Perils of Cambodia greet U.S. diplomat
By Richard S. Ehrlich
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia
The very day the new American ambassador's family arrived in the country, a rocket-propelled grenade blasted them to the floor of their new home.
But they were used to it.
"I've been shot at, wounded or blown up in every foreign assignment I've had," Kenneth Quinn, the new U.S. ambassador to Cambodia, told The Washington Times in an interview.
"Each year, my family has a life-threatening experience. My family is now known as, 'The Family From Hell'."
After the grenade exploded, Mr. Quinn crawled over this wife, daughter and two sons to reach the phone and alert Washington.
The ambassador and his family had been celebrating his birthday on June 17, opening presents and watching a video of "The Thin Man."
"My family just arrived. It was their first day" in Cambodia, he said.
But tensions and anti-American sentiments are now high in Cambodia, where Pol Pot, the communist Khmer Rouge leader held responsible for more than one million deaths during his 1975 to 1979 reign, is believed to be under arrest by his own troops in remote jungles along the Thai border.
"I heard some shots, four or five, and then a big explosion," Mr. Quinn said. "It knocked us back, blew out the door and peppered shrapnel into the house. Then there was a lot of shooting."
Suddenly, it was "kids and wife onto the floor, I'm down," he said. "Everybody was scrambling. I called Washington, and give them the first updates. It went on long enough. It was very worrying. I peeked out the gate and could see a lot of soldiers all over the place.
"We were on the radio alerting Americans" and "telling them, 'Stay home, stay in'," Mr. Quinn said. "It could've been much worse."
No one at the ambassador's residence was hurt in the blast, which occurred during a brief firefight between Cambodia's national police and First Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh's bodyguards. But at least two soldiers died and two other people were injured.
U.S. military experts who examined the shrapnel from the blast described the grenade as a B-14, commonly supplied by Russia, former Soviet bloc nations and China. Moscow and Beijing have provided Cambodia's various governments and guerrillas with massive weapons and ammunition during the past few decades.
Mr. Quinn said all his past diplomatic postings as also marred by violence. In Vietnam, "I was hit by a rocket in Saigon in April 1970," which "killed three or four people" at the Majestic Hotel, he said.
Later he was posted to Vienna, the capital of Austria. "I didn't get shot at [there], but my job took me to the Middle East" working with Palestinian refugees in 1983. "In the Gaza Strip, in the U.N. compound, bullets started flying. Everybody was down on their stomachs."
Mr. Quinn also witnessed two unsuccessful coup attempts in the Philippines in 1987 and 1989. "We had mortar rounds and B-40 rounds into the embassy," during "a nine-day siege when we never got out of the embassy," in 1989, he said.
From 1991 to 1994, based on his experience, Mr. Quinn gave "the training course to ambassadors, lectures, how to prepare for a crisis," he said.
U.S. embassies must prepare redundancy systems so that they have back-up, alternative plans and infrastructure ready in case their first line of defense is knocked out, he said.
