BANGKOK — Hun Sen first took power in Cambodia when Ronald Reagan was wrapping up his first term in office, Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” topped pop music charts, and the Soviet Union was a superpower.
Unlike many of his authoritarian peers, the Cambodian prime minister says he is stepping down on his terms and timetable this summer after finding a suitable successor: his son.
Hun Sen is expected to resign after winning reelection in July, ending a remarkable journey. Once a severely wounded guerrilla in Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, he became one of the world’s longest-ruling leaders, crushing dissent and unsettling the U.S. with a steady move toward China.
Unlike other authoritarian leaders who overstay their welcome, Hun Sen is leaving on a high note. The prime minister’s domestic and international standing rose in November when President Biden flew to Phnom Penh to meet with him and attend a summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Hun Sen is also stepping aside at a delicate time, as China and the U.S. heat up their rivalry in Cambodia’s military, economic and diplomatic affairs. Cambodians are bracing for a generational change when, as expected, Hun Sen wins nationwide parliamentary elections on July 23 and passes his job to his son, Hun Manet.
“Now we have found the young generation that will come to replace us,” Hun Sen told villagers on March 14. “We should hand it over better to them and just stay behind them.”
The prime minister, 70, retains a stranglehold on the country, with his Cambodian People’s Party occupying all of parliament’s seats.
No one expects Hun Manet, 45, to match his father’s legacy from the 1970s onward. Hun Sen survived U.S. bombings, Vietnam’s 1979 invasion and the struggle for power in postwar clashes. He even endured the historical ignominy associated with Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge rule.
Hun Sen said in a 1989 press conference that he and many other Cambodians considered the anti-U.S. Khmer Rouge “a national, patriotic movement, and therefore I was also in that movement” during the 1970s.
“I was only a simple Khmer Rouge,” he said. He bristled when asked about the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal policies and harsh repression of opponents. Hun Sen said he eventually felt betrayed by the brutality of Pol Pot’s rule and began plotting against him.
To escape bloody internal Khmer Rouge purges, Hun Sen defected in 1977. He fled east across the border into Vietnam, where he was recruited for a force to return to Cambodia and oust the regime. In January 1979, Vietnam invaded Cambodia, chased Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge guerrillas into the jungle and installed Hun Sen as foreign minister.
In 1985, during Vietnam’s nearly 11-year occupation, Hanoi promoted Hun Sen to prime minister. He has been Cambodia’s dominant political figure for nearly four decades.
Transitions
It has been an era of transitions. During the past few decades, Hun Sen weaned Cambodia from an overwhelming dependence on Vietnam and turned to China for trade, aid and security. To the consternation of the Pentagon, he recently allowed Beijing to fund, develop and use Ream naval base on Cambodia’s southern coast along the resource-rich, strategic Gulf of Thailand.
On March 19, the navies of China and Cambodia practiced a training drill for the first time while organizing the land-based Golden Dragon 2023 military exercise, which lasted more than two weeks. A Chinese navy landing ship, the Jinggangshan, brought some personnel and equipment for Golden Dragon and led a two-hour exercise with two Cambodian patrol boats off Cambodia’s Sihanoukville port, near Ream, according to Chinese reports.
Cambodia’s coastal waters open into the South China Sea, where China and the U.S. have become increasingly confrontational over territorial and access rights, including undersea resources. At home, Hun Sen’s welcoming of Chinese money, companies and projects has transformed the skylines of Phnom Penh and other cities.
Hun Sen is reportedly allowing China to deepen Ream’s port so bigger ships, including military vessels, can dock for maintenance and to construct a dry dock for repairs to ship hulls. Both countries deny that the project is solely for Beijing’s military purposes.
Cambodian Defense Minister Tea Banh said last year that the port would be open to all countries.
“Chinese interest in bases in the region goes back at least to its construction of the airport in Kompong Chhnang during the Khmer Rouge regime,” said Rich Garella, a U.S.-funded International Republican Institute consultant in Cambodia in 2003 and former Cambodia Daily newspaper managing editor. “The U.S. is desperately trying to maintain appearances, but its influence [in Cambodia] is a shadow of what it was in the mid-’90s. It just can’t compete with China.”
Hun Sen’s manipulation of his eldest son into the prime ministry will result in “another generation, at least, of Cambodians whose dreams of democracy are denied [and] a lasting humiliation for the Western funders that he played for fools,” Mr. Garella said.
Prime minister ‘in the future’
Hun Sen announced his support of his West Point-educated son to be the next prime minister in 2021. The Cambodian People’s Party Central Committee unanimously endorsed Hun Manet as “the prime minister candidate in the future” that December.
In addition to his West Point training, Hun Manet earned a master’s degree in economics from New York University and a Ph.D. in economics from Bristol University in England. That education may do him well in negotiations with China, the biggest investor in Cambodia.
His U.S. and British education, culture and social connections may sway Hun Manet’s international decision-making. His rise through the ranks has been thorough. After West Point, Hun Manet became Royal Cambodian Army commander, armed forces deputy commander in chief, plus deputy commander of his father’s bodyguards and head of Cambodia’s counterterrorism unit.
He became a four-star general on March 17. Some think his international background might make him a more accessible figure for the West than his father.
“The commanders of the Australian and New Zealand armies sought meetings with him last October,” Charles Dunst, adjunct fellow with the Southeast Asia Program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in a Feb. 13 analysis. “There is a better potential for partnership with Hun Manet than there has been with Hun Sen for at least the last decade.”
Some repair work with the Biden administration is needed. U.S.-Cambodian relations have deteriorated over the years as Washington criticizes Hun Sen’s records on human rights and civil liberties.
“It will be difficult for Hun Manet to extend an olive branch to Washington and its allies, particularly if human rights violations and Chinese developments at the Ream naval base continue,” Mr. Dunst said.
The son also inherits the father’s political opponents.
“Hun Manet is not a good choice to become prime minister,” said Mu Sochua, a former vice president of the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party now living in self-exile in Providence, Rhode Island. “He has no political experience, no charisma, and there is no way that he would be considered for the job but for his father.”
“Hun Manet as prime minister would have to give orders to ruling party veterans who are far senior to him in terms of age and experience. Many of these veterans are disgruntled by their scant reward for decades of loyalty,” Mu Sochua said.
“The fragility of Hun Sen’s rule and his succession plan should not be underestimated,” Mu Sochua said in an interview.
Exiled political opposition leader Sam Rainsy, who often voices elaborate conspiracies critical of Hun Sen, broke with Cambodia National Rescue Party leader Kem Sokha last year, splintering the anti-regime forces.
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