The Killing Fields and Indonesia's Relations with Cambodia Revisited

Dr. Benny Widyono with Prime Minister Hun Sen who after the clash in 1997 continued to consolidate his power until today 2010.
Benny eventually represented the U.N. Secretary General in Cambodia after the Killing Fields in which about two million Cambodians perished
In his capacity of UNTAC Governor, Benny inspected U.N. forces in Cambodia.
Benny Widyono, Mrs. Bintari Sudarpo, King Norodom Sihanouk, Queen Monineath,
with Indonesian Ambassador Taufik Sudarpo, and Benny's wife Francisca.
Benny sits on the Board position of an NGO running slum area schools in Phnom Penh
founded one of his former staffers honored as a CNN hero for her work with children.

September 16, 2010
Jim Luce
The Huffington Post (USA)

I first met Benny Widyono at an Indonesian Consulate fete years ago. I knew upon meeting him that he had an extraordinary mind and knew Asia's southeast as well as he knew this nation's northeast. Living in Connecticut and commuting to his office at the U.N. for decades - when he wasn't living in Phnom Phen, clued me into that reality. I told him if he ever wrote his memoirs I wanted to read them. Sure enough, they arrived by post last week. And they are riveting.

The book Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the United Nations in Cambodia has just been published. It is excellent. I had planned to read it next month, but I could not put it down. It is well written, engaging, and highly informative. I now understand so much more of Cambodia's Cold-War history and how it led to the Killing Fields in which about two million Cambodians perished. Google reviewers have given this excellent book 4.5 stars.

Dr. Benny Widyono was born "Hong Lan Oei," but during the madness of the anti communist/anti-Chinese period in Indonesia that killed 800,000 suspected Communists including ethnic Chinese - also a result of the Cold War - his name was "nativized" under the Suharto regime. Indonesians were still not allowed to read or speak Chinese when I first arrived there in 1995. Thus, my struggle to adopt an Indonesian Chinese infant then to get him away from there. However, today normalcy has returned to the Republic and Chinese language and culture are no longer criminalized.

Benny is thus an excellent guide to post-colonial Cambodia. As a recipient of the title of Commandeur de L'Ordre Royal de Sahametrey in 2004, the highest title for civilians bestowed by H.M. King Sihanouk of Cambodia, Benny played an integral role working with the U.N. in the recovery from the death and destruction of Pol Pot in a way that a non-South East Asian could have. Another key player at the time was the Japanese head of United Nations in Cambodia, Yasushi Akashi.

Benny notes in his book the King's words to the Japanese head of the U.N. presence in Cambodia:

"I wish to thank you, Excellency Mr. Yasushi Akashi, for sending another prince from Java to help bring peace to Cambodia," quipped Norodom Sihanouk, the King of Cambodia, referring to me.

We were at the official inauguration of my office, the provincial headquarters of the U.N. Transitional Authority on Cambodia (UNTAC) in Siemreap, Cambodia in 1992, the U.N. Peacekeeping operation established to bring peace to Cambodia.

Prior to our arrival, Cambodia was, due to its political location, been for 20 years the subject of turmoil, civil war and Khmer Rouge induced genocide. To end the stalemate of Cambodia having two governments... the U.N. became the temporary government until elections could be held.

Yasushi Akashi was the head of UNTAC and therefore, temporarily, the head of the country. I was his "governor" of Siemreap Province, home of the world famous Angkor Wat temple.

Benny's life is fascinating because he was raised in Indonesia in a minority religion - Roman Catholicism - and yet he attended the most prestigious university there, the University of Indonesia in Jakarta. He went on to study economics in the University of Texas. His Ph.D. dissertation compared the role of petroleum in economic development in Mexico and Indonesia. One week after he graduated he was offered a position with the United Nations in Thailand, beginning his professional and personal odyssey.

In 1981, Benny was transferred back to New York to work on helping countries cope with multinational corporations. In his new capacity he writes of coming home late from New York City as now his work at the U.N. consisted of "going to endless cocktail parties to lobby with ambassadors and other diplomats of member states. Most of the work gets done in these parties."

At the U.N. cocktail parties, he notes ruefully, the poorer the country the more lavish its reception:

One day Ethiopia celebrated its tenth anniversary of the Marxist revolution in that country with unlimited shrimps and other delicacies and whiskey and wine flowing all evening while we see pictures on BBC TV of starving Ethiopians looking like corpses.

Another anomaly was that the Khmer Rouge ambassador, who was responsible for killing 1.7 million of its own people, would strut about shaking hands with everybody to lobby against that bad fellow Hun Sen, Prime Minister of Cambodia who de facto ruled the country since 1979, because the U.S. and China spearheaded a resolution in the U.N. to continue to recognize the Khmer Rouge instead of the People's Republic of Kampuchea.

It is this encounter with the Khmer Rouge ambassador, plus his experiences in Thailand where he had witnessed Cambodian refugees escape the Khmer Rouge atrocities and appear -- one by one -- from the jungle like emaciated corpses. These survivors reminded him of those in Ethiopia which made me decide to volunteer for Cambodian service for the U.N. I wrote about such survivors such as my good friend Ambassador Sichan Siv, whose story I have also told.

We all have this myth that we control our lives. Benny tells it as it is:

One day, in the restroom of my floor, the 31st floor of the United Nations, I stood next to Yasushi Akashi, who just became the head of UNTAC in Cambodia. I congratulated him and asked whether he can take me along to Cambodia. Knowing me well he said yes, you will be the governor of Siemreap Province., which has Angkor Wat and is the most Khmer Rouge invested province.

I said yes as I did not want to languish in some idyllic province on the beach where nothing happened. Thus the last five years I was transferred to Cambodia, where I was at the political forefront of the political turmoil in the tragedy of Cambodia. It turned out to be the best assignment and I found out that my real fascination was with politics which I watched first hand. It is like studying while getting paid at the same time.

Benny writes in his book that Akashi was right:

I got plenty of excitement and adventure in Siemreap where the Khmer Rouge murderers were ever present although at day time Hun Sen's People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) reigned supreme in almost all the country.

Siemreap was attacked many times by the Khmer Rouge. Since it was too dangerous for wives to join their husbands my wife stayed in Connecticut although she came to visit me several times. Live was very primitive as the Hun Sen government was isolated by the U.N.

Danger was ever present and at night I could not sleep if I don't hear mortar fire as Hun Sen's troops were fighting the Khmer Rouge. One day Siemreap was attacked by 800 Khmer Rouge. I called my wife in Stamford from the only telephone at my headquarters. After a full day Hun Sen troops drove them away.

Soon he received a phone call from the powers that were in U.N. Headquarters in New York and he was appointed the political envoy of the Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali in Cambodia.

Soon, his wife joined him full time. They were often invited, together with other ambassadors, to dinner with the King. He watched over dinners and diplomatic dispatches - and reported to his new boss Kofi Annan - that as Cambodia acquired two prime ministers who were former enemies, and with the "wily king pulling the string from behind the scene," he smelled trouble. Both sides clashed and in 1997 Hun Sen became the only prime minister. Benny then reached the age of 60 -- the mandatorily retirement age at the U.N. - and he moved back to the U.S. to teach at several universities including Cornell.

Benny has remained active with Cambodia and continues includes a board position with the Peoples Improvement Organization, an NGO running slum area schools in Phnom Penh now with 850 students who each day get lunch and education in English. These schools were founded one of his former staffers, Phymean Noun, who became a CNN hero in 2009 for her work with children.

I have been delighted to know Dr. Benny Widyono, born "Hong Lan Oei," as an outstanding Indonesian-American active with the United Nations in Cambodia and around the world. His compassion for all - especially children - has impressed me greatly. Above and beyond being a thought leader and global citizen, Benny has been able to share his gripping life in an exceptional book. I highly recommend it.

Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the United Nations in Cambodia - Reviewed by Stephen J. Morris

December 5, 2008
Reviewed by Stephen J. Morris
Far Eastern Economic Review

"Unfortunately, what could have been a shorter and less controversial memoir of events, has extended itself unnecessarily into a work of advocacy for the current dictatorship that rules Cambodia"

Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the united nations in Cambodia
by Benny Widyono
Rowman and Littlefield,356 pages, $29.95

In the sad history of 20th century Cambodia, a bright light of hope for its long suffering people came from the peace plan, adopted by the United Nations Security Council in 1990, and signed by the warring Cambodian parties in Paris in October 1991. That plan authorized the holding of free elections in a “politically neutral environment,” under the supervision of U.N. peacekeepers and a United Nations Temporary Administration in Cambodia. The primary purpose of the Agreement was to end the war between competing Cambodian factions, two of which were rival communist organizations, and two of which were noncommunist. The second purpose of the plan was to give the Cambodian people the chance to determine their own future in a nonviolent way, by creating a culture of tolerance and social pluralism, and a set of liberal democratic political institutions.

It is now clear that while armed conflict eventually ended in 1999, it was not because of the Paris Agreement that had been applied in 1992-93. It is also clear that the will of the Cambodian people, as expressed in the victory of the noncommunists in the elections of 1993, was ignored. The election’s loser—the communist Cambodian People’s Party—bullied its way into retaining real power with threats of massive violence. Prince Norodom Sihanouk and the force-averse U.N. “peacekeepers” caved in to Hun Sen’s demand for an ostensible but in fact bogus “coalition” with the election’s winners. Consequently, Cambodia did not then and does not now have a government freely chosen by its people.

Why this U.N. failure was allowed to happen has never been systematically analyzed in a sober and objective way. However, the appearance of a memoir by Indonesian-born U.N. diplomat Benny Widyono is welcome. Mr. Widyono’s book mostly recalls his personal experiences as the senior UNTAC official in Siem Reap province during the election preparations, campaign and balloting of 1992-93, and as the U.N. secretary general’s personal representative in Cambodia from 1993-97.

For the already well informed and objective scholar, Mr. Widyono’s account has several things to recommend it. He ably describes the profound failings of the UNTAC administration as he witnessed them at the local level. UNTAC was expected, by the terms of the Paris Agreement, to exercise control over the key ministries of the existing administration of Cambodia. But Mr. Widyono shows how hopelessly understaffed UNTAC was for the designated task. It was also ill equipped linguistically, with most of the few Khmer speakers assigned to the Information Division. The UNTAC leadership itself was in disarray at the beginning of the operation. UNTAC was unable to ensure that the CPP-controlled government did not finance the CPP’s political campaign, and UNTAC would not stop partisan violence during the elections.

But while informed scholars can glean many interesting details of the failings of UNTAC from Mr. Widyono’s account, it is defective as an overall objective analysis for either scholars or the broader public.

First, Mr. Widyono clearly has preferences between the various contenders for political power. He exposes the many political and personal flaws in the leader of the royalist funcinpec party, Prince Ranariddh: his vacillation, his weakness and his corruption. The royalist funcinpec party is treated with derision. Most of Mr. Widyono’s charges against the royalists, especially Ranariddh, have long been known to astute observers of Cambodia.

At the same time, Mr. Widyono applies different standards in his treatment of the CPP and its government structure, the State of Cambodia. Though not uncritical of the CPP, the author gives CPP strongman Hun Sen and his regime a fairly gentle evaluation.

For instance, Mr. Widyono ignores evidence of the Hun Sen regime’s direct involvement in drug trafficking, human trafficking and forest defoliation. In a cover story entitled “Medellin on the Mekong?,” which appeared in the REVIEW in 1995, former review and Washington Post journalist Nate Thayer explained the close link between political figures and criminal syndicates in Cambodia. Mr. Widyono quotes the review often, but not for this revealing analysis.

Moreover, he accurately describes the notorious head of the National Police, Hok Lundi, as “one of the most feared men in Cambodia,” but the details are not spelled out. Nowhere in the book does Mr. Widyono hold Lundi (who died in a helicopter crash last month) responsible for the torture and murder of the political opposition, or for his continuing involvement in human trafficking.

Or consider Mr. Widyono’s coverage of the May 1997 grenade attack on a peaceful political rally by opposition leader Sam Rainsy, which killed 19 people and wounded 150. The author suggests that the culprits for this atrocity were not obvious; he tries to muddy the evidential waters by claiming that different parties had been blamed. Yet despite Mr. Widyono’s agnosticism, numerous analyses by journalists since that event have provided compelling evidence that the Hun Sen regime was directly involved in the atrocity. Hun Sen is always portrayed as a tough and wily politician, but not as a ruthless dictator.

At the beginning of the book, Mr. Widyono writes that the whole peace process was flawed because the Khmer Rouge was part of it. But one is compelled to ask how there could have been a peace process without one of the main belligerents? Mr. Widyono’s illogical view was precisely the political position of the Hun Sen regime and its foreign supporters up until the moment it agreed to sign the Paris Peace Agreements. No wonder then that when Mr. Widyono’s time was up as U.N. representative in Cambodia in May 1997, Hun Sen begged the U.N. secretariat to allow him to stay on.

The informed observer could have guessed where Mr. Widyono’s sympathies lay from his choice of Ben Kiernan to write his foreword. Mr. Kiernan was a devoted supporter of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge from 1975-77 who subsequently became a propagandist for the Heng Samrin-Hun Sen led faction of Khmer Rouge’s defectors, now known as the CPP.

Unfortunately, what could have been a shorter and less controversial memoir of events, has extended itself unnecessarily into a work of advocacy for the current dictatorship that rules Cambodia. But even as a piece of advocacy it has its value, for it gives us insight into the thinking of some U.N. bureaucrats who performed so poorly. And by exposing his own prejudices in favor of the CPP dictatorship, Mr. Widyono inadvertently illuminates one reason why the 1991 Paris Agreements failed to bring peace or democracy to Cambodia.

Stephen Morris is a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington D.C., and author of Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia (Stanford University Press, 1999).