From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

de
facto
government under Hun Sen controlled the army, the police and the
administration.
The generals will eventually have to adjust and change to a form of
government more like their Asean neighbours’. This will come about sooner if
their contacts with the international community increase.
I prefer to remember Cambodia as that oasis of peace and prosperity in the
war-torn Indochina of the 1960s. Choo and I made our first visit to Phnom Penh,
its capital, in 1962. Prince Norodom Sihanouk personally greeted us at the
airport and had dancers in traditional costume scatter flower petals on the red
carpet as we walked to the car after I had inspected a guard of honour. Phnom
Penh was like a French provincial town, quiet and peaceful with wide
boulevards reminiscent of the Champs Élysées in Paris lined with trees and
flanked by side roads also shaded by trees. There was even a monumental
archway, a Khmer version of the Arc de Triomphe, at the centre of a major

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crossroads, the Place de I’Indépendance. We stayed at the Palais du
Gouvernement, formerly the residence of the French governor-general, by the
Mekong River. Sihanouk himself lived in the old palace. He entertained us to
dinner in grand style, then flew us in his personal Russian aircraft to see Angkor
Wat.
Sihanouk was an extraordinary personality, highly intelligent and full of
energy and 
joie de vivre
. He had the airs and graces of an educated French
gentleman, with all the accompanying gestures and mannerisms, and spoke
English the French way. Medium in height, a little rotund, he had a broad face
with flared nostrils like the stone carvings on the temples around Angkor Wat.
He was an excellent host who made each visit a memorable and enjoyable
occasion. His banquets of French 
haute cuisine
, with the best French wines and
beautiful cutlery to match, were a treat. I remember going to his palace in the
provincial capital of Batambang, driving up to a raised entrance typical of
driveways in French chateaux. As we arrived, short Cambodian guards, looking
dwarfed by their thigh-high gleaming black Napoleonic boots with helmets to
match, saluted with glinting swords. The reception and banquet halls were
luxuriously furnished and air-conditioned. There was a Western and a
Cambodian orchestra. Foreign diplomats were in attendance. It was a royal
occasion.
The prince was mercurial, hypersensitive to criticism. He would answer
every press article that was in any way critical. Politics for him was the press and
publicity. When he was overthrown in the 1970 coup he said that he sought
refuge in Beijing because he feared for his life. I believe that had he returned to
Cambodia then, no soldier would have dared to shoot him on arrival at the
airport. He was their god-king. He had kept Cambodia an oasis of peace and
plenty in a troubled, war-ravaged Indochina by maintaining a precarious balance
between the communists and the West. He sought the friendship and protection
of the Chinese while he kept his ties with the West through France. When he
stayed in Beijing instead of returning to defy the coup-makers, the old Cambodia
was destroyed.
I met him again when he came to Singapore in September 1981 for talks on
forming a coalition with the Khmer Rouge. It was a changed Sihanouk. He had
gone back to Phnom Penh and been a captive of the Khmer Rouge. He had been
through a harrowing time; many of his children and grandchildren had been
killed by Pol Pot, and he himself was in fear for his life. The old bouncy
Sihanouk had been destroyed. His laughter, the high-pitched shrill voice when

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he got excited, his gestures – all were more muted. He was a living tragedy, a
symbol of what had happened to his country and his people. The Chinese had
rescued him just before the Vietnamese captured Phnom Penh at the beginning
of 1979. He appeared before the UN Security Council to speak against the
Vietnamese invasion, and he became the international symbol of Cambodian
resistance. For a long time he was unforgiving and adamant against a coalition
government with the Khmer Rouge.
After the Khmer Rouge occupied Phnom Penh, the Cambodians, or
Kampucheans as they called themselves during Pol Pot’s regime, were not active
in the region. A senior minister, Ieng Sary, visited me in March 1977. He was
soft-spoken, round-faced and chubby; he looked the softest, kindest person, one
who would look after babies tenderly. He was the brother-in-law and trusted aide
of the infamous Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader who had slaughtered from one
to two million Cambodians out of a population of seven million, including most
of the educated, Cambodia’s brightest and best. He made no reference to this
genocide and I decided against questioning him. He was bound to deny, as their
Khmer Rouge broadcasts did, that it ever took place. Ieng Sary was realistic. He
wanted trade – barter trade. He needed spare parts for factories, pumps for
irrigation and outboard motors for their fishing boats. In exchange he offered
fish from the Tonle Sap, Cambodia’s famous inland lake which flooded every
year and produced excellent fish. The barter trade did not flourish (they had
problems with logistics), so we had little trade or anything else to do with them.
Relations between Vietnam and Cambodia deteriorated with border clashes.
Vietnam attacked Cambodia in 1978 and captured it in January 1979. Thereafter,
Cambodia existed in my consciousness only through our activities in and out of
the UN to garner votes to block the Vietnamese puppet government from taking
over Cambodia’s UN seat, and through our support for Cambodian resistance
forces operating from the Thai-Cambodian border.
Sihanouk’s son, Prince Ranariddh, I had met several times between 1981 and
1991. His father had placed him in charge of the royalist forces near the Thai
border with Cambodia. Ranariddh resembled his father in voice, mannerisms,
facial expression and body language. He was darker-complexioned and smaller,
more equable in temperament and less swayed by the mood of the moment, but
otherwise much in the same mould. He had his father’s fluency in French and
had taught law in Lyon University before he took over the leadership of the
royalist forces.
When I inspected their training camp in northeast Thailand in the 1980s I

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noted that it was not well organised and lacked military spirit. It was the best
Ranariddh could do because, like him, his generals and officers spent more time
in Bangkok than in the camp. As we were supporting them with weapons and
radio equipment, I felt disappointed. After the 1991 settlement, the big aid
donors took over. Ranariddh became the first prime minister (with Hun Sen as
second prime minister) when his party won the 1993 UN-organised election.
When we met in Singapore that August, I warned him that the coalition was a
precarious arrangement. The military, police and administration belonged to Hun
Sen. If he wanted to survive, Ranariddh had to win over a part of Hun Sen’s
army and police officers and some of the provincial governors. Being called the
first prime minister and having his man appointed defence minister were of little
value when the officers and troops were loyal to Hun Sen. He probably did not
take my words to heart. He might have believed that his royal blood would
assure him the support of the people, that he would be irreplaceable.
I met Hun Sen in Singapore in December that same year. He was a totally
different character, a tough survivor of the Khmer Rouge, a prime minister
appointed by the Vietnamese in the 1980s but agile enough to distance himself
from them and be acceptable to the Americans and West Europeans. He left an
impression of strength and ruthlessness. He understood power, that it came from
the barrel of the gun, which he was determined to hold. Once the Khmer Rouge
were on the decline, and Ranariddh could no longer team up with them to
challenge him, Hun Sen ousted him in 1997 and took complete control, while
remaining nominally second prime minister. Sihanouk had become king again
after the 1993 election, but his poor health and frequent absences from
Cambodia for cancer treatment in Beijing had taken him out of the cockpit of
power now occupied completely by Hun Sen and his army.
Cambodia is like a porcelain vase that has been smashed into myriads of
shards. To put them together will be a slow and laborious task. As with all
mended porcelain, it cannot withstand much pressure. Pol Pot had killed 90 per
cent of Cambodia’s intelligentsia and trained personnel. The country now lacks a
coherent administration. The people have been accustomed to lawless conditions
for so long that they are no longer law-abiding. Only the gun is feared.
The people of Cambodia are the losers. The country is crushed, its educated
class decimated, its economy devastated. Hun Sen’s coup caused Cambodia’s
admission into Asean to be postponed. It was eventually admitted in April 1999
because no country wanted to spend US$2 billion for another UN operation to
hold fair elections. Cambodia had had 27 years of war since Lon Nol’s 1970

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coup. Its present leaders are the products of bitter, relentless struggles in which
opponents were either eliminated or neutralised. They are utterly merciless and
ruthless, without humane feelings. History has been cruel to the Cambodians.

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