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Posted by: | Posted on: April 9, 2019

Cambodia: Free Opposition Leader From House Arrest

Cambodia: Free Opposition Leader From House Arrest

Immediately Drop Bogus Case Against Kem Sokha

Op-Ed: HRW

Opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party President Kem Sokha shows off his ballot before voting in local elections in Chak Angre Leu on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Sunday, June 4, 2017.
Opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party President Kem Sokha shows off his ballot before voting in local elections in Chak Angre Leu on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Sunday, June 4, 2017. © 2017 AP Photo/Heng Sinith

 (New York) – Cambodian authorities should immediately and unconditionally release opposition party leader Kem Sokha from house arrest and drop the politically motivated criminal case against him, Human Rights Watch said today. Sokha, president of the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) at the time of his arrest, has been without his freedom for over 18 months.

On March 19, 2019, an investigating judge in Cambodia’s politically controlled courts rejected Sokha’s renewed request to drop the charges against him. The judge provided no update or additional information about the completion of his investigation and whether the case will be sent to trial.

“For a year and a half, Cambodian authorities have imprisoned Kem Sokha, first in a remote jail and now in his own home; denied him visits from colleagues, diplomats, and journalists; and conducted a baseless investigation with no end in sight,” said Brad Adams, Asia director. “The government should immediately end Sokha’s arbitrary detention and release him.”

Courtesy: Phnom Penh Post

On September 3, 2017, eight members of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s personal bodyguard unit and about 100 police officers arrested Sokha at his home in Phnom Penh. An investigating judge charged him with “colluding with foreigners” under article 443 of the Cambodian criminal code, which carries a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison. He was immediately stripped of his parliamentary immunity on the grounds that he was caught in the act of committing a crime, even though the purported evidence against him was a highly edited video of a speech he gave in 2013, more than four years earlier, in which he explained that his party had received advice from a United States-based NGO.

On June 5, 2018, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, a body of independent experts, declared Kem Sokha’s pretrial detention “arbitrary” and “politically motivated,” and said that Cambodian authorities should immediately release him.

Sokha spent a year in pretrial detention in a remote jail during which his health sharply deteriorated. On September 10, 2018, a judge ordered him released under highly restrictive conditions of judicial supervision that amount to house arrest. Under article 208 of Cambodia’s criminal procedure law, the investigating judge may only detain a felony suspect on legally justified grounds for up to 18 months. However, the judge has wide discretion to determine bail conditions, which allows for severe restrictions on the suspect’s freedom of movement and other rights. There is no provision in Cambodian law that allows for house arrest.

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Posted by: | Posted on: April 5, 2019

Saumura Tioulong: Aristocrat & Activist, East and West, Synergy & Individuality

Saumura Tioulong: Aristocrat & Activist, East and West, Synergy & Individuality

Op-Ed: FNF

Feature 03.04.2019

This author has personally heard Saumura, on more than a few occasions, say this statement or permutations of the same point—“The wife of Sam Rainsy?! I am Saumura.” Indeed, it is but just to refer to her as her own person whose solid credentials and competence in the fields of both politics and economics stand on their own merit. 

(C) FNF SEEAsia

She is the daughter of a former prime minister, minister of three portfolios: foreign affairs, finance and education, and governor of Phnom Penh and other provinces; and the wife of the leader of the Cambodian opposition who was also a former finance minister after a successful career in Paris in business and finance. But make no mistake about it, she is her own person.

Saumura Tioulong
(c) Cambodia Daily

At the zenith of its power and glory, the Khmer Empire covered much of today’s Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. More than five hundred years later and after a century of French colonial rule, the genocidal reign of the Khmer Rouge reduced Cambodia to one of the poorest nations in the world. 

Imperial Khmer…Indochine. The ruins of the magnificent Angkor Wat in Siem Reap and the dilapidated maisons along Sisowath Quay in Phnom Penh are monuments of stone to Cambodia’s past—both as conquerors and conquered, both triumphant and tragic. In 1953, Cambodia gained independence from France. Though political turbulence continued, Cambodia in the fifties and the sixties held promise and possibilities. And Saumura’s father was part of that promise. 

Then came the Killing Fields (1975 to 1979) that assaulted Cambodia with the relentless orgies of death and destruction of the infamous and murderous Khmer Rouge. 

Saumura spent her primary education in Phnom Penh, Paris, Tokyo and Moscow; her high school at the Lycee Descartes in Phnom Penh. In 1969, Saumura went to France, her prominent family maintained a home in the center of Paris. She was still in her late teens when she left Cambodia, several years before the Khmer Rouge came to power. She returned only in 1992 with her husband, Rainsy. They have three children. 

In France, she received the best education: a Political Science Diploma from the Institute of Political Science of Paris (1974) and an MBA from the prestigious Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires (European Institute of Business Administration) or INSEAD (1980), acknowledged as one of the best business schools in the world, in its main campus in Fontainebleau. 

With her sterling academic qualifications, she entered the world of high finance. Starting as Financial Analyst and Portfolio Manager at Banque Indosuez de Paris (1975- 1983), she became Managing Director of the French branch of Robert Fleming and Company, a Scottish investment bank specializing in securities management (1983-1988). And from 1988 to 1993, she was President and Chief Executive Officer of Mobiliere Conseil, a stock market advisory firm specializing in the Southeast Asian market. 

Her being Asian and a woman were not obstacles not necessarily because the European and the men were open-minded but more so, because she did not allow it to be so. Had she remained in Europe, she would have certainly made more impressive strides in world finance. But Cambodia, her home, beckoned. 

During her long years in France preoccupied with her studies and immersed in the world of finance while raising a family at the same time, Cambodia was always in her mind and heart. She was a member of the royalist FUNCINPEC since its founding in 1981. The Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Indépendant, Neutre, Pacifique et Coopératif (National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia) or FUNCINPEC was founded by King Norodom Sihanouk and his son, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, led the party to electoral victory in the 1993 elections supervised by the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) (Facts and Details, n.d.). Sam Rainsy was one of the FUNCINPEC candidates who won that year’s election and he was later appointed as Minister of Finance. 

Saumura Tioulong
CALD Archives

Saumura became Vice Governor of the Cambodian Central Bank in 1993. She nego- tiated and supervised the implementation of the first International Monetary Fund (IMF) support programs in Cambodia. She left the Central Bank in 1995, the same year Rainsy founded the Khmer Nation Party (KNP), the precursor of the Sam Rainsy Party (SRP). 

In 1998, she became a member of parliament for the first time, representing Phnom Penh during the second National Assembly of Cambodia. She was one of the 15 SRP stal- warts who became part of 122-member legislature. She was reelected in 2003, one of the 24 SRP legislators in the 123-member third National Assembly of Cambodia. In 2008, she became one of the 26 SRP members in the fourth Cambodian National Assembly. During that year’s general elections, the Human Rights Party (HRP) of Kem Sokha won three seats. 

Saumura Tioulong
CALD Archives

SRP and HRP merged to become the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) on 17 July 2012. A CALD press release (18 July 2012) reported that Sam Rainsy and Kem Sokha and other leaders of SRP (including Saumura and Mu Sochua) and HRP convened at the CALD Secretariat in Manila to discuss the long-awaited unification of the two parties. After two days of careful deliberations, the two party presidents reached a historic agreement to “unite in accordance with the Khmer people’s will in order to save Cambodia by bringing about political change to put an end to a dictatorship serving destructive foreign interests.” The merger between SRP and HRP aims to directly oppose the dictatorial government that lies at the root of Cambodia’s problems. The ruling CPP recklessly exercises its power in violation of human rights and with- out consideration of national interests. It is this government that has led Rainsy into multiple self-imposed exiles to avoid imprisonment for politically motivated charges. 

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Posted by: | Posted on: March 28, 2019

Protecting Kem Sokha and Democracy in Cambodia

Op-Ed: The Geopolitics  

Protecting Kem Sokha and Democracy in Cambodia

Protecting Kem Sokha and Democracy in Cambodia

By Sam Rainsy -March 27, 2019

Under the leadership of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, the only opposition party in parliament, the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), was arbitrarily dissolved in 2017 and its leader, Kem Sokha, arrested. This set the scene for rigged elections in July 2018, with all of the seats in the National Assembly being won by the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP).

Kem Sokha remains under house arrest, and his period of detention without trial now exceeds the maximum 18 months permitted by Cambodian law. When dealing with the international community, the government makes a half-hearted attempt to get around this 18-month problem by claiming that Kem Sokha has been released on bail. The restrictions on his movement since he was allowed home after spending a year in a remote prison, however, limit him to a few streets around his home.

Hun Sen in a speech to a domestic audience on March 25 clarified the point when he referred to Kem Sokha as being under house arrest. In the same speech, he also clarified, if any clarification was needed, that the justice system is subservient to his dictatorship. “I won’t set you free!” he said in comments aimed at Kem Sokha. “Once the court has convicted you, there won’t be any more problems.”

The reasons for such statements are clear. Kem Sokha, as the prime minister noted, has been urging the 118 leading members of the CNRP who are banned from politics against applying for political “rehabilitation.” The aim of these selective, individual rehabilitations is to divide the CNRP, to cut it into salami slices and to remove its electoral effectiveness. Recall that, despite numerous irregularities, the CNRP officially won close to the half of the votes in both the national election of 2013 and the local commune elections of 2017. Since its creation in 2012, the party has posed a clear threat to the continued domination of the CPP, and its division has been an overriding government priority.

The aim, therefore, is to produce small breakaway groups from the CNRP, which will join the numerous tiny parties which contested the 2018 national election but could not win a single national assembly seat between them. If any of these salami-slice parties one day became large enough to pose a serious threat to the government, they would simply be dissolved at gunpoint and the long, deceitful cycle would start again. The international community, it is hoped, will fail to see through the subterfuge. In fact, selective rehabilitation is a recipe for a series of rigged local and national elections in the years to come, underpinned, as and when needed, by government violence. Hun Sen has also made this clear, by saying that the government must work to “eliminate” the CNRP before Cambodia loses duty-free access to European markets.

The problem with the government’s plan to convict Kem Sokha is that it can’t find any evidence to take to a kangaroo court. The charge of treason that he faces is ludicrous and no credible evidence to support it has been produced at any stage. Any trial would be closely watched by the international community, but would be unable to produce any scrap of proof. The government has also failed to find a way to break the courage and resilience of Kem Sokha himself. Kem Sokha has endured all the threats that the government has made against him, and his continued loss of freedom, in the belief that Cambodians are entitled to a genuine democratic choice, and that the CNRP is capable of giving it to them.

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Posted by: | Posted on: March 27, 2019

Japan Should Stop Acting Like China in Cambodia

Japan Should Stop Acting Like China in Cambodia

Tokyo is fighting a losing battle for Hun Sen’s support, and selling its own legacy in the democratization of Cambodia short. Published in The Diplomat

Brad Adams, Asia Director, Teppei Kasai Program Officer, Asia Division

2013_Cambodia_Shinzo
Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe speaks at the ASEAN Plus Three Summit in Bandar Seri Begawan on October 10, 2013.
  © 2013 Reuters

In a dimly lit ballroom at a Tokyo luxury hotel, Sok Chenda Sophea, the secretary general of the Council for the Development of Cambodia and the minister attached to Prime Minister Hun Sen, persistently asked about 200 Japanese businesspeople to invest in Cambodia.

“Cambodia is not mini-China, come [visit],” Sophea said at the Cambodian Investment Forum on March 5. Sophea’s 30-minute speech mentioned everything from special economic zones to Japanese Overseas Development Assistance.

But Cambodia’s major crackdown on dissent and its ban on the main opposition party before last year’s election were not on his agenda. When questioned by Human Rights Watch about whether the Cambodian government has concrete strategies to ensure rights protections for the Cambodian people amid a growing number of foreign investments and development projects, Sophea dodged the question.

“I’m sorry to say, but we’re in a business seminar,” Sophea said, apparently not concerned that illegal land confiscation for business projects and the abuse of workers are among the country’s biggest rights problems.

Japan has been important to Cambodia, for decades its largest aid donor and one of its largest foreign investors. Now, with China surpassing Japan in both areas, the Japanese government appears willing to throw its principles out the window to compete with China for Hun Sen’s affections.

Given Hun Sen’s dictatorial and violent record, this is a contest that Japan can’t – and shouldn’t want to — win.

Despite Sophea’s denials, in recent years, Hun Sen, who has held power for 34 years, and Chinese President Xi Jinping have been inseparable. They kicked off 2019 by striking a deal involving what Hun Sen described as a Chinese grant of nearly $600 million and a pledge to import 400,000 tons of Cambodian rice. The two agreed on a target of $10 billion in bilateral trade by 2023.

The deal was topped off by smaller investments and loans, including an agreement from China to provide a bodyguard compound for Cambodia’s Council of Ministers. This is very worrisome, given that Hun Sen’s bodyguard unit has long been responsible for bloody attacks on the prime minister’s critics, including an infamous 1997 grenade attack on a political demonstration by the then-leader of the opposition, Sam Rainsy.

For Xi Jinping and Hun Sen, it was business as usual. Since the 1998 demise of the Khmer Rouge, which China helped propel to power, leading to the deaths of as many as 2 million Cambodians, China has poured billions of dollars into Cambodia in loans, aid, and investments. By 2010, China became Cambodia’s largest foreign donor, though much of its aid is in loans that Cambodia may never be able to repay. In 2018, China accounted for nearly half of Cambodia’s $6 billion foreign debt.

Presiding over a one-party state at home, the Chinese government doesn’t have to consider public opinion when supporting dictatorships or account for the expenditure of its funds. It can bribe officials with impunity. Things are different in Japan.  

This has left Japan in a bind. Despite the worsening climate for human rights in Cambodia, Japan still shies away from open and clear criticism, while continuing to provide large amounts of aid and staging high-level visits, all to charm the deeply unpopular Hun Sen.

But Japan is fighting a losing battle for Hun Sen’s support. Japan can’t outspend China or deliver sweetheart contracts to Cambodia, yet its overt and clumsy attempts to ingratiate itself have led to a backlash among Cambodian activists, who see Tokyo selling out democracy and human rights to maintain a friendship with a dictator. Activists see this “values free” Japanese diplomacy contributing to the seemingly irreversible decline of democratic values in Cambodia.

That became increasingly apparent in the lead-up to the July 2018 Cambodian national elections. Fearing defeat, the government dissolved the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), kicked out its members of parliament, and imposed a five-year political ban on 118 of its senior members. Hun Sen also cracked down on independent media outlets, journalists, and independent organizations promoting the rule of law, democracy, and human rights.

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