Both Hok Longdy and Hun Sen have dismissed the French account as fiction. The tale has been diligently aired by the opposition Sam Rainsy Party. From the outset, few expected a proper investigation of the Pilika case. In fact, the vast majority of killings and other crimes in Cambodia, political and otherwise, go unsolved - even when photographs of public lynchings are regularly published in newspapers. The grenade attack on a Sam Rainsy demonstration which killed at least 16 people outside the National Assembly in early 1997 is still unsolved, as are the murders of some 100 people in the wake of political violence a few months later which ousted Prince Norodom Ranariddh as first prime minister.
Nobody is safe.
Even the new U.S. ambassador, Kent Wiedemann, was robbed at gunpoint of his mobile telephone during an evening stroll with his wife. Now, with richly ironic timing, the Piseth Pilika controversy has brought the issue of justice in Cambodia right to Hun Sen's own private doorstep. The 1991 Paris Peace Agreement paved the way for the U.N. Transitional Authority in Cambodia to create a climate whereby elections could occur. Since then, the U.N. has maintained offices in Phnom Penh, and has called for a special court to try detained Khmer Rouge bigwigs. But the U.N. and Hun Sen disagree on the composition and structure of the tribunal.