{"id":96712,"date":"2013-07-24T00:23:33","date_gmt":"2013-07-23T18:53:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=96712"},"modified":"2013-07-26T13:58:56","modified_gmt":"2013-07-26T08:28:56","slug":"hun-sen-the-making-of-a-cambodian-autocrat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/hun-sen-the-making-of-a-cambodian-autocrat\/","title":{"rendered":"Hun Sen: The Making Of A Cambodian Autocrat"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Marwaan Macan-Markar<\/a><\/span> –<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Marwaan Macan-Markar<\/p><\/div>\n

If names of political parties are expected to elicit sympathy, then Cambodia\u2019s hounded opposition has a winner. It is called the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), a name that says much about the fate of multi-party democracy in this still impoverished country.<\/span><\/p>\n

The two major opposition parties that merged early this year to form the CNRP \u2013 the Sam Rainsy Party (SRP) and the Human Rights Party (HRP) \u2013 will certainly have to perform a rescue act to save this kingdom from ending as a one-party state at the forthcoming general elections.<\/p>\n

It is all that stands between Cambodia having a multi-party democracy and another right wing autocrat in the mould of Suharto, Ferdinand Marcos, Mahathir Mohamed or Lee Kwan Yew.<\/p>\n

At the minimum, that means the CNRP needs to aim for two magic numbers at the July 28 poll for the 123 seats up for grabs in the National Assembly. Were it to secure 30 seats, the CNRP legislators would enjoy power to at least summon government officials for parliamentary inquiries.<\/p>\n

And a more ambitious 42 seats would guarantee them significant legislative power to stall proposed laws that could be detrimental to the country\u2019s political and economic life.<\/p>\n

But neither of these numbers will be easy to achieve because the opposition is up against a formidable adversary in Prime Minister Hun Sen. He is Asia\u2019s longest-serving leader \u2013 in office already 28 years \u2013 and he has made it known that he is seeking to cross an unconquered political frontier \u2013 complete domination of the 123-member National Assembly.<\/p>\n

Were that to happen, Hun Sen\u2019s grip on power would be complete, because he effectively already controls the military, police, bureaucracy and judiciary.<\/p>\n

A yearning for such unbridled legislative dominance was exposed in June. Hun Sen\u2019s political juggernaut, the ruling Cambodian People\u2019s Party (CPP), which has 90 seats in the legislature, used a loophole in the law to expel 27 opposition lawmakers.<\/p>\n

They belonged to the SRP and the HRP, who had contested separately in the last parliamentary poll in 2008. A CPP-controlled parliamentary committee accused them of breaching election laws after they merged to set up the new CNRP.<\/p>\n

But that was only the first of many blows meant to grind the opposition in what is clearly an unequal battle. Other strategies include dirty tricks of old. Character assassination is among them, with CNRP vice president Khem Sokha being a particular target.<\/p>\n

Popular opposition figure Sam Rainsy, barred from contesting and forced to live in exile for years to avoid a jail term, has not been spared CPP vitriol.<\/p>\n

There are also warnings from some quarters that the elections could be rigged. According to a U.S.-based think tank, the National Democratic Institute, a recent survey of a sampling of the estimated 9.6 million registered voters revealed \u201c10.8 percent of eligible citizens who thought they were registered (voters) were not on the registry even though they said they voted in the 2008 elections.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moreover, the accuracy of voters\u2019 personal records, such as names, dates of birth and addresses, in the registry \u201cdeclined compared with 2008, with only 63 percent of dates of birth and 84.4 percent of names matching information in the voters\u2019 ID documents.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights \u2013 better known locally by its acronym LICADHO \u2013 has also sounded the alarm. It warned that the election\u2019s outcome \u201cis already imperiled by an inaccurate voting list, while the ruling CPP is resorting to increasingly vicious tactics to discriminate and marginalise the opposition.\u201d The CPP has flexed its muscle to \u201cintimidate and obstruct\u201d opposition supporters at the commune and village level, the League said.<\/p>\n

A similar sense of foreboding has been echoed by the Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia. It has announced that the country\u2019s fifth parliamentary elections is likely to be the least fair in the 20 years since 1993, when the United Nations held the country\u2019s historic poll after the 1991 Paris Peace Accords.<\/p>\n

Cambodia\u2019s democracy is \u201cincreasingly fragile\u201d and \u201cshowed trends towards authoritarianism\u201d noted the local, independent election watchdog.<\/p>\n

So, rather than give this questionable elections a veneer of legitimacy, a respected regional election monitoring group has decided to abstain from sending its customary polls observers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is concern from international observers that many areas for a free and fair elections are found wanting,\u201d Ichal Supriardi, executive director of the Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL), told The Edge Review<\/em>. \u201cWe will not officially send an ANFREL monitoring mission, because the presence of foreign observers could be manipulated by state agencies.\u201d<\/p>\n

That Cambodia\u2019s two-decades-long political journey has come to this is an indictment of the architects of its post-conflict nation-building project. The promise of a multi-party electoral system was set as a goal by those who charged in to shape its political, economic and social fortunes.<\/p>\n

It was, in many ways, an unprecedented political experiment — to give rise to a new country that had suffered 20 years of a debilitating war and civil conflict and the horrors of the Khmer Rouge genocide.<\/p>\n

These architects included the United Nations, international financial institutions like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, and the donor community from the industrialised nations.<\/p>\n

In fact, Cambodia\u2019s rise as the poster-child of post-conflict reconstruction was copied elsewhere, in places such as East Timor and Kosovo. The philosophical underpinnings of this approach to nation-building were to encourage the growth of a stable government, chosen at regular polls, to support the spread of a free market economic model.<\/p>\n

But dealing with Hun Sen, who in 1985, at the age of 33 years, became prime minister in a Cambodia then ruled by Vietnam, put paid to such plans over the years. Using a mix of thuggery, armed assaults, verbal attacks and judicial prosecutions, the head of the CPP grabbed and expanded his hold of the political levers.<\/p>\n

From winning 51 seats at the 1993 poll, which was contested by an array of parties, the CPP forced its way to winning 64 seats in 1998, 73 in 2003, and 90 at the last poll.<\/p>\n

Despite such ruthless behavior at the polls \u2013 refusing to concede defeat in 1993 to the royalist FUNCINPEC party, led by Prince Norodom Ranaridh \u2013 or while in government \u2013 intimidating opponents, attacking the media \u2013 Hun Sen was guaranteed Western development aid.<\/p>\n

In 2010, for instance, international donors pledged 1.1 billion U.S. dollars, up from the previous pledge of 950 million U.S. dollars in 2009. That amount, the largest aid package in the country\u2019s history, was announced during the same month the government succeeded in silencing one of the country\u2019s outspoken female opposition figures, Mu Sochua, in the wake of a court battle with Hun Sen that saw her stripped of her parliamentary immunity.<\/p>\n

The emergence of China as a major source of aid \u2013 with loans for infrastructure projects and development assistance totaling some 19 billion U.S. dollars — has further emboldened Hun Sen, who counters his critics by arguing that he is responsible for guiding Cambodia\u2019s development and restoring peace to a country whose citizens most fear a return to the internal conflict and civil war that plagued it for decades.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of the traditional donors, the World Bank have lost influence with Hun Sen and the CPP, which is essentially Hun Sen,\u201d remarked Shalmali Guttal, a senior researcher at Focus on the Global South, a Bangkok-based think tank. \u201cHis politics is their creation and he knows the donors will not walk away.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, come July 28, a landslide victory for Hun Sen in a questionable poll would enshrine his place among the ranks of Southeast Asia\u2019s infamous strongmen. And for the French, Cambodia\u2019s former colonial master, that would be a d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu moment.<\/p>\n

It was Louis XIV, after all, who delivered that ultimate line summing up the mind of an absolute ruler: \u201cL\u2019etat c\u2019est moi<\/em> (I am the state).\u201d<\/p>\n

*Marwaan Macan-Markar, a Sri Lankan journalist, is a foreign correspondent who has been reporting from Southeast Asia since 2001, following a posting in Mexico City. This dispatch was published in a July issue of The Edge Review, www.theedgereview.com, a new Southeast Asian magazine launched in Kuala Lumpur<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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