Cambodian PM waves "iron fist" back at UN envoy

PHNOM PENH, Mar 29 (Reuters) Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said today the United Nations should sack a human rights envoy who suggested he was running the impoverished southeast Asian nation with an iron fist.

Hun Sen, the former Khmer Rouge soldier who has been in charge of Cambodia for the past two decades, also described the U.N human rights body and its special representative, Yash Ghai, as ''long-term tourists''.

''Mr. Ghai has accused me of using an iron fist to violate the independence of the courts. What he said is wrong. He should not give me advice,'' he told a agriculture meeting in the capital, Phnom Penh.

U.N. Secretary-General ''Kofi Annan should fire him'', he said.

Kenyan-born Ghai, who is on a regular human rights fact-finding trip, said yesterday one person continued to control all the levers of power in Cambodia despite its gradual recovery from the Khmer Rouge genocide of the 1970s.

''I have been quite struck by the enormous centralisation of power, not in the government but in one individual,'' Ghai told reporters.

''I have talked to judges, so many people, politicians, and every one is so scared. It seems that everything depends on one individual. That is not really a precondition under which human right can flourish,'' he said.

He did not name the individual, but Hun Sen took it personally and said he would never agree to a meeting with Ghai, who became U.N. rights envoy to Cambodia last November.

''You don't even know about your own poor country, Kenya, in which over 50 percent of people live in poverty,'' he said. ''You are lucky that this time a deputy prime minister met you. That won't happen next time.'' Ghai also called on international donors, whose annual 600 million dollars aid accounts for 60 percent of Phnom Penh's revenue, to push harder for reform in a country devastated by 30 years of civil war.

''I do believe the donors have a moral obligation to intervene in one way or another,'' Ghai said.

Although Cambodia ranks alongside many African nations with many of its 13 million people living on less than a dollar a day, Hun Sen hit back: ''Don't come and lecture me. You should go back home and learn more. Your knowledge cannot work in Cambodia.'' Pol Pot's ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge ran Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, the era of the ''Killing Fields'' genocide in which an estimated 1.7 million people were executed or died of torture, starvation, disease or forced labour.

A frontline Khmer Rouge commander, Hun Sen lost an eye in the final assault on Phnom Penh in April 1975, but later defected and fled to neighbouring Vietnam. There is no evidence linking him to atrocities under Pol Pot.

REUTERS SB SND1255