Sebastian Strangio's Blog, page 8

Forty years after ‘Year Zero’: Cambodia’s young wrestle with a dark past

TAKEO, Cambodia — Four decades ago, on April 17, 1975, the communist Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh and seized power. As a 13-year-old boy living in Cambodia’s capital, Rithy Panh, now an internationally acclaimed documentary filmmaker, recalls the unease that settled over the city as the black-clad peasant troops took control. “I felt something very oppressive,” he said. “It was something very heavy, like the weather before the rain.”

The takeover launched a bloody political maelstrom that engulfed Cambodia for three years, eight months and 20 days. Setting the dial for their twisted vision of a “Year Zero” utopia, the Khmer Rouge and paramount leader Pol Pot emptied the cities, banned money and enslaved the population in vast rural collectives.

By the time the regime collapsed in January 1979, an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians had perished from starvation, overwork, torture and execution. Rithy survived but lost most of his immediate family. He would spend his subsequent career attempting to make sense of the cataclysm through his films. “I promised that if I would survive I would tell what happened,” he said at his studio in Phnom Penh.

“They don’t want to listen”

Today, Cambodia is a very different place. From 1998 to 2007, its economy grew at an average pace of 10% per year, one of the fastest in the world. Phnom Penh, a ghost town under Pol Pot, has been transformed into a bustling city of high-rise office buildings and glitzy shopping malls, where youth sport the latest electronic gadgets. Nearly two-thirds of Cambodia’s 15 million-plus population is under 30, according to United Nations data, meaning that only a small minority has any direct memory of the bloody Khmer Rouge era.

The upshot is a growing divide between those who directly experienced the nightmare and those who can barely imagine it. Among the latter is Svay Bros, a 16-year-old in Takeo, a sleepy provincial town 75km south of the capital. Growing up, Bros learned of the Khmer Rouge as a bogeyman invoked by older relatives to scare him into behaving. “When I’m lazy my grandparents often say, ‘In the Pol Pot time, you would have been killed for that’!”

“I felt something very oppressive,” he said. “It was something very heavy, like the weather before the rain.”

For Than Rath, an 18-year-old clad in a Newcastle United soccer jersey, past horrors fade in importance next to the usual teenage concerns: girls, gadgets and going out. “I want to have some money, and I’m not too worried about the past,” he said, sitting at a village cafe his family owns in Takeo. His father, Keo Thy, 44, complained: “I try to tell my sons about my life under Pol Pot and they don’t want to listen to me. … They don’t want to know about torture, killing or hardship.”

Underscoring the irony of Keo Thy’s lament, one of the grisliest vestiges of Khmer Rouge rule stands near his village. Kraing Ta Chan Security Center was established in 1972 in one of the first parts of Cambodia to be captured by the communist insurgents. It served first as a training and education facility for Khmer Rouge cadre, and then as a security center, where suspected enemies of the regime were jailed, tortured and executed.

Than Rath’s grandfather, Keo Thon, 67, recalled seeing blindfolded prisoners being walked through his village during the Khmer Rouge years. They came most days, he said, “usually in the afternoon.”

Prosecutors at the U.N.-backed tribunal currently trying former Khmer Rouge leaders in the capital claim that some 15,000 people lost their lives at Kraing Ta Chan. Today it is a quiet, leafy place, marked by a white stupa filled with hundreds of exhumed skulls. At its base lie bundles of burnt-out joss sticks and two dishes, one bearing a rusted shackle from the old prison, the other a pile of human teeth.

Elsewhere, hand-painted information boards mark the location of burial pits and other landmarks. One describes how inmates were questioned under torture. “The answers didn’t matter,” it states flatly. “They were all killed eventually.”

“There’s a huge gap”

Kraing Ta Chan is just one of hundreds of former killing sites that dot Cambodia, totems of a dark and unresolved history. Elsewhere, survivors wrestle privately with their traumas, while hundreds of killers who received amnesty in later years under Prime Minister Hun Sen — himself a former Khmer Rouge cadre — live in peaceful retirement.

Robert Carmichael, author of “When Clouds Fell from the Sky,” a new book on the period, said that despite the achievements of the Khmer Rouge tribunal — known officially as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia — the country remains largely unreconciled. “There’s a huge gap that hasn’t been bridged at all,” he said.

One key to closing this gap, some say, is education. Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, or DC-Cam, said that while many Cambodian youth might see the past as remote from their concerns, they would sooner or later start to ask questions. “I think that as they grow older, they will realize that it’s incredibly significant for their future,” he said.

To provide them with answers, DC-Cam, an independent body that researches Khmer Rouge crimes, in 2007 published “A History of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979).” It was the first proper school textbook on the Khmer Rouge. In 2009, the 73-page volume, a clear-eyed text featuring rare photos from DC-Cam’s archives, became a compulsory part of the national high school curriculum. It has since been translated into six languages, and more than 350,000 copies have been distributed to 1,700 schools.

There is a lot of ground to make up. Until 2007, Khmer Rouge history was not taught in Cambodian schools at all, due to political sensitivities — in government and across society. Since coming to power in 1979, the Cambodian People’s Party has built its legitimacy on the fact that it overthrew Pol Pot and brought peace. In the 1980s, the party built dozens of memorials at places like Kraing Ta Chan, encouraging survivors to see the CPP as the midwife of their “second birth.” The memorial stupa at Kraing Ta Chan was built by CPP President Chea Sim.

With open discussion discouraged, some Cambodians have fallen victim to what Chhang describes as “the disease of conspiracy.”

Prime Minister Hun Sen, in power for 30 years and now one of the world’s longest serving leaders, has also played on survivors’ traumas, portraying the CPP as the only guarantee of continued stability and economic progress. In January, he proclaimed that anyone opposing his three-decade rule was, by definition, “an ally of the Pol Pot regime.” Complicating matters further is that many CPP officials, Hun Sen included, served the Khmer Rouge before helping to overthrow it.

Chhang said these entanglements have made it hard for Cambodians to discuss their history without bias. Even getting official approval of DC-Cam’s textbook was a challenge. In 2006, when a government commission reviewed it for public use, only four of the seven members voted in favor. Dissenters complained that it did not put enough emphasis on the CPP’s achievements.

“They want to discover what happened”

With open discussion discouraged, some Cambodians have fallen victim to what Chhang describes as “the disease of conspiracy.” Today a minority still denies that the Khmer Rouge were responsible for what happened in the mid-1970s, instead blaming neighboring Vietnam, which drove out the Khmer Rouge after invading Cambodia in late 1978. To this day, Vietnam remains a frequent target of nationalistic animosity. “That’s why the role of history is important,” Chhang said. “Not knowing it accurately makes you incomplete.”

To help reach a new generation of tech-savvy youth, DC-Cam intends to digitize its textbook and create a mobile app that will allow students to share their families’ stories online. Pheng Pong-Rasy, a team leader of DC-Cam’s Genocide Education Project, said that only a balanced understanding of their country’s past will teach young Cambodians to think critically about a present that remains plagued by problems like impunity, political violence and pervasive corruption. “Not just yes or no — the questions should be, why, what and how? How did the Khmer Rouge regime happen?”

It is indeed a complex question, and one that Rithy Panh has tried to answer in his own way, through films like the 2000 documentary “S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine.” His most recent feature, “The Missing Picture,” was nominated for an Academy Award in 2014. “It’s complex, it’s painful, but we have to resolve it,” he said. “And when it’s written you can turn over the pages. You cannot turn over empty pages.”

Rithy detects a growing interest in history among the young. When he made his first films in the late 1980s and 1990s, few Cambodians came to screenings. But when he showed “The Missing Picture,” which uses tableaux of clay figurines to depict his experience in Pol Pot’s “Democratic Kampuchea,” the cinemas were full of young Cambodians. “It’s a very interesting phenomenon,” he said. “They want to discover what happened to their families.”

On the outskirts of Takeo, by a sprawling lake, 18-year-old Pring Sreinich and six of her friends gathered on a recent morning, playing music on their mobile phones and buying shaved-ice treats from a traveling vendor. Unlike past generations, all of them had studied the Pol Pot regime at school.

Sreinich, currently in the 11th grade, said it is hard to make comparisons between now and then, although she emphasized that she is happy to look back as well as forward. “I think it’s very important,” she said. “If we know about the past, that it was very difficult, we will be more thankful for the present.”

Forty years after ‘Year Zero': Cambodia’s young wrestle with a dark past

TAKEO, Cambodia — Four decades ago, on April 17, 1975, the communist Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh and seized power. As a 13-year-old boy living in Cambodia’s capital, Rithy Panh, now an internationally acclaimed documentary filmmaker, recalls the unease that settled over the city as the black-clad peasant troops took control. “I felt something very oppressive,” he said. “It was something very heavy, like the weather before the rain.”

The takeover launched a bloody political maelstrom that engulfed Cambodia for three years, eight months and 20 days. Setting the dial for their twisted vision of a “Year Zero” utopia, the Khmer Rouge and paramount leader Pol Pot emptied the cities, banned money and enslaved the population in vast rural collectives.

By the time the regime collapsed in January 1979, an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians had perished from starvation, overwork, torture and execution. Rithy survived but lost most of his immediate family. He would spend his subsequent career attempting to make sense of the cataclysm through his films. “I promised that if I would survive I would tell what happened,” he said at his studio in Phnom Penh.

“They don’t want to listen”

Today, Cambodia is a very different place. From 1998 to 2007, its economy grew at an average pace of 10% per year, one of the fastest in the world. Phnom Penh, a ghost town under Pol Pot, has been transformed into a bustling city of high-rise office buildings and glitzy shopping malls, where youth sport the latest electronic gadgets. Nearly two-thirds of Cambodia’s 15 million-plus population is under 30, according to United Nations data, meaning that only a small minority has any direct memory of the bloody Khmer Rouge era.

The upshot is a growing divide between those who directly experienced the nightmare and those who can barely imagine it. Among the latter is Svay Bros, a 16-year-old in Takeo, a sleepy provincial town 75km south of the capital. Growing up, Bros learned of the Khmer Rouge as a bogeyman invoked by older relatives to scare him into behaving. “When I’m lazy my grandparents often say, ‘In the Pol Pot time, you would have been killed for that’!”

“I felt something very oppressive,” he said. “It was something very heavy, like the weather before the rain.”

For Than Rath, an 18-year-old clad in a Newcastle United soccer jersey, past horrors fade in importance next to the usual teenage concerns: girls, gadgets and going out. “I want to have some money, and I’m not too worried about the past,” he said, sitting at a village cafe his family owns in Takeo. His father, Keo Thy, 44, complained: “I try to tell my sons about my life under Pol Pot and they don’t want to listen to me. … They don’t want to know about torture, killing or hardship.”

Underscoring the irony of Keo Thy’s lament, one of the grisliest vestiges of Khmer Rouge rule stands near his village. Kraing Ta Chan Security Center was established in 1972 in one of the first parts of Cambodia to be captured by the communist insurgents. It served first as a training and education facility for Khmer Rouge cadre, and then as a security center, where suspected enemies of the regime were jailed, tortured and executed.

Than Rath’s grandfather, Keo Thon, 67, recalled seeing blindfolded prisoners being walked through his village during the Khmer Rouge years. They came most days, he said, “usually in the afternoon.”

Prosecutors at the U.N.-backed tribunal currently trying former Khmer Rouge leaders in the capital claim that some 15,000 people lost their lives at Kraing Ta Chan. Today it is a quiet, leafy place, marked by a white stupa filled with hundreds of exhumed skulls. At its base lie bundles of burnt-out joss sticks and two dishes, one bearing a rusted shackle from the old prison, the other a pile of human teeth.

Elsewhere, hand-painted information boards mark the location of burial pits and other landmarks. One describes how inmates were questioned under torture. “The answers didn’t matter,” it states flatly. “They were all killed eventually.”

“There’s a huge gap”

Kraing Ta Chan is just one of hundreds of former killing sites that dot Cambodia, totems of a dark and unresolved history. Elsewhere, survivors wrestle privately with their traumas, while hundreds of killers who received amnesty in later years under Prime Minister Hun Sen — himself a former Khmer Rouge cadre — live in peaceful retirement.

Robert Carmichael, author of “When Clouds Fell from the Sky,” a new book on the period, said that despite the achievements of the Khmer Rouge tribunal — known officially as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia — the country remains largely unreconciled. “There’s a huge gap that hasn’t been bridged at all,” he said.

One key to closing this gap, some say, is education. Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, or DC-Cam, said that while many Cambodian youth might see the past as remote from their concerns, they would sooner or later start to ask questions. “I think that as they grow older, they will realize that it’s incredibly significant for their future,” he said.

To provide them with answers, DC-Cam, an independent body that researches Khmer Rouge crimes, in 2007 published “A History of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979).” It was the first proper school textbook on the Khmer Rouge. In 2009, the 73-page volume, a clear-eyed text featuring rare photos from DC-Cam’s archives, became a compulsory part of the national high school curriculum. It has since been translated into six languages, and more than 350,000 copies have been distributed to 1,700 schools.

There is a lot of ground to make up. Until 2007, Khmer Rouge history was not taught in Cambodian schools at all, due to political sensitivities — in government and across society. Since coming to power in 1979, the Cambodian People’s Party has built its legitimacy on the fact that it overthrew Pol Pot and brought peace. In the 1980s, the party built dozens of memorials at places like Kraing Ta Chan, encouraging survivors to see the CPP as the midwife of their “second birth.” The memorial stupa at Kraing Ta Chan was built by CPP President Chea Sim.

With open discussion discouraged, some Cambodians have fallen victim to what Chhang describes as “the disease of conspiracy.”

Prime Minister Hun Sen, in power for 30 years and now one of the world’s longest serving leaders, has also played on survivors’ traumas, portraying the CPP as the only guarantee of continued stability and economic progress. In January, he proclaimed that anyone opposing his three-decade rule was, by definition, “an ally of the Pol Pot regime.” Complicating matters further is that many CPP officials, Hun Sen included, served the Khmer Rouge before helping to overthrow it.

Chhang said these entanglements have made it hard for Cambodians to discuss their history without bias. Even getting official approval of DC-Cam’s textbook was a challenge. In 2006, when a government commission reviewed it for public use, only four of the seven members voted in favor. Dissenters complained that it did not put enough emphasis on the CPP’s achievements.

“They want to discover what happened”

With open discussion discouraged, some Cambodians have fallen victim to what Chhang describes as “the disease of conspiracy.” Today a minority still denies that the Khmer Rouge were responsible for what happened in the mid-1970s, instead blaming neighboring Vietnam, which drove out the Khmer Rouge after invading Cambodia in late 1978. To this day, Vietnam remains a frequent target of nationalistic animosity. “That’s why the role of history is important,” Chhang said. “Not knowing it accurately makes you incomplete.”

To help reach a new generation of tech-savvy youth, DC-Cam intends to digitize its textbook and create a mobile app that will allow students to share their families’ stories online. Pheng Pong-Rasy, a team leader of DC-Cam’s Genocide Education Project, said that only a balanced understanding of their country’s past will teach young Cambodians to think critically about a present that remains plagued by problems like impunity, political violence and pervasive corruption. “Not just yes or no — the questions should be, why, what and how? How did the Khmer Rouge regime happen?”

It is indeed a complex question, and one that Rithy Panh has tried to answer in his own way, through films like the 2000 documentary “S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine.” His most recent feature, “The Missing Picture,” was nominated for an Academy Award in 2014. “It’s complex, it’s painful, but we have to resolve it,” he said. “And when it’s written you can turn over the pages. You cannot turn over empty pages.”

Rithy detects a growing interest in history among the young. When he made his first films in the late 1980s and 1990s, few Cambodians came to screenings. But when he showed “The Missing Picture,” which uses tableaux of clay figurines to depict his experience in Pol Pot’s “Democratic Kampuchea,” the cinemas were full of young Cambodians. “It’s a very interesting phenomenon,” he said. “They want to discover what happened to their families.”

On the outskirts of Takeo, by a sprawling lake, 18-year-old Pring Sreinich and six of her friends gathered on a recent morning, playing music on their mobile phones and buying shaved-ice treats from a traveling vendor. Unlike past generations, all of them had studied the Pol Pot regime at school.

Sreinich, currently in the 11th grade, said it is hard to make comparisons between now and then, although she emphasized that she is happy to look back as well as forward. “I think it’s very important,” she said. “If we know about the past, that it was very difficult, we will be more thankful for the present.”

The House That Hun Sen Built

The strongman has ruled Cambodia for 30 years with corruption, charisma, and brute force. Now he’s facing the greatest challenge of his career.

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — In late November, Cambodia’s squabbling politicians finally called a truce. In exchange for ending its year-long parliamentary boycott following national elections in July 2013, the government offered the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) some concessions. One was that the parliament would formally recognize the CNRP’s president, Sam Rainsy, as leader of the opposition, with a “rank equal to the prime minister.”

In practice, it was a hollow designation, the sort of status-boosting honorific that is common in the country’s politics. But Cambodia’s longtime leader had a message for anyone suspecting otherwise. Some people “may say that in Cambodia, there are two prime ministers,” Hun Sen, the country’s prime minister, told a hall of graduating students the following week. “I will just say one word … no.”

Most Cambodians know no other leader. On Jan. 14, Hun Sen marks his 30th anniversary in power. In that time, the Cambodian leader has been one of the world’s great political Houdinis, passing unscathed through repeated cycles of his country’s turbulent history. He now stands as the longest-serving non-monarch in Asia and one of the world’s longest-ruling prime ministers — and at just 62, he still may have a ways to go.

Hun Sen’s remarkable career has tracked the tumults of modern Cambodia. He was born in 1952 to a family of peasant farmers in a village along the Mekong River, northeast of the capital, Phnom Penh. When he was 13, Hun Sen’s parents sent him to study in the capital, just as neighboring Vietnam was slipping into civil war. Sometime in the late 1960s, Hun Sen left school and joined the domestic communist insurgency opposing Cambodia’s patrician ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk.

“He is a chess player,” said Lao Mong Hay, a human rights advocate, “and he thinks four or five moves ahead.”

Throughout the 1970s Hun Sen fought for those “Khmers Rouges,” or Red Khmers, as Sihanouk dubbed them. After taking power in April 1975, the Khmer Rouge established a network of brutal labor camps in the Cambodian countryside, which led to the death of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians — nearly a quarter of the population.

Led by “Brother Number One” Pol Pot, the regime soon started devouring its own ranks in a paranoid search for spies and wreckers. In 1977, Hun Sen, then a mid-ranking commander in the army, defected to Vietnam to escape the purges. When the Vietnamese army overthrew the Khmer Rouge in January 1979 and installed a socialist government in its place, Hun Sen became foreign minister. Largely self-taught, he quickly evolved into a loyal and reliable ally of the Vietnamese, who continued to occupy the country through the late 1980s. On Jan. 14, 1985, at the age of 32, the Cambodian legislature appointed Hun Sen prime minister.

Since then, Hun Sen has played a long list of roles: apparatchik and reformer, strongman and statesman, demagogue and freewheeling free-marketeer. If his career has had one constant, however, it has been his ability to bend with the political wind. “He is a chess player,” said Lao Mong Hay, a human rights advocate, “and he thinks four or five moves ahead.”

Prime Minister Hun Sen’s first act of political escapism came with the collapse of communism. Throughout the 1980s, Hun Sen’s government, supported by Vietnam and the Soviet Union, fought a bitter Cold War proxy conflict against a Chinese- and U.S.-backed resistance coalition that included the Khmer Rouge. In October 1991, in the dying days of the Cold War, the warring factions signed the Paris Peace Agreements, which created the U.N. Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), tasked with ending the civil war and holding democratic elections.

In the face of this challenge, Hun Sen urged the adoption of cosmetic political reforms. By aping the language of the new zeitgeist, he seemed to be arguing that his Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party could navigate the democratic transition and maintain its grip on power. And so, between 1989 and 1991, the party recalibrated itself for democratic politics: It abandoned Marx, released political prisoners, embraced “pluralism” and private property rights, and renamed itself the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP).

Hun Sen also saw through the democratic triumphalism of the age to the brittle political reality that lay beneath. Despite all the talk about bringing democracy to Cambodia, foreign governments had signed the Paris Peace Agreements to remove strategically unimportant Cambodia from the international agenda, not to deepen their entanglements. This became clear after the U.N.-organized elections of May 1993 — the first since the early 1970s — when the CPP came second to the royalist Funcinpec party led by Sihanouk’s son, Prince Norodom Ranariddh. In response, Hun Sen and other CPP figures threatened violence and strong-armed their way into an equal share of power. In a wholly undemocratic arrangement, Hun Sen became “second” prime minister to Ranariddh’s “first.” The United Nations, having already declared the election a success, packed up and left.

To an international audience, Hun Sen is a skilled peddler of promises, fluent in donor-speak.

In the years that followed, the two prime ministers vied for supremacy. The final reckoning came in July 1997, when security forces loyal to Hun Sen defeated Funcinpec’s military wing in street battles, murdering many of the prince’s key commanders and driving Ranariddh into exile in Bangkok. The prince returned to contest a new election in 1998. Yet this time, in a climate marked by violence and politically motivated killings, the CPP won, gaining 41.4 percent of the vote to Funcinpec’s 31.7 percent. The two parties again formed a coalition — but Hun Sen ruled alone.

Since then, Hun Sen has used guile and force to neutralize his remaining opponents and extend his control over the country’s courts, parliament, and armed forces. As a former soldier, Hun Sen has long understood power as a function of force and interests, a tool to be employed in the pursuit of political objectives; everything else — whether democratic principles or human rights — is window dressing. “Hun Sen is known for creating his own reality and then living in it,” said Gordon Longmuir, Canada’s ambassador to Cambodia in the mid-1990s.

Today, power in Cambodia resides not in the democratic institutions imported by the U.N., but in the channels of influence linking Hun Sen with the country’s powerful business and political elite. But Hun Sen has stopped short of doing away with democracy altogether. The government has maintained a mirage of pluralism in order to placate the foreign governments that still provide it with roughly $500 million in aid per year (around 14 percent of Cambodia’s national budget for 2015). To an international audience, Hun Sen is a skilled peddler of promises, fluent in donor-speak.

Domestically, he projects a different image: that of a wise and benevolent ruler, raining blessings on the people. His name is attached to thousands of schools bankrolled by friendly oligarchs; his personality finds its full expression in long, Castro-esque speeches in which he jokes, scolds, threatens political opponents, and recounts episodes from his childhood. With Hun Sen a son of the soil, his grasp of his people’s hopes and fears has allowed him to manipulate them effectively, portraying the CPP as the only thing standing between Cambodia and a return of the horrors of the past. In his first speech of 2015, Hun Sen brusquely declared that anyone opposing him is “an ally of the Pol Pot regime” — which is now long defunct. This blend of threats, charity, and strongman bombast has helped the CPP win the past four elections.

Hun Sen’s supporters point out that he has presided over an extended period of political stability and economic growth, rare commodities in Cambodia’s troubled history. Between 1998 and 2007, Cambodia’s GDP grew nearly 10 percent annually, one of the fastest growth rates in the world. But though these achievements are real, it is less clear whether his reign has any aim beyond its own perpetuation. This is the verdict of Sam Rainsy, the French-educated former investment banker who has been Hun Sen’s main political rival since the 1990s. “He is a genius, but a genius for himself,” Sam Rainsy said in an interview in March 2014. “His only achievement is that he has managed to cling on to power for so many years.”

After the 2013 election, however, the future for Hun Sen does appear slightly grimmer. The CPP’s majority plummeted from 90 to 68 of the parliament’s 123 seats, its worst electoral showing since 1998. There were many reasons for the turn against Hun Sen. One was demographic: Most Cambodians are too young to remember the Khmer Rouge.

But it is also stemmed from the widening gap between what the government promises and what it delivers. To maintain their loyalty, the government has allowed businessmen and the political elite to strip the country of its resources and fell its once-abundant forests. Little of the revenue has reached the poor, who have suffered land grabs, violence, and other abuses. On paper, Cambodia has seen poverty levels drop: By 2011 one out of every five Cambodians was living in poverty, compared to one in two in 2004. But many people still live on a knife edge: If the poverty line were raised by just 30 cents, the poverty rate would double, according to the World Bank.

After 2013’s election, Hun Sen promised change. Ministries have been reshuffled; reforms have been launched in education and environmental policy. At the same time, the government has ruled out any possibility of a new administration. After opposition supporters and unions took to the streets in December 2013 calling for Hun Sen’s resignation, security forces fired at striking garment workers on Phnom Penh’s outskirts on Jan. 3, 2014, leaving five dead. Politicians and protesters have since been hauled into court on spurious charges.

Hun Sen now faces perhaps the greatest challenge of his career: to win back Cambodian voters without undermining the tycoons who have bankrolled his long reign. Does an aging strongman have the energy for another rebranding before elections due in 2018? Whatever happens, Cambodia’s singular leader has made it clear he isn’t going anywhere. After the January 2014 garment protest crackdown, Hun Sen showed no remorse for those killed, warning that he would meet further protests with even bigger demonstrations of his own. “If Hun Sen comes out to do something,” he said, “it’s not going to be small.”

Published by Foreign Policy, January 13, 2015

A One-Man Dynasty

Thirty years ago, Hun Sen was appointed prime minister of Cambodia. By remaining at the helm of the country’s turbulent politics until the present, Hun Sen now sits alongside the world’s longest-serving political leaders.

ON September 3, 1997, Thomas Hammarberg, the UN secretary-general’s special representative for human rights in Cambodia, was invited to a meeting with the country’s second prime minister, Hun Sen. Hammarberg had good reason to expect a tense reception. Two months earlier, security forces loyal to Hun Sen and his Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) had launched lightning strikes against the private army of the first prime minister, Prince Norodom Ranariddh of the royalist Funcinpec party, killing dozens of key commanders and driving many more opponents into exile.

In the aftermath, Hammarberg and staff at the UN Centre of Human Rights got to work documenting the violence. The UN’s 50-page report, released that August, outlined the campaign of executions, torture and disappearances that accompanied the July 5-6 fighting. Particularly, it named 41 Funcinpec figures who had been killed following their arrest by CPP forces and recommended the government conduct a “serious criminal investigation” into each.

Hun Sen wasn’t pleased. His government had defended the CPP strikes as a pre-emptive law-and-order operation, and he had always bristled at the UN’s “interference” in his country’s affairs.

The Swedish diplomat and the Cambodian politician were a study in contrasts. The 55-year-old Hammarberg had dedicated his career to the advancement of human rights and a more just international order. His CV included stints as head of the Swedish branch of Save the Children and as secretary-general of Amnesty International, on whose behalf he had received the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize.

His blond hair now fading to white, Hammarberg cut a patrician figure next to the boyish Hun Sen, 10 years his junior. Largely self-taught, with his rough peasant edges only partly smoothed down by a well-cut suit, Hun Sen had known little but war and political struggle. Since being appointed foreign minister after the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime in January 1979, he had clawed his way to the peak of Cambodian politics, where he was now determined to remain.

As Hammarberg remembered it, this meeting of opposites in September 1997 got off to a surreal start. As soon as he had arrived and was seated, Hun Sen motioned to an aide. A door opened, and about 20 uniformed soldiers filed into the room. Here, Hun Sen announced, were the men listed as killed in the UN’s report into the July 1997 clashes. Hammarberg recalled Hun Sen’s sarcastic response: “They look very much alive, don’t they?”

The Swede was taken aback. But he was also confident of his research. The UN team had probed each case in painful detail, exhuming blindfolded corpses and conducting dozens of interviews. Only those allegations that had been fully verified were included in the final report. As he went through the report with Hun Sen, Hammarberg realised these “dead men walking” were an elaborate bluff. Once he made this clear to Hun Sen, the Cambodian politician “sort of lost face”, Hammarberg recalled. “His way of handling the meeting just collapsed.”

While Hun Sen was forced to back down, it wasn’t long before he resurrected the stunt. In early 1998, Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, arrived in Cambodia on a much-publicised visit. During a meeting with Robinson on January 23, Hun Sen surprised the former Irish prime minister by producing four men – again, very much alive – whom the UN had supposedly declared dead. Hun Sen then paraded the men during a joint press conference with Robinson, condemning the UN and warning that his government would refuse to cooperate with “people who violate us, who abuse us, or distort us”.

A former soldier, he saw power not as a matter of principle, but as a function of force and interests. Everything else, whether human rights or democratic norms, was window-dressing.

Again, it was a bluff. Hammarberg later clarified that none of the men were listed as killed in the report – the first didn’t appear in it at all; the second and third had been reported missing (but not killed); and the fourth was the brother of two who had been killed in July 1997 – and was now being used in an attempt to exonerate the party responsible for his siblings’ deaths. The press conference was staged on a Friday afternoon; by the time the story could be corrected, it had already been parroted widely in the Khmer-language press.

The cosmopolitan Hammarberg recalled being flummoxed by Hun Sen’s theatrics. “Not only had he pulled the trick again, but he had also pushed relatives of those who had been killed to be witnesses to undermine the report,” he said. “That was his style.”

In truth, Hammarberg and his Cambodian interlocutor represented radically divergent world views. Where Hammarberg was an idealist, Hun Sen understood reality and the ways in which it could be bent to his will. Where the Swede envisioned a world governed by universal norms, the Cambodian bristled at any suggestion that the same standards should apply in Phnom Penh as in New York or Stockholm or Geneva.

In place of the enlightened deliberation represented by the UN, Hun Sen inhabited a world of zero-sum political struggles. A former soldier, he saw power not as a matter of principle, but as a function of force and interests. Everything else, whether human rights or democratic norms, was window-dressing – of little consequence to whom ultimately came out on top. “What are international standards?” Hun Sen was fond of asking. “I don’t understand. International standards exist only in sports.”

Enlightened or not, Hun Sen’s political intuitions have proved remarkably durable. Thirty years ago today, the Cambodian National Assembly voted to appoint Hun Sen as prime minister, at the age of just 32. Since then, his Machiavellian political style has seen him through repeated cycles of the country’s turbulent history, through three decades of civil war and political upheaval, the collapse of communism, and the country’s transition to democracy.

Now 62, Hun Sen stands as one of the great political survivors, the longest-serving non-monarch in Asia, and one of the longest-serving prime ministers in the world. With about 65.3 per cent of Cambodians today under the age of 30, according to the UN, the majority of the population now has no memory of anyone else.

Over the course of his career, Cambodia’s prime minister has played many roles: communist soldier, socialist apparatchik, international statesman, free-market reformer, demagogic demigod. But if Hun Sen’s career has had one constant, it has been his ideological flexibility.

“He is not hard-headed,” a CPP insider said this week, on condition of anonymity. “He knows how to move in accordance with the situation, like a boat sailing on the Mekong River.”

* * * *

THE village of Peam Koh Snar stretches out along a wide brown bend of this same great waterway, about 40 kilometres northeast of Kampong Cham city. It is peaceful and orderly. The houses are wooden with tiled roofs, lined by tobacco fields and rice paddies. The village has a well-sealed road that runs over a small steel bridge flanked by seven-headed concrete nagas. Not far away, there is a new pagoda dedicated by Hun Sen’s relatives and a primary school named after his brother, the former provincial governor Hun Neng: over the years, Peam Koh Snar has been a special subject of strongman charity.

On August 5, 1952, Cambodia’s future leader was born here in a brown stilt house just off the main village road. Locals still express affection for the local boy who conquered the heights of Cambodian politics. “All the villagers are proud of him,” said Nin Kimsoeun, 31, a second cousin of Hun Sen who looks after the prime minister’s childhood home, welcoming curious visitors. “He has helped a lot of people here.”

Down the road, 68-year-old Ros Thorn sat on a concrete table under a tree at Wat Botum Kesor. Brown cupping marks covered his forehead, and a light blue towel lay draped around his neck. Thorn recalled the skinny youth before he was sent by his parents to study in Phnom Penh in 1965, at the age of 13. “Hun Sen was not only a good student; he was good at everything,” he said.

Not long after leaving Peam Koh Snar, Hun Sen was swept up in the tumult of modern Cambodian history. Sometime in the late 1960s – it is unclear exactly when – he left school and joined the communist insurgency opposing the government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Throughout the 1970s, Hun Sen fought for these “Khmers Rouges”, as Sihanouk dubbed them, losing an eye to a piece of artillery shrapnel as the communists closed in on Phnom Penh in April 1975.

Hun Sen has since claimed he was shocked by the radical experiment set in motion by the new leaders of “Democratic Kampuchea”, and had no hand in atrocities committed by the regime, which led to the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians. In mid-1977, after rising to the rank of deputy regimental commander, Hun Sen defected to Vietnam to escape the regime’s purges.

When the Vietnamese army overthrew the Khmer Rouge in January 1979, Hun Sen became foreign minister in the socialist clone administration they installed in its place. Closely mentored by Ngo Dien, Vietnam’s ambassador in Phnom Penh, he quickly evolved into a loyal and reliable ally. In late 1984, when Prime Minister Chan Si died in Moscow, Hun Sen was the obvious choice as successor.

He took the reins in a turbulent period. Throughout the 1980s, his People’s Republic of Kampuchea, supported by a Vietnamese occupation force and millions of rubles in Soviet aid, fought a bitter Cold War proxy conflict against a Chinese- and US-backed resistance coalition, which included the Khmer Rouge. In a cruel twist of Cold War realpolitik, the Khmer Rouge continued to represent Cambodia in the UN, while the PRK and its Vietnamese patrons were subject to a Western embargo. For a young Hun Sen, the decade would leave a deep impression. It instilled a conviction that for superpowers like the US, human rights and democratic norms were very often simply means to a political end. Why should those same norms bind him?

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and the paralysing polarities of the Cold War gave way to a new era of promise. In Cambodia, the end of the Cold War led to the withdrawal of Vietnamese forces from the country and the signing of the Paris Peace Agreements on October 23, 1991. The treaty created the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) of 1992-93, which had a mission to end the civil war and hold democratic elections. With the UN’s arrival, Cambodia became a laboratory of the post-Cold War international order. Phnom Penh went from being an impoverished socialist capital to a postmodern treaty port city, forced open not by colonial gunboat diplomacy but by international aid and the wave of foreign consultants and NGO workers that followed.

The leaders in Phnom Penh saw the arrival of the UN and its civil war-era enemies as a hindrance and a threat. But Hun Sen quickly saw through the triumphalist language of the age to the brittle political commitments that lay beneath. Despite all the talk of bringing democracy and international norms to Cambodia, foreign governments had crafted the Paris Peace Agreements in order to detach them from the country’s political squabbles, not to deepen their involvement. This was illustrated starkly in the aftermath of the UN-organised 1993 election, which the CPP lost to Prince Ranariddh’s Funcinpec.

“He knows how to move in accordance with the situation, like a boat sailing on the Mekong River.”

In the days following the election, CPP figures threatened violence, announced a secession of the country’s eastern provinces, and thus strong-armed their way into an equal share of power. In an undemocratic arrangement that could only have been cooked up by Cambodian politicians, Hun Sen became “second” prime minister to Ranariddh’s “first”. There was nothing much the UN could do.

Having already declared the election a success, it packed up and left.

The next four years were marked by intrigue and political struggle as the two prime ministers vied for supremacy – a struggle that eventually came to a head in July 1997 in the streets of Phnom Penh. Despite initially protesting the violence, most foreign governments accepted the status quo when a chastened Ranariddh returned to contest a new election in July 1998. This time, the CPP won.

The election was flawed, but it was enough for most foreign governments to resume their aid. Once again, Hun Sen ruled alone.

There he has remained ever since, using guile and threats to neutralise his remaining opponents and consolidate his control over the courts, parliament and armed forces. According to Human Rights Watch, hundreds of politicians, union leaders and journalists have been killed in politically motivated attacks since the late 1990s; virtually no one has been brought to justice. Violence has since receded in Cambodian politics just as most national institutions – from the Buddhist monkhood and the monarchy to the boy scouts and the Cambodian Red Cross – have been “harmonised” with the CPP’s political consensus.

Today, true power resides not in the democratic institutions imported by the UN, but in the flows of influence and mutual obligation linking Hun Sen with dense networks of business and political elites. “Human rights [and] political space still depends on his mood,” said Thun Saray, the director of the human rights group Adhoc. “It’s a rule of man.”

Even so, the outward forms of democracy remain. Even before UNTAC, Hun Sen recognised the value of a good performance. In the late 1980s, as peace beckoned, he became a key advocate of cosmetic reform – of exchanging a “red” shirt for a “blue” one. By abandoning communism and adopting the language of pluralism, he argued that his party could survive the transition to democracy and maintain its grip on power. And so, Hun Sen grew into a skilled peddler of promises, fluent in donor-speak, conjuring up dreams and illusions of reform to placate the foreign governments that still give hundreds of millions in aid each year.

At the same time as he has played bait-and-switch with foreign donors, Hun Sen’s local stature gained new dimensions. State propaganda now depicts him as a benevolent peasant king, raining blessings on the people. He smiles down from party billboards across the country. His name is attached to thousands of schools bankrolled by friendly oligarchs. His personality finds its full expression in long speeches in which he scolds and jokes and threatens, instilling in his rural audiences a particularly Cambodian blend of fear and awe.

A son of the soil, Hun Sen has been able to manipulate the fears and hopes of rural people effectively, depicting the choice between the CPP and its opponents as a choice between stability and chaos, between a chance of a better future and a return to the horrors of the past. In his first speech of 2015, Hun Sen brusquely declared that anyone still opposing him was “an ally of the Pol Pot regime”. Under the peasant king, there is no middle way.

* * * *

HUN Sen’s long reign has provoked sharply divergent opinions. Overseas, the Cambodian premier has been often vilified as a brutal dictator who thwarted Cambodia’s chance at democracy. In July 1997, the described him as “Hun the Attila”. In a May 2012 article marking Hun Sen’s 10,000th day in power, Brad Adams, the Asia director of Human Rights Watch, compared him to recently deposed Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi.

But others also point out that Hun Sen has presided over a long period of political stability and economic growth – rare commodities in a country that has never known any sort of popular sovereignty. In the decade after 1998, Cambodia’s GDP grew by nearly 10 per cent per annum, one of the fastest growth rates in the world. “He is the right man at the right time,” said Phay Siphan, a spokesman for the Council of Ministers.

Many foreign officials who have dealt with Hun Sen say that while he could be violent and unstable, he was one of the few effective leaders in the egotistic aviary of Cambodian politics. One Western ambassador posted to Phnom Penh in the mid-1990s contrasted Hun Sen’s single-minded focus and capable support staff to the court-like sycophancy that surrounded his coalition partner, the “petit prince”, Ranariddh. Charles Ray, who represented US interests a decade later, described Hun Sen as one of the few politicians whose word he believed he could trust.

At its core, this divergence of opinions represents a disagreement over whether Hun Sen’s rule should be judged against an international standard, or in the light of his country’s particular history and circumstances. Both offer insights into Hun Sen’s rule. On the one hand, the premier deserves credit for presiding over a long spell of stability and development, in a manner mostly consistent with past generations of Cambodian leaders. On the other, the contradictions of his rule have scarcely been more apparent.

Since the end of the civil war in the late 1990s, stability has come at a steep price for many Cambodians. To maintain the loyalty of powerful tycoons, the Cambodian government has allowed them to strip the country’s resources and fell its once-abundant forests. An economic revolution has been accompanied by land grabs, impunity, and a widening gulf between rich and poor. Despite the CPP’s frequent gifts of schools and pagodas, many rural poor still live on a knife-edge.

All the while, Hun Sen has become an Olympian figure, coddled by yes-men and insulated from the realities of his rapidly changing country. Sam Rainsy, the leader of the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), likened him to a boat’s captain who is so absorbed with trying to avoid the rocks that he has lost track of where he is sailing. “He is very good at daily survival, but he has no vision,” Rainsy said.

This rising discontent lay behind the surprising result of the July 2013 national election, when the CPP’s majority plummeted from 90 National Assembly seats out of 123 to just 68 following large gains by Rainsy’s CNRP. After the election, the CNRP claimed that it actually would have won were it not for large-scale voter fraud, and announced a boycott of the new National Assembly pending an investigation of the election. The huge crowds of young people that took to the streets in support of the CNRP’s demand were an ominous sign for Hun Sen.

A man of his political intuitions can’t have failed to grasp that the CPP had overreached. Straight away, the promises came. Reforms were launched in education and environmental policy, while key ministries were reshuffled. At the same time, however, the CPP moved to quash any possibility of an opposition alternative. Armed thugs were deployed against opposition protests. On January 3, 2014, security forces fired at striking garment workers on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, leaving five dead.

Throughout the post-election tumult, Hun Sen remained unbowed. He showed no apparent remorse for those killed in the garment crackdowns, warning that he would meet further protests with even bigger demonstrations of his own. “Do you want to know or try a taste?” he asked. “If Hun Sen comes out to do something, it’s not going to be small.”

Hun Sen has become an Olympian figure, coddled by yes-men and insulated from the realities of his rapidly changing country.

But with the next national election due in 2018, Hun Sen now faces perhaps the greatest challenge of his career: to bring promised reforms without undermining the powerful interests that have bankrolled his long reign. After so many twists and turns, does an ageing leader have the energy for another rebranding? The CPP insider predicted that Hun Sen would rise to the challenge. “Hun Sen will hold the prime minister’s seat until his retirement,” the official said.

It would be foolish to rule it out. Already, the CPP is moving the chess pieces into place as it seeks to wear down the CNRP. Despite agreeing to end its parliamentary boycott in July 2014 in exchange for a handful of political concessions, opposition figures remain in court, and the party is cowed. Last month, Prince Ranariddh was wheeled out of retirement to take the reins of his old party, Funcinpec, admitting Hun Sen had “played a clear role” in his return, in a presumed attempt to draw support away from the CNRP.

Ou Virak, former chairman of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, said Hun Sen was again using the divide-and-rule strategies that have served him so well, but this time with more of an eye to public opinion. “Hun Sen was very arrogant in 2013 when he discounted the rise of the young population with smartphones in their hands,” he said. “He won’t make that same mistake in 2018.”

Virak said Hun Sen is a born fighter with the stamina to keep ruling Cambodia beyond the next election, but said he would also be preoccupied with readying a succession plan, perhaps smoothing a transition to one of his sons.

Whatever happens, Cambodia’s leader clearly still has a few battles left to fight. In the past, Sam Rainsy has depicted his rival as an anachronism, standing on the wrong side of history. But Hun Sen’s singular ability has been to shape history to his liking, whatever the costs to his people. Only time will tell who has a firmer grasp of changing Cambodian realities.

Published in the Phnom Penh Post, January 14, 2015

The heavy hand of religious police in Aceh

Since 2001, far-flung Indonesian province has enforced its version of Islamic law, using floggings to punish offenders.

BANDA ACEH–A small group of punk and hardcore rockers recently organised a guerrilla gig in an empty lot behind a coffee shop in the capital of Aceh province. The show was not advertised. None of the neighbours were notified; neither was the owner of the coffee shop.

One of the organisers was Bolong, 28, a skinny youth sporting a black T-shirt, tight black jeans, and scuffed brown Doc Martens. As he and his friends unloaded a truck full of guitars and amps, he explained the philosophy of the event. “Our aim is to fight capitalism,” he said. “It’s all about rebellion.”

There has been plenty to rebel against in Aceh. Since 2001, the far-flung province of 4.7 million has enforced its version of Islamic law, which forbids alcohol, punishes premarital romance, and has little tolerance for the anti-establishment posturing of its tiny punk-rock community. Back in December 2011, religious police broke up a rock concert in Banda Aceh and took about 30 punk-rockers into custody. Bolong was among them.

After three days at a police lock-up, he said the group was taken to a police training facility, where they were imprisoned for a week and forced to take part in military-style drills.

To provide extra “motivation”, police fired guns over their heads.

“We were treated like animals,” said Bolong, who asked that his real name not be used, for fear of repercussions. “They burned all our clothes and shaved our hair … They said our appearance would have a bad influence on the next generation.”

Since the crackdown, Aceh’s punks have dialled down their appearance.

“In the past we could see people with mohawks and piercings and chains,” said Zuliran Fauzi, 23, who goes by the nickname “Bunda” and heads his own band, The Punk Terigu. But now, he said, “we want to make it a little bit polite”.

Public floggings

In recent months, Aceh’s Islamic laws have tightened. In September, the local legislature passed a new bylaw, or qanun jinayat, imposing harsher penalties on a longer list of “crimes”.

Offences not previously regulated include adultery and same-sex sexual relations, both of which are punishable by public floggings with a thin rattan cane, carried out by a medieval-looking hooded figure to the jeers of onlookers.

The penalties for homosexuality are especially harsh. Gay sex, which is not illegal elsewhere in Indonesia, is now punishable by 100 lashes or 100 months in jail. Officials can also demand 1,000 grams of gold – about $38,500 – if they catch gay or lesbian couples in the act.

The new bylaw is a watered-down version of a controversial law passed by Aceh’s legislature in 2009, which mandated stoning to death as a punishment for adultery.

After the resulting international outrage, the stoning provision was dropped from the new bylaw, which now awaits approval by Indonesia’s Minister of Home Affairs. A decision is expected by September 2015.

In the meantime, human rights groups are calling for an end to caning, a practise they say violates not only the Indonesian constitution, but also a raft of international treaties signed by Indonesia. “Victims of caning experience pain, fear, and humiliation, and caning can cause long-term or permanent injuries,” said Josef Benedict, an Indonesia researcher with Amnesty International. In some cases, he said, such punishments “may amount to torture”.

Flogging ‘education’

Supporters of the law say the point of flogging is not pain, but education.

“The purpose of giving canings is to give a warning to the people who break the law,” said Faisal Ali, secretary of the Aceh Assembly, a body of Islamic scholars, that helped formulate the new bylaw.

“This is only a short-term punishment, unlike regular punishments, putting people in jail for months or years.”

According to Amnesty, at least 41 people have been caned so far this year in Aceh for offences including gambling, drinking, and adultery.

In 2001, the central government in Jakarta allowed Aceh to adopt Islamic law in an attempt to quell a decades-long separatist conflict waged by the Free Aceh Movement, or GAM.

Benedict said the move was seen as “part of a calculated political strategy to bolster support for the government among the Acehnese people and to weaken support for secular GAM”.

Since then, the religious edicts have been enforced by green-clad religious police, who drive about town ordering shops to close for Friday prayers and pulling women over for violations of a strict dress code.

Headscarves are mandatory; tight pants, or anything showing the shape of the body, are banned. Young unmarried couples are also banned from unaccompanied public meetings, a transgression known as khalwat.

While most of Aceh’s residents are devout Muslims, not all agree with the government’s strict interpretation of Quranic laws.

“I believe my holy book teaches about love, not about that kind of punishment,” said Rosnida Sari, a lecturer at the Islamic Institute in Banda Aceh, and part of a network of local activists petitioning Jakarta to amend the bylaw.

Vigilante justice

Women’s rights activists said the laws have also been abused by local zealots and vigilantes. In a tragic case in 2012, religious police seized a 16-year-old schoolgirl at a concert in the eastern town of Langsa and accused her of being a prostitute. After the girl was named in the local press, she hanged herself.

In May, a group of eight men broke into a house in Langsa, where they caught a 25-year-old woman with a married man. Accusing them of adultery, the vigilantes beat up the man and gang-raped the woman, before dousing the couple in raw sewage.

Officials then announced that despite her traumatic ordeal, the woman would be flogged for adultery. Ruwaida, of Solidaritas Perembuan Aceh, a Banda Aceh-based women’s rights group, said the introduction of Islamic law had “changed the perception of the men here, who think that a woman who is not properly dressed should be punished, even though they are not the authority to do that”.

She added: “They claim to uphold the Islamic law, and then they can do whatever they want.”

Faisal Ali, the Islamic scholar, said there were tough punishments for those who abuse religious laws but defended the religious controls over citizens’ private lives. “In Islam, we have to take care of every brother and sister,” he said. He added same-sex relationships were “forbidden in Islam”.

Aceh’s punk rockers remain unconvinced. While many have toned down their appearance, the rebellious spirit still burns brightly. About 100 young people turned out to see Bolong and his friends play their gig, banging away enthusiastically while some 20 youths jumped about to the music, sparks from their cigarettes flying.

One of the few female attendees was Enda, 19, neatly dressed in black headscarf and a red T-shirt with a message: “Destroy Fascism” – somewhat at odds with her gentle demeanour.

Asked about her headscarf, Enda said for her there was no incompatibility between being a devout Muslim and a hardcore punk fan.

“Everyone has the right to have their own beliefs,” she said during a break between sets, as the muezzin began the evening call to prayer from a nearby mosque. “We don’t stand aside from Islam because our music comes from our soul.”

Published by Al Jazeera, December 21, 2014

A Decade After Tsunami, Scars Linger in Indonesia’s Aceh

Much has been rebuilt, but hidden wounds may take far longer to heal

December 26, 2004 began much like any other Sunday. Dilla Damayanti was sitting in her parents’ living room having breakfast when the tremors hit: first an insistent shaking, then a pause, then a sudden violent seizure. The family quickly took refuge at a nearby mosque. “It was very quick,” she said. “Suddenly, water was coming, very fast.”

Dilla was just five years old when the Indian Ocean tsunami slammed into her small village near the coast of Indonesia’s Aceh province. She and her family survived the waves, but from her refuge on the mosque’s second floor she saw something she would never forget — her young school friend, a girl named Nadia, washed away in the deluge.

“She was shouting, help, help, but there was nothing we could do,” recalled Dilla, now a high school student. “That’s why I cannot forget. I thank God that I survived.”

Ten years ago this month, an earthquake 160 kilometers off the coast of Sumatra island triggered waves which killed an estimated 230,000 people, devastated coastal communities in 11 countries, and added a terrifying new term to local peoples’ vocabulary.

Among the worst-hit regions was Aceh, an Indonesian province on the northern tip of Sumatra. As massive waves — some as high as 30 meters — surged inland, around 130,000 people were killed and more than half a million displaced.

One thing many residents of Aceh recall about the tsunami is the booming sound of the approaching water. Rahmadullah, 31, remembered “a sound like a cyclone.” Mohammad Saleh, a 54-year-old primary school principal, said the noise “was just like a bomb,” as the waters swept aside concrete buildings like so many cardboard boxes.

The capital city Banda Aceh was all but wiped off the map. In Ulee Lheue, the tsunami’s “ground zero,” just 10 percent of the area’s pre-disaster population of 6,000 survived. “When I arrived here all people were still collecting the dead bodies,” said Amrullah, an aid worker who arrived in Banda Aceh six days after the tsunami at the head of a disaster response team organized by the NGO Plan International.

The international response to the disaster was overwhelming. In total, around US$7 billion was pledged to rebuild homes and restore infrastructure in tsunami-affected areas.

The tsunami also prompted a rethink of Indonesia’s disaster management procedures. In the aftermath of the calamity, the government centralized the procedures, placing them under the direct authority of the president. Laws were passed making it mandatory for new homes, buildings and schools to include disaster mitigation plans. In 2011, the UN recognized these efforts by designating then-Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono as a “Global Champion for Disaster Risk Reduction.”

The lesson was especially well learned in Banda Aceh. Everywhere around town, signs point out tsunami evacuation routes and in some places warning sirens have been installed. The Aceh Tsunami Museum — housed in a building shaped like the prow of a ship — not only commemorates the disaster, but also serves as an emergency shelter should a tsunami ever hit the city again.

Mohammed Saleh, the principal of Lamnga Primary School in Aceh Besar district, said that each year his teachers take part in disaster training conducted by the government and the Indonesian Red Cross. The school also holds annual disaster drills to teach students what to do in the event of another mega-quake.

“Now if there’s something, we know what to do,” he said.

Today, a decade after it was nearly claimed by the ocean, Banda Aceh hums with activity. Young people ride their motorbikes down streets rebuilt with international aid money. In the center of town, restaurants and coffee shops — even the odd shopping mall — are crowded and open late.

Bukhari Daud, 55, the former governor of Aceh Besar district, said that in the aftermath of the tsunami, “Banda Aceh was a different place.”

Today, “the reconstruction has not only been successful in replacing what was destroyed, but also putting [in] more development… if you had not seen Banda Aceh before, you would not know what has changed.” While the sudden influx of foreign aid money brought the usual share of corruption and local rent-seeking — “there were tidbits here and there,” Daud admitted — the overall reconstruction effort was a success.

In fact, the only outward signs that a tsunami took place at all are the boats left stranded in strange places by the waves — on the top of a building in Banda Aceh, on the beach outside town — and the dozens of memorials dotted along the coast, commemorating those lost in the disaster.

However, the hidden wounds may take longer to heal. Exact figures on mental health are hard to come by, but the World Health Organization estimates that up to 20 percent of a population may suffer stress-related disorders in the aftermath of a calamity like the Indian Ocean tsunami. Added to that is the impact of the civil war between the Indonesian military and rebels of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), which killed 15,000 people over nearly three decades of see-sawing conflict.

While the devastation of the tsunami spurred efforts to end the conflict — the two sides went on to sign a peace agreement in August 2005 — the legacies of conflict have been harder to address than the region’s physical infrastructure.

Amrullah of Plan International said that at the time the tsunami hit, people affected by the war were already suffering from a variety of mental health problems. While the roadblocks and checkpoints of the civil war years are now gone, he added, “psychologically [they’re] not”.

The people of Aceh “got trauma from the military, then they were hit with the tsunami. We cannot measure the magnitude.”

But for all the problems still facing the region, ten years of reconstruction have dulled the grief, repaired shattered infrastructure and at least given people a fresh start.

Before the tsunami, life in Lamboro Nijid, a village on the outskirts of Banda Aceh, was tough. Due to the war, movement was restricted. Curfews were common. Local people were frequently taken in for questioning about their supposed links to GAM rebels, and sometimes tortured for information.

“When there was conflict the worst affected were the ordinary people,” said Rahmadullah, a resident of the village. Then, one day came the roaring waters to wash it all away.

“After, we could speak freely,” he said of December 26, 2004. “What happened that day? We got freedom.”

Published by UCA News, December 18, 2014

Cambodia’s recent history shows the need for a Plan B in Myanmar

It hasn’t been a good year for Myanmar’s reforms.

Journalists have been arrested and killed. A committee in the military-dominated parliament has refused to amend a constitutional provision that blocks Daw Aung San Suu Kyi from running for president, robbing her story of its fairytale ending. Meanwhile, the loosening of political controls has uncorked the genie of Burmese religio-ethnic chauvinism, dormant during decades of dictatorship, and the country’s ethnic periphery remains conflict-torn and far beyond the control of the central government—as it has for the bulk of Myanmar’s history. More than three years after President Thein Sein took office and initiated the reforms, there is backtracking on nearly every front.

Two decades ago, another Southeast Asian nation made a similar emergence from isolation, and experienced similar challenges. Indeed, Cambodia’s progress over the past 23 years offers a cautionary tale not only about the likely course of Myanmar’s “transition”, but also the assumptions we make about such transitions to begin with.

Cambodia opened to the world on October 23, 1991, with the signing of the Paris Peace Agreements. By the time the accord was signed, the country had been at war for more than 12 years; before that had come the murderous rule of the Khmer Rouge, which led to the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people; and, before that, more civil war. The Paris treaty sought to finally bring peace, democracy, and some semblance of normality to a long-suffering country. To implement the accords, it created the UNTAC mission of 1992-93, under whose benign auspices Cambodia would be reborn. As Cambodia opened, the world rushed in. Thousands of foreign consultants, UN staff, and aid workers arrived. Development aid typhooned in. Phnom Penh, a ramshackle capital of golden spires and potholed streets, became a steamy outpost of what Alex de Waal has termed the “humanitarian international”.

Cambodia’s progress over the past 23 years offers a cautionary tale not only about the likely course of Myanmar’s “transition”, but also the assumptions we make about such transitions to begin with.

As with Myanmar’s reforms, expectations were high, all the more so since Cambodia’s opening coincided with a crucial historical juncture: the fall of the Soviet Union and the wave of liberal optimism that followed in its wake. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama had famously proclaimed the “end of history”, arguing that communism’s collapse heralded “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”.

After four decades of ideological stalemate, history had chosen a winner. Cambodia quickly became a symbol and subject of the new global optimism. With history at an end, the “international community”, working with empowered local NGOs, would usher a victim of Cold War realpolitik along the road to the democratic promised land.

But while the West had experienced a “revolution of moral concern,” as Michael Ignatieff described it, no such change had taken place inside Cambodia. The government that emerged from the $2 billion-plus UNTAC mission in 1993 was an unstable coalition between two wartime enemies: the steely Hun Sen, prime minister of the regime installed by Vietnam after it overthrew of the Khmer Rouge in 1979; and the feckless Prince Norodom Ranariddh, head of the royalist Funcinpec party. When UNTAC wound up in late 1993,the civil war resumed. In July 1997, Hun Sen ousted Ranariddh in bloody factional street clashes; 18 months later, the Cambodian army finally defeated what was left of the Khmer Rouge. And so the Cambodia civil war came to an end — not through resolutions and treaties, but through military force and political deals. Hun Sen has ruled the country in much the same way ever since.

Today, Cambodia remains far from the promised land. Hun Sen’s achievements over the past 23 years have been substantial — peace, political stability, economic growth — but they are also highly contingent. The country’s stability rests not on any deep social consensus, but on a delicate balance between competing patronage networks. The gap between rich and poor grows wider, while tens of thousands have been thrown off their land to make way for large-scale agribusiness projects—some little more than cover for lucrative logging operations. Cambodia’s political system has little apparent aim beyond its own perpetuation, leaving many ordinary people to live off the crumbs.

But the “humanitarian international” lives on. Twenty years after the UN struck its blue tents, Cambodian civic culture is awash in democratic symbols and human rights narratives. Government officials speak the language of universal values and “good governance”. Artificial UN events like International Human Rights Day are official holidays. Colourful NGO insignia can be seen everywhere, on posters, banners, t-shirts, bumper-stickers, calendars, coffee mugs, and the sides of the white 4WDs that roar around the capital Phnom Penh. But that’s about as deep as it goes. In Cambodia, the end of history produced not democracy, but a façade—an almost pure abstraction.

Now, with Myanmar’s own reforms heading in a similar direction, development experts and human rights groups warn that the country is in danger of becoming “another Cambodia”. Their warnings contain a presumption that things could have turned out substantially otherwise. But could they?

The lesson of Cambodia is not that things somehow took a wrong turn on the road to democracy; it’s that the political road meanders, reverses, splays off in countless directions. There’s no iron guarantee it will end at the desired destination at all.

Though Francis Fukuyama’s controversial thesis has fallen out of fashion, his central idea still seems to pervade the way we think about development. The “end of history” brought us to a point where all the important social, political, and economic questions had been supposedly settled. “Development” was seen as merely a matter of bringing in proven expertise to implement proven solutions. For the Swiss critic Gilbert Rist, the choice of the biological metaphor was telling: “development” implied a rational, predictable course to social and political growth. As an acorn grows into an oak, so would the “developing” world become “developed”, politically (via democracy), economically (via free markets) and morally (via human rights). All this radiant troika required was the necessary sunshine and nutrients — the necessary “capacity building”.

These assumptions are still very much in evidence today in Myanmar. With reforms faltering, the reaction of many people is to question not the model, but the implementation. The international community gave too many concessions too quickly, say the international human rights groups. The US government should “ensure” Myanmar respects its “commitments”, and reimpose sanctions if they fail to do so, say the Republicans in Congress. At its extreme, the case is made that foreign countries should drag Myanmar’s leaders kicking and screaming into the promised land.

But what if it’s not the implementation that is flawed, but the model itself? In my new book Hun Sen’s Cambodia, I describe how the international intervention in Cambodia produced not democracy, but a “mirage” of democratic government behind which power works much as it always has — through relationships of patronage between powerful individuals. Meanwhile, the international commitment to Cambodia has devolved into a “development complex” that has entrenched dependency and now largely escaped the control of a fictive and divided “international community”. The lesson of Cambodia is not that things somehow took a wrong turn on the road to democracy; it’s that the political road meanders, reverses, splays off in countless directions. There’s no iron guarantee it will end at the desired destination at all.

This is an important lesson for Myanmar today. Cambodia’s recent history shows the limits of what can be achieved by moral suasion and international pressure. True, outside pressure has forced Hun Sen to release political prisoners and prevented the most overt forms of repression — as it has to some extent in Myanmar. These achievements are noteworthy, but limited. Such pressure can buy some short-term gains, but it can do little to force either countries’ leaders to adopt the normative outlook that respects democracy or human rights as concepts. This change can only come from below—from the Cambodian and Myanmar people themselves.

According to the American historian Mark Lilla,  the problem with thinking about countries in terms of where they lie on a linear  scale of development is that it obscures the importance of local history and context, which do more to determine a country’s political fate than the templates of international development.

Lilla writes, “If the only choices we can imagine are democracy or le déluge, we exclude the possibility of improving non-democratic regimes without either trying forcibly to transform them (American-style) or hoping vainly (European-style) that human rights treaties, humanitarian interventions, legal sanctions, NGO projects, and bloggers with iPhones will make a lasting difference.” The only sensible question to ask about countries like Myanmar is therefore a sobering one: “What’s Plan B?”

Published in the Myanmar Times, October 31-November 6, 2014

Rich Chinese are literally eating this exotic mammal into extinction

GlobalPost visits a border outpost where the world’s most trafficked mammal is on the menu.

MONG LA, Myanmar — “It’s delicious,” the Chinese waitress says, pointing at the three metal cages on the pavement. Inside each is a pangolin — an odd-looking creature that, over the past decade, has become the most heavily trafficked wild mammal in the world, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

At the moment, each pangolin resembles a ball about the size of a melon, covered in crocodile-like scales.

Sensing danger, the three animals have instinctively curled themselves into tight balls. In the wild, this reflex protects them from predators like bears and large cats. But there’s little defense against wildlife traffickers and well-heeled diners hoping to taste a rare and exotic meat.

This neon-soaked eatery in Mong La, a shabby town in a tiny rebel-held fief on the China-Myanmar border, is just one end-point of a global trade that is pushing the pangolin to the brink of extinction. The main trigger: a soaring demand for their scales and meat, mostly from China and Vietnam.

“The species here in Southeast Asia are getting absolutely hammered by a very large-scale, well-organized, systematic collection and trade to supply demand in China,” says Chris Shepherd, Southeast Asia regional director of the wildlife protection organization TRAFFIC.

In Mong La, pangolins are openly sold in restaurants to border-hopping Chinese tourists. Nearby wildlife boutiques sell pangolin skins and scales immersed in rice wine. At the open-air central market, one Chinese trader offers to sell me the skin of a Sunda pangolin, listed as “critically endangered” by the IUCN, for 200 yuan (about US$32). “Here, feel how soft it is,” she says, running her hands over the grey scales.

A shy, nocturnal animal, the pangolin has a long snout, tough outer scales, and snaking tongue, which it uses to lick up insects. In China, where it is known as lingli, or “hill carp,” in reference to its scaly exterior, pangolin meat has long been prized. The creature’s scales — made from keratin, the same substance as human fingernails and hair (as well as Rhino horn) — are also prescribed by traditional doctors to treat skin disorders and other ailments — despite lacking medical benefits.

The trade in pangolin parts from Southeast Asia to Hong Kong and China has taken place since at least the early 20th century, according to Dan Challender, co-chair of the IUCN’s Pangolin Specialist Group. From the 1950s to the 1980s, Challender says, pangolin skins were also exported in small quantities to the US and Mexico, where they were used to make shoes and clothes. The “official” exports of these products came to an end in 2000, when the trade in wild-caught pangolins was effectively banned under the international wildlife treaty CITES.

But with China’s boom, demand for pangolins has skyrocketed. For many middle-class Chinese, consuming black-market pangolins is now considered a sign of wealth and status, says Challender, who is writing his PhD on the global pangolin trade.

“The pull from China is getting bigger and bigger, and stretches wider and wider.”

While conducting research in Vietnam in 2012, Challender witnessed a diner pay $700 for a two-kilogram pangolin. “The creation of urban luxury markets for wild meat, especially where wild meat has been consumed historically, has been a key driver in the trade of pangolins,” he says.

To meet increased demand, pangolins are now harvested and processed illegally on an industrial scale. In one week in March 2008, Vietnamese officials confiscated 23 tons of pangolins at Hai Phong port, part of a shipment making its way from Indonesia to China. In 2010, another 7.8 tons of frozen pangolins were seized in southern China, along with 1,800 kilograms (nearly 4,000 pounds) of scales. Similar hauls have been made more recently en route to the Chinese market.

By the time they are packed into these large shipments, the pangolins are “effectively meat,” Challender says. “They’ve had all the scales taken off, they’ve had all the organs taken out — they’ve been processed industrially.”

In a June report, the Pangolin Specialist Group estimated that more than a million pangolins have been taken from the wild over the past decade, and that populations across Asia were in “precipitous decline.” Of the eight pangolin species, the IUCN now lists four as vulnerable, two as endangered, and two as critically endangered.

With pangolin supplies in China and nearby countries dried up, wildlife traffickers have looked further afield. The newest frontier is Africa. People in countries like Gabon, Kenya, Cameroon, Nigeria, and the Central African Republic have grown more aware of the value of pangolins to international traffickers.

So far this year, more than six tons of African pangolin scales have been seized prior export to Asia — more than the combined total of all previous seizures on the continent. “The pull from China is getting bigger and bigger, and stretches wider and wider,” says Vincent Nijman, a zoologist at Oxford Brookes University in the UK who has studied the wildlife trade in Southeast Asia.

According to Challender the beginnings of an intercontinental trade present nothing short of a “global crisis.”

“The worrying thing is the scale of it. The worrying thing is the number of countries from which African pangolins have been [taken],” he says.

Conservationists say that despite occasional large seizures, and despite pangolins being protected by law in every Asian country other than Brunei and Bhutan, dismantling wildlife trafficking networks remains a low priority.

In Cambodia, Toby Eastoe of Conservation International works with forestry rangers in the thickly-forested Cardamom Mountains, one of the few places in the country where significant populations of pangolins remain.

As in many other countries, the trade in pangolins is driven by poverty and opportunity. For a poor Cambodian villager, finding a live pangolin or accidentally snaring one in the forest is like winning the lottery. A live animal can fetch them anywhere from $100 to $400. “Everybody’s looking for pangolins,” Eastoe says. “It’s one of the most lucrative animals that you can easily get.”

Even while rangers sometimes arrest local people for catching pangolins, few higher up the chain are ever caught. As Eastoe says, “most of the people we arrest are poor. They’re just poor people trying to earn an extra buck.”

Despite all of this, there is some reason for optimism. Awareness of the pangolin’s plight is greater than it has ever been—the necessary first step to the effective enforcement of wildlife laws. And while pangolins only produce one offspring at a time, they can breed in the wild quite quickly, meaning that populations could potentially bounce back quickly if hunting pressure is alleviated.

But without a concerted push to fight trafficking cartels and give teeth to longstanding wildlife treaties, pangolins will remain easy prey. “Their only real defense, other than hiding, is rolling up into a ball,” says Shepherd of TRAFFIC. “They aren’t designed to deal with this sort of threat.”

Published by GlobalPost, October 18, 2014

The End of the Myanmar Fairytale?

With racial tensions soaring, doubts over the future of Aung San Suu Kyi and a challenging business environment, is the West’s love-in with the former pariah state finally over?

“MYANMAR: NO TURNING BACK.” These four words accompanied a photo of two smiling monks and an article lauding the political and economic reforms undertaken by the country’s government since 2011. “President U Thein Sein has radically changed the direction of the nation,” it read, “turning back the clock on decades of military rule and vowing to resurrect Myanmar’s former glory.” Further articles rhapsodised the country’s progress in energy, tourism and transport. On another page Myanmar was hailed, amid stock photos of rice crops and microchips, as “Asia’s next lion economy”.

All this was part of a ten-page “sponsored section” in the September/October 2012 issue of the American journal Foreign Affairs, paid for by the government of Myanmar and produced by Country Strategic, a New York-based firm specialising in “nation branding”, which on its website boasts “15 Years of Experience, 5 Continents, 60 Countries Branded”.

The Myanmar supplement was conveniently timed. Just the month before, Thein Sein’s government ended direct censorship of the press for the first time in 50 years. A few months before that, Aung San Suu Kyi, iconic head of the National League for Democracy (NLD), was elected to parliament amid boisterous scenes in the country’s crumbling former capital Yangon.

Since taking office in March 2011, Thein Sein’s government had surprised the world. Almost overnight, it released hundreds of political prisoners and initiated far-reaching economic reforms intended to drag Myanmar into the 21st Century. A country once mentioned in the same breath as Iran and North Korea was now spoken of as a democracy-in-waiting. During his historic visit to Myanmar in November 2012, US President Barack Obama drew deeply from his arsenal of presidential clichés to hail Myanmar’s “flickers of progress”, and spoke of “the power of a new beginning”.

That, at least, was the hope. As David Pilling wrote recently in the Financial Times, Myanmar’s emergence from dictatorship had previously had all the ingredients of a fairytale, the world’s neatest morality play. On one side was Aung San Suu Kyi, the beautiful daughter of an assassinated national hero, struggling to restore peace and democracy to a troubled land. On the other were the cruel, grasping generals who over half a century had turned Myanmar into a byword for bloody repression.

A potent one-woman brand, Suu Kyi inspired a campaign of boycott and divestment that isolated Myanmar from most of the West. Confined to her mouldering villa on the shores of Inya Lake in Yangon, she occupied a sort of moral sanctuary, idolised at home and abroad for her stand against the evil junta, which did little to help its cause, referring to itself until 1997 by the Bond-villain name of SLORC – the ‘State Law and Order Restoration Council’.

Then, in late 2010, the generals appeared to relent. Suu Kyi was released from house arrest and, a few months later, Thein Sein, a former general, committed his new civilianised government to reform. Most Western sanctions were jettisoned. New ceasefires were signed with the country’s restive ethnic militia groups. The transformation seemed almost magical. As Pilling wrote, all that remained was “for the military to return definitively to barracks and allow Suu Kyi, the princess of this tale, to take up her rightful position as leader of a democratic, peaceful and prosperous country”.

But a happy ending remains far, far away. To start with, the Lady, as Suu Kyi is known, is unlikely to become president in 2015, thanks to a constitutional provision barring anyone with a foreign spouse or children from the top office. The constitution also reserves a quarter of the seats in parliament for the Myanmar military, or Tatmadaw, giving it de facto veto power over any changes to the constitution. Despite the loosening of Myanmar’s Orwellian system of censorship, journalists have been jailed and threatened with legal action for reporting on ‘untouchable’ subjects.

Meanwhile, peace remains as elusive as ever. Negotiations for a nationwide ceasefire proceed apace, minus the restive Kachins, but the outer rim of Myanmar remains an effectively lawless land beyond the reach of government control – as it has been for the bulk of recorded history. Sectarian tensions have also flared over the past two years in Rakhine State, where dozens of Muslims have been killed and tens of thousands forced to abandon their homes in pogroms led by Buddhist fanatics.

Confined to her mouldering villa on the shores of Inya Lake in Yangon, Suu Kyi occupied a sort of moral sanctuary, idolised at home and abroad for her stand against the evil junta

Loosed from the grip of military dictatorship, Myanmar now floats somewhere between outright freedom and outright repression. “In 2008 the situation was really clear,” said Nay Phone Latt, a blogger imprisoned that year for opposing the authorities. “There was a military government and there was an opposition party. But now the situation is not so clear.” For one thing, he said, the NLD now sits in parliament. “It is not easy to say what is wrong and what is right,” he added. “There are so many grey zones.”

None of this should be surprising, given the motivations for the opening and the massive challenges facing the country. In truth, Myanmar’s reforms started not with the calculated release of the Lady in 2010, but some six years earlier, when, seeking to shrug off their country’s pariah-status, Myanmar’s generals embarked on a “seven-step roadmap” from dictatorship to “discipline flourishing multi-party democracy”.

The main aim of the reforms was to build bridges with the West and create a hybrid system in which the military’s power was preserved within a framework of “disciplined” – which is to say, tamed – democracy. Dave Mathieson, a Myanmar researcher for Human Rights Watch, described the constitution as an “artfully constructed document to preserve military interests and perpetuate a softer form of military rule”. Kyaw Min Swe, editor of The Voice news journal, characterised Thein Sein’s civilian government as “old persons, new system.”

This is to say nothing of the practical burdens of 50 years of dictatorship. Take the economy: when Myanmar opened to the world, investors and economic analysts envisioned their own Shangri-La of untapped markets. “When the reforms started three years ago there were a lot of potential investors coming in who had totally unrealistic expectations,” said Aung Thura, the CEO of Thura Swiss, a Yangon-based research and consultancy firm.

The truth, he said, is that Myanmar lacked even the bones and sinews of a modern economy: infrastructure was and remains in a moribund state, telecoms and internet access are poor and unreliable, and electricity is among the most expensive in the region. In the most recent issue of the World Bank’s Doing Business Report, Myanmar ranked 182nd out of the 189 countries surveyed, coming in below even such economic disaster zones as Libya and Congo. The fact remains that, despite three years of considerable progress, Myanmar remains one of the most difficult places in the world to do business.

The country has great economic potential, Thura said, but investors are becoming much more aware of the challenges and limitations. “If you drive one hour out of Yangon, the country changes completely, you’re in rural areas where people are farming with water buffalos. To believe that the consumer market is boundless is a big mistake,” he said.

As the reforms enter their fourth year, it is clear that the stark categories of the pre-reform years no longer apply. In place of the evil cabal of generals, Nay Phone Latt said there is an ambiguous split between hardliners and reformers, differing in their preferred method for ushering Myanmar to the promised land of “disciplined democracy”.

The same grey areas apply to the NLD, a party built around the exalted status of Suu Kyi. The Lady is literally greying – she will be 70 by the time of the election – and the youngest member on the NLD’s 15-member executive committee is 62 years old. As committee member Win Htein, who is 72, admitted in an interview: “There’s nobody who can match her charisma and

her leadership.”

But Suu Kyi has had a difficult transition from Mother Theresa-status to working politician. When the reforms began, there was a hope that the Lady’s engagement with Thein Sein would yield some minor constitutional concessions, or some voluntary diminution of the military’s power. But it hasn’t happened. “I think that’s looking more and more like a trap that she walked into,” said Mathieson. Nyan Win, the NLD’s spokesman, offered a terser explanation that hinted at years of overblown expectations: “She’s not a magician.”

Since then, Suu Kyi has drawn international flack for expressing affection for the Tatmadaw, of which her father Aung San was a famous founding member, and for not speaking out quickly enough to condemn the violence against Myanmar’s Muslims. Suu Kyi has stated that “as the leader of a party, you have to aspire to the leadership of the nation”, and is no doubt aware that many of her supporters are suspicious, as many Burmese are, of the country’s Muslim minority.

The fact remains that, despite three years of considerable progress, Myanmar remains one of the most difficult places in the world to do business.

Some observers say that the party has no clear plan for life after the Lady. “There is no evidence of any natural succession to Aung San Suu Kyi within the NLD,” said Derek Tonkin, a former British diplomat who now serves as an advisor to Bagan Capital, an investment and advisory firm. “Suu Kyi has tended to regard the NLD as subservient to her will and she has in the past maintained an iron discipline. Dissent has not been tolerated. For that reason, any weakening of her standing could lead to the NLD splitting into factions.”

On a drizzly Yangon day in July, I met Johnny Than on a lonely rail siding near the city’s crumbling downtown grid. At 79, he was rake-thin and careworn, but still possessed rather eccentric English, picked up years ago from reading dusty back issues of the New York Times. “There is no law and order in this country. It is like Somalia,” he said by way of introduction, as we stepped over the grass and concrete sleepers.

Like most people, Than is pleased at the political opening, as far as it goes. But life remains tough. Since his retirement from the Railways Ministry 28 years ago, Than has survived on a meagre government pension of about $25 per month – barely enough to survive a daily life that remains, in many ways, untouched by the reforms. “Every department takes bribes,” he said by way of example. “Bribery and corruption is number one.”

But it would be wrong to describe people like Than as disillusioned; the reality is that most were never really ‘illusioned’ in the first place. In the junta days, the stark division between Suu Kyi and the generals produced a simplistic view of the country’s problems, an irrational exuberance about the reforms when they came and then an inevitable backlash when reality started to set in. It’s undoubtedly more productive to see Myanmar for what it is – an impoverished country “no better, but no worse than many other regimes in Southeast Asia”, as Tonkin described it. From this, there is truly no turning back – and that’s probably a good thing.

Published in the Southeast Asia Globe, October 2010

Cambodia at the Crossroads

After many months of protests and rounds of negotiations, the Kingdom’s two main parties have struck a deal. But in a country with a youthful population and old-school leaders, it remains to be seen whether politicians can meet rising expectations

On August 5, 55 elected lawmakers from the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) donned their traditional purple pantaloons and were finally sworn into the country’s National Assembly. In doing so, they brought an end to the protracted political deadlock that had paralysed Cambodia since a disputed election last year. As opposition lawmakers entered parliament, normality resumed in the capital Phnom Penh. The unfortunately named ‘Freedom Park’, barricaded and guarded since protests in January, was reopened and restored to the public. The tense standoff between Cambodia’s two largest parties – one on the rise, the other battling the accretions of age and decades-long incumbency – was finally at an end.

What will happen next is unclear. When Cambodians went to the polls on July 28 in 2013, they upturned their country’s political landscape. The ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), which has controlled the country in various guises since 1979, reeled as its share of National Assembly seats was slashed from 90 to just 68 – its worst electoral performance since 1998. The remaining 55 seats were won by the CNRP, which had deftly capitalised on the simmering discontent with the 29-year rule of Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Opposition leader Sam Rainsy and his deputy Kem Sokha immediately claimed they were robbed of victory and demanded a UN-backed investigation into voter fraud. To drive their demands home they boycotted the newly elected National Assembly and launched a campaign of colourful public demonstrations at Freedom Park, a government-sanctioned ‘protest zone’ in the centre of the city. The wave of opposition peaked in late 2013, when more than 100,000 people marched through Phnom Penh, openly calling for Hun Sen’s resignation – the largest sign of opposition for 15 years. At the same time, the two parties negotiated behind closed doors, bartering and trading, seeking a workable end to the deadlock.

In the end, the agreement that broke the deadlock was born not of amity but of confrontation: On July 15, during an opposition protest to “free Freedom Park”, CNRP supporters set upon a squad of thuggish district security guards, beating several bloody. In the aftermath, seven CNRP politicians were arrested, slapped with trumped-up charges and locked up at Prey Sar prison in Phnom Penh. In typical Cambodian style, the wheel turned quickly; within days, the flashpoint had led to a resumption of talks, and then an eventual resolution.

So where to from here? In purely institutional terms, the settlement looks promising for the opposition. In exchange for ending its boycott of the National Assembly, the seven CNRP detainees were released from prison, and the party received the chairmanships of five of the parliament’s ten special commissions and the post of National Assembly vice-president. The agreement also reconfigured the National Election Committee (NEC), previously a CPP fief whose reform was a key opposition demand after the election. The nine members on the new-look NEC will now be split between four delegates from each party, with the balance held by one ‘neutral’ delegate – Pung Chhiv Kek, the respected founder and president of the human rights group Licadho.

In typical Cambodian style, the wheel turned quickly; within days, the flashpoint had led to a resumption of talks, and then an eventual resolution.

A fortnight later, at the first joint session of the National Assembly, CNRP president Rainsy hailed a new dawn in Cambodian politics. “To guarantee the implementation of this agreement, both parties must carry it out with optimism, honesty and belief in each other, even though we will be met with obstacles and difficulties,” he said in his address to the parliament. Hun Sen described the occasion in slightly less sunny terms, as “the start of a long process together”.

But despite the apparent optimism that attended the end of the deadlock, history tells a far muddier story – a story of deals made and broken, of twists and turns, of unending political gymnastics in a land where power resides not in political institutions, but in the powerful people who occupy them. As one deadlock ends in a springtime of optimism, another more crucial one is almost certainly beginning.

To start with, analysts say it is more than likely that the canny Hun Sen, who has survived repeated cycles of Cambodian history since becoming prime minister in 1985, will attempt to manipulate the agreement for his own gain. As the royalist Funcinpec party discovered after entering a coalition with the CPP in 1993, a share of government posts and ministerial portfolios is no guarantee of real power. Despite winning that election, Funcinpec officials quickly found themselves cut out of decision-making – “shuffling meaningless documents, attending vacuous meetings, reading newspapers”, as the historian Steve Heder wrote.

Under coalitions brokered after elections in 1998 and 2003, Hun Sen slowly picked off Funcinpec’s leadership with threats and inducements, and the party eventually collapsed in ignominy at the 2013 election, failing to win a single seat. “Hun Sen sliced [Funcinpec] up like you sliced a salami, and then [he ate] them one by one,” said Benny Widyono, a former UN envoy to Cambodia.

Observers said the CNRP now runs the risk of its strong electoral showing being paid out, Funcinpec-style, in a debased coinage of powerless posts in powerless institutions. “I have no reason to believe that the way in which the CPP and CNRP interact has changed fundamentally,” said Sophal Ear, the author of Aid Dependence in Cambodia: How Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy. Ear said that “by hook or by crook”, Hun Sen would try to turn the arrangement to his advantage, exploiting ambiguities in the deal, buying off the opposition, and wielding the salami knife with as much relish as ever. As Ear said: “The devil is in the details.”

But Hun Sen will face unprecedented challenges in manipulating his way into another decade in power. At its heart, the surge of support for the opposition at last year’s election was an indication that the CPP’s method of ruling Cambodia had become unsustainable. The party has built its legitimacy on the fact that it cast out the Khmer Rouge and brought a semblance of peace, stability and economic growth to a war-ravaged country. At the same time, it has worked hard to buy off, eliminate or otherwise marginalise rival centres of power, foreclosing any alternative path for Cambodia.

But profound social and demographic changes have weakened the CPP’s political hold. The election in 2013 was the youngest in Cambodia’s history: about 3.5 million of the 9.5 million registered voters were between the ages of 18 and 30 years, and 1.5 million of them – more than 15% – were voting for the first time. The large majority of Cambodians now have no memory of the Khmer Rouge, are less scared of speaking out and are no longer willing to accept Pol Pot’s nightmare as a benchmark.

First-time voters have grown up in a very different country to the one their parents knew. Under Hun Sen, land grabs and hurricane capitalism have uprooted tens of thousands. As rural migrants have flooded to the cities, joining a growing urban working class of garment and construction workers, they have escaped the smothering influence of CPP village chiefs and commune authorities – the bedrock of the CPP’s power since the 1980s. Voters also have greater access to information than ever before. Urban migration and the proliferation of internet access and social media networks such as Facebook have fostered a dawning sense of awareness that local issues – land grabs, deforestation, radiant levels of corruption – are part of a larger system, one that had created massive amounts of wealth yet largely ignored the needs of ordinary people.

One of these people was Yiv Yek Khuan, a 67-year-old woman who I met after the election in a small hamlet in Kampong Cham province. In the broad brown sweep of the Mekong River she owned a small wooden house and a sunny yard where laundry billowed and pink fish were laid out drying in the sun.

“I still pay remember and pay gratitude to January 7, to the Hun Sen government, which liberated me from the killing,” she said. “But recently I haven’t been satisfied with this. The paying of gratitude never ends.” As time goes by, fewer people like Yek Khuan are carrying portraits of Hun Sen during demonstrations, calling for his kingly intercession in local disputes. More of them are criticising him. More are connecting the dots.

Hun Sen has responded to the changes as he always has – with threats and hand-outs. After the election the premier promised reform, telling officials during a six-hour speech in September 2013 to “scrub your body” and “heal our disease”. The party borrowed from the most popular elements of the opposition platform and promised wage hikes to teachers, garment workers and civil servants. It also reshuffled its cabinet, moving on a handful of rusted officials and replacing them with respected technocrats.

History tells a far muddier story – a story of deals made and broken, of twists and turns, of unending political gymnastics in a land where power resides not in political institutions, but in the powerful people who occupy them.

But can an old tiger change its stripes? Some observers are sceptical. “The ruling CPP has not improved and cannot quit its political culture of using violence and courts to suppress rivals,” said Ou Ritthy, a blogger and political analyst based in Phnom Penh. Sure enough, in the countryside, far from the international panopticon of Phnom Penh, the land grabs and logging have continued. Meanwhile, amid much talk of reform, the CPP-controlled courts prosecuted a series of legally spurious cases against demonstrators arrested during post-election protests. Throughout the deadlock the message was clear: Reform would come like everything else in Hun Sen’s Cambodia – as a gift from the party.

But with the opposition surging, and commune and national elections scheduled for 2017 and 2018, it remains an open question whether tweaks to Hun Sen’s system will allow him to stem the circular inertia of Cambodia’s patronage state long enough for him to retain power until the age of 74 – his planned age of retirement.

Equally uncertain, however, is whether the opposition can offer a credible alternative. The CNRP has proven itself good at organising street protests and political stunts, but it’s unclear if the party has the resources to run the country, or pay for the massive wage hikes and pensions it has promised voters. And despite the impressive unity the party has shown since forming a little more than two years ago, its two main leaders, Rainsy and Sokha, have a history of conflict and mistrust. At lower levels, the party is essentially divided into factions loyal to the two leaders, who have differed on key aspects of the negotiations with the CPP. According to Ritthy, Sokha was unhappy with the final agreement with the CPP; he wanted the CNRP to make greater demands of Hun Sen before ending its boycott. Tensions also exist at the ideological level. Some CNRP officials, such as the charismatic Mu Sochua, who rose to prominence during a legal spat with Hun Sen in 2009, constitute what might be termed the ‘Berkeley wing’ of the party: foreign-educated, urbane, antiracist. But many others in the CNRP still traffic in demagogic criticisms of Vietnam, describing the Hun Sen government as a puppet of Hanoi, illegitimate by definition. In June this year, Sokha went so far as to blame the yuon, as Vietnamese are often derogatorily termed, for the bridge stampede at Diamond Island in 2010, which killed 353 people and injured many hundreds more. “They created the scene to kill Khmers at Koh Pich,” he said.

This has created a schizophrenic party, which tries simultaneously to court Cambodian voters, foreign donor constituencies and the shrill diaspora communities whose donations keep the party afloat. The result is a series of scattered promises to end corruption, boost wages, put Hun Sen on trial at The Hague and throw out the Vietnamese. One minute, policies are wrapped in the language of human rights and the next, in the language of ethno-nationalism. Some are impossible to implement, others simply contradictory.

The challenge for the CNRP will be turning its scattershot platform into a focused legislative agenda while maintaining its unity as Hun Sen wields the carrot and the stick. As the political battle resumes, Ritthy said the Rainsy-Sokha relationship will be critical for the party. “Even though Sam Rainsy and Kem Sokha have shown some different political strategies and approaches to deal with the CPP so far… the two can compromise,” he said. Anything else, he added, would be “suicide” for the leaders. “They are old now [and] 2017 and 2018 seem to be their last battles,” Ritthy said. “The 2017 and 2018 elections are the best chances of their lives.”

Published in the Southeast Asia Globe, September 2014