In 1972, after what he described as a heroic raid, he changed his name again. As Hun Sen, he lost an eye in the battle for Kampong Cham, on April 16, 1975, the day before the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh and sent the Americans fleeing in helicopters.[n] Cambodia's cities and towns emptied out by order of the new regime. The crash of falling bombs was replaced by the scratch of the shovel and the dull thud of the hoe.
Two years into the nightmare, Hun Sen was a deputy regimental commander, in charge of 2,000 Khmer Rouge troops. By then, however, the regime had already turned on itself. Although Vietnamese communist support had been instrumental in the Khmer Rouge takeover, Cambodia’s historical (and not entirely unjustified) fear of its much more populous and powerful neighbor soon trumped any sense of ideological kinship.[n]In 1977, Hun Sen was ordered to take part in what he considered a foolhardy attack on Vietnam. Perhaps fearing that he would be swept up in the regime’s increasingly vicious internal purges, he fled into the waiting arms of Cambodia’s enemy instead.[s]
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| Photo: Rich Garella |
Before Iraq, before Afghanistan and before Bosnia, the West set out to heal another ruined country.
The Cambodia operation began in earnest in 1991, with the Paris Peace Agreement. International donors rebuilt roads and bridges—a broken nation’s bones and tendons. They also used Cambodia as an experiment in modern methods of implanting democracy.
On the morning of March 30, 1997, it became clear that the experiment had gone wrong. What happened that Easter Sunday would draw the FBI and the State Department into a test of America’s commitment to the war on terrorism and its dedication to the rule of law.
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A Tragedy of No Importance, by Rich Garella and Eric Pape
viewed on April 01, 2012 - about - e-mail - print all
viewed on April 01, 2012 - about - e-mail - print all
Contents
About A Tragedy of No Importance
This article has been researched and written by Rich Garella and Eric Pape. Both of us lived in Cambodia at the time of the grenade attack and came to know many of the people affected by it. We saw what happened to the ambitious effort to bring democracy and development to Cambodia, and learned how the West chooses, finances and inoculates its winners, and what happens when it abandons its losers.
A Tragedy of No Importance was published by Mother Jones magazine online. That version can be seen here.
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Quote:
Sihanouk, from his exile in China, quickly joined his Communist former enemies, the Khmer Rouge. To bolster their common struggle, he called upon his “little people” to join the fight for liberation. Ritthi Sen changed his name to Hun Samrach—Samrach meaning “someone who completes his life’s work”—and joined the movement. Samrach was wounded several times as he rose through the ranks of the Khmer Rouge.
In 1972, after what he described as a heroic raid, he changed his name again. As Hun Sen, he lost an eye in the battle for Kampong Cham, on April 16, 1975, the day before the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh and sent the Americans fleeing in helicopters.
RITTHI SEN ??????
1st of April joke???
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