Following a visit to Cambodia by the assistant secretary of state for East Asia last week, three imprisoned critics of the government were released, though they still face prosecution for defamation. A spokesman for Cambodia’s ruler, Hun Sen, called the releases “a gift for Mr. Christopher Hill on the inauguration of the new U.S. Embassy” in Phnom Penh. That revealing statement illustrates perfectly the way Hun Sen runs his country, cracking down internally while currying favor with the international community.

The arrests, the State Department had previously said, “call into question the Cambodian government’s commitment to democracy and human rights.” Putting it that way suggests that they are an aberration, disappointing but not necessarily significant or characteristic. The releases, then, allow the fiction to be maintained that Cambodia is a “transitioning democracy.” More important, it enables the myth that the enormous international undertaking of the early 1990s, to end the prolonged agony of Cambodia’s people through genocide, war and foreign occupation, was a success.

More than a decade of political violence and impunity under Hun Sen and his Cambodian People’s Party makes a different conclusion inescapable. There is no democratic transition underway in Cambodia. Instead, as Duncan McCargo, writing in the Journal of Democracy, puts it, the U.N. project of the early 1990s, “was only a passing outside intervention that left the CPP’s grip on power unchanged.”

Hun Sen has consolidated authoritarian rule. His use of lawsuits to neutralize opponents is not a sign of mild tactics, but of the high degree of control he has achieved through violence, intimidation and official impunity. Much takes place outside the international spotlight. Other instances are spectacular like the unsolved murder of an actress identified as Hun Sen’s mistress, gunned down in public, who wrote in her diary of warnings from the chief of national police about a plot on her life, or the deaths of 19 people during an attack on a peaceful opposition rally in 1997 that the Washington Post reported was traced by the FBI back to Hun Sen’s bodyguards.

Elections meant to prevent power from being monopolized have instead become a charade. When he hasn’t liked the outcomes, Hun Sen has used force or the threat of force to remain in power. During the U.N. sponsored elections of 1993, his party came in second and he demanded a power-sharing arrangement.

Four years later, he staged a coup against his co-premier. Dozens of members of the party with which he ostensibly shared power were killed during several days of chaos and violence.

To calm international outrage, a new election was held. The months leading up to that poll were filled with more murders. Well in advance of Election Day, international observers concluded that the poll could not be fair. It went ahead anyway and Hun Sen scored a suspect victory. The international community acquiesced.

Meanwhile, corruption has become entrenched, extending to the procurement of jobs in the government and military, provision of health care and education, and disputes over land. The leading opposition politician, already convicted of defamation, remains abroad, stripped of his parliamentary immunity by the regime. The media is targeted for repression.

Hun Sen uses comparisons of his rule to the genocidal regime that preceded him to maximum advantage, even manipulating interest in justice for the surviving Khmer Rouge. Eagerness to conduct trials at almost any cost has enabled him to extract major concessions from the international community on the terms and conditions of the tribunals.

For example, one ambiguous provision will shield some Khmer Rouge deemed not “responsible for the most serious crimes” while the whole enterprise will be compromised by the participation of the Cambodian judiciary, the same, corrupt, incompetent body that is collaborating with the current crackdown.

Cambodia’s lack of progress toward stable democracy is often attributed to a tragic past that decimated and traumatized its society. Yet there is nothing fateful about how the international nation-building project went astray. For example, the peace accords of 1991 stipulated that all of Cambodia’s factions be disarmed. They weren’t and today’s Cambodia owes a great deal to that failure.

The international community that invested – and overlooked – so much from the very beginning of the effort to deliver Cambodia from its terrible past to a democratic future must face up to the fact that Hun Sen is an obstacle. Not doing so will not only prolong Cambodia’s difficulties, but also prevent the international community from learning crucial lessons about how this often celebrated example of nation building has failed.

Ms. Bork is deputy director of the Project for the New American Century and a contributing editor of The New York Sun.