Democracy takes backseat 10 years after Cambodia coup

Friday, July 06, 2007
Seth Meixner
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

"We've become more autocratic, to say the least, if not a dictatorship" - Dr Lao Mong Hay

The anniversary Thursday of Cambodia's worst political upheaval in a decade - the bloody ouster of one prime minister by another - went by unnoticed on the streets of the capital Phnom Penh.

"Nothing's changed since then," said mototaxi driver Ou Dara, pondering the events of the past 10 years. "The government doesn't know the real needs of the people."

While Cambodia's profile has risen abroad and double-digit economic growth generates unprecedented wealth for some at home, the clashes in July 1997 ultimately doomed the dream of multi-party democracy in the battered country, observers said.

After three days of fighting that erupted on July 5, Prime Minister Hun Sen deposed his political partner and rival Prince Norodom Ranariddh.

Scores were killed, while royalists loyal to Ranariddh were hunted down, tortured and executed - their decomposing bodies unearthed in the following weeks by rights workers. Hun Sen's troops looted the city.

The coup also killed one of the great hopes of the UN's massive 1991-1993 intervention to promote plurality in Cambodia: a power-sharing agreement that appointed both Ranariddh and Hun Sen as co-prime ministers after disputed national polls in 1993.

It gave Hun Sen - a former Khmer Rouge guerrilla who emerged from the genocide of the late 1970s as the country's most accomplished political street- fighter - sole power to shape the country to his liking. Under his increasingly hardline rule, Cambodia's political elite have turned one of the world's most expensive experiments in democratization into their own feudal playground, observers said.

"There is a cult of personality embodied by our prime minister," said Lao Mong Hay, a Cambodian analyst with the Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission.

"We've become more autocratic, to say the least, if not a dictatorship."

Billions of dollars in aid and the prodding of international donors have done little to push Hun Sen's Cambodia toward democracy, he said.

In fact, the relative peace of the past decade has had the opposite effect, allowing the prime minister and his ruling Cambodian People's Party to largely consolidate their power and wealthunopposed in the name of stability.

Some diplomats argue that Cambodia's working, multi-party legislature and regular elections are evidence that democracy has taken greater hold since the 1997 coup.

"The fundamentals of democracy are still there. You have a parliament, you have a government and you have elections," said one diplomatic official.

"Look at Cambodia's economic growth figures."

The economy is perhaps Hun Sen's biggest achievement since assuming total control over Cambodia. Double- digit growth has brought Cambodia back from the brink of failure, offering greater global exposure, jobs at home and giving rise to a middle class.

But prosperity does not go hand in hand with good governance, said Thun Saray, director of the Cambodian civil society group Adhoc.

"There is a tendency in some countries around the region - China and Singapore especially - to think that economic development without democracy does work," he said.

"That is the model that has inspired our leaders. They like that idea, but does it work for Cambodia? Economic development gives only material satisfaction, but justice is still not for the weak or poor."