The Trouble With Tyranny
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| Suong Sophorn, a housing activist, can be seen held by his hair by Hun Xen's violent cops. He was later beaten up some more (Licadho Video) |
Op-Ed by MP
Such violent seizures of communal and private assets - as seen in a video clip posted in this forum of late – are not the symptoms of collective ills, but rather a tragic manifestation of a society held in hostage by a band of sophisticated and politically well organised thugs.BACK in the days when Ieng Sary's KR faction was still in control of the Pailin region and Hun Sen was trying to entice him over to his side, it was reported that Hun Sen assured Ieng Sary and his son in a negotiation that there was much he and them had in common, since in his words: "We are Red Khmers like you!” Ieng Sary himself was subsequently granted royal pardon over his involvement during the KR regime, and no one would blame him now if he feels let down since by being made to stand trial for mass murders.
In fact, peace or 'national reconciliation' was not uppermost in Hun Sen's mind at the time, nor, it can be argued, is it the case today when he still finds it to his advantage to exploit the ghosts of the KR and the country's prolonged armed conflict of recent past to scare off domestic and international opinions. In order to make this reconciliation with Ieng Sary more congenial to such opinions, some contemporary writers and observers even went so far as to float the farfetched notion of a 'moderate' Ieng Sary, who like other prominent figures within Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea, had either to follow Pol Pot's ideological madness or perish, and whose leadership of what remained then of KR forces could then be incorporated into the Phnom Penh regime's unified political-military structure. However, it is as well to note that it was not for nothing that Pol Pot and Ieng Sary chose to cement their political alliance through their being married to Khieu Ponnary and Ieng Thirith (who were siblings) respectively since their stay in Paris decades before they came to power; an arrangement, moreover, not uncommon within the circle of the country's economic-political elite, as testified by the intricately formed family tree(s) of the current CPP leadership which sees most of the powerful elements welded together through their children’s marriages as well as other manners of reciprocating nepotism that also bind those not directly tied to this extended Family through blood.
What prompted Hun Sen to make peace with his erstwhile foes like Ieng Sary and Sihanouk was not out of character of someone who has been exposed to a combination of ideological currents and influences sweeping across the developing world in the 1960s and 1970s, including Maoist guerrilla tactics, Vietnamese revolutionary experience, as well as, most enduringly, Stalinist machinations and expedience in face of political rivalries and intrigues. By depriving the former anti-Vietnamese resistance of its most potent military component in the KR, Hun Sen had sought to isolate and weaken the other non-communist forces within that alliance, rendering the Paris Peace Accords a mere ceremonious affair, reducing it in effect to the status of diplomatic and theoretical formality or impotence.
