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| Former opposition leader Sam Rainsy, pictured at his home in Paris last month. Facebook |
Cambodia’s drift towards dictatorship
Phnom Penh Post | 2 March 2017
Editor,
Every observer of Cambodia recognises that the country is dangerously
adrift. Local and national elections are scheduled for June 2017 and
July 2018 and these elections have the potential to end the autocratic
power that has been in place for decades. Fear of democratic change has
led those in power into an ever-blinder and more violent course of
repression, which affects all parts of society and which risks derailing
the electoral process and provoking an explosion of popular anger.
The Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) of Prime Minister Hun Sen, in
power for 38 years, is showing obvious signs of age. It has to face the
reality of a young and ever-better informed population, which has become
more and more critical and demanding, and an ever-more powerful
opposition in the shape of the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP).
The opposition would have won the last legislative elections in 2013 but
for the manipulations of the CPP, which many independent observers have
denounced.
Three factors have increased the fears of the CPP concerning the next
elections of 2017 and 2018: growing popular discontent at government
corruption, notably massive misappropriation of peasant land; the
dynamic of an opposition party united for the first time in the
country’s modern history; and the creation and effective functioning of a
new national election commission. This body, more independent and
credible than in the past, is the opposition’s most important landmark
achievement to date.
These three factors have led the CPP to change its strategy for
clinging to power: from a traditional strategy of voter intimidation,
vote buying and electoral manipulation, it has now moved to a new tactic
of simply suppressing the CNRP, the only opposition party represented
at the National Assembly, to avoid electoral competition.
This attempt at suppression has been carried out via the legislature:
the CPP has a small majority in the National Assembly, where it has
adopted an amendment to the electoral law especially made to allow the
government to dissolve the CNRP at any moment under pretexts as vague as
“threatening public security” or “incitement leading to the destruction
of national unity”.
It has also proceeded via the judiciary: courts under government
orders have sentenced several leading members of the CNRP to prison
sentences “legally” incompatible with the status of a party politician,
and with the exercise of public functions in the future.
As I have been condemned to such sentences for “defamation” of CPP
leaders I had to resign last month from the leadership of the CNRP to
avoid the dissolution of the party in the light of the new law.
Prime Minister Hun Sen and his CPP are in the process of testing
international opinion to work out how far and how fast they can go in
their attempt to impose a single-party system on Cambodia as under the
Khmer Rouge and during the Cold War.
This attempt and this totalitarian drift, contrary to the Paris Peace
Accords of 1991, have already been condemned by international rights
organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
It is incumbent on the governments of the democratic countries of the
world to show the government of Mr Hun Sen who still needs legitimacy
and international assistance that there is a limit which must not be
crossed, and that death of a “system of liberal and pluralist democracy”
laid down in the Paris accords, would result in fresh woes for the
long-suffering Cambodian people.
Sam Rainsy
Former leader, CNRP
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