The Future of Cambodia’s Opposition
PHNOM PENH — Sam Inn has a simple explanation for why his small party of civil society leaders have turned up their noses at the desperate appeals from the banned opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) to boycott the July 29 national election in a show of solidarity.
Three decades watching Prime Minister Hun Sen run rings around the world’s attempts to pressure him to backtrack on severe repression has been enough to draw a few conclusions, says the German-educated secretary-general of the fledgling Grassroots Democracy Party (GDP).
“You cannot expect much from the international community,” Inn, 45, said on the sidelines of a special party congress held at the GDP’s headquarters in Phnom Penh last month to choose its candidate for prime minister on July 29.
“Sooner or later, they will go shake hands with this government.”
The world has always folded and endorsed the rule of Hun Sen and his long-ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), the former Lutheran health NGO director noted, so it stands that this election will be soon recognized too — even if the CNRP remains banned, and its leader still jailed.
“That is what we have analyzed,” Inn said with a shrug. “If we can foresee this result, we need to participate to bring more benefits to the country. We can at least mitigate the CPP; there will be some kind of opposition in the National Assembly and we can do advocacy from there.”
The June 10 GDP congress in the outer suburban area of Phnom Penh Thmey — a favored suburb of Cambodia’s slowly-growing middle class — was attended by about 200 people, including a spattering of Cambodia’s few remaining independent journalists not imprisoned or unemployed.
Without the pomp of similar events held by the much larger CNRP before it was banned in November, Inn and two other hopefuls delivered stump speeches beneath a large outdoor canopy in the GDP headquarter’s yard, nestled uncomfortably close to the Phnom Penh International Airport.
With ducks milling about and amid the intermittent roar of airliners taking off — at times seemingly meters above the vinyl canopy — a GDP official soon announced party chairman and “founding father” Yang Saing Koma had easily won the ballot, taking 127 of 146 votes.
Himself a 51-year-old former head of an organic-farming NGO with an agricultural doctorate from Germany’s Leipzig University, Saing Koma edged out Inn (12 votes) and a third candidate, a police officer from Siem Reap province (7 votes), to easily secure the nomination.
It was a significant, if seemingly minor, election to win—with the CNRP banned from taking part in the election come July 29, the GDP stands to be the only prominent independent party on the ballot in an election in which boycotters have been warned they will be punished.
“Of course we feel sorrow for the CNRP and they should have the chance to compete. But at the very least, we need to break the two-thirds majority of the CPP,” Saing Koma said after his victory, noting that the ruling party could change the Constitution if it took at least 84 of the 125 seats on offer.
“The voters and the citizens do not belong to any party,” he added with some force, rejecting the idea of a boycott. “We are in a pluralistic democratic society, and people are free to choose which party they support. This kind of idea is not good for a democratic society. We are sick of the confrontational politics.”
The banned opposition
The CNRP’s leader Kem Sokha was himself once also a prominent Cambodian civil society leader, running the U.S.-funded Cambodian Center for Human Rights from its establishment in October 2002 until he left to make a run for politics in April 2007 with his new Human Rights Party (HRP).
A year before the July 2013 national election, the HRP merged with the rival Sam Rainsy Party (SRP) to form the CNRP. It was a huge success.
Where the SRP and HRP had won 29 parliamentary seats between them to the CPP’s 90 at the 2008 election — the nadir of Cambodia’s opposition movement — the newly united CNRP won 55 seats to the CPP’s 68 at the 2013 election, which took place less than 12 months after the merger.
It was the best performance by a non-CPP party since the U.N.-run 1993 elections, with the official results showing the CPP only just overcoming the CNRP with 48.8 percent to 44.5 percent of the vote. The impressive performance was then backed up in the June 2017 commune elections.
At that vote, the CNRP managed to take 43.83 percent of the vote nationwide to the CPP’s 50.76 percent — a huge and telling swing from the June 2012 commune elections, when the CPP with its 61.6 percent had walloped the divided SRP and HRP’s cumulative total of 30.5 percent.
CNRP spokesman Yim Sovann was at the time eager to point out that Cambodia’s opposition had always won about 10–15 percent less of the vote at commune elections than at the national elections that come a year later. But then the party’s leader was suddenly arrested.
In a September 4 midnight raid by hundreds of well-armed police on his family home not far from the GDP’s headquarters, Sokha was seized and taken to a remote maximum security prison for having supposedly planned a U.S.-led “color revolution” to overthrow Hun Sen.
For a CNRP that has watched on unhappily at the GDP’s recent campaigning, it was the most compelling reason for an election boycott. If that was the treatment doled out to the CNRP’s leaders after getting the party into a position to challenge Hun Sen’s rule, what hope would the GDP ever have?
“It’s irrelevant how many new or smaller ‘opposition’ parties there are on the ballot. As long as the biggest and only viable opposition party is not on it, no election is legitimate,” said Kem Monovithya, the 36-year-old eldest daughter of Sokha, who has since her father’s arrest been based in Washington D.C. but has also frequently traveled to Brussells for lobbying.
“We stand firm on our call for free and fair elections,” she said. “That means allowing the largest and only viable opposition, the CNRP, to compete, freeing our leader Kem Sokha, lifting the ban on CNRP officials, reinstating independent media and putting a stop on harassment against civil society.”
Monovithya had before her father’s arrest served as the deputy of the CNRP’s public relations department but has since led the push for the U.S. and European Union to pressure Hun Sen to reverse course.
She said the GDP’s leaders were wrong to surrender so soon to the prime minister’s preferred new reality for Cambodia. For all of Hun Sen’s past aggressions, she said, he had always relied on the veneer of regular elections to help make his decades of rule of Cambodia seem more legitimate.
Now he had been forced onto unfamiliar terrain, Monovithya said. To fight him, the illegitimacy of his rule had to be the focus. It was too hasty and short-sighted to bow down to his rule and start aiming to simply mitigate things now, she explained.
“The international community will not let them get away this time,” she said. “Some forms of pressure have been applied to the Hun Sen regime from the international community, and more are coming.
Threats of sanctions
Yet few world leaders are more capable of navigating threats of sanctions and illegitimacy than Hun Sen. His career has been forged by weathering threats while stamping down challenges to his rule. Once secured, things can be loosened — in exchange for recognition of his rule.
The strategy has always seemed to bear fruit for Hun Sen. Most prominently, it worked for him in the year between the “factional fighting” in July 1997 (or coup d’etat, as others have described it) and the July 1998 election.
Although dozens of Hun Sen’s opponents were executed in the year between the fighting and the election — and some even even during the campaign — in the end U.S. Congressman Stephen Solarz called the ballot that secured Hun Sen’s rule “the Miracle on the Mekong.”
It worked, too, after military police shot dead five garment workers and injured dozens more to end the CNRP’s mass protests against voter fraud at the 2013 election. The protests were meant to delegitimize Hun Sen’s victory and secure a fresh election. But the opposition and world soon folded in exchange for electoral reforms that in 2018 seem meaningless.
The leaders of the CNRP say that they have learned their lessons about trying to work with Hun Sen. They also say that commitments from the U.S. and Europe to pressure Hun Sen have seemed come with a greater sense of urgency now he no longer even pays lip service to democracy.
In the past two months, the U.S. has already blacklisted Hing Bun Heang, the commander of Hun Sen’s bodyguard unit, under its Global Magnitsky Act — forcing U.S. citizens and firms with a U.S. presence such as most foreign banks to freeze his assets and cut commercial ties.
More pressingly, the U.S. and E.U. have also both said they will review Cambodia’s continued eligibility for preferential trade access to their markets, which allows Cambodians to export to their markets without tariffs in exchange for the government’s respect for human rights.
Their two markets together purchased a huge 61.1 percent of Cambodia’s roughly $10 billion in exports in 2016, the most recent year for which breakdowns are available, largely due to the generous tariff exemptions, such as the E.U.’s “Everything But Arms” scheme.
By comparison, China, who Hun Sen has increasingly turned to in order to balance the West, bought only 6% of Cambodia’s exports in 2016 — slightly less than Canada, with its 6.5%.
So the threats have not gone unnoticed.
Only days after Hun Sen in December dared the E.U. to carry out its threats to cut the EBA during a speech to garment workers, a memo sent to him from Commerce Minister Pan Sorasak was leaked, revealing that such a move would cost exporters $676 million in tariffs a year.
It also advised Hun Sen to take the threat seriously and counteract the CNRP’s lobbying efforts. Perhaps betraying his concern on the matter, Hun Sen last month followed the advice and dispatched a small team to Brussels led by the French-educated Sok Siphana, who led the successful talks for Cambodia’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2004.
The CNRP’s leaders have already resigned themselves to the July 29 election taking place without them, but believe the task will then turn to convincing the CPP that the costs of ousting them were far too high.
“Hun Sen’s regime would be out of their mind to go ahead with these sham elections without realizing the [threat posed by] calls for sanctions from the international community,” Monovithya said, insisting the warnings not feigned and sanctions materialize if the CPP did not back down.
“This regime will not survive when it happens,” she said.
Hun Sen Holds the Cards
Still it is unlikely that the government would ever fold so easily.
Ou Virak, a U.S.-educated economist who founded the Future Forum policy think-tank in Phnom Penh in 2015, said that the prime minister would always be hoping smaller concessions, such as the release of Kem Sokha, would once again buy him time until the next election due in 2023.
At a cafe at Phnom Penh’s latest expansive co-working complex (converted from a garment factory near the CNRP’s shuttered headquarters), Virak said releasing Kem Sokha would let the U.S. and E.U. claim their victories in Cambodia without forcing Hun Sen to give up anything serious.
“Hun Sen will always resort back to his old tested and proven tactics of ‘always keep the strings tight — but not too tight,’” he said. “He understands that he will continue to need the West’s support, and in particular their markets, and so there could well be an easing of pressure.”
The threats to the EBA would be significant, Virak said, but the CNRP would still ultimately always be hard-pressed to turn down offers from the prime minister to release their leader after election, “and the deal could be that Kem Sokha must advocate for the EBA not to be removed.”
“A strong new opposition is not on the cards for Hun Sen,” he explained. “It depends on how much control he has in the future but right now he’s a man in full control, so a revival of the CNRP is very unlikely.”
Virak had headed the Cambodian Center for Human Rights from Kem Sokha’s April 2007 departure until December 2013 and has himself been a target of the CPP’s wrath. In April 2016, the CPP even briefly sued him for defamation for questioning on radio the political wisdom of the party’s frenetic campaign over Kem Sokha’s alleged martial infidelity.
It was part of a campaign against CPP critics that left dozens in prison and many others afraid to speak out and peaked with the assassination of popular political commentator Kem Ley in July 2016. Once the election was secure, though, the prime minister might believe he could loosen his grip here.
Two journalists from Radio Free Asia have also been in prison on spurious “espionage” charges since last year’s crackdown, while Tep Vanny, a 38-year-old housing rights activist who met then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2013 has been in prison since August 2016.
In the CPP’s battle for legitimacy, the promise of their immediate release alongside Sokha would be prominent “bargaining chips” to bring to the table in talks with the U.S.
A strong performance from the GDP as an independent party on the ballot on July 29, meanwhile, would likely only help Hun Sen put forward the argument that things are not as bad in Cambodia as some people say, Virak said.
Still the CNRP hopes a low turnout in a country that has historically seen upwards of 90 percent turn out would subvert Hun Sen’s claims Cambodia remains a democracy—the legitimacy of the election itself would then be in question. And they already have some high-profile supporters.
Clean fingers
The GDP was founded in August 2015. A year later, its chief architect, Kem Ley, was assassinated in broad daylight in Phnom Penh on a Sunday morning.
The popular social commentator was on July 10, 2016, shot in the temple and beneath his arm from point-blank range moments after sitting down for a gas-station coffee in a Caltex in central Phnom Penh — a twice-daily ritual.
After her husband’s death, a pregnant Bou Rachana fled with her four young sons to Bangkok, where she gave birth to a fifth son. She was then last year granted a visa to move to Melbourne, Australia, where she now lives and has slowly started to speak out on social media.
Crushingly for Saing Koma and Inn, Rachana has sided with the CNRP.
Two days after the GDP selected Saing Koma as it candidate for prime minister in the July 29 election, Rachana took to Facebook to post a selfie showing a raised forefinger — symbolically unblemished by the ink used to stain fingers to prevent people voting twice — to declare her stance.
The image of the raised finger, which has become an increasingly popular gesture for pro-boycott voices in the face of government threats (named the “Clean Finger” campaign), was widely shared by Cambodians.
Then in an interview with Radio Free Asia a week later, she said she believed her husband too would have boycotted the vote.
“I will absolutely not participate in this mess of an election and what’s more, if my husband still had his life, he too would not be satisfied and he too would not go and join in the election,” Rachana said, calling the ballot a meaningless exercise.
“We are citizens, we have Cambodian blood, and we are the masters of our nation and owners of our ballots,” she said in the interview. “We have the right to decide [who to vote for] according to the desire of our hearts,” she said.
It was a victory for the CNRP, not least because Rachana and her sons attracted intense pity from Cambodians across the political aisle. But it was also a symbolic victory because Kem Ley’s shadow still looms over Cambodia as a memory of a time when things finally seemed to be improving.
For a while, the plain-speaking analyst, who spoke in allegories and rose to prominence in frequent Radio Free Asia interviews after the disputed July 2013 election and amid the months of protests afterwards, had appeared to be deftly carrying out a political balancing act long thought impossible by many.
Unusually for a Cambodian in the political spotlight, he had strived to keep up a reputation of independence between the government and opposition, believing that Cambodia would forever be kept under the thumb of foreign powers if no one stood up to unite its leaders in common cause.
For many who had tired of watching Hun Sen and Sam Rainsy bickering for the past two decades, he was a breath of fresh air. Only a lowly adviser in the Health Ministry shortly before the 2013 election, he quickly built a large following with his readiness to criticize the CPP and CNRP in equal measure.
Differences in the CPP
Kem Ley’s message had seemed to be seeping through to both parties.
On the back of Kem Ley’s advice, the CNRP’s Sokha announced that tycoons who had grown rich under the CPP would not fear reprisals or seizures of their wealth if the CNRP came to power but had to be open to reform.
Perhaps most importantly for the CNRP’s current standoff with Hun Sen, some prominent government leaders who have long lived in the prime minister’s shadow appeared to be listening to Kem Ley’s message too.
Among the slew of reported “moderates” in the CPP, Interior Minister Sar Kheng has most often been pointed to as proof that there remains hopes of change within the ruling party. Notably, it has also often been these officials who the CPP has deployed in its negotiations with the CNRP.
The interior minister has long been Hun Sen’s main rival for power in the CPP, after inheriting a vast patronage network centered on his ministry and in Battambang province in the west from his brother-in-law — the CPP’s late founding president Chea Sim, who died in 2015.
According to Brad Adams, who was a U.N. official in Phnom Penh in the 1990s and is now deputy head of Human Rights Watch for Asia, Kheng and his allies even refused to join in Hun Sen’s ouster of his Funcinpec coalition partner, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, in the 1997 factional fighting.
Most recently, after Kem Sokha escaped Hun Sen’s initial attempts to arrest him in March 2016, a spokesman for Kheng’s ministry even surprised multiple news outlets over a two-day blitz by announcing that police might refuse to carry out any further arrest warrants issued for the opposition leader.
His arrest would cause chaos, he said, and police must prevent chaos. It appeared to be a major opening in the spirit of promoting reconciliation between the parties promoted by Kem Ley, but the reprieve was short lived.
Two months later, with Kem Sokha having still not left his sanctuary in the CNRP building and Hun Sen’s arrest threats ramping up, the premier’s top military ally Kun Kim told the media he could have soldiers make the arrest.
The next day, the Air Force’s Chinese-built helicopters and Navy speedboats circled the CNRP’s riverside headquarters, where the opposition leader had been in hiding from Hun Sen’s threats for months. In front of the building, balaclava-clad soldiers from Hun Sen’s elite personal bodyguard unit clasping rifles repeatedly drove past to hammer home the message.
Tensions were clearly bubbling over: the Interior Ministry might refuse to arrest the opposition leader, the message was, but Hun Sen had the military.
After Kem Sokha was eventually arrested in September 2017, his predecessor as CNRP leader, Sam Rainsy, then told French-Cambodian opposition supporters in Paris (to where he fled in November 2015 to avoid his own arrest ) that Kem Sokha had “been talking” to Sar Kheng’s associates and that the pair were arranging a direct phone call.
The arrest, Rainsy explained to supporters at the December event, had forced Kheng to put his cards on the table before he was ready to and locked him in behind Hun Sen before anything could happen closer to the election. The interior minister has since remained publicly in lock-step behind Hun Sen.
The Hope for Calmer Heads
The CPP itself has long denied that there are any divisions between Hun Sen and Sar Kheng—or between their followers in the party, which remains largely built around personal loyalties.
Often the CPP’s various leaders have differences of opinion, they acknowledge, but all remain loyal party members. Rumors of divisions are just fabrications put forward by the party’s many enemies to foster indivision and make the CPP look weaker, they say.
When Kong Korm (who in the 1980s briefly succeeded Hun Sen as foreign minister but defected to the opposition in 1995) said in a June 2017 speech that Kheng might in fact be a deputy prime minister in a future CNRP government, the interior minister issued an angry statement denying it.
Phay Siphan, a spokesman for Hun Sen’s government, said that there were no divisions in the government about the potential consequences of Hun Sen’s recent crackdown and that the government would never be swayed or divided by the threats to Cambodia’s economic development.
“Whatsoever these countries decide, we prioritize our sovereignty and independence, and we just worry about our peace and stability for economic growth. It’s up to them; they have the right to decide that, but the government has an obligation to maintain peace and stability,” Siphan said.
He said there were 19 other parties, including the GDP, which did not seek to carry out a “color revolution” to overthrow Hun Sen from power with the help of the U.S.. They would be on the ballot on July 29 and people were free to choose those, he said, and Cambodia would always find a way to survive.
“In 1998, we had only 8 parties and now we have 20,” he added, rejecting the notion the CNRP’s past successes suggested that many people would nevertheless be disenfranchised. “Well, right now that 45 percent have the right to vote again and support one of the 20 parties.”
Yet the internal solidarity of the CNRP itself has also been hit with questions over the past year of turmoil and arrests.
Long financed by overseas Cambodians, with Rainsy and Sokha frequently leaving on fund-raising trips to the U.S., Canada, France and Australia over the past five years, the CNRP has also been afflicted by the divisions over whether to boycott the election have been reflected in donations.
Touch Vibol, the North Carolina-based president of the Cambodian-American Alliance, which aims to influence U.S. policy to help Cambodia and was long one of the CNRP’s biggest allies, said that many Cambodian-Americans had grown tired of the CNRP’s repeated strategic errors and inconsistencies.
The emergence of the GDP was a positive, he said, even if it helped legitimate the election results. After all, the presence of the CNRP had done the same.
“Regarding legitimating the unfair election, it is totally Sam Rainsy’s opinion. Contrarily, I feel he owes the public an explanation of his past alignments with Hun Sen and his past participation in the election,” Vibol said, explaining that he had personally shifted his support to the GDP ahead of the July 29 vote.
He pointed to Rainsy’s own “culture of dialogue” with Hun Sen in 2014, when the then-CNRP leader ended protests and encouraged cooperation with Hun Sen on the basis that “even in a monster there can be can a spark of humanity” as evidence of what he said was hubris and a tendency to double standards.
“In my view, the GDP will bring a new and honest culture of dialogue in dealing with the Hun Sen regime. Instead of confronting Hun Sen through an antagonistic attitude, the GDP are instead choosing soft approaches by offering solutions,” he said.
Rainsy did not respond to requests for an interview.
Back to the Future
At the bistro of the French Institute on Phnom Penh’s St. 184 — a reminder of a different troubled time in Cambodia’s political history — Prince Sisowath Thomico said he also acknowledged that the CNRP had committed a slew of strategic errors leading up to its dissolution last year.
A nephew and adopted son of the late King Father Norodom Sihanouk, the architect of Cambodia’s 1953 independence who died in October 2012, Prince Thomico defected to the CNRP from the pro-CPP royalist Funcinpec party in a huge coup for the opposition party months before the July 2013 election.
The prince said that Sokha had given the CNRP a fighting chance to dent Hun Sen’s supreme rule after his February 2017 assumption of the CNRP presidency from Sam Rainsy and could do so again if released from prison.
For better or worse, Rainsy, who was Cambodia’s opposition leader from October 1994 to February 2017, had long been despised as capricious and ultimately untrustworthy by many CPP leaders (including the interior minister), he said. But his successor was different.
“So long as Sam Rainsy was our leader, there was no way the CPP could split and align with the CNRP. But with Rainsy aside, there was a possibility for Sar Kheng and Kem Sokha to discuss, and align,” Prince Thomico said, adding that Kheng nevertheless had “no choice” but to support Sokha’s arrest once Hun Sen’s crackdown had started.
The prince said the CPP would still have its own demons to put to bed after its inevitably large victory July 29. Hun Sen might be eager to use the victory to set in motion a transfer of power to his three sons — Hun Manet, Hun Manith and Hun Many — and that would always cause tension.
Hun Sen’s West Point-educated eldest, Hun Manet, was this month already appointed as the deputy commander of the military alongside a longtime Hun Sen loyalist, while Hun Manith heads the intelligence department in the Defense Ministry. The youngest, Hun Many, is a CPP lawmaker.
But there are also many other faces in the CPP who will be eager for more of the limelight once the election is passed.
“I don’t know whether Hun Sen will draw upon the lessons from the election in 2008. In 2008, the CPP won 90 seats and they had full control over the country, the laws and the Constitution,” the prince said.
“But it was at this time when the CPP began to split because of interests — the group interests, and personal interests, within the CPP,” he said.
“If Hun Sen draws on those lessons, he may be able to unite the CPP again. But he cannot unite it by imposing Hun Manet as the prime minister,” Prince Thomico added, insisting tensions could flare.
“It could happen,” he said, smiling. “Everyone knows Hun Sen and Sar Kheng don’t get along.”
Back at the GDP’s headquarters, Saing Koma said that he acknowledged his small party may be getting itself in over its head by entering such a fraught political environment, which has in the past two years seen the murder of his friend, the forced closure of Cambodia’s second biggest party and the jailing of the opposition leader.
But he said that, above all else, the fledlging party’s aim was just to keep alive the spirit of Kem Ley’s unifying agenda.
“We are just focused on spreading a new political culture and paving the way for a younger generation to participate in politics without fear,” Saing Koma said, putting a positive spin on the situation. “We want to set an example for how you can run the country with a strong parliament and a strong local government.”
“Of course, you have to fight for the seats too,” he added. “But if you don’t get any seats, that’s OK too. We don’t worry.”
