Power stayed

HIS funeral was billed as the most important state event in Cambodia since the funeral of King Norodom Sihanouk in 2013. The mourning ceremony and cremation on June 19th of Chea Sim, president of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), was intended to be a grand affair: flags across the country flew at half mast; Hun Sen, Cambodia’s prime minister, declared a national holiday.

But the outpouring of grief that met Sihanouk’s passing did not engulf the nation this time. Though 1.5m turned out to say farewell to Sihanouk, only a few thousand lined the streets of Phnom Penh, the capital, to watch Mr Chea Sim’s 3km-long funeral procession. Residents largely ignored the gold-lacquered floats and honour guards, instead using the holiday to spend more time with their families.

Mr Chea Sim was often described as the second most important politician in Cambodia. Along with Mr Hun Sen and the president of the National Assembly, Heng Samrin, his face is plastered across billboards around the country. He was part of the generation that saw independence from France in 1953, then agitated and worked for communist rule in the country throughout the 1960s and early 1970s.

He was also head of the country’s Eastern Zone for the Communist Party of Kampuchea—better known as the Khmer Rouge—from the mid-1970s until, amid internal purges, he fled to Vietnam. He returned to Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge’s fall in 1979. Like so many former Khmer Rouge leaders who defected to Vietnam and later took up senior positions in Cambodia, Mr Chea Sim was shielded from the tribunals examining the horrors of its misrule—much to the frustration of human-rights groups, which accused him of complicity in torture, executions and genocide.

In 1981 he was elected president of the National Assembly, and was a power broker in the negotiations that led to the Paris peace accords of 1991 and the UN-sponsored elections of 1993. He also acted as head of state on occasion, though he was escorted out of the country in 2004 after refusing to help change the constitution to empower the CPP. That marked the end of any lingering cosiness between him and Mr Hun Sen, who moved ruthlessly to replace loyalists to Mr Chea Sim within the party, leaving him with little more than a symbolic role.

His death was not unexpected: he had been ill for some time, and Mr Hun Sen had announced in April that he would assume the party presidency on his passing. At the funeral last week, a tearful Mr Hun Sen spoke of the man’s struggle for national independence, salvation and reconciliation; his death, he said, was distressing and heartbreaking. Still, by taking over his post as head of the CPP, Mr Hun Sen has positioned himself to install one of his sons as prime minister in the future.

Described as ruthless and charismatic, a good Buddhist and a staunch constitutionalist, Mr Chea Sim’s moderating influence in the CPP will be missed in Cambodia—if not by Mr Hun Sen. The billboards are being taken down, replaced by ones featuring Mr Hun Sen alone.