PHNOM PENH — Cambodia’s beleaguered opposition leader Sam Rainsy faces fresh legal troubles after a court summoned him for questioning on possible charges of being an accomplice to “forgery and incitement.” But Rainsy, who is currently in Manila, welcomed the charges, saying that “clownesque” efforts by the Hun Sen regime to persecute him only added momentum to his fight for justice.
According to a Phnom Penh Municipal Court summons issued on Friday, the charges relate to a post made to his public Facebook page by a third party.
Ruling party officials say the third party was Hong Sok Hour, an opposition senator arrested in August on the orders of the country’s long-serving leader, Prime Minister Hun Sen. Sok Hour has been charged with forgery and incitement after posting on Rainsy’s Facebook page a video containing inaccurate version of a 1979 border treaty with Vietnam.
“Senator Hong Sok Hour, he posted false documents on this account,” said Phay Siphan, a spokesman for the Council of Ministers, as Cambodia’s cabinet is known. As the owner of the page, he said Rainsy could be liable for Sok Hour’s posts, but added that formal charges have yet to be filed. Rainsy has been summoned to appear on Dec. 4.
In later remarks, at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations meeting in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday night, Phay Siphan told the NAR that the charges against Rainsy are “a matter for the courts not the government.” He refused to comment on whether the Cambodian government would raise Rainsy’s presence in Manila with the Philippine government, either at the ASEAN meeting or later.
Spiralling tensions
The summons is just the latest shot fired in a brewing political stand-off pitting Rainsy directly against Hun Sen, who has ruled Cambodia for more than three decades through what is widely seen as a combination of belligerent realpolitik and subtle manipulation.
It comes at the end of a week in which Rainsy, president of the main opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party, was effectively stranded overseas after the courts ordered his arrest on an old defamation conviction carrying a two-year jail term. While Rainsy vowed to return to Cambodia on Nov. 16 to face arrest, he postponed his return at the last minute, citing fears of violence.
The defamation case referred to comments from 2008, in which Rainsy accused Foreign Minister Hor Namhong, a senior member of Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party, of collaborating with his captors at a Khmer Rouge prison camp in the late 1970s.
In remarks to Cambodian media, Rainsy welcomed the new possible charges, which carry a maximum combined penalty of 17 years in prison. “It may seem paradoxical but it’s good news for me; the more clownesque the CPP-controlled court becomes the stronger the support I get to find justice for all the victims of the recent political repression in Cambodia,” said Rainsy, who is currently in Manila with other members of his party.
Even so, the legal charges raise the prospect of another prolonged absence from the country for Rainsy, who has spent nearly half the past decade in self-imposed exile during Hun Sen’s various crackdowns.
The most recent spell of exile began in late 2009, after Rainsy in a provocative move uprooted temporary demarcation posts along the Vietnamese border, and lasted until Hun Sen – in a move to improve his image — engineered a royal pardon allowing Rainsy to return to Cambodia shortly before national elections in July 2013.
Same old tune
Kem Ley, head of Khmer for Khmer, a political advocacy group, said the latest ruling party crackdown on dissent was simply “the same song” repeating in a different key. “The CPP has no new strategy to get popular support,” he said. “They know only one way — to crack down on the CNRP.”
The crisis also marks a final breakdown in the so-called “culture of dialogue” — a political truce which was brokered by the two leaders in mid-2014 in a bid to end the bitter recriminations that followed the disputed 2013 national election. The pact reached its zenith in July, when Hun Sen and Rainsy dined together with their families at a Phnom Penh hotel, posting pictures of the event on Facebook.
Since then it has all been downhill. After the arrest of Senator Hong Sok Hour in mid-August, Hun Sen gave a string of barnstorming speeches in which he compared Rainsy to Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot and warned several times of civil war if the CNRP ever came to power.
On Oct. 26, CNRP parliamentarians Kong Sophea and Nhay Chamroeun were dragged from their cars and beaten in the street by thugs after a National Assembly session. CPP lawmakers then voted to remove CNRP vice president Kem Sokha from his post as deputy president of the National Assembly.
The last straw seemingly came when Rainsy began comparing himself with Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, following her National League for Democracy party’s landslide win in the country’s historic election on Nov. 8.
He posted on Facebook old photos of himself with Suu Kyi, and juxtaposed images of the 1988 student protests in Myanmar, put down with bloody force by the country’s military, with pictures of recent CNRP rallies. “The wind of freedom that is blowing throughout the world will also reach Cambodia in the very near future,” he wrote.
Eye on the elections
Local analysts say Hun Sen is maneuvering with an eye on crucial local elections in 2017 and national polls the following year. The CNRP is expected to poll well in both after a strong showing at the last election in 2013, when the CPP saw its parliamentary majority slashed from 90 seats in the 123-seat National Assembly to just 68.
The CNRP, created from a merger of the Sam Rainsy Party and Kem Sokha’s Human Rights Party in 2012, cleverly tapped into a reservoir of discontent relating to land grabs, corruption, mismanagement, and a general lack of opportunity for many Cambodians, despite two decades of strong economic growth.
In a bid to rebuild popular support, Hun Sen has attempted to introduce reforms and rein in big business. In October, he canceled a deal giving ticketing rights for the famous Angkor temples in western Cambodia to Sokimex, a local conglomerate, a move that has been strongly criticized by the opposition. At the same time, the CPP has fallen back on the sorts of violent political tactics that have served it well over the past two decades.
“He is much too concerned about political competition,” Koul Panha, executive director of the election monitoring group Comfrel, said of Hun Sen. “The opposition has the right and the duty to criticize the ruling party.”
U.S. concerns
On Nov. 19, a U.S. State Department official told a Senate subcommittee that Washington was “very concerned” that the current political situation would affect the legitimacy of the upcoming elections. “Recent events…including beatings, arrests, imprisonment of opposition supporters, and the removal of opposition MPs, have severely limited political space and are a cause for grave concern,” said Scott Busby, deputy assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor.
While political deals and amnesties have ended Rainsy’s previous bouts of exile, ruling party officials have suggested that this time might be permanent. CPP spokesman Suos Yara said Friday that Rainsy has only one choice: to face the law. “He has to come and serve his sentence,” he said. “Sam Rainsy is a leader of an opposition party, but as an individual person he needs to be responsible.”
During a state visit to Paris last month, Hun Sen foreshadowed possible legal trouble for Rainsy over his Facebook page, warning that a pardon could be out of the question. “The page’s owner is Rainsy, so it can be involved with that guy,” the prime minister said in a speech to Cambodians living in Paris. “This time, I will not pardon him because I have granted him a pardon two times already.”
Koul Panha, executive director of the election monitoring group Comfrel, said he expected political negotiations would eventually allow Rainsy’s return. But the crackdown had taken a political toll on Rainsy, he said, citing the CNRP leader’s decision not to return and face arrest, which after comparing himself to Suu Kyi and promising to “sacrifice his life” for his country, had disappointed many CNRP supporters.
For the past two decades, Sam Rainsy has built a career out of trying to convince others, and perhaps himself, that his victory over Hun Sen was merely a matter of time — that the “wind of freedom” was blowing in his own direction.
Hun Sen, on the other hand, has shown little hesitation in forcing reality, often violently, to conform to his own wishes. The Cambodian people clearly want a change from the current government, which has ruled Cambodia for more than a generation — but Rainsy’s long-sought victory, if it comes, will have to be fought for.
Published by the Nikkei Asian Review, November 21, 2015.
