Hun Sen
Hun Sen was prime minister of Cambodia from 1985 to 2023, thirty-eight years, the longest of any in the world when he stepped down, the Khmer Rouge regimental commander who lost an eye at the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, fled to Vietnam in June 1977 when the eastern zone was purged, and came back with the Vietnamese army in January 1979 as foreign minister of the government it installed at twenty-six. He became prime minister in 1985 and has survived everything since. There was the Vietnamese withdrawal of 1989, the Paris agreement of 1991 and the UN's election of 1993, which his party lost and after which he made himself co-prime minister by threatening secession. There was the coup of July 1997 in which his troops drove out the other co-prime minister, Prince Ranariddh, the Khmer Rouge's final surrender in 1998. There were the elections every five years, won by ever larger margins after the opposition was dissolved by the courts in 2017 and its leader Kem Sokha jailed for treason, so that in 2023 his party took every seat. He was born in Kampong Cham in 1952 into a peasant family, was a pagoda boy in Phnom Penh, joined the Khmer Rouge in 1970 after Sihanouk's call from Peking, and rose in the eastern zone under So Phim until the purge. The government of the 1980s was a Vietnamese protectorate under siege from the Khmer Rouge and the royalists on the Thai border and under embargo from the West and China. The government after 1993 was a patronage state in which the forests, the land and the casinos were given to the generals and the tycoons and the roads, bridges and dams were built by China, whose closest friend in south-east Asia he became, hosting its navy at Ream. Growth ran at seven per cent for two decades on garments, tourism and construction, and the poverty rate fell from half the population to a tenth. He handed the office to his son Hun Manet, a West Point graduate, in August 2023, took the presidency of the senate in 2024. He remains the president of the party and the man who decides. In 2025 he leaked a phone call with Thailand's prime minister that brought her down and fought a five-day border war.
- Lived: 1952 CE – ?
- Nationality: Cambodian
- Roles: prime minister, politician
