In his first public appearance in nearly two months, Second Prime Minister Hun Sen on Wednesday hailed the collapse of the Khmer Rouge and issued a veiled rebuke to Prince Norodom Ranariddh, the rival prime minister ousted from power last year.
Hun Sen contrasted his government’s isolation of Khmer Rouge leaders with “others” who he claimed would have guaranteed rebel leaders positions of political strength in Phnom Penh.
The speech at the Olympic Stadium coliseum was decorated with pomp and ceremony to mark Hun Sen’s first public appearance in seven weeks of mourning following the death of his mother on March 10.
Five state-run television stations and six radio stations carried the speech live. Seventy-one hard-line defectors, who until late March were waging a guerrilla war against the Cambodian military, heard the nearly hour-long speech.
Hun Sen used the spotlight to stage an election-campaign jab at Prince Ranariddh, saying hard-line defectors and the CPP-dominated Phnom Penh government would band together to seal off the corridors of power from top Khmer Rouge politicos—and those who would aid their rise into government.
“[We will] not allow into government anyone who wants to keep the Khmer Rouge politically strong in order to remain politically superior to those others,” the second prime minister said in a veiled reference to the prince. “And we will not negotiate with the Khmer Rouge military or their political representatives.”
The prince was convicted in March by the Phnom Penh Military Court on charges of plotting to overthrow the government by negotiating with the Khmer Rouge. Diplomats, however, said court proceedings were designed to prevent the prince from standing in national elections scheduled for July 26.
The prince was pardoned by his father, King Norodom Sihanouk, under a Japanese-brokered plan to ensure donor aid for elections.
During Hun Sen’s silence, the prince returned here after nine months in self-imposed exile and Pol Pot, another nemesis of Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party, died of a purported heart attack while being pursued by the second prime minister’s generals.
At Wednesday’s speech, several thousand people, including members of the government, armed forces, diplomats and journalists, attended.
Eleven recently defected Khmer Rouge figures, including former Democratic Kampuchea ambassador to Beijing Pich Chheang and former Democratic Kampuchea central zone commander Ke Pauk, joined high-ranking military and government officials sitting in positions of honor on the floor behind Hun Sen and his wife, Bun Rany.
Another 60 of the rank-and-file hard-line splitters attended the ceremony wearing green infantry outfits with the blue and red Royal Cambodian Armed Forces patch on the arm.
During his speech, Hun Sen several times rattled off the names of the most prominent defectors, turning around to nod in their direction.
Hun Sen, himself an eastern zone Khmer Rouge cadre before he fled to Vietnam in 1977, said a new generation of Cambodians has effectively ended years of lingering civil war.
“We did not create this war, but we suffered through it,” the second prime minister declared. “When the war started in 1970, we were young children, students, farmers….But we have suffered from a war which was created by an older generation of men.
“Now the Khmer Rouge forces have been reduced to their smallest number in the last five decades.”
An estimated 2,000 hard-line soldiers defected to the government in March following a vigorous three month propaganda campaign against anti-government bastions in O’Smach and Anlong Veng along Cambodia’s northern border with Thailand.
Banners draped around the coliseum trumpeted the so-called “win-win policy,” referring to the peaceful defections of Khmer Rouge hard-liners.
Ironically, it was a dispute with Prince Ranariddh over the nature of negotiations with hard-line Khmer Rouge last year that led to July’s bloody factional fighting, which left 600 homes destroyed and 3,000 people homeless in Phnom Penh. More than 60,000 political refugees and civilians fled to Thailand.
The recent defections—which helped deliver key hard-liner outposts into government hands with virtually no bloodshed—were precipitated by two commanders who fled their posts in December after clandestine contact with RCAF commanders.
(Additional reporting by Kay Kimsong)
