The Best of Cambodia & Laos

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CAMBODIA IN DEPTH
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LOOKING BACK
Who’s Who in Cambodian Politics?
Cambodian politics remains an affair of shifting sands, Byzantine alliances, and
Mafia-like power plays. The prime minister, Hun Sen, has ruled the country for
3 decades. He heads the Cambodian People’s Party, successor to the People’s
Revolutionary Party of Kampuchea. He was a midlevel Khmer Rouge commander
from the Eastern Zone. Initially under So Phim (purged and killed on
the orders of Pol Pot in 1978) the Eastern Zone cadres were always fairly strong
on their own account. They came under the paranoid suspicion of the “Center”
of Angkar in 1978 and were forced into the arms of the Vietnamese. Hun Sen
and many others fled to Vietnam after the bloody purges of their people.
When the Vietnamese liberated Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge, Hun Sen
was one of the Vietnamese-backed returnees installed in power. Under Heng
Samrin, prime minister of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, he served as
foreign minister, becoming prime minister himself in 1985. He has been the
main power in Cambodia ever since, through turbulent times, winning the last
two elections in 2003 and 2008.
FUNCINPEC was formed as a political front, built around Sihanouk’s opposition
of the Vietnamese after they liberated Cambodia in 1979. This alliance
included the Khmer Rouge as the backbone of their fighting force. Following
the withdrawal of the Vietnamese in 1979, Sihanouk’s son, Prince Norodom
Ranariddh, served as co–prime minister from 1993 to 1997 and led the party
until October 2006. In 1997, the FUNCINPEC rivalry came to a head and Ranariddh
was evicted from government in violent military clashes across the
country. This was not unexpected, given that the UN had left in place two
competing prime ministers. Ranariddh fled but returned later on to rejoin
politics in a reduced role. In reality, he was already finished. He has since been
forced out of the party and formed a new one of his own, the Norodom Ranariddh
Party (NRP). Current leader Keo Puth Rasmey succeeded Ranariddh.
Both FUNCINPEC and Ranariddh’s new party took a hammering in the 2008
elections, from which they are unlikely to ever recover.
The SRP, or Sam Rainsy Party, first formed by the politician of the same name,
is a mercurial mix of pro-Western liberal sentiment and violently racist, anti-
Vietnamese rhetoric. Sam Rainsy himself was a FUNCINPEC finance minister in
the ’90s, but quit as a result of what he saw as unbridled corruption. While he
highlighted an issue that is central to Cambodia’s progress, he has confronted
Hun Sen’s undoubted thuggery with a political demagoguery of his own. As
things stand now, SRP is the second-largest party in the National Assembly but
has an increasingly diminishing chance of ever seeing real power.
Khmers suffered the devastating economic
effect. There has also been simmering tension
around the temples of Preah Vihear
(or Khao Phra Viharn in Thai). In 2008,
the two countries came close to war as
soldiers of both nations died in firefights.
The general trend, however, is positive.
Having had two elections that have taken