Truth and fear in Cambodia

Truth and fear in Cambodia 

USA Today | 2 June 2016

Cambodian leaders claim King Norodom Sihamoni has asked them to investigate the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) for filing a petition asking the monarch to intervene in the alleged persecution of anti-government activists.

Reported on Thursday by the Cambodia Daily — a respected news website that analysts cite as a key source of information about Cambodia’s inner workings — the investigation is the latest in a worrisome escalation of political tensions in the authoritarian Southeast Asian country.

“The Cambodia government is going after the opposition with hooks and tongs in a way that we haven’t seen since the dispute over the 2013 election results,” Human Rights Watch Asia Deputy Director Phil Robertson told The Financial Times. 

It’s not clear if the king really asked for the probe. But if the government says something is true, well, then, it must be true, critics say.

The government has signaled that it will jail CNRP leader Sam Rainsy, who has been in exile since 2015, even though he received a royal pardon in a criminal defamation case. His deputy, Kem Sokha, faces charges of soliciting a prostitute stemming from a conversation he allegedly had over the phone. He denies the charges.

Opposition leaders want Prime Minister Hun Sen to let Rainsy return and drop the charges against Sokha.

Opposition lawmakers gave the king the petition earlier this week. The lawmakers delivered the appeal after a standoff with police who refused to let around 1,000 activists march to the palace, the Associated Press reported.

CNRP claimed to have collected around 200,000 thumbprints for its petition. Those numbers fueled the opposition party’s argument that Hun Sen rigged the 2013 elections that kept him in power after 31 years in office.

Cambodia became famous in the United States over the so-called “killing fields” where an estimated two million people, or a quarter of the population, died during Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot’s communist revolution in the 1970s.

Hun Sen is a former Khmer Rouge leader.

The groundswell of opposition support appears to be causing him worries over local elections slated for next year and a general election expected in 2018.

The U.N. has expressed concerns over the situation.

“The Secretary-General is concerned about the escalating tensions between the ruling and opposition parties in Cambodia, particularly arrests or attempted arrests,” said U.N. spokeswoman Devi Palanivelu, Reuters reported. “A non-threatening environment of democratic dialogue is essential for political stability and a peaceful and prosperous society.”

At the same time, three of the prime minister’s bodyguards were also convicted last week of beating up two CNRP lawmakers outside parliament. They’re going to prison for a year.

Human Rights Watch suggested that the guards’ prison sentences could be a whitewash, an attempt to show the persecution of opposition members doesn’t go to the top of the Cambodian power structure.

But the two lawmakers received serious injuries, so they received a lesson no matter what people believe about who was behind the violence.