Adolf Hitler once said that “when diplomacy ends, war begins” and it has been a major task for diplomats from Cambodia, a small Southeast Asian country with just 16.33 million people surrounded by much bigger neighbors, to ensure that diplomacy never ends and war never returns to their country.
The gentle Khmer people have suffered a lot and for a long time from the bloody wars caused by big-power conflicts and interests as well as the brutal atrocities of the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979), unlike the glory days of the Khmer Empire that ruled Cambodia from the ninth to the 15th centuries.
Over the past three decades, however, the Cambodian people have enjoyed unprecedented peace and prosperity, especially since the historic 1991 Paris Peace Accords were signed and Samdech Hun Sen became prime minister in 1985.
