The Dissident and the Dictator
He’s one of Cambodia’s most enduring – and few – opposition leaders. Sam Rainsy, the President of the Cambodian National Rescue Party, swung through Washington recently to push for new legislation to counter what he calls the repressive tactics of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s regime.
In fact, it’s virtually impossible to talk about Sam Rainsy’s role in Cambodian politics for the past three decades without talking about Hun Sen. In office for 38 years, he is the world’s sixth longest-serving ruler. To many, he’s also a dictator and a thug – gutting the opposition, holding fake elections, and unafraid to unleash violence, threats and intimidation against anyone who dares to cross him.
On top of that, it looks like Hun Sen is now copying some moves out of Beijing’s play-book.
Welcome to episode 8 of “Who Killed Haing Ngor.” This is a real-time and crowdsourced podcast, in which we examine lingering questions about the murder of Dr. Haing S. Ngor, as well as issues connected to his legacy. Dr. Ngor, of course, was a survivor of the Khmer Rouge “Killing Fields,” and went on to star in the groundbreaking film of the same name. He was an outspoken supporter of the Cambodian people, and not shy about criticizing anyone he thought was doing them wrong.
I have to admit: from the moment I decided to launch this podcast about the murder of Haing Ngor, I knew I had to interview Sam Rainsy.
When I was reporting from Cambodia in the 1990’s, Sam Rainsy was seen as a bright and shining star. He was a democracy activist, and he’d worked in finance in Paris – so he had his own money, and was seen as uncorruptable. He became Cambodia’s Finance Minister.
Rainsy was also an absolute darling of the international press. That’s partly because he made himself super accessible. If you got Sam Rainsy on the phone, you could always count on him for quote, and that quote made its way into the news cycle.
And there’s one quote I remember : It’s been stuck in the back of my head for decades. It was when Sam Rainsy said that Hun Sen was behind the murder of Haing Ngor.
Sam Rainsy
Wikimedia Commons | Creator: DOMINIQUE FAGET | Credit: AFP Copyright: AFP
Rainsy had been booted from the Finance Ministry at that point because Hun Sen had started political maneuvering against him. So Rainsy was an opposition figure. And all this was in 1996 - 27 years ago. Still, I had to ask him about that quote.
MPN: I remember that you suggested at the time that Hun Sen might have been involved. Do you remember that?
SAM RAINSY: Possibly. But I have no evidence. In Cambodia with… former Khmer Rouge, those who succeeded the Khmer Rouge like Hun Sen -- everything is possible. But it’s far away for me. I cannot recall.
The logic was that Haing Ngor was popular. He had a following back home in Long Beach, California - and that meant possible funding from the Cambodian diaspora. So he’d be a threat to Hun Sen if he ever wanted to make a political run. That’s what I remember as Rainsy’s reasoning at the time.
I personally never filed a news story about Haing Ngor’s murder or Rainsy’s allegation back in 1996. I can’t find any reference to that quote on the internet, which was still close to brand new at the time. So I can’t prove that he said it.
For the record, when Ngor was killed, Hun Sen called the murder a “political act.” He said exactly the opposite of what Rainsy was alleging: the murder was an attempt to intimidate his Cambodia’s People’s Party, the CPP, with whom Haing Ngor had done some development work. And that’s true – they had worked together. We heard about that in the last episode.
Still, Rainsy was able to paint a picture of why Hun Sen might have been involved.
RAINSY: The truth is not it's not convenient for some people. People do not want the truth to be exposed. And it’s a custom, and a habit in Cambodia: in order to hide the truth, we kill people. Many suspicious deaths -- I can be even precise -- assassinations were conducted, have been conducted over the last decades, in an attempt to hide the truth.
Now, Hun Sen has a lot of skeletons in his closet. He has assassinated journalists. Labor leaders. He even tried to assassinate Rainsy in 1997, human rights group say, when someone threw a grenade at a political rally. Sixteen people died.
He threw a coup d’état, overthrowing the UN election winner – in Cambodia’s only free and fair ballot. He later managed to coopt that entire party, FUNCINPEC, that had won the election. Which now just does Hun Sen’s bidding. FUNCINPEC was once a “royalist” party, but even its Princes - Ranariddh and Sirivudh - were bought out.
He locks up political opponents, and forces others into exile with bogus corruption or sedition charges. That includes Rainsy, who lives in France. His Cambodian National Rescue Party, the CNRP, is officially banned.
None of this is news. It’s all been widely documented by human rights groups, the US State Department, the European Union, and others - and has been for decades. I’ll throw some links on the webpage. Hun Sen is a tyrant.
The “inconvenient truth” Rainsy’s referring to in this conversation? That’s another potential motive for murdering Haing Ngor. As Rainsy said, Hun Sen used to be Khmer Rouge.
Haing Ngor and the man he played, Dith Pran, are arguably the world’s two most famous survivors of the Khmer Rouge. Once “The Killing Fields” came out, they campaigned together for an international tribunal to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice. Just like Nuremberg did for the Nazis.
A tribunal was always going to be a sticky subject. Here’s why.
The Khmer Rouge revolution was based - in part – on paranoia. Pol Pot and senior leaders were trying to create a classless society, and the revolution was meant to be “pure.”
That’s why they killed tens of thousands of so-called “bourgeois” Cambodians – right at the start. They had clearly benefited from the capitalist structure so they had to be eliminated. Peasant farmers, on the other hand, were idealized.
Soon after the Khmer Rouge takeover, the thrill of victory wore off. The Khmer Rouge had forced everyone to work on collective farms – or in, what could be better described as “forced labor camps” – and they ran into trouble.
Starvation set in. Disease. Discontent. When the rice harvest failed to come in, for example, the fault would never lie with revolutionary policies, the thinking behind those labor camps. out in the countryside.
Instead, senior Khmer Rouge blamed mid-level officers. Clearly, their actions weren’t pure enough. They had betrayed revolutionary ideals.
The solution was to purge them - as traitors to the revolution. The Khmer Rouge began to arrest and execute their own people. The revolution started eating its own tail.
It didn’t take long for those mid-level Khmer Rouge to say, Enough of this. They fled to Vietnam. And when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979, toppling the Pol Pot regime – it was those former Khmer Rouge officers who led the charge.
One of them was Hun Sen.
Hun Sen immediately took up top positions in Cambodia’s new government – the one installed by Vietnam. At just 26 years-old, he was the world’s youngest foreign minister; before becoming prime minister in 1985.
Hun Sen never wanted there to be a Khmer Rouge tribunal. He always massaged the message about his Khmer Rouge past. I’ll post a link to a Human Rights Watch report that says he was a Khmer Rouge regimental commander in the Eastern Sector.
Hun Sen, via Wikimedia Commons
RAINSY: This we can remember we can comment on. Hun Sen wanted - he still wants to, to hide facts.
Haing Ngor was killed in 1996. And it wasn’t until late 2008 that the Khmer Rouge tribunal opened its first case. So I’m glossing over a whole lot of history here – including the work of journalists Nate Thayer and Nic Dunlop, which I’ll get to in a future episode.
But when that tribunal finally opened? Hun Sen did everything he could to sabotage it, before it got to him.
SAM RAINSY: Because he actually limited the scope of the Khmer Rouge tribunal. He doesn’t want investigation to go too far. He was looking for a few scapegoats so that to close the book, but I think it is very unfair. If the Khmer Rouge tribunal did its working properly, we would better understand how the Khmer Rouge system worked and who played what role in the system. And then we would see that the responsibility for the mass killings is shared. He shared among many people, including those who are in power in Cambodia now.
Hun Sen is still playing power games.
AUDIO MONTAGE /BREON PEACE: Two miles from our office, just across the Brooklyn Bridge, this nondescript office building in the heart of bustling Chinatown in lower Manhattan has a dark secret. Until several months ago, an entire floor of this building hosted an undeclared police station of the Chinese national police.
That last voice is Breon Peace speaking at a press conference on April 17 of this year. He’s the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.
PEACE: The secret police station appears to have had a more sinister use. On at least one occasion, an official with the Chinese National Police directed one of the defendants, a US citizen who worked at the secret police station to help locate a pro-democracy activist of Chinese descent, living in California. In other words, the Chinese National Police appear to have been using this station to track a US resident on US soil.
In short: China is sending its henchman to go after the Chinese diaspora living in the US.
Beijing is targeting activists from the minority Uighur and Tibetan communities, democracy activists from Hong Kong, and others. This is transnational crime.
Now, Hun Sen is copying those tactics. That’s what Rainsy was just in Washington to discuss with lawmakers.
RAINSY: Hun Sen has sent agents from Cambodia and has built a network with his supporters in the US to threaten the Cambodian community in the US, those Americans of Cambodian descent, when they speak up their mind, when they criticize the Hun Sen regime, they got threatened by Hun Sen’s agents operating in the US.[] And Hun Sen himself threatens families of the people who criticize him, from abroad. Hun Sen threatens to retaliate .
The level to which China, Cambodia - and I’m sure we can throw in Iran, and the Saudis s –are conducting surveillance on US soil -- that’s increasingly intense. So much so that a bi-partisan group of US Senators introduced the Transnational Repression Policy Act in March 2023.
It calls for the US intelligence community to identify the perpetrators of transnational repression. It sets up a tip-line for at-risk communities to complain directly to Homeland Security about harassment. Ultimately, the US President could impose sanctions on offending governments. I personally think that the transnational repressions we’re hearing about now is just the tip of the iceberg.
There’s one thing Sam Rainsy and Hun Sen have in common: they are both remarkably stubborn and resilient men - survivors of Cambodia’s toxic and turbulent political culture.
Unfortunately, for anyone interested in democracy and the rule of law, Hun Sen is clearly winning. Parliamentary elections to take place in July are widely expected to be a farce.
In March of this year, Kem Sokha was sentenced to 27 years in house arrest for treason – a case seen as politically motivated. He’s a colleague of Rainsy’s from the CNRP. A few weeks ago, the Candelight Party, a new potential a threat to Hun Sen’s popularity, was also banned from participating in the vote.
So Hun Sen’s CPP, is running virtually unopposed.
RAINSY: Frankly speaking there would be no change to the Hun Sen regime. I have been asked, knowing that elections in Cambodia, including the one to be held in three months would be a fake election., “Why do you want to participate in it? Why don't you just boycott??” So my answer is that if we boycott, we would disappear from the political scene.
Cambodia’s opposition is hanging on by a thread. Hun Sen, who’s now 70 years-old, is talking about handing power down to his son, Hun Manet. We’ll have to see down the road if the CPP is willing to put up with that.
So Haing Ngor wanted a Khmer Rouge tribunal, had an international following, and was thinking of getting into politics. That looks like motive for Hun Sen, who’s been linked to previous assassinations.
Still, there’s no evidence linking Hun Sen to the murder of Haing Ngor. But given the wider political context - if a prominent Cambodian is murdered – it’s pretty easy to see why Hun Sen is the usual suspect.
Sam Rainsy is not the only one who thought Hun Sen killed Haing Ngor.
There’s a real “inside baseball” footnote related to this episode that I’ll include on the webpage. The mysterious Ruom Ritt, clearly thought Hun Sen was behind the killing as well. Just who is Ruom Ritt? That’s a pen name for another senior figure.
Check out Ruom Ritt here.
So here we are: We are beginning to get a more rounded - anecdotal - picture of Haing Ngor and the circumstances he found himself in, in Cambodia.
In Episode 7, we learned about Dr. Ngor’s feud with orphanage director Naomi Bronstein, which left him with financial issues that dragged on between 1993 and 1995.
Sam Rainsy paints a picture of Hun Sen as a violent despot, a view widely supported by the international human rights community. But we also know that Ngor collaborated with Hun Sen on some development work in this same period.
Emilia Casella described Ngor as a plainly dressed but passionate, purposeful guy. He indirectly referenced his political aspirations to her without elaborating.
In Episode 1, Andy Pendleton found Haing Ngor to be an outspoken guy – who vented at Cambodian leaders engaged in corruption. Andy, on the other hand, saw Ngor was also wearing whole lot of bling and running with what he thought looked like the wrong crowd.
Two months before his death in February 1996, Ngor told his creative partner Dave Walker that was going to make a political run in Cambodia.
So It appears Ngor had money problems, and at the same time, he was getting ready to dive into politics. And then he was murdered.
Thank you for listening. My name is M.P. Nunan. Remember, this is a crowd-sourced podcast – an experiment in journalism.
If you knew Haing Ngor personally and would like to contribute – even just an interesting anecdote - please get in touch. If you know any details about his murder you think are relevant, please get in touch. The best way to reach me is to email whokilledhaingngor@gmail.com
Thank