Leadership Quote by Hun Sen

A door being closed with two blunt syllables: "That's it". Hun Sen frames justice for the Khmer Rouge era not as a moral project but as a tightly managed transaction with strict boundaries. The line’s power lies in its administrative chill. It turns one of the 20th century’s starkest episodes of mass death into a jurisdictional box: leaders, 1975 to 1979, end of story.

The specific intent is control. By emphasizing "organized with U.N. participation of some kind", Hun Sen signals international legitimacy while keeping the arrangement deliberately vague, as if the U.N. is an accessory rather than an equal architect. It pre-empts demands for a wider mandate: no inquiry into lower-level perpetrators, no broader accounting of complicity, no extension into adjacent years that could implicate others or reopen politically inconvenient histories.

The subtext is contemporary power. Hun Sen, himself a former Khmer Rouge cadre who later defected, has long governed through stability-first pragmatism. A narrowly scoped tribunal promises enough catharsis to satisfy donors and foreign governments, while minimizing the risk that legal scrutiny metastasizes into a reckoning that touches the current elite, the security apparatus, or the political settlement that ended the wars.

Context sharpens the cynicism: Cambodia’s hybrid tribunal (the ECCC) arrived late, moved slowly, and was repeatedly accused of political interference. "That's it" reads less like a legal clarification than a warning shot to prosecutors, activists, and survivors: the state will permit remembrance only up to the point it threatens the state.