Autopsy of a Cambodian Election
How Hun Sen Rules
Khmer New Year is the closest thing Cambodia has to a High
Holiday, and in April, Prime Minister Hun Sen celebrated it in style
with his fiercest opponent. During a festival at the ancient temples of
Angkor, he and Sam Rainsy ate together from a gigantic cake of sticky
rice weighing more than four metric tons—a Guinness World Record. It was
an uncanny scene, not least because the last time Sam Rainsy had made a
major public appearance at Cambodia’s most glorious site, in September
2013, it was to call Hun Sen a cheat and a usurper.
On that day,
Sam Rainsy and 55 members-elect of the opposition Cambodia National
Rescue Party were boycotting the inaugural session of the new National
Assembly to protest alleged fraud in the recent general election, which
the CNRP had officially lost by a small margin. With the ancestral
temples bearing witness in the background, they called for an
investigation, vowing “not to betray the will of the people.”
Has Hun Sen done it again? He has been
Cambodia’s prime minister for 30 years, in spite of his unseemly
political origins. A one-time Khmer Rouge commander who defected, he was
put in power in 1979 by Vietnam, Cambodia’s historical enemy, after it
toppled Pol Pot’s regime. Hun Sen has remained in place after the advent
of electoral democracy in 1993, even though his party has never won a
majority of the popular vote in a general election, except in 2008,
maybe—but the results of that election, like those of all the others,
are disputed. Over the years, Hun Sen has coaxed or cowed, corrupted or
co-opted, defanged, sidelined, or otherwise neutralized a large cast of
adversaries, far and near.
Hun Sen has perfected the art of
electoral authoritarianism without alienating Western donors ostensibly
dedicated to the rule of law, while offsetting their influence by
welcoming more and more investment from China. At once crass and deft,
salt of the earth and grandiloquent, he is a remarkable political
animal. But his longevity also reflects a distinct political
culture—inspired by stories and folktales about mighty, wily kings and
hares outwitting greater creatures—that rewards and glorifies the
ambitious and the sly, the ruthless and the adaptable.
An autopsy
of the 2013 election and its fallout suggests that even Hun Sen’s
opponents cannot entirely escape this conception of power. At the same
time that Sam Rainsy and the CNRP pressed for multiparty democracy,
liberalism, and human rights, they seemed to unwittingly adopt some of
Hun Sen’s ways. The opposition claimed to represent the people’s will
and the people’s interests, but it sometimes treated its supporters with
a paternalist instrumentalism that evoked manipulation more than
emancipation. The CNRP practiced a half-baked form of nonviolent
resistance that, instead of shaming the government for abusing its
monopoly on force, wound up bowing to it. The party’s appeals to
nationalism and flirtations with anti-Vietnamese xenophobia were a
gambit designed to contest Hun Sen’s legitimacy, but in addition to
courting real danger, they may have indirectly confirmed certain
features of Hun Sen’s self-mythology.
Perhaps it could hardly have
been otherwise, given the CPP’s lock on state resources. And the CNRP
may have nudged along some overdue reforms. But the opposition’s tactics
also seem to have confirmed that democratic contestation in Cambodia
remains, at bottom, a struggle for power, and that serves Hun Sen above
all.
THE PRIME MINISTER WHO WOULD BE KING
The
promise of multiparty democracy returned to Cambodia with elections in
1993, after the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops and a UN-brokered peace
accord that ended a long-running civil war. Immediately, however, the
notion was trampled. Although the CPP lost the election to Funcinpec, a
royalist party, Hun Sen wrangled a position as second prime minister,
and in 1997, he staged a coup.
By then, the Khmer Rouge was
still waging a guerrilla war but falling apart as a movement. Hun Sen
hastened the group’s disintegration with military strikes and offers to
protect leaders who defected. This was a ploy not only to eliminate
opponents but also to create for himself the persona of a grand pacifier
and mastermind of national reconciliation.
Over the next decade,
Hun Sen consolidated his power. He cordoned off rival factions within
the CPP. He brought the royalists into a coalition and then cannibalized
them. He maneuvered around the royal family—especially after 2004, when
the formidable king, Norodom Sihanouk, aging and ailing, abdicated in
favor of his feckless son Norodom Sihamoni.
Hun Sen also fought
off the democratic opposition, by way of intimidation and lawsuits. His
chief target was Sam Rainsy, a former financier trained in France who
had served as Funcinpec’s finance minister from 1993 to 1994 and then
went on to head his own party, calling for clean government, workers’
rights, and the rule of law. Sam Rainsy had earned an aura of half
martyrdom by surviving a grenade attack in 1997 that killed more than a
dozen people; Hun Sen saw him as an irritant.
By 2009, the prime
minister was riding high. After the 2008 election, the CPP had a
commanding majority in the National Assembly. A new UN-backed court was
starting to try major Khmer Rouge figures but without troubling the
former Khmer Rouge cadres now serving in Hun Sen’s government. And then,
Sam Rainsy did Hun Sen a favor. On a visit to the Vietnamese border,
Sam Rainsy uprooted a post that he claimed violated the official
boundary between Cambodia and Vietnam, a public relations stunt that
earned him a prison sentence for “racial incitement” and sent him into
self-imposed exile. In 2010 came another, longer jail sentence—for
falsifying maps and spreading disinformation—which ensured that he would
have to stay away.
Over the next few years, Hun Sen grew only
more secure, partly on the back of a brisk economy. Between 1993 and
2013, Cambodia’s average annual growth rate was 7.7 percent, the
sixth-highest in the world. And during that period, the country’s
poverty rate dropped. But growth also meant more concentrated wealth and
opportunities for corporate plunder. A number of nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) claim that some 700,000 Cambodians have been
adversely affected—many of them displaced and dispossessed—by the vast
land concessions the government has granted to large companies.
Hun Sen has constructed an implausible composite regime, a kind of political chimera.
Human rights groups criticize the Hun Sen government for this practice,
as well as other abuses—justifiably, but also sometimes with
inexplicable ferocity, and disproportionately, it seems, compared with
the way they treat the governments of Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. This
happens precisely because Cambodia is more open than its neighbors: the
UN’s presence in the 1990s spawned a slew of NGOs, and foreign-language
media (although not Khmer-language outlets) work largely unmolested.
Call it the peril of partial toleration—and of having created a system
that defies ready definitions.
Hun Sen has constructed an
implausible composite regime, a kind of political chimera, that is part
vestigial communism, part crony capitalism, part neofeudal paternalism,
and part divine-right monarchism. The CPP, like other communist
holdovers from the Cold War, conflates its own apparatus with the state.
It oversees a top-to-bottom system of control over the bureaucracy, the
judiciary, the security forces, and traditional media. It is secretive,
opaque, and paranoid. The party runs the economy on an exploitative,
clientelistic basis, at once predatory and patrimonial. The state
delivers (or withholds) schools, hospitals, and roads to the population
as though they were favors rather than public goods.
At the same
time, Hun Sen has exalted the monarchy—the better, it seems, to bask in
its mystique and usurp its symbolism. He especially likes to compare
himself to the sixteenth-century hero Sdech Kan, a commoner who became
king after killing a king who wanted to kill him; he has had several
statues of Sdech Kan built around the country, some in his own likeness.
During Sihanouk’s cremation in February 2013, King Sihamoni, the queen
mother, and senior monks took turns trying to ignite the funeral pyre,
but they all failed. When Hun Sen tried, it lit up immediately. A
miracle, he said later, and a sign that he had “inherit[ed] the task of
protecting the monarchy.”
FROM SUBJECTS TO CITIZENS
The
prime minister who would be king entered the 2013 election season in
full form. “If you love Hun Sen, if you pity Hun Sen, if you are
satisfied with Hun Sen, if you believe in Hun Sen,” he enjoined
Cambodians, then “vote for the CPP.” As in past elections, he campaigned
on generalities about stability and progress and invoked the specter of
the Khmer Rouge. He announced some populist measures: the monthly
minimum wage of garment workers was increased; a new road was unveiled
here, a new bridge there. He also issued threats. A land-titling
campaign would end if the CPP were not reelected. Civil war might break
out. “Change is not a game,” Hun Sen said a month before the election.
Of
the seven other parties in the race, the CNRP was the most important.
But it was a fledgling party, and its standard-bearer was in
self-imposed exile. It had been created just the year before, in the
wake of the 2012 local elections, after the Sam Rainsy Party and the
Human Rights Party, which had been rivals, realized they could have
outperformed the CPP in some areas if they had run under a single
banner.
The CNRP presented a platform that was more a wish list
than a program, pledging, among other things, higher wages for factory
workers and civil servants, lower gas prices, and free health care for
the poor. All of this would somehow be funded with money recovered by
ending government graft—another crowd-pleasing promise. While Sam Rainsy
was away, it was Kem Sokha, a veteran human rights advocate, who did
most of the campaigning, while fending off a slew of dubious lawsuits
meant to derail him.
In light of the CNRP’s challenges, Hun Sen
had good reason to feel secure—which may explain why, a couple of weeks
before the election, he allowed Sam Rainsy to come home, as several
Western governments had been urging, by obtaining a royal pardon
annulling Sam Rainsy’s prior convictions. After four years in
self-imposed exile, Sam Rainsy, the opposition leader in dark-rimmed
glasses, with the look of a dreamy, distracted professor, returned to
Cambodia without fear of arrest—although too late to run in the election
himself, or to even cast a ballot.
Sam Rainsy arrived on July 19,
and despite the blackout on state media that day, he was greeted by a
huge, ecstatic crowd. Tens of thousands of people lined the road all the
way from the airport to the center of Phnom Penh, chanting, “B’do!”—“Change!”
The last night of the campaign, there were competing party concerts:
the CPP’s featured famous stars, smoke effects, portable toilets, and
boxed meals; the CNRP’s featured a rickety platform, with a single
spotlight, and half baguettes. This election would be a contest between
entitlement and enthusiasm.
It was a very close call. On the evening of July 28,
2013, after an election day unusually light on violence, the CPP
promptly announced that it had won 68 seats and that the CNRP had taken
55. (No other party in the running won any.) Almost as promptly, the
CNRP claimed to have won 63 seats—and thus the election itself. Even
going by the government’s figures, this was a searing rejection of Hun
Sen: the CPP had lost 22 seats.
There were several reasons for the
setback. Some 1.5 million voters were first-timers, and being young,
they had little memory of major unrest; Hun Sen’s pledge to maintain
stability had little traction with them. Although Cambodia had become
less poor, to many voters, it seemed more unfair. Urbanization, coupled
with the explosion of social media, had heightened the awareness of
inequality and of impunity for the rich.
Sam Rainsy had also
cleverly exploited widespread anti-Vietnamese sentiment. The CPP’s
common characterization of Vietnam as Cambodia’s savior from the Khmer
Rouge runs against the widely shared view among Cambodians that their
neighbor is an invader and pilferer. Sam Rainsy had raged against
abusive land concessions by claiming that they favored Vietnamese
companies. This was true, if incomplete—Chinese companies may benefit
even more—but the claim was a half argument that turned prejudice into
righteousness.
Sihanouk’s death in October 2012 may also have
boosted the anti-CPP vote. Over the lengthy mourning period that
followed, thousands of Cambodians of all ages, all classes, and all
parts of the country had gathered in front of the royal palace to pay
homage to the king. A French reporter based in Cambodia since 1999 told
me that period was the first time she had heard so many people seem so
disaffected, and say so openly—and now, they lamented, Sihanouk, the
only real counterweight to Hun Sen, was gone. Footage broadcast to
commemorate Sihanouk’s heyday in the 1960s—images of large factories,
immaculate schools, and all-girl rock bands—also made an impression:
life under the CPP was better than it had been under the Khmer Rouge,
but it could be better still.
The political analyst Lao Mong Hay,
who is in his 70s, almost choked up when he told me after the election
that he had never seen Cambodians so fearless and free. At long last, he
said, they had gone from “being subjects” to “becoming citizens.”
MOST FREE AND LEAST FAIR
With
the CNRP claiming fraud, it was invested with a double mandate: not
only had Cambodians voted for the party in unprecedented numbers, but
then they had been cheated of the real results. Nationwide, the
difference between the CPP and the CNRP was only about 290,000 votes,
out of approximately 6.6 million cast, and before the election, NGOs had
warned of major structural problems affecting many more people than
that. The names of more than one million eligible voters seemed to be
missing from the official rosters. Yet the lists contained 250,000 exact
duplicates. And local authorities, most of whom were CPP members, had
distributed some 290,000 temporary voting cards after the registration
period. The National Democratic Institute later reported that an
inordinately high number of votes were cast for the CPP by voters using
temporary cards. Koul Panha, head of the Committee for Free and Fair
Elections in Cambodia, a watchdog group that sent out 11,000 monitors on
voting day, told me that if the 2013 election had been “the most free”
in Cambodia’s history, it had also been “the least fair.”
Hun Sen is often called "the strongman of Cambodia," but that label undersells his government's skill at calibrating violence.
But fraud is a tricky thing to prove or even identify. The name of one
of Kem Sokha’s daughters appeared on the registries of two districts—yet
if the CPP had had a master plan, presumably it would not have involved
her voting twice. The supposedly indelible ink used to identify voters
could be washed off with a five-minute bleach treatment. But that was
the case also for the ink at the polling station used by Kem Sokha, and
if there was one place in the entire country where any election riggers
would have made sure to use good ink, it was there.
The
difficulties of proving wrongdoing seemed like yet another major hurdle
for the CNRP’s leaders—but then again, if you can’t measure it, you
might as well exaggerate it. After all, while getting incensed over
cheating in general terms would help them rally their supporters, not
dwelling on the details would leave them room to negotiate with the CPP.
About a month after the election, Sam Rainsy told me that at first, the
CNRP’s leaders claimed to have won because they were “on hot coals.”
Now he preferred to say, “The spirit that truly reflects the situation
is that there are two winners on an equal footing.” The CNRP was still
calling for an investigation, but only into irregularities on election
day and during ballot counting. This would redistribute a few seats at
most—allowing both the CPP to stay in power and the CNRP to enter the
National Assembly without looking like a sellout.
One could call
this a victory of pragmatism over principle and laud the realism of the
CNRP’s leaders for looking ahead rather than risk stalling on a lost
cause. But the move reeked of petty politicking. The CNRP wasn’t openly
explaining its strategy to the people whose votes had brought it this
far and whose will it claimed to represent.
PEOPLE POWER?
Aside
from a couple of speeches, Hun Sen was mostly quiet in the weeks after
the election. Rumors circulated of stunned confusion among the CPP’s
leaders (how could voters be so ungrateful?) and of growing rifts within
the party. Officially, however, the CPP was proceeding with its new
mandate in all formality, insisting that any complaints about the
election should be addressed to the relevant authorities—none with a
reputation for independence. The CNRP countered by announcing that it
would boycott the National Assembly until an investigation was
conducted. And in September, it started staging mass rallies in Freedom
Park, an awkward expanse of tiled concrete in Phnom Penh designated by
the government as an appropriate venue for free expression.
At
times, the gatherings felt like town-hall meetings; at other times, like
country fairs. While onstage politicians made speeches and ordinary
people shared their grievances, hawkers waded through the crowd selling
steamed clams and cubes of sugar cane. As the occasional daytime rallies
turned into overnight sit-ins, the countryside seemed to take over the
city. The students and young office workers who had dominated
pre-election gatherings gave way to peasants with brittle bodies and
pruned faces.
The rallies were small and civil compared to the
ones that toppled governments in Egypt and Ukraine in recent years, but
for Cambodia, they were without precedent in scale and daring. How long
would Hun Sen put up with such defiance? The CNRP was scrupulous about
stating its commitment to nonviolence. At the same time, it tolerated,
and sometimes seemed to stoke, anti-Vietnamese sentiment. Comedians were
allowed to perform incendiary skits on the stage at Freedom Park.
Considering that the most serious brawls reported on election day—near
lynchings—had targeted people suspected of being Vietnamese, this
smacked of easy populism and seemed irresponsible.
It also seemed
like an implicit admission of weakness. The CNRP was up against the
CPP’s vast machinery, with few means to match it. Even the CNRP’s main
asset, popular support, had a shortcoming: the party was trying to ride a
protest vote—a vote that hadn’t endorsed it so much as rejected Hun
Sen. And in its attempt to leverage something that wasn’t entirely its
to claim, at times the CNRP betrayed a view of the masses that was not
only instrumentalist and patronizing but also almost feudal in its
assumptions about the relationship between people and power.
One
day in late September, the opposition dispatched supporters to ask the
king to rescind a letter formally convening the new National Assembly. A
dozen women sat by barricades a couple of blocks away from the royal
palace guarding boxes with petitions stamped with 265,788 thumbprint
marks, they claimed. They were waiting for a representative of the
palace to accept the delivery. Clouds gathered, a drizzle threatening,
and a blue tarp was thrown over the boxes. Finally, someone came out to
say that the king would hear the people’s plea. A rickshaw was
commissioned, the heavy boxes were stacked high onto the single seat,
and the scrawny driver rode off toward the royal gate, his charge
teetering.
A few days later, the National Assembly met as planned,
without the opposition. Yet in late October, the CNRP again sent out
supporters bearing petitions to appeal to a higher authority. Hundreds
of demonstrators marched to the UN’s human rights office to deliver a
truckful of papers demanding an investigation into the July election:
two million thumbprints, allegedly, representing almost 13 percent of
the country’s total population. The boxes sat in a storage room for
weeks, awaiting a bill of lading from UN headquarters in New York.
So
much for Lao Mong Hay’s hope that Cambodia’s subjects had finally
become citizens; on those occasions, they were cast in the role of
supplicants—and to little effect. As the fall wore on, more and more
states formally recognized Hun Sen’s new government. Their diplomats in
Phnom Penh were growing frustrated with the CNRP’s antics, wishing the
party would just take its seats in parliament and get down to the hard
work of being an opposition party. The crowd in Freedom Park was
starting to thin.
PRISONER'S DILEMMA
The
CPP, for its part, was regrouping. A few of the party’s more worldly and
dynamic members were brought into the government. The Commerce Ministry
announced a campaign to cut back on unofficial payments by automating
the filings that all businesses have to make. The education budget was
increased. One cabinet member told me then that the election results had
been “a wake-up call”; the party’s survival depended on accelerating
reform.
Today, as ever, the most explosive issue for Cambodians is Vietnam.
But there were obstacles. Tackling large-scale corruption would unsettle
the patronage networks that prop up CPP elites. Going after small-time
graft might please Cambodians fed up with petty shakedowns, but it could
alienate bureaucrats, who are underpaid and need the extra cash. There
was also the knock-on effect of rising expectations: when garment
workers asked for a wage increase to more than $150 per month, teachers
asked for $250, and civil servants for $500. Some weeks earlier, I had
asked Sam Rainsy if he worried that the CPP might undermine the CNRP by
getting ahead of its program. He had answered: “The problem is more
complicated. Hun Sen isn’t just the head of a system; he is its
prisoner.”
By late fall, it looked like Sam Rainsy was a prisoner
of that system, too. The CNRP was making little headway on negotiations
with the CPP, even after downgrading its conditions for taking its seats
in the National Assembly—now, basically, it was demanding only to
receive a television license and the presidency of some parliamentary
commissions. If the CNRP ever came to power, given its limited
experience in government, it would have to rely on bureaucrats loyal to
the CPP. Even the opposition’s policy of nonviolence was held hostage to
its assumption, widely shared, that at any moment the government might
still resort to force.
Hun Sen is often called “the strongman of
Cambodia,” but that label undersells his government’s skill at
calibrating violence. After an initial display of troops, water cannons,
and barricades with razor wire in response to the postelection
protests, state security forces had pulled back to a remarkable extent.
But there were a few brutish crackdowns on small protests far from
Freedom Park—just a reminder. And Hun Sen would occasionally warn of the
mysterious “third hand,” code for thugs, infiltrators, and agents
provocateurs, who might cause trouble for the demonstrators.
Yet
in late December, the CNRP doubled down, announcing that it would hold
regular marches until Hun Sen resigned and early elections were
scheduled. Around then, the garment workers’ movement stirred. A group
of independent unions announced a mass strike until the minimum wage was
raised from $80 per month to $160—the government’s own estimate,
roughly, of a living wage. Since the industry accounts for around 80
percent of Cambodia’s export revenues, that could mean a major economic
disruption. Sam Rainsy went to a factory area by the Vietnamese border
and encouraged workers to strike: “We have to be together. I support all
of you until you reach success. And I’ll be with you and protect you
all.”
The CNRP’s parade on December 29 through the heart of
Phnom Penh was its largest demonstration yet, perhaps 100,000 strong,
and it was the first time garment workers joined en masse. The Ministry
of Labor, which had just announced an increase in the workers’ minimum
wage, to $95 per month, now raised it to $100, while demanding that the
striking workers return to their factories no later than January 2. That
day, a protest at a plant on the outskirts of Phnom Penh was repressed
by an elite paramilitary unit. Another protest at a nearby plant
degenerated—with bonfires and looting—and the next day, security forces
quashed it by shooting into the crowd, killing five people.
The
day after that, bullet casings, allegedly from the factory shooting,
were put on display at the CNRP’s headquarters. Sam Rainsy condemned the
killings and reaffirmed the party’s commitment to nonviolence. But he
also made a lengthy, coldly mathematical case demonstrating that the
minimum wage could be raised to $160 per month without undercutting
Cambodia’s competitiveness. The CNRP, he said, backed the cause of
garment workers by offering them “arguments” and “intellectual support.”
Considering the deadly events of the day before, it was a kind of
support that sounded a lot like distancing.
If Sam Rainsy’s
message was intended as a gesture of conciliation to Hun Sen, it was too
subtle or it came too late. Just hours after he delivered it, state
security forces and masked thugs wielding batons and metal pipes raced
into Freedom Park and forcibly flushed it of opposition supporters. The
authorities issued a ban on any assemblies of more than ten people.
The
raid on Freedom Park stripped the opposition of its greatest showcase.
But it also exposed the government’s ruthless defensiveness. The result
was a draw of sorts. Sam Rainsy had the people on his side, and Hun Sen
had state force, but neither was decisive.
THE COSTS OF COMPROMISE
The
spring of 2014 was quiet, predictably. Some activists were arrested.
Security forces were congratulated. While Sam Rainsy toured foreign
capitals, Mu Sochua, a former minister of women’s and veterans affairs
and a CNRP member who had won a seat in parliament, started a one-woman
campaign to reclaim Freedom Park, staging repeat solo sit-ins there. On
July 15, she went with reinforcements. There was a clash and arrests.
Sam Rainsy flew back from abroad, and within days struck a bargain with
Hun Sen: the government would release the CNRP members who had been
arrested, and everyone would finally take their seats in the National
Assembly. The “culture of dialogue” was born.
For the CPP, the
benefits were obvious: an end to this crisis, a sop to foreign
investors, and a chance to co-opt the CNRP. For the opposition, the
results were more mixed. Kem Sokha would become the vice president of
the National Assembly. The CNRP would head five parliamentary
commissions, including a new one devoted to anticorruption. A new
election commission, tasked with drawing up entirely new voter lists,
would be set up. But many of these gains were symbolic, and the more
significant ones hinged on details of implementation that were to be
determined later.
The deal also exposed the CNRP’s weaknesses.
Senior members and party advisers complained that Sam Rainsy had struck
the deal with Hun Sen without consulting them enough. The new election
commission would not include members from any political parties other
than the CPP and the CNRP. Mu Sochua later justified this to me by
saying that no other party had won any seats in the 2013 election—never
mind the idea that smaller actors should have a say in shaping the
system. The CNRP’s objective wasn’t pluralism, or even leveling the
playing field; it was securing power.
A year later, the CNRP has
obtained a license to operate a television station, but the permit is up
for renewal annually. Although all the CNRP activists who were jailed
have been released, the cases against them are “frozen,” as Sam Rainsy
put it, meaning that they could be reactivated. The new election
commission must re-register an estimated ten million eligible voters in
time for local elections in early 2017. As of July, however, its next
secretary-general—the person in charge of the administration that will
oversee the actual registration—had not been selected. For the time
being, the incumbent from the old, suspect commission remained in the
post.
The National Assembly has passed a raft of laws that many
NGOs have decried for reining in civil society and trade unions. The
CNRP has objected to these bills, sometimes with vehemence. But its
commitment to the “culture of dialogue” acts as a cap on such criticism.
After a legislator from the CNRP questioned the administration of the
Red Cross, which is headed by Hun Sen’s wife, the prime minister
challenged Sam Rainsy to take an oath at a famous shrine and vow to “die
through bullets, lightning and everything” if that accusation—or the
ones about the 2013 election being rigged—turned out to be wrong.
The
CNRP’s leaders seem to have tied their own hands, and this is
alienating some supporters, most visibly on social media and among
Cambodians in the United States, a significant source of funding. When I
spoke to him in late June, Kem Sokha estimated that the CNRP’s
rapprochement with Hun Sen may have cost the party ten percent of its
backers and that another 50 percent were skeptical, waiting to see
concrete results.
Mu Sochua, however, was crediting the “culture
of dialogue” with enabling the CNRP to “penetrate the base” and start
building up support for the local elections in 2017 and the general
election in 2018. With détente now an official policy of the government,
she explained, CPP agents were no longer intimidating opposition
supporters.
For Sam Rainsy, the CNRP has time on its side: the
population of Cambodia is getting younger, and that demographic shift,
he believes, can only serve his party. But his talk of happy
inevitability suggests a different kind of resignation. In an interview
in late June, he invoked the end of apartheid in South Africa,
amnesties, and truth and reconciliation commissions to argue that Hun
Sen needed assurances that he would not be prosecuted after leaving
power. And the more Sam Rainsy talked about ways to encourage Hun Sen to
step down, the more he seemed to be at the man’s mercy.
VIETNAM SYNDROME
Hun
Sen has shown little sign of wanting to go. During the CPP’s congress
in June, his candidacy for 2018 was announced and he was elected party
president, in place of his longtime rival Chea Sim, who had recently
died. The interior minister, a protégé and brother-in-law of Chea Sim,
was promoted to vice president—as was a longtime CPP operative with
detailed knowledge of the party apparatus. The CPP was closing ranks.
Already, it had promoted the children of some party bigwigs and vastly
expanded its Central Committee to include many officers and officials
with command authority over security forces.
It was also
continuing to undertake reforms, especially in areas readily visible to
ordinary people, such as education. The minimum wage for garment workers
had gone up to $128 per month, and David Welsh, a labor rights
activist, forecast other increases—although probably no significant ones
until just before the next election. According to the political
scientist Kheang Un, the CPP dispatched working groups after the 2013
election to sound out constituents regardless of their political
affiliation. The party finally seemed to understand that it must be more
responsive to the needs of more people, not just its supporters.
Whether
or not these measures can win back Cambodians who voted for the CNRP in
2013, they are reminders of the stark disparity in resources available
to the two parties—a vast gap that may explain why the CNRP often winds
up having to play Hun Sen’s game and, perhaps inevitably, adopts
confused views and shoddy tactics. When, for example, Sam Rainsy says
that the CNRP is committed to nonviolence, he doesn’t just mean that the
party won’t resort to violence; he also means that it doesn’t want its
supporters to suffer any violence themselves. But how strong is a
nonviolent movement that refuses to take a hit? And so at the same time
that Sam Rainsy repeatedly called for calm, he also seemed to be playing
with fire, coyly. He embraced the workers’ movement and appealed to
anti-Vietnamese sentiment as though he wouldn’t mind sparking a
revolution, but only with plausible deniability. (An uprising? Who, me?)
Today, as ever, the most explosive issue for Cambodians is
Vietnam—in particular, its alleged encroachment on Cambodian territory
and the illegal immigration of Vietnamese to Cambodia. It is also, of
course, the most embarrassing issue for Hun Sen: an awkward reminder
that he was first installed in office by the enemy. In June, the CNRP
was busy trying to exploit this, with some of its legislators leading
groups of supporters to areas of the border that were being demarcated
and clashing with Vietnamese officials and residents there.
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