Cambodia’s Hun Sen makes pre-election bid to stifle opposition

Photograph by: PORNCHAI KITTIWONGSAKUL , AFP/Getty Images

“Opponents of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen have the tendency to show up dead.”

With warnings of civil war and one-sided legislation, strongman for 28 years indicates he won’t go easily

By Jonathan Manthorpe, Vancouver Sun columnist June 11, 2013

Hun Sen has ruled Cambodia since 1985 and one of his favourite campaign tactics is to warn voters there will be civil war if they are foolish enough to defeat him.

His threats are not to be taken lightly.

When his Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) lost the country’s first democratic elections in 1993 to the royalist FUNCINPEC party, the leader Prince Norodom Ranariddh found it advisable to make Hun Sen co-prime minister.

Hun Sen repaid the prince by launching a coup in 1997 and regaining what he considers his rightful place as Cambodia’s sole leader.

With elections slated for July 28 and Hun Sen facing the most serious challenge for many years from a newly revived opposition, he is again pulling out all the stops to ensure he remains in power.

In this campaign, Hun Sen’s warning of civil war and war with neighbouring Vietnam if the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) wins was merely an opening gambit uttered as far back as April.

Since then Hun Sen has got really serious about undermining the CNRP’s campaign.

Last week, Hun Sen’s CPP used its majority in the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, to expel 28 CNRP members.

The CPP also passed legislation making it illegal to question the official history of the “Killing Fields” genocide of the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979.

The move appears to be aimed at intimidating or even imprisoning the CNRP deputy head Kem Sokha, who is widely regarded as the most effective opposition leader Hun Sen has ever confronted.

And, as usual throughout his political career, Hun Sen’s adversaries have a habit of turning up dead.

On several occasions, opposition politicians and journalists have had deadly encounters with pistol-wielding assassins on motorcycles.

This time the victim was a senior Buddhist monk, Keo Touch, who had strong family links to senior CNRP figures. The monk was found beaten to death at the end of May.

Cambodian elections always echo to the grim memories of the Khmer Rouge genocide in which about two million people were murdered.

As a young man, Hun Sen abandoned plans to become a monk and in the early 1970s joined the Khmer Rouge in its bid to oust the military regime of United States-back Gen. Lon Nol.

When the Khmer Rouge swept to power in 1975, Hun Sen was a battalion commander in eastern Cambodia, but in 1977 he led his men into Vietnam to avoid an anticipated purge.

In 1979, the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia, overthrew the Khmer Rouge and in 1985 installed Hun Sen as prime minister.

Thus Hun Sen straddles two key fault lines in Cambodian politics: association with the Khmer Rouge, and also with the feared and mistrusted neighbour Vietnam.

CNRP leader Kem Sokha, who is deputy to the party’s self-exiled president Sam Rainsy, has tried to capitalize on both these chinks in Hun Sen’s armour.

It was Kem Sokha’s threat at the start of the campaign to bring several former Khmer Rouge members of the CPP government to justice that prompted Hun Sen to warn of civil war if the CNRP wins the election next month.

But when late last month Kem Sokha made a roundabout attack on Hun Sen’s Vietnamese links, the opposition leader appears to have played into the prime minister’s hands.

In a couple of speeches delivered to rallies in provincial cities, Kem Sokha said he found it hard to believe that the Khmer Rouge’s most notorious torture and killing centre, Tuol Sleng, which is now a museum, was in fact a relic of the genocide.

He said that surely the Khmer Rouge would have destroyed evidence of their atrocities before retreating.

Kem Sokha said he thinks Tuol Sleng was staged by the invading Vietnamese after 1979.

Hun Sen’s response was to have his CPP followers, who hold 90 seats in the 123-seat National Assembly, rush through legislation last week making it illegal to deny crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge.

And last weekend survivors of Tuol Sleng, where an estimated 12,000 men, women and children were killed, organized rallies against Kem Sokha in the capital Phnom Penh and several other cities around the country.

However, civil society groups which monitored the rallies claim they were organized by the Hun Sun government. Government officials are said to have paid people the equivalent of about $10 to attend and used government vehicles to ferry people to and from the meeting sites.

Also pushed through the National Assembly last Friday was a motion expelling the 28 opposition CNRP members.

The justification was that this is a new party formed by the amalgamation last year of the Human Rights Party and the Sam Rainsy Party. The CPP members claimed it is unconstitutional for them to sit as CNRP members when they were elected under their old banners.

jmanthorpe@vancouversun.com