Crude remarks uncalled for

10/02/2010
Bangkok Post

Prime Minister Hun Sen grabbed headlines but lost much in his unreasonable and personal outbursts. The words he used were hardly the phrases of a statesman or diplomat. It is hard to see what the Cambodian leader hoped to gain by aiming rude, personal abuse at Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva. The hard-line nationalists back home already support Hun Sen's unceasing attacks on PM Abhisit and other Thai leaders. The Thai prime minister did the right thing by ignoring the repeated and primitive verbal assaults; so it is Hun Sen who lost face.

The ex-Khmer Rouge troop commander first came to international attention in 1979, shortly after the Vietnamese invasion installed a regime friendly to Hanoi. Thus, at 27, Hun Sen gained a sort of fame as the world's youngest foreign minister. With many years in the post, it seems something of a shame that the Cambodian politician failed to learn the niceties of international diplomacy. There is no justification for using the sort of language he was quoted as using on a Cambodian website, even as he was visiting border regions.

The Khmer-language website may have been directed to Cambodians, but Hun Sen knows as well as anyone that these days, there is nothing local on the internet. In any case, his words were directed at PM Abhisit personally, as in "You are the robber" and "It is none of your business" how Hun Sen dresses. Such direct, personal and in-your-face insults would be intolerable if Cambodia and Thailand were in conflict. Under current circumstances, this disrespect for a fellow Asean prime minister says far more about Hun Sen than about PM Abhisit.

Please click here to read more...