As Cambodia and the United States celebrate six decades of diplomatic ties, the Post looks back at a  relationship that has moved from alliance to alienation and back

By Sebastian Strangio & Neth Pheaktra

Published in the Phnom Penh Post, July 16, 2010

Prince Norodom Sihanouk and his wife Monique fete Jacqueline Kennedy at Chamkarmon Palace during her visit to Cambodia in November 1967. (Photo: Private collection of Ambassador Julio A. Jeldres)

WHEN the United States and Cambodia celebrate six decades of diplomatic ties next week, they will look back on a relationship that has seen its fair share of ups and downs. Launched at the beginning of the cold war in 1950, the relationship has been fraught with ideological passions, experiencing periods of intimacy, violent disagreement and chilly silence.

It remains young: Less than two decades have passed since diplomatic ties were re-established at the end of the cold war, and barely 10 years since the end of the ensuing civil war. For 20 years out of 60, there was little or no relationship at all. Observers and officials from both countries, however, say the current bond – which they describe as built on solid foundations and enduring mutual interests – anticipates a long-term US presence in Cambodia.

Koy Kuong, spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said this week that since the re-establishment of relations in November 1991, the two countries had rebuilt strong political, commercial and military ties. “Our diplomatic relations are developing, and we hope that after the 60th anniversary, Cambodia-USA relations will progress again,” he said.

The administration of US President Barack Obama has identified Southeast Asia as a focal point of a foreign policy that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a speech last year, described as “neither impulsive nor ideological”. Instead, that policy was geared towards creating “dynamic and productive partnerships that can address both the challenge and the promise of this new century”.

US Ambassador Carol Rodley said last week that since 1950, Phnom Penh and Washington have oscillated between close cooperation and periods in which they “were seriously at odds” with each other. “For some significant amount of time”, she said, “we looked past each other or we saw each other through lenses that confused rather than clarified the picture for both sides.”

Rodley, who first served in Cambodia as US deputy head of mission between 1997 and 2000, said that “dramatic” changes during her first posting, including the end of the decade-long civil war and Cambodia’s entry into ASEAN, had fostered a more lasting relationship. “We’ve come to a more mature relationship and a more mature understanding of each other, which I think is a good thing,” she said.

Past troubles

At the time Ambassador Donald Heath, a career foreign serviceman, presented his credentials to then-King Norodom Sihanouk on July 11, 1950, US policymakers saw Cambodia as both a potential ally and a potential threat. A bastion of Western influence, the country – like the remaining French territories in Indochina – was also seen as a domino teetering on the edge of a red abyss. Sihanouk, who skillfully courted all sides of the growing Indochina conflagration from 1955 until his overthrow 15 years later, was perhaps the prime embodiment of this relationship. In the mid-1960s, he broke off and then restored diplomatic relations with the US as part of his delicate dance between the cold war superpowers.

On March 18, 1970, it became clear, however, that Sihanouk had overplayed his hand. Amid increasing anger over what many viewed as the prince’s tacit approval of Vietcong encroachments into Cambodian territory, he was overthrown by a US-supported general and close adviser, Lon Nol, in a right-wing coup d’etat. For the next five years US-Cambodia relations during the Cold War era reached their high-water mark.

This period of cooperation was premised on a relationship of patronage with the US government, which provided military, economic and political support to the government. But this relationship also came at a steep price. As it poured military and economic aid into the country in a bid to stave off a communist victory, the US also executed a bombing campaign that some historians say aided the Khmer Rouge in their rise from a ragtag jungle insurgency to the country’s iron-fisted rulers.

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By Sebastian Strangio

Published in Asia Times Online, July 7, 2010

Chhun Yasith, pictured at the CFF’s Long Beach headquarters in 2001. (Photo: Jeff Gritchen/Long Beach Press-Telegram)

PHNOM PENH – EARLY on November 24, 2000, about 70 gunmen slipped into the center of Cambodia’s capital city. After drinking and singing traditional songs at a karaoke bar, one unit of men moved towards a series of government buildings armed with AK-47 rifles, grenades and B-40 rocket launchers. After seizing control of the city’s railway station, they sprayed bullets at the Ministry of Defense and Council of Ministers and lobbed a grenade as a nearby gas station. The Cambodian military engaged the attackers in a firefight, scarring many nearby buildings with bullet holes. They quelled the ragtag militia, leaving eight dead and around 14 wounded, after an hour of fighting.

In the wake of the attack, an obscure group calling itself the Cambodian Freedom Fighters (CFF) took credit for the violence. The group’s ethnic Khmer leader, Chhun Yasith, a Long Beach, California-based accountant, at the time made no attempt to hide his intent to overthrow the government of Hun Sen, Cambodia’s long-serving prime minister. Despite the failure of the “coup” attempt, Yasith boasted that he would continue working to topple the “tyrannical” regime by force. “Next time,” he told a journalist in 2004, “we will attack the whole country.”

The 53-year-old Yasith’s threat came to an abrupt legal end last month, when a US district court judge sentenced him to life in prison for his role in the attempted coup. In a hearing at the court on June 22, prosecutors said the CFF was ordered to carry out “popcorn” attacks on soft targets such as karaoke bars and nightclubs before launching the all-out assault to overthrow the government on November 24. The CFF leader was charged with violating the US Neutrality Act, a 200-year-old law banning military operations against nations with which the US is at peace.

A tearful Yasith told the court he felt he had to do something for his native country and that he formed a rebel militia to avenge the murder of his father by the communist Khmer Rouge. “I’ve been punished because I failed, that I’m not good enough to overthrow that government,” the Los Angeles Times quoted him as saying. Chhun Yasith’s attorney, Richard Callahan Jr, said he would appeal the sentence.

Cambodian officials welcomed the sentence, describing the November 2000 coup attempt as a “clear terrorist act”. “We applaud the decision taken by the US government to prosecute Chhun Yasith,” Foreign Minister Hor Namhong told reporters after signing an agreement with Japan for the construction of a new bridge across the Mekong River. “We welcome the elimination of terrorism and not just terrorism in Cambodia and the US, but in all regions where it threatens people’s security.”

The decision comes at a time of warming US-Cambodian relations after years of open antagonism and follows on a similar court action against another California-based group that threatened to overthrow by arms Laos’ communist regime. President Barack Obama has initiated policies to counter-balance China’s rising commercial influence in the region, including last year’s reclassification of Cambodia and Laos as no longer Marxist-Leninist states that opened the legal way for US Ex-Im Bank loans and financing. Later this year, the US is scheduled to hold its first joint military exercises with Cambodia, in an operation to be known as Angkor Sentinel. Earlier, the two sides enhanced security-related cooperation after high-profile terror suspects were found to have traveled freely in Cambodia.

Accountant cum rebel

Some have long questioned whether the CFF had the capacity to carry out the attack on its own. Opposition leader Sam Rainsy, the president of the Sam Rainsy Party (SRP), charged that Hun Sen orchestrated the “coup” as a pretext to crack down on government critics. He told the Phnom Penh Post in December 2000 that the reaction to the coup had “killed many birds with one stone”. About 200 people were detained in the 12 days following the attacks, many without warrants as required by Cambodian law, US rights lobby Human Rights Watch reported in December. Yasith was tried in absentia in Phnom Penh in June 2001 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Richard Kiri Kim, a fellow US citizen who directed the CFF forces in Phnom Penh, was captured following the attack and remains in prison on a life term.

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If hypocrisy, as one writer claims, is an unavoidable — even integral — part of democratic politics, then the two remaining Democratic nominees for president are locked in a dead heat. Both stridently oppose a war that they once supported as members of Congress, and both employ a high-minded liberal rhetoric littered with non-partisan clichés and references to the abstract ideals — liberty, unity, fairness — that stand over American politics like a colossus. Senator Barack Obama, speaking to his supporters in Des Moines after clinching the Iowa caucus on January 3, declared that ‘we are one nation. We are one people. And our time for change has come’. Clinton, in response, riffed on a similar theme: ‘Together we have presented the case for change and have made it absolutely clear that America needs a new beginning’.

Amongst this swarm of rhetoric, one could be forgiven for mistaking Democrats for Republicans, flip-flopping liberals for hawkish conservatives. But in the coming months (if not on Super Tuesday) a big decision has to be made, of whether it will be Obama or Clinton who runs in the ‘unloseable’ ’08 election. And now that my old favourite John Edwards has dropped out of the race, I’m firmly for Obama. Here’s why.

Everything about Hillary Clinton — more so than Obama, more so than Edwards — is sculpted and premeditated. She is like the bonsai of politicians, trimmed back to her colourless essence, all trunk and no roots. Her posturing, her rhetoric — even her iPod playlist — are all carefully poll-tested by a gaggle of sycophants, bootlicks and machine-men before being loosed on the voting public. Jacob Weisberg of Slate Magazine discusses Clinton’s musical taste, as unveiled to the media in May 2006:

On the world-is-divided-into-two-kinds-of-people question ‘the Beatles or the Stones’, she, like her husband, finds a middle path: both. She names no Stones songs and chooses a consensus, universally liked, neither-early-nor-late Beatles tune, ‘Hey Jude’. Hillary also manages a shout-out to racial diversity and feminism via Aretha Franklin, and she strikes a younger, socially conscious chord with U2. ‘Take It to the Limit’, on the other hand, is such a lame, black-hole-of-the-1970s choice that it can’t be taken for anything other than an expression of actual taste.

But for all her theoretical ‘appeal’, it’s ironic that Clinton manages to elicit such strong reactions from Americans. Assuming she could be elected, Hillary’s presidency would be like the love-child of Bush and (Bill) Clinton’s. It would prevaricate and dither in its foreign policy, erecting a watery front of liberal institutionalism to cover for its lack of leadership qualities (just like Bill); and, like Bush, it would exacerbate and profit (perhaps unwittingly) from the deep polarisation of the post-9/11 era, swelling the ranks of the GOP with bitter conservatives and clap-happy Christians. It would be better than Bush — but what wouldn’t?

Put simply, Barack Obama is more electable than Clinton. Amidst discussions as to whether being black or female is more of a liability in American politics, Democrats run the risk of overlooking the fact that the 2008 election still remains to be won. All the talk of it being ‘unloseable’ after the train-wreck of the Bush era obscures the deep disillusionment that many Republicans also feel for the current administration, and their determination to elect a more ‘authentic’ conservative to the presidency. Obama’s advantage is that he is extremely popular among the thousands of young Americans who have come of voting age since 2004, a demographic shift that could single-handedly sweep him into the White House. A Clinton nomination, on the other hand, would mean a McCain inauguration next January.

Obama supporters rally in Austin, Texas, February 2007.

He also has the edge in foreign policy. In the Middle East, for instance, where memories last longer than the American electoral cycle, the resentment at the US presence in Iraq and Saudi Arabia is likely to fester for generations. The next president needs to convince the Muslim world that Bush was an aberration, and back it up with concrete action. It will require proactive engagement, something more than the hands-off, semi-interventionist stance of the last Clinton administration. By shattering the inter-dynastic stranglehold that the Bushes and Clintons have had on the White House for the past two decades, Obama will also have more room for innovation in foreign affairs. (On top of all this, I must also confess a less lofty motive: Obama used to be a neighbour of my uncle Paul in Chicago. They played squash together. But I digress).

Excepting Hillary and Republican Mitt Romney, Obama is playing a game as two-faced as any of the would-be presidential candidates. On any fair assessment, he uses the same transparent rhetoric and is saddled with the same all-too-human inconsistency as his competitors. But as David Runciman points out:

Elections shouldn’t be about sifting out the hypocrites in an elusive search for the candidates of integrity. They should be about deciding which sort of hypocrite we prefer.

Me? I’m for the Chicagoan.