Sebastian Strangio's Blog, page 4

In Cambodia, everything is different but nothing has changed

As is usual at this point in the electoral cycle, the Cambodian government is clamping down hard on its opponents. Since mid-2015, events in Cambodia have unfolded according to a familiar script: Flimsy legal charges against government critics, threats and bluster from Prime Minister Hun Sen, and bland statements of “concern” by the U.N. and foreign governments, unwilling or unable to back their words with concrete sanction.

More than 20 people have been arrested in the past year, including human rights activists, opposition lawmakers, and a member of the country’s National Election Committee. In July, Kem Ley, a prominent political advocate, was shot dead at a petrol station in downtown Phnom Penh, an act that shocked the nation and raised echoes of an earlier, more violent phase of Cambodian politics. Meanwhile, Sam Rainsy, president of the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party, is in self-exile — his third spell of enforced absence in the past 10 years — while his popular deputy Kem Sokha remains holed up in party headquarters, facing arrest if he emerges.

In July, at the height of this latest confusion, I left Cambodia after covering the country for eight years for the local and international press. But in spite of some dramatic changes, Cambodian politics looks much the same as it did when I arrived as a novice reporter in early 2008. The styles and patterns remain unchanged. So do the main personalities. Even as it changes, Cambodian political life, like the rhythmic chanting of the Buddhist monkhood, has a tendency to cycle back to the same cadences and rhymes.

Like many of my colleagues, I was drawn to Cambodia initially by the prospect of getting a leg-up in journalism, taking an internship, and then a job, at the local English-language Phnom Penh Post. Delving into the country, I became captivated by what the historian David Chandler has described as Cambodia’s “rackety charm”: its blend of beauty, incongruity, and exoticism, grounded by the genuine warmth and kindness of its people. Cambodian explorations were complemented by the journalistic challenge of trying to make sense of the opaque workings of Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party, part of a ruling class that had ruthlessly consolidated power over three decades.

In that time, the country has seen drastic changes. Phnom Penh has been transformed from an impoverished city of cracked, tree-lined boulevards into a pinprick of incipient modernity. A city that was forcibly emptied by the communist Khmer Rouge in 1975 is now heaving with traffic. Skyscrapers cast their sundial shadows over the pavements. A new middle-class flocks to gleaming malls, fashionable cafes, and American fast-food chains.

These are only the most outward signs of a deeper transformation. In the three decades that Hun Sen has ruled Cambodia, market-fueled capitalism — the dividend of the end of the country’s civil war in the late 1990s — has raised living standards and generated some of the fastest economic growth rates anywhere in the world.

Rampant corruption

At the same time, “Hunsenomics” has mostly enriched a tiny slice of the population at the expense of the rest. Corruption is rampant and incandescent. Cambodia’s forests have been stripped in an endless cycle of loyalty and payola capitalism. No longer able to earn their bread from the land, hundreds of thousands of young people have moved abroad or into the cities to find grinding work on construction sites and in apparel factories.

All of these changes seemed to come to a head in 2013. At that year’s national elections the CNRP, empowered by Facebook and riding a wave of deep popular discontent, handed Hun Sen and the CPP their worst electoral showing since 1998. It was a remarkable thing to witness. Following the CNRP’s campaign across the eastern part of the country, I watched as tens of thousands of rural people surged into the streets in small provincial towns to voice their desire for change. In sleepy Prey Veng, on a shady promenade overlooking a lake in the center of town, I met a shaven-headed 75-year-old widow named Pech Yean, who had travelled with her extended family to see Rainsy speak. I asked her what was wrong with Cambodia’s current rulers. “Absolute power,” she said. “They always find fault and put people in prison.”

Although Hun Sen eventually retained power with a reduced parliamentary majority, the election result, and the huge turnout in support of the CNRP, suggested that in the interstices of an engrained fear and deference, a new Cambodia might be emerging. But since 2013, as the CNRP’s momentum has sputtered out and Hun Sen has reasserted control, it has become harder to distinguish the continuity from the change.

In Western countries, it is often assumed that economic modernization and political development are mutual and self-reinforcing. As a country develops, religious beliefs and other pre-modern vestiges fall away, and people sooner or later develop some form of democratic government, based on free markets, the rule of law, and respect for individual rights.

Cambodia presents a more ambiguous picture. Hun Sen, stung by his party’s reverses in 2013, has introduced measures designed to win back popular support: higher wages for workers, soldiers and government workers, and promises of land for the landless. He has used Facebook to present a more populist image, responding directly to public complaints made on his page. People may have benefited from these gifts. But by design they have avoided any real democratic reforms.

Charisma and kleptocracy

Despite rapid modernization, Cambodian political culture remains overwhelmingly rooted in old ways of thinking. It is highly personalized, based on chains of loyalty and social obligation that stretch from the bottom of society to the charismatic leaders and kleptocrats at the top. As was the case under Prince Norodom Sihanouk in the 1950s and 1960s, political institutions have no real power independent of the perceived bunn (merit) and omnaich (power) of those who occupy them.

Operating in a universe of personally-grounded, cosmically-ordained power, politics remains deeply solipsistic. No politician is willing to admit the possible legitimacy of any rival. The CPP and CNRP both nsee each other as foreign-backed enemies driving the country into the jaws of disaster, while portraying themselves as the only legitimate guardians of the national interest.

As the main opposition to Hun Sen, the CNRP represents a contradictory mix of inheritances. If Rainsy and Kem Sokha speak often of liberal democratic values, their language is also rich in racially-charged references to khmae yoeung (“we Khmers”) and to the yuon, the hated Vietnamese, the bogeymen of the Cambodian political imagination, bent on swallowing the country whole.

The depth of the pride and emotion attached to the “Vietnamese problem” is hard to exaggerate. I remember being struck by this early on during my time in Cambodia, during one of my first Khmer language lessons. My teacher, Sokha, was a gentle soul in his mid-twenties with round walnut eyes and a wispy moustache. One day I decided I would try to impress him by referring to an upcoming trip to Saigon using its old Khmer name, Prey Nokor. As soon as I uttered the name of the old Cambodian town, “lost” to southward Vietnamese migration three centuries ago, Sokha froze. Tears clouded his eyes. I quickly changed the subject.

As the Irish photojournalist Nic Dunlop wrote in his book The Lost Executioner, Cambodia is an easy country to romanticize, a gentle-seeming land of green paddy-fields, undulating rivers, and gold-spired Buddhist temples. Given how much the country has suffered, there has always been an understandable tendency to extrapolate hopes for democratic change into expectations that this development is somehow imminent.

Instead, Cambodia’s path probably lies somewhere between Western-style modernity and social and political arrangements deeply rooted in its own past. What is emerging today may well turn out to be a particularly Cambodian form of modernity, a hybrid mash in which skyscrapers, Starbucks, and social media will co-exist with old political myths and ways of seeing the world.

Of course, everything changes in time. The current generation is more educated and connected than any in modern Cambodian history, and public expectations have never been so high. Sooner or later, Hun Sen and the CPP will have to become more accountable to the people — or risk serious social and political unrest. But while political change seems likely, it is hard to foresee what form it will take: something recognizably democratic, or some unforeseen repetition, in new circumstances, of an old Cambodian rhyme.

Published in the Nikkei Asian Review, October 23, 2016.

The King Is Dead. Is Thailand’s Monarchy Next?

Thailand’s revered king held the country together for more than 70 years. But his son’s succession could threaten everything he built.

After two days of rumors about the health of Thailand’s king, confirmation finally arrived in the form of a solemn statement issued by the royal palace Thursday evening. King Bhumibol Adulyadej, a unifying figure through seven politically tumultuous decades, died peacefully in the capital of Bangkok at the age of 88. According to the palace, the world’s longest-reigning monarch died at 3:52 p.m. after years of declining health. The immediate cause of death was not clear.

Despite reports that the king’s health had worsened in recent days, the news has plunged Thailand into a period of deep mourning and uncertainty. For most Thais, King Bhumibol is the only monarch they have ever known, the one constant in a modern history marked by mass protests, military coups, and widening political fault lines. In some quarters, the king is revered with almost religious fervor; his beatific portrait is ubiquitous, staring down from the walls of homes, businesses, and government buildings across the country.

By the time the king’s death was announced Thursday evening, crowds of mourners had gathered outside Siriraj Hospital, clad in yellow and pink, colors associated with the throne. Some wept openly, clutching portraits of the monarch. Others sang royalist songs in a plaintive key. On social media networks, the #longlivetheking hashtag was trending as Thai web users posted hundreds of messages and photos in memory of King Bhumibol.

In a televised address, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, a general who took power in a May 2014 coup, declared a year of mourning and a 30-day moratorium on entertainment events. He also announced that King Bhumibol will be succeeded as expected by Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, who has said he “needs time to mourn his father” before taking his place as the 10th king of the Chakri Dynasty. Unlike King Bhumibol, Prince Vajiralongkorn is a controversial figure, a jet-setting womanizer whose eventual ascension to the throne will likely herald a period of rocky transition for one of the world’s most revered monarchies.

During a reign lasting a touch more than 70 years, King Bhumibol presided over Thailand’s transformation from a rural kingdom once known as Siam into a regional economic powerhouse. A quiet, introverted man with horn-rimmed glasses, Bhumibol was born in 1927 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while his father was a student at Harvard Medical School. The young prince spent much of his early life abroad, until the mysterious shooting death of his brother, King Ananda Mahidol, unexpectedly catapulted Bhumibol to the throne in 1946.

In his early years as ruler, King Bhumibol split his time between his official royal duties and hobbies like photography and jazz and as the years went by came to be seen as a stabilizing force that stood firm amid cycles of political upheaval. (Since 1932, this country of 67 million has experienced 19 coups and coup attempts.) The king’s stature was heightened by the political tumult of October 1973, when the arrest of 13 student activists triggered massive public protests against Thailand’s military dictator du jour, Thanom Kittikachorn. After security forces fired on student protesters, killing around 70, King Bhumibol and other royals intervened and expressed support for the protesters. The junta was eventually forced out of power, and Thanom fled the country.

If these events revealed a new zenith of popularity for the 45-year-old king, it also demonstrated the ambiguity of his position in Thailand’s fractious politics: not directly involved but never wholly aloof. In an article on the October uprising, the New York Times described King Bhumibol’s role as “less than ruling but certainly more than just reigning.” Although royalists argue that the king was a father figure who ruled for the good of his people, most of Thailand’s military coups have enjoyed tacit royal approval.

Despite standing as a bastion of unity for the Thai people, the king’s image papered over wide social and political divides.

In his twilight years, as Thailand’s political crises compounded, King Bhumibol became a remote, isolated figure, more a presence than a man, dogged by poor health and swaddled by a stringent lèse-majesté regime that effectively prevented any open discussion of the royal family — including the effect his death might have on this politically fragile country.

The ramifications of King Bhumibol’s death are uncertain but likely to be far-reaching. Despite standing as a bastion of unity for the Thai people, the king’s image papered over wide social and political divides. For the last 15 years, a bitter political struggle has pitted the allies of former prime minister and billionaire telecommunications mogul Thaksin Shinawatra, who won massive support from the rural poor for his populist social and economic policies, against the traditional royalist elite — a tight-knit coterie of soldiers, bureaucrats, and rich businessmen surrounding the palace. This conflict reflects a deeper social rift between the conservative middle class in the cities and rural and working-class Thais — the so-called “Red Shirts” — who found their political voice in support of Thaksin.

Some observers have suggested that the succession could have complex effects on the outcome of this struggle. The most immediate question surrounds King Bhumibol’s nominated successor. Though Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn’s claim to the throne is clear, the 64-year-old lacks his father’s royal aura and is believed to be deeply unpopular among the royalist elite. Over the years, he has shown little interest in the public duties associated with the royal family, instead earning a reputation as a fast-living playboy who spends most of his time outside the country, largely in Germany, where he reportedly owns an $11 million villa on a lake south of Munich.

In 2007, leaked video footage showed Prince Vajiralongkorn holding a lavish private party with his then-wife, Srirasmi Suwadee — clad in nothing but heels and a G-string — and his pampered pet poodle, Foo Foo, which by the time of its death last year held the rank of chief marshal in the Royal Thai Air Force. (The mutt’s death was marked by four days of Buddhist funeral rites.) In July, the German tabloid Bild published photos of Prince Vajiralongkorn boarding a plane in Munich wearing low-rise jeans and an unflattering tank top that revealed a palette of fresh yakuza-style tattoos. (Thai authorities claimed the photos were doctored.)

Scottish journalist Andrew MacGregor Marshall, author of the 2014 book A Kingdom in Crisis, which was banned in Thailand for its discussion of the royal succession, says much of the Thai elite is implacably opposed to the prospect of Prince Vajiralongkorn succeeding his father. “From quite a young age, he acted like a medieval monarch,” Marshall said of the crown prince. “For the elites who benefit from the continued perception of a benevolent monarchy, this is a disaster.”

To make matters worse, many fear that Prince Vajiralongkorn might make common cause with Thaksin, who is currently in exile abroad, joining hands with the popular politician to clean house in the palace. This, in turn, could undermine royalist control of the Privy Council, a small but influential royal advisory body, and threaten the sprawling networks of business and patronage that converge on the opaque Crown Property Bureau, which administers the palace’s estimated $53 billion in property and business investments. “What the elite has always been terrified of is that the crown prince and Thaksin will get together and that Thaksin would get his hands on the Crown Property Bureau. That thought absolutely terrifies them,” Marshall said.

One question is whether the popular reverence for the monarchy will fade now that King Bhumibol is gone.

For now, with the population in deep mourning, things are likely to be muted. Undoubtedly, this is by design. Kasit Piromya, a former foreign minister, told me last year that one of the army’s main motivations for launching the 2014 coup was to ensure there was political stability during the sensitive period of succession. Pavin Chachavalpongpun, an associate professor at Kyoto University in Japan, said despite the elite’s distaste for the crown prince, most senior officials would probably wait to see how things pan out. “At the end of the day, the well-being of the monarchy is the well-being of the royalists. Even if they don’t like it, they’ll have to swallow it for their own good,” he said.

Where the succession leads in the longer term is harder to predict. One question is whether the popular reverence for the monarchy will fade now that King Bhumibol is gone. Another question is what sort of monarch Prince Vajiralongkorn will turn out to be if and when he is crowned king. Will he choose to settle into a comfortable life of palace-bound ritual? Or will he decide to pursue an activist reign, shaking up an entrenched political establishment in pursuit of his own vision for Thailand? There is also the question of whether elections, which the junta has promised for next year, will go ahead in the current situation. What is certain is that as one historical era opens, and another closes, the future of the monarchy will now hang ever more ominously over the country’s political life — whether or not anyone can acknowledge it publicly.

Published by Foreign Policy, October 13, 2016.

‘Meet Kill’

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When Kem Ley’s murderer was asked for his name, he offered a chilling sobriquet: ‘Chuob Samlap’ – literally, ‘Meet Kill.’

 

I.

This is no country for decent and outspoken men. On 10 July, at just after half-past eight in the morning, Dr Kem Ley, a prominent Cambodian political commentator and grassroots organiser, was shot and killed while drinking coffee at a Caltex service station in downtown Phnom Penh. The bullets were fired from close range by an unemployed former soldier who was picked up in the street by police shortly afterwards, blood streaming from his head after being pummelled by an angry mob. When asked for his name, the sinewy forty-three-year-old offered a chilling sobriquet: “Chuob Samlap” — literally, “Meet Kill.” Meanwhile, Kem Ley died almost instantly, sprawled backwards on the shiny mini-mart floor.

Kem Ley’s killing was striking for being so unexpected, yet so chillingly familiar. Violence has declined in Cambodian public life in recent years, but killings like this have stained the past quarter-century, rhyming in many of their specifics: high morning, a busy public place, the shots expertly and lethally placed. When Mr Meet Kill met his target, and delivered on his deadly promise, Cambodia lost another from its small pool of free-thinkers and consensus-breakers. Born in the coup-year of 1970, in rural Takeo province, Kem Ley was a father of four, with a fifth on the way. He was the coordinator of Khmer for Khmer, a grassroots advocacy network that he established in 2014, after becoming disillusioned with the country’s main opposition faction, the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP). Kem Ley had recently registered a new political party of his own, and was quickly gaining stature throughout the Cambodian countryside, a result of his frequent travels and outspoken commentaries on Khmer-language radio. I would be conceited to pretend any close or easy familiarity, but Kem Ley was always open and available for a conversation about the ills of his country’s politics.

In the weeks leading up to his assassination, the slain advocate posted on his Facebook page a series of “fables”: short prose tales that anatomised his country’s psychology of obedience to the powerful. These critiques drew on a rich vocabulary of allegory and metaphor. They were cutting and incisive — and all the more effective for not naming names. One such fable, dated 2 July, just a few weeks before Kem Ley’s death, told the story of a man named Uncle Sao, who works in the garden of his boss, Uncle Sok.

One day, the sun is shining very strongly and Uncle Sao starts watering the flowers, leading his boss to come and praise him, and to be very happy that his gardener knows how to water the flowers so well. Only a moment later, it starts raining very heavily, so the gardener decides to stop watering the garden. The boss comes back to look again and, not seeing the gardener watering the flowers this time, shouts out: “Why haven’t you continued to water the flowers?” The servant says, “It’s raining, boss! No need to water them now.” The boss scolds him: “If you’re afraid of getting wet, why not bring an umbrella to cover you as you water the garden?” Uncle Sao, afraid of his boss’s power, continues watering the garden, even though it’s raining so heavily. In a society that concentrates power on individuals  without the ability to think deeply when it comes to  administration, even when the orders are wrong and endowed with danger, it does not matter. The people in the system must follow, whether the rain pours or not.

In mid-July, ten days after the assassination, I left Cambodia for the United States, after eight years of living and working in this beautiful but troubled country. It is not a time to inspire optimism. Stung by its sharp loss of support at national elections in 2013, Hun Sen and his ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) have doubled down on the old strategies: dispensing patronage and gifts while arresting critics, dishing out court summonses, and in general creating an atmosphere of fear and foreboding. Since mid-2015 the government has jailed more than twenty people, including opposition parliamentarians, human rights activists and land rights campaigners. Kem Sokha, the deputy president of the country’s main opposition party, the CNRP, remained holed up in the party’s headquarters in Phnom Penh, accused of “procuring prostitution” in connection with an alleged affair with a hairdresser half his age. Meanwhile, his colleague, CNRP President Sam Rainsy, Hun Sen’s longtime bête noire, is stranded in self-exile overseas—his third enforced timeout in the past decade—facing his own raft of thin legal charges.

As Cambodia moves towards its next national election in 2018, it is becoming increasingly clear that Hun Sen and his old comrades in the CPP have little intention of ever giving up power willingly. Ten days before his daylight killing, I called up Kem Ley and asked him for his political diagnosis. He was pessimistic. With the ruling party locked in a struggle to maintain its “political life” in the face of rising opposition, he said Cambodia was unlikely to see the sort of breakthrough that Myanmar experienced at its landmark election in November, when Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won a sweeping victory.  “No,” he said, “this will not be like [Myanmar].”

¤

II.

If I was asked to choose an epitaph for my time in Cambodia, it would be hard to better the imperishable French phrase, attributed to the nineteenth-century French critic and journalist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr: “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” The more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s not that things aren’t changing in Cambodia. In quantitative terms, the shift has been dramatic. Under Hun Sen, the country has experienced the longest period of peace, or lack-of-war, in the country’s modern history. The economy has approached take-off, and Phnom Penh has become a boomtown fretted with light. In line with this, grievances and expectations are also growing. Since the early 1990s, the patronage-based political system headed by Hun Sen has started to provoke a strong blowback from the Cambodian public. Requiring ever-greater amounts of patronage to renew the loyalty of powerful tycoons, military commanders and other heavies, the system is fast approaching the outer limits of both the country’s resources—the amount of land left to sell, the number of trees left to cut—and the limits of what the Cambodian people are willing to endure.

As ordinary people have become more connected via technologies like Facebook, they have acquired a sense of shared grievance that had previously been pre-empted by Hun Sen’s Jovian personality cult and the CPP’s near-monopoly control on the Khmer-language media. Compounding this is the fact that the Cambodian electorate skews heavily towards the young: a new generation that is more educated, more connected and more demanding that any of those that survived Cambodia’s recent cataclysms. Indeed, those who will vote for the first time in 2018 were born after their country’s cycle of civil wars came to an end in the late 1990s. This is a generation for whom the dark days of the Khmer Rouge — and the CPP’s much-trumpeted role in toppling the regime in 1979 — are distant history.

It’s tempting to assume that the quantitative tension of the current political moment will resolve into something qualitatively more democratic. Demographic and technological change has empowered  oppositional currents in Cambodian society, and  according to the standard liberal orthodoxy, a step away from authoritarian rule is always a step towards democracy. But if history offers any straightforward lesson, it’s that the country is stubborn to this kind of  easy understanding, and resists analysis within Western political frameworks. Cambodia in the democratic era is a graveyard of outside assumptions.

In Western countries today, mainstream views of social and political development rest on two related articles of faith. The first is the idea of steady human progress over time. Like advances in the sciences, political and moral gains are seen as cumulative, building on and consolidating previous gains, despite the inevitable drawbacks. For all its secular pretensions, this is an idea, like Marxism, with deep roots in the Christian past: it is the idea of redemption in history. The second idea, popularised by authors such as Daniel Bell in the 1950s, assumes that as modernisation takes hold, it will produce a convergence towards a single political model. In Bell’s case, this meant that the Soviet Union and its satellites would evolve to become like the advanced industrial societies of the West. This idea gained fresh currency once the Soviet behemoth started its slow collapse in the late 1980s, when the likes of Francis Fukuyama declared the “end of history” as liberal democracy emerged triumphant. As the British philosopher John Gray has argued, Fukuyama took a contingent historical event (the implosion of the Soviet empire) and interpreted it as a universal law of history. Political progress was not only seen to be cumulative, like technology; it also posited liberal democracy, individual rights and free markets as the natural endpoint of this process of political development.

Cambodia in the democratic era is a graveyard of outside assumptions.

Today, despite history’s bloody persistence in the 1990s, this remains the operating assumption of Western policy-making elites on both sides of politics, from Tony Blair and Samantha Power to Michael Ignatieff and Paul Wolfowitz. The language often differs: “regime change,” for instance, is a few grades to the right of “humanitarian intervention,” even though they often describe the same thing. Likewise, Europeans tend to emphasise human rights and legal processes, while Americans focus more on democracy and electoral ones. But these shifts in register take place around a central assumption: that an idealised form of Western government is something like the natural resting state of human societies. Without artificial restrictions—dictators, say, or others of wicked intent — democracy will effloresce.

This assumption was sweet in the air on 23 October 1991, when the Paris Peace Agreements were signed and Cambodia was loosed with a crack into the democratic dawn. The treaty, signed by Cambodia’s four armed factions, aimed to end the long civil war, disarm and demobilise the four factions and let refugees return home. This being the early 1990s, the treaty also aimed to create, from Cambodia’s churned-over ashes, a liberal democratic state—a Denmark of the Far East. To implement its ambitious terms, Paris created the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, or UNTAC, which arrived in Cambodia in early 1992, along with thousands of aid workers and foreign NGO staff—the whole sprawling apparatus of what Alex de Waal has termed the “humanitarian international.”

Paris and UNTAC set the stage for a spectacular, albeit slow-motion, collision between two incompatible worldviews: a liberal one that saw human history as a constant process of moral and political improvement, and a Cambodian one, rooted deep, in which progress represented a mere temporary respite from perpetual cycles of chaos. The story of this collision has been told many times: how the United Nations successfully organised elections in May 1993 that Prime Minister Hun Sen’s CPP, in power since 1979, lost to the royalist faction Funcinpec; how the CPP issued threats and blustered its way into an equal-share of power in a coalition government; how the party marginalised Funcinpec policy-makers and eventually ousted their vain leader Prince Norodom Ranariddh in a violent coup de force in July 1997; how Hun Sen squeezed out a questionable victory-by-ballot at the next year’s flawed election; how he learnt to manipulate Western donor governments, adopting their language of “good governance” and  universal values; how Cambodian institutions remained a façade, behind which power worked in the traditional way: through a dense network of ksae, or strings, of patron-client ties, a fluid and organic currency of power that bound the country’s political, business, and military elites into a close pact of mutually-assured enrichment; how Hun Sen eventually extended his control over most of Cambodian politics and society, through a combination of force, bribery and muscular charisma, and established himself as the uncrowned king of his own sand-founded reign.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. But the faith remains. The high hopes that were heaped on Cambodia in the 1990s have reappeared today, at another time of rapid change. With a tectonic shift in demographics, the much-hoped-for “transition” is again nigh, supercharged by Facebook. One of the lingering effects of Paris and the UNTAC mission was to make Cambodia a global cause, a birthplace of Hegelian dreams, with more elevated expectations than neighbouring countries like Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. In the utterances of global human rights activists and others in the humanitarian imperium, Cambodia has always been a special case: it is the democracy that should have been, but never was, but might soon be again — if only we get it right this time.

But liberal diagnoses of Cambodia focus so much attention on the ought that they often forget to deal with the is. Cambodia ought to be more fair and democratic—few would disagree. The government ought, also, to respect its very fine constitution, rich with rights and freedom-guarantees, and let people speak their mind without fear of violent attack. There are many other things it ought to do: this is the hollow language of the human rights press release, and the raison d’être of the whole global architecture of UN treaties and committees, which exists to constantly remind the government what these things are. But pointing out the ought is a pointless exercise if one does not ask, as Bill Clinton might have phrased it, what the reality of is is.

After eight years of working in Cambodia, and a further three or four observing its cycles from afar, here’s what I’ve learned of the reality. Firstly, the rule of law and an impartial judiciary, the foundation of a democratic society, are the end products of successful liberal systems, not the beginnings.

There’s no plan; they can’t be reverse-engineered, like a Rolex watch or a downed piece of American military technology. To be sure, a successful country’s institutions can be reproduced in a country like Cambodia. You can easily declare them on paper: photocopies of posthistory. But there’s no inherent magic in institutions, to magnetise the people that fill them. Secondly, there’s good reason to think the causality actually flows in the opposite direction. Like sponges absorbing sea-water, institutions take on the weight of the cultural, social and political conditions in which they are immersed. Everything politically exalted tends downwards into the deep water of local customs and relations of power.

Cambodian political culture has never tolerated opposition. As the scholars Trudy Jacobsen and Martin Stuart-Fox argued in a 2013 paper*, political power here stems not from a popular mandate, but from the fragile perception of bunn, or Buddhist merit. This is built and expressed through ostentatious displays of wealth and power, by feeding patronage networks and by expressions of charismatic oratory. Those with superior bunn, and the wealth that is its worldly manifestation, are perceived to hold their power as if by right. “In a very real sense,” Jacobsen and Stuart-Fox write, “bunn determines destiny.” In this pre-modern scheme of power, it is no surprise that criticisms often provoke violent reactions. To question a leader has traditionally been to question his merit, and hence his right to rule. This, naturally, is a slight that cannot be tolerated.

Today, as the Cambodian multi-party system approaches its silver jubilee, the concept of a “loyal  opposition” remains a contradiction in terms, a phrase whose two halves attempt to bridge an irreconcilable gap. In its history, the country has never experienced a peaceful transfer of power from one regime to another. No Cambodian leader, CPP or otherwise, has ever admitted defeat in an election, let alone ceded power to the victors. Phay Siphan, the attack-dog spokesman of the Cambodian Council of Ministers, expressed this view clearly in response to a recent question from the Cambodia Daily about Sam Rainsy’s international campaign to bring sanctions against the CPP government. “He does not seem to belong to Cambodia. He does not want Cambodian prosperity,” Phay Siphan said. “He is very different than other opposition leaders in the world.” But to be “loyal” in this sense would be to give up being “opposition” at all. It would be to be like Uncle Sao, watering his boss’s plants as the rain pours down.

The rule of law and an impartial judiciary, the foundation of a democratic society, are the end products of successful liberal systems, not the beginnings.

Hun Sen and his political opponents differ on just about every point, but they are united by their identification of their own faction as the essential expression of the national interest, congruent with all that is good and truly Khmer, and of their opponents as fundamentally illegitimate and treasonous. For the CPP, the opposition CNRP is a satrapy of Western powers, bent on wrecking the hard-won gains of peace and political stability. For the opposition, the CPP is steadily delivering Cambodia into the jaws of extinction, abetted by its old backer, the demon of the national imagination: Vietnam. (Hence, Cambodia National Rescue Party.)

There are many reasons for Hun Sen’s longevity, but one of the most important is that he has dealt with his country on the basis of how it is, rather than some vision of how it ought to be. Born in August 1952, in a village on the Mekong River in the backwater of Kampong Cham province, Hun Sen came of age just as Cambodia was slipping into the abyss. In service to the Khmer Rouge, and then to the Vietnamese-backed government that replaced it, he proved himself a survivor, rugged yet flexible, with few ideological commitments. Over thirty-one years in power he has tailored his political message to an intimate understanding of Khmer social hierarchies and his people’s instinctive aversion to chaos. He is also, by instinct or cultivation, alert to the cosmic dimensions of power.

Hun Sen has succeeded by reinforcing, through violence and rough-edged populist appeal, the way things already are and have supposedly always have been—the cultural reflexes of deference, hardened during decades of conflict. Western governments, and the opposition leaders who appeal to them for support,  carry an additional burden. They are always forced to  square ideological commitments—to democratisation, to respect for human rights—with Cambodian realities. They struggle to fit the ought into the is. It is a noble enterprise. But it’s no surprise that Hun Sen always comes out on top.

¤

III.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. The deep wisdom of the old axiom lies in the fact that it eschews straight roads in human affairs. It sees the loops and patterns, the deep-down reflexes. There’s no knowing, as yet, what the social, economic and generational shift in Cambodia will produce. But the convergence with Western democratic models that Bell and Fukuyama believed was under way in the world has not happened, and there’s little likelihood that it will happen in Cambodia, or in Southeast Asia, any time soon. Cambodian history, if it suggests anything, suggests that whatever comes around next is likely to be a reiteration, or a series of variations, on what came before.

The main opposition to Hun Sen, the CNRP, itself represents a mélange of past currents in Cambodian politics: the patrician inheritance of the Democrat Party, before it was sidelined by Prince Norodom Sihanouk in the 1950s; the ethnic nationalism of Lon Nol, whose foreshortened tenure in the early 1970s saw massacres of Vietnamese; and the liberal boilerplate of the foreign powers on which it has staked its political fortunes since the early 1990s. Like Sihanouk’s rule, and Hun Sen’s, the party of Sam Rainsy and Kem Sokha still operates along essentially personal lines.

A sudden change in the political situation could conceivably lead to deeper democratisation. But in the near term it is probably more likely to trigger a resurgence in exclusive ethno-nationalism—“Cambodia for the Khmers”—or a period of chaos as patronage networks collapse and the system is forced to reconstitute itself from the tangle. The rise of Facebook has opened up new avenues of account, but may also allow Hun Sen to produce a technologically fortified version of his long authoritarian reign. Whatever comes about in Cambodia, it will be an outgrowth its own internal political dynamics, which remain governed by the all-or-nothing dyad represented by the CPP and its opponents: support of the cosmic order, or a desire to tear it down and erect an alternative one.

Reflecting on the life and work of Kem Ley, it becomes clear the extent to which he was a transgressor in this scheme. In the obvious sense this is undeniable: Kem Ley was outspoken, and it’s obvious that someone in power feared his example. But it’s also possible that he made himself a target by refusing to pick a side. In the Cambodian political culture sketched above, opposition is easy to categorise. It opposes; it exists “against.” It thus sits in some sort of comprehensible relation to the reigning consensus. Here is something that Hun Sen and the CPP can grasp: an opponent whose stance has hard edges, if only because it is the exact negative and inverse of one’s own. But Kem Ley, an equal-opportunity critic, didn’t conform to the categories of Cambodian politics. He represented the possibility of feather-edges and gradations of perspective. He was an aberration, a category error. When the system tried to process him, it threw up blue screens.

On Sunday, 24 July, hundreds of thousands of  Cambodians accompanied Kem Ley’s body on its final, seventy-kilometre journey home to Takeo. It was the country’s largest display of public mourning  since the death of Norodom Sihanouk in October 2012, an oceanic outpouring of grief for a slain hero. Kem Ley hadn’t figured out a clear road to democracy for Cambodia—that’s probably a question without an answer. What he did do was show that there was an alternative to the country’s current destructive dynamic: an alternative cycle, perhaps; a less fearful habit of mind that could at least permit the people to stop watering when it begins to rain.

Published in the Mekong Review, August-October 2016.

Crony In the Forest

On Google Maps the Boeng Per Wildlife Sanctuary in northern Cambodia is marked by a patch of theoretical green, like each of the country’s 32 national parks and protected areas. On the ground, however, there’s little to distinguish the zone from any old swath of Cambodian countryside. Along National Road 62, a sealed highway that bisects the sanctuary from north to south, there are square wooden houses alongside rice paddies. There are black market vendors selling gasoline in old Pepsi bottles, and muddy sidings where cars and motorbikes stop for snacks and iced coffee. There are also plenty of trees–but few that would pass for protected forest. “They’ve cut everything down,” said Huon Keano, 38, a member of the Kuy ethnic minority from Ou Pour, a village of some 200 families, which has sat for generations in the center of the sanctuary. “They burned it until only some stumps remained.”

Huon Keano stops his motorbike about a mile off the highway in an expanse of churned-up soil soaked by a recent downpour. All around, charred tree-trunks stick from the mud like blackened matchsticks—an area of forest that was cleared by bulldozers a few months ago to make way for commercial plantations. Further along a dirt track is the dripping silence of a rubber grove. Radiating outwards, invisible on Google’s maps, are hundreds of hectares of cashew, rubber and jackfruit saplings.

These plantations, owned by the Cambodian tycoon Try Pheap, are located near the center of the 242,500-hectare Boeng Per sanctuary, created by royal decree in 1993. The Kuy, who have traditionally made a living by tapping resin from forest trees for use as sealants and varnishes, say that since Try Pheap was granted a 10,000-hectare concession in the area in 2011, in what they say was a violation of Cambodian law, they have been blocked from accessing the land. “Try Pheap came here and killed everyone’s business,” said Huon Keano, back at his village. “The ethnic minorities here don’t have resin, they don’t have trees. The business here is gone.” (Try Pheap’s representatives have said that not only has he created thousands of jobs, but he also will build health centers and schools—which villagers say they haven’t seen.)

Over the past decade Try Pheap, in his early 50s, has become prominent in this nation of 15 million. An associate of Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has run the country in various guises since 1985, his holdings run deep. In addition to agricultural plantations, Try Pheap has vast and growing interests in real estate, including three casinos, two dry-ports for local and international shipping, and two Special Economic Zones in border areas. He recently launched “PAPA,” a petrol retailer, and is building a $300 million port in Kampot province on the country’s southern coast.

Like most other tycoons close to Hun Sen and his ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), Try Pheap holds the singular title of Oknha, an honorific granted to those who have gifted more than $100,000 to the state— which is to say, the CPP.

Fortified by high-level connections, Try Pheap is said to have scored one more business milestone. In a 2015 report the London-based transparency group Global Witness accused him of controlling “an all-encompassing illegal logging network that relies on the collusion of state officials and supposed enforcement agencies.”

The report accused Try Pheap of getting around official logging bans by obtaining permits for industrial agricultural developments known as Economic Land Concessions (ELCs) and using them to “launder” luxury-grade timber from protected areas both within and outside the concession boundaries. “This large-scale industrial takeover is helping drive tree and animal species to extinction,” the report claimed, “while stripping indigenous and forest-dependent communities of resources on which their livelihoods depend.” Try Pheap’s suspected bounty is Siamese rosewood, a richly hued hardwood that can fetch tens of thousands of dollars per log for buyers in Vietnam and China. At the time, the Forestry Administration maintained that the collection of luxury timber was restricted to ELCs and the reservoirs of hydropower dams, and that anyone permitted to sell it paid taxes to the government. No charges were ever brought.

Marcus Hardtke, a forest campaigner who has worked in Cambodia for 17 years, says that in his quest for rosewood Try Pheap has used his political connections to “corrupt all relevant government agencies”–even those, like the Ministry of Environment and the Forestry Administration, tasked with eliminating forest crimes.

“These guys are just laundering timber through these plantations. It’s basically turned the idea of forest management upside-down,” he says. Hardtke describes Try Pheap’s involvement in the rosewood trade as “an environmental crime of monstrous proportions.” Between 2001 and 2014 forest loss in Cambodia accelerated at a faster rate than in any other country in the world, according to figures in a World Resources Institute report.

Try Pheap’s office declined a written request for an interview with FORBES ASIA, but in an interview last year with the Phnom Penh Post he acknowledged involvement in the timber trade while denying that he had “annihilated” forests. He professed to buying timber legitimately from ELC owners and exporting it to China. “We use capital to buy timber from people clearing concessions, paying from $700 to $1,000 per cubic metre, and we sell it for $2,500 to $3,000 in China. But we have to pay export tax, harvesting and transportation costs, so we only make $300 on a cubic metre,” he said.

On the Try Pheap Group website the tycoon pays tribute to Hun Sen’s leadership and claims that his businesses have been “actively contributing to the development activities of the government.” Boeng Per has certainly seen a growth spurt since Try Pheap’s arrival. His firm has built a market, administration buildings and a way station for tourists. There is also a gas station, named after Try Pheap, and a villa owned, it is said, by the magnate. All of this is dominated by a huge arch announcing the “Try Pheap Boeng Tonle Merech Rubber Plantation.”

“It’s basically turned the idea of forest management upside-down.”

The developments have attracted hundreds of new residents to the area, including Buth Chan Chesda, 29, who runs a shop at Try Pheap’s market serving noodles to plantation workers. He says he is happy for any developments that alleviate the need to seek jobs abroad— a common problem in Cambodia. “Before it was all forest. When my wife came four years ago, she slept in a hammock,” he says. “He has a good heart,” he adds of Try Pheap.

But environmentalists and local residents say that Try Pheap’s concession in Boeng Per, as elsewhere, has served as cover for the large-scale removal of rosewood and other luxury wood species. Toby Eastoe, an Australian ecologist who worked in forest protection in Cambodia from 2008 to 2015, says he has seen Try Pheap’s logging networks quickly spread “like a big spider web across the whole of Cambodia.” When asked what position the tycoon occupied in Cambodia’s logging economy, Eastoe responds, “He is the logging economy.”

In a shabby hut on the highway, Vong Tola, 52, a former forest ranger, confirms this version of events. “In 2012 the forest was like a person who wore very nice clothes,” he says, “but in 2016 it’s like a person who’s wearing nothing.”

Try Pheap’s timber-fueled rise encapsulates the opaque and pervasive form of crony capitalism that has characterized Hun Sen’s 31 years in power. For years off-the-books wealth has been crucial to the Cambodian strongman’s hold on power, providing a wellspring of patronage that trickles downward, ensuring the loyalty of powerful tycoons, provincial power brokers, and key members of the military and police. So says Global Witness in its most recent study, released on July 7, which focuses on the extensive business interests of Hun Sen and his family. Try Pheap offers a textbook example of the “symbiotic relationship” that exists between Hun Sen and his country’s elite, the organization argues.

Try Pheap appears to have six companies officially listed in Ministry of Commerce records, but it is nearly impossible to ascertain the full extent of his holdings. Few Cambodian firms release annual reports, and lucrative state contracts are often granted behind closed doors. “The real cash is not transferred by bank,” says Ouch Leng, an award-winning environmentalist who has studied his country’s logging operations in depth. Asked to assess the baron’s net worth, Cambodian sources put forth figures ranging from a few hundred million dollars to several times that.

Equally obscure is Try Pheap’s background. The businessman told the Phnom Penh Post he was born into a humble rural family in Kandal province, outside Phnom Penh, before beginning his rise.

According to one story repeated by several sources, he started out as a taxi driver before getting into timber by marrying a midlevel trader. Another story, also hard to verify, is that Try Pheap is connected by marriage to Pheapimex, one of Cambodia’s largest conglomerates. This firm, profiled by FORBES ASIA in 2014, is led by the businesswoman Choeung Sopheap and her husband, Lao Meng Khin, a CPP senator and, according to a 2013 report, director of a mining firm along with Try Pheap. The couple, who enjoy close ties to Hun Sen and his wife, Bun Rany, continue not to respond to our questions.

Whatever the reason, Try Pheap’s rise over the past decade has been fast and frictionless. By the last national election in 2013 he was wealthy enough to make his big contribution to the CPP and its associated charity organizations.

In February 2013, five months before the election, the agricultural ministry gave Try Pheap permission to purchase all wood felled inside ELCs in Ratanakkiri province. Then, in June that year, he was granted the right to collect up to 4,871 cubic meters of luxury wood seized from illegal loggers by forestry officials throughout the country, reportedly strengthening his grip on the trade. The profits from the murky trade are allegedly enormous. In October 2014 the Phnom Penh Post reported that Try Pheap had made an estimated $227 million profit on rosewood logged in the Stung Atay hydropower dam reservoir and the Phnom Samkos Wildlife Sanctuary in the three years to 2012.

Try Pheap’s case hints at the challenges Hun Sen may have in extending his rule beyond the next national election, due in mid-2018. While the country has experienced strong economic growth and was recently promoted by the World Bank to lower-middle-income status, the CPP is facing rising opposition. At the 2013 national election the party suffered a sharp loss of support, in large part because of rising public anger about issues like illegal logging and landgrabs, as well as a lack of job opportunities.

“In 2012 the forest was like a person who wore very nice clothes, but in 2016 it’s like a person who’s wearing nothing.”

Since then, Hun Sen has promised reform. In a marathon six-hour speech in September 2013, he told officials to “scrub your body” and “heal our disease.” So far the government has boosted salaries for soldiers and garment factory workers, and reshuffled the cabinet (twice). Earlier this year he reorganized the ministries that deal with ELCs and protected areas, vowing to eradicate illegal logging.

At the same time, Hun Sen has ruthlessly acted to quash any challenge to the resource networks that sustain him. Since mid-2015 the government has jailed more than 20 people, including parliamentarians from the opposition, human rights activists and land rights campaigners. In July a prominent activist was shot dead at a gas station in Phnom Penh in an attack many saw as politically motivated. (Hun Sen has since promised a “vigorous” investigation into the shooting.)

The dilemma for Hun Sen, critics say, is that any true reform would undermine the economic base of his power. Forest activist Hardtke says the prime minister was taking money from timber barons like Try Pheap at the same time that he was claiming to be clamping down on the trade—”trying to catch fish with both hands.” As if to illustrate the contradiction, when Try Pheap opened his rubber plantation in Boeng Per in July 2015, Say Sam Al, Hun Sen’s new “reformist” minister of environment, appointed in a reshuffle after the last election, was there to help.

Government officials remain curiously tight-lipped about the secretive mogul. Phay Siphan, a spokesman for the Council of Ministers, as Cambodia’s cabinet is known, says he has requested information from Try Pheap’s company about its business operations to answer reporters’ questions but has received no reply. “I have no idea, my friend,” he says. “He’s a big shot.” Suos Yara, a CPP parliamentarian and party spokesman, says he has “no information about him at all.”

People nearby confirm that logging operations have indeed slowed in Boeng Per, largely, they say, because the most valuable trees have already been cut. But Ouch Leng, the environmentalist, has no doubt that Try Pheap’s operations are still active in more remote parts of the country. “Try Pheap hasn’t stopped the timber business—he’s waiting to see the political situation. It’s not true. It’s never true. It’s just political propaganda,” he says.

Either way, old ties continue to bind. In mid-May Try Pheap appeared at the National Institute of Education in Phnom Penh to accept an honorary doctorate in economics from the IIC University of Technology in Cambodia. As the school’s rector praised his contributions to Cambodia’s development, the tycoon stepped onto the stage, wearing a black-and-blue academic gown and mortarboard, as senior government officials looked on.

And who presented him with the framed diploma? Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Published in Forbes Asia, August 2016

The ‘lawless’ playgrounds of Laos

Has the Asian gambling enclave become a ‘semi-lawless’ zone where gambling, prostitution, and illicit trades flourish?

From the Thai side of the Mekong River, the Kings Romans Casino shimmers like a scene from a fairy-tale, its domes and turrets rising up against a backdrop of foliage-covered mountains. Up close, Greek columns and classical statues flank a grand entrance where SUVs unload groups of visitors in the tropical heat. Inside, sitting around tables, gamblers bet wads of Chinese and Thai currency in air -conditioned silence.

Kings Romans is the glitzy centrepiece of the 10,000-hectare Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, a joint venture between the Laotian government and the Hong Kong-registered Kings Romans Group.

Since signing a 99-year lease in 2007, Kings Romans says it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars transforming this remote corner of northern Laos into an oasis of hotels, shops, massage parlours and banquet halls, all dominated by the casino’s colossal golden crown.

According to local press reports, Kings Romans plans to add shopping malls, industrial zones, and an international airport, all in the hope of boosting economic growth in this impoverished nation of seven million. But critics say the enclave – three times the size of Macau – has instead become a semi-lawless zone where gambling (the legal status of which is ambiguous as there is a ban on “forbidden gambling”), prostitution, and other illicit trades flourish.

While the area remains under the nominal control of the Laotian government, which reportedly holds a 20 percent stake, its exact status is difficult to pin down.

“It’s not transparent at all,” said Stuart Ling, an agricultural consultant who has lived and worked in the area for 17 years and has witnessed the project develop since 2007. ” Nobody collects statistics on it. It exists as a special zone, a special entity.”

‘A little China’

Sitting at the heart of the Golden Triangle, the point where the borders of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar converge, the Kings Romans Casino attracts hundreds of visitors each week from mainland China, where gambling is banned outside Macau. Most come by road from the Chinese province of Yunnan, or fly to northern Thailand and cross the Mekong on speedboats operated by Kings Romans.

Despite sitting in Laos, the zone has the feel of a Chinese enclave transplanted into the tropical hills. Gamblers count the hours in Beijing time, one hour ahead of Laos. Mandarin is the lingua franca, and few shops accept the Laotian kip.

“Many people come to the casino … there’s very good money here now,” said Macky Sutthivong, 30, a Lao souvenir seller who works in the Special Economic Zone. While visitors come from Laos, Russia, Thailand, and Myanmar, he said, “the number one is China”.

Both the economic zone and Kings Romans Group are headed by the entrepreneur Zhao Wei, who hails from Heilongjiang province in China’s icy northeast. After years in the timber business, Zhou went on to operate casinos in Macau, where he holds permanent residency, and in Mong La , a notorious gambling enclave run by a rebel armed group on the Myanmar side of the Golden Triangle.

‘A lawless playground’

Zhao has high-ranking friends in the Laotian government. Senior officials have paid visits to the Special Economic Zone, including former President Choummaly Sayasone, who is pictured with Zhao in a Kings Romans promotional magazine available in the casino lobby. Several ex-government officials also sit on its management committee.

Representatives from Kings Romans declined a request for an interview and did not respond to repeatedly emailed questions. But in a wide-ranging 2011 interview with Chinese state media, Zhao said he was inspired to invest in Laos by the flame-flowered kapok trees which grow in the area (in Mandarin, the company’s name is Jin Mumian, or “golden kapok”). He said his aim was to “make this piece of wild, barren land full of a new vitality of life”.

Paul Chambers, director of research at the Institute of Southeast Asian Affairs in Chiang Mai, Thailand, said that in exchange for much-needed Chinese capital, the government in Vientiane, the Laos capital, appeared happy to cede a measure of sovereignty over the area.

“They’re hoping that the Chinese will bring some development to this faraway tract of territory in Laos,” he said.

“De jure, it’s Laotian territory, but de facto, it’s Chinese.”

In reality, the Special Economic Zone’s semi-autonomous status has allowed a certain type of tourism to flourish.

In an elaborately decorated “Chinatown” district behind the casino, Chinese sex workers ply their trade in nightclubs and “massage” parlours, a practice that is illegal in both Laos and China; cards advertising their services can be found scattered around town.

Environmentalists allege that the area is also home to a flourishing market in endangered animal products.

In a 2015 report, the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) described the zone as “a lawless playground” and a free-for-all “illegal wildlife supermarket”.

The report described wildlife boutiques stocking items such as ivory and tiger skins, and a restaurant that sold tiger meat and Hu Gu Jiu – tiger-bone wine – from a liquor-filled tank holding a complete tiger skeleton.

Debbie Banks, a senior campaigner at EIA, said that many of the animal products, banned under international wildlife agreements such as CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, were imported by Chinese traders from Mong La, a long-standing centre of the regional wildlife trade.

She said both zones were an example of the worrying trend of “wildlife-trade tourism”, in which Chinese tourists travel to neighbouring countries to buy rare animal products which are illegal or hard to get at home.

“Laos has such weak enforcement and capacity and political leadership on this that it has become a safe-haven for wildlife criminals,” Banks says.

One-party Laos remains one of the most secretive countries in Southeast Asia, and recently came under fire for further tightening its restrictions on foreign journalists. This journalist was refused official press access, and was unable to put these allegations to Laotian government officials.

But in March 2015, shortly after the release of EIA’s report, Laotian authorities conducted televised raids on four businesses selling illegal wildlife products in the Special Economic Zone, burning more than $12,000 worth of ivory and tiger skin.

Shi Feng, the Chinese restaurant owner, admitted that his God of Fortune Restaurant once sold wild and exotic animals, but said the practice had now been curbed.

“Before they didn’t have laws. Everyone bought them, even the Lao people ate them,” he said in an interview at one of his restaurants in Vientiane. Now, he said, “we must follow the Lao law”.

According to EIA investigators, Shi’s establishment specialised in exotic animal dishes including bear paw, monitor lizard, pangolin, and Tokay gecko, as well as tiger-bone wine.

At the time, Chanthachone Wangfaseng, vice-chairman of the zone and a former provincial official, told Laotian TV that the owners of the businesses “might not be familiar” with wildlife regulations, which would henceforth be enforced rigorously.

“The goal of our development is to build tourism and protect the environment,” he said.

One manager at the Kings Romans Casino, who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorised to speak to the press, confirmed that the authorities had “shut all of that down”.

‘Under the counter’

Many of the wildlife boutiques and restaurants indeed seem to have closed – but not all. At the side of the Xinxing Nenyuzhuang restaurant on Laos-China Friendship Street were cages filled with monkeys, geckos, an owl, and an endangered Asiatic golden cat, all of which a restaurant worker confirmed could be cooked to order.

Not far away a shabby “zoo” contained around 30 tigers in small enclosures, near a banner that read, in Chinese, Lao and English: “Safeguard Ecological Security.”

The casino manager claimed that the animals were simply kept as zoo attractions, but EIA alleges that tigers held in the zone are destined to be harvested for their skins and meat, as well as for tiger-bone wine, which is still advertised in the Kings Romans’ promotional magazine.

“As far as we’re aware, trade has not stopped. It continues, but it may be more under the counter,” Banks says.

Jeremy Douglas, the Bangkok-based regional head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime who visited the zone on an official tour in February, said that Laotian police appear to be present in the area, in addition to security personnel employed by Kings Romans, but that it is “unclear to us the extent that the police are active”.

Douglas said that semi-autonomous enclaves like the Special Economic Zone and Mong La in Myanmar remained “grey areas” for law enforcement. “They’re so close to here, but so far away, so off the grid,” he said.

Macky Sutthivong, the souvenir seller, said that despite many locals benefiting from the influx of tourist dollars, he is worried that his government’s support is creating “a little China” on the Mekong. “They want to get more people from China,” he said. “They want this area to be a Chinatown permanently.”

Published by Al Jazeera, July 24, 2016

Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless

The family of Cambodian dictator Hun Sen sits on at least $200 million. But it might not save them from populist anger.

PHNOM PENH — Like the monsoons, repression in Cambodia comes on a regular schedule, and the current season looks like it will be an especially long and stormy one. On July 10, the tension reached a violent crescendo when Kem Ley, a prominent political commentator and advocate, was shot and killed in a brazen daylight attack at a gas station in Phnom Penh. Though police quickly arrested a man who confessed to shooting Kem Ley over a $3,000 debt, few doubt the killing was politically motivated — just one of a string of unsolved political murders that stretches back to the early 1990s.

Over the past 12 months, the government has jailed more than 20 people, including opposition parliamentarians, human rights activists, and land rights campaigners. Kem Sokha, the deputy president of the country’s main opposition party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), remains holed up in the party’s headquarters in Phnom Penh, Julian Assange-style, facing arrest in connection with an alleged affair with a hairdresser. His crime? Trumped-up charges of “procuring prostitution.” As of May 26, failure to show up to court has been added to the docket. Meanwhile, Sam Rainsy, the country’s perennial political gadfly, is stranded in self-exile overseas — his third enforced timeout in the past decade — facing arrest on a defamation conviction from 2011.

This is all straight out of the playbook of Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen, one of the world’s longest-serving leaders. For nearly half his life, the 63-year-old has loomed over this small Southeast Asian nation of 15 million people, ruling through a carefully calibrated blend of force, guile, and legal manipulation. Crackdowns like the current one have alternated with periods of apparent calm and tolerance, often timed to national elections. And Hun Sen, as well as his ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), always emerges on top — even when he doesn’t win the actual election.

But as opposition mounts ahead of local elections next June, and with crunch national polls scheduled for mid-2018, Hun Sen’s hold on power is appearing increasingly insecure.

But as opposition mounts ahead of local elections next June, and with crunch national polls scheduled for mid-2018, Hun Sen’s hold on power is appearing increasingly insecure. At the last national election in 2013, the CNRP scored large gains by tapping into concerns about the corruption, clotted institutions, and lack of economic opportunity that have marked the latter years of the Hun Sen era.

Indeed, after 37 years in power, the CPP has a lot to lose. In a report released on July 7, the London-based transparency group Global Witness argued that Hun Sen sits at the center of an economic empire that reaches into every corner of the country, what it described as a “huge network of secret deal-making, corruption and cronyism.”

According to the report, titled “Hostile Takeover” and based on public company records held by the Cambodian Ministry of Commerce, Hun Sen’s immediate family — including his wife, five children, children-in-law, and various nieces and nephews — has registered interests in 114 private domestic firms. These range from energy, petrol, and bottled water to advertising and media, with a total listed capital of just over $200 million — the first conclusive statistic to have been published on Hun Sen’s family wealth.

Patrick Alley, the co-founder of Global Witness, said this was most likely just the “tip of the iceberg,” given the dearth of official documentation. “There is very little transparency in Cambodia’s private sector and the majority of economic activities take place behind a wall of secrecy,” he said in an email. As for the full extent of the Hun family’s wealth, “experts estimate it as anything from half a billion USD up to as much as $4 billion, but nobody knows the real figure.” Phay Siphan, a spokesman for the Council of Ministers, as Cambodia’s cabinet is known, refused to comment on the specific allegations made by Global Witness. “This report is propaganda against the prime minister. We don’t care about these people,” he said.

For years, this off-the-books wealth has been crucial to Hun Sen’s hold on power, providing a wellspring of patronage that trickles downward, ensuring the loyalty of powerful tycoons, provincial power brokers, and key members of the military and police. In this system, companies owned by well-connected individuals are granted lucrative public contracts and concession licenses for land and natural resources like timber, allegedly kicking a share of the profits back to Hun Sen and the CPP.

But like the late Indonesian dictator Suharto, whose 31-year reign ended amid widespread rioting and public protests in May 1998, this cycle of patronage has created a social blowback that now threatens the CPP’s hold on power. Public anger about land grabs, deforestation, and low-level corruption — amplified by the canny use of social media — contributed to the CNRP’s large gains in the 2013 election. And while economic growth remains strong on paper (between 2004 and 2011, the number of Cambodians living under the poverty line fell from more than half the population to one in five, according to the World Bank, and GDP growth for 2015 was projected at 7 percent), large numbers remain vulnerable to small changes in economic fortune.

Demographics have compounded Hun Sen’s challenge. Increasing numbers of Cambodians are too young to remember the country’s cycle of civil wars, which ended in the late 1990s, and are thus less satisfied with the CPP’s claim — repeated constantly through the pliant Khmer-language press — that it brought peace and stability to a long-suffering land.

The problem for Hun Sen, longtime Cambodia watchers say, is that true democratic reform risks undermining the economic base of his power.

The problem for Hun Sen, longtime Cambodia watchers say, is that true democratic reform risks undermining the economic base of his power. Marcus Hardtke, a veteran environmental activist who has lived in Cambodia for 17 years, described the system as “a textbook organized crime cartel,” with Hun Sen in the role of godfather. “He has to feed the dogs,” Hardtke said. “If he’s not feeding them every month, they won’t be loyal anymore.”

The contradiction is evident in how Hun Sen has sought to win back lost support since 2013. Stung by his party’s poor showing in the polls, the prime minister has since adopted a dual-track strategy of wooing the electorate through populist reforms — wage hikes for teachers and soldiers, promises of land for poor farmers — while acting ruthlessly to quash any challenge to the patrimonial networks that sustain him. This strategy can be seen in the microcosm that is Hun Sen’s busy Facebook page, another post-2013 election innovation. His staff posts noodle stall photo-ops and avuncular family shots, alongside live-streamed speeches in which he threatens his opponents.

In the past, Hun Sen has usually eased off his opponents in order to placate the foreign governments that have bankrolled Cambodia’s reconstruction since the early 1990s. But as opposition mounts, there are signs that Hun Sen may be settling into a more permanent authoritarian groove. The prime minister has already warned Sam Rainsy, the president of the CNRP, that he shouldn’t expect to be allowed to return to Cambodia for the 2018 election, as he was allowed to in 2013. And the prime minister recently told Kem Sokha that he could remain under house arrest “forever” if Hun Sen wished it. “If you don’t go to prison, the prison will come to you,” he said in a barnstorming June 29 speech.

The July 10 assassination of Kem Ley, who had registered a new Grassroots Democracy Party to run in the 2017 commune elections, was a further dark throwback to the 1990s and early 2000s, when journalists, union leaders, and opposition members were frequently gunned down with impunity. In the days before his death, Kem Ley had commented publicly about the new report by Global Witness and criticized the use of the judiciary to attack the opposition.

But now, with increasing amounts of support from a rising China, which has poured billions of dollars in loans and investments into Cambodia over the past two decades, Hun Sen is less afraid of a serious backlash from Western donor governments. When the European Parliament passed a resolution in June calling for a suspension of EU development aid to Cambodia in response to the current clampdown, Hun Sen shrugged off the threat, praising Beijing for its no-strings support. In another June speech, he told foreign diplomats to keep their mouths shut, warning, in his characteristic third person, that “Hun Sen cannot be easily pressured.”

Even if Hun Sen comes out on top again, he won’t be able to avoid the question of how to reform a patronage-based political system that is in many ways unreformable. As Alley of Global Witness put it, increasing amounts of wealth are still required to “continuously reward the country’s elites who expect to be bestowed with ‘gifts’ in return for their unwavering support.”

And so the long season of authoritarianism stretches on.

And so the long season of authoritarianism stretches on. About a week before he was murdered in Phnom Penh, I called Kem Ley and asked him for a forecast of where he thought the country was headed. He said he saw little chance of an opposition victory like in Myanmar’s November election, where Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy swept to a stunning victory. “No,” he said, “this will not be like Burma.”

But the contradiction underlying Hun Sen’s rule — the gap between the needs of the system and the needs of the Cambodian people — will have to be resolved. When I spoke with him, Kem Ley warned that if a politically awakened population can’t get solutions from its leaders, it might be tempted to seek solutions in the street. “If the party can’t change to respond to the needs of the people, the people will change things for themselves,” he said.

Published by Foreign Policy, July 11, 2016.

The Rise, Fall and Possible Renewal of a Town in Laos on China’s Border

BOTEN, Laos — For five years, this remote town on the China-Laos border has lived in the shadow of more prosperous times.

On the main street, weeds grow where bustling shops and restaurants once stood. Old nightclub signs blister and peel in the tropical climate. Around town, abandoned multistory hotels loom like decaying sentinels, colonized by armies of jungle insects.

About a half-dozen years ago, Boten was a casino boomtown, a pinprick of neon amid thickly forested hills. Its gold-rush economy revolved around the Chinese casinos and gambling halls, which drew in thousands of visitors a month from across the border in Yunnan Province.

“When the casinos opened, there were many people visiting,” said Thong Arn, 54, a Lao businesswoman whose restaurant is one of the few remaining on a strip of shuttered shop fronts with faded Chinese signs. “Now there are no more tourists, only the people working here.”

But Boten’s luck may be about to turn once again. Chinese investors have poured more than $1.5 billion into a new development called the Beautiful Boten Specific Economic Zone, according to Laotian state media.

A glossy prospectus details plans for offices, factories, duty-free shops, tourism developments, an international bus station and a golf course. The development also includes a station for the planned $7 billion high-speed railway linking the Chinese city of Kunming and the Laotian capital, Vientiane, an ambitious project that broke ground in December.

Beautiful Boten resurrects many of the original plans for the town, with one crucial tweak: no gambling.

Vixay Homsombath, a Laotian official who sits on the board of the new development, said in an interview that the government had learned its lesson from Boten’s aborted gambling experiment. In a rush to bring development to this outlying region, the government gave the Chinese concessionaires too much control.

“At the time, we didn’t have experience,” he said. “The old developers focused on the casinos — that was their first priority.” And the government had little idea of the potential risks.

In 2003, a Hong Kong-registered company signed a 30-year lease with the Laotian government to set up a 1,640-hectare (about 6.3 square miles) special economic zone known as Boten Golden City, a trade and tourism hub intended to kick-start development in this backwater region of northern Laos.

Concrete was laid and brightly colored buildings rose in the hills. Chinese tourists and business merchants poured over the border, drawn by visa-free access and gambling, which is illegal in mainland China. The casinos spawned a satellite economy of brothels, nightclubs and karaoke bars, even a cabaret featuring cross-dressing dancers from Thailand.

With the Laotian customs office placed a few miles inside of Laos to make border-crossing easier, Boten became a virtual Chinese outpost, with clocks set to Beijing time and transactions conducted in Chinese currency.

But just as gambling powered Boten’s rise, it also brought about its fall.

In late 2010, reports emerged that casino concessionaires were locking up visitors who were unable to pay off gambling debts. According to reports in the Chinese news media, officials from Hubei Province were sent over the border to negotiate their release.

Shortly afterward, even though Boten is in Laos, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs ordered the casinos closed, tightened border controls and cut the power supply to the town.

Boten quickly went into decline. Most shop and restaurant owners packed up and went home. From a population of around 10,000 at its peak, the town is now home to just 500 souls, eking out a living amid the collapsing infrastructure of Boten’s heyday.

At the Jingland Hotel, formerly the Royal and once the showcase development of Boten Golden City, rooms are empty and a tropical dampness spreads through the upper floors. A jagged hole gapes behind the lobby: the former entrance to a demolished casino annex. Across the tarmac other buildings stand empty, their doors fastened with cheap bicycle locks.

“I’ve been here a year, but business isn’t great,” said Deng Jie, 25, who owns a bare-walled restaurant and karaoke bar on another forlorn strip of shuttered stores. Now he’s considering selling out. He sighed, saying, “I can’t keep going on like this.”

But amid the decay there are some small signs of renewal. Construction is underway on a series of 18-story towers along the highway through town, which has been lined with billboards showing President Xi Jinping of China shaking hands with Choummaly Sayasone, until recently the president of Laos.

Just as gambling powered Boten’s rise, it also brought about its fall.

Not far away, an old casino has been converted into a gem emporium, chandeliers aglow above marble floors and rich red carpets. Even the cabaret with cross-dressers is back in business.

The grand plans for Boten reflect the intimate ties between landlocked Laos and its giant northern neighbor. Since the early 2000s, Chinese money has poured into this communist nation of seven million people, mostly into mining, agriculture, hydropower and real estate.

In late 2013, the cumulative value of Chinese investment topped $5 billion, making China the largest foreign investor in Laos for the first time. The cash has been accompanied by a wave of economic migrants from China, who have settled in Vientiane and in enclaves across the country’s mountainous north.

Paul Chambers, director of research at the Institute of South East Asian Affairs in Chiang Mai, Thailand, said that while the early investments in Boten had a freewheeling nature, the spotlight now is on more strategic interests.

“China’s new focus on Boten is to make it a transportation hub facilitating greater Chinese penetration of Laos,” he said.

Despite all the promises, the benefits have been slow in coming. The main duty-free mall, converted from an old nightclub, is bereft of customers, its shelves of cigarettes and single-malt whiskey standing as still and pristine as museum exhibits. More popular is an adjoining room filled with slot machines and electronic roulette tables, the only type of gambling now permitted in Boten.

Analysts say that much depends on the progress of the China-Laos railway, which has been plagued by funding problems and other delays. Joshua Kurlantzick, a Southeast Asia expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, gave the project a “50 percent chance” of succeeding.

The slow progress makes many Chinese business owners nostalgic for Boten’s glory days, when the lights shone brightly and the town was mobbed by cashed-up tourists.

Zhang Xiangxun, 51, a shopkeeper from Anhui Province who came to Boten six years ago, runs a small grocery on the main street, its shelves heaving with Chinese beer, soap, snacks and fireworks. Business is slow. Mr. Zhang and his wife, Zou Zhonghua, 46, say they earn around 500 renminbi (about $75) per day, barely enough to cover rent and other costs.

But after so many years in Laos, they have decided to wait it out. “The casino’s shut and everything’s very quiet, but we’re still staying,” Mr. Zhang said, tapping cigarette ash into an empty Harbin Beer box.

While the couple are optimistic that Boten’s fortunes, and their own, have finally turned, Mrs. Zou thinks the real solution is much simpler. “If they just opened the casinos again,” she said, “business would increase a thousand percent.”

Published by the New York Times, July 7, 2016.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless

The family of Cambodian dictator Hun Sen sits on at least $200 million. But it might not save them from populist anger.

Like the monsoons, repression in Cambodia comes on a regular schedule, and the current season looks like it will be an especially long and stormy one. On July 10, the tension reached a violent crescendo when Kem Ley, a prominent political commentator and advocate, was shot and killed in a brazen daylight attack at a gas station in Phnom Penh. Though police quickly arrested a man who confessed to shooting Kem Ley over a $3,000 debt, few doubt the killing was politically motivated — just one of a string of unsolved political murders that stretches back to the early 1990s.

Over the past 12 months, the government has jailed more than 20 people, including opposition parliamentarians, human rights activists, and land rights campaigners. Kem Sokha, the deputy president of the country’s main opposition party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), remains holed up in the party’s headquarters in Phnom Penh, Julian Assange-style, facing arrest in connection with an alleged affair with a hairdresser. His crime? Trumped-up charges of “procuring prostitution.” As of May 26, failure to show up to court has been added to the docket. Meanwhile, Sam Rainsy, the country’s perennial political gadfly, is stranded in self-exile overseas — his third enforced timeout in the past decade — facing arrest on a defamation conviction from 2011.

This is all straight out of the playbook of Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen, one of the world’s longest-serving leaders. For nearly half his life, the 63-year-old has loomed over this small Southeast Asian nation of 15 million people, ruling through a carefully calibrated blend of force, guile, and legal manipulation. Crackdowns like the current one have alternated with periods of apparent calm and tolerance, often timed to national elections. And Hun Sen, as well as his ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), always emerges on top — even when he doesn’t win the actual election.

But as opposition mounts ahead of local elections next June, and with crunch national polls scheduled for mid-2018, Hun Sen’s hold on power is appearing increasingly insecure. At the last national election in 2013, the CNRP scored large gains by tapping into concerns about the corruption, clotted institutions, and lack of economic opportunity that have marked the latter years of the Hun Sen era.

Indeed, after 37 years in power, the CPP has a lot to lose. In a report released on July 7, the London-based transparency group Global Witness argued that Hun Sen sits at the center of an economic empire that reaches into every corner of the country, what it described as a “huge network of secret deal-making, corruption and cronyism.”

According to the report, titled “Hostile Takeover” and based on public company records held by the Cambodian Ministry of Commerce, Hun Sen’s immediate family — including his wife, five children, children-in-law, and various nieces and nephews — has registered interests in 114 private domestic firms. These range from energy, petrol, and bottled water to advertising and media, with a total listed capital of just over $200 million — the first conclusive statistic to have been published on Hun Sen’s family wealth.

Patrick Alley, the co-founder of Global Witness, said this was most likely just the “tip of the iceberg,” given the dearth of official documentation. “There is very little transparency in Cambodia’s private sector and the majority of economic activities take place behind a wall of secrecy,” he said in an email. As for the full extent of the Hun family’s wealth, “experts estimate it as anything from half a billion USD up to as much as $4 billion, but nobody knows the real figure.” Phay Siphan, a spokesman for the Council of Ministers, as Cambodia’s cabinet is known, refused to comment on the specific allegations made by Global Witness. “This report is propaganda against the prime minister. We don’t care about these people,” he said.

For years, this off-the-books wealth has been crucial to Hun Sen’s hold on power, providing a wellspring of patronage that trickles downward, ensuring the loyalty of powerful tycoons, provincial power brokers, and key members of the military and police. In this system, companies owned by well-connected individuals are granted lucrative public contracts and concession licenses for land and natural resources like timber, allegedly kicking a share of the profits back to Hun Sen and the CPP.

The problem for Hun Sen, longtime Cambodia watchers say, is that true democratic reform risks undermining the economic base of his power.

But like the late Indonesian dictator Suharto, whose 31-year reign ended amid widespread rioting and public protests in May 1998, this cycle of patronage has created a social blowback that now threatens the CPP’s hold on power. Public anger about land grabs, deforestation, and low-level corruption — amplified by the canny use of social media — contributed to the CNRP’s large gains in the 2013 election. And while economic growth remains strong on paper (between 2004 and 2011, the number of Cambodians living under the poverty line fell from more than half the population to one in five, according to the World Bank, and GDP growth for 2015 was projected at 7 percent), large numbers remain vulnerable to small changes in economic fortune.

Demographics have compounded Hun Sen’s challenge. Increasing numbers of Cambodians are too young to remember the country’s cycle of civil wars, which ended in the late 1990s, and are thus less satisfied with the CPP’s claim — repeated constantly through the pliant Khmer-language press — that it brought peace and stability to a long-suffering land.

The problem for Hun Sen, longtime Cambodia watchers say, is that true democratic reform risks undermining the economic base of his power. Marcus Hardtke, a veteran environmental activist who has lived in Cambodia for 17 years, described the system as “a textbook organized crime cartel,” with Hun Sen in the role of godfather. “He has to feed the dogs,” Hardtke said. “If he’s not feeding them every month, they won’t be loyal anymore.”

The contradiction is evident in how Hun Sen has sought to win back lost support since 2013. Stung by his party’s poor showing in the polls, the prime minister has since adopted a dual-track strategy of wooing the electorate through populist reforms — wage hikes for teachers and soldiers, promises of land for poor farmers — while acting ruthlessly to quash any challenge to the patrimonial networks that sustain him. This strategy can be seen in the microcosm that is Hun Sen’s busy Facebook page, another post-2013 election innovation. His staff posts noodle stall photo-ops and avuncular family shots, alongside live-streamed speeches in which he threatens his opponents.

In the past, Hun Sen has usually eased off his opponents in order to placate the foreign governments that have bankrolled Cambodia’s reconstruction since the early 1990s. But as opposition mounts, there are signs that Hun Sen may be settling into a more permanent authoritarian groove. The prime minister has already warned Sam Rainsy, the president of the CNRP, that he shouldn’t expect to be allowed to return to Cambodia for the 2018 election, as he was allowed to in 2013. And the prime minister recently told Kem Sokha that he could remain under house arrest “forever” if Hun Sen wished it. “If you don’t go to prison, the prison will come to you,” he said in a barnstorming June 29 speech.

The July 10 assassination of Kem Ley, who had registered a new Grassroots Democracy Party to run in the 2017 commune elections, was a further dark throwback to the 1990s and early 2000s, when journalists, union leaders, and opposition members were frequently gunned down with impunity. In the days before his death, Kem Ley had commented publicly about the new report by Global Witness and criticized the use of the judiciary to attack the opposition.

But now, with increasing amounts of support from a rising China, which has poured billions of dollars in loans and investments into Cambodia over the past two decades, Hun Sen is less afraid of a serious backlash from Western donor governments. When the European Parliament passed a resolution in June calling for a suspension of EU development aid to Cambodia in response to the current clampdown, Hun Sen shrugged off the threat, praising Beijing for its no-strings support. In another June speech, he told foreign diplomats to keep their mouths shut, warning, in his characteristic third person, that “Hun Sen cannot be easily pressured.”

And so the long season of authoritarianism stretches on.

Even if Hun Sen comes out on top again, he won’t be able to avoid the question of how to reform a patronage-based political system that is in many ways unreformable. As Alley of Global Witness put it, increasing amounts of wealth are still required to “continuously reward the country’s elites who expect to be bestowed with ‘gifts’ in return for their unwavering support.”

And so the long season of authoritarianism stretches on. About a week before he was murdered in Phnom Penh, I called Kem Ley and asked him for a forecast of where he thought the country was headed. He said he saw little chance of an opposition victory like in Myanmar’s November election, where Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy swept to a stunning victory. “No,” he said, “this will not be like Burma.”

But the contradiction underlying Hun Sen’s rule — the gap between the needs of the system and the needs of the Cambodian people — will have to be resolved. When I spoke with him, Kem Ley warned that if a politically awakened population can’t get solutions from its leaders, it might be tempted to seek solutions in the street. “If the party can’t change to respond to the needs of the people, the people will change things for themselves,” he said.

Published by Foreign Policy, July 11, 2016.

Activist murder heightens political tensions in Cambodia

PHNOM PENH — Political tensions are intensifying in Cambodia following the brazen daytime killing of a high-profile activist in the capital Phnom Penh.

Kem Ley, a prominent political commentator and grass roots organizer who had just established a new political party, was shot dead shortly after 8.30 a.m. on July 10 while drinking coffee at a service station on a busy downtown intersection. The murder sent shock waves through the nation, raising political temperatures as the country moves toward local council elections next June and crucial national polls in mid-2018.

Police arrested a man who confessed to shooting the advocate over a $3,000 debt, but many Cambodians have been quick to claim that the murder was politically motivated — just the latest in a string of similar execution-style killings stretching back to the early 1990s. In a message posted on his Facebook page just hours after the killing, opposition leader Sam Rainsy denounced Kem Ley’s killing as an “assassination” and an “act of state terrorism.” Loun Sovath, a Buddhist monk and political activist, said that the act had all the hallmarks of “the traditional way of politics” in Cambodia. “They kill whoever is brave, whoever is smart, whoever is a leader,” he said.

In recent years Kem Ley, who headed the Khmer For Khmer rural advocacy network, had become a frequent fixture on Khmer-language radio and traveled widely through the countryside. Ou Virak, the president of the Future Forum policy institute, said that the slain advocate had won a large following by tailoring his language to appeal to rural people. “Kem Ley was a gifted communicator. He was able to simplify big ideas and policies into languages the people could understand,” Ou Virak told the Nikkei Asian Review.

In August 2015, Khmer For Khmer registered a new Grassroots Democracy Party, which was gearing up to run candidates in next year’s council elections. In the days before his death, Kem Ley highlighted questions raised in a new report from the U.K.-based corruption watchdog Global Witness, alleging that Hun Sen and his family had accumulated vast amounts wealth over the past three decades.

As news of the murder broke on social media, crowds descended on the petrol station where Kem Ley was shot and prevented his body from being taken away by an ambulance. It was eventually carried to Wat Chas pagoda, where it is being held until July 20, before the planned cremation.

On July 12, a large crowd had gathered at the pagoda to pay their last respects. Mourners lit incense and laid flowers beneath photos of the late activist. Some gently touched the dead man’s cheek as they passed his open casket, which was heaped with sweet-smelling wreaths of jasmine.

“We all feel sorry,” said Son Soubert, a former member of the Constitutional Council and a prominent member of the opposition, who attended the wake earlier in the week. “Mr. Kem Ley was very popular. The way he made his political arguments, it touched the poor. They accepted what he said.”

The assassination underscores the growing political dissent in Cambodia. Over the past 12 months, the government led by Prime Minister Hun Sen and the Cambodian People’s Party has arrested more than 20 people, including opposition parliamentarians, human rights activists, and a member of the National Election Committee, Cambodia’s official election body.

Opposition leader Sam Rainsy, president of the ascendant Cambodia National Rescue Party, is in self-exile overseas to avoid arrest on an old defamation charge if he returns to the country. Meanwhile, his deputy Kem Sokha has been holed up inside party headquarters for the past six weeks, facing criminal charges of his own relating to an alleged affair with a young hairdresser.

Back to bad old days

Kem Ley’s daylight assassination is an unsettling throwback to the early 1990s and early 2000s, when public murders of prominent journalists, union leaders and opposition politicians were disturbingly commonplace. Among the most well-known victims were royalist politician Om Radsady, shot and killed while he has having lunch in Phnom Penh in early 2003; and labor leader Chea Vichea, gunned down at a newspaper stand the following year. The New York-based advocacy organization Human Rights Watch claims that more than 300 people have been killed in politically motivated attacks in Cambodia since the early 1990s. The group says that very few have ever been brought to justice for the killings.

Prime Minister Hun Sen has promised a “vigorous” investigation into the killing and urged his countrymen not to jump to conclusions. But in a speech on July 12, he suggested that the murder may have been organized by unspecified enemies in a bid to discredit his government. “This is a huge loss and impacts the government’s image. Who gains to benefit from such a case which happened at the same time the government is talking about peace and safety for the people?” he said. Later, one CPP-aligned news website openly pinned the crime on the opposition CNRP in general, and Kem Sokha in particular, claiming that the leader saw Kem Ley as a “traitor.”

In a joint statement on July 11, 70 Cambodian civil society groups said that the only way to allay public concern would be to conduct a transparent investigation of the murder. “It is imperative that the investigation surrounding Kem Ley’s murder be conducted with the utmost transparency if it is to be credible and diffuse misunderstandings,” the statement said. The main suspect in the shooting, identified as 43-year-old Oeuth Ang, a former soldier and forestry official, appeared in court for questioning on July 12.

While political violence has gradually receded in Cambodian political life as Hun Sen has consolidated his hold on power, his party, in power since 1979, faces a steep challenge in extending its rule beyond the 2018 national election. At the last election in mid-2013, the CNRP cut deeply into the ruling party’s parliamentary majority, drawing on surging public discontent about corruption, paralyzed public institutions, and the lack of economic opportunities. For a more educated and more connected electorate, the CPP’s old claim to legitimacy — that it brought peace and stability to Cambodia after decades of chaos — has started to lose its effect.

In this context, Kem Ley had assumed an increasingly prominent status as a campaigner and commentator who fearlessly anatomized his country’s ills. It was after the 2013 election that he became disillusioned with the CNRP and founded the Khmer For Khmer advocacy network through which he gained a wide following.

For now, public anger seems to be contained. But Son Soubert said that while violent political tactics may have achieved their aim in the past in Cambodia, in the long term they are less likely to frighten new generations that are more connected via the internet and more informed about their country’s affairs than ever before. “I don’t think they can intimidate them anymore, especially the young people. They are more educated now, even in the countryside,” he said. “They say, ‘you can’t lie to us. We know everything now.'”

Published by the Nikkei Asian Review, July 13, 2016.

The Rise, Fall and Possible Renewal of a Town in Laos on China’s Border

For five years, this remote town on the China-Laos border has lived in the shadow of more prosperous times. On the main street, weeds grow where bustling shops and restaurants once stood. Old nightclub signs blister and peel in the tropical climate. Around town, abandoned multistory hotels loom like decaying sentinels, colonized by armies of jungle insects.

About a half-dozen years ago, Boten was a casino boomtown, a pinprick of neon amid thickly forested hills. Its gold-rush economy revolved around the Chinese casinos and gambling halls, which drew in thousands of visitors a month from across the border in Yunnan Province.

“When the casinos opened, there were many people visiting,” said Thong Arn, 54, a Lao businesswoman whose restaurant is one of the few remaining on a strip of shuttered shop fronts with faded Chinese signs. “Now there are no more tourists, only the people working here.”

But Boten’s luck may be about to turn once again. Chinese investors have poured more than $1.5 billion into a new development called the Beautiful Boten Specific Economic Zone, according to Laotian state media.

A glossy prospectus details plans for offices, factories, duty-free shops, tourism developments, an international bus station and a golf course. The development also includes a station for the planned $7 billion high-speed railway linking the Chinese city of Kunming and the Laotian capital, Vientiane, an ambitious project that broke ground in December.

Beautiful Boten resurrects many of the original plans for the town, with one crucial tweak: no gambling.

Vixay Homsombath, a Laotian official who sits on the board of the new development, said in an interview that the government had learned its lesson from Boten’s aborted gambling experiment. In a rush to bring development to this outlying region, the government gave the Chinese concessionaires too much control.

“At the time, we didn’t have experience,” he said. “The old developers focused on the casinos — that was their first priority.” And the government had little idea of the potential risks.

In 2003, a Hong Kong-registered company signed a 30-year lease with the Laotian government to set up a 1,640-hectare (about 6.3 square miles) special economic zone known as Boten Golden City, a trade and tourism hub intended to kick-start development in this backwater region of northern Laos.

Concrete was laid and brightly colored buildings rose in the hills. Chinese tourists and business merchants poured over the border, drawn by visa-free access and gambling, which is illegal in mainland China. The casinos spawned a satellite economy of brothels, nightclubs and karaoke bars, even a cabaret featuring cross-dressing dancers from Thailand.

With the Laotian customs office placed a few miles inside of Laos to make border-crossing easier, Boten became a virtual Chinese outpost, with clocks set to Beijing time and transactions conducted in Chinese currency.

But just as gambling powered Boten’s rise, it also brought about its fall.

In late 2010, reports emerged that casino concessionaires were locking up visitors who were unable to pay off gambling debts. According to reports in the Chinese news media, officials from Hubei Province were sent over the border to negotiate their release.

Shortly afterward, even though Boten is in Laos, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs ordered the casinos closed, tightened border controls and cut the power supply to the town.

Boten quickly went into decline. Most shop and restaurant owners packed up and went home. From a population of around 10,000 at its peak, the town is now home to just 500 souls, eking out a living amid the collapsing infrastructure of Boten’s heyday.

At the Jingland Hotel, formerly the Royal and once the showcase development of Boten Golden City, rooms are empty and a tropical dampness spreads through the upper floors. A jagged hole gapes behind the lobby: the former entrance to a demolished casino annex. Across the tarmac other buildings stand empty, their doors fastened with cheap bicycle locks.

“I’ve been here a year, but business isn’t great,” said Deng Jie, 25, who owns a bare-walled restaurant and karaoke bar on another forlorn strip of shuttered stores. Now he’s considering selling out. He sighed, saying, “I can’t keep going on like this.”

But amid the decay there are some small signs of renewal. Construction is underway on a series of 18-story towers along the highway through town, which has been lined with billboards showing President Xi Jinping of China shaking hands with Choummaly Sayasone, until recently the president of Laos.

Just as gambling powered Boten’s rise, it also brought about its fall.

Not far away, an old casino has been converted into a gem emporium, chandeliers aglow above marble floors and rich red carpets. Even the cabaret with cross-dressers is back in business.

The grand plans for Boten reflect the intimate ties between landlocked Laos and its giant northern neighbor. Since the early 2000s, Chinese money has poured into this communist nation of seven million people, mostly into mining, agriculture, hydropower and real estate.

In late 2013, the cumulative value of Chinese investment topped $5 billion, making China the largest foreign investor in Laos for the first time. The cash has been accompanied by a wave of economic migrants from China, who have settled in Vientiane and in enclaves across the country’s mountainous north.

Paul Chambers, director of research at the Institute of South East Asian Affairs in Chiang Mai, Thailand, said that while the early investments in Boten had a freewheeling nature, the spotlight now is on more strategic interests.

“China’s new focus on Boten is to make it a transportation hub facilitating greater Chinese penetration of Laos,” he said.

Despite all the promises, the benefits have been slow in coming. The main duty-free mall, converted from an old nightclub, is bereft of customers, its shelves of cigarettes and single-malt whiskey standing as still and pristine as museum exhibits. More popular is an adjoining room filled with slot machines and electronic roulette tables, the only type of gambling now permitted in Boten.

Analysts say that much depends on the progress of the China-Laos railway, which has been plagued by funding problems and other delays. Joshua Kurlantzick, a Southeast Asia expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, gave the project a “50 percent chance” of succeeding.

The slow progress makes many Chinese business owners nostalgic for Boten’s glory days, when the lights shone brightly and the town was mobbed by cashed-up tourists.

Zhang Xiangxun, 51, a shopkeeper from Anhui Province who came to Boten six years ago, runs a small grocery on the main street, its shelves heaving with Chinese beer, soap, snacks and fireworks. Business is slow. Mr. Zhang and his wife, Zou Zhonghua, 46, say they earn around 500 renminbi (about $75) per day, barely enough to cover rent and other costs.

But after so many years in Laos, they have decided to wait it out. “The casino’s shut and everything’s very quiet, but we’re still staying,” Mr. Zhang said, tapping cigarette ash into an empty Harbin Beer box.

While the couple are optimistic that Boten’s fortunes, and their own, have finally turned, Mrs. Zou thinks the real solution is much simpler. “If they just opened the casinos again,” she said, “business would increase a thousand percent.”

Published by the New York Times, July 7, 2016.