Word: hun
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...better known for a brooding scowl and outbursts of temper. But on March 6 he was ebullient as he presided over his daughter's wedding. His smile was broadcast over a huge video screen to 5,000 guests at tables spread around his house in the Tiger's Den. Hun Sen was doubly happy, he said in his speech, not only because of his daughter's marriage but also because that very day his troops had arrested Ta Mok, the Khmer Rouge leader also known as "the Butcher," the last of the rebel commanders still at large since the death...
Only two years ago, Hun Sen requested U.N. assistance in setting up an international tribunal to try Khmer Rouge leaders for some of the worst crimes against humanity this century has seen. Last month three independent U.N. jurists presented him with a report on how 20 to 30 top Khmer Rouge leaders could be put on trial in another Asian country. But after two decades of denouncing the "genocidal regime of Pol Pot," Hun Sen is balking. "We have no confidence in an international court of law," he says...
...Prime Minister begins talking about himself in the third person. "Hun Sen has nothing to lose by a trial of the Khmer Rouge leaders--only to gain," he says. "The problem is not the Khmer Rouge, but their relations with others. If we didn't need national reconciliation, I would not be scared of a trial. We have to be cautious to avoid any panic among leaders of the Khmer Rouge." Hun Sen fears that a large-scale trial would disturb the balance he has achieved, one that has rabid guerrillas, royalists and former communists from his own party...
...more Hun Sen feels threatened, the more his dark side shows. After losing an election in 1993, he bullied his way into a coalition government and then, in July 1997, staged a coup that drove his opponents and erstwhile partners out of the country. The international community cut off most aid in protest to the bloodiness of the coup and the 100 or so executions that came after it. But Hun Sen survived all that...
...political killings have continued, and although Hun Sen denies Cambodia is "a country of impunity," his promises to investigate and arrest the killers have come to nothing. He may not have personally ordered the killings, but some of his lieutenants are widely feared: victims have been found with eyes gouged out or hands cut off, clearly tortured before they were killed. Says Christophe Peschoux of the U.N. Human Rights office in Phnom Penh: "It is the chronic problem of Cambodia. They cannot manage conflict. Either they use intermediaries, or they reach for the gun. They cannot sit down and discuss...