Cambodia: Survival of the Paranoid

Cambodia's leader talks to TIME about power. For him, it has only two settings: all or nothing

The one-eyed man appears to be talking about chess. "In order to kill your enemies you should know how to move your pawns," says Hun Sen, Prime Minister of Cambodia. But his thoughts are really on his kind of politics. There are no political opponents, only enemies to be eliminated; no debate, only plots to survive. "If you lead with your big pieces, you put them in danger." He knows about danger. He followed and abandoned the genocidal dictator Pol Pot, survived the Khmer Rouge's killing fields and civil war to become master of a country haunted by 1.7 million unavenged...

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