Hun Sen, (born April 4, 1951, Kâmpóng
Cham province, Cambodia), Cambodian politician, who was prime minister of Cambodia from
1985.
Hun Sen Prime minister of Cambodia |
Hun Sen was educated at a Buddhist monastery in Phnom
Penh. In the late 1960s he joined the Communist Party of Kampuchea and
in 1970 joined theKhmer Rouge. During the regime of Pol
Pot (1975–79), when an estimated two million Cambodians lost their lives,
Hun Sen fled to Vietnam, joining troops there opposed to the Khmer
Rouge. He returned to Cambodia after the Vietnamese installed a new government in
1979 and was made minister of foreign affairs. He became prime minister in
1985.
In 1993 elections the royalist party of Prince Norodom Ranariddh, the son of head of state King Norodom Sihanouk, outpolled Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). Hun Sen, however,
refused to cede power, and, under an agreement imposed by international powers,
a coalition government was formed, with the prince named first prime minister
and Hun Sen second prime minister. In a violent coup in July 1997 Hun Sen
deposed Prince Ranariddh, who had made overtures to remnants of the Khmer
Rouge, and appointed a replacement. In March 1998 Hun Sen had the prince tried
in absentia and found guilty of charges that included an attempt to overthrow
the government. Prince Ranariddh was subsequently pardoned by his father, and
he returned to Cambodia to take part in elections held in July 1998. That time
Hun Sen outpolled the prince, but once again the two were forced to enter into
a coalition government, with Prince Ranariddh made president of the National
Assembly and Hun Sen becoming the sole prime minister. In the national election
of 2003, the CPP once again finished first, and Hun Sen was appointed to
another term as prime minister in July 2004.
In the parliamentary elections of 2008, the CPP again
emerged victorious, with three-fourths of the assembly seats, and Hun Sen
entered yet another term as Cambodia’s prime minister. The opposition Sam
Rainsy Party (SRP) comprised nearly all of the remaining members. In the 2013
elections, however, the CPP barely won a majority of seats in the chamber, with
the newly formed opposition Cambodian National
Rescue Party (CNRP)—created through the merger of the SRP and another
party—gaining the remainder of the seats. The CNRP members protested the
election’s outcome and boycotted the assembly, precipitating a constitutional
crisis that was not resolved until mid-2014. Throughout that time Hun Sen
remained prime minister and continued in office once an agreement had
been reached between the CPP and CNRP.
Several decades after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, Hun Sen
continued to grapple with fostering national reconciliation and prosecuting the
surviving members of the Pol Pot regime for war crimes. The United
Nations sought to bring the perpetrators to justice before an
international tribunal, but Hun Sen insisted on relying on the Cambodian court
system. The first judgement against a defendant—a guilty verdict—came only in
2010. Other pressing issues concerned development of the country’s economy,
improvement of infrastructure, and management of an ongoing border dispute with
Thailand—the latter finally resolved in 2013 following a ruling favourable to
Cambodia by the International Court of Justice.
Source ; http://www.britannica.com/biography/Hun-Sen
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