Cambodia's seemingly limitless capacity for implosive self-destructiveness reached an unexpected level in mid-1997. Whatever “new glimpse of hope” that may have been proffered by measured momentum in 1996 was dashed by escalating tension within the coalition government in Phnom Penh, which culminated in the bloody confrontation of the weekend of 5 July between Hun Sen forces of the Cambodian People's Party (CPP) and its royalist rival, Prince Norodom Ranariddh's FUNCINPEC. What surprised most observers was not the coup itself, which many had foreseen in the making, but rather the brutality with which it was conducted. In the wake of torture, summary executions and custodial deaths, unlawful mass arrests, detention, and intimidation of political opposition, Cambodia witnessed a return to state-sponsored violence and de facto single-party autocracy in absolute defiance of the spirit of the U.N.-brokered Paris Accords to which all parties were signatories. In fundamental aspects, Cambodia once again found itself in a similar predicament to the 1980s — plagued by resurgent insurgency, without an effective opposition, ruled by force rather than law, its economy battered, its population displaced both internally and across the border, facing international sanction, and with rival factions contesting diplomatic representation at the United Nations. In effect, the weekend campaign and ensuing developments reversed many of the positive steps that had heretofore been achieved, further underscoring the fragility of the political arrangement that emerged from the Accords and U.N.-sponsored election of 1993. At year's end, the ultimate scope and extent of the impact of the coup was still being assessed. The ramifications, however, are undeniably grave and multi-dimensional, both in the immediate and medium terms.

Anatomy of a Coup

Tension within the coalition government in Phnom Penh had been apparent since its inception after the national election in 1993. While coalitions in general are by no means easy political arrangements, even under the best of circumstances, the Cambodian experience was exacerbated by the fact that this forced partnership resulted not from popular electoral expression but from the hijacking of nascent democracy by prevailing politico-military realities in Cambodia.