Hun Sen

Over the last year, Cambodia’s ruling party, the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), has dramatically increased its pressure on its political opponents and civil society. Democracy in Cambodia has always been fraught, and elections are not completely free and fair. But the current crackdown is much greater in scope, and far more concerning, in part because it is being enabled by American apathy. To see more about the interplay between U.S. policy and Cambodia’s crackdown, read my new Project Syndicate piece.

For decades, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, the longest-serving nonroyal ruler in Asia, has played a delicate political game. While using a wide range of tactics—co-option of opposition party leaders, the use of state funds to promote the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), laws and lawsuits to reduce the influence of civil society and political opponents, and reportedly sometimes outright election fraud—he also has tried to maintain at least an appearance of some political freedom in Cambodia. As a result, for decades Cambodia existed as a kind of pseudo-authoritarian state, but one in which there were greater freedoms than in neighboring nations like Vietnam, Laos, and even to some extent Thailand. The country held contested elections, even if the electoral process was highly biased against opposition parties, and the CPP used a wide range of threats and other tools to try to divide and harass the opposition. Civil society, which had been rebuilt in the 1990s, continued to flourish despite the CPP’s tough tactics toward environmental groups, some media outlets, campaigners for fairer electoral processes, and other NGOs. Foreign civil society organizations like the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute continued to operate in the country. Reporters faced harassment—and worse—but in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s a young generation of Cambodian journalists emerged, and tough, independent radio, online, and print outlets investigated government activities and posed tough questions to policymakers. In 2013, the main opposition party even nearly won national elections—the true result will never be known, although some opposition figures believe it did actually win, but the election commission did not allow the CPP to lose. In the past year, however, Cambodia’s politics have slid farther backwards than probably any other country in East Asia. (Thailand is a close competitor, but the Thai military took power in 2014, not 2017.) Hun Sen and the CPP this year have launched an all-out attack on political opposition and civil society. The prime minister seems to have decided to take no risks ahead of 2018 national elections—no repeat of the possibility that his party could lose. He also appears emboldened by a new geopolitical situation in Southeast Asia in which the United States government, which historically had been one of the major critics of Hun Sen’s abuses, has chosen to mostly ignore human rights issues. Most recently, last week the Cambodian government filed papers that seek to dissolve the main opposition coalition, which would leave the opposition shattered before national elections in 2018. The proposed dissolution of the opposition is just the capstone on a year of turbulence. One of the main opposition leaders, Sam Rainsy, remains in exile. If he returns to Cambodia, he will have to face defamation charges. The other opposition leader, Kem Sokha, was arrested in September on dubious charges of treason and is reportedly now in prison. The crackdown has extended more widely as well. The Cambodia Daily, one of the most important media outlets, shut down in September. NDI had its program shuttered earlier this year, and top Cambodian government officials are now warning other NGOs that their events could be shut down if they do not get government permission in advance. Hun Sen’s government also has closed a number of independent radio stations, and is reportedly eying an even broader crackdown on politicians and civil society. The Los Angeles Times reports that about half of the opposition’s members of parliament have fled the country. With good reason: As the Los Angeles Times reports, earlier this month Hun Sen warned that “rebels” in Phnom Penh were supposedly plotting to overthrow the government, and suggested action needed to be taken against them. Hun Sen, in fact, has been issuing dire warnings all year of how bad it could get. In June, he delivered a speech in which he warned opposition politicians and other critics to “prepare coffins” if his party happened to lose in 2018. The prime minister is certainly using every tool possible to make sure his party wins.

Part Two Read Part One here.  Could the situation for democracy in Southeast Asia, which had seemed on the verge of having multiple consolidated democracies in the 2000s, get worse these days? Well, actually … In recent weeks, authoritarian rulers have demonstrated even more willingness to crack down in Cambodia and Thailand. And, Myanmar is descending into the kind of civil strife that could easily undermine the democratic transition—or even make some army leaders think they need to seize control of the country again. Likely worried about the opposition’s gains in 2013 national elections and in 2017 local elections—and perhaps emboldened by the election of a U.S. government that has demonized reporters and downgraded rights promotion as a component of U.S. foreign policy—long-serving Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen has gone on the attack against his opponents in the past six months. Hun Sen also probably is seizing this chance to defang the opposition before national elections next year. Hun Sen has now taken his crack down to a level not seen in decades. Last week, opposition leader Kem Sokha was arrested on treason charges. He was just one of many people who have been caught up in Hun Sen’s crackdown. In recent weeks the government also has forced the National Democratic Institute to remove its foreign staff from the country and end its programs in Cambodia. The Hun Sen government also has gone after the Cambodia Daily, one of the foundations of Cambodia’s independent press. The Cambodia Daily, which had been an important voice for independent reporting in the country, published its last issue yesterday. Hun Sen also is threatening Voice of America and Radio Free Asia’s Cambodia outlets, among other media outlets and civil society organizations. There are legitimate fears that Hun Sen may try to simply shut down the CNRP opposition party. Democracy in Thailand is not doing much better, although Thailand’s main opposition party, like the opposition CNRP in Cambodia, still probably enjoys significant public support. Former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra apparently has fled the country instead of facing her court date on August 25, on charges related to her administration’s rice subsidy scheme. (Her verdict has been postponed until late September.) On the same day two weeks ago that Yingluck did not appear in court, her former commerce minister from the period of Yingluck/Puea Thai rule was given a forty-two year jail sentence in a case related to Yingluck’s charges. Some of these charges on the rice subsidy scheme are controversial, since those accused are standing trial essentially for government incompetence. Other Puea Thai leaders face serious charges. The military may indeed hold an election in 2018—or it might not—but in any case it has already tried to destroy the opposition, and to make sure that the armed forces have control of politics for many years to come. Then there is Myanmar. Since Aung San Suu Kyi’s government took power last year, it has concentrated on the economy and on the peace process with a number of ethnic minority groups. Indeed, Suu Kyi’s spokesperson has made clear that rights and democracy come behind economic issues and the peace process on the NLD’s priority list. So, Suu Kyi has said little as security forces have gone on a scorched earth campaign in Rakhine State since last autumn, and in recent weeks the security forces and an increasingly powerful Rohingya militant group have laid waste to Rakhine again. The Washington Post noted last week that “witnesses said Myanmar soldiers [have] torched villages and sent thousands of Rohingya fleeing across the Naf River to neighboring Bangladesh, which is already home to about 400,000 Rohingya refugees who have fled Burma in recent years,” yet Suu Kyi has not commented on the army’s tactics. The fighting in Myanmar shows no sign of ending. Human Rights Watch has documented massive burning of villages, and the United Nations reported this week that some 120,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar in just the past two weeks, adding to the number of Rohingya as refugees or internally displaced people. Under Suu Kyi, Myanmar reporters also have been increasingly threatened, whether through defamation cases or simply by harassment from the security forces. There seem to be few signs of a better future for Southeast Asian democrats, at least in the near term. Indeed, if the past five years have been terrible for democracy in Southeast Asia, the next five look even more uncertain.

In recent months, the issue of Cambodia’s Indochina War-era debt to the United States, for which the U.S. government still demands repayment, has resurfaced once again. A recent lengthy New York Times article outlines the current situation, which has also been covered by Southeast Asian media. The Cambodian government is asking Washington to forgive a loan made to the Lon Nol government to buy essential items, at a time when U.S. bombing and the growing civil war in Cambodia had driven large numbers of refugees into Phnom Penh. That loan, with interest, now comes to around a half a billion dollars. “We lack the legal authority to write off debts for countries that are able but unwilling to pay,” Jay Raman, a spokesman for the United States Embassy in Phnom Penh, said in an email last month, according to the Times article. “These legal authorities do not change from one administration to the next, absent an action from Congress.” The dispute over whether Cambodia should pay has lingered for years. Now, the Cambodian government has, since the inauguration of the new U.S. president, highlighted some of the difficult moral and ethical issues related to asking for the debt repayment. According to Asia Times, Prime Minister Hun Sen has publicly called on the new U.S. president to cancel the debt. Prime Minister Hun Sen has highlighted the fact that unexploded U.S. bombs still are common in the countryside, while Hun Sen has spoken several times in recent months about Cambodia’s unwillingness to pay. He noted, according to Al Jazeera, "I have not sent an official letter to Trump asking him to cancel the debt … They brought bombs and dropped them on Cambodia and [now] demand Cambodian people to pay," said Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen early this month. But one aspect of the debt issue has gone mostly unnoticed, although it has been mentioned by Sophal Ear, an expert on Cambodia at Occidental College. He told the Times that, for Hun Sen, focusing on the issue of the war debt “deflects attention from what’s happening now in Cambodia and puts the limelight on Cambodia the victim.” As I noted, there are a wide range of legal and moral arguments about whether or not Cambodia should repay its debts---the debts were incurred after massive U.S. bombing of the country, making it seem highly morally wrong to some for Washington to ask a poor nation for debt repayment; but, international law still holds that countries should pay their debts. But, as Sophal Ear alludes to, “what’s happening now” in Cambodia is that longtime prime minister Hun Sen’s government has gotten increasingly authoritarian in the past two years, as 2017 and 2018 elections loom. And Hun Sen appears to be potentially using the U.S. debt issue as a way to rally his base and reduce attention on his increasingly authoritarian style. In the past two years, Hun Sen, who long has run a quasi-authoritarian government, has taken some of his most extreme measures against critics. His government removed opposition leader Kem Sokha from his role as minority leader in the parliament, he has launched a wide crackdown on rights activists and civil society leaders, according to numerous human rights groups, and he has said he might seize the property of former opposition leader Sam Rainsy. The prime minister has overseen attempts by parliament to pass new legislation that would essentially make it easier to keep opposition lawmakers from participating in politics. A group of Southeast Asian parliamentarians, noting that growing climate of oppression in Cambodia, released an analysis of the situation last month. According to the Phnom Penh Post:   “A scathing report by a group of ASEAN parliamentarians yesterday called recent changes to the Law on Political Parties and judicial harassment of opposition lawmakers part of a “systematic dismantling of democracy”, creating a “dark shadow” over Cambodian society ahead of June commune elections.   Titled Death Knell for Democracy, the report describes the sustained use of a partisan judiciary and National Assembly by the government in a bid to hobble the opposition in the wake of the “game changer” 2013 election, which saw a unified opposition make unprecedented gains.”   Focusing on the debt issue, as Sophal Ear notes, further helps Hun Sen distract attention from the growing crackdown, and possibly play up a popular issue among Cambodians. With critical elections looming in the next two years, it is unlikely the prime minister will step back from his increasingly hard line approach.

Over the past two years, Cambodia’s government has steadily ramped up the pressure on the opposition Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP), as well as on any civil society activists and journalists who question the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). In just the past year, security forces have cracked down on demonstrators holding regular Monday protests, while the government has pursued criminal charges against opposition leaders Kem Sokha and Sam Rainsy. In July, someone murdered prominent activist Kem Ley in broad daylight at a gas station, and while police have arrested one suspect, the motive for why he would kill the activist remains murky. Earlier this month, after Kem Sokha refused to surrender to police for months on dubious charges, a court sentenced him to jail. Now, as Kem Sokha still refuses to surrender to police, Prime Minister Hun Sen has taken an even tougher line, threatening to destroy any protesters and refusing to even negotiate with the CNRP while Kem Sokha remains holed up, according to Radio Free Asia. Co-opposition leader Sam Rainsy meanwhile remains in exile, facing his own criminal charges. According to Radio Free Asia, Hun Sen recently told legislators,” You [the political opposition] can never threaten us with the demonstrations. Let me make it clear that it is not going to work that way … Don’t even think about it. If I ever enter into such negotiations I will be nothing short of a dog.” The Cambodia Daily reported even tougher comments from the prime minister. It noted that, “Prime Minister Hun Sen on Monday said he would ‘eliminate’ opponents who dare to protest against his government during a speech in which he also declared that he personally ordered the military to deploy around the CNRP’s headquarters late last month.” Indeed, the Cambodian military recently held exercises close to CNRP headquarters. Always dangerous, Cambodian politics now seem to have reached a new level of viciousness, in advance of 2017 location elections and 2018 national elections. The brutality of Cambodian politics has come in waves over the past three decades, with periods of intense discord and violence alternating with somewhat quieter times. This appears to be a time of discord and violence. The opposition plans to continue with mass demonstrations in Phnom Penh, while Hun Sen and the security forces prepare to battle them. Meanwhile, civil society leaders and journalists are complaining that they are facing a level of intimidation and threats unseen in the country since the early 2000s. But the 2000s was a time when Hun Sen had much greater control over Cambodian society. Between the early 2000s and 2013, the last national election, Hun Sen had consolidated his power, cowed opposition parties, and co-opted many opposition legislators; the prime minister probably was less fearful of his political future. Where does Cambodian politics, which seemed poised for real change in 2013, after the CNRP nearly won national elections, go next? Most likely, the country is headed toward even greater distrust and violence. Hun Sen and the CPP are setting out a marker---they will give no ground in advance of the 2017 and 2018 elections. Hun Sen is even less constrained by any international norms than he was fifteen years ago---Cambodia’s economy is growing, aid and investment is flowing in from China, and the country has become an increasingly central player in ASEAN. Yet unlike in the 2000s, the opposition is more unified, less likely to be co-opted, and more able to organize demonstrations and share information, using social media and not having to rely on word of mouth and the state-dominated broadcast media. Young, urban Cambodians have been registering to vote in record numbers; the country’s urban population has become much more knowledgeable about politics, and much more aware of the flaws of the CPP, over the past decade. Hun Sen’s monopoly on power remains strong, but his ability to control what Cambodians hear about the government has weakened substantially. And despite intimidation, opposition supporters have refused to halt their demonstrations in Phnom Penh and its outskirts.

Last week, I spoke via email with Sophal Ear, Associate Professor of Diplomacy & World Affairs at Occidental College, and author of Aid Dependence in Cambodia: How Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy, about the current crisis in Cambodian politics. After a brief truce following elections in 2013, in which the opposition Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) shocked the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) by nearly winning control of the National Assembly, any semblance of détente has broken down. One opposition leader, Sam Rainsy, remains in exile; if he returns home he could face charges of defamation. Another opposition leader, Kem Sokha, has been holed up in the CNRP’s headquarters for weeks. If he comes out, he faces charges of “procurement of prostitution.” A prominent government critic, Kem Ley, was gunned to death in broad daylight one morning two weeks ago, raising fears that, in the run up to national elections in 2018, the country may be returning to the violent politics of the 1990s and early 2000s, when many opposition, politicians, activists, and journalists were killed. I asked Prof. Ear for his insights about the current crisis. Joshua Kurlantzick: To start, what do you think the ultimate outcome of the current CPP- CNRP standoff will be? Sophal Ear: The ultimate outcome of the current CPP-CNRP standoff is likely to be eventual denouement sometime before the election. At some point, Sam Rainsy/Kem Sokha and Hun Sen will have rapprochement—in 2013, it was the passing (from old age) of Hun Sen’s father that triggered some head clearing. The rhythm and pattern of previous electoral cycles suggests this, but this time could be different of course. There’s no parent left for Hun Sen to shed tears over and there’s growing worry that his vise will not loosen. In that case, we’d be in relatively unchartered waters whereby the elections would take place without opposition leader Sam Rainsy present in-country and his deputy unable to campaign outside of party headquarters since he is holed up there. In the five national elections Cambodia has held from 1993 to date, this has never happened. Joshua Kurlantzick: Can the opposition mount a campaign, even under these circumstances? Sophal Ear: If the ruling party continues to turn up the heat, the opposition won’t have to lift a finger---the campaigning for the opposition will be done by the ruling party for them. But we have seen this movie before; back in 1993, the royalist party, FUNCINPEC, won national elections, but the CPP still finagled a co-Prime Ministership. The stakes were high then, but they’re even higher now for the ruling party. There’s hundreds of millions of dollars at stake just for one ruling family. Across the entire ruling party, there could be billions. How many dead critics and arrested opposition folk does it take to get people mad enough to the point where they’re not going to take it anymore? From Cambodia’s past, it seems a lot more than what’s happened so far, so expect still more tragedy going forward. In fact, there’s already talk in ruling party-aligned media that the opposition was behind government critic Kem Ley’s murder. The next logical step is to involve the courts which will of course be “independent” in their handling of this matter. Joshua Kurlantzick: Is there a likelihood that, if the opposition wins, there are some elements of institutions, like the armed forces, that would not go along with a 1993-type situation? Sophal Ear: If the opposition wins (something I don’t think will be permitted), but let’s say that if by some miracle they do, sure there’s always a chance, however small, that some elements like the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF), would try to stand-up and prevent another 1993 “No winners/No losers” election. Joshua Kurlantzick: Is there a way out of this cycle? Sophal Ear: It’s hard to imagine much changing while Hun Sen is on the scene because it’s not as if he’ll wake up one day and decide that the system he put in place needs to change. Too much is at stake; his family’s regal status and wealth are all on the line. Electoral pressure occasionally forces his hand (after the 2013 election, he did swap out some ministers, and also more recently, but increasingly, it’s looking like musical chairs). At best, the changes are incremental. What we know for sure though is that no one escapes old age, sickness and death. I know that’s very Buddhist of me to say in a very Buddhist country, but it is what it is. Joshua Kurlantzick: What is the outlet for young Cambodians’ dislike of politics as usual, if they don’t get a change in government? Sophal Ear: Social media is the obvious outlet for young Cambodians’ venting and they really do not like what they’re seeing. A three-star general complained on social media about having $200,000 worth of jewelry stolen from his gym locker (yes, that is not a typo, there are five zeros). He was mercilessly mocked online for having so much jewelry to begin with while on his government salary. Of course, this being Cambodia, they promptly charged some hotel employees even though the CCTV footage apparently exculpates them. In another case, a leading social media critic with a million followers on Facebook and an early supporter of the CNRP decided to sue Kem Sokha for defamation over the scandal now embroiling him (having a mistress—said prostitute he allegedly procured—with whom he was secretly recorded speaking unflatteringly of the social media critic). That social media critic has since been savaged online. Passions and mass sentiment on the internet can also be incredibly destructive. In 2003, a mass chain of emails kept being forwarded about a Thai soap opera actress claiming that Angkor Wat was Thailand’s and that she’d rather be reborn a dog than Khmer. I knew immediately it was completely bogus, but it led to the anti-Thai riots and the burning of the Thai Embassy in Phnom Penh. Even Hun Sen got into the act before the riots, saying the actress wasn’t worth a blade of grass. I’m sure the authorities see this and know that if they cannot mollify young people or co-opt them online, they’ve got a powder keg on their hands in a country where more than half the population is 24 years old or younger.

Over the past year, any hopes that Cambodia, where national elections almost led to a change in government three years ago, was headed toward a democratic transition, have been fully dashed. Prime Minister Hun Sen and the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) are again taking complete control of the kingdom. In fact, as the country prepares for the next national elections, to be held in 2018, Hun Sen appears to be resorting to his usual combination of repressing opposition politicians and co-opting a small number of his opponents. These harsh but skillful tactics have helped him become the longest-serving non-royal ruler in Asia, surviving one of the most tumultuous political environments in the world. To review – following national elections in 2013 in which the new opposition coalition, the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), did much better than expected, Hun Sen appeared unusually subdued. He publicly acknowledged a need for more inclusive politics and he publicly welcomed opposition leaders into parliament. The opposition coalition had relied on support from younger Cambodians who, in many cases, no longer remembered the Khmer Rouge era and longed for better government than that provided by Hun Sen. Perhaps shocked by nearly being beaten by the opposition in 2013, Hun Sen promised a new “culture of dialogue” with the opposition CNRP. Many CNRP leaders took their seats in parliament and prepared for Cambodia to potentially grow into a stable, two-party system. Opposition leader Sam Rainsy, who had been living in exile, returned to Cambodia. That compromise has come completely unraveled, with the government using all its tools to crack down on the CNRP.  Rainsy has fled into exile again after the government produced a warrant for his arrest on old, questionable charges. The government has arrested four human rights workers and an election commission official as part of an elaborate investigation into an alleged affair by top CNRP leader Kem Sokha. It also has detained at least twenty-five opposition politicians on a range of charges, while police have raided the opposition coalition’s headquarters. This crackdown may have economic repercussions as well. As Markus Karbaum notes on New Mandala, Hun Sen’s tight control of politics, combined with a lack of transparency and high levels of graft throughout the economy, are dissuading foreign investors. The country has few comparative advantages over neighboring nations like Vietnam, and its rice sector and garment sector, which are critical to the economy, are facing serious troubles. Rice is becoming too costly to produce, due in part to poor physical infrastructure. The garment industry will shrink if Cambodia loses its priority access to the EU market, which is possible in the next decade or so. Strangely, Rainsy does not seem as alarmed as the situation might warrant. In an interview with Radio Free Asia during a recent visit to Washington, Rainsy was muted in his criticism of Hun Sen. Rainsy further maintained that the opposition continues to “value and hail the culture of dialogue” even as it is battered by the CPP. Hun Sen’s crackdown is part of a regional trend. After being challenged in the early 2010s, anti-democratic forces are getting stronger in many parts of Southeast Asia. In Malaysia, where a 2013 election nearly put the opposition coalition in power, the opposition is in tatters and fighting amongst itself. Former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad has attempted to take the opposition reins, but he is still widely distrusted by many urban and liberal Malaysians. With the opposition split, and the Najib government aggressively pursuing prosecutions of politicians and civil society activists under sedition laws, even the massive 1MDB state fund scandal does not seem to have stopped Najib’s consolidation of power. Although in the long-term, young and urban support for the ruling coalition is waning, Najib’s coalition just won two parliamentary by-elections and looks poised to dominate national elections, which must be held before August of 2018. Given the opposition’s lack of coherent leadership, and the ruling coalition’s two by-election victories, it is highly possible that Najib will call elections in 2017 instead. Similarly, in Thailand the military junta increasingly shows few signs of giving way. Asked this week whether he would step down if the Thai public votes, in August, against the junta-backed new constitution – as Prime Minister David Cameron offered his resignation following the Brexit vote – Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha was blunt. “Do you want me to leave or what? I’m not leaving,” even if the junta-backed constitution is voted down in the national referendum, Prayuth told reporters. “I’m the one who sets the rules.”

An excellent article in this month’s Foreign Affairs, by Stephanie Giry, outlines the strategies Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has used to stay in power. Now the longest-serving nonroyal ruler in Asia and the seventh-longest serving nonroyal ruler in the world, Hun Sen remains the ultimate survivor. He is a man who was one of the youngest foreign ministers in the world in the period after 1979, when he served in the government installed in Phnom Penh after Vietnam invaded and removed the Khmer Rouge. He was a former military man who made a gradual transition from the unschooled, rugged but naturally savvy former fighter from that time to a suave and charming head of government. For three decades, according to human rights groups, Hun Sen has used a combination of populist charm, control of the media through relations with media tycoons, outright intimidation, and relatively effective management of the economy to stay in power. Cambodia holds elections, but the deck tends to be stacked heavily against the opposition, with TV networks, the election commission, and other critical actors historically favoring the ruling party. In 2013, after his party, the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), suffered a shock setback in national elections, nearly losing control of parliament to the opposition, Hun Sen appeared more conciliatory toward the opposition. Despite its virtual control of all broadcast media, Hun Sen and the CPP now faced a major challenge from young, urban Cambodians who could organize through social media and the Internet, and did not have the loyalty to the CPP that their parents and grandparents displayed. For many of these young Cambodians, Hun Sen’s basic promise of a rough kind of stability, after the destruction of the Khmer Rouge era, was not enough to vote for the CPP. In the wake of the opposition’s strong election showing, Hun Sen and opposition leader Sam Rainsy embraced each other and agreed to foster a “culture of dialogue” that, in Cambodia’s often-brutal politics, had been lacking in the past. Hun Sen allowed the opposition to get a license to run its own television station; terrestrial broadcast media had been dominated by stations that were pro-Hun Sen and pro-CPP, according to multiple human rights groups. The opposition halted its boycott of parliament and the two sides agreed to create a new election commission, which supposedly would be more impartial than its predecessor in overseeing the next national elections in 2018. Last year, some Cambodian observers speculated that Hun Sen would soon retire, and would not stand for prime minister in the 2018 elections. The culture of dialogue appears, already, to be history. Although Rainsy has not returned to openly bashing Hun Sen, the opposition and the government are doing battle, Cambodia-style, once again. In July, authorities jailed eleven opposition activists on charges of “insurrection” that could net them as much as twenty years in jail. In August, the government charged an opposition senator with treason for supposedly posting a diplomatic document related to the Vietnam-Cambodia border online. The government this year is debating or has passed new legislation that might neuter unions and nongovernmental organizations as well, by reducing the number of union members needed to dissolve a union and by allowing the state to potentially prosecute nonprofits on vague charges of undermining national security, national unity, peace, and Cambodian culture. Despite a new boycott of parliament by the opposition, the government passed the new law on nonprofits this summer. The law also may restrict international NGOs, some of which have had contentious relations with Hun Sen in the past. Under the new legislation, international NGOs and domestic NGOs both must register with the government, even if they are only conducting short-term projects in Cambodia. Hun Sen, meanwhile, appears to be actually consolidating his hold over the CPP, taking on the post of party president after his close ally Chea Sim, the former party president, died earlier this year. In April, Hun Sen announced that he would be running for election in 2018 and said that a civil war could be averted only if he was re-elected prime minister. The armed forces, too, appear to be demonstrating that they will back Hun Sen to the hilt. In late July, Radio Free Asia’s Cambodia service reported:   Cambodia’s armed forces belong to the country’s ruling party and must prevent a ‘color revolution’ from overtaking the Southeast Asian nation, a four-star general said.   Many parts of the armed forces, in fact, operate almost like private militias, according to a recent article in The Diplomat; they are funded by major Cambodian businesspeople, many of whom have close links with the CPP. Little hope left, indeed, for the culture of dialogue in Phnom Penh.

Although the Vietnam War, including the “sideshow” war in Cambodia, has been the subject of thousands of books, post-war Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos have gotten relatively little treatment from Western writers. This despite the fact that Cambodia suffered one of the worst genocides in history, Vietnam fought another war in 1979 against China and then remade itself into a strategic and economic power, and Laos remains one of the most authoritarian states in the world. There have been a tiny handful of quality books on post-1975 Cambodia, such as Elizabeth Becker’s When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution, and David Chandler’s A History of Cambodia. Even fewer have analyzed Cambodia in the 2000s and 2010s. Other books, like Cambodia’s Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land by former New York Times journalist Joel Brinkley, had some fine attributes but tended to succumb too easily to glib generalizations about Cambodians and about Cambodian political culture. Still other books on Cambodia were overly academic accounts of Cambodia in the present that were almost impossible for policymakers and the general public to understand. Now, a new book by Cambodia-based journalist Sebastian Strangio, Hun Sen’s Cambodia, has set the standard for compelling and accessible histories of modern-day Cambodia. In particular, the book is the first to offer an accessible but thorough biographical portrait of longtime Cambodian prime minister—and strongman—Hun Sen. Strangio details in compelling form how Hun Sen rose from a skinny, totally uneducated and unworldly senior official in the Vietnam-installed post-Khmer Rouge regime into a smooth autocrat who has dominated the country for decades. Over time, Hun Sen also has become fabulously rich and has become an increasingly powerful player in Southeast Asia, due to Cambodia’s membership in ASEAN, Hun Sen’s longevity, and Hun Sen’s ability to play his patrons Vietnam and China off of each other. Strangio delves into Hun Sen’s early life and his time serving the Khmer Rouge, before he defected and joined the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. Strangio also clearly reveals how many of Hun Sen’s closest associates in the Cambodian government almost surely committed atrocities during their time in the Khmer Rouge, before they defected. Most important, Strangio’s portrait of Cambodia reveals how Hun Sen has been able to dominate the country for so long. (Indeed, Hun Sen now is the longest-serving non-royal leader in East Asia and the seventh-longest-serving non-royal leader in the world.) By January 2015, Hun Sen will have been in power for thirty years, and will have been the only leader most Cambodians have known, since the country is extremely young, a result of the massacres of the late 1970s. Strangio lucidly shows how Cambodia’s other political leaders allowed themselves to be bought, controlled, or otherwise co-opted by Hun Sen, and how the devastated country never built the political institutions that could stop the strongman from gaining power. He reveals how, at least for a time, Hun Sen’s version of iron-fisted stability and growth—albeit growth with high inequality—also truly made the strongman popular with the public. Strangio shows how Hun Sen alone, among Cambodia’s major political figures, understood how to build a nationwide party organization and how to appeal to the rural population, in much the same way former King Sihanouk appealed to the Cambodian poor. Indeed, Sihanouk, in Strangio’s telling, wished that Hun Sen had actually been his son, since Hun Sen possessed the popular touch and political acumen that Sihanouk’s actual sons did not. Strangio also offers a devastating indictment of the foreign donors who financed UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), the early 1990s UN-led aid and peacekeeping operation in Cambodia, following the end of Cambodia’s civil war. The same donors continue to pour money into the country today, even as Cambodia’s political culture remains corrupt, Hun Sen’s government is utterly destroying the country’s environment, and growth has enriched only a tiny coterie of elites, mostly in Phnom Penh. Yet even though foreign donors for years enjoyed great power over the Cambodian government, they rarely tried to use that power to really push Hun Sen’s government to change, and Hun Sen was savvy enough to allow a thin veneer of political freedom and civil society. This veneer was enough to allow donors to claim that the country was always becoming more open and more democratic, though this was always a falsehood. In reality, though Cambodia retains a degree of independent civil society, trade unionists, journalists, and activists of all sorts are routinely arrested, beaten, or summarily executed in Cambodia. What’s more, now that Hun Sen has cultivated China, which has become the biggest donor in Cambodia, the group of donors—mostly Western nations and Japan—who for years financed much of the Cambodian budget have less influence over Phnom Penh anyway. Strangio’s book has some flaws. Unlike Brinkley’s book, which had both sizable strengths and deep weaknesses, Strangio does not get the chance to put the pressing questions about Hun Sen’s rule to Hun Sen’s inner circle itself, other than a few of Hun Sen’s business allies. He is not able to confront the most corrupt in Hun Sen’s circle with their graft, to ask the prime minister’s closest aides the hard questions about how Hun Sen has dominated Cambodian political culture and institutions. Brinkley somehow was able to get face-to-face with Hun Sen’s closest circle and put these questions to them, and often get surprising answers. Strangio instead mostly relies on his own analysis, on interviews with a few Hun Sen allies, on many field reporting trips that examine the impact of Hun Sen’s rapacious economic and political strategies, and on outside analysts to show the impact of Hun Sen’s rule. Overall, Strangio’s approach is far more nuanced and thorough; but, I would have liked to see some of Hun Sen’s senior-most aides—or the prime minister himself—squirm in front of the tough questions they never face from the Cambodian media. Finally, though Strangio worked on the book for years, compiling what appear to be mountains of research, the book seems to have been finished before the shocking Cambodian national elections of 2013, in which the opposition almost defeated Hun Sen’s party despite state media showing only Hun Sen and Hun Sen’s party engaging in all sorts of pre-election intimidation of the opposition. According to many election observers, if not for widespread fraud by Hun Sen’s party during and immediately after election day, the opposition coalition would have won a majority in Parliament in 2013. Even so, the 2013 election results showed that, after decades of Hun Sen’s dominance, Cambodia finally might be on the verge of change; Hun Sen’s control of the media had been undermined by the Internet and social media, while opposition politicians who once just squabbled with each other worked together this time and ran a successful campaign. Strangio inserts a kind of postscript on the 2013 elections and its aftermath, which included months of negotiation between the opposition and Hun Sen’s party about the election results and about control of Parliament. Still, the postscript is not enough to capture the 2013 elections thoroughly and to analyze what they might mean for Hun Sen’s long rule and for Cambodia’s future. Overall, this is the finest book on Hun Sen and modern-day Cambodia that has been released thus far.

Over the weekend, Cambodia’s opposition coalition, the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP), held a large rally in Phnom Penh to protest the national election commission’s ratifying of the results of this summer’s election. The national election commission—which is controlled by the long-ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP)—essentially said that all the results of the summer national election were valid, that Prime Minister Hun Sen’s CPP had won 68 seats in Parliament, enough to form a government, as compared to 55 for the CNRP. Of course, 55 seats was an enormous gain for the opposition compared to previous parliaments, but opposition leaders Sam Rainsy, Kem Sokha, and others claim that the CNRP really won a majority of the seats, and only has been allotted 55 due to massive irregularities, fraud, and the toothlessness of the national election commission. The opposition brought over 20,000 people to Phnom Penh this weekend to protest the election commission’s ratification of results and to call, once again, for an international inquiry into the election results. The turnout was extremely impressive for Cambodia, but more importantly the CNRP showed that, unlike in the past, it would not play into Hun Sen’s hands, giving the prime minister the opening he needed to crush or co-opt the opposition. Hun Sen’s party clearly was preparing for some acts of violence during the rally, which they could use as a justification to crack down. According to the Wall Street Journal, “CPP officials have repeatedly discouraged Saturday’s protest, warning of potential civil unrest and pressing the CNRP to pursue its claims through bilateral talks … Police officials said tens of thousands of security personnel were deployed across Phnom Penh to maintain order.” At various points in the past, Cambodian opposition leaders have given Hun Sen this pretext, by overseeing violence, most notably when former Hun Sen adversary Prince Norodom Ranariddh in 1997, anticipating a Hun Sen attack, tried to launch his own attack on Hun Sen’s forces; Hun Sen responded by crushing Ranariddh’s forces and, eventually, destroying his party. At other times over the past two decades, Hun Sen has emasculated the opposition by co-opting its main leaders, a strategy he used with Ranariddh and, for a time, Sam Rainsy. But the opposition no longer seems so easy to handle. Unlike in the past, when opposition leaders fought openly among themselves and frequently turned to Hun Sen’s side after receiving rewards of patronage and appointments, now the opposition is more unified- Hun Sen, a wily survivor, surely has already tried to co-opt Rainsy or other leaders this time around, but they have not given in. In part, the opposition has not given in because it knows it has Cambodia’s young, urban population on its side, giving the CNRP—or whatever comes out of it—great hope for the future, even if CPP remains in power for now; Rainsy and especially Kem Sokha also seem to have matured as leaders, understanding that they have to keep their coalition together if they are to sustain a challenge to Hun Sen.  In addition, as in the rally this weekend, the opposition has vocally called for nonviolent tactics, and taken every effort to stop CNRP supporters from even scuffling with police – when police stepped up to protesters this weekend, demonstrators gave policemen food and other gifts, and the opposition also enlisted many monks to participate in the demonstrations to keep order. Next move, Hun Sen.

Over the weekend, tanks, armored personnel carriers and other heavy weaponry appeared in the Phnom Penh area, according to reports in the Cambodian press and in Asia Sentinel. Only a few weeks after Cambodia’s national elections, which the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) allegedly won in a squeaker and the opposition claims was fraudulent, why are tanks and APCs rolling into Phnom Penh? Cambodia has no battles in the capital; even its border skirmishes with Thailand over the disputed Preah Vihear Temple have calmed down in the past two years. No, the show of force is designed to intimidate opposition supporters, who tend to live in urban areas. Defense Minister Tea Banh of the CPP didn’t mince words. According to the Cambodia Daily, he said, “You don’t have to wonder, they [the weapons] will be used to protect the country, and crack down on anyone who tries to destroy the nation." Although the U.S. Congress has long maintained tough policies toward Cambodia, because of the authoritarian behavior of longtime prime minister Hun Sen—now the longest-serving leader in Asia—the Obama White House has pursued military-military ties with Hun Sen’s government, despite Hun Sen’s increasingly autocratic political style. Although, in the wake of the closest election in Cambodia in two decades, Hun Sen seemed to be conciliatory toward the opposition, he and the CPP now are returning to form. The military show of force is likely to be part of a broader crackdown on opposition politicians and supporters. The national election commission just decided it would not even investigate irregularities in the recent vote, despite obvious massive irregularities, and at least one opposition activist was murdered last week. Although Cambodia under Hun Sen has had high growth rates, aid still comprises almost half of the central government’s budget. Yet over and over, going back two decades, donors have criticized Hun Sen yet never halted the aid tap. After what looks like a stolen election, and the rumblings of a new crackdown, will this time be any different? Given that the White House and Pentagon still value military cooperation with Cambodia highly—although I believe that Cambodia has minimal strategic value, given that the United States has many other close partners in its neighborhood—don’t expect donors, including the United States to do anything this time either.

Last week, in advance of Cambodia’s national elections, I noted that the election was a foregone conclusion, given that the long-ruling Cambodian People’s Party, led by increasingly autocratic prime minister Hun Sen, had awarded itself so many advantages in advance of the actual voting day. The opposition Cambodian National Rescue Party managed to overcome many of these obstacles, and the tally of fifty out of 120 parliamentary seats that it has won—the tally of CNRP seats that the government’s spokesman admitted the opposition won—is shockingly high, given the huge barriers placed in its way. These barriers included possible CNRP voters simply being turned away from registering to vote, hundreds of thousands of people deleted from the voter rolls, state media devoting almost no time to anyone but the CPP in the run-up to the election,  attacks on CNRP supporters, and much more thuggery. Now, CNRP leaders are alleging that the opposition actually should have won many more seats, if not for massive vote-rigging and other shenanigans on Election Day itself. They want an international inquiry into the election. The fact that the government refuses and wants to swear in a new cabinet as soon as possible suggests that Prime Minister Hun Sen and his allies know, too, that they had to scramble to get enough fixes in on Election Day, since they were confident that their pre-vote intimidation, and Hun Sen’s record of delivering peace and growth, would win them a huge majority of voters. More than any election since 1993, when a huge number of Cambodians came out to vote for the first election in years and actually voted for the opposition Funcinpec Party but found that Hun Sen was able to bludgeon his way into the leadership anyway, this election shows that the Cambodian people have not lost faith in the democratic process. It shows Cambodians are not willing to ignore the predatory elite developing in their country, are not willing to accept growth that also has come with widening inequality, and are not willing to simply vote for Hun Sen because he is strong and has provided a measure of stability after the killing fields. Unfortunately, Hun Sen is likely to get his cabinet sworn in anyway, and to continue serving what is now the longest term in office of any current leader in Asia. Despite increasingly violent protests in Cambodia, the U.S. and other major donors to the country have refused to call Hun Sen’s bluff and push for a serious recount – even though Cambodia is hardly a strategic asset like Egypt, where (though I don’t agree) one could at least make the case that despite the military’s bloody behavior, the country is too important to downgrade ties and cut off assistance. Unfortunately, this weak approach to Cambodia is not unusual; for years, the U.S (other than a few Cambodia hard-liners in Congress) have been accepting whatever Hun Sen does, and continuing to provide substantial aid to the country. Now, the U.S., like most other outside actors, has simply called for Cambodia’s own election authorities to investigate any irregularities, knowing full well that Cambodia’s own official election authority, like every other major institution in the country, is controlled by the CPP and is unlikely to take any of the opposition’s complaints seriously. So expect Hun Sen to be at the next U.S.-ASEAN summit, and top American leaders to shake his hand.

Until the past week, Cambodia’s national elections, which will be held on July 28, 2013, looked utterly unexciting. The Cambodian People’s Party (CCP) of the increasingly autocratic Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has ruled the country in various positions, for nearly three decades, seemed destined to win an almost-total victory. The CPP, which has increased its share of parliamentary seats in each of the past three elections, had used various autocratic tools to ensure that the July 28th elections bore no resemblance to free and fair polls. Members of the opposition Cambodian National Rescue Party, which holds a small minority of seats in parliament, were harassed and served with a buffet of civil and criminal complaints. Their supporters, particularly in rural areas, were attacked by pro-CPP thugs, while the state media, which dominates the country, has been used almost exclusively to promote Hun Sen and his allies, according to Human Rights Watch. Then, last week, the election seemed to take a sudden turn. Under pressure from many democratic donors—despite strong economic growth, Cambodia’s budget is still highly dependent on aid—Hun Sen allowed opposition leader Sam Rainsy, the only viable other major national political figure, to return to the country. Rainsy had been living in exile while facing a variety of trumped-up offenses, and Hun Sen pushed King Sihamoni to grant him a royal pardon, which the pliant king immediately did. Now, Rainsy is returning to Cambodia this Friday and is investigating registering to run for an MP slot; even if he does not run, he will be heading up many rallies for the Cambodian National Rescue Party, and surely bringing a larger number of voters to the demonstrations and, possibly, the polls. Optimists are arguing that, with Rainsy back and a large percentage of Cambodian voters participating in their first election—more than half of registered voters are under 35 and do not remember the Khmer Rouge era, or Hun Sen’s role in ending it—the long-term rule of Hun Sen and his party may be threatened. Opposition supporters in Phnom Penh are jubilant, and young, middle-class Cambodians, who are increasingly using social media to organize for the opposition, think that all these new voters will be swayed by Rainsy’s charismatic presence and a desire for change. Don’t count on it. For one, though Rainsy has more democratic credentials, Hun Sen is a far smarter politician than the opposition leader. Several times in the past, Hun Sen has had his government bring charges against Rainsy, only to withdraw them when Rainsy capitulated to him on various issues, or when Hun Sen needed the veneer of a real opposition to maintain the fiction that Cambodia is a democracy. This veneer now has been provided again by Rainsy. In addition, even if the new voters are energized by the arrival of Rainsy—who shows up very late in the election campaign game—their votes may not matter anyway. The Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia (COMFREL) the main nonpartisan election monitoring organization, has already said that this national election will be the least free of the five that have taken place in the past two decades, due to padded electoral rolls, voter intimidation, and other dirty tricks. The European Union, which sent monitors to the last election in 2008, has decided not to participate this time, concluding that this vote is beyond redemption. Even if the vote was free and fair, would the opposition win? It would probably make even more inroads in Phnom Penh and some other larger towns, but it does not have the village by village grassroots organization of the CPP, which dominates local elections and local patronage. In addition, although the past decade has seen widening economic inequality in Cambodia, wanton destruction of natural resources, and growing authoritarianism, with the king no longer able to serve as any kind of check on Hun Sen, the economy has, overall, grown very strongly for ten years. GDP per capita has risen from around $275 a decade ago to nearly $1000 today, a significant jump based on around seven percent annual growth. Hun Sen remains popular outside of Phnom Penh, largely because of this development. A May poll conducted by the International Republican Institute (IRI) in Cambodia found that 79 percent of Cambodians felt their country was headed in the right direction. So Hun Sen probably does not have to steal the election. Too bad that he will anyway.

Of the major figures from the Indochina Wars of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, there are now very few left. Vo Nguyen Giap, military commander for the People’s Army of Vietnam, is still alive, though over one hundred years old. Some of the wartime leaders from Laos remain alive. A few mid-level figures from the American side are still around, though the senior army and civilian leaders are all gone. On Monday, Beijing time, the biggest figure still alive from that period, former King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, passed away. He had been ill for some time, and was constantly traveling to and from Beijing for hospital care, so this was not a huge surprise. The king also had become less relevant in Cambodia in recent years, handing over the throne to his son Sihamoni, no longer writing his frequent missives in French —and often in a penname— criticizing the government or the general state of affairs in the country, and finding the power of the monarchy curtailed severely by longtime prime minister Hun Sen. Several recent newswire stories actually have portrayed Sihamoni as a kind of prisoner in the royal palace in Phnom Penh, able to do virtually nothing without it being approved by Hun Sen —though, of course, Sihanouk actually was a prisoner in the palace during the 1975-1979 Khmer Rouge period, when he was kept under house arrest and, to Sihanouk’s eternal shame, forced to cook his own food. There are already many obituaries released that describe Sihanouk’s enormous importance and contradictory, even maddening, traits: A deep love for his country combined with a patriarchal view of  “my people” as needing his benevolent guidance always; a skilled political mind that for a time navigated the minefield between the United States, Vietnam, Cambodia’s communists, and China, yet also broke down completely at times, leading Sihanouk to withdraw from public life or be bested, as at the Paris Peace Accords, by men like Hun Sen; a desire to expand education in Cambodia by opening many new schools in the 1950s and 1960s yet a willingness to abandon his countrymen to the grim fate of the Khmer Rouge, which Sihanouk understood to be a coming atrocity, warning his own personal aides not to return to Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and instead remain in France, as Elizabeth Becker has noted. Not noted in many obituaries, however, is one important point. At several times during his reign, Sihanouk made noises about opening Cambodia up to true multi-party democracy, but he never could really do so, preferring instead to keep all parties under the thumb of himself and the royalist establishment. At times, his beneficent monarchical style proved effective —in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, he made many judicious and foresighted decisions for his country. But though he is hardly the only one to blame for Cambodia’s current political state, his inability to ever move beyond his patrician, monarchical, and authoritarian style left a legacy of big man rule that Hun Sen, for years Sihanouk’s antagonist, has readily adopted. Today, in fact, the true heir of Sihanouk is not his son Sihamoni, who sits on a far less valuable throne, but rather Hun Sen, who controls Cambodia the way Sihanouk once did.