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Details of ruling party’s five-year plan to minimise opposition revealed
Op-Ed: Phnom Penh Post
Hun Sen White Paper 2018 in English
Hun Sen White Paper -2018-Khmer_11Feb2018
Cambodia’s ruling party will increase surveillance, shut out any opposition “force” and prevent the spread of information that “twists the truth”, according to their five-year political plan, obtained yesterday by The Post.
Hun Sen is a master of manipulation in Cambodia.
The Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) Political Programme 2018-2023, adopted at the party’s congress three weeks ago, maps out the government’s next steps in what observers describe as authoritarian – if unsurprising – rhetoric.
Chief among the CPP’s diktats was “to not allow the loophole or space that is used for the creation of the opposition force or any illegal armed force to destroy the achievements and prosperity of the society and the nation”.
“[We] must strengthen the capacity of our surveillance system and the controlling technology system thoroughly, and reduce the risk for society,” another read.
The party’s plan comes during a widespread crackdown on dissent in the Kingdom, with politicians imprisoned, media outlets shuttered and activists seeking refuge abroad. Cambodia’s main opposition – the Cambodia National Rescue Party – was forcibly dissolved in November last year, ahead of upcoming elections.
That crackdown appears set to continue, with the CPP vowing in its plan to “oppose any riot activities, subversion, [and] sabotage of all kinds”, and to “attack their black tricks” – a reference to the frequently invoked accusations of “colour revolution” and “foreign interference” that were used by the ruling party to justify the dismantling of the opposition.
The party will also “prevent and eliminate the dissemination activity to distribute information . . . that is of an inciting nature, that breaks up [society], twists the truth, exaggerates the situation, causes insecurity, disorder or immorality, [or] that breaks the culture or tradition of Cambodia”.
Addressing the armed forces, which are led by CPP stalwarts, the party said it would push for RCAF reforms and demanded they “show the great, absolute loyalty to the nation” and that they “have the willingness to fight absolutely in protecting . . . the legitimate government that was born from the people”.
CPP spokesman Sok Eysan yesterday defended the document’s call for a tighter hold on the political sphere, saying “strengthening power is normal for the one who is in charge of the power, because power comes from the people”.
“A loophole can bring a catastrophe to peace and political stability. We allow opposition, but [only] the opposition that complies with the democratic principles – not an opposition that makes anarchy,” Eysan said.
“If we do not strengthen the control [on surveillance technology], it will become anarchy that impacts and influences the implementation of the democratic rule of law,” he added.
Sebastian Strangio, author of Hun Sen’s Cambodia, said the CPP’s plan came as little surprise given the events of the past six months.
“The plan looks like a roadmap to permanent one party rule, albeit with the cosmetic presence of small opposition parties that will do little to challenge the CPP’s control,” he said in an email.
“Overall, this is consistent with the CPP’s long-held view that any smidgeon of political opposition poses a mortal threat to peace and stability, and that these things can only be guaranteed by the CPP’s monopolization of power.”
But he warned that “the CPP may find that abolishing formal opposition is much easier than abolishing public demand for change” while popular demands for political reform go unaddressed.
Social analyst Meas Nee yesterday observed that the document and its aspirations for consolidating power echoed Cambodia’s situation two decades ago, when the CPP’s then-political rival, Funcinpec – which had beaten the CPP in the 1993 UN-backed elections – was ousted by troops loyal to Prime Minister Hun Sen in bloody fighting.
“This is almost identical to the events happening in 1997, when Funcinpec was destroyed . . . There was the 1997 coup and the 1998 election, but after 1998, Funcinpec was not powerful. The whole of Funcinpec was paralysed,” he said.
Funcinpec indeed slid into irrelevance following 1998, only returning to the political fore after it was granted the bulk of the CNRP’s redistributed National Assembly seats late last year. Funcinpec had failed to win a single seat of its own in 2013, unlike the CNRP, which took 44 percent of the vote and 55 seats.
“I thought this was unique to 1998, but when it came to the events in 2017 . . . the dissolution of the CNRP left them completely paralysed . . . but it is more difficult to dissolve the whole mentality of the CNRP in the public imagination,” Nee said
Facebook Corruption
Quotes & Op-Ed from BuzzFeed
Facebook has styled itself as a neutral platform for information. But its role in spreading propaganda and fake news, as well as its relationship with the Cambodian government, shows how easily that neutrality can be exploited by autocrats.
Weeks after Kem’s arrest, Cambodia’s top court dissolved the main opposition party at the request of the government. It marked a fundamental shift in Cambodian politics, which had long incorporated a vibrant media and civil society, as well as flawed but fiercely fought elections. Democracy in the country had collapsed, and it was broadcast to millions on Facebook.
Lim Cheavutha, who is in his thirties and speaks with an easy confidence, brags about the pageviews on Fresh News with the passion of a football coach obsessing about stats. The site combines the fast-breaking headlines of a newswire with a decidedly pro-government slant, and Lim says he’s so close to Hun Sen that they sometimes message about stories well past midnight. Asked about the growth of his site, he claims extraordinary numbers that are impossible to verify because the company is privately held — more than 10 million pageviews per month and 1,400 downloads of the app a day. (Cambodia has about 4.8 million Facebook users, according to a 2017 assessment.)
Lim says he built Fresh News from scratch with just $10,000. His critics say this is untrue and that Hun Sen is simply bankrolling the site. (A spokesperson for the prime minister did not respond to requests for comment on the site’s ownership.) Lim insisted his site was independent — but then expressed pride in his cozy relationship with the prime minister and other ruling party officials. The opposition won’t return his messages, he said, though opposition officials told me they’d never heard from Lim.
In a place like Cambodia, Lim’s site couldn’t be successful without Facebook, which is where almost everyone gets their news. “Facebook is an absolute necessity for my site,” he said.
Lim said his most popular stories are about the mundane, like traffic accidents and celebrity gossip. But when it comes to politics, he’s quick to note that he alone has the ear of the prime minister.
“They trust me because if they give me the whole thing, I publish the whole thing,” Lim said. “If he [the prime minister] wants to spread news, he comes to me … that’s why I get scoops.” Despite claiming to be independent, Lim said he does not edit Hun Sen’s statements, and says he puts out quick stories himself, tapping them out on his phone, based on what message the prime minister wants to get out.
It’s clear that Hun Sen, who has spent 33 years in power, understands how important Facebook is in his country. With more than 9 million followers, he is the third most engaged world leader on Facebook, after Donald Trump and India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, according to a study by the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller. The report called his presence “unusual” in its candidness — browsing through shows plenty of selfies as well as shots of him with his family and working behind the scenes. For Cambodians, it was a change from the strongman-like figure he presented for years before.
“He’s been a zealous convert to Facebook,” said Sebastian Strangio, the author of Hun Sen’s Cambodia. “He’s using Facebook to sand down the rough edges and present a more avuncular and beneficent public image.”
“Facebook is the most important part of work as well as life,” said Duong Dara, an aide to Hun Sen and the head of his Facebook team, in a rare interview. “The new generation doesn’t have time to watch television anymore, even I don’t buy newspapers. The News Feed, I can see quickly.”
Duong, who is in his early forties, first started using Facebook, he said, because he saw posts about Cambodia being a dangerous place to visit and wanted to clap back out of patriotism. Later, he created a fan page for Hun Sen, who he had long supported. He attracted millions of followers with his straightforward voice. After the election in 2013, Hun Sen himself saw it, Duong said, and got in touch.
Duong came on board and began building a team to manage Hun Sen’s Facebook presence. He declined to specify its size, but said the team was made up of technical people as well as those who understand politics, government policy, and public opinion.
Duong, who speaks English with a perfect American-style accent, has traveled throughout his country and abroad at Hun Sen’s side. He carries five mobile phones in a black vinyl case specifically so he can monitor different Facebook accounts. The phones use different cell service providers so that there’s always a guarantee of signal when the prime minister needs to post — even during a recent visit to China, where Facebook is blocked, and in less developed parts of the countryside.
Duong’s team obsessively monitors comments and likes on the prime minister’s posts with the fervor of day traders playing the stock market, trying to replicate successes and interrogate failures. They’ve learned photos that show Hun Sen’s personal side — like selfies or casual snaps — do a lot better than messages about policy.
Duong’s team also monitors Facebook for people posting comments critical of Hun Sen that they feel cross the line.
Cambodia and China: Rewriting (and Repeating) History
Op-Ed: The Diplomat
A lot has changed in 40 years — but not everything.
Chana’s Premier Li Keqiang, center, shakes hands with his counterpart, Nguyen Xuan Phuc, second from left, of Vietnam, Prayuth Chan-o-cha, left, of Thailand, Hun Sen, second from right, of Cambodia, and Thongloun Sisolith, right, of Laos, before an opening of the 2nd Mekong Lancang Cooperation Leaders’ Meeting, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2018. Leaders of nations along Southeast Asia’s Mekong River gather Wednesday in the Cambodian capital amid a push by China to build more dams that are altering the water flow and have raised environmental concerns. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)
Like Pol Pot before him, Hun Sen has now pinned his political longevity on China, which again looks out at a visage of hostile powers across Asia as it seeks to rise to the status of the regional hegemon, and celebrates having a strong ally in Phnom Penh.
The Soviet threat is gone, but Hun Sen’s cantankerous political attacks on all things American in Cambodia, which has tied him to the Chinese for support, might be viewed in much the same way as Pol Pot’s attacks on Vietnam: it’s me, or a pawn of China’s great power rival du jour.
Though Hun Sen never specified the precise hue of the “color revolution” brewing against him by Cambodia’ popular opposition party as he dismantled the country’s 25-year-old UN-built democracy late last year, his targets both in the opposition and in fragile civil society had a distinct American accent.
The 24-year-old U.S.-owned English-language newspaper-of-record, The Cambodia Daily, was forced to close — but not the Australian-owned Phnom Penh Post. Gone too were radio programs from the U.S.-run Voice of America and Radio Free Asia — along with two of their reporters, who were imprisoned for “espionage” — but not those of Radio France International.
Gone, even, was U.S.-funded National Democratic Institute — even as Germany’s Konrad Adanaeur Institute, which had been actively working with the opposition to develop policies, was left untouched. The message to China would have been clear.
Hun Sen is only the latest in a long line of Cambodian leaders to bank his leadership’s long-term survival and his legacy on the rise of China as the regional power.
Pol Pot, too, was not the first.
King Norodom Sihanouk, the father of Cambodia’s 1953 independence, also moved sharply toward China’s influence late in his rule. He went as far as to sever diplomatic ties with the U.S. in 1965, believing that the future in Asia was with China.
Pol Pot and King Sihanouk were notably both thwarted by competing interests from within their regimes — a pro-U.S. faction represented by the coup leader Lon Nol for Sihanouk in March 1970, and a pro-Vietnamese faction, with Hun Sen among the leaders, in the case of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in January 1979.
Hun Sen may well yet prove to have bested both for timing in the China gambit. Yet as a self-proclaimed life-long student of history and geopolitics, he would be forgiven for looking around his party with apprehension.
To Liberate Cambodia
Op-Ed: GlobalResearch
Cambodian Politics
Politically, Cambodians are largely naïve with most believing that they live in a ‘democracy’ despite the absence of its most obvious hallmarks such as civil and political rights, the separation of powers including an independent judiciary, free and fair elections, the right of assembly and freedom of the press (with the English-language newspaper The Cambodia Daily recently closed down along with some radio stations). And this is an accurate assessment of most members of the political leadership of the CNRP as well.
Despite a 30-year record of political manipulation by Hun Sen and the CPP – during which ‘Hun Sen has made it clear that he does not respect the concept of free and fair elections’: see ‘30 Years of Hun Sen: Violence, Repression, and Corruption in Cambodia’ – which has included obvious corruption of elections through vote-rigging but also an outright coup in 1997 and the imprisonment or exile of opposition leaders since then, most Cambodians and their opposition leaders still participate in the charade that they live in a ‘democracy’ which could result in the defeat of Hun Sen and the CPP at a ‘free and fair’ election. Of course, there are exceptions to this naïveté, as a 2014 article written by Mu Sochua, veteran Cambodian politician and former minister of women’s affairs in a Hun Sen government, demonstrates. See ‘Crackdown in Cambodia’.
Moreover, as Sovannarun has noted: most Cambodians ‘still think international pressure is effective in keeping the CPP from disrespecting democratic principles which they have violated up until this day. Right now they wait for US and EU sanctions in the hope that the CPP will step back.’ See, for example, ‘The Birth of a Dictator’. He asks:
‘Even assuming it works, when will Cambodians learn to rely on themselves when the ruling party causes the same troubles again? Are they going to ask for external help like this every time and expect their country to be successfully democratized?’
The problem, Sovannarun argues, is that
‘Cambodians in general do not really understand what democracy is. Their views are very narrow. For them, democracy is just an election. Many news reports refer to people as “voters” but in Khmer, this literally translates as “vote owners” as if people cannot express their rights or power beside voting.’
Fortunately, recent actions by the CPP have led to opposition leaders and some NGOs finally declaring the Hun Sen dictatorship for what it is. See, for example, ‘The Birth of a Dictator’. But for Sovannarun,
‘democratization ended in 1997. The country should be regarded as a dictatorship since then. The party that lost the election in 1993 still controlled the national military, the police and security force, and the public administration, eventually using military force to establish absolute control in 1997. How is Cambodia still a democracy?’
However, recent comprehensive research undertaken by Global Witness goes even further. Their report Hostile Takeover ‘sheds light on a huge network of secret deal-making and corruption that has underpinned Hun Sen’s 30-year dictatorial reign of murder, torture and the imprisonment of his political opponents’. See ‘Hostile Takeover: The corporate empire of Cambodia’s ruling family’ and ‘Probe: Companies Worth $200M Linked to Cambodian PM’s Family’.
So what are the prospects of liberating Cambodia from its dictatorship?