compete with other Cambodians in the field to reach that power,” said Mr. Song, who in the 1990s would serve as a senator for Mr. HE’s CPP.

“Besides, I don’t remember any other Cambodian leader who was not a ‘puppet’ of a certain foreign power, if one liked so much to use the term,” he said.

“Cambodians must realize that a certain permanent solution must be found between the Cambodians and Vietnamese,” Mr. Song said. “At the end, they must co-exist peacefully.”

Pragmatic Reform

Inside the communist party—and against a faction perceived to be led by Mr. Samrin and Chea Sim, the interior minister who controlled police—Mr. HE began to make a name as a relatively pragmatic reformist.

A few months after Mr. HE’s regime renounced communism in April 1989 and renamed itself the State of Cambodia—apparently against the protests of Mr. Sim—The New York Times published a report titled “In Phnom Penh, Vietnam’s ‘Puppet’ Is Finding His Voice.”

“To young people in Cambodia, who have no memory of Prince Sihanouk, Mr. HE represents modernity,” the New York Times noted. “Returning from Paris this month, he stepped off his airplane in a French double-breasted suit. He favors imported cigarettes and wears metal-frame glasses that help mask the scar from the shrapnel that took his left eye in 1975.

“Mr. HE takes advantage of his differences with the Prince while publicly urging him to come home. Meanwhile, he cleverly explains the Prince’s failure to do so by saying that the Prince remains allied to the Khmer Rouge, a relationship most Cambodians find disturbing.”

By the late 1980s, the prime minister was deftly convincing his communist comrades to embrace the free market, according to Evan Gottesman’s book “Cambodia: After the Khmer Rouge,” which is based on the minutes of Council of Ministers meetings in the 1980s.

“No one is anyone’s socialist teacher, because [Cambodian socialists] have practiced socialism for twenty years already, and they are starting to discard and dismantle it and are starting anew,” Mr. HE is quoted as saying in a June 1988 meeting. “They are agreeing they are completely wrong.”

Yet behind a veneer of reformism, Mr. HE, who was negotiating the return of plural democracy to Cambodia with Prince Sihanouk, remained a creature of the communist party through which he had risen—dedicated to it as the vessel for exercising his power.

Speaking at the Council of Ministers in June 1989, according to Mr. Gottesman, Mr. HE raised a pragmatic reason to move to privatize (to trusted allies) the industries that his government had worked so hard to build after the fall of the Khmer Rouge.

“If there is a political solution, we want all state factories to become private factories,” Mr. HE said. “If we leave them with the state, we will face problems when the three parties [in Prince Sihanouk’s resistance] come and spend money that belongs to our factories, which we have operated for 10 years.”

Restoration of Democracy

Mr. HE and Prince Sihanouk signed the Paris Peace Agreements on October 23, 1991, and plural democracy returned to Cambodia, with the prince’s erstwhile resistance group returning to Phnom Penh to participate in a U.N.-run national election.

When the results of the poll were released in June 1993, Mr. HE’s CPP had won 51 seats to the 58 won by the Funcinpec party, led by Prince Sihanouk’s son, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, whose campaign relied heavily upon his father’s enduring popularity.

With two-thirds of the 120 National Assembly seats required to form a government, Mr. HE elbowed his way into the position of “second prime minister,” with Prince Ranariddh as “first prime minister.”

Mr. HE’s continued stake in power, underpinned by the old regime’s dominance of the state apparatus and the money pouring back into Cambodia, put him a stronger position than before yielding control of the state.

“As a survivor, he’s adaptable. He’s not doctrinaire,” said Sophal Ear, author of “Aid Dependence in Cambodia,” adding that the thread tying together Mr. HE’s 30 years in power has been a fidelity to his own interests.

“He embraced capitalism with open arms and followed [Chinese communist reformer] Deng Xiaoping’s dictum: To get rich is glorious. His style of leadership has been populist with language the masses could embrace, but he’s also had an iron fist just in case,” he said.

Indeed, Mr. HE’s three decades as prime minister have been marked by a willingness to patiently observe opposition to him develop, before suddenly bringing down that fist.

Perhaps the foremost example of this pattern was the July 1997 factional fighting in Phnom Penh between armed forces loyal to Mr. HE and those loyal to Prince Ranariddh, which led to the prince’s removal about a year after the pair began fighting over their power-sharing deal.

With the prince exiled in France, Cambodian-Australian Funcinpec lawmaker Ung Huot replaced him as first prime minister. Mr. HE said the prince’s removal was thus not a coup, and blamed Ranariddh himself for inviting Khmer Rouge remnants into Phnom Penh.

A U.N. report in August 1997 confirmed summary political executions of 41 opponents to Mr. HE, including Interior Ministry Secretary of State Ho Sok, who was killed inside his ministry.

In a November 1997 BBC documentary, Mr. HE laughed off the damning U.N. findings.

“There are probably no more than 50 people in Cambodia who have read the report. There are 11 million people in Cambodia. They don’t understand what the human rights report is about,” he said.

“What the U.N. says doesn’t bother me. The problem is my people and whether they support me.”

The U.N.’s human rights office in Phnom Penh reported a further 16 political killings in the two months before the July 1998 national election, which the CPP won, legitimizing Mr. HE’s power and allowing him to return as Cambodia’s sole prime minister.

“His legacy is nothing, except for dictatorship. His rule is to threaten, to rob and kill others to smooth the way for him to stay in power,” said Pen Sovann, who was briefly the first prime minister of the regime that replaced the Khmer Rouge, before being purged and imprisoned in Vietnam for a decade.

“From year to year, even after 1997 and in the 2000s, I have never seen any improvements in his leadership, except for.......

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John Bingham
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Re: Happy 30th Anniversary to Cambodian Prime Minister HE!

Post by John Bingham »

Great pictures of an amazing man. Becoming Prime Minister at 32 years old and staying one for 30 years, congratulations.
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Re: Happy 30th Anniversary to Cambodian Prime Minister HE!

Post by General Mackevili »

Here's to another 30 years! :beer3:
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Re: Happy 30th Anniversary to Cambodian Prime Minister HE!

Post by LTO »

John Bingham wrote:Great pictures of an amazing man...
Beat me to it once again. Regardless of what one thinks of him and his rule, he is an amazing person.
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Re: Happy 30th Anniversary to Cambodian Prime Minister HE!

Post by Mrs Stroppy »

Very interesting article, thanks for posting.
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Re: Happy 30th Anniversary to Cambodian Prime Minister HE!

Post by Soi Dog »

Other "amazing" people you could (or could have) congratulate on their reigns...

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Re: Happy 30th Anniversary to Cambodian Prime Minister HE!

Post by Milord »

The Great Deceiver will Reign Forever. Best gov that money can buy.
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Re: Happy 30th Anniversary to Cambodian Prime Minister HE!

Post by John Bingham »

Soi Dog - I think you might have misunderstood me. I was using amazing in the formal sense.
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Re: Happy 30th Anniversary to Cambodian Prime Minister HE!

Post by Soi Dog »

John Bingham wrote:Soi Dog - I think you might have misunderstood me. I was using amazing in the formal sense.
Fair enough. But with words like "Happy 30th Anniversary.." in the thread title and "congratulations" being combined with "amazing man", the tone of the thread starts to get a bit too upbeat for my taste. HE may have been the best of a bad lot 30 years ago, but any more positive sentiments than that about the guy are misplaced and unfortunate, IMO. Other synonyms seem more apt. Stupefying, dumbfounding, etc.
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Re: Happy 30th Anniversary to Cambodian Prime Minister HE!

Post by Dara »

And he is a wounded war vet. Some cultures appreciate what soldiers
did for their country. My culture appreciated it, and I sure do.

I heard he had a gun. The guys shooting at him had mortars.
That must have took a lot of guts to stand his ground.
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