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Cambodia – Fractured politics and a culture of monologue
The genesis of the culture of dialogue was the close-run 2013 general election when Hun Sen’s ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) came within a few hundred thousand votes (in an electorate of nearly 10 million) of losing the popular ballot to Rainsy’s CNRP.
With a youthful population tired of the cronyism, poor services and lack of opportunities available to them under a CPP government – and unreceptive to the ruling party’s mantra that it brought peace to Cambodia by defeating the Khmer Rouge – the trend was towards change.
The opposition is banking on that continuing and, with two-thirds of the population under 35, is confident of its chances in 2018. The CPP is understandably fearful, and has begun improving education (whose budget in 2016 will, at nearly $500 million, be double its 2013 level) while at the same time, perhaps ominously, shoring up the amount allocated to defense and the police (up nearly two-thirds over the same period to a combined $650 million).
Cambodia – Fractured politics and a culture of monologue
Op-Ed: DW
Over a year after Cambodia’s two main parties agreed on a “culture of dialogue,” the deal looks to have unraveled, with the PM warning only his re-election would keep the nation from civil war. Robert Carmichael reports.
The July 2014 agreement between Prime Minister Hun Sen and opposition leader Sam Rainsy was born of a close-run general election the previous year and a subsequent deadlocked, and at times bloody, political process that saw the opposition refuse to take the 55 seats they had won until allegations about electoral fraud were addressed.
But eventually, after months of opposition-led protests and increasingly violent suppression by the authorities, the two sides came to an arrangement. Under its terms, Hun Sen and Rainsy agreed to discuss key issues, while party worthies would resolve lesser disputes.
Autopsy of a Cambodian Election How Hun Sen Rules
Autopsy of a Cambodian Election
How Hun Sen Rules
By Stéphanie Giry
Op-Ed: Foreign Affairs
Khmer New Year is the closest thing Cambodia has to a High Holiday, and in April, Prime Minister Hun Sen celebrated it in style with his fiercest opponent. During a festival at the ancient temples of Angkor, he and Sam Rainsy ate together from a gigantic cake of sticky rice weighing more than four metric tons—a Guinness World Record. It was an uncanny scene, not least because the last time Sam Rainsy had made a major public appearance at Cambodia’s most glorious site, in September 2013, it was to call Hun Sen a cheat and a usurper.
On that day, Sam Rainsy and 55 members-elect of the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party were boycotting the inaugural session of the new National Assembly to protest alleged fraud in the recent general election, which the CNRP had officially lost by a small margin. With the ancestral temples bearing witness in the background, they called for an investigation, vowing “not to betray the will of the people.”
Cambodian politics appeared to be at an inflection point then, after years of civil war, military repression, totalitarianism, foreign occupation, an international trusteeship, and de facto one-party rule. By the government’s own tally of the votes, Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) had lost about one-quarter of its seats in the National Assembly. For months afterward, tens of thousands of Cambodians, led by the CNRP, took to the streets to pillory Hun Sen and ask him to resign. Yet today, the opposition cannot seem to get enough of rapprochement, touting a “culture of dialogue”—a phrase it repeats like a mantra—so far with little to show for it.
Has Hun Sen done it again? He has been Cambodia’s prime minister for 30 years, in spite of his unseemly political origins. A one-time Khmer Rouge commander who defected, he was put in power in 1979 by Vietnam, Cambodia’s historical enemy, after it toppled Pol Pot’s regime. Hun Sen has remained in place after the advent of electoral democracy in 1993, even though his party has never won a majority of the popular vote in a general election, except in 2008, maybe—but the results of that election, like those of all the others, are disputed. Over the years, Hun Sen has coaxed or cowed, corrupted or co-opted, defanged, sidelined, or otherwise neutralized a large cast of adversaries, far and near.
Hun Sen has perfected the art of electoral authoritarianism without alienating Western donors ostensibly dedicated to the rule of law, while offsetting their influence by welcoming more and more investment from China. At once crass and deft, salt of the earth and grandiloquent, he is a remarkable political animal. But his longevity also reflects a distinct political culture—inspired by stories and folktales about mighty, wily kings and hares outwitting greater creatures—that rewards and glorifies the ambitious and the sly, the ruthless and the adaptable.
An autopsy of the 2013 election and its fallout suggests that even Hun Sen’s opponents cannot entirely escape this conception of power. At the same time that Sam Rainsy and the CNRP pressed for multiparty democracy, liberalism, and human rights, they seemed to unwittingly adopt some of Hun Sen’s ways. The opposition claimed to represent the people’s will and the people’s interests, but it sometimes treated its supporters with a paternalist instrumentalism that evoked manipulation more than emancipation. The CNRP practiced a half-baked form of nonviolent resistance that, instead of shaming the government for abusing its monopoly on force, wound up bowing to it. The party’s appeals to nationalism and flirtations with anti-Vietnamese xenophobia were a gambit designed to contest Hun Sen’s legitimacy, but in addition to courting real danger, they may have indirectly confirmed certain features of Hun Sen’s self-mythology.
Perhaps it could hardly have been otherwise, given the CPP’s lock on state resources. And the CNRP may have nudged along some overdue reforms. But the opposition’s tactics also seem to have confirmed that democratic contestation in Cambodia remains, at bottom, a struggle for power, and that serves Hun Sen above all.
THE PRIME MINISTER WHO WOULD BE KING
The promise of multiparty democracy returned to Cambodia with elections in 1993, after the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops and a UN-brokered peace accord that ended a long-running civil war. Immediately, however, the notion was trampled. Although the CPP lost the election to Funcinpec, a royalist party, Hun Sen wrangled a position as second prime minister, and in 1997, he staged a coup.
Trans-Pacific Partnership: Do it for Vietnam
Trans-Pacific Partnership: Do it for Vietnam
John Kerry Attends a Reception in Honor of the 20th Anniversary of U.S.–Vietnam Trade Relations
Image Credit: Flickr/ U.S. Department of State
Tyler Cowen, the prolific economist behind Marginal Revoution (a blog I’ve read for over half-a-decade and recommend), has a unique case in favor of the Trans-Pacific Partnership that relies on simple utilitarian logic. Simply put, the benefits of the TPP coming into effect outweigh the costs in a huge way. Particularly, the benefits for one country—Vietnam—are huge. In fact, Cowen makes that case that the benefit to Vietnam would be so huge that any costs borne by U.S. interest groups and constituencies are marginal. The benefits to Vietnam alone should make the TPP a “no brainer” of an agreement.
The economic reason is simple. The TPP, while it is many things, is at its core a tariff-effacing trade agreement for among its 12 signatories. Vietnam, meanwhile, is not only a poor country, but a country that remains at odds with the values and principles guiding the primary stakeholder behind the TPP: the United States. Vietnam, a Communist country, has undertaken some liberalization on tariffs, “but since then has done some backsliding,” writes Cowen. Specifically, after its entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), Vietnamese tariffs “on products of interest” to the United States drastically, only to slightly increase them to come in line with the maximum of the range allowed under WTO bindings (see the U.S. Trade Representative’s report on Vietnam here).
Given that Vietnam does a lot of trade with the United States and that the TPP will slash major trade protections on the Vietnamese market, it follows that Vietnamese goods will be particularly competitive in a post-TPP context. In support of these claims, Cowen cites a simulation study by the Peterson Institute on International Economics that demonstrates the same (i.e., that Vietnam, of all countries party to the TPP, stands to benefit the most). A particularly telling statistic for the potential gains for Vietnam in a zero-tariff scenario is the following: in 2012, 34 percent of U.S. apparel imports came from Vietnam, amounting to $7 billion. In a zero-tariff scenario, these imports are suddenly far more competitive.
Why CNRP is pushing hard from bottom-up TV investment?
Why CNRP is pushing hard from bottom-up TV investment?
TV station is one of the results from the political deal in July 22, 2014. One year anniversary of this political settlement between CPP and CNRP has resulted in both progress and regress outcomes. But the grand policies CNRP are aiming to achieve have not been changed. Those grand policies are following:
- 7 points policy to bringing about change for Cambodia remains the same. These policies shook the base of CPP in 2013 and they should be more effective in 2017 and 2018 of upcoming elections when these grand 7 points policies have been paid a price through more in-dept and comprehensive galvanization.
- The culture of dialogue to paving way for comprehensive and skillful interaction between top leaders of CPP and CNRP to maximize the interests of the nation is still intact and stronger. The dialogue is a good political mean for both parties to prepare the homestretch in 2018. Those who are regarded as disrespectful to this dialogue shall face with stronger condemnation by the Cambodian people.
- Sun TV Channel to adding on to those existing 18 TV channels in Cambodia is a powerful ongoing project. Sun TV Station has appeared as a pro-poor, neutral, professional and pre-owned channel by the Cambodian people.
According to the survey by Asia Foundation, there is above 50% of population are watching TV in daily basis. So this highest proportional market share of Cambodia media, CNRP is not going to waste its energy and investment in capitalizing to create the TV channel. The investment’s business plan is different from others as this channel is not owned by tycoons or powerful politicians, but owned by the Cambodian people who donated money in kind to supplement with the shares invested by many individuals.
This donation and share’s participation rights shall help to enable the Sun TV Channel become true governing by the Cambodian people, for the Cambodian people, and serve the Cambodian people.