Son Sann

Son Sann was a Cambodian politician and prime minister who served as head of government from 1967 to 1968 under King Norodom Sihanouk and later led one of the three resistance factions opposing the Vietnamese-backed government in Phnom Penh during the 1980s. He was born on October 5, 1911, in Phnom Penh, then part of French Indochina, into an ethnic-Khmer family with roots in Cochinchina, and he died on December 19, 2000, in Paris.

He trained in France at the École des Hautes Études Commerciales and returned to Cambodia in the 1930s, where he worked in banking and entered politics after the country gained independence from France in 1953. He held a series of cabinet portfolios under Sihanouk, including finance, and founded the National Bank of Cambodia in 1955, serving as its first governor.

His tenure as prime minister from May 1967 to January 1968 came during a period of growing economic strain and rising left-wing insurgency. After the 1970 coup that deposed Sihanouk and the subsequent Khmer Rouge takeover in 1975, he went into exile in France. The fall of the Khmer Rouge to a Vietnamese invasion in 1979 drew him back into political life, and in 1981 he founded the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, a non-communist resistance group that operated from the Thai border.

His faction joined Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge in the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, a recognized exile body that held Cambodia's UN seat through the 1980s. After the 1991 Paris Peace Accords ended the conflict, he returned to Cambodia and led the Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party in the 1993 elections, winning ten seats. He retired from active politics later in the decade and returned to France.

His name Son Sann follows Cambodian convention with the family name first; Son is the surname and Sann the given name. Sann in Khmer carries a sense of calm or peace, and he wore the name for nearly nine decades.