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| Published in Washington, D.C. April 10, 1998 |
Cambodian prince seeks power under tight security
By Richard S. Ehrlich
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia
When Prince Norodom Ranariddh visited this violence-wracked capital recently, he was so frightened of being attacked that he stayed virtually around the clock inside the thick-walled, five-star Hotel Le Royal.
Mobs, for and against the prince, occasionally swirled around the hotel resulting in skirmishes, which left several injured and at least one person dead.
Steel-helmeted security forces, armed with AK-47 assault rifles and crackling, black electric prods, belatedly kept the rallies from escalating.
The two brief occasions when Prince Ranariddh emerged were via speeding limousine convoys.
First, he zipped to his nearby political party headquarters, where he attended a Buddhist ceremony and expressed high hopes to a few thousand of his most fervent supporters.
His second excursion, hours before his departure from Cambodia April 3, was a hurried ceremonial visit to a pagoda inside the empty palace of his estranged father, King Norodom Sihanouk, who is self-exiled in China.
Each day, a slew of diplomats from various embassies lined up with Cambodian and other officials inside the hotel to meet the prince and hear his plans to run for re-election, kick out co-Prime Ministers Hun Sen and Ung Huot and rule this Southeast Asian nation single-handedly.
Despite worries over his ability to safely campaign in public, Prince Ranariddh thinks he can win the next election -- tentatively scheduled for the end of July or early August -- based on his thin margin of victory at the polls in 1993.
Critics contend he won that election only because he was the son of Cambodia's popular king, and the public was weary of Hun Sen's long, austere reign which began when the Vietnamese installed him in the early 1980s.
Today, voters might not be so anxious to give Prince Ranariddh power again because during his time at the top Cambodia became increasingly divided, corruption spiraled out of control and it all ended in bloody tank battles in July that killed more than 40 people and destroyed the airport, foreign and local businesses and many homes.
The prince blames those woes on a doomed coalition he was forced to endure with rival Hun Sen.
But many of the people at the bottom -- all potential voters -- complain that whatever bribes they had to pay to officials during Hun Sen's rule in the 1980s simply doubled when Prince Ranariddh arrived because his newly empowered supporters also demanded their share of whatever loot could be extorted.
The prince, expressing insecurity, is now making noises about a possible boycott of the polls if anti-Ranariddh violence continues.
Many officials in his party, known by the French abbreviation Funcinpec, have been assassinated or chased away by repeated death threats.
A boycott of the polls could cause a problem for other countries that have pegged future aid and investment to Cambodia on the success of "free and fair" elections.
Prince Ranariddh nevertheless covets the prestige of again being prime minister. Many people still suffer the traumas of Khmer Rouge guerrilla leader Pol Pot's infamous 1975 to 1979 "killing fields" reign in which an estimated two million people died.
As a result, it is impossible to predict who would win the election, which would include an array of smaller parties also vying for power. Hun Sen, meanwhile, plans to win no matter what kind of an election is staged.
Hun Sen now enjoys a near-monopoly of the civil service, military, police, Khmer-language media and local administration, especially in the countryside where most Cambodians live.
But in many ways, Prince Ranariddh's battle against Hun Sen is not the central contest in this devastated, dilapidated nation.
The real war is between the shrinking inner circle of Khmer Rouge hard-liners around Pol Pot who continue to fight against former Khmer Rouge "defectors" who now run the government.
Hun Sen and many of his ministers are ex-Khmer Rouge who defected a year or so before Pol Pot's regime crumbled under a 1978 Vietnamese invasion.
Hun Sen is currently unleashing his military against Pol Pot, who is said to be on the run but under the boot of a vicious usurper, one-legged Ta Mok, and their several hundred Khmer Rouge guerrillas in the northern Dangrek Mountains around Anlong Veng.
Prince Ranariddh, according to opponents, has led his supporters to fight in alliance with Khmer Rouge guerrillas along the Thai-Cambodian border against Hun Sen, making it harder for Pol Pot and Ta Mok to be crushed.
For many Cambodians, this fight is more important than the election because they still fear a return of Pol Pot or Ta Mok and other Khmer Rouge who elude international demands to put them on trial for crimes against humanity and genocide.
Prince Ranariddh is considered by many to be a wild card in that ongoing war because, though Hun Sen is luring Khmer Rouge to defect, Prince Ranariddh's efforts to do the same may simply give both leaders fresh fighters, ammunition and cash -- and thus prolong the civil war.
The prince denies links with the Khmer Rouge and apparently understands that his relations in the past with the guerrillas have made him unpopular among many foreign governments, which previously supported him against Hun Sen.
For people in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan and elsewhere, who may or may not be following the chaos in Cambodia, such twists will affect their nations as well because they not only threaten to result in more bloodshed but can also mutate the balance of power in Asia.
For example, Hun Sen recently reached out toward China because the United States cut off aid -- and many foreign investors fled -- after the street battles in July resulted in Hun Sen's victory over Prince Ranariddh.
Continuing civil war in Cambodia also allows this impoverished nation to fester as a haven for Interpol-evading foreign and domestic criminals, including drug runners, hired gunmen and weapons smugglers.
A worst-case scenario is if hardline Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot or Ta Mok, successfully manipulate both sides. As "defectors," they have been allowed to occupy positions of political and military power.
If these Khmer Rouge conspire to rise up in the future, they could once again take over Cambodia.
Prince Ranariddh's quest for the prime ministry may also put this country at odds with neighboring Vietnam, because Ranariddh's supporters often voice anti-Vietnamese sentiment, especially against the hundreds of thousands of poorly documented, legal and illegal settlers who have migrated here.
To his supporters, however, Prince Ranariddh appears to embody modernization, fresh foreign investment, nationalism, anti-communism and other concepts rooted in his many years as an international diplomat and U.S.-financed guerrilla leader.
The reputation dates to his foreign-based struggle against Vietnam's decade of occupation, which ended in 1989.
For many others, however, there is no good-guy-vs.-bad-guy scenario. Both leaders have been ordering thousands of hapless Cambodians to kill and die during the past two decades as stepping stones to the top.