Tenth out of ten: A few days at centre stage for Hun Sen, Cambodia’s dictator, may not be entirely welcome

Nov 17th 2012 

The Economist

THE ten-member Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) is used to fending off “interference” by the West in the internal affairs of some of its members. In recent years the human-rights record of the regime in Myanmar has been the tenderest of these sore spots. But as ASEAN’s leaders gather in Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia, for their annual summit between November 18th and 20th, Myanmar, liberalising and opening up, finds itself flavour of the month in the West. Instead, it is the host country that is now the butt of more criticism.

Since Cambodia joined ASEAN in 1999, Phnom Penh has grown from a quaint backwater into a bustling city. The economy, thanks in part to garment exports, is growing at a steady 6% a year. Hun Sen, Cambodia’s prime minister, has a lot to show off at the East Asia summit, held alongside ASEAN’s get-together, and drawing Barack Obama and other world leaders. It caps Cambodia’s year in ASEAN’s rotating chair, and Phnom Penh is being spruced up. Beggars and hawkers are being moved, anyone thinking of a street protest has been told to think again, and eight people were detained on November 15th when they protested on a roof instead with a picture of Mr Obama and a message reading “SOS”. NGOs had to cancel planned events as venues withdrew. But Mr Hun Sen’s reputation does not scrub up quite so easily.

ASEAN is still smarting from the debacle of its annual security forum and foreign ministers’ meeting in Phnom Penh in July. For the first time its members could not agree on a joint communiqué. The Philippines and Vietnam wanted references to their disputes with China in the South China Sea. Cambodia, apparently at China’s behest, objected. Mr Hun Sen, it was felt, was now in the pocket of China, which in September announced $500m in soft loans to Cambodia. The row drags on. Cambodia’s ambassador to the Philippines had to be withdrawn from Manila after carrying it on in the press and is yet to be replaced. This is Cambodia’s second serious falling out with one of ASEAN’s “core” founder members. Last year Cambodia and Thailand lobbed shells at each others’ troops over a disputed bit of their border.

For human-rights critics, the summits offer a chance to remind the world of Mr Hun Sen’s ruthless record. A former Khmer Rouge, he emerged in the Vietnamese-backed regime that rebuilt Cambodia from the ruins left by the Pol Pot terror of 1975-79. In 1985 he became prime minister of a one-party state on the Vietnamese communist model. After the Paris peace agreements of 1991, the United Nations tried to plant a multiparty democracy in this infertile soil. Ever since, Mr Hun Sen has seemed to be trying to hoe away its traces, like so many weeds. Having lost the first election, in 1993, he muscled his way into a power-sharing deal. Sharing power, however, is not Mr Hun Sen’s style, and in 1997 he staged a coup.

Most of the villages, where four-fifths of Cambodia’s 14m people live, have schools bearing his name, along with offices of his Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). The CPP is almost as dominant as in the one-party days, and has made Mr Hun Sen Asia’s longest-serving leader. The party controls most of the media and it harasses the opposition, whose leading figure, Sam Rainsy, facing 11 years in jail on various dubious charges, has exiled himself.

A new report by Human Rights Watch, a New York-based campaign group, calculates that since 1991 more than 300 people have been killed in political attacks. The CPP has easily won elections, even without stuffing ballot boxes. The opposition, now called the National Rescue Party, a recent merger of the Sam Rainsy Party (SRP) and another, has threatened to boycott the next vote in July 2013 unless Mr Rainsy can compete (unlikely: he has been stripped of his vote) and if the election commission is not given independence. In fact, opposition members suggest a boycott would be very much a last resort.

Some analysts blame the looming election for a recent crackdown. Mam Sonando, a well-known journalist critical of Mr Hun Sen, was last month sentenced to 20 years in prison, for leading an “insurrection” in April, for which 13 women had also been jailed. The alleged uprising was actually a protest against a land grab, in which a 14-year-old girl was shot dead by the authorities.

Land grabs—or the enforcement of “economic land concessions”—are the other big human-rights concern clouding Mr Hun Sen’s day in the sun. In principle a sensible idea to bring economies of scale to the countryside by selling farmland, these have become a nightmare of abusive, uncompensated eviction. Protests have been violently suppressed and activists murdered. A moratorium on land concessions has been in force since May, as a land-titling exercise is undertaken. Yet concerned NGOs and businessmen alike see this as a sham. Evictions continue on concessions deemed already in the approval process.

Everything but fair

In late October a dozen American congressmen wrote to Mr Obama urging him to take Mr Hun Sen to task in Phnom Penh. The European Parliament is calling for an end to the land concessions and a release of political prisoners. A campaign to remove Cambodia’s “everything but arms” duty-free access to the EU is gathering steam. A particular target is “blood sugar”—Cambodian sugarcane allegedly produced on grabbed land. Myanmar is in the process of regaining these tariff privileges. When it does, it could be a big competitor to Cambodia’s garment industry.

Mr Hun Sen must find all this terribly unjust. In terms of its infrastructure, regulation and political stability, Cambodia is far better placed to receive foreign investment than is Myanmar. And it is free of the hideous ethnic cleansing seen in Myanmar’s Rakhine state last month. Other ASEAN countries—Brunei, Laos, Vietnam—flout democratic principles with, apparently, far less opprobrium. Yet that is the lesson Mr Hun Sen has spent three decades drumming into Cambodia’s opposition: life is unfair.