Sebastian Strangio's Blog, page 10

Its Electricity Dwindling, Cambodia is Getting Very Dark and Very, Very Hot

Yim Bopha Thnourith at his blackout-hit barber shop in Phnom Penh’s Meanchey district. (Sebastian Strangio)

PHNOM PENH—If floods are the scourge of the Cambodian wet season, power-cuts are the scourge of the dry, which sears its way through February, March, and April, often pushing the mercury to over 100 degrees. During last year’s dry season, rolling blackouts plagued the city, generally sparing its embassies and the homes of high-ranking officials. But so far this year, the state power company has managed to keep the lights on more often, and officials say they have a plan to continue improving the system going forward, even as the city’s ballooning population puts more strain on the power grid.

With several hydropower plants soon to begin operations and a new coal plant firing up in coastal Sihanoukville, power company Electricité du Cambodge (EdC) remains confident that Phnom Penh’s chronic outages will soon be a thing of the past. In March this year, EdC announced that the “rolling blackouts” of 2013 would not be repeated in 2014, and so far, to some degree, they’ve delivered.

Nearly everyone I spoke with agreed that things have improved on the dark, hot season of 2013: dak phleung, as power-cuts are known in Khmer, are less frequent now, and are sometimes announced in advance on television. During the course of 2013, Urban Voice Cambodia (UVC), a crowd-sourcing platform that maps city blackouts, reported 700 separate instances of power-cuts. My Sovann, a project coordinator with UVC, says his organization has only received a handful of complaints so far in 2014.

But people living on Phnom Penh’s outskirts still complain that they’re left without power for hours at a time — and without warning. According to one EdC employee who spoke on condition of anonymity, authorities are still forced to prioritize which areas of town receive regular power. “Nowadays the power is still not enough for the city’s use; it is becoming very weak,” the official says, “which is the reason [EdC] has to do blackouts in areas where they think that it is not really important, to save power for some more important areas.” Despite the improved power supply, Sovann says Phnom Penh is growing so quickly that power-cuts will almost certainly continue for the foreseeable future. “There is always demand for more electricity,” he says.

In Phnom Penh’s outlying Meanchey district, Yim Bopha Thnourith writhes in discomfort as he recounts the previous night, which began when the power flickered out at about 6 p.m., and ended 12 interminable hours later, as the sun crept up over the Cambodian capital. “It’s very difficult for business and for living,” says Thnourith, 27, who owns a barber shop made of corrugated iron with mirrors mounted on two walls, two old-fashioned barber chairs and a small fan whirring above. “Two weeks ago it pretty much blacked out during the daytime, but this week it blacked out at night as well.” When the power is switched on, Thnourith says he can make between $15 and $20 per day, and up to $30 on Sundays, sleeping at the back of his shop to save on rent. But when his shop is hit by a dak phleung, the customers stay away, and his earnings drop to as little as $2 or $3. “Customers need a fan to cool them off,” he says. “Without power, I’m stuck.”

Thnourith’s story is echoed across this outer suburbs of Phnom Penh, an arc of concrete tenements, garment worker dormitories and small family homes that has sprung up over the past decade. In that time Cambodia’s capital has expanded outward in an unplanned sprawl as the economy has boomed and rural migrants have poured into the city in search of jobs on construction sites and in apparel factories. Phnom Penh’s rapid growth — the city is estimated to be growing at around four percent per year — has heaped strain on its public utilities, especially the poorly equipped power grid.

According to a UN draft report, Phnom Penh and its environs account for a full 70 percent of Cambodia’s total electricity consumption. This amounted to more than 400 megawatts in 2012, of which it received only 290, most of which was imported from Vietnam. Demand continues to far outstrip supply, especially in the hot months. In neighborhoods on the outskirts, it is not uncommon to see one power connection split into four or five, and tangles of splayed power cabling connecting small concrete rooms to the mains. The poor supply of power also means that the cost of power in Phnom Penh is among the highest in Southeast Asia, often exceeding 1,000 riels ($0.25 US) per kilowatt hour. In wealthier areas of town, large hotels, restaurants and apartment buildings rely on large diesel generators, which can be heard revving up in wealthier areas as soon as a blackout hits.

But at the Taso Café, close the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh’s south, dak phleung have become part of day-to-day life, a phenomenon, like storms and sunshine, to be negotiated with hopeful resignation. Inside a narrow room lined with steel tables, a fan spins noiselessly and a TV blares a dubbed Chinese sitcom. Fluorescent tubes light up a simple kitchen, where 40-year-old Dan Poma and her mother Rath Samoeun whip up iced coffee and simple Khmer dishes. As if on cue, the lights switched off, the TV went silent, and the fan spun gently to a halt. “Dak phleung!” Poma and her mother said in unison, laughing. A couple minutes later the appliances sprung back to life. But Poma doesn’t expect the power to be on for long. “This is just a sort of confirmation,” she says, as Samoeun begins transferring food from a fridge to a plastic ice-box. “It’s an indication another long blackout is coming.”

Published by Next City, May 27, 2014

Phnom Penh’s Wildly Opulent Gated Communities are Fracturing the City

PHNOM PENH — Cambodia’s suburban future announces itself with a grand archway, a replica of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, topped with a clutch of rearing bronze stallions. Beyond, Grand Phnom Penh International City unfolds in smooth, asphalted harmony: a landscape of columned mansions and palm trees, shady streets and water fountains, green lawns and well-manicured gardens.

Five years ago, this site on the northern fringe of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital of two million, was sparsely inhabited swampland. Today, it is metamorphosing into a paradise for the wealthy and a monument to a new mode of Cambodian middle-class living. By the time construction finishes around 2020, Grand Phnom Penh International City will include 4,500 houses, half-a-dozen residential apartment towers, a golf club and a water park. Residents will have access to an international-grade school and a state-of-the-art hospital.

Homes and swimming pools at Grand Phnom Penh International City, the vanguard of middle-class living in Cambodia’s capital (Sebastian Strangio)

“It’s like a luxury city,” says Heng Channith, a sales executive in the air-conditioned marketing office, scanning a laser pointer over a 1/1000-scale display model, an expanse of green felt and tiny Monopoly-board mansions. “We have the best facilities. We have villas, we have flats, we have shophouses… We have public gardens. And it’s not as crowded as Phnom Penh.”

Grand Phnom Penh International City, a joint venture between the Indonesian developer Ciputra and YLP, a local construction firm, is just one of several “satellite cities” that have sprung up in Cambodia’s fast-growing capital in recent years. As a new wealthy class rises in one of Asia’s poorest countries after decades of war and upheaval, many have sought a quieter life in gated communities far from the dust and SUV snarls of the downtown districts. According to local realtor CBRE, seven “satellite city” projects are scheduled for completion around the Cambodian capital over the next 10 to 15 years, covering nearly 8,000 hectares — about 12 percent of the city’s total land area. In 2005 one city official described the urban ideal as “a city with no smoke and no sound.”

In a country where a fifth of the population still lives on less than $1.33 per day, it’s a privilege that doesn’t come cheap. Villas at Grand Phnom Penh International City range in price from $120,000 for the most basic models to $850,000 for one of the palm-engulfed “golf villas” backing onto the 18-hole course planned by Nicklaus Design, a firm established by American golfing great Jack Nicklaus. The names of the homes are signifiers of old-world sophistication: Tuscany, Venezia, Versailles. At the “Chateau” model home, I walk through rooms filled with rococo symbols of wealth — divans, tapestries, tasseled curtains, Renaissance prints, filigreed bedheads. In the upstairs study a full set of the 1971 Encyclopedia Americana shares the shelves with a few faux-Asian antiques; a window looks out onto the smooth greens of the Grand Phnom Penh International Golf Course.

A few blocks away, I meet Neang Ren, 61, a retired education ministry official, who recently moved into a $400,000 Chateau villa fronted by scrawny jacaranda trees. “This place is beautiful and spacious. The second thing is security – it is very safe,” he says with satisfaction, sitting on a plastic chair like he’s back in his village, a checked krama scarf wrapped around his waist. Three months after moving in, Ren and his wife Ruom Saroeun have made their new suburban oasis home. Plants hang from the cast-iron fence in empty milk formula tins; a Toyota Tundra pickup sits in the drive, next to a golf buggy. The neighborhood is green and quiet, except for the birds. “Everybody makes the same decision to come here,” he says. “It’s a perfect life.”

While satellite cities have become an established part of the new suburban landscape, urban planners say these mega-projects have been poorly coordinated with the growth of the city as a whole. Each development is its own well-planned island. Outside the stallion-gates of Grand Phnom Penh International City, asphalt and concrete quickly give way to the gravel and potholes of Sen Sok district. In 2008, Frederic Mauret, a French urban planner who helped advise Phnom Penh Municipality, warned about the traffic jams, flooding and other consequences of isolated satellite city developments. “Those mega projects think only about the development in their locations, turning blind eyes on the development of the whole city,” he said.

The interior of a “Chateau” model home (Sebastian Strangio)

Willem Paling, formerly of the University of Western Sydney, who has conducted research on urban growth and development in Phnom Penh, describes city planning as “a disjointed, halting process” driven by massive private sector investments, mostly from Asian countries like China and South Korea. In 2005 French urban planning consultants drafted a 2020 Master Plan for Phnom Penh, but it has never been implemented. In its absence, projects are often announced by senior government officials like Cambodia’s long-serving prime minister, Hun Sen, before they are formally approved by the city authorities. “Enforcing adherence to the Master Plan is difficult when the capital associated with large projects is so attractive,” says Paling.

With little effective regulation, some satellite city developments have had more acute social and environmental effects. In 2007, Boeung Kak, a 133-hectare lake in central Phnom Penh, was quietly leased to the Cambodian senator and oligarch Lao Meng Khin for the construction of a housing and commercial project. Since then the project has displaced more than 4,000 families, and according to many urban planning experts, the filling of the lake is likely to exacerbate flooding in a city where much of the land lies below the level of the Mekong River during the monsoon season.

On Chroy Changva, the peninsula that divides the Mekong River and the Tonle Sap, riverbanks have collapsed as sand has been dredged from the Tonle Sap to fill land for a $3 billion, 956-acre project known as “Chroy Changva City, City of the Future.” Diamond Island, a lemon-shaped island that is home to housing developments including Elite Town, a gated township of pastel-yellow villas, has involved evictions and land reclamations that could change the water flow, eroding the riverbanks. As Pen Sereypagna, an architect and urban researcher, puts it, “Planning is focused on private dreams.” Everything else is left to its own devices.

With Phnom Penh’s population growing at a rate of around four percent per year, urban planners say the city risks developing into a few islands of well-planned suburbia in a dusty cityscape hampered by inadequate infrastructure. “By creating these kind of projects, you put a lot of limitations on the city’s development,” says Piotr Sasin, an urban planner who heads the Czech NGO People In Need. “Phnom Penh used to be called the Pearl of Asia; there’s very little of that left.” Paling says that for satellite cities to succeed, they need to be part of an overarching plan. “Broader investment in infrastructure is essential, not just in these isolated pockets, cut off from the rest of the city,” he says.

Outside, back on Grand Boulevard, Cambodian officials take turns smashing golf balls from a driving range out over a rectangular lake, aiming for island greens with pennant flags. At a playground nearby, 32-year-old Khon Phana cradles his 15-month-old son as he watches his nephews and nieces playing on the slides and other play equipment. Phana lives in Sen Sok, outside the gates of this new community, but with few other public parks in Phnom Penh, he brings his children to play here. “People outside can bring their kids to play, they don’t mind,” he tells me, as green-shirted workers with brooms maintain the blemish-free streets. Would he like to live here one day? “I couldn’t even dream about it, it’s too expensive for me,” Phana says. “But of course I would, if I had the money.”

Published by Next City, April 24, 2014 [link]

Cambodian deadlock at crucial juncture

CNRP supporters march through the streets during election protests in Phnom Penh on September 15. (Sebastian Strangio)

PHNOM PENH – After a six-week political impasse, Cambodia’s National Election Committee (NEC) has officially declared incumbent Prime Minister Hun Sen the winner of disputed national elections held on July 28. There was little surprise in the September 8 announcement, despite the opposition Cambodian National Rescue Party’s (CNRP) heated claims that widespread electoral irregularities tilted the scales in favor of the long-serving Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP).

Like many Cambodian government institutions, the NEC is widely assumed to take its marching orders from the CPP. As if on cue, it ratified earlier provisional results that gave the CPP 68 seats in the country’s 123-seat National Assembly; the CNRP was awarded 55. In so doing, the NEC rejected a raft of complaints from the CNRP and its president, Sam Rainsy, who claims it actually won a thin majority with 63 seats. A tense stalemate has reigned since the polls, with both parties claiming victory.

Opposition concerns about the elections are pressing and legitimate. One election evaluation released by a coalition of 21 Cambodian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) last week concluded that due to large-scale irregularities the NEC’s endorsed result does not “fully reflect the will of the voters”.

It found that thousands of names on voter lists had been erased and altered, and that many voters arrived at polling stations only to find someone else had voted in their name. It also counted more than 300,000 duplicate names on voter lists. All this has added weight to CNRP claims that, due to a scripted campaign of voter fraud, more than a million Cambodians were effectively disenfranchised.

Still, little has happened since the election to change the political balance. For the past six weeks, the CNRP has repeatedly called for an independent election investigation, which the CPP has predictably rejected. In turn, the CNRP has rejected CPP invitations to enter political talks on the formation of the new government, demanding instead that Hun Sen step down.

When Rainsy announced that his party would hold public demonstrations against the election result, the government responded by beefing up security around Phnom Penh and publicly drilling hundreds of riot police in a public show of strength. The CNRP have held several large rallies to protest the election results, including a 20,000-strong gathering on September 7, but none have dared to stray from Freedom Park, a sanctioned protest space in the capital.

The announcement of the official results has kicked this game of cat and mouse into a new, more critical phase. Immediately, the opposition announced it will hold a three-day protest “camp-in” starting on Sunday, with Rainsy threatening to defy an official prohibition against marches through the city’s streets. The CNRP also says it will boycott the first session of the new National Assembly on September 23, in a bid to hold up the formation of a new CPP-led government.

In response, the CPP has issued fresh warnings about unsanctioned public gatherings, warned NGOs against supporting the opposition’s protests, and claimed the right to reallocate the CNRP’s parliamentary seats if it sits out the formation of a new government.

On Friday morning, a small homemade explosive device was found near the National Assembly building in Phnom Penh and detonated by landmine experts, while three M79 grenade shells turned up close to the Freedom Park protest site, raising the political temperature ahead of Sunday’s demonstrations. Lao Mong Hay, a long-time analyst of Cambodian politics, characterized the CPP’s current message to the opposition as “take it or leave it” – join the government or forfeit your role altogether.

Royal intervention

Enter King Norodom Sihamoni. On Thursday, a day after returning from a medical trip to Beijing, the Cambodian monarch wrote to Rainsy and Hun Sen, inviting them to the Royal Palace on Saturday for talks to help “solve” the current stand-off. With the King now engaged, observers say that a negotiated settlement with the ruling party looms as the most probable path out of the deadlock. Prince Sisowath Thomico, a member of both the royal family and the CNRP, said the King could give both sides an honorable exit from the confrontation. “The King is the only way to face-saving for both parties,” he said.

A supporter of the Cambodian opposition calls for an election probe during protests in Phnom Penh on September 15. (Sebastian Strangio)

This is especially crucial for the opposition. The difficulty the CNRP has had so far is that it has pledged itself publicly to both non-violence and non-compromise in a situation where confrontation and compromise are the only real ways forward. Despite notching significant gains at the ballot box, prevailing political forces still weigh mostly in the CPP’s favor. Domestically, it still controls the army, police, and most (if not all) government institutions.

At the same time, Western governments are stuck in a holding pattern, making pro forma calls for an election probe but also urging both parties to come to the negotiating table and avoid a violent confrontation. They are very unlikely to support the CNRP’s claims to victory in the election, preferring a stable status quo to an unpredictable spell of political upheaval. Slowly, the CNRP is coming to grips with an unfortunate and sobering reality: that in Cambodian politics, holding the legal and moral high-ground only goes so far.

Kem Ley, a Phnom Penh-based independent political analyst, said that the opposition’s upcoming protest camp was unlikely to sway the ruling party, but would help maximize the CNRP’s bargaining power if and when it sits down to negotiate with the CPP. In exchange for joining a new government, he suggested, the CNRP could demand a stronger role in national decision-making or concrete reforms to institutions like the NEC. “For me, inside its heart, the CNRP is happy with this [election] result,” he said.

The King’s involvement might now give the CNRP the face-saving pretext it needs to come to the table. Rainsy dropped a hint earlier this week that his party might join the first meeting of the National Assembly if he receives a direct request from the King, who traditionally presides over the occasion.

It was the first public softening of the opposition line. Indeed, Kem Ley suggests that the King’s return at this juncture might be an indication that the two parties are already in talks – or that a deal has already been struck. “If the CNRP and CPP did not agree, the King would not have come back,” he said.

A “Cambodian” solution of this kind would be par for the course. Election results in Cambodia are typically the start of a political process rather than the end of one – a jumping-off point for the sorts of political gymnastics and chess games that have become a national specialty. Every election since the United Nations-organized poll of 1993 has been followed by negotiations between competing parties, and in the end the will of the Cambodian people has been always been trimmed and tailored to fit the prerogatives of leading factions and personalities.

Despite his tough talk of making no compromises with Hun Sen, Rainsy has shown himself amenable to such compromises in the past. After the 2008 national election, the Sam Rainsy Party – as the opposition party was then known – announced a similar boycott of the National Assembly but then attended the opening session at the 11th hour after talks with the ruling party.

That deal largely set the pattern for the following five years, most of which Rainsy whiled away in self-exile in Paris after the government brought what he claims were politically motivated charges against him for uprooting Vietnamese border markers and publishing “false” maps of the politically sensitive frontier.

After a much stronger showing in this year’s election, and the support of large swathes of the Cambodian public, the choices Rainsy and his CNRP colleagues make in the next few weeks will be all the more crucial.

[Published by Asia Times Online, September 13, 2013]

Post-poll deadlock tests Cambodian stability

Cambodian opposition leader Sam Rainsy takes part in a ceremony at a stupa commemorating victims of a 1997 grenade attack, in Phnom Penh on July 30. (Sebastian Strangio)

PHNOM PENH – A new political dance has begun in earnest between Cambodia’s long-serving prime minister Hun Sen and his chief rival opposition leader Sam Rainsy, with potential far-reaching implications for political stability in the weeks and months ahead.

In the five days since Rainsy’s Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) posted surprising gains in tense national elections, the opposition has taken the political offensive by rejecting a preliminary official announcement that gave a 68-to-55-seat victory to the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) and calling for an international probe into widespread electoral irregularities. On Tuesday, Rainsy raised the stakes by declaring victory outright, claiming his party actually won 63 of the National Assembly’s 123 seats and calling for Hun Sen’s resignation. After years of fighting against Hun Sen, in power now for 28 years, Cambodia’s perpetual political gadfly finally sees executive power within reach.

With both sides claiming to have won the election, Cambodia is now in political deadlock. Similar periods of paralysis followed elections in 1998 and 2003, when the CPP failed to win the two-thirds majority then required to form a government. On both occasions, Rainsy, then head of his self-named party, joined with Prince Norodom Ranariddh, the leader of the royalist Funcinpec party, and held up the formation of government in a bid to extract concessions from Hun Sen. On both occasions, Ranariddh cut a deal with the CPP behind Rainsy’s back, entering government in exchange for a raft of government posts and sinecures.

This time the CNRP opposition has an unprecedented degree of leverage. For one, there is no third party that Hun Sen can buy-off with token government posts and other sweeteners. For the first time, Cambodia has what could be described as a two-party system, and the CNRP appears united and energized, riding on a wave of popular desire for change. Though the current result gives Hun Sen the simple majority he requires to form a government and extend his rule into its fourth decade, analysts say the CNRP has the power to boycott the opening session of the National Assembly and hold up the installation of a new cabinet.

The party is also backed by a wide cross-section of the Cambodian public, who came out en masse to welcome Rainsy home from self-exile on July 19. Though Rainsy was barred by the National Election Committee (NEC) from contesting the polls, the possibility remains that the CNRP could up the ante on its claim to victory through street protests. Rainsy has warned the CPP of a “massive demonstration on a nationwide scale” if his party’s demands are not met.

After three days of post-election silence, Hun Sen’s first response was to strike a conciliatory tone. Touring a construction site in Phnom Penh on Wednesday, he told reporters that he welcomed a joint investigation if the NEC was willing to establish one. Hun Sen also said his party was “ready and open” to enter talks with the CNRP over the formation of a new National Assembly.

Then came the stick. In meetings with foreign diplomats on Thursday night, Hun Sen warned the CNRP that if it boycotts the National Assembly the government has the power to redistribute its seats to other minor parties (none of which won any seats on Sunday). The same day, the NEC – widely believed to be under the ruling party’s thumb – rejected the proposal for a joint election inquiry. Alongside this threat, Hun Sen reiterated that he was willing to cooperate closely with the CNRP, hinting at an offer of key positions in the National Assembly.

Despite grossly misreading popular sentiment, Hun Sen still controls the police, army, courts, civil service and a nationwide political network with roots in every village and commune.

All of this is more or less par for the course. Based on past experience, Hun Sen will try to open negotiations, shackle his opponents with small concessions, and then work the process to his advantage. But with the prime minister still reeling from his party’s bruising loss of seats (it won 90 of 123 seats at the 2008 polls), the CNRP is standing firm. “We accept the dialogue, but the objective is to establish and expose the truth – nothing less,” Rainsy told Radio Australia on Thursday. “The truth is that the ruling party, after ruling Cambodia for 34 years, has lost this election and there is a democratic change underway in Cambodia.”

Misread popular sentiment

The CNRP’s complaints of electoral irregularities have been echoed by the observations of most independent election monitors, who say the poll – the most peaceful since the election organized by the United Nations in 1993 – has also been the least fair.

But even if the CNRP can provide conclusive proof it was robbed of victory, it still has to contend Cambodia’s unchanged political reality. Despite grossly misreading popular sentiment, Hun Sen still controls the police, army, courts, civil service and a nationwide political network with roots in every village and commune. Crucially, he also has the support of most of the business community. After winning a surprise victory against the CPP in 1993, Ranariddh’s Funcinpec was not able to run the country without accepting Hun Sen as co-premier – and there is no reason to think Rainsy could do so now.

Sam Rainsy has a reputation as a principled but often stubborn figure. (Sebastian Strangio)

Some sort of political settlement is therefore almost certain. But how willing is Rainsy to compromise? Over the past two decades he has developed a reputation as a principled but often stubborn figure. Appointed finance minister after the 1993 election, he was dumped from the cabinet a year later for attacking the corruption of Hun Sen and Ranariddh, then co-prime ministers. In 1995, Ranariddh kicked him out of the Funcinpec party altogether, costing Rainsy his seat in the National Assembly. Rainsy has been in opposition ever since, on a self-appointed mission to unseat Hun Sen and restore democracy to Cambodia. “The impression you had [of Rainsy] was very little flexibility, very little compromise,” said one former Western ambassador who served in Cambodia in the 1990s.

Rainsy’s own principles have been matched by an often naive conviction that the UN and Western governments would provide him concrete backing in his struggle for democracy against Hun Sen. In August 1998, during post-election protests, he went so far as to call for the US to remove the prime minister by bombing his “tiger’s lair” compound south of Phnom Penh. In recent days, he has held talks with US and European officials, presumably seeking international support for his post-election plans. After previous elections, however, foreign governments have rarely provided much beyond statements of “concern” or lukewarm calls for reform. Ultimately, they have accepted the results of every poll since 1993, even though these have frequently been marred by political bloodshed.

As expected, the US has called for investigations into Sunday’s poll, but Sophal Ear, the author of Aid Dependence in Cambodia: How Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy, said the public comments showed Washington had “little resolve” to intervene directly. Countries like China, Bangladesh and Hungary have also already declared the elections “free and fair”. “I know it’s not a popularity contest,” Ear said, “but unless the international community closes ranks, the ruling party isn’t going to be swayed.”

A fine line

This leaves the CNRP with two options. The first is that Rainsy and his deputy, Kem Sokha, emboldened by their strong electoral showing, take to the streets – something independent observers warn could be a risky move. “Rainsy has to see that what he’s won is seats in the Assembly that could have an influence on the future of Cambodia. He has not won a mandate to rule the country,” said Professor David Chandler, a leading historian of Cambodia. Comparing the current situation to 1998, when post-election protests led to violent clashes and the shooting of demonstrators, he said Rainsy runs the risk of stumbling into a confrontation that escapes his control.”It’s not the same situation now,” Chandler said, “and if you pull people onto the streets somebody might get killed. That’s what happened in ’98, and its more crucial now because he’s got more support.”

The other option – the more likely, according to analysts – is to reach some sort of negotiated settlement with the CPP. While Rainsy claims the CNRP is not interested in bargaining for positions in government – that instead he wants “truth” and “justice” – he is likely to temper his claims. “The rhetoric now is different, but the reality is he’s compromised in the past,” said Ou Virak, president of the Cambodian Centre for Human Rights.

As pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi has recently discovered in Myanmar, the ability to raise people’s hopes also imparts the crushing burden of trying to satisfy them.

Accommodation carries its own dangers. As Funcinpec discovered after entering coalitions with the CPP after the 1993, 1998 and 2003 elections, a share of government posts and ministerial portfolios is no guarantee of practical power. Funcinpec’s share of power shrunk at each subsequent election, and the party is now effectively dead after failing to win even a single seat at the July 28 poll. If the CNRP enters a coalition with Hun Sen, the opposition’s claimed electoral victory could be paid out in the same debased coinage given to the royalists: powerless figurehead posts in ministries and institutions that remain beholden to the CPP. “The opposition party should learn from this,” said Kem Ley, an independent political analyst. “Even if they’re given the ministry of health, they can’t control the administrative structure.”

Ley suggests that the CNRP should instead focus its energies on securing key positions in the National Assembly – the posts of president and deputy president, as well as leading positions on the nine parliamentary commissions – where they could provide robust opposition to the CPP and begin the slow process of internal reform. The party could also request the reform of other CPP-infused institutions like the NEC and Constitutional Council, with an eye towards creating a more level playing field for the next national election in 2018.

The other challenge for Rainsy will be managing public expectations. As pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi has recently discovered in Myanmar, the ability to raise people’s hopes also imparts the crushing burden of trying to satisfy them. For Rainsy and his party, reaching a weak deal with the CPP risks alienating the party’s support base – especially those activists who have put their personal safety on the line to campaign for the CNRP and are now reportedly agitating for protests. “Many of the youth do not necessarily fully support Kem Sokha and Sam Rainsy; they just want change,” Virak said. “If their leaders betray them, they may not listen.”

Regardless of how the situation plays out, the July 28 vote was a remarkable result for Cambodia. As in 1993, the people came out and voiced a strong preference for change, confounding a ruling party that thought it had built enough bridges, roads, and schools to satisfy a discontented and impoverished population. As the country enters a brave new political world, the opposition, flushed with success, will have to perform a delicate dance if it is to transform electoral returns into real reforms and practical power.

“Politics is always a fine balance,” said Virak. “This time is no different.”

[Published at Asia Times Online, August 2, 2013]

Poll loosens Hun Sen’s grip on Cambodia

Prime Minister Hun Sen casts his ballot at Takhmao, 10 kilometres south of Phnom Penh, on July 28. (Sebastian Strangio)

PHNOM PENH – Cambodia’s opposition leader Sam Rainsy has called for an independent investigation into widespread electoral irregularities, a day after his party secured surprising gains in a tense national election. As expected, Prime Minister Hun Sen and his Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) have claimed victory in the polls, but look set to come away with a severely reduced majority. According to preliminary results released by Information Minister Khieu Kanharith on his Facebook page last night, the CPP won 68 seats in the 123-seat National Assembly, down from the 90 it has held since the 2008 election.

The opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) emerged with 55, nearly doubling the combined 29 seats previously occupied by the Sam Rainsy Party and Human Rights Party before they merged to form the CNRP last year. Despite his party’s impressive showing, CNRP president Rainsy rejected the government’s election result, claiming that more than a million people had been disenfranchised due to voter-list problems and other irregularities. “We don’t accept the election results,” he told a crowded news conference at the party’s headquarters in Phnom Penh. “There are too many irregularities with far-reaching implications that have distorted and reversed the will of the people.”

The CNRP has called for the formation of an independent committee comprising representatives of the two political parties, civil society and election monitors, which should probe complaints and make a final report by August 31. Rainsy said that in the event the allegations of glaring irregularities are upheld, the party will call for recounts and a possible re-run of the election.

The surprise election result follows an unusually vibrant campaign period in which young CNRP supporters clad in the party’s rising sun insignia swarmed through the Cambodian capital on motorbikes chanting their desire for change. Similar scenes also took place in provincial towns, where Rainsy and Human Rights Party founder Kem Sokha whipped crowds into a frenzy during a week-long rural campaign tour that ended on Friday with large rallies in Kampong Cham and Phnom Penh.

“This is a historical day, a great day for Cambodia,” Rainsy told reporters on Sunday afternoon. “People came in great numbers to express their will and democracy seemed to move forward.”

As polls opened on Sunday morning in Takhmao, around 10 kilometers south of the capital, Hun Sen and his wife, Bun Rany, arrived in a black Mercedes S600 sedan to cast their votes before a wall of flashing cameras. Rainsy, barred from voting or running as a candidate in the poll after a royal pardon quashed criminal charges that he claims were politically motivated and allowed his return from self-exile on July 19, spent the morning touring polling stations and reporting alleged electoral irregularities. “Let’s wait for more evidence … but many indications point to the same plan or plot to rig the election in the way that would reverse the will of the people,” he told reporters at a Buddhist pagoda on the outskirts of town.

Rainsy’s complaints echo the observations of independent election monitors, who say the poll – the most peaceful since United Nations-organized elections in 1993 – has also been the least fair. Claims of irregularities are legion: according to a recent voter audit, 9% of voter names had disappeared from the national rolls, while one in ten belonged to “ghost voters” who appeared not to exist. Election monitors also expressed concerns that the indelible ink used to mark the fingers of voters could be easily washed off, enabling fraudulent repeat voting.

Corruption watchdog Transparency International Cambodia said in a statement that “an unusually high number of critical incidents at the polls”, including “large numbers” of voters who were unable to find their names on the voter lists, and others who arrived only to find someone had already voted in their place. Transparency International reported today that in 60% of polling stations, citizens with proper ID were unable to find their names on the list.

A man stands on an upturned police truck during a short-lived riot that broke out in Stung Meanchey, Phnom Penh, during national elections on July 28. (Sebastian Strangio)

Outside a polling station at Moha Montrey pagoda, 25-year-old Thon Viley complained that he tried to vote only to be told that he had already cast his ballot. “I was very disappointed,” he said. “I’m not sure, but I think it might be purposeful cheating.” Hotel worker Sun Kosal, 26, said her name and those of her sister and father were all absent from the list – despite them all having voted in 2008 and in commune elections last year. “This is my land, and I demand democracy to come back to my country,” she said.

At Stung Meanchey Primary School, tensions over missing voter names boiled over into violence after a young man reportedly clashed with a monk over problems with the electoral list. An angry crowd gathered and barricaded a member of the National Election Committee in a classroom after she allegedly failed to address unsubstantiated claims that illegal Vietnamese migrants had attempted to cast ballots.

When a contingent of military police arrived to free the woman, the crowd began hurling rocks and attacking police, who were forced into retreat. The crowd then fell upon two abandoned police trucks in the street outside, smashing them with rocks and setting them alight while chanting slogans against the government and the Vietnamese.

“I’m angry because a monk was punched at the polling station,” one rioter told Asia Times Online, saying he was fighting for the National Rescue Party. Riot police and trucks with water cannons were lined up a few blocks away but did not confront the protesters, who gradually lost interest and dispersed. By nightfall, an uneasy calm had fallen over the city.

Significant setback

The election result represents a considerable setback for Hun Sen, who has ruled the country since 1985 and has seen his electoral support climb at every election since 1993. The CNRP’s successes appear to have exposed the contradictions in Hun Sen’s rule, which has claimed credit for ushering in peace, stability, and years of strong economic growth but also fostered a rapacious system of crony patronage that has resulted in land-grabs, ballooning income inequality, and endemic levels of corruption.

“All the people now realize they’ve received a lot of injustice. Now they want to see a new leader. They were powerless, but now they have power,” said Kem Ley, an independent analyst. “I see this as a great result that tells the CPP that even though they are [still] winning, they are also a loser.”

The CNRP has capitalized on this discontent by hammering home a populist party line calling for a rise in the minimum wage and a monthly pension for the elderly, alongside long-standing promises to tackle corruption and fight what the party claims is a large influx of illegal Vietnamese migrants.

“We have been eating sour Vietnamese soup for 30 years,” Rainsy told a cheering crowd in the border province of Svay Rieng on July 25. “It’s time for that to stop.” The party has also benefited from a rise in the use of social media in urban areas, which has allowed opposition activists to circumvent the CPP’s near-total control of the broadcast media.

A monk looks on during a short-lived riot that broke out in Stung Meanchey, Phnom Penh, during national elections on July 28. (Sebastian Strangio)

However, it remains unclear what leverage the CNRP has to call for an investigation into the election results. The CPP still retains the simple majority required to form a government and is likely to resist calls for an independent probe. Government spokesman Phay Siphan said it was up to the new government-elect as to whether a committee would be formed but said there were already official mechanisms for lodging complaints. “[Rainsy's] rejection of the election results is nothing new for me,” he said. “He’s said that a number of times already.”

Kem Ley predicted that the CPP would reject opposition calls for an independent probe or a recount but said the opposition would probably use the threat to bring pressure on the ruling party and win greater say in the formation of a new government. Most importantly, he said, was the fact that though the CPP has the simple majority required to form government alone, a quorum of two-thirds is required in the National Assembly before it can swear in a new cabinet.

Hun Sen is unlikely to cede political ground without a fight. Between 1993 and 2008, the politician slowly whittled down Funcinpec, once his royalist coalition partner, by buying off individual officials and engineering splits in the party. Funcinpec failed to win a single seat yesterday, losing the two that it had salvaged in 2008.

Kem Ley said the party’s demise provides a cautionary tale for any negotiations the CNRP might engage in with the CPP. Based on past practice, he said the party would seek to make a deal with the CNRP as a whole – similar to the arrangements with Funcinpec that followed the 1993, 1998, and 2003 elections. If that fails, the CPP could also start “hunting” individual parliamentarians, targeting them with inducements in a bid to promote a split in the opposition party.

Despite the dangers, the CNRP’s strong showing in the elections has put it in a rare advantageous position. “Right now the CNRP has a lot of power to negotiate with the CPP for the benefit of the people,” Kem Ley said. “Everything right now is in the hands of the opposition.”

[Published by Asia Times Online, July 29, 2013]

The Cambodian Candidate

Cambodian opposition leader Sam Rainsy speaks to thousands of supporters during a pre-election rally in Prey Veng on July 25. (Sebastian Strangio)

The Cambodian national election this Sunday will almost certainly propel the country’s sitting prime minister, the 61-year-old Hun Sen, into his fourth decade of rule. Asia’s longest-serving elected leader, Hun Sen has held power since 1985, and his Cambodian People’s Party enjoys all the advantages of decades-long incumbency: pliant government institutions, favorable media coverage, and powerful tycoon backers. The CPP has increased its share of the vote at every national poll since 1993 and currently holds 90 of the 123 seats in the National Assembly.

In Cambodia, elections have never been truly free or fair. Nor have they been peaceful. But even by Cambodian standards, circumstances this year heavily favor the ruling party. What independent election monitors delicately label “irregularities” abound. According to a recent audit of voter lists, nine percent of voter names have disappeared from the national rolls, and one in ten belongs to voters who do not exist. The CPP also boasts genuine popular support; much of the population feels grateful for the thousands of roads, bridges, schools, and Buddhist pagodas built under the party’s rule.

Cambodia’s travails fail to attract much attention in Washington nowadays, but its impending election has shone a rare spotlight on Hun Sen’s iron-fisted rule. In recent months, the U.S. State Department rebuked the prime minister after his government ejected 28 opposition lawmakers from the parliament and ordered a ban — since revoked under U.S. pressure — on foreign radio broadcasts during the 31-day campaign period. Then, on June 7, U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) sponsored a resolution that would reduce U.S. aid to Cambodia if the State Department does not deem the upcoming election “credible and competitive.” Meanwhile, U.S. Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R–Calif.), a longtime Hun Sen critic whose California district is home to a large Cambodian diaspora community, recently described the prime minister as “a corrupt, vicious human being, who has held that country in his grip for decades.” “It’s time,” he added, “for Hun Sen to go.”

Critics in Congress are not calling for a new policy so much as a return to an old one. U.S.-Cambodia relations have warmed only recently, thawing a long-standing freeze that dates back to Hun Sen’s violent overthrow of his chief political rival, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, in 1997. In the wake of Hun Sen’s coup de force, Rohrabacher denounced the Cambodian premier as a “new Pol Pot” on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Although Cambodia hawks such as Rohrabacher have remained vocal, the United States has gradually learned to live with the Cambodian strongman. It has had little choice: After Hun Sen’s takeover, China began pouring billions of dollars’ worth of “no-strings attached” loans and investments into the country, reducing Cambodia’s dependence on U.S. and Western development aid, which was often tied to democratic and good governance reforms.

Washington has long worried about Phnom Penh’s increasing closeness with Beijing, but it was not until the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that the United States took major steps to reassert its influence. In 2003, U.S. authorities learned that the Indonesian terrorist known named Riduan Isamuddin (also known as Hambali) — a rare non-Arab member of Osama Bin Laden’s inner circle — had planned to use Cambodia as a base for bombings throughout Southeast Asia. Concerned that Cambodia, with its porous borders and marginalized Muslim minority, could become a terrorist safe haven, the George W. Bush administration embraced Hun Sen as a new partner in the global war on terror, lifting restrictions on military assistance in 2005. Two years later, the United States resumed direct foreign assistance after a decade-long hiatus.

When the Obama administration announced its so-called pivot to Asia, it quietly reconfigured the alliance, turning a partnership against terrorism into a bulwark against China. In 2008, Hun Sen gave his 35-year-old son, Hun Manet — a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point — command of Cambodia’s National Counterterrorism Special Force, then newly established with U.S. assistance. In 2009, the two countries exchanged defense attachés and subsequently initiated Angkor Sentinel, an annual joint military exercise. This year, the United States plans to give Cambodia $70 million in aid, mostly to nongovernmental organizations, with around $6 million earmarked for military aid.

One side effect of the U.S. pivot — in Cambodia and the broader region — has been the downgrading of democracy and human rights as U.S. priorities. Vietnam’s escalating attacks on civil rights and free speech, for example, have not dampened U.S. diplomacy there; Vietnamese President Truong Tan Sang will pay an historic visit to the White House this week. Nor have concerns about democracy deterred the United States from restoring ties with Myanmar (also known as Burma), a country whose recent “reforms” have papered over festering ethnic conflicts and state-backed pogroms against Muslims. And of course, Hun Sen continues to trample democracy.

But U.S. relations with Cambodia do fall somewhat outside the wider trend of Washington’s pivot. Since the Obama administration achieved its breakthrough with Myanmar, relations with Phnom Penh have cooled. When President Barack Obama visited Cambodia for the East Asia Summit in November 2012, he was visibly unfriendly toward Hun Sen, even as the Cambodian strongman gripped his hand and flashed a hearty grin for the cameras. (The CPP has since used photographs of the handshake as propaganda in the current presidential campaign.) In a tense closed-door meeting, Obama chided the Cambodian strongman on a range of human rights issues, including recent land seizures and political arrests. Just days earlier, Obama had gleefully shaken hands with Myanmar’s President Thein Sein, a former general who has led the country’s much-vaunted democratic opening. In May, Sein made a return visit to the White House, an invitation to which Hun Sen reportedly covets.

A supporter of Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen, during a pre-election rally in Kampong Cham on July 26. (Sebastian Strangio)

What explains this double standard? For one, the rehabilitation of the junta in Myanmar may have “dictated a need to find a new bad boy in Asia, with the target switching to Hun Sen,” explains Don Jameson, a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer who held posts in both Cambodia and Myanmar. With U.S influence on the rise in Myanmar, which lies in the strategically crucial crossroads between China and India, Cambodia has become more expendable to policymakers — and more vulnerable to congressional pressure. Charles A. Ray, who served as U.S. ambassador to Cambodia during the George W. Bush administration, suggests that Obama may also be responding to domestic pressure. “The Burmese had made some concrete moves that are along the lines we want and that allow us to say ‘progress’ is being made,” he says. “Cambodia has not made a lot of fast progress, so [Obama’s] advisers probably told him not to alienate the neo-cons in Congress by being too friendly with a dictator that they don’t like.”

Yet as bad as Hun Sen’s abuses may have been, they never approached the scale of atrocities committed by the Burmese government. And many analysts argue that recent reforms merely conceal an enduring military rule behind a new civilian facade.

It is just as hard to see how cutting aid or wielding a megaphone would advance democracy or human rights in either Cambodia or Myanmar. For one thing, the proud and prickly Hun Sen would probably call a U.S. bluff. As much as he craves international legitimacy (as was evident during Obama’s visit), Hun Sen remains highly sensitive to any hint of Western hypocrisy. Vietnamese diplomats told their U.S. counterparts as much behind closed doors in 2006, advising that “incentives will have more of an effect on Hun Sen than criticism.”

Like other Cambodians who came of age during the Vietnam War, Hun Sen remembers well the devastating U.S. B-52 raids of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many historians believe the bombings gave rise to the Khmer Rouge regime, which killed an estimated 1.7 million people during its four-year rule. After the regime fell to a Vietnamese invasion in 1979, the United States and its allies treated the new, Hanoi-installed government (of which Hun Sen was a member) as an international pariah. The United States worked to keep Khmer Rouge diplomats in the United Nations until 1991.

This history forms the basis of long-held (and legitimate) Cambodian grievances that explain why the country responded so negatively to Obama scolding Hun Sen last November. Sources who work with the U.S. embassy in Phnom Penh say the U.S. embassy’s influence has consequently diminished, a development that harms U.S. interests — and, where human rights are concerned, those of the Cambodian people.

If the United States wants to advance human rights and democracy in Cambodia, then it must play a long game, blending quiet diplomacy, public condemnation when necessary, and funding that supports Cambodian civil society — in short, what Washington had been doing, until recently, for close to a decade.

In dealing with small countries like Cambodia, U.S. policymakers have assumed that they can afford to defend democracy loudly without endangering crucial national interests. But Cambodia’s size belies its importance, especially in a region where Washington has been looking for opportunities to gain strategic ground against China. Given Cambodia’s strong ties to Beijing — and its fraught history with the United States — diplomacy must walk a fine line. “Human rights issues in Cambodia need to be raised,” says Carl Thayer, an analyst at the Australian Defence Force Academy, in Canberra, but “it shouldn’t be the focal point of the relationship.”

The tragedy for the long-suffering Cambodian people is that no shortcut to democracy exists — no quick fix of the sort that periodically transfixes U.S. policymakers. Washington’s recent push to cast Hun Sen in the role of regional pariah is proving counterproductive, undermining both the wider aims of the pivot and any chance of nudging Cambodia in a more democratic direction. With Hun Sen poised to win another scripted election, the United States must decide what sort of relationship it wants with Cambodia — and whether the politics of the pivot can coexist with the promotion of human rights. According to Jameson, it is a question that policymakers have never seriously asked since the 1960s. Cambodia, he says, has always seemed “too small for policymakers in Washington to take seriously — except when they need to blow off steam.”

[Published by ForeignAffairs.com, July 25, 2013]

Veneer of democracy in Cambodia

Supporters of the Cambodian National Rescue Party gather in Phnom Penh to mark the start of election campaigning on June 27 (Sebastian Strangio)

PHNOM PENH – After nearly four years on the political margins, Cambodian opposition leader Sam Rainsy will again take center stage when he returns to his homeland on Friday in advance of national elections on July 28.

The president of the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) has been living in France to avoid an 11-year jail term for defamation and other charges handed down in connection with a stunt in which he uprooted demarcation posts along the Vietnamese border in late 2009. Following a royal pardon last Friday, the 64-year-old can now return without fear of arrest and will immediately throw himself into campaigning against the country’s long-serving prime minister Hun Sen.

For Rainsy, the pardon, engineered by Hun Sen and rubber-stamped by King Norodom Sihamoni, is the culmination of four years of lobbying in Western capitals, where he has struggled-often in vain-to keep Cambodia on the international agenda. As the election has drawn near, his efforts have started to pay off.

In the past few months, the US State Department has rebuked Cambodia for glaring problems in its electoral process, including Rainsy’s absence from the country and the ruling party’s expulsion of 28 opposition lawmakers from the National Assembly last month. It also slammed a government ban-since reversed-on the airing of foreign radio broadcasts during the month-long campaign period. (A separate ban on foreign election-related broadcasts in the five days prior to polling day remains in place).

The US Congress has also upped the pressure. In a June 7 resolution, US Senators Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio called for a freeze on US aid to Cambodia if the coming election is “not credible and competitive”. A similar resolution is also set to be introduced in the US House of Representatives, where Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a long-time Rainsy ally, denounced Hun Sen as “a corrupt, vicious human being, who has held that country in his grip for decades”. The US politician added: “It’s time for Hun Sen to go.”

The 61-year-old strongman, Asia’s longest serving prime minister, clearly has different plans. Hun Sen has been in power since 1985 and his Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) enjoys all the advantages of decades-long incumbency: a pliant court system and government administration, a near-monopoly on media coverage, the support of the army and police, and the financial backing of a clique of friendly crony-tycoons.

The CPP has increased its share of National Assembly seats at every national poll since the United Nations-backed 1993 election-in 2008, it won 90 out of 123 seats-and controls appointments to the country’s National Election Committee (NEC). Despite his rival’s return, Hun Sen will almost certainly win again by a big margin.

For a large percentage of Cambodians, politics generally remains a case, to paraphrase German playwright Bertolt Brecht, of “first rice, then democracy”.

Even so, the CPP has spared no expense in its election campaign, monopolizing public space with the party’s blue campaign posters and sending paid party activists through the streets of the capital to wave flags and blare pro-government techno music. Earlier this month, the CPP released a slickly-produced campaign video featuring karaoke star Nop Panharith, which mixed homilies to Hun Sen’s “iron-fisted” leadership with footage of Angkor Wat and sweeping helicopter shots of party youth activists forming a large number 4-the CPP’s ballot number-on the roof of Phnom Penh’s Canadia Bank building.

For all its newfound multimedia-savvy the CPP has kept its message simple, emphasizing the party’s role in deposing the Khmer Rouge in 1979, forging peace, and fostering a period of impressive economic growth. For the three-quarters of the Cambodian population who still live in poor rural areas, it remains a convincing pitch, made all the more so by memories of past horrors and conjured-up fears that the country might somehow slide back into chaos.

In a poll conducted in Cambodia earlier this year, the US-funded International Republican Institute found that 79% of respondents thought the country was heading “in the right direction”, while 74% hailed the ruling party’s road-building as a key achievement. For a large percentage of Cambodians, politics generally remains a case, to paraphrase German playwright Bertolt Brecht, of “first rice, then democracy”.

But Cambodia’s political landscape is slowly changing. In the upcoming election around 3.5 million of the country’s 9.5 million registered voters will be between the ages of 18 and 30, according to the NEC, of which 1.5 million, or 15% of the electorate, will be voting for the first time. What this means is that as much as half the Cambodian population now has no memory of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, who ruled the country from 1975-79.

As a result, the opposition CNRP-formed last year from a merger of Rainsy’s eponymous party and the Human Rights Party founded in 2007 by Kem Sokha (now the CNRP’s deputy president) hope they will be more open to a campaign focused on corruption and job creation. “[Young people] feel that it’s their future which is being challenged now,” said Long Botta, a former education minister who is running as a CNRP candidate in western Battambang province. “Things have changed for most of them. They’re in a bubble of excitement.”

Change or no change?

Lacking the CPP’s financial resources, the CNRP has built its campaign around a Barack Obama-esque mantra “change or no change?”, which has been taken up enthusiastically by young supporters at party rallies. The party also hopes to capitalize on simmering discontent related to state-backed land-grabbing, which by one count has affected 300,000 people across the country since 2003 and has escalated considerably since the last national election in 2008.

There are signs that the CPP is growing worried about its hold on power. Despite a convincing victory in commune elections in June 2012, the party took some unexpected hits in its rural heartland. To mollify land concerns, Hun Sen formed a troupe of paid “volunteer” students who fanned out across the country handing out new title deeds to affected villagers. In the first half of 2013, he also presided over the inauguration of 22 Buddhist pagodas, many located in key “swing communes”.

Addressing audiences of rice farmers, he openly warned that the benefits of CPP rule-particularly its infrastructure projects and patronage of Buddhism-will come to an end if he loses power. “If people don’t vote for [the CPP], we will be disheartened and will stop giving,” he said during the inauguration of a national road in March. “All projects will be eliminated. … Even a project like pumping water to dry farms.” The next month he even warned of “internal war” if the opposition came to power.

In the context of a close-fought poll, Rainsy’s return to Cambodia presents both pitfalls and opportunities for the opposition. Some observers think that by energizing the CNRP campaign, it will help the opposition build on the 29 out of 123 seats it currently holds in the National Assembly. “It will give the party a big boost,” said Lao Mong Hay, an independent political analyst. “This party has generated what might be called a mass movement for change across the country, and it has been gaining momentum during the absence of its leader.”

But Rainsy’s return could also benefit the wily Hun Sen, who as always has his eye on the long game. Elections are always a magnet for international attention, and with the spotlight glaring some kind of political arrangement to secure Rainsy’s return was always likely for the sake of appearances. But will the attention be sustained after the polls?

In February 2006, a year after Rainsy was hounded out of Cambodia by defamation lawsuits brought by Hun Sen and his then-coalition partner Prince Norodom Ranariddh, he received a royal pardon and returned hailing a “new chapter in Cambodian history”. A few years later, after the CPP secured a landslide electoral victory in 2008, the government tightened the screws again by dragging journalists and opposition figures through the courts. Following his border post stunt in October 2009, Rainsy himself was forced back into exile.

In 20 years, Hun Sen has lowered democratic expectations to such a degree that the mere presence of an opposition leader on Cambodian soil may now be enough get it over the line.

Optimistic observers hold out hope that this time things will be different. “The pressure has been mounting over time,” said Lao Mong Hay. “It seems America means business.” But history suggests otherwise. As Hun Sen has consolidated his control over the past 20 years, he has repeatedly used “royal” pardons as a means of resetting the status quo by defusing pressure from abroad and extracting political concessions from his rivals. In 2006, Rainsy offered a public apology to Hun Sen and Ranariddh in return for his pardon. The currency on offer this time is legitimacy: Rainsy’s presence is set to boost the credibility of what will remain a seriously flawed election.

Rainsy himself has warned that “the mere fact of my return does not create a free and fair election for Cambodia”. But Hun Sen knows that the main question for foreign governments is not whether the election will be “fair” in absolute terms – no election since 1993 really has been – but rather whether the poll is fair enough.

Ou Virak, president of the Cambodian Centre of Human Rights, said prior to Rainsy’s pardon that based on past practice foreign governments – having long learned to live with Hun Sen – will admit “irregularities” in the vote but probably accept the result. “My view is that the donors … will see the injustice, will complain about it, but will never ever take a stand,” he said.

In 20 years, Hun Sen has lowered democratic expectations to such a degree that the mere presence of an opposition leader on Cambodian soil may now be enough get it over the line. Foreign Minister Hor Namhong has already claimed that Rainsy’s presence is in itself a guarantee of a “free and fair” poll.

With or without Rainsy, the real long-term danger for the CPP will be maintaining the political momentum generated by its own propaganda. Hun Sen is characterized in increasingly superhuman terms-as a military genius, a political mastermind, and man of overweening merit who rains blessings on the people.

It is a myth that can only really be perpetuated by ever-greater margins of electoral victory. If Rainsy and his reinvigorated party are able to eat into the CPP’s rural vote-bank, it is possible that Hun Sen’s carefully cultivated aura of invincibility might slowly, if imperceptibly, begin to fade. If that were the case, the gamble of Rainsy’s return might just be worth it.

[Published by Asia Times Online, July 15, 2013]

How a Brutal Khmer Rouge Leader Died ‘Not Guilty’

A verdict was never reached in Ieng Sary’s human rights abuses case. His story reveals the limitations of international tribunals.

Former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary is assisted during his pre-trial hearing at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) in the outskirts of Phnom Penh on June 30, 2008. (Reuters)

MALAI, Cambodia—It was the sort of send-off his own regime would never have permitted: an elaborate Buddhist funeral that ended with prayers, reminiscences, and the crackle of fireworks in an inky night sky. Ieng Sary, one of the last surviving leaders of Cambodia’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime, died of a heart attack on March 14, at the age of 87. For a week afterward, hundreds of white-clad mourners turned out in this former communist stronghold to pay their last respects to a man they remembered as a comrade and patriot–a man who thought only of his nation.

To everyone else, Ieng Sary enjoys the dubious distinction of being the only person to be tried for genocide on two occasions: first in 1979, shortly after the Khmer Rouge fell from power, and then more recently at a UN-backed tribunal in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. By dying in the dock, he escaped justice for his role in the Khmer Rouge regime, which ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Led by “Brother Number One” Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge conducted a hellish communist experiment — a “super great leap forward” that killed an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians and sowed a green land with hundreds of mass graves.

But that’s not how Sary is remembered in this forgotten corner of the country, a stronghold of the Khmer Rouge until the mid-1990s. On the day of his funeral, monks chanted as wartime comrades and sun-cured farmers arrived at Sary’s country villa to pay their respects. Wreaths of flowers surrounded his gold casket, which sat alongside a jasmine-fringed photo of the former leader. Later the casket was moved into an elaborate two-story crematorium festooned with blinking lights. During a 10-minute eulogy, Sary’s daughter Hun Vanny made just one reference to his involvement with the Khmer Rouge, a period when “he sacrificed his life by leaving his wife and family, moving from place to place.”

“Cambodians talk about the purity of water, purity of gold, purity of silver,” she said of her father. “None of these can compare with the purity of heart.”

Also paying a final farewell was Sary’s frail widow and fellow defendant Ieng Thirith, who was led to the base of crematorium before being bungled into a van and driven away. Thirith served as the Social Affairs Minister under the Khmer Rouge and was also on trial until her release in September, when the court ruled she was unfit to stand trial due to dementia. As Sary’s body burned and fireworks flowered overhead, old comrades reminisced about a boss who fought to free his country from foreign domination. “Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot were not communist people–they were liberators,” said 58-year-old Chan Sary, a former Khmer Rouge soldier who lost a leg to a landmine in 1990. “At the top they didn’t know the hardships,” he added, leaning on his crutch.

This is not the story historians usually tell. When the Khmer Rouge took power in April 1975, toppling a U.S.-backed republic, they treated Cambodia’s people as an expendable raw material with which they planned to forge a rural utopia of unsurpassed purity, an agrarian dream-state whose name would “be written in golden letters in world history.” Money was abolished, the cities were emptied, and the entire population put to work on vast rural communes. Sary was one of the six members of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK)–the nerve-center of the regime. Appointed foreign minister of “Democratic Kampuchea” — as the new regime euphemized itself — Sary issued calls for sympathetic Cambodian intellectuals to return to reconstruct a land destroyed by five years of civil war. Of the 1,000 or so who returned, most were jailed, executed, or perished from starvation or disease.

Many years later Sary would deny any involvement in Khmer Rouge atrocities, but experts have little doubt there was enough evidence to convict him. In 2001, Steve Heder, a leading historian of the period, concluded in a paper co-authored with the legal scholar Brian D. Tittemore that arrest and execution orders routinely crossed Ieng Sary’s desk. They concluded there was “significant evidence of Ieng Sary’s individual responsibility for CPK crimes, for repeatedly and publicly encouraging arrests and executions within his Foreign Ministry and throughout Democratic Kampuchea.”

Ieng Thirith, Ieng Sary’s widow and former Khmer Rouge social affairs minister, pays her respects to her husband at his funeral in Malai, western Cambodia, on March 21. (Sebastian Strangio)

Ieng Sary was the most slippery of the Khmer Rouge leaders–a master dissimulator who easily shed old revolutionary convictions and adopted new guises. He was “a devious manipulative man, crafty rather than clever,” wrote Philip Short in his book Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare. “He concealed insincerity beneath a calculated ability to make himself agreeable.” Unlike his austere comrades, Sary was also a revolutionary with a taste for the finer things, such as lobster thermidor, cognac, and French perfume, which he enjoyed during years of starvation and civil war. “When he dropped his normally radiant smile, [it was clear] how dark and harsh his face could become,”wrote James Pringle, a former Reuters correspondent who first met Sary in China in 1971. “I would hate to have faced him across an interrogation table.”

After the Khmer Rouge was overthrown by a Vietnamese invasion in January 1979, Sary and his colleagues fled to the Thai border, where they re-established themselves in jungle bases and, with Chinese and Western support, waged war on the new Vietnam-backed government that had replaced them. Sary, now in charge of the movement’s finances, installed himself in Pailin, a dusty boomtown surrounded by rich gem and timber deposits. By the 1990s he had grown rich — much richer than his austere revolutionary colleagues. Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, the two remaining defendants at Cambodia’s war crimes court, did not profit from their careers. Pol Pot died, defeated and penniless, in 1998.

In August 1996, Sary defected to the government in return for a royal amnesty that quashed a death penalty handed down by a Phnom Penh tribunal in 1979. Sary and his wife lived a comfortable life in a shady villa in central Phnom Penh, jetting off to Thailand regularly for medical treatment. Justice finally caught up with the pair in November 2007, when they were arrested and charged with crimes against humanity. It was a heady moment: Nearly 30 years after the Khmer Rouge fell from power, there was a hope that at last justice would be done.

But Ieng Sary’s death mid-trial is a major setback for Cambodia’s war crimes court, known officially as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. After six years and more than $150 million, the tribunal has secured just one conviction–that of Comrade Duch, a former school teacher who was sentenced to life in prison for his role in running S-21, a grisly security center where he oversaw the interrogation and torture of as many as 15,000 people.

The two remaining defendants in the court’s second case, known as Case 002, are also frail and in uncertain health: 86-year-old Nuon Chea, the Khmer Rouge’s chief ideologue and “Brother Number Two” to Pol Pot, has been in and out of hospital and was reported earlier this year to be “approaching death.” Khieu Samphan, the regime’s former head of state, is 81. Peter Maguire, the author of Facing Death in Cambodia, compared Sary’s death to that of the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, who died in 2006 while on trial at The Hague, and argued that both tribunals allowed themselves to become mired in legal minutiae. “This is typical of the UN’s post-Cold War war-crimes trials,” he said. “Like the Milosevic case, there is no urgency.”

The court has also been dogged by allegations of political interference in connection with two possible future cases, Case 003 and Case 004, involving five more senior regime figures. Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen, himself a former mid-ranking Khmer Rouge commander who defected to Vietnam in 1977, has ruled Cambodia in various coalitions since 1985, and retains a strong grip over the domestic courts. In October 2010 he told visiting UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that more trials at the ECCC–a hybrid court composed of local and international judges–would not be “allowed.” Because of these two impediments, the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), a court-monitoring group, said last week that “it remains doubtful that the ECCC will successfully complete its current caseload and make a positive contribution to ending impunity and increasing respect for the rule of law in Cambodia.”

Buddhist monks watch on during the funeral of former Khmer Rouge leader Ieng Sary, in Malai, western Cambodia, on March 21. (Sebastian Strangio)

But the problem runs deeper. In some ways Sary’s death has heightened the contradictions of a tribunal process that has always struggled to reconcile the irreconcilable: to map the abstractions of international criminal law onto the social and political realities of contemporary Cambodia–a post-conflict country with virtually no history of independent courts. This gulf was illustrated shortly after Sary’s death, when the London-based human rights group Amnesty International issued a statement urging the expedition of the trials. “Ieng Sary should not be presumed guilty of the crimes alleged,” it said, “as the proceedings against him were not completed and there has been no verdict.” In legal terms this was exactly correct, but how just or moral was it? The ECCC was explicitly established with the victims in mind, and was the first tribunal of its kind to invite participation from civil parties representing those who suffered under the Khmer Rouge. How much solace were victims expected to take in the fact that the legal procedures had been followed, and that a man whose crimes are well attested by the historical record had gone to his grave–as many will no doubt interpret it–”not guilty?”

It showed, above all, that Cambodia remains a long way from The Hague. Sary’s death, like Milosevic’s before it, demonstrates that one of the saving ideas of our times–the hope that international criminal tribunals can punish atrocities, deter warlords and provide closure for victims–remains burdened by serious limitations. “Cambodia is a complex, mostly Buddhist country,” said Maguire. “The idea that Western outsiders can transplant Western modes of conflict resolution is incredibly naïve.”

And yet, this may be the closest Cambodia gets to accountability for the horrors perpetuated by the Khmer Rouge. Youk Chhang, the director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which researches Khmer Rouge history, said that now that the court was in motion it had no option but to continue its work. “The court must move on,” he said. “The UN and the Cambodian government made a promise to punish the perpetrators of genocide. The victims deserve closure. The victims deserve to see the process completed.”

Ieng Sary’s victims will have to make do with the verdict of history — but that may well prove the more enduring.

[Published at TheAtlantic.com, April 1, 2013]

 

Death of a killer in Cambodia

Ieng Sary in Cambodia in 1977, when he was Foreign Minister of Democratic Kampuchea (Documentation Center of Cambodia)

PHNOM PENH – Ieng Sary, a veteran member of Cambodia’s communist Khmer Rouge movement and one of the few of its leaders to be put on trial for crimes committed during the regime’s 1975-79 rule, died on Thursday morning at the age of 87. He was being tried at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), a United Nations-backed tribunal, along with two other senior Khmer Rouge leaders. The ECCC confirmed Ieng Sary’s death in a statement on Thursday morning. The cause of death was not immediately known, but he had suffered from high blood pressure and heart problems in the past and was admitted to a Phnom Penh hospital on March 4.

Ieng Sary’s death came before any verdict was handed down in his case, allowing him to evade responsibility for crimes allegedly committed during the Khmer Rouge’s bloody years in power. Ieng Sary was a key member of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), alongside his brother-in-law and Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, before the party marched into Phnom Penh on April 1975. After their seizure of power, the Khmer Rouge treated Cambodia’s people as an expendable raw material with which they planned to forge a rural utopia of unsurpassed purity, an agrarian dream-state whose name would “be written in golden letters in world history”. Money was abolished, the cities were emptied, and the entire population was put to work on vast rural communes. Prior to the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge by a Vietnam-led resistance force in January 1979, the regime’s policies led to the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people from starvation, execution and overwork.

Ieng Sary was born Kim Trang on October 24, 1925, in southern Vietnam. In the early 1950s, he was among a small group of Cambodian students who received government scholarships to study in France. It was there he first became immersed in communist ideas and met a young student named Saloth Sar, later to take the infamous nom de guerre Pol Pot. The pair cemented their friendship when they met and married the sisters Khieu Thirith and Khieu Ponnary. After their return to Cambodia the four went on to form the inner circle of the nascent Cambodian communist movement.

Ieng Sary returned to Cambodia in 1957, and became a member of the communist party’s Central Committee in 1960. Like many other Cambodian communists of the time, Ieng Sary taught at a high school in Phnom Penh while taking part in clandestine activities against the regime of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who had spearheaded Cambodia’s struggle for independence from France and faced rising opposition from a small number or communists whom he famously dubbed the “Khmers Rouges” (Red Khmers). During an intensifying anti-communist crackdown by Sihanouk’s security forces in 1963, Ieng Sary, along with his brother-in-law Pol Pot, left Phnom Penh for the remote jungles of northeastern Cambodia.

The Khmer Rouge eventually came to power in a bloody civil war against the US-backed regime of General Lon Nol, who overthrew Sihanouk in 1970. From 1975 until its overthrow in early 1979, Ieng Sary was a permanent member of the CPK’s Standing Committee – the nerve-center of the Khmer Rouge regime – and served also as foreign minister. In that capacity he maintained close ties with leaders in China, the main foreign patron of the Khmer Rouge. He was particularly close to the infamous Gang of Four, the radical Chinese faction that had risen to prominence during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. When Ieng Sary was informed of the arrest of the Gang of Four in October 1976, according to author and journalist Nayan Chanda, he was shocked, muttering, “No it can’t be true! They are good people.”

Though he later protested his innocence, experts believe Ieng Sary was closely involved in ordering the torture and mass execution of suspected internal enemies. Shortly after the regime took power, Ieng Sary made public calls for overseas Cambodian intellectuals to return and help rebuild their country; when they returned, they were arrested and placed in brutal prisons where many later died. Youk Chhang, the director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) which researches Khmer Rouge crimes, said there was plenty of evidence attested to Ieng Sary’s close involvement in or knowledge about purges and killings during 1975-79. “There are many documents that show he was responsible or aware, was directly or indirectly involved in instances where victims disappeared or were executed,” he said.

China comrade

After the regime’s overthrow in January 1979, Ieng Sary retained close links with China. When a barefooted Ieng Sary crossed into Thailand four days after the fall of Phnom Penh to Vietnam-backed forces, officials from the Chinese Embassy in Bangkok were there to greet him with fresh clothes and shoes to replace the sandals he had lost in the confused retreat from the capital. He was then placed aboard a Thai military helicopter to Bangkok and flown to Beijing. Throughout the 1980s, China continued to back the ousted Khmer Rouge in a civil war with the new Vietnam-installed regime in Phnom Penh.

In August 1979, eight months after the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge, a people’s revolutionary tribunal orchestrated by the new government found Ieng Sary and Pol Pot guilty of genocide and sentenced them to death in absentia. Ensconced in the jungles of western Cambodia, Ieng Sary continued on as foreign minister of the ousted regime until 1982, when he transferred the duties to his colleague Khieu Samphan, the CPK’s former head of state. Afterwards he held no formal position in the movement but remained in control of Khmer Rouge finances. Ieng Sary later became the baron of Pailin, a dusty boom-town set in gem-rich hills along the Thai border, and amassed a great personal fortune.

By the time the Paris Peace Accords were signed in 1991, however, his influence in the movement had begun to wane. The prominence he had enjoyed during the 1980s due to his close relationship with Beijing evaporated after the cut-off in Chinese aid in 1991. His advocacy of cooperation with the UN mission that arrived to implement the Paris Accords in 1992-93, coupled with the decidedly un-revolutionary extent of his wealth, also soured his relationship with Pol Pot, who attempted to bring his fief under closer control.

Ieng Sary during a trial hearing at Cambodia’s UN-backed war crimes court on March 20, 2012 (ECCC/Nhet Sok Heng)

In August 1996, Ieng Sary defected to the government, bringing with him thousands of Khmer Rouge troops that hastened the end of the movement. Khmer Rouge radio denounced him as a “traitor”, accusing him of embezzling millions in Khmer Rouge funds and collaborating with the “Vietnamese aggressors, annexationists, and race-exterminators”. Ieng Sary’s defection delivered to the government two Khmer Rouge base areas – Pailin and Malai – that years of government offensives had failed to secure.

As an reward for his defection, Ieng Sary was given a royal amnesty that overturned the death penalty handed down by the 1979 tribunal. Ieng Sary thereafter lived a comfortable life, dividing his time between a shady villa in central Phnom Penh and a home in Pailin, where he still commanded great influence among the local population. His son Ieng Vuth currently serves as deputy governor of Pailin.

Though Ieng Sary long claimed his innocence, arguing after his defection that Pol Pot “was the sole and supreme architect of the party’s line, strategy and tactics”, justice eventually caught up with him. On November 12, 2007, Ieng Sary and his wife Ieng Thirith, the former Khmer Rouge Minister for Social Affairs, were arrested and put on trial at the ECCC. Ieng Sary was charged with genocide – the second time he had faced the charge – crimes against humanity, and grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. His trial, alongside Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, and his wife, began in 2011 but has since been threatened by pay disputes and the advanced age of the defendants. Late last year, Ieng Thirith was ruled unfit to stand trial because she suffering from a degenerative mental illness and was released.

Ieng Sary’s death is a setback for the ECCC, whose two remaining defendants are in poor health and which has recently been plagued by a shortage of funds and allegations of political interference. Despite the challenges facing it, Youk Chhang of DC-Cam said the tribunal, and the international community that has supported it, had no option but to keep pursuing justice. “The court must move on,” he said. “The UN and the Cambodian government made a promise to punish the perpetrators of genocide. The victims deserve closure. The victims deserve to see the process completed.”

[Published by Asia Times Online, March 14, 2013]

Departure of a king, death of an institution

Norodom Sihanouk’s funeral casket leaves the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh on February 1. (Sebastian Strangio)

PHNOM PENH – To the boom of artillery and the crackle of fireworks, Cambodians bid a final farewell this week to their beloved King Father Norodom Sihanouk. Across the country, citizens paused for a moment of silence as Sihanouk’s embalmed body was cremated in a lavish new structure built on hallowed ground next to the walls of the Royal Palace. Dozens of foreign dignitaries, including French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault and Prince Akishino of Japan, were on hand to witness the passing of Cambodia’s last God-King, who died in Beijing on October 15, two weeks shy of his 90th birthday.

As evening fell, the crematorium, a 47-meter-high tower topped with a golden spire, blazed with thousands of tiny lights as King Norodom Sihamoni and Queen Mother Monineath, both clad in white, entered its inner chamber. Half an hour later, Sihamoni symbolically lit his father’s sandalwood oil-soaked body and the former king was engulfed in flames, ascending in a cloud of smoke to the haunting strains of Cambodia’s traditional funeral music. The following day, some of Sihanouk’s ashes were scattered in the city’s churning river waters; the remainder of his ashes will be kept in a diamond-encrusted urn inside the Royal Palace.

So departed one of history’s great characters and iconoclasts, a reluctant monarch who came to personify his country’s violent and turbulent journey through the 20th century. Born in Phnom Penh on October 31, 1922, Sihanouk oversaw Cambodia’s transition from French colonialism to independence, and then its descent into the maelstrom of civil war and the brutal dictatorship of the communist Khmer Rouge. Along the way, he served in a bewildering array of roles, first as king, and subsequently as prime minister, head of state, non-aligned leader, communist figurehead, leader-in-exile, and finally as constitutional monarch until his abdication in 2004.

On Monday, tens of thousands of white-clad Cambodians gathered in a park a few blocks from the palace, where they awaited a chance to pay their final respects to their beloved Samdech Eav, or “Monsignor Papa”. “I think a lot about him,” said Saem Yeam, 77, who grew up under Sihanouk’s rule in the 1950s and 1960s. Clasping her hands together in a gesture of reverence, Yeam recalled the Sihanouk years as an island of peace before the turmoil of war and upheaval. “In that time, all of his children were very happy and educated. Everything was being developed. Everything was perfect,” she said.

Despite the outpouring of nostalgia, Cambodia’s centuries-old monarchy faces an uncertain future. Since 2004, when Sihanouk abdicated in favor of his son Norodom Sihamoni, the monarchy has been elbowed aside by Prime Minister Hun Sen, the former communist who has run Cambodia with a firm hand for the past 28 years. In addition to being a moving send-off for the King Father, this week’s funeral ceremonies were also something of a victory lap for Hun Sen and his ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) – the successful culmination of the party’s long effort to bind the monarchy in ceremony, shackle it with praise, and assert itself as the sole protector and heir of Sihanouk’s royal legacy.

Since 1979, when the CPP (then known as the Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party) was installed in power by Vietnam after it overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime, Sihanouk’s popularity has posed a persistent threat to its power. During the 1980s, when Sihanouk was part of a resistance coalition fighting the regime in Phnom Penh, the CPP-run press denounced the ex-king as an “exploitative” feudal reactionary opposed to the interests of the working class. The CPP’s attitude started to shift as peace talks advanced in the late 1980s: when Sihanouk returned to Cambodia from exile in November 1991, shortly after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, Hun Sen rode with him into town past ecstatic crowds. In 1992, the CPP party mouthpiece Pracheachon praised Sihanouk and described the CPP as the “little brother” of Sihanouk’s earlier regime.

Norodom Sihanouk’s cremation on the evening of February 4. (Sebastian Strangio)

Gilded cage

At the same time, however, the CPP also sought to restrict the returning monarch’s ambitions. After he was re-crowned king in September 1993, it went to great lengths to confine Sihanouk to the roles laid down in the new constitution, which specified that the king reign but not rule. “From the beginning, the CPP saw the danger of giving the monarchy a free reign, because of the popularity of the King Father with the rural population,” said Julio Jeldres, Sihanouk’s official biographer. “So from the beginning, everything was tightly controlled.”

A few days before the September 24 coronation of King Sihamoni, Kong Samol, an American-educated agronomist and current CPP Politburo member, was appointed minister of the Royal Palace, a position he has held ever since. Sources close to the palace say the minister has kept King Sihamoni under increasingly close surveillance, preventing him from meeting the people or traveling freely around the country.

Sihanouk initially bucked against these restrictions, hoping to maneuver himself back into the political game. After several failed attempts to form his own government after the UN-backed 1993 elections, Sihanouk found himself increasingly bereft of power. His son, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, won the election and ruled in coalition with Hun Sen, but increasingly bucked and ignored his father’s wishes. In July 1997, Hun Sen overthrew Ranariddh in a bloody coup de force, an event that marked a further diminution of Sihanouk’s power.

Henceforth, the king spent an increasing amount of time outside the country, particularly in Beijing, where he penned sorrowful and acerbic commentaries lamenting the corruption and injustice of Hun Sen’s rule. Hun Sen, at the same time, donned Sihanouk’s mantle, replicating his hours-long speeches, school construction drives, and close identification with Cambodia’s “little people”. “Hun Sen has always wanted to become the Sihanouk of his era, and somehow he has succeeded,” said Prince Sisowath Thomico, one of Sihanouk’s former aides.

Realizing that the game was up, Sihanouk finally stepped down in 2004, ceding the throne to his son Sihamoni and the political arena to Hun Sen, who he increasingly took to describing as the “son” he never had. “Sihanouk had one big ambition that remained unfulfilled and that was to rule over a prosperous and peaceful Cambodia,” said Benny Widyono, author of Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the United Nations in Cambodia. “He had realized he couldn’t beat Hun Sen. His lifelong ambition remained unfulfilled.”

King Sihamoni, a former ballet dancer who spent years as Cambodia’s ambassador to UNESCO in Paris, has shown little taste for the political game, leaving politics to Hun Sen and his CPP dominated government. In the end, with Hun Sen consolidating his own power and marginalizing royalist rivals like Ranariddh, Sihanouk chose to abdicate in a bid to ensure the monarchy would survive beyond his own death.

“He had to make sure the monarchy would survive. His only choice was to abdicate and have the council of the throne to elect a new king,” said Thomico. But if the ascension of Sihamoni saved the monarchy from Hun Sen’s attacks, it also gave the CPP what they had wanted all along: a king who would stay out of politics. “If I was to write a book about Sihamoni I would call it The Reluctant King,” said Widyono. “He fits Hun Sen’s bill very well.”

As a result, Sihanouk’s passing has been politically muted – a final lavish seal on the monarchy’s withdrawal from political life. And the CPP has spared no expense in asserting itself as the sole guardian of his legacy. The government reportedly spent US$5 million building the soaring crematorium that was the centerpiece of the weekend’s tightly-scripted ceremonies. On Friday, a lavish funeral procession bore Sihanouk’s casket through the streets of Phnom Penh for one last time, while loudspeakers rigged across town broadcast eulogies of the King Father and long lists of his achievements.

The new 1,000-riel note bearing an image of Norodom Sihanouk’s funeral cortège.

In addition, the government minted a new title for the departed King Father, who will henceforth be known by the honorific Preah Borom Ratanak Koad, as well as a new 1,000 riel (US$0.24) note bearing an image of the golden funeral carriage which bore his body home from Beijing in October. (The only country in the world to boast a ruin on its national flag, Cambodia is now likely the first to have a funeral on its currency). Then came Monday’s beautiful cremation, a final flourish of tradition that drew a firm line between the fading era of Sihanouk and the rising era of Hun Sen.

“Hun Sen says, give them the last rites,” said one former Asian diplomat. “After that, the monarchy will be lost in oblivion.”

Phay Siphan, a government spokesman, said that under the Constitution, the king had no political power but still retained a “power of conscience”. Government officials meet regularly with King Sihamoni to discuss the state of the country, he said, but denied the government kept the palace on a short leash. “It’s groundless. Why would we monitor it?” Siphan said. “We have no power to decide for the king.”

For now, many Cambodians remain fixated on the past, mourning Sihanouk’s life and achievements. Since Friday, Mao Sovann, 54, has sold hundreds of commemorative photographs of the King Father. Spread out in front of her in the park, they show Sihanouk as a young man, haughty in the early years of his reign, and Sihanouk in suit and tie, at the cherubic peak of his power in the mid-1960s. Other portraits show Sihanouk and his wife in the black pajamas of the Khmer Rouge in 1973, and later in a formal portrait alongside their son Sihamoni.

“Everybody loves him and wants to keep photos for their children and grandchildren,” Sovann said. “The next generation who didn’t know him, we will show them the pictures.” And as for the future? “I don’t know what’s going on,” she said. “Right now there’s only one thing I know: Prime Minister Hun Sen – he’s in charge of everything.”

[Published by Asia Times Online, February 6, 2013]