Sebastian Strangio's Blog, page 7

Aung San Suu Kyi courts ethnic vote

HSIHSENG, Myanmar — Just before the official campaign period for Myanmar’s Nov. 8 election, opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi paid a visit to this township in rural Shan State, where she delivered a speech from the back of a truck beneath a huge red banner and a portrait of her father, the late independence hero General Aung San. As elsewhere in Myanmar, “the Lady,” as she is known, demonstrated her singular ability to draw a crowd. In a muddy field an audience of around 1,000 — most of them Shan and Pa’O tribespeople — cheered, chanted and waved flags with the red peacock logo of her National League for Democracy. Others wore headbands printed with the words “We love Mother Suu.”

Suu Kyi appeared in Hsihseng, a rural area of deep green rolling hills around 128 kilometers from the state capital Taunggyi, to make an early pitch for the country’s ethnic vote. Addressing the crowd in measured phrases, she promised to form a government which would address the longstanding grievances of Myanmar’s ethnic minorities, who make up an estimated 30-35% of the population.

“After we become a real federal system, minority ethnic groups will be free from fears and they can independently decide their affairs,” the 70-year-old Nobel peace laureate said, to cheers.

The ethnic minority vote could well hold the key to whether the NLD manages to unseat the ruling, military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party on Nov. 8. The odds are already against it: with a quarter of the seats in parliament reserved for military representatives as per the constitution, the NLD will have to win twice as many seats as the USDP in order to gain power and elect the country’s next president. And if it is to reach the 333-seat majority it needs, say observers, the party must fare particularly well outside its traditional ethnic Burman heartland.

“In the Union Parliament, 40% of the seats come from the ethnic states,” said Sithu Aung Myint, an independent analyst and political columnist. “The role of the ethnic parties will be very important for the NLD.”

A week after her appearance in Shan state, Suu Kyi visited Kayah state, in the country’s east, another ethnically diverse battleground. In addition to the USDP, which swept the state’s seats in 2010, the NLD is also competing against Aung Min and Soe Thane, two well-resourced former ministers attached to the President’s office, who are running as independents.

Speaking in Demoso township on Sept. 10, Suu Kyi again claimed that in a crowded electoral field, her party was the only one capable of delivering real change. “If we can form government, we will serve the rights of ethnic people and protect them well,” she told a cheering crowd.

To win in ethnic constituencies, the NLD will not only have to trump the wealthy USDP, but also dozens of ethnic political parties boasting a bewildering array of ethnic, political and personal allegiances.

The 2015 election will feature greater involvement by ethnic political parties than ever before. Of the total 91 or so parties participating in the election, 59 represent ethnic or religious minorities, including many that boycotted the last widely derided election in 2010. Yan Myo Thein, a Yangon-based political analyst, predicted that ethnic parties could clinch as much as a fifth of the seats in parliament, emerging as an important third force. “The ethnic parties will become one of the leverage factors in the post-election period,” he said.

One man banking on that result is Sai Aik Paung, chairman of the Shan Nationalities and Development Party, one of Myanmar’s largest ethnic parties. Known locally as the White Tigers, and believed to be linked to the ruling USDP, the SNDP currently holds 58 seats in national and regional legislatures — and Sai Aik Paung is bullish about the party’s chances on Nov. 8. “In Shan state, because the Shan nationals are the majority, they only want to cast their vote for nationals,” he told the Nikkei Asian Review.

From its pool of 208 candidates, the SNDP hopes to win 100 seats, including 50 in the national – or Union – parliament. After that, he said, the party and its partners in the National Brotherhood Federation, a loose alliance of 23 ethnic political parties, will support whichever large party is willing to offer them regional power. “If they want to win the presidency, they have to come and lobby with us,” Sai Aik Paung said, denying that his party would automatically support the USDP. “We will have quite a lot of bargaining power.”

But ethnic parties like the SNDP face some stiff challenges. The main threat is the specter of vote-splitting: in many constituencies, voters will be forced to choose between two or more parties representing their particular ethnicity. In Shan State, for instance, the SNDP is going head-to-head with its local rival, the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy, also known as the Tiger Heads.

In 2010, the White Tigers broke away from the Tiger Heads after the latter decided to boycott that year’s election, and recent attempts to reunite have run aground on disagreements about how far to engage with the current, military-dominated system. In most ethnic areas, parties are divided along similar lines.

So far the only successful merger has been in Rakhine state in Myanmar’s west, where a unified Rakhine National Party looks set to sweep the election in that region. Elsewhere, according to a recent report from the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute, “the impact of identity politics and vote-splitting along ethnic and party lines may see electoral success falling short of expectations.”

Ethnic splits could be good news for the NLD, but the party still faces obstacles in its bid for the ethnic vote. While Suu Kyi can pull a big crowd in the ethnic states, she is dogged by perceptions of high-handedness in her dealings with local leaders. Counter to expectations, the NLD chose not to broker any alliances with ethnic parties – even those, like the SNLD, which were allies of the NLD in the 1990 election, when it won a massive victory that was subsequently annulled by the military.

Myat Thu, the founder of the Yangon School of Political Science, said many ethnic leaders bristled at the Lady’s “my-way-or-the-highway” style: “There are a lot of bitter feelings among the ethnic minorities over the NLD, and especially over Aung San Suu Kyi. She’s never reached out to them for a strategic alliance, or any form of alliance. They always have to approach her. It’s kind of like she’s arrogant or something.”

Sai Aik Paung depicted a leader out of touch with the grievances of ethnic people. “The majority of ethnic people think that she doesn’t care about our problems,” he said

Some ethnic leaders were particularly angered when the NLD announced it was contesting 1,151 of the country’s 1,171 seats, backtracking on an apparent promise to withdraw from seats where old ethnic allies stood to poll well. “She should not give frivolous promises. If she does, the people and her allies will lose trust in the NLD,” Aye Thar Aung of the Rakhine National Party told local media. Observers say that given their distrust of the NLD, some ethnic parties — including the RNP and SNDP — could well throw their support behind the USDP after the election, increasing its chance of holding onto power.

NLD spokesman Nyan Win said the party’s aim is to win the election first, and address ethnic concerns later. “We are trying to stand for democratic elections. Why are they angry about it?” he asked. “We think we are the only [party] who can compete, to transform the situation and reform the situation.” He dismissed USDP-linked parties such as the SNDP as “only interested in business,” adding, “We have nothing to do with them.”

On Nov. 8, the ethnic vote is likely to be determined by a complex interplay of ethnic allegiances, ideological divides, and the question of whether Suu Kyi can franchise her iconic appeal in remote, conflict-torn regions of the country.

It is clear where Thura Han Htoon Aung’s allegiances lie. The 40-year-old NLD supporter, who has a mixed Kayin and Mon heritage, said that the people were willing to support any leader able to improve their lives – and the Lady seems to fit the bill. “People want change,” he said, standing by a roadside in Hsihseng where ethnic Pa’O were beating drums, awaiting the arrival of Suu Kyi’s motorcade. “They’re waiting for a leader who can change things.”

Published by Nikkei Asian Review, September 17, 2015.

Dancing with dictators

Unbowed by prison terms and vicious beatings, human rights lawyer Robert Sann Aung has been battling Myanmar’s much-derided judiciary for more than 30 years

After decades fighting for justice in Myanmar’s corrupt courts – and suffering a deal of injustice himself – Robert Sann Aung remains unbowed. “I hate dictators,” the country’s foremost human rights lawyer said, his jaw working a hunk of betel quid, the gravel of long experience in his voice.For three decades, the 61-year-old has defended human rights activists and others consumed by Myanmar’s refractory legal system. In that time he has seen the surreal qualities of the country’s judiciary from both sides: from 1993 until 2012, Sann Aung was banned from practising law and repeatedly imprisoned in harsh conditions, physically attacked and trailed around town by “special branch” military intelligence goons. Recalling his six spells in jail – a fact stated proudly on his business card – Sann Aung reels off the dates with courtroom precision. His most recent: “2008, June 19, Thursday, to 2010, December 17, Friday.”

We meet on a Saturday morning in May, in a small apartment on Thein Phyu Road in central Yangon – the bedroom, kitchen, legal armoury and all-in-one headquarters of Sann Aung’s pro bono “Hygienic Legal Clinic”. The walls are lined with glass cabinets filled with legal volumes, laced with bestsellers by Thomas Friedman and Hillary Clinton. Papers are scattered everywhere.

It’s Sann Aung’s day off, and he looks like he’s just fallen out of bed. He wears a white shirt and bright blue longyi as he shuffles from desk to shelf, his mop of black hair askew, fetching documents and answering a novelty plastic phone which rings – frequently – to the tune of Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You”.

Sann Aung maintains a tireless schedule: weekdays for legal work, weekends for meeting journalists and other visitors. Since the reinstatement of his legal licence in mid-2012, he has taken more than 70 cases, representing journalists, protesters opposing a copper mine, jailed child soldiers, victims of land confiscations. All of the cases are pro bono, and Sann Aung supports himself by taking on additional civil and criminal cases. “Democracy and human rights are the most important things for the development of the country,” he said. “I’m also a former political prisoner, so I’ve always been interested to be a pro bono lawyer for political activists.”

Sann Aung has gained a reputation for doggedly arguing the law in a court system where the law often has little bearing on the outcomes of cases. Last year, he defended four journalists and a manager from the Unity news journal who were convicted and sentenced to ten years’ hard labour after publishing an article alleging that chemical weapons were being produced at a military facility in the central city of Magwe.

Sann Aung says the charges were baseless – “It was an illegal proceeding, an illegal order, an illegal appeal decision.” – and to make his point, he pulls out a copy of the 1923 Official Secrets Act (Section 2), which the Unity five were accused of contravening. Leafing through the browned pages, with their old-fashioned colonial-circular type, Sann Aung runs his finger beneath the legal definitions of “prohibited areas”, which he says was misapplied: “It was not a free and fair trial.” Currently Sann Aung is seeking justice for the widow of the freelance journalist Aung Kyaw Naing, also known by his pen name Ko Par Gyi, who died while in military custody in Mon State in October 2014.

In recognition of his work, Sann Aung was nominated in April for the Martin Ennals Award for human rights defenders, a collaboration between ten of the world’s leading human rights groups – the two other nominees are Ahmed Mansoor from the United Arab Emirates and Guinea’s Asmaou Diallo; a winner will be announced on October 5. The nomination brief praised him for taking on sensitive political cases with “little hesitation”.

“Within five years you can speak freely with journalists, but that’s it. The changes are very limited.”

Born in 1954 in Yangon Division, Sann Aung says he was attracted to the law from an early age. It started with a family connection: “When I was a child, my uncle was a judge, a township judge in Meiktila. When he visited my house, I asked questions about the law terms that I read in the newspaper.”

Sann Aung had his first encounter with political activism in 1974, during his first year of university. That December, student protests erupted when General Ne Win, the dictator of the day, refused to accord a state funeral to U Thant, the recently deceased UN secretary general. After a week of tumult, during which students commandeered U Thant’s coffin, the military responded with lethal force, killing more than 100 students. Sann Aung was arrested, interrogated and held for two months – the first in a career cycle of arrests and jailings.

Sann Aung finally received his law degree in 1982. One of his first cases was the defence of soldiers accused of high treason. For this he was accused of being part of the rebel Karen National Union and threatened with disbarment. As Myanmar shook to the 1988 pro-democracy uprising, the young lawyer spoke out strongly in favour of the rule of law, which earned him another short spell in prison.

Following the 1990 election, which was annulled by the ruling generals, Sann Aung took up the legal challenge of Peter Linn Bin, an independent candidate in Pyin U Lwin, a town outside of Mandalay, who challenged the result. In return, he received threats from the military and, in January 1993, the suspension of his legal licence, a moment he described as a “professional ex-party death sentence”. Subsequent spells of prison – from 1997-2003, and again from 2008-10 – only hardened Sann Aung against the “dictators” who he says still run his country.

It’s not surprising that the lawyer remains sceptical about the much-vaunted reforms that have taken place in Myanmar since President Thein Sein took office in 2011. Despite increased political freedoms, Sann Aung’s own domain – the judiciary – remains stubbornly dysfunctional. “The judicial system is under the administrative power,” he said, still chewing betel, “and 95% of the administrators come from the army. Township, district and regional administrators are not elected persons; they are nominated by the military chief of staff.” He says that even non-political cases resemble “an auction system” where the biggest bribe wins.

However, some things have changed. Political trials are now held in open court, rather than secretive, private proceedings. All the same, Sann Aung says special branch officers prowl around high-profile court hearings, and the media is often blocked from entering. “Within five years you can speak freely with journalists, but that’s it. The changes are very limited,” he said.

Given the state of the courts, Sann Aung’s role is as much political as it is legal. “I use the media,” he said. “After finishing a trial, when I go outside, most of the media are waiting for an interview. So I tell them, to the public. But in court there is no fair trial.” Sann Aung predicts that as Myanmar moves closer towards landmark elections scheduled for November 8, the quasi-civilian government will revert to proven tactics. “The situation near the election time will get worse. More political prisoners will be arrested,” he said.

Khin Zaw Win, the director of the Tampadipa Institute, a Yangon-based policy institute, who also spent time in prison on political charges, agreed that Myanmar’s judiciary was “the last holdout, the remaining bastion untouched by reform”. When it comes to political or human rights cases, he added, “very few lawyers will touch them, and the judges all follow orders from above. [Sann Aung] deserves all the prizes and honours that come to him. The best thing he could do for posterity is to set up an institute to nurture more lawyers like him.”

For his own part, Sann Aung is modest about his nomination for the Martin Ennals human rights prize. “If an international organisation gives me an award it can protect my career and my life,” he said. “I don’t need money. But I hope I will get it, for our country.”

Published in the Southeast Asia Globe, September 2015

Khmer Rouge’s ‘first lady,’ charged with genocide, dies at 83

PHNOM PENH — Ieng Thirith, the highest-ranking woman in the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, has died in Cambodia after a long illness, according to a United Nations-backed tribunal that is trying former regime leaders in Phnom Penh. A statement released by the court where Thirith, who faced charges of crimes against humanity, was deemed unfit to stand trial in 2012, shows she died Aug. 22 in Pailin, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold in western Cambodia near the Thai border. She was 83.

One of the few women ever to be charged with genocide, Thirith was deeply embedded in the upper echelons of the radical communist regime, which exterminated an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979. She was the wife of the regime’s foreign minister, Ieng Sary, and the sister-in-law of “Brother Number One,” Pol Pot, who died in 1998.

Along with her husband, Thirith was among five surviving Khmer Rouge leaders facing justice at the Phnom Penh tribunal, known officially as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. In 2012, proceedings against her were suspended after she was found unfit to stand trial due to progressive dementia. According to the ECCC statement, “She was released under a regime of judicial supervision [and] remained under judicial supervision until her death.”

Born to privilege

The daughter of a well-to-do provincial judge, Thirith was born into a life of relative privilege in the early 1930s. She graduated from Phnom Penh’s prestigious Lycee Sisowath and went on to study Shakespeare at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she became the first Cambodian woman to receive a degree in English literature. It was there that she married Ieng Sary, with whom she eventually had four children. Along with Pol Pot and his first wife, Khieu Ponnary, Thirith’s sister, the pair formed the nucleus of the communist movement that seized power in April 1975.

In “Democratic Kampuchea,” as the Khmer Rouge regime called itself, Ieng Thirith served as minister of social affairs, overseeing medical services and schools, which were severely lacking at the time. Though often dubbed the “first lady” of the regime, scholars say she was far from a mere appendage of her husband. “She worked her way up there because she believed in the revolution,” said Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which studies Khmer Rouge crimes. “She was not naive, but an active leader,” he added.

In his book Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, Philip Short wrote that during a tour of Cambodia’s northwestern region in 1976, Thirith was “shocked” at the disastrous health conditions that the regime’s ruthless collectivization policies had brought about. Instead of calling for change, however, she reported to Pol Pot that the conditions were the result of “foreign agents” trying to undermine the revolution.

Friends in high places

After being driven from power by the Vietnamese army in January 1979, Thirith and her husband settled in the western province of Pailin, where they and the ousted regime continued to enjoy military and diplomatic support from China, the U.S. and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which backed them in a civil war against the new Vietnam-installed government in Phnom Penh. Sary subsequently built Pailin into a personal fiefdom, using proceeds from the export of timber and gems across the Thai border.

Short quotes a British ambassador who attended a lunch with the couple after the Khmer Rouge fell, likening the experience “to having tea with Rosemary West and her husband, two murderous sexual deviants whose names became a byword in Britain for grisly perversion.”

In August 1996, Sary defected to join the Phnom Penh government and was pardoned by King Norodom Sihanouk, after which the couple lived a comfortable life in a shady Phnom Penh villa, flying to Thailand regularly for medical treatment. They were finally arrested in November 2007 and handed over to the ECCC, which charged them with crimes against humanity, genocide, and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. Like her co-defendants, Thirith consistently denied any wrongdoing. In a courtroom outburst in 2009, she even said her accusers would be “cursed to the seventh circle of hell.”

“I have suffered a great deal and I cannot really be patient because I have been wrongly accused,” she said.

Ticking clock

Thirith’s death, which came after years of deteriorating health, will have little direct impact on the proceedings at the ECCC. But it underscores the urgency of the tribunal’s task in completing its vital second case before the remaining defendants are incapacitated.

Since its establishment in 2006, the ECCC has brought just one trial to completion: that of Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Comrade Duch, the chief of S-21 prison in Phnom Penh, who is currently serving a life sentence.

Of the four defendants charged in the tribunal’s headline case, known as Case 002, only two remain alive: 84-year-old Khieu Samphan, the Khmer Rouge’s former head of state, and 89-year-old “Brother Number Two” Nuon Chea, the regime’s chief ideologue. The tribunal scored a victory in August 2014, when both were found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment in the trial’s first phase, Case 002/1, which dealt with Khmer Rouge’s evacuation of Phnom Penh in April 1975 and subsequent forced population movements. The verdict is under appeal. Meanwhile, Case 002/2, the trial’s second phase and the first to deal with the heart of the mammoth 772-page Case 002 indictment, is inching forward.

Dissension on the court

At the same time, the ECCC, a hybrid tribunal comprising U.N. and Cambodian judges, has been dogged by bitter disagreements over two possible future cases, Case 003 and Case 004, which have long been opposed by the Cambodian government. Prime Minister Hun Sen, himself a former midlevel Khmer Rouge military commander who defected to Vietnam in 1977, has publicly voiced disapproval of the new cases, which involve five midlevel regime leaders, one of whom is deceased.

In 2010, Hun Sen told U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that trials beyond Case 002 were “not allowed.” His position has been echoed in the decisions of Cambodian judges at the tribunal, who have largely stopped cooperating with their U.N. colleagues to move the cases forward.

The disagreement flared most recently in March, when international co-investigating judge Mark Harmon charged Case 003 suspect Meas Muth, the former head of the Khmer Rouge navy, with crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Harmon was forced to bring the charges in absentia, after Cambodian judicial police refused to execute a warrant for Muth’s arrest. Police similarly failed to execute a warrant for the arrest of former district commander Im Chaem, one of the accused in Case 004. The Cambodian government argues that the warrants, issued without the signature of Harmon’s Cambodian colleague, You Bunleng, are invalid.

With the tribunal’s continued operation dependent on donations from fatigued supporters, the political sensitivity of the two pending cases leaves the future of the tribunal in doubt. But however the saga ends, the tribunal has enriched the historical record, providing reams of first-person testimony that could help younger Cambodians, two-thirds of whom are under the age of 30, come to grips with the reality of what engulfed their country in the 1970s.

Despite Ieng Thirith’s death, Youk Chhang hoped the verdict of history would endure, even if the former minister can no longer be pronounced guilty by a court of law. “She was brutal to her population and she was active in supporting the [Khmer Rouge’s] policy,” he said. “This should not be buried with her death.”

Published by Nikkei Asian Review, August 24, 2015

China stirs up ghosts of Khmer Rouge airport project

KAMPONG CHHNANG — The military airport outside this river town in central Cambodia sprawls out in eerie silence, its vast concrete runway untroubled by any sign of aircraft. Half-sealed roads lose themselves in fields of scrub and sugar palms. Nearby, an empty control tower looks out over grazing cows and the odd villager on a motorbike — the only real traffic the airport has ever seen.

In the late 1970s, thousands died or were killed building the airport under the radical Khmer Rouge, whose mad push for a communist utopia led to the deaths of some 1.7 million Cambodians — about one-quarter of the country’s population.

According to prosecutors at the United Nations-backed war crimes tribunal in Phnom Penh, which is currently trying a handful of surviving leaders of the regime, laborers mostly used basic tools to clear the land, uproot trees and pour cement. Most were purged members of the military, sent to perform punitive labor at the airfield site.

In recent testimony at the tribunal, known officially as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, one survivor described the airport as “a place to be tortured and to be ordered to work hard.” Prisoners who could not keep pace were executed, usually by a blow to the back of the head.

Bou Yot, a 60-year-old veterinarian from the nearby village of Krang Leav, said that the bones of executed workers, accused of being traitors, were scattered in the surrounding hills. “There are many mysteries around these mountains,” he said. Most researchers put the airport’s total death toll at well over 10,000.

The airport’s 2.4km runway — still in near-pristine condition despite four decades of neglect — is also a clear reminder of the strong support that “Democratic Kampuchea,” as the Khmer Rouge’s regime was known, enjoyed from China, which dispatched hundreds of engineers to oversee the construction of the airport and other projects between 1976 and 1979. Chinese advisers also supervised the excavation of an underground command complex — a catacomb of reinforced concrete bunkers stretching hundreds of meters into the nearby hills. Not far away, four towering water tanks sit empty in the jungle, pinging with otherworldly echoes.

While Cambodian prisoners toiled in punishing conditions, local residents said the Chinese engineers lived in wooden houses with running water and electricity. Phat Bora, who as a teenager worked on a Khmer Rouge road-building brigade near the airport site, said she often saw groups of Chinese experts, easily recognizable by their blue trousers and collared shirts (the prisoners all wore black).

“They came to inspect the rice fields,” said Bora, now a work-worn woman of 53. “Their skin was very white and beautiful.”

Calls for accountability

As China prepares to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II with a Sept. 3 military extravaganza in Beijing, officials have taken up a perennial theme: accountability for wartime atrocities committed by the Japanese military. In March, Premier Li Keqiang repeated China’s long-held desire that Tokyo “face history” head-on.

“While inheriting the historical achievements made by their predecessors,” Japanese leaders “also need to shoulder the historical responsibilities for crimes committed by past generations,” he told journalists.

Such calls for Japanese accountability raise inevitable questions about Beijing’s own past actions abroad, not least its strong support for the Khmer Rouge. Between April 1975, when it seized power, and January 1979, when it was finished off by a Vietnamese invasion, the Khmer Rouge regime cut Cambodia off from the world and embarked on a “super great leap forward” to communism.

While China had no direct hand in the subsequent purges and killings, it was the only country that gave the regime unstinting support.

“Khmer Rouge documents show that Chinese support went from the village level all the way up to the highest level of the Khmer Rouge leadership,” said Youk Chhang, the director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which researches the regime’s crimes.

In his book, Brothers in Arms: Chinese Aid to the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979, Andrew Mertha writes that Chinese food aid and technical assistance began arriving within days of the Khmer Rouge taking Phnom Penh. In June 1975, the regime’s shadowy leader, Pol Pot, made a secret trip to Beijing to meet with then-leader Mao Zedong, who offered him $1 billion in aid — at that point China’s largest aid pledge to any country. Mertha said the aid ran the full gamut, from military materiel and radio transmitters to agricultural implements and food aid. A weekly flight from Beijing — Cambodia’s only link to the outside world — brought in thousands of Chinese engineers and civilian advisers.

Mertha, who heads the China and Asia-Pacific Studies program at Cornell University, said China’s support of Cambodia was driven by its desire to establish itself as a “third-way” power that could match the clout of the Soviet Union and the U.S. “Cambodia provided China, symbolically, with its first-ever client state,” he said.

The airport in Kampong Chhnang, which Mertha describes as the “jewel in the crown of Chinese military assistance” to Pol Pot, had a pivotal role in this scheme. If completed, the base’s location in the center of Cambodia would have given China a staging ground on the southern flank of its nemesis Vietnam, with easy access to the Gulf of Thailand.

For similar geopolitical reasons — a desire to isolate Soviet-backed Vietnam — China continued its support of the Khmer Rouge throughout the 1980s, joining the U.S., the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and much of the West in funding its civil war against the Hanoi-installed regime that replaced the Khmer Rouge.

Unanswered questions

Today, this obscure chapter of Chinese history is rarely mentioned by either government. In 2010, Zhang Jinfeng, China’s ambassador to Cambodia, broke a long silence by telling students that Chinese aid consisted only of hoes, scythes and food aid. “The Chinese government never took part in or intervened in the politics of Democratic Kampuchea,” she said. Unsurprisingly, Beijing for years opposed moves to put Khmer Rouge leaders on trial, worried perhaps about what might be told in court.

All this prompts the question: Why is China so reluctant to acknowledge its support for the Khmer Rouge, when past Chinese leaders have admitted the excesses of domestic catastrophes such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution?

According to Mertha, part of the reason is renascent official nationalism, which has made any criticisms of Chinese actions — even those of the pre-reform era — politically taboo. The past few years, especially, have seen “a significant and dramatic rollback in terms of the types of the sources that are available for people to do research, the types of topics that are on- or off-limits.” In the current environment, “the chance of revisiting China’s role in Democratic Kampuchea is virtually zero.”

“Cambodia provided China, symbolically, with its first-ever client state,” Mertha said.

The result, according to the prominent Chinese historian Zhang Lifan, is history a la carte. “The government propagandizes the parts which it finds useful,” he told the New York Times in March, “while ignoring aspects that could draw criticism.”

Cambodia, too, has reasons to put history to one side. Since 1990, when China finally cut off support for the Khmer Rouge, Beijing has slowly risen to again become Cambodia’s main foreign benefactor. When China’s then president, Jiang Zemin, paid a landmark visit to Phnom Penh in 2000 — the first by a Chinese leader since 1963 — the talk was of the future, not the past. Cambodia’s pragmatic Prime Minister Hun Sen told Jiang that his country’s blooming relationship with Beijing was “a precious gift.” A handful of protesters who hoisted banners protesting China’s support for Pol Pot were quickly bundled out of sight by police.

Since then, China has given Cambodia hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and investment, bankrolling the construction of roads, dams and bridges. In a move that might bring history full circle, Cambodian state media reported in early August that China’s Everbright International Construction Engineering is in talks to refurbish the Kampong Chhnang Airport, finishing the job begun by Chinese engineers nearly 40 years ago.

Despite its grisly history, what once made the airport a geopolitical prize for Beijing — its strategic location — also makes it potentially valuable for Cambodia today. Many locals said the economic benefits of a fully functional airport were more important than awakening old ghosts. “Every day I just see buffaloes. I want to see airplanes,” said Sang Sophat, 43, a guard who watches over the lonely runway.

But as many Cambodians embrace the prospect of a better future, villager Bou Yot fears that a full accounting of China’s support for the regime will be forever buried beneath the runway at Kampong Chhnang.

“I want the prime minister of China to be responsible for what happened in Cambodia,” he said. “For 35 years there hasn’t been even a word.”

Published by Nikkei Asian Review, August 21, 2015

Opposition boycotts parliament as Hun Sen moves to regulate NGOs

PHNOM PENH — The ruling Cambodian People’s Party forced a contentious law regulating the country’s large nongovernmental sector through parliament on Monday, amid widespread opposition and fears that the new bill will be used to stifle dissent and muzzle critics of the government.

The Law on Associations and Non-Governmental Organizations, usually referred to as LANGO, was adopted unanimously by 68 CPP lawmakers after opposition parliamentarians boycotted the vote in protest against the legislation. As the session took place, protesters gathered a few blocks away from the National Assembly, waving banners and wearing stickers amid a heavy police presence.

In recent months dozens of local and international NGOs have called for the law to be scrapped, arguing that the legislation is unnecessary, repressive, and open to abuse. Critics have taken particular aim at provisions requiring mandatory registration for all domestic and international associations and NGOs, and criminalizing any activity by unregistered entities.

The law also includes a provision requiring NGOs to maintain “political neutrality” in their work. Meanwhile, international NGOs can be shut down if they take part in any activities deemed to “jeopardize peace, stability and public order or harm the national security, national unity, culture and traditions of the Cambodian national society.” The bill will now move to the CPP-dominated Senate for approval — in practice, a largely ceremonial process — before being sent to the king for signing into law.

The legislation contained some small concessions to critics, including a reduction in the minimum number of members that NGOs will be required to have before registering. But John Coughlan, a researcher for the human rights group Amnesty International, described the overall impact of the changes as “superficial.” Taken as a whole, he said, the law would likely create a “bureaucratic minefield” for Cambodia’s 3,000-odd NGOs and community associations, as well as giving the authorities sweeping powers to shut down groups on vague or political grounds. “The whole regime it sets out is problematic,” Coughlan said.

The Cambodian government says the law is necessary to prevent criminal activity and the possible use of Cambodian NGOs to funnel terrorist funds into the country. In an April speech, Prime Minister Hun Sen said the government needed to know if money was coming into Cambodia from terrorist groups such as al-Qaida and Islamic State.

“If someone spends money to build a military force, how can we maintain national security?” Hun Sen said, in comments reported by the Cambodia Daily. “We are not making the law to block non-government organizations, we just want you to be transparent.”

Phay Siphan, a spokesman for the Cambodian Council of Ministers, said that Cambodia had a right to regulate the nongovernment sector, and was doing so in order to promote national development. “In 39 articles there is not a single word that the government intends to prevent the freedom of NGOs and freedom of speech,” he said.

But critics are not convinced, saying that laws to crackdown on terrorist activities already exist, and that the legislation will curb the activities of NGOs in key ways. LICADHO, a Cambodian human rights organization, claims that mandatory registration could have a particularly severe impact on the freedom of association of grassroots groups and community-based organizations, which have recently been effective in mobilizing local discontent around issues like deforestation and land-grabs.

Development aid threatened

The law could also impact the activities of large international aid agencies and NGOs that have helped support Cambodia’s reconstruction over the past two decades. On June 9 the European Parliament adopted a resolution warning that the passage of the law could cost the country up to $700 million in development aid annually. “LANGO would place restrictions on budgets, which would threaten the capacity of international NGOs to run cost-effective projects,” the resolution said.

Cambodia’s large nongovernmental sector has been a thorn in the side of Hun Sen and the CPP since the early 1990s, when a United Nations peacekeeping mission facilitated the formation of civil society organizations after years of war and international isolation.

Ou Virak, the president of the Future Forum, a Phnom Penh-based policy institute, said that the CPP has since viewed civil society groups, many of which are funded by foreign governments, as a fifth column seeking to unseat it from power. “They look at NGOs with great suspicion,” he said.

The passage of the new NGO bill coincides with a decline in the popularity of the CPP, following an election in mid-2013 in which the party experienced its largest political setback since 1998.

The opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party, which boycotted Monday’s vote, has deftly capitalized on rising popular discontent about land-grabs, ballooning income inequality and everyday corruption, which continue to plague the country despite impressive economic growth over the past two decades. Although it retains a majority large enough to pass legislation — it currently holds 68 seats in the 123-seat National Assembly — the CPP faces a stiff challenge to win back popular support ahead of the country’s next national election in 2018.

Ou Virak said that the 2013 election and its aftermath confirmed the CPP’s longstanding paranoia about the allegedly subversive role played by Cambodian NGOs. As such, the government was now equipping itself with a legal arsenal to face down a similar turn of events in future.

“They are fearful of a color revolution, or what happened in the Arab world,” he said. “The events of 2013 are feeding into that paranoia.” In addition to the LANGO, the government is readying a suite of potentially repressive laws including a draft trade union law, and another piece of legislation targeting “cybercrimes,” both of which critics say are aimed at trimming back fundamental freedoms.

Despite the sweeping powers granted by the NGO bill, Ou Virak predicted that it was unlikely to have much immediate effect. Unlike China or Russia — both of which have recently launched legal offensives against civil society groups — Cambodia has remained reliant on overseas development assistance, making it necessary to strike a balance between domestic control and international support.

As a result, the law is likely to come into play only if and when Cambodia experiences a surge of public opposition like that seen in 2013. Until then, said Ou Virak, the government’s aim was a system that combined the appearance of pluralistic politics with the perpetuation of its own rule. “It looks like a democracy,” Ou Virak said, “but one they can control.”

Published by Nikkei Asian Review, July 13, 2015

The Strongman of Siam

With Thailand’s ailing monarch fading from the scene, Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha is positioning the military to rule indefinitely — by silencing all dissent.

BANGKOK — On March 25, Thailand’s unelected Prime Minister Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha asked the country’s journalists for a little goodwill. “I am not saying you cannot criticize me,” he told a group of them at an air force base in the capital, Bangkok. “You can criticize me, but you have to have some understanding.” When asked about how the government would deal with uncooperative reporters, Prayuth’s response was deadpan: “Execution, maybe?”

The general was trying to be funny, but Thais could be forgiven for not getting the joke. In May 2014, the Thai military toppled the government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra in a coup d’etat. Since then, the 61-year-old Prayuth, formerly commander-in-chief of Thai’s military the Royal Thai Army, has suspended the constitution and dialed back civil liberties such as freedom of speech and assembly. In April, he ended martial law. But he replaced it with Article 44 of an interim constitution, which gives the ruling junta, known as the National Council for Peace and Order, sweeping powers to search, arrest, and detain people without judicial oversight.

Prayuth has further undermined his image with a series of tin-eared PR messages and public outbursts. After the coup, the junta launched a widely ridiculed “happiness” campaign involving free concerts and svelte young women in camouflage miniskirts. He even penned the lyrics to a pop song, titled “Returning Happiness to Thailand,” which defended the military’s seizure of power and promised to “bring back the love.” These attempts to remake military rule for the social media age have failed to conceal the general’s thin patience for the sort of questions usually directed at politicians. In recent months, Prayuth has hurled a banana peel at a television cameraman and referred to his opponents as “human trash.”

Like Thai military leaders past — since 1932, this country of 67 million has experienced 19 coups and coup attempts — Prayuth has described himself as “a soldier with a democratic heart,” working to cleanse his nation of corruption. (The one political constant throughout the country’s tumultuous modern history is 87-year-old King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who has held the throne since 1946.) From that long cast of strongmen, Prayuth’s impulsive style is probably most similar to Sarit Thanarat, the mercurial general who seized power in a coup in 1957 and ruled until his death in 1963. Sarit famously referred to Thai society as “a big family” in need of a strong, wise patriarch. Prayuth’s critics say his own year in power has reflected a similar view of the Thai people and their ability to make informed decisions. “I don’t think this is a democratic way of doing things,” said Phongthep Thepkanjana, who served as deputy prime minister in the ousted Yingluck administration. “It’s like ‘father knows all.’”

 

* * *

Prayuth was always a serious person. Born in the mid-1950s into a military family in Nakhon Ratchasima, a city in Thailand’s northeast, he told a student magazine that he wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father and be a soldier. The magazine described him as bookish and mature beyond his years — a teenager who enjoyed reading and studying more than playing outdoors.

Like much of Thailand’s military brass, Prayuth attended the Chulachomklao Royal Military Academy in Bangkok, and upon graduation, entered the officer corps. According to Paul Chambers, director of research at the Institute of Southeast Asian Affairs in the Thai city of Chiang Mai, Prayuth soon became a prominent member of the Eastern Tigers, a royalist military faction based in eastern Thailand.

In the 1990s, Chambers said, the Eastern Tigers amassed considerable wealth by trading gems with Cambodian Khmer Rouge insurgents based along the two countries’ border, a racket which “directly benefited” the faction and some of its commanders. Within a decade, the Eastern Tigers dominated the Thai military. In 2004, factional head Gen. Prawit Wongsuwan was appointed army chief, and a string of protégés and associates followed, including Gen. Sondhi Boonyaratglin, who led Thailand’s last coup in 2006, and Prayuth himself, who was promoted to army chief in 2010. Kasit Piromya, a former Democrat Party MP who served as foreign minister from 2008 to 2011, said that throughout his career, Prawit — now serving as defense minister — has looked out for Prayuth, helping shepherd him through the ranks. “Prawit was like a big brother,” Kasit said.

Prayuth was army chief when Thailand’s political crisis boiled over in late 2013. For years, a bitter struggle had pit allies of former prime minister and billionaire telecoms mogul Thaksin Shinawatra, whose social and economic policies made him wildly popular among the rural poor, against members of the traditional royalist elite. The fight reflected a widening social rift between the conservative middle-classes in the cities and the rural and working-class Thais, who found their political voice in support of Thaksin.

As the country stuttered from crisis to crisis, the streets of Bangkok saw oscillating protests by pro-Thaksin Red Shirts and anti-Thaksin Yellow Shirts. (While Thaksin has been in self-imposed exile for years to avoid prison on corruption charges, the 2006 coup failed to dent his popularity inside Thailand, where his proxy parties, backed by the Red Shirts, have swept the last three general elections, including a landslide victory in 2011 that brought his sister Yingluck to power.) On May 20, 2014, after months of Yellow Shirt protests calling for Yingluck’s resignation, the army declared martial law and summoned the country’s political leaders for peace talks — arresting them when they arrived. Two days later, Prayuth announced that the armed forces were assuming control. Televisions blared martial anthems; the constitution was repealed.

Upon taking power, Prayuth promised the Thai people “sustainable happiness” and laid out a “roadmap” for a return to democratic rule. “I have taken over the power because I want democracy to live on,” he said in January. Military spokesman Col. Werachon Sukondhapatipak said that after years of political dysfunction, somebody needed to step in. “His motivation is not for himself, for his own power, but to end the deadlock and take the country forward,” he said of Prayuth. He described the roadmap’s goal as “fully-functioning democracy.”

To some, however, Prayuth’s year in power has seemed stifling and paranoid. Flailing out at any hint of opposition, the junta has banned protests, political party activities, and public readings of George Orwell’s 1984. It has defined the public eating of sandwiches — an anti-government protest stunt — as a criminal act. When other activists adopted the three-fingered salute from the blockbuster Hollywood franchise The Hunger Games, that gesture was banned too. Over the past year, more than 1,000 politicians, academics, and journalists have been detained or sent to Thai military facilities for “attitude adjustment” — while Yingluck is on trial for criminal negligence over alleged graft in a rice subsidy scheme. Sean Boonpracong, a former spokesman for the pro-Thaksin Red Shirts who served as national security advisor under Yingluck, said this heavy-handedness reflected the personality of the junta’s leader: “a little bit erratic, highly-strung, emotional.” (In an interview, Werachon claimed that many of the general’s public utterances have been lost in translation. “This is just his sense of humor,” he said.)

Moving ahead with its roadmap, in April the government released a draft of a new constitution, which includes a pro-junta senate and a new voting system favoring small parties and weak coalition governments. With the constitution still to be finalized and approved by referendum, the government said in mid-May that a general election won’t be held until at least August 2016.

Flailing out at any hint of opposition, the junta has banned protests, political party activities, and public readings of George Orwell’s 1984.

Even then, it’s unclear what a return to democratic rule will entail in practice. The 35-member drafting committee claims that the draft constitution includes “everything that every citizen ever felt the need to fight for,” but critics say the military’s real aim is to prevent a return of the sort of concentrated electoral power once wielded by Thaksin. “The military is now trying to put in place an infrastructure through constitutional drafting to ensure that even when it is forced out of power, it could continue to control Thai politics,” said Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a Thailand specialist based at Kyoto University in Japan.

The real stakes go far beyond Prayuth’s legacy. Observers on both sides of Thailand’s political divide say the military’s long game is geared to the eventual passing of King Bhumibol, who is in ill-health. “They want to ensure that at the time of the transition, or the succession period, that they are still in control,” said Kasit, the former foreign minister.

Whether or not the junta succeeds in this aim, Prayuth’s “democracy with Thai characteristics” may struggle to bridge his country’s deep political and social divides. American academic David Streckfuss has described his rule as a throwback to Thailand’s “golden age of military dictatorship” during the Cold War, as outdated as the martial songs that accompanied last year’s coup. Particularly, it overlooks the rising political expectations of the Thai people. “This is not the same Thailand as 1958, 1976, or 1991,” Streckfuss writes. “And neither are the Thai people the same. Democracy in Thailand may not be inevitable, but its chances are considerably higher than successfully putting the genie of political consciousness back in the bottle.” In other words, Thailand’s latest military father figure may well find his “children” growing restless.

Published by Foreign Policy, May 21, 2015

Myanmar’s Internet innovators emerge amid connectivity boom

YANGON — It says a lot about Myanmar’s tech scene that one of its pioneers is still in his 20s.

Htoo Myint Naung was just 18 in 2004, when he built his country’s first mobile phone app — a simple program for sending text messages in the Burmese language. After graduation, when most of his classmates headed for greener tech pastures in Singapore or the U.S., he chose to stick it out in Myanmar, a country then languishing in a self-imposed digital dark age.

“I’m the only one who stayed behind and kept doing this kind of stuff,” he said. “I saw a lot of potential in Myanmar.” In 2006 Naung founded his software company Technomation and began developing apps for the tiny local market. It would take almost a decade for his gamble to start to pay off.

Now, thanks to a sudden connectivity boom and a rapidly developing cellphone network, Myanmar has become an improbable frontier for tech startups. In 2011, Naung plowed all his savings into developing a Myanmar-specific GPS navigation unit called PolarStar. It took him two years to draw the maps, build the software, and line up manufacturers in China. When it launched in 2013, the PolarStar navigation units, which were available in five models costing between $85 and $200, were an instant success. Technomation has since sold “a few thousand” of the sleek GPS units, which guide drivers around town with Burmese language directions. “Suddenly there’s a big market in Myanmar,” Naung said.

Speedy change

Just five years ago, Myanmar’s tech sector was almost a contradiction in terms. Internet access was expensive, and so sluggish that it was sometimes quicker to physically transport files across town than to send them digitally. Cellphone subscriptions, tightly controlled by the paranoid military junta then ruling the country, cost $3,000 apiece. Owning one put you in “a different class,” Myint Naung recalled.

Then, in 2011, the government of President Thein Sein took office and initiated political and economic reforms geared at ending Myanmar’s international isolation. The government awarded the Norwegian telecoms giant Telenor and Qatar-based Ooredoo 15-year licenses to expand the country’s limited telecoms network and boost internet penetration. Last year, the two companies flooded the market with cheap SIM cards.

The sudden availability of 3G data and cheap smartphone handsets — some costing as little as $30 — means that most of Myanmar’s 53 million people are experiencing the internet for the first time on mobile devices. “This is really the first time that a country of this size has come online so quickly and gone straight to smartphones,” said David Madden, the Australian founder of Phandeeyar, a collaborative tech hub in downtown Yangon. “Myanmar may well set some records for speed of penetration.”

By March this year, the country’s mobile penetration rate had topped 50%, according to Myanmar’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, up from around 10% at the end of 2013. So far, Myanmar’s relatively young population has been quick to embrace social media apps like Facebook and Viber, which have each attracted millions of local users. Facebook now has an estimated 3.8 million users in the country. Viber, the most popular messaging app, claims more than 5 million users.

Drawn home

The sudden appearance of a booming consumer tech market has also drawn dozens of young Myanmar entrepreneurs home from overseas, hoping their knowledge of local conditions can help them carve out a space alongside the big players. One is Myo Myint Kyaw, who studied computer science at Middlesex University in the U.K. before returning to Myanmar in 2012 to found RevoTech, a software and web design company. RevoTech is based in a musty, sixth-floor apartment in central Yangon where photos of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg share the walls with whirring air-conditioners. “Apple is like a religion for us,” he said.

Last year RevoTech released Phew, its first proprietary Android app, which teaches children the Burmese script; now it has plans to create an entire suite of educational apps. “Before I couldn’t imagine coming back and starting my own firm in Myanmar,” Myint Kyaw said. “I always wanted to do my own business, but this wasn’t a plan when I went [overseas].”

Myanmar’s tech sector still faces some stiff challenges. Developers have to deal with competing and incompatible standards for displaying the Burmese script. Power cuts remain frequent and the cost of internet is prohibitively high. It can also be hard for companies to find skilled graduates fluent in the latest coding languages, especially when better pay is still available in places like Singapore. “That’s not just in IT, that’s everywhere,” said Ko Revi, a long-time software developer and founder of DevLab Yangon, the city’s first collaborative tech hub. “The training schools don’t provide enough usable talent.”

But the biggest hurdle, many tech entrepreneurs say, is how to monetize their products. Less than 10% of Myanmar’s population possesses a bank account, a fact that has inhibited development of online payment systems. As Htoo Myint Naung of Technomation put it, “there’s no way of getting money through the banking system to the developers.”

Previously, Naung distributed his apps directly to phone shops on encrypted USB sticks. Now he is ready to launch his next project: an all-Myanmar app store. When Technomation’s app store launches — the plan is for this to happen later this year — it will allow customers to make purchases with prepaid scratch cards. With the impending extension of app stores like Google Play into Myanmar, he admits it’s a risky gambit. “There must be something to fill in the gap,” he said. “I’m trying to do it.”

Investor interest

Despite the challenges, overseas tech investors are showing strong faith in Myanmar’s potential. MySquar, a Singapore-based company behind the local chat app MyChat, claims it has attracted 800,000 local users since launching the beta version of the app in August. The company’s founders are planning to list MySquar on the London Stock Exchange’s Alternative Investment Market by the end of June, seeking $2.5 million in funding on a $25 million valuation.

Daniel Campbell, MySquar’s general manager, says the company and its investors are confident their product — honed over months of market testing in Myanmar — can coexist with dominant rivals like Facebook and Viber. “The more unique aspects we find, the more we can differentiate and change our products to suit Myanmar,” Campbell said.

Taking a similar local approach is Myanmar CarsDB, the country’s leading classified advertising site for cars. Not long after Myanmar’s vehicle import system was deregulated in 2011, Wai Yan Lin, 31, returned to Myanmar from Singapore and founded Rebbiz, which set up Myanmar CarsDB and other online classified services. Lin says he was lured by the prospect of being able to fill an important niche: “The country was opening up and the people here were trying to change, so I thought, why not?” Myanmar CarsDB now counts 80,000 active web users, plus 30,000 more on the site’s Android app. “It’s at a bit of an early stage,” Lin said, “but I think the time will come when it takes off.”

Others, like David Madden of Phandeeyar, are hoping that the connectivity boom can be harnessed for socially-progressive ends. In early 2014, Madden founded Code for Change Myanmar, a new-technology initiative, and organized the country’s first “hackathons” — tech cram sessions in which attendees are tasked with finding solutions to various civic challenges within a short space of time. Struck by the “huge” amount of energy, enthusiasm and talent he saw, Madden went on to establish Phandeeyar, a collaborative tech space or “hub” modeled on similar facilities elsewhere in the developing world.

The aim of Phandeeyar, housed in a converted office with sweeping views over the Yangon River, is to function as a permanent base for tech-related events, hackathons, and other tech-civil society collaborations.

“We’ve seen the tremendous impact that technology’s made in other countries. But one of the challenges is that because Myanmar was largely cut off from large parts of the world for so long, it’s not necessarily going to happen automatically,” Madden said on a recent evening, as local tech-heads gathered for a live, night-time streaming of the Google I/O development conference from San Francisco. “The idea was, let’s create a space that can try to harness the potential of this connectivity revolution.”

Published by Nikkei Asian Review, June 22, 2015.

Death of ruling party veteran boosts authority of Hun Sen

PHNOM PENH — The recent death of Chea Sim, a key figure in Cambodia’s politics since the fall of the communist Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, has put a spotlight on the future of Prime Minister Hun Sen, his long-time ally and one of the world’s longest serving national leaders. Chea Sim died on June 8 at the age of 82. For more than three decades, he had been a pillar of the country’s ruling establishment, serving for years as president of the formerly communist Cambodian People’s Party, as well as president of the country’s senate.

As old comrades and colleagues paid their respects at Chea Sim’s villa in Phnom Penh this week, CPP spokesman Sok Eysan paid tribute to the party stalwart, telling local media that he “used one of his hands to stop the Khmer Rouge genocide that killed the people from happening again, while using his other hand to hold a hoe and a plow to lead the people to rebuild the country.” Hun Sen declared June 19 an official day of mourning, when flags will fly at one-third mast and Chea Sim will be cremated in a ceremony near the Wat Botum Buddhist temple in Phnom Penh.

Though little known outside Cambodia, Chea Sim was a crucial figure in his country’s politics following the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979. Along with Hun Sen and 81-year-old National Assembly President Heng Samrin, he dominated the communist regime that controlled Cambodia throughout the 1980s, and maintained a prominent position in the multi-party system established after the end of the Cold War.

Born in 1932 in a rural area of Svay Rieng province near Cambodia’s border with Vietnam, Chea Sim studied at a Buddhist pagoda and began his political career as an organizer among the monks. In 1952 he joined the anti-colonial Issarak movement, and later the Cambodian communist party. Chea Sim continued to serve the communists — also known as the Khmer Rouge — after they seized power in April 1975, establishing a murderous slave state that would eventually lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians. After rising to the post of district party secretary in the country’s Eastern Zone, he fled to Vietnam in mid-1978 to escape vicious political purges.

Chea Sim served as deputy chairman of the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation, established by the Vietnamese communists in December 1978 to support their coming offensive against the Khmer Rouge regime, which the Vietnamese army drove out of power in January 1979. In the regime that replaced it, he became interior minister, drawing on his Khmer Rouge-era connections to carve out a prominent position.

Throughout the 1980s Chea Sim was a leading member of the Phnom Penh government, in firm control of the repressive state security apparatus. In his 2004 book “Cambodia After the Khmer Rouge,” Evan Gottesman described Chea Sim as “an old-fashioned Cambodian politician who understood how to nurture a patronage system and how to inspire loyalty in his followers.” But as time went by his power was gradually eclipsed by that of Hun Sen, a political prodigy 20 years his junior, who was appointed prime minister in 1985 and played a key role in international peace talks seeking an end to Cambodia’s long civil war. Unlike the mutable Hun Sen, Chea Sim was less able to adapt to the more open political system established after the signing of the Paris peace accords that ended the civil war in October 1991. After suffering a stroke in October 2000, and increasingly out-maneuvered by the wily and powerful Hun Sen, Chea Sim gradually withdrew from official duties.

Serious challenges

Chea Sim leaves behind a party that faces serious challenges as Cambodia moves toward national elections in 2018. In the last poll in 2013, the CPP saw its share of National Assembly seats slashed from 90 to 68 of the total of 123 — its worst electoral result since 1998. The Cambodia National Rescue Party, led by Hun Sen’s nemesis Sam Rainsy, deftly capitalized on rising popular discontent about land-grabs, ballooning income inequality and everyday corruption, which continue to plague the country despite political stability and impressive economic growth over the past two decades.

After the shock election result, Hun Sen promised sweeping reforms. The government has since offered wage hikes to teachers and soldiers, and reshuffled its cabinet to include a number of younger, more able technocrats. Two years on, however, the top leadership of the CPP remains mostly unchanged. In January, the 62-year-old Hun Sen marked his 30th year in power; many of his key aides and ministers have occupied senior posts since the 1990s, if not earlier. Before Chea Sim’s death last week, six of the 10 highest-ranking members of the CPP’s politburo, in theory the party’s key decision-making body, were founding members of the movement that helped to overthrow the Khmer Rouge in 1979.

At the same time, old political problems persist: Illegal or semi-legal logging continues to devastate Cambodia’s forests, and land-grabs by powerful people continue to make headlines. The government has also intensified its persecution of activists offering alternatives: The past two years have seen a series of violent crackdowns on demonstrations (when they have been permitted to take place) as well as the jailing of opposition figures and land rights activists.

As a result, the party finds itself out of touch with Cambodia’s young population, nearly two-thirds of which is below the age of 30, according to the United Nations. “The greatest challenge for the CPP will be to reinvent itself into a party of the present,” said Ou Virak, who heads the Future Forum, a Phnom Penh-based policy institute. “If you compare [party leaders] to the voting population there’s a disconnect there — the majority are not even from the same generation.”

“The greatest challenge for the CPP will be to reinvent itself into a party of the present”

Given his long illness, the death of the CPP’s long-time figurehead is unlikely to alter the internal dynamics of the party fundamentally. On June 20, the CPP will convene a special congress which is expected to appoint Hun Sen as the new party president, while current secretary-general Say Chhum has already taken over the post of senate president. But observers say the passing of one of Hun Sen’s main internal rivals may give him greater leverage to advance promised reforms and speed up the generational transition within the party. While Chea Sim’s hard power has long been in decline, Ou Virak said, the CPP president played an important role as a party elder, helping to defuse personal disagreements and intra-party turf wars. Ou Virak said this helped to maintain internal stability, but also prevented a necessary clean-out of ageing officials and hangers-on.

Ok Serei Sopheak, a development consultant who served as a political adviser to the CPP in the 1990s, said that with Chea Sim off the scene, Hun Sen will likely have more of a free hand to ease out party veterans and make the deep changes necessary to win back public support while maintaining the stability necessary for continued economic growth. “By becoming the president of the party he will probably have more freedom to introduce reform policy, to promote younger reform-minded people into key institutions,” Sopheak said.

The wider question, however, remains whether a greater reliance on Hun Sen, which many critics see as the root of the country’s problems to begin with, is really the solution to the party’s legitimacy deficit. Sopheak said that if Hun Sen now had more freedom than ever to make the right decisions, the reverse was also true. “If he fails,” he said, “it will only be himself that is responsible.”

Published by Nikkei Asian Review, June 15, 2015

Myanmar’s hard-line monk looms as key political player

MANDALAY — Myanmar’s most notorious monk is clearly enjoying the attention. In the hall where Ashin Wirathu presides, an entire wall is given over to newspaper clippings and large photographs of himself in various poses. One photo shows the man who has been described by some critics as the “Buddhist Bin Laden” with hands clasped beneath his chin; in another he gazes serenely at the ocean. Nearby, a painted portrait of the monk stares down over the worn floorboards where novices crouch to recite their sutras.

Wirathu is the media-savvy leader of Myanmar’s 969 movement, a hard-line nationalist group that has been accused of fueling waves of violence against the country’s Muslims and, more specifically, the Rohingya, a stateless people who live mainly in western Rakhine state. Since vicious sectarian violence erupted in 2012, tens of thousands of Rohingya are believed to have fled Myanmar, many risking — and some losing — their lives in perilous sea voyages in leaky boats. As this exodus has intensified in recent months, foreign journalists again began seeking out the man many believe is most responsible for the desperate plight of the Rohingya.

From his monastic perch, surrounded by monks and other supplicants, the 46-year-old Wirathu denied any hand in the boat crisis. “My preaching doesn’t aim to create tensions between Buddhists and Muslims,” he told Nikkei Asian Review in a weary tone. “I just give the message, like the signpost on a house that says ‘beware of dog’.”

Wirathu’s inner sanctum is at the New Masoeyein Monastery, a shaded compound in a dusty quarter of the central Myanmar city of Mandalay that sprawls along the Irrawaddy River. The atmosphere is tranquil, broken only by the chanting of novice monks and the hourly chiming of a colonial-style clock tower.

While Wirathu sports the saffron robes many Westerners associate with a life of spiritual contemplation, he peddles a poisonous message. In 2001, Wirathu founded the 969 Buddhist movement to counter what he saw as the alarming increase in the birthrate of Myanmar’s Muslim minority. (Muslims make up around 5% of the estimated 52 to 53 million population, according to official figures; Wirathu claims the real figure is more than a fifth.)

Since then, the diminutive monk has called for boycotts of Muslim-owned businesses and warned of an epidemic of Muslim rapes of Buddhist women. He has been a driving force behind a proposed package of laws to “defend race and religion.” In front of his quarters is a gruesome display, a billboard covered with alleged massacres and beheadings and desecrations — the supposed crimes of global Islam.

As for the Rohingya — frequently described, including by the United Nations, as “one of the most persecuted minorities in the world” — Wirathu and other nationalists deny they are even a proper ethnicity, instead calling them Bengalis and koewin — “sneak-ins” from across the border in Bangladesh. “If these people regard themselves as refugees I have sympathy and I want to show compassion and I’m ready to provide humanitarian assistance, but they need to be honest,” he said. “They say they come from Myanmar, and they say they are Rohingya. But actually they are Bengali.”

“My preaching doesn’t aim to create tensions between Buddhists and Muslims… I just give the message, like the signpost on a house that says ‘beware of dog’.”

Human rights activists claim Wirathu’s sermons were instrumental in priming the violence that erupted in Rakhine state in mid-2012, and its subsequent spread to Myanmar’s Burman heartland, where anti-Muslim pogroms and clashes spread rapidly throughout 2013. “Wirathu’s claim that he has not advocated or encouraged violence is utterly disingenuous,” said Penny Green, director of the International State Crime Initiative and professor of law and globalization at Queen Mary University of London. “He and ultra-nationalist monks throughout Burma [Myanmar] have been critical in fomenting Rakhine anti-Muslim violence through their concerted campaigns to stigmatize, marginalize and intimidate the Rohingya, and Muslims more generally.”

Wirathu’s hateful mantra was nurtured over many years in the monkhood. He was born in 1968 in Kyaukse, a town in Myanmar’s dusty central plain, and adopted his saffron robes after finishing the ninth grade. In 2003, two years after he founded 969, Wirathu was imprisoned for inciting religious violence and remained in jail until the government of President Thein Sein took office in 2011, initiating sweeping political and economic reforms.

Myanmar’s reforms have since been a boon for Wirathu. In 2012 he was released from prison as part of a general amnesty for political prisoners, and has been allowed to travel widely around the country preaching and cultivating his mini-personality cult. He has also capitalized on the country’s sudden growth in Internet access, communicating with his followers over Facebook — he currently has more than 62,000 followers — and through an official Android app, which relates a round-the-clock stream of Wirathu-related news and agitation.

Wirathu and other nationalist figures now loom as key players in the landmark national elections expected to take place in November. While the monk has ruled out supporting any particular political party, he said he would back candidates pledging to “defend nationalism.”

Those running for office can hardly afford to ignore the increasing clout of Myanmar’s hard-line groups. On June 2, Htin Lin Oo, a former senior member and information officer for the opposition National League for Democracy, was sentenced to two years hard labor in Sagaing, a region in the country’s central-west, after being found guilty of offending “religious feelings.” His crime? To argue, during a talk at a literary event in October, that discrimination on racial and religious grounds was incompatible with the central tenets of Buddhism.

His conviction came several months after a New Zealand bar owner and two local business partners in Yangon were jailed for three years for “insulting religion” after distributing a promotional flyer for the bar depicting an image of the Buddha wearing headphones. At both trials, members of the Association for the Protection of Race and Religion, often known as Ma Ba Tha, another group closely associated with Wirathu, protested outside the courtroom.

At the same time, many activists point out that the government has done suspiciously little to curb anti-Muslim hate speech and violence. While police cracked down on recent student protests, arresting several dozen demonstrators, hard-line nationalist groups were free to march through the commercial capital Yangon in May describing Rohingya refugees as “terrorists” and “beasts.” “Wirathu speaks freely and can go anywhere. Why don’t they do anything?” asked Ah Mar Ni, a former student activist and member of the Mandalay Peacekeeping Committee, an interfaith group formed after sectarian riots there last year.

The lack of action has led some to suspect that the nationalist resurgence has been fanned by “hidden hands” in Myanmar’s military or its proxy, the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party. One figure often accused of backing Wirathu and 969 is Aung Thaung, a parliamentary member of the ruling USDP and a former junta minister of industry who in October was placed on the U.S. Treasury Department’s sanctions blacklist for “intentionally undermining” Myanmar’s political reforms.

“Wirathu’s claim that he has not advocated or encouraged violence is utterly disingenuous.”

While the connections have not been conclusively proven — Washington has not revealed what specific evidence led it to place Aung Thaung on the sanctions list — it is clear that the USDP stands to draw electoral dividends from the rise in sectarian tensions. The issue has already wrong-footed their main rival, Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s one-time democracy icon and leader of the NLD.

As the situation in Rakhine state deteriorated, the Nobel laureate disappointed human rights activists by remaining mostly silent, fearful of alienating her support base. “For her and the NLD to win the election is really important, and with a majority,” said Harry Myo Lin, executive director of The Seagull, a Mandalay-based human rights organization. “If she speaks out, she will face big disappointment from the majority [of] Buddhists.”

Either way, many radical nationalists seem ready to accuse “the Lady,” as she is known, of being pro-Muslim, regardless of what she says. Wirathu once worshipped Suu Kyi and even sports a tattoo of the NLD’s peacock insignia on his left arm. But in 2012 he withdrew his support, accusing her, as did human rights activists, of staying silent — in this case about the violence supposedly committed by Muslims against Buddhist Rakhines. “She has emphasized democracy, but not nationalism,” he said.

While denying that 969 receives any backing from the USDP or politicians like Aung Thaung, Wirathu said he sees President Thein Sein as a good nationalist. “I fully trust in U Thein Sein,” he said.

Politicking around ethnic issues has been a common feature of Myanmar’s troubled modern history. Robert H. Taylor, a Myanmar specialist and fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, has described ethnicity as “a political cocktail from which demagogues drink and politicians, rather than providing the public guidance and leadership, do little to drain off except by appeasement.” Unless somebody steps up to challenge the prevailing narrative, Wirathu and his friends will all be drinking heartily from that particular glass come November.

Published by Nikkei Asian Review, June 11, 2015.

Vietnam: Forty Years Later

Forty years after the war, it is the ideals of the former South Vietnam that appear ascendant.

HO CHI MINH CITY—ON April 30, 1975, the army of communist North Vietnam took Saigon, toppled the government of South Vietnam, and brought two decades of American military involvement in Vietnam to an end. Today the fall of Saigon is defined, at least in the west, by two indelible images. The first, taken by the late Dutch photographer Hugh Van Es, shows a line of desperate Vietnamese trying to board an American helicopter from a rooftop in downtown Saigon. The other image was captured on film by the Australian journalist Neil Davis: It showed a North Vietnamese tank, bristling with diminutive bo doi infantry, smashing through the cast-iron gates of the Presidential Palace, climbing to its roof, and running up the standard of liberation.

In their own way, both images were a fittingly shambolic testament to a war that was hastily conceived, poorly planned, and conducted with brutal indifference to the people of the country that it ostensibly sought to save. The U.S. intervention in Vietnam cost the lives of around 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans, devastating the country’s physical infrastructure and setting its development back by decades. Forty years on, those who are old enough still remember the mixture of fear, relief and uncertainty that marked South Vietnam’s final days and the end of the war. “On April 30 there were tanks in the street here. Saigon was very chaotic,” said Nguyen Quoc Kien, 48, the owner of a coffee shop in Cholon, the Chinese district of Saigon. “I remember a girl – she was shot at a roundabout because she was a Viet Cong.” Pham Van Minh, 67, a former engineer in the South Vietnamese navy, remembered an eerie calm. “We were very happy to have peace, to have the war finished,” he said, crossing his fingers and jabbing them to emphasize the closing of one era and the beginning of another.

Last month, Saigon – almost no one here calls it by its official name – marked the 40th anniversary of the great communist victory with lavish parades and reenactments. In preparation, the center of town was plastered with even more communist propaganda posters than usual. These blared the familiar socialist imagery: swooping doves, charging tanks, Uncle Ho etched on slabs of blue and red, beaming like a communist Colonel Sanders.

The city of Ho Chi Minh has become a place of wild economic energy, a mainspring of economic renovation, the hub and pulsing heart of a great Vietnamese Capitalist Party.

For years Vietnam’s communist leader was the most potent “brand” in the city bearing his name. But Saigon today is a very different place. Two decades of economic growth have created a burgeoning consumer class and Uncle Ho faces increasing competition from the corporate icons of the West. On Dong Khoi Street in the heart of old French Saigon, glitzy boutiques sell the most exclusive European fashion brands. Not far away, the high-end Diamond Plaza shopping center seems almost defiantly bourgeois, considering it sits on a street named after a famous communist leader, beneath a row of illuminated signs proclaiming, “Celebrate the 40th anniversary of the liberation of the south.” Next to the advertisements for Lancôme and Burberry and Salvatore Ferragamo are posters covered with ideological exhortations and cartoon proletarians, their arms raised in militant salute.

Forty years after the great communist victory, the ironies of Vietnam’s brand of “market-oriented socialism” have been dialed up to a high pitch. Far from a monument to its austere namesake, the city of Ho Chi Minh has become a place of wild economic energy, a mainspring of economic renovation, the hub and pulsing heart of a great Vietnamese Capitalist Party.

Evacuation

When Saigon fell, Than Trong Phuc was 17 years old, in his second-last year of high school. He came from a family that was solidly republican: his father was a retired officer in the South Vietnamese army and his mother worked at the U.S. consulate in Danang, close to one of the largest American military bases in South Vietnam. In early 1975, as the communists launched their all-in offensive against the southern regime, overrunning the Central Highlands and taking Danang in March, Than’s family relocated to join him in the capital where they waited out the final days. As the relatives of an American employee, these were among the lucky few eligible for evacuation and resettlement in the U.S. On the evening of April 29, nine members of Than’s family crowded onto three scooters and drove through the empty city streets towards the fortified U.S. embassy compound on Thong Nhat Boulevard. Just after midnight, Than was plucked from the roof and choppered out of his homeland.

For many years, Than put Vietnam behind him. After short spells in Minnesota and Florida, the family finally settled down in Torrance, California. Than graduated with an engineering degree from the University of California at Davis and, in 1986, went to work for the computer giant Intel in Santa Clara. There he built a solid career, as the firm rode the 1990s consumer computing boom. One day in late 1999, he took a call from one of the firm’s executives. “He said to me, “look, we are expanding to Vietnam, are you interested in going back?’” Than recalled. “Of course I said yes.” In January 2006, Intel announced it would construct its largest chip assembly plant in Ho Chi Minh City, an investment that was eventually worth $1 billion.

Than Trong Phuc is just one of thousands of viet kieu, or overseas Vietnamese, who have returned to do business in the land of their birth. “When I left I never thought that one day I would come back,” said Than, now the managing director of DFJ VinaCapital, one of Vietnam’s first venture capital funds. “When the Intel idea came up I said, oh, Vietnam’s opening up, so here’s a chance to do something meaningful.”

Between Than’s departure as a refugee and his return as a businessman, Vietnam had come a long way. When the war ended, 70 percent of the population lived below the official poverty line. This was only compounded by the vindictive campaign waged by the U.S. government. Humiliated by its defeat in the war, Washington imposed a trade embargo, cutting off the devastated country from most of the Western world. Socialist Vietnam became an international pariah state, reliant on handouts from the Soviet Union. To be sure, Communist policies shared some of the blame. After the war, the party introduced collectivization and land reform policies that hit agricultural production hard and drove tens of thousands to flee the country on leaky boats, seeking better lives in the West.

In 1986, the party discarded hardline socialist policies and announced doi moi, a campaign of economic reforms aimed at creating a “socialist-oriented market economy.” Hoisting high the banner of socialism, the government embraced the market. Foreign investors arrived, and the economy grew. By 2000, the poverty level had fallen to 32 percent; twelve years later, it was just 11.3 percent. In that time, the country’s GDP grew by an average of nearly 6.5 percent per year. In 2007, Vietnam brokered a trade deal with the U.S., its former enemy, and joined the World Trade Organization. Thirty years after victory and reunification, communist Vietnam was hailed as Asia’s newest tiger economy, a fully integrated member of the global capitalist economy.

Today, amid the manifold ironies of hammer-and-sickle capitalism, it would be reasonable to revisit the question of exactly which side won the war. Reflecting on a changing Vietnam, Than Trong Phuc said the insistence of Vietnam’s socialist propaganda masked the fact that it no longer had any relevance outside of a small “legacy group” in the party. “It’s just a façade,” he said. “Nobody gives a hoot about the hammer and the sickle… They don’t want to lose face, they don’t want to lose face that we won the battle, but we may have lost the war.”

‘Interest Groups’

Sometime around 2011, a new phrase entered the popular lexicon in Vietnam. Seemingly overnight, talk of nhom loi ich, or “interest groups,” was everywhere, especially in the country’s newly flourishing blogosphere. The reason was a string of high-profile corruption scandals involving the friends and relatives of powerful members of the Vietnamese Communist Party.

Corruption and nepotism were nothing new in Vietnam, but an economic downturn had suddenly focused public ire on the new elite class that was using its political connections to get rich. With internet access spreading rapidly, critics also now had a way of circumventing the state’s tight control of the press, which had previously kept these sorts of high-level scandals under wraps.

The phenomenon of “interest groups” came up frequently in a conversation I had recently with Pham Chi Dung, a former communist party member. Dung resigned his membership in late 2013, disgusted with the government’s unwillingness to tackle graft. “The origin of heavy corruption in Vietnam is one party,” Dung told me. “If we want to change this we must have multi-parties, democracy, and human rights.” In late 2013 Dung caused a stir when he penned an open letter explaining his reasons for renouncing his party affiliation. “Never before has corruption been so rampant at all levels,” he wrote in the letter, which was published widely online. “Never before have specific groups and political cronies benefited so profoundly from their cooperation [with the party]. Never before has the gap between the poor and the rich been so wide.”

“What we often refer to as ‘reform’ is as much about attempts by rival political-business interests to gain control over financial and other resources,” the British academic Martin Gainsborough wrote in 2002.

I met Dung at the Wheel House Café, an American diner-style establishment on a narrow street in the Tan Binh district of Ho Chi Minh City. The wiry 49-year-old sat on a red vinyl couch, leaning forward with one leg crossed over another, as he told the story of his disillusionment. In his youth, Dung was a true believer. He recalled the pride and excitement he felt on April 30, 1975, when news of the great victory reached Hanoi, where he was then living. The son of a high-ranking party figure, he graduated from the military academy in 1989 and joined the party as soon as he could.

Dung’s falling out with the party was gradual. At first, he understood why the party mandarins turned to market mechanisms to boost the economy, but working as a journalist for the state-run press in the 1990s, he saw first-hand evidence of the corruption and inequality that had replaced the ideals of socialist brotherhood. Later, he began putting his concerns in writing and sending them to Vietnamese publications overseas. In July 2012 he was arrested and spent five months in jail. The experience drained what hope he had left that the system could be reformed. “I decided that the Vietnamese Communist Party is not for the benefit of the people,” Dung said. “It is for interest groups.”

In 2013 Dung finally quit. He had decided to leave ten years before, but was afraid of losing the associated privileges. The next year he founded the Independent Journalists Association of Vietnam, which today boasts 82 members, 23 of them overseas. As an outspoken dissident, Dung is now followed everywhere by police and has had his passport confiscated by the authorities. Pausing between quick swigs of iced coffee, Dung reflected on his political evolution since his nine-year-old self cheered the liberation of the south. “Forty years, there’s been an incredible change,” he said. “My idealism about communism is broken, quite broken.”

Widening Gap

In recent years, the communist leadership has struggled to reconcile the party’s message of social justice and equality with the widening gap between the new elite and the bulk of the population. Despite the patina of wealth in cities like Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, poverty remains stubbornly high. This is especially true in rural areas and among members of Vietnam’s 53 ethnic minority groups, who make up around 13 percent of Vietnam’s population of 90 million, yet account for over 40 percent of its poor.

In recent years, popular discontent has found an outlet in a rising number of labor strikes, which now occur at an average of around 1,000 per year – or three per day, according to Tuong Vu, an associate professor of political science at the University of Oregon. In March this year tens of thousands of garment workers at a Chinese-owned factory on the outskirts of Saigon walked off the job to protest a new insurance law that would prohibit workers from collecting a lump-sum insurance payment if they resign.

On a humid morning in late April, I met Nguyen Van Hoang in an empty lot next to bustling Tran Phu Road, near a strip of shops selling garish framed art prints. On the whole, the 55-year-old cyclo driver was impressed with the country’s growth after the past two decades. “Now that the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is oriented towards capitalism it is better,” he said. But while there were more opportunities for the young and well-educated, his lot remains tough. On a good day, he can make 100,000 dong (about $4.50) per day peddling passengers around town.

Lounging backing on the vinyl seat of his battered pedicab, he seemed torn between gratitude and hardship, between relief that the country is at peace and frustration at the lack of opportunities in the new Vietnam. “I’m living in two societies,” he said, “between the old one and the new one.”

In the new society, most people agree that the main problem is the close links between party leaders and the managers of Vietnam’s powerful state-owned enterprises. These account for around 40 percent of Vietnam’s economic output, yet are poorly managed and riddled with corruption. Tuong Vu said that the state’s continued ownership of Vietnam’s land and major productive assets had provided opportunities to place cronies in plum positions. “Those with political connections have benefited the most,” he said. “The state distributed the land and the assets to their cronies and friends and party members…they divided it among themselves, and that’s created a lot of resentment.”

In April 2012, the Vietnamese blogosphere went into a tailspin when To Linh Huong, the 24-year-old daughter of Politburo grandee To Huy Ria, was appointed the head of a state-owned construction company. Three months later, amid widespread criticism, Huong resigned her post.

Crony Capitalism

Then there is the family of the prime minister, Nguyen Tan Dung, whose children head the list of “red offspring” who have risen in the firmament of “market-oriented socialism.” Since taking office in 2006, Dung has proven himself to be a classic southerner, friendly to business, who has successfully guided Vietnam though a period of economic instability. But many say he has also presided over a slide towards crony capitalism and political back-scratching.

Vietnam’s new business-political nexus is well illustrated by Dung’s daughter Nguyen Thanh Phuong. Phuong is married to the viet kieu businessman Henry Nguyen, who holds a bustling business portfolio that includes a stake in a Los Angeles soccer team and the country’s first McDonald’s franchise, which opened in Ho Chi Minh City in 2013. She is also a formidable businessperson in her own right. She heads Viet Capital Asset Management, an investment fund, and a brokerage called Viet Capital Securities; she also served briefly as chairwoman of Viet Capital Bank, before stepping down amid an outcry about the family connections which allegedly delivered her the position. In a leaked diplomatic cable from 2006, Seth Winnick, the U.S. consul-general in Ho Chi Minh City, profiled the business successes of Phuong and her brothers. “There is no doubt that she is talented,” he wrote. “However, her rapid advance, and the many doors that opened for her and her two brothers are indicative of how the Vietnamese political elite ensures that their progeny are well placed educationally, politically, and economically.”

The government seems to be aware of its mounting legitimacy problem. At a local meeting in 2012, Nguyen Phu Trong, the party’s general-secretary, told reporters that “so many party members have gotten richer so quickly, leading a lavish life that is miles away from that of the workers.” In the past few years, the authorities have made a show of cracking down on corruption at the highest levels of government. Last year, the government sentenced three bankers to death for corruption and embezzlement, and handed down life sentences to a number of their accomplices. One prominent case involved a former executive at the Vietnam Development Bank who was convicted of misappropriating $93 million.

Over the years, critics have questioned the motivation of high-profile anti-graft trials in Vietnam. “What we often refer to as ‘reform’ is as much about attempts by rival political-business interests to gain control over financial and other resources,” the British academic Martin Gainsborough wrote in 2002. More recently, others have argued that the anti-corruption purge is connected with an internal power struggle between the prime minister and his main rival, the party boss Nguyen Phu Trong. “Part of it is political,” said Carlyle A. Thayer, a Vietnam expert at the Australian Defense Force Academy in Canberra. “It is to pull down allies in the banking sector, allies of the prime minister who have political cover.”

This struggle is only likely to intensify as Vietnam approaches the 12th Party Congress of the Vietnamese Communist Party, scheduled for early next year. Tu Vuong said that there were two broad groups in the party. On one side there is the “moneymaking faction,” a group connected to the prime minister which uses its access to power to enrich relatives and cronies.

“It has taken the path which has been about preserving the party rule, which is seen as the most important thing,” Hayton said. “Everything else has been up for negotiation.”

On the other is a “loyalist” faction retaining some adherence to the party’s founding values. With Dung set to vacate his office, there is some talk that he will seek the position of party boss, currently held by his rival. Either way, Tu Vuong said, he is likely to face considerable opposition. Bill Hayton, a journalist and author of the book Vietnam: Rising Dragon, said internal disagreements may crystallize around the issue of whether Vietnam should join the Trans Pacific Partnership, a U.S.-led regional free trade pact. Dung and his supporters are widely believed to support Vietnam’s membership. But while Hanoi and Washington have grown close in recent years, in large part because of China’s rise as a global power, many others in the party remain deeply suspicious of “peaceful evolution” towards the democracy advocated by the U.S. “They regard it as a sinister threat to the rule of the communist party, the idea that through the power of Facebook and Starbucks, the Americans will overthrow the communist party,” Hayton said. “They are reluctant to have any kind of partnership which kind of gives the U.S. a say in Vietnamese politics.”

Loyal Protest

Whatever happens, the party faces will face challenges sustaining the economic growth and beating back corruption, the main things it will need to do to maintain popular support. However, Hayton pointed to recent signs of accountability in the party. Earlier this year, when authorities in Hanoi announced plans to cut down 6,700 trees across the city, outraged residents mobilized to oppose the plan. A Facebook group was formed and received 20,000 “likes” in the first 24 hours. The state media was let off the leash and ran op-eds and news stories about the opposition to both the tree-culling plan, and the poor state of decision-making in general. “Good, transparent governance is what people demand,” one concluded.

Eventually, Hanoi’s authorities put the tree-cutting on hold and promised to reconsider the policy. Hayton sees it as a rare and promising sign that the system might be capable of change. “People used the system,” he said. “They protested, but they were loyal. They used the media and they used their connections. That’s probably more significant than the dissident activities… It embodies a sense of dynamism within the party.”

It remains an open question, however, whether the party will allow more fundamental conversations – about history, the war, and what came after. In the official commemorations at the end of April, the communist party presented the war as the latest in a long line of Vietnamese victories against foreign invaders. Somewhere between Marx and Mastercard, the party quietly discarded its socialist inheritance. Hayton said it was just one of the many pragmatic adjustments it has made to remain in power. “It has taken the path which has been about preserving the party rule, which is seen as the most important thing,” he said. “Everything else has been up for negotiation.”

In his recent two-volume book Ben Thang Cuoc (“The Winning Side”) journalist and army veteran Huy Duc reflected on his experiences of Vietnam since the end of the war. In hindsight, he wrote, it was the south that liberated the north, rather than vice versa. The book has been controversial in Vietnam, but Tu Vuong said its enthusiastic reception was a sign of a growing understanding that the communist victory of forty years ago marked the end not just of a foreign occupation, but also the end of a bloody civil war, and the victory of one particular vision of Vietnam’s future. Perhaps one day, forty months or forty years from now, another vision will emerge.

Published in The Diplomat magazine, May 2015.