Clinton ‘Legacy’ Watch #1: Acquiescence to Hun Sen’s 1993 Power-Play Ensured Present Meltdown in Cambodia

(Washington, D.C.): The word leaching
out of the Clinton Administration is that
President Clinton is now fixated on
securing his “place in history”
and that he has decided the easiest place
to do that is in the realm of foreign
affairs. Unfortunately, past experience
suggests that such preoccupations with a
presidential “legacy” usually
prove to be formulas for shortsighted
policies — policies that often produce
signing-ceremonies and favorable, if
ephemeral, press notices but little in
the way of durable contributions
to U.S. national security or interests.

In the interest of discouraging such
expediency driven policies and keeping in
perspective the true nature of
President Clinton’s “legacy” in
the foreign and defense policy portfolio,
the Center for Security Policy is today
launching a new series entitled Clinton
“Legacy” Watch. While the
world’s attention is focused on the
latest of the President’s foreign policy
“achievements” — the
invitation to three Central European
nations to join an “enlarged”
NATO⁽¹⁾
agreed to in Madrid this week — a more
accurate picture of the sort of place in
history Mr. Clinton is likely to occupy
came into sharp focus half-a-world away.

Doomed to Fail

Indeed, this week’s coup d’état in
Cambodia offers a prime example of the
legacy emerging from Mr. Clinton’s
shortsighted policies. In 1993, the
Clinton Administration decided to
go-with-the-flow as Hun Sen, a
Khmer-Rouge-commander-turned-Vietnamese-puppet,
demanded — under threat of renewed
violence — the right to participate in
Cambodia’s first freely elected
government, despite his Communist Party’s
defeat at the polls. At the insistence of
the U.S. and other members of the
international community then bankrolling
a $2 billion peacekeeping operation in
Cambodia, the democratically elected
government of Prince Norodom Ranariddh href=”97-D95.html#N_2_”>⁽²⁾
was obliged to accept Hun Sen as a Second
Prime Minister and institute a similar,
parallel structure to oversee the
defense, interior and foreign ministries.

Not surprisingly, this externally
imposed Rube Goldberg arrangement proved
utterly unworkable. It did, however,
afford Hun Sen an opportunity to
consolidate his power by: recruiting into
his armed forces entire divisions of the
Khmer Rouge (KR) — including their
leadership — who had, until recently,
remained loyal to the infamous Pol Pot
(six members of the KR’s political
committee were integrated into Hun Sen’s
Cambodia’s People Party); using
government offices and assets to
facilitate narco-trafficking; and
engaging in assassination attempts
against his democratic opposition —
including a 1997 Easter Sunday massacre
of scores of people aimed at liquidating
opposition leader Sam Rainsy. href=”97-D95.html#N_3_”>⁽³⁾

To counteract Hun Sen’s military
build-up, Prince Ranariddh made his own
effort to win over rank and file members
of the KR to end their war against the
government and shore up his position vis
á vis Hun Sen. In the event, such
contacts — and the prospect that Prince
Ranariddh and his allies might finally
come to enjoy not only a popular mandate
but also the wherewithal to defeat Hun
Sen’s pro-Vietnamese faction — provided
the pretext for the latter to move
against the former. (N.B. Hun Sen was in
Hanoi on what his spokesman called a
“personal” trip immediately
prior to his military takeover of Phnom
Penh. According to some reports,
Vietnamese troops infiltrated into
Cambodia in civilian garb joined forces
with those loyal to the Communist
co-premier to attack Prince Ranariddh’s
supporters.)

‘See No Evil’

The absence of any Western response to
what one U.N. official described to the Washington
Post as “a gradual recourse by
the government to violence to suppress
any form of political debate” and
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s
last-minute decision to cancel a visit to
Phnom Penh after visiting Hanoi can only
have increased Hun Sen’s confidence that
there would be no costs associated with
his violent coup. If any doubt remained
on that score, it was cleared up by State
Department Press Spokesman Nicholas
Burns — President Clinton’s
appalling choice to become Ambassador to
Greece — who oozed moral equivalence in
his response on 7 July 1997 to the
following question:

Question: “Do you
think it was a mistake after the
elections in Cambodia, which
Ranariddh and his party won, to
let Hun Sen pressure his way into
an equivalent job in the
government?”

Burns: “Well, that
was a decision made by
Cambodians, and that was made,
you know, through the free will
of both Prince Ranariddh and his
associates. I think that’s for
the historians to judge, not for
us, especially on a day when the
dust hasn’t even cleared from
Phnom Penh.”

This is, of course, utter revisionist
nonsense. Thanks to international
pressure, Prince Ranariddh was in no more
position to exercise his “free
will” on that score than he is to
lead his government in Phnom Penh today.
As the Washington Post
editorialized on 9 July 1997:

“Almost [immediately after
the 1993 election], th[e]
courageous voters [of Cambodia]
did not get the international
support they needed. Hun
Sen…and his People’s Party
unexpectedly lost the election,
despite a campaign of
intimidation against other
parties. Yet, again through
coercion and threat of force, he
was permitted to muscle into the
government as co-prime minister,
essentially negating the election
results.”

Call a Spade a Spade

Two days later, Burns went even
further, signaling that the Clinton
Administration could not even bring
itself to call Hun Sen’s actions “a
coup”:

“It would be easy to say
it’s a coup d’état and
walk away. But there’s a
lot going on in Cambodia.
In addition to the takeover of
Phnom Penh by Hun Sen, there is
vicious fighting now under way in
many of the provinces. It’s not
at all clear what’s going to —
what will be the result of that
fighting and who’s going to be at
the bottom as a result of that
fighting. I think we’re going to
have to, unfortunately, if the
fighting continues, spend a
little bit more time analyzing
what’s going on before we’re so
quick to brand this as a
completed act, because there’s
quite a lot of opposition to Hun
Sen right now — military
opposition….

“But this drama is not over.
And what we’d like to see–we’d
like not to see is a full fledged
civil war. We’d like to
see cooler heads prevail.
And we’d like to see an agreement
between Hun Sen and Ranariddh to
stop the fighting. That clearly
is the responsible thing for the
United States to be urging right
now, and we always try to be
responsible.”

Even the New York Times could
scarcely conceal its contempt for the
Clinton-Burns approach. In a powerful
editorial in today’s editions, the Times
caustically observed:

“Washington is still
searching for a diplomatic
euphemism to describe this week’s
military ouster of Cambodia’s
First Prime Minister, Norodom
Ranariddh, by his coalition
partner and longtime rival,
Second Prime Minister Hun Sen. Simply
calling it a coup would bring an
automatic suspension of American
aid to the country. The
Clinton Administration fears such
instant disengagement would
reduce rather than increase
United States leverage. href=”97-D95.html#N_4_”>⁽⁴⁾

“Whatever label Washington
applies, Mr. Hun Sen’s
bloody seizure of power is an
affront to democracy and a
violation of the 1991 Paris peace
agreement that ended the
Cambodian civil war. Most of all
it is a disaster for Cambodia.“
(Emphasis added.)

The Bottom Line

If President Clinton is genuinely
concerned with leaving a lasting,
constructive imprint on the history of
long-suffering Cambodia, he should move
promptly to take the following steps:

• Refuse diplomatic
  recognition to Hun Sen’s illegal
  regime: If for no other
  reason, U.S. interests would be
  well-served by preventing
  Ambassador Kenneth Quinn — whose
  dismal record in connection with
  accounting for American
  servicemen after the Vietnam War
  has been further sullied by his
  April Glaspie-style pandering to
  Hun Sen⁽⁵⁾
  and his narco-trafficking cronies
  (e.g., Teng Bun Ma href=”97-D95.html#N_6_”>⁽⁶⁾)
  — from further muddying
  Washington’s position toward this
  once-and-future Khmer Rougist
  despot.
• Suspend U.S. and
  international assistance to Hun
  Sen: The Japanese
  government’s decision to suspend
  aid flows to Phnom Penh and ASEAN
  action to withdraw an invitation
  to Cambodia to join that group
  are steps in the right direction.
  Washington should applaud these
  measures and reinforce them by
  cutting off both bilateral aid
  and multilateral funding provided
  to Cambodia through mechanisms
  like the IMF, World Bank and
  Asian Development Bank.
• Provide support — covert
  and overt — to Cambodia’s
  emerging democratic front: Active
  resistance to Hun Sen’s rule
  should be encouraged and
  facilitated to the maximum degree
  possible.
• De-classify and make
  public the U.S. FBI investigative
  report on the 1997 Easter Sunday
  massacre which implicates Hun
  Sen’s “private security
  force.”
• Make clear that further
  normalization of relations with
  and aid to Vietnam will be
  suspended if Hanoi comes to the
  assistance of Hun Sen’s regime.

– 30 –

1. Yesterday,
Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien
unintentionally offered public
confirmation of the base domestic
political considerations that prompted
President Clinton to pursue even this
latest “accomplishment.”
According to today’s Washington Post,
Chretien confided to Belgian Prime
Minister Jean-Lug Dehaene in front of a
microphone he was unaware was activated
that “[Clinton’s motives for
promoting expansion of NATO] is not for
reasons of state. It’s all done for
short-term political reasons.” He
added that decisions about who to admit
have “nothing to do with world
security. It’s because in Chicago, Mayor
Richard [Daley] controls lots of [ethnic]
votes for the [Democratic]
nomination.”

2. Eighty-nine
percent of the eligible voters turned out
for an election marred by a systematic
campaign of violence and intimidation
reportedly carried out, in part, by Hun
Sen-associated death squads operating out
of the Vietnamese embassy in Phnom Penh.

3. According to
the 29 June 1997 Washington Post,
“the FBI tentatively has pinned
responsibility for [a series of grenade
attacks against an anti-corruption
demonstration led by Sam Rainsy] and the
subsequent interference [in efforts to
apprehend those believed to have launched
them and provide medical care to the
injured] on personal bodyguard forces
employed by Hun Sen…according to four
U.S. government sources familiar with
[the] contents [of a classified Bureau
report on the attack].” One victim,
an American employed by the International
Republican Institute, told the Post
“Whoever threw [the grenades at Sam]
must have done so in full view of Hun
Sen’s troops.”

4. The Clinton
Administration used similar excuses to
justify calling Serb and Croat genocide
in Bosnia anything but genocide.

5. The New York
Times reported on 6 July that Quinn
told Hun Sen’s generals shortly before
the coup that “It would not be
understood in my country if, in fact, we
had a civil war in Phnom Penh.”

6. Amb. Quinn is
reported to have accepted rides on Teng’s
personal helicopter.