Sam Rainsy, left, and Prime Minister Hun Sen pose for photos after meeting at the National Assembly in 2014. Heng Chivoan |
Prime Minister’s formula put to test
Phnom Penh Post | 9 Dec. 2016
For the many who have pinned their hopes on Sam Rainsy and Kem
Sokha’s Cambodia National Rescue Party, it would be a crushing blow for
the delicate alliance to have come so far only to split now.
[Knowing this, then and now, the then-and-now leaders of the Human Rights Party have done everything to hold Sam Rainsy hostage to their endless demands for power and positions -- from the juvenile to the ridiculous to the Machiavellian play for power to nepotism to dangerous obstruction -- knowing Sam Rainsy would acquiesce for the sake of party unity. A cursory review of the past few years without even deep analysis tells the story. The Cambodian people get it.]
[Knowing this, then and now, the then-and-now leaders of the Human Rights Party have done everything to hold Sam Rainsy hostage to their endless demands for power and positions -- from the juvenile to the ridiculous to the Machiavellian play for power to nepotism to dangerous obstruction -- knowing Sam Rainsy would acquiesce for the sake of party unity. A cursory review of the past few years without even deep analysis tells the story. The Cambodian people get it.]
Yet less than six months from the June 4 commune elections – the most
important test yet of the nearly five-year-old experiment in placing
the downfall of Prime Minister Hun Sen ahead of competing egos – the
still-maturing marriage of convenience has never been so openly
fractious.
From Sokha’s open rebuke of Rainsy’s refusal to leave the safety of
Europe, to Rainsy’s obvious displeasure in giving up the title of
parliamentary “minority leader” for Sokha, never before have the deep
personal differences in the CNRP appeared so at risk of blowing up.
(Last month, Sokha’s daughter even publicly taunted Rainsy as “Peter
Pan” for his perceived childishness.)
It’s a familiar place for Hun Sen, who over his three decades in
power made a name for himself as Cambodia’s great divider – slicing and
dicing the Khmer Rouge, the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front,
Funcinpec and anyone else who dared oppose him. So there is a wealth of
experience for Sokha and Rainsy to draw on as they perform their latest
three-person dance with the man they have sworn to remove from power by
working together.
“I hope the two leaders will not fall into that trap again,” said Son
Soubert, who has for legal purposes served as nominal leader of Sokha’s
old Human Rights Party since its structure and membership was merged
with that of Rainsy’s party to form the CNRP in July 2012.
“If they have learned from the past, this is what the prime minister
has done: First, the CPP divided the KPNLF, and when they succeeded,
they started to do it with Funcinpec, too. Now – I hope – the political
parties should have learned their lesson,” he added.
However, Soubert, who is a former member of the Constitutional
Council and son of late prime minister Son Sann, said that even though
he has known Rainsy and Sokha for decades, he could not predict if the
former fierce rivals could prove themselves different to past leaders.
“That is difficult to say. Human nature is that they both have reason
– to think and to calculate – but they have also their egos and
hearts,” Soubert said.
Both CNRP leaders should also be intimately aware of the relevant
history, with Rainsy having his political roots in Funcinpec – for whom
he was finance minister in the 1990s in coalition with the CPP – and
Sokha having cut his teeth as a clandestine KPNLF operative in the
1980s.
Outside of its large youth following, the CNRP in fact still remains
largely a latter-day regrouping of holdouts from both those movements,
which had been both allies and rivals from their creation to their
collapse at Hun Sen’s hands. And much of that divide remains.
The Sam Rainsy Party faction of the CNRP remains associated with the
remnants of Funcinpec, from which the SRP split in the 1990s, as well as
Rainsy’s personalist style, while Sokha’s HRP is heavily populated by
former KPNLF figures, who touted their old party as more democratic.
As a founding Funcinpec member who now sits in Sokha’s faction and
often criticises Rainsy, Prince Sisowath Thomico bucks that trend. He
said that for all the personal differences between Rainsy and Sokha, he
believed both were hyper-aware that they cannot win alone.
“I’ve said this many, many times before: Kem Sokha and Sam Rainsy
cannot be divided, because if they split, they will both have no future.
The CNRP has raised so much hope, so I do not believe in divisions
between Sokha and Rainsy,” Thomico said.
“But what I am more concerned about,” the prince added, “is divisions
between their supporters – not at the grassroots, but at the
intermediary level. We have to remember that the CNRP is still a union
of the Sam Rainsy Party and the Human Rights Party.”
“Both parties had different ethics, different organisations and
different cultures,” he said. “At the moment, some SRP people could feel
offence.”
Still, few among the factions around Rainsy and Sokha should be
tricked by Hun Sen suddenly favouring one and excluding the other, given
the brazenness of the gambit, said Sophal Ear, an associate professor
at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
“It’s like Theresa May (Conservatives) saying she doesn’t want to
work with Jeremy Corbyn (Labour) anymore and he must be replaced in the
UK Parliament,” said Ear, who wrote Aid Dependence in Cambodia: How
Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy.
Such a proposal could only be interpreted as an undisguised tactic to
secure unfair political gains, he said, and so would dupe few among the
opposition. “On the flip side,” Ear added, “the optics are damaging for
the CNRP: real or apparent loss of agency.”
CPP spokesman Sok Eysan said that while he did not want to say his
party was using tricks to divide the CNRP by pampering Sokha and
excluding Rainsy – after doing the opposite throughout 2015 – he would
also feel uncomfortable denying it.
“If we completely deny this, that would also not be reasonable,
because generally, for competing parties in a democratic society, there
is no party that wants its competitor to become stronger,” Eysan said.
“It’s the same for any party, not only the CPP.”
“Any party that is created wants its competitor to become weaker, and
this is normal,” he reiterated. “If we deny it completely, it would
seem to contradict the truth.”
While a prime minister selecting his own opposite would seem
ridiculous in most countries, for Hun Sen, it is just another page from a
well-worn recipe book of divide-and-conquer.
He split Funcinpec in the 1990s and 2000s by declaring he would only
work with minor official Ung Phan – and later Ung Huot, and later Nhek
Bun Chhay – and not the party’s leader, Norodom Ranariddh. He split the
KPNLF by saying that he would work with Ieng Mouly, but not party leader
Son Sann.
However, Soubert, the nominal president of Sokha’s old HRP, said that
he believed the deputy opposition leader’s unexpected rapprochement
with Hun Sen was not the past repeating itself, but instead a necessity
while the CNRP has a chance to extract more from Hun Sen.
“Now, the concern of Kem Sokha is the people from the party and NGOs
who are in jail from his case,” Soubert said, referring to four Adhoc
rights workers and an elections official who remain in jail over the
“prostitution” case for which Sokha was pardoned. “When they are
released, we will see.”
Rainsy said in an email that he indeed could see the old tactics of
division behind Hun Sen shifting his affections to Sokha and his disdain
to Rainsy, but also appeared to reserve judgment on the matter.
“You are possibly right,” Rainsy wrote. Asked why he believed Hun Sen
would be so transparent in trying to split him from Sokha, Rainsy
added: “Because the game has become so obvious that any cover would be
useless. Worse, the guy has no other game to play.”
Indeed, while Hun Sen may revel in the politics of division, it has
been rare for him to leave success to so late in the game – especially
with Rainsy and Sokha seeming only to grow more sure-footed as their
party unity holds up amid their public divisions.
Before the CNRP, Hun Sen had never faced a united opposition at an
election, and success for the CNRP in the commune elections in six
months would send shivers down the premier’s spine as he ponders how to
protect the veneer of invincibility he has curated.
With the be-all-and-end-all July 2018 national election scheduled
only a year after the commune poll, a question that has over the past
few years seemed easy to kick down the road has suddenly arrived to
demand a answer: Can Hun Sen break the CNRP?
I think Mr. Sam Rainsy and Mr. Kem Sokha should stay firm, strong, alert, united as one Khmer or strong CNRP party and active without letting Hun Sen, his secret Yuon/Vietnamese agents (in Khmer/Cambodian military uniforms as you have already in the public scenes) and Hun Sen's masters in Hanoi to do whatever they want to break up Mr. Sam Rainsy and Kem Sokha of CNRP. CNRP supporters and leaders should become more active, motivated, intelligent and watch out on each others to protect every Khmer/Cambodia citizens, and don't ever fight or argue each others for no reasons, must support each others, don't accuse our own Khmer, support and help each others no matter how small you have, learn from each others, understand each others, don't regard any of our own Khmer as weak or poor, show the supports to our Khmer people who don't know or confuses or they are fooled by Yuon/Vietnamese CPP supporters to destroy their own kinds.
ReplyDeleteKhmer Yeurng
Kem Sokha only stays firm when he is with young girls. He already betrays Sam Rainsy.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteKem Sokha has been fooled and tricked by Traitor Hun Sen, similarly as
ReplyDeleteKing ( stupid Kong ) Chey Chetha II by a Yuon King's daughter.