Anatomy of a Crisis: Education, Development, and the State in Cambodia, 1953-1998

6 Ranariddh and Hun Sen: From Uneasy Alliance to Coup

Ranariddh and Hun Sen From Uneasy Alliance to Coup 150 On July 5, 1997, Cambodia’s second prime minister, Hun Sen, appeared on national television dressed in military fatigues. With none of his usual flamboyance, he calmly read a statement in which he accused his counterpart, First Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh, and other of- ficials from Prince Ranariddh’s National United Front for an Independent , Neutral, Peaceful, and Cooperative Cambodia (FUNCINPEC) party, of illegal acts that were “dangerous to the nation.” Hours later, bullets began to fly as troops aligned with Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) attempted to forcibly disarm those troops and security personnel aligned to FUNCINPEC. Within two days, Hun Sen was in control of Phnom Penh; his coup had been successful.1 On July 10, the second prime minister was again before the cameras, explaining that the coup wasn’t really a coup, and that he was merely acting to prevent anarchy. To astute observers, Hun Sen’s coup came as no surprise, merely finalizing the deterioration in relations between the two major parties that had formed Cambodia’s coalition government following UN-sponsored elections in 1993. The days and weeks that followed the coup were as much a farce as they were a tragedy. Ranariddh, in France at the time he was ousted, was threatened with arrest if he attempted to return to Cambodia. In order to maintain a semblance of normalcy and the illusion of a FUNCINPEC-CPP coalition, Hun Sen rounded up those members of FUNCINPEC who had not fled the country and announced that Foreign Minister Ung Huot, a former minister of education, would assume the position of first prime minister. Human rights groups and sympathetic nongovernment organizations (NGO), meanwhile, sheltered those who were afraid for their lives. Their fears were not without good reason; at least forty FUNCINPEC officials, including General Chao Samboth and Secretary of State for the Interior Ho Sok had been executed. Apart from providing a striking testament to the failures of the UN’s expensive Cambodian operation, the coup also quite explicitly demonstrated the absolute power enjoyed by Hun Sen over the institutions of the Cambodian state. It is a power that reinforced the sense of déjà vu that permeated Cambodian social and political life after the country again became a kingdom in 1993. For many long-time observers, Hun Sen’s apparent paranoia, his continuous and all-pervading presence in the media, monumental speeches, uncanny ability to find scapegoats for his country’s ills, and capacity to eliminate his political opponents, were an acute reminder of years when Sihanouk was the undisputed captain of the Cambodian boat. Continuities aside, there also existed fundamental differences between the Cambodia that entered the 1990s and that of the immediate postindependence years. A first distinction between the periods was in the legacy of the past they inherited. While their predecessors inherited from the French a negligibly developed political and economic infrastructure , Cambodia’s leaders following UN intervention were forced to contend with an infrastructure whose fabric had been repeatedly reconstituted and often destroyed since 1970 and whose status, in terms of key development indicators, had plummeted in comparison to its counterparts in the developing world.2 A second distinction was that the Cold War had ended, and therefore Cambodia’s political allegiances, and the ideological orientation associated with those allegiances, were no longer a consideration. A final distinction, related to the second, was that Cambodia was faced with a world in which globalization, especially in terms of economic integration, was a fundamental concern and in which national development was—and continues to be—almost universally regarded as a celebration of capitalism. Within the context of this climate of political instability, continuities and discontinuities, and globalization, the central concern of this chapter is the extent to which those charged with the development of Cambodian education learned from past policies and practices. The key question is if the mistakes of the previous forty years were repeated. The evidence, sadly, shows overwhelmingly that the optimism generated by the unparalleled international intervention in Cambodia was unFrom Uneasy Alliance to Coup 151 founded, pointing to an educational crisis that overshadows, with the obvious exception of the Khmer Rouge period, those of the past. The basis for Cambodian and international optimism, and the manner in which that optimism unraveled—shifting from a sense of hope to one of despair—is...