Just over 30 years ago, a crackling radio in a refugee camp on the Thai border brought Sam Sophal word that the United Nations was coming to his war-ravaged homeland of Cambodia.
For Sam Sophal, who survived the Khmer Rouge genocide only because his mother bribed Khmer Rouge executioners with her silver watch, the promise of peace was irresistible.
"Now I see we have gone backwards. To one-party rule," he said under the shade of a Jujube tree in his Phnom Penh backyard. So when UNTAC arrived with their sky-blue flag and helmets they were seen as an incarnation of that deity, some even painting their homes a U.N. shade of blue, recalled Youk Chhang, executive director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia.A former French colony, by the early 1990s Cambodia had endured decades of devastation after getting sucked into the Vietnam War. During the four-year Khmer Rouge "killing fields" regime an estimated 1.
Threatening to break up the country, Hun Sen forced a power-sharing deal that saw the man who had won the vote, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, and Hun Sen taking the roles of first and second prime ministers.