Cambodia's Curse (20 page)

Using the missile assault on Quinn’s house as the pretext, the department canceled Albright’s stop in Cambodia. She’d have to visit Angkor some other time. Nevertheless, the debate over her visit threw off the American Embassy’s carefully calculated time line. Rather than starting on July 1, as expected, the violence would begin five days late.

 

The denouement was still days away, but angry argument dominated the weeks leading up to it. During his meeting in Paris the year before, Ranariddh had probably talked to Khieu Samphan about contributing
Khmer Rouge troops to the battle. Hun Sen’s personal forces were indisputably larger and better armed than Ranariddh’s, and he was afraid that Hun Sen’s warm welcome to Ieng Sary when he had defected meant that Ieng Sary’s 2,000 troops might fight on Hun Sen’s side. Without help from the Khmer Rouge, Ranariddh would be outmatched.

In late May, Hun Sen caught Ranariddh trying to import three tons of weapons and ammunition through the port at Sihanoukville. The shipping manifest, addressed to Ranariddh, described the ship’s contents as “spare parts.” When Hun Sen called him on it, Ranariddh insisted he had every right to import weapons for his forces; Hun Sen was certainly importing weaponry of his own. Hun Sen then accused Ranariddh of making alliances with the Khmer Rouge. Ranariddh threw the same accusation back at Hun Sen.

The U.S. Embassy held its Fourth of July party as usual. This was a glittering event, and normally everyone who was anyone in Phnom Penh wanted to be on the guest list. This year, though, almost no one from the government showed up. That was quite unusual. But then, clues surfaced. In early July, a diplomat said, a foreign intelligence service working in Phnom Penh began picking up information from Funcinpec officials about something they were calling Operation Crossbow. And on the morning of July 5 the service picked up word that a Funcinpec soldier was asking Nhiek Bun Chhay, the Funcinpec secretary-general, whether Operation Crossbow was on. Yes, he said, it is.

 

The fighting started on the outskirts of town, where Funcinpec’s military was encamped, but then moved into Phnom Penh. Ranariddh’s forces drove tanks and armored personnel carriers (APCs) into the city; gun- and rocket fire echoed across town. Trying to sort out who had instigated the violence, diplomats noted that Sok An, Hun Sen’s powerful deputy, was trapped in his house, unable to escape. Ranariddh, on the other hand, had already flown to Paris. Asked why he was there, he explained that his military commanders had told him it
was not safe to stay. It would later be revealed that he had bought the ticket weeks earlier.

Not until late that evening did columns of armor—tanks and APCs—begin approaching the capital from the South, where Hun Sen maintained his country estate and military compound. A few of his tanks, scrambled in a rush, ran out of gas on the way. But by the second day, July 6, 1997, Hun Sen had brought all of his forces into a fierce battle.

At the U.S. Embassy, “our building was shaking,” Quinn said. “We began burning all the files. There were tanks in the streets. We took out our own weapons. We were ready to destroy the communications equipment, the codes.”

But by the end of the second day, the fighting was all but over. Hun Sen had prevailed. Funcinpec forces were on the run. Hun Sen’s soldiers captured and summarily executed dozens of Funcinpec officers. Funcinpec secretary-general Nhiek Bun Chhay said Hun Sen’s forces captured five of his bodyguards, gouged out their eyes, and then killed them. He also accused Hun Sen’s forces of executing thirty of his soldiers after they had surrendered and then burning their bodies.

Hun Sen’s soldiers looted shops and businesses downtown while Funcinpec soldiers and officers began calling the U.S. Embassy, asking for refuge. Quinn now said he told his staff: If anyone comes to the embassy, let them in. Human-rights officials and others have long insisted, however, that the embassy actually turned these people away. But whatever happened at the embassy, Quinn did rent the ballroom of the Cambodiana Hotel and began sending people who needed refuge over there.

By day three, the city was quiet. The war was over.

Prince Ranariddh, mortally offended by his treatment by Hun Sen, had thought he could topple this peasant, this Communist, from power. He wanted to take his rightful place as Cambodia’s undisputed leader. It turned out, however, that the Khmer Rouge had not come to fight for either side. Hun Sen’s forces, despite Ranariddh’s
surprise initial attack, came to the battle with more troops and superior intelligence. They turned the battle around and defeated Ranariddh’s troops.

Even with Hun Sen’s long record of violent, perfidious behavior, Ranariddh was unquestionably the aggressor. But in Washington that same afternoon, the State Department spokesman, Nicholas Burns, read a statement condemning Hun Sen, saying the United States strongly opposed “the use of force to change the results of the 1993 election and the use of force by the forces of Hun Sen to effectively rupture the Paris accords of 1991.”

Soon after, Washington announced it would end all foreign aid to Cambodia. “They never asked me,” Quinn said, shaking his head. “On day three, when the fighting was all over, Washington ordered the evacuation of all Americans and nonessential embassy personnel. They never asked me about that either. I had to send my family away. I felt terrible. It didn’t feel like we were respected, like we were being paid attention to.” But then, Quinn knew full well that most everyone in Washington hated Hun Sen. He’d seen hints that Ranariddh was planning something, “and I’d sent bits and pieces of that in cables. But some people in Washington didn’t necessarily want to believe that.”

In Washington the issues were black-and-white. Hun Sen was the villain. Ranariddh and Rainsy were the heroes. But since he arrived in Phnom Penh, Quinn had been building a close working relationship with Hun Sen. He was the man in power. Wasn’t that how an ambassador could be most effective? They held frequent meetings and had dinner at each other’s homes. Quinn had even stood next to him when Hun Sen received an honorary degree from Iowa Wesleyan University, at a ceremony in Phnom Penh—bringing catcalls from across the city. What Quinn didn’t bargain on was the disrespect, even hatred, this strategy would bring him, from human-rights officials, members of Congress—even some in his own department. To them, Quinn was a quisling.

This may explain why State Department officials paid so little mind to his cables suggesting that Ranariddh had started the battle.
“He was
boastful
of his relations with Hun Sen,” Abney said, his voice laced with scorn. At a congressional hearing a few days after the fighting ended, Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California, demanded that “Ken Quinn, our ambassador in Phnom Penh, be immediately recalled from Cambodia to appear before this committee and to answer questions before this committee and to the American people about why there has been a less than forceful opposition to these horrible events we’re witnessing in Cambodia.”

Eni F. H. Faleomavaega, who represented American Samoa, echoed Rohrabacher’s suspicions and went so far as to imply that Quinn might even have helped Hun Sen set off the attack. Rohrabacher’s statement “seems to collaborate some of the things that I have heard also through the rumor mill about the activities of our ambassador there. Has he been participating in the process, or is he staying on neutral grounds, or is he trying to do something that is not in conformance with our policies towards Cambodia?”

When Abney testified, he piled on as well. The American Embassy “has continually refused to criticize Hun Sen and, in fact, has a relationship with him which frightens the outspoken critics of his strongarm government.”

A State Department official testified that the government had full confidence in Quinn. Still, most every member of Congress, every diplomat, every journalist and commentator, had settled on Hun Sen as the villain. After years of vilifying him, from the days he ruled Cambodia as a puppet of Hanoi and a “Communist stooge,” this stance felt natural, even comfortable, for its certainty. Hun Sen had engineered a “coup” to depose Ranariddh, the senior prime minister. As that conviction took hold, the dislike of the man among most everyone who followed Cambodia thickened to detestation.

Hun Sen was now responsible for the conclusion most everyone now drew: The grandest nation-building operation the world body had ever undertaken had collapsed. Democracy was dead. Hun Sen had squandered the $3 billion gift to the long-suffering Cambodian people. “The four-year-old experiment with democracy is in dire
straits, and a tyrant has seized power through the force of arms, intimidation, terror, and summary executions,” said Representative Doug Bereuter, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific. “This is altogether too familiar ground for the Cambodian people. Few people have experienced as much pain, suffering and terror as the people of Cambodia over the last 30 years.”

Benny Widyono, who had just completed his term as the UN’s special representative in Cambodia, was one of just a few public officials to lay blame on another offending party. The United Nations “left the four parties intact and armed to the teeth,” he told the
Washington Post.
Funding for the UN operation had been so drastically cut that “we gambled on the election,” as if “that was the main thing in the agreement. We should have stayed longer in the post-conflict rebuilding process.”

Brad Adams, a senior UN official in Cambodia, told a congressional committee, “It seems fair to ask why the international community would negotiate a peace treaty with strong provisions regarding human rights and democracy and then mount the largest, most expensive peacekeeping operation ever—involving 20,000 soldiers and an army of election and human rights monitors, all at a cost of over $2 billion—and then lose interest.”

But Kofi Annan, the secretary-general, seemed to be living in a dream world. He continued to boast of the UN’s great achievement, even a few days after the fighting ended. “The UN operation was successful in helping establish national institutions which could lead to stability and economic development,” he averred.

Quinn was the most disappointed of all. In 1974 he had delivered the world’s first warning about the coming Khmer Rouge horror. He had written his dissertation on the Khmer Rouge. As a deputy assistant secretary of state, he been an important player in the work to set up the UN occupation and election—the world’s effort to redeem the state and its people. And he had arrived as ambassador “with an idealized view, that if they could find a way for everybody to live together and share, there can be a better life for everyone.”

Naive, perhaps, but now, he said, “The international community paid a ton of money to help them restore their country, but then they put in place another game. All of them were trying to reshuffle the deck and climb back on top, push the others out of the way.” Quinn had come to understand that “Cambodians are capable of doing awful, destructive things to their own country for their own gain. You come away so dispirited by their efforts to manipulate you as part of their effort to destabilize the country for their own benefit. Now all the things we had worked for, all of this lay shattered, pieces on the floor. Like Humpty Dumpty. All the promise, it fell apart. It was over.”

In Washington, some people were so angry that, through gritted teeth, they began calling for regime change.

F
or a people still reeling from the trauma of war, the continuing violence in the 1990s nourished the debilitating mental illnesses that still plagued so many Cambodians. During the street battles for control of the government, tens of thousands of people huddled in their homes, quivering, hearts racing.

Even when there was no actual fighting, all too often visitors found residents of villages nationwide terrified to venture beyond their town’s perimeter, afraid a Khmer Rouge soldier might be behind any tree. At the same time, across the nation Cambodians routinely unearthed mass graves by accident. Each held dozens, or hundreds, of skeletal remains from Khmer Rouge execution grounds. Most often villagers piled the remains in barns or outbuildings the Khmer Rouge had once used. Even now, decades later, villagers say the skulls speak to them.

Seth Mydans of the
New York Times
visited one of these villages in May 1996 and observed a haunted landscape:

Most of the nation’s Khmer Rouge survivors suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, but through the 1990s no one in Cambodia recognized this or offered any treatment. No one paid any attention at all, allowing the illness to fester and, in some cases, worsen. For someone suffering from PTSD, most anything out of the ordinary could set off a heart-wrenching panic. For older people with heart trouble, these panics could trigger a heart attack.