The Life and Death of a Tyrant

Saturday, May 29, 2010
Op-Ed by MP

SOME posters in this forum appear to associate the eventual political retirement of Mr Hun Sen either through death or old age with the demise of his regime. In fact, as I am about to suggest, although he bears certain responsibility for the regime in question, this regime is neither his, nor is it the case that he is necessarily that regime in embodiment. This might seem obvious, but for the sake of public discussion and clarity, one should not assume that the departure of Mr Hun Sen will spell the end of ‘his’ regime for a number of reasons.

First, individuals may differ in terms of personal style and 'leadership' approach, but the revolving door of a leadership change is a poor indicator of the actual well being and influence of that regime itself. The regime to which we refer composes of a whole network or layer of ruling organs and institutions that operate in affiliation towards a single common aim in which individuals can be said to exercise only power and influence deemed not to be in conflict with the stability and preservation of that regime as such. Several individuals before and during Mr Hun Sen’s rule were placed in prominent positions and hastily removed afterward from those positions (see Pen Sovan among others) to make way for more compliant replacements.

Mr Hun Sen may be the country's longest serving 'PM', but this is less indicative of sound statesmanship than it is of his unabashed opportunism and unconditional subservience to his political patron's will and agenda over his own people and nation. His apologists will point to his long reign as evidence of his smart manoeuvrings in a political jungle - and they are right in the narrowest of self-preservation sense - but from the point of view of national self-determination, it is nothing less than a tragedy.

Hanoi may not be entirely happy with someone it initially endorsed as an ‘experiment’, but in Mr Hun Sen it has found an able administrator; a proficient implementer of whatever it placed before him. More than that, his ruthlessness had on so many occasions, crippled his political rivals and opponents, while his Machiavellian tendency would have made Machiavelli himself turn in his grave, yet none of these attributes has given his masters real cause for concern for in him they have a protégé that more than exceeds in deeds their general expectations of him by means of those very attributes which even they would have found – privately, at least – distasteful.

Second, it is necessary to bear in mind that Hanoi does not operate by drawing on hastily hatched contingency plans, but rather, the preference has been to devise and incubate practical stratagems years and decades before foreseen events could take forms. Like good astrologers, Hanoi's source and inspiration lie more in its ability to divine causality of events and anticipate their likely occurrences on the basis of certain common patterns or denominators in human behaviour and past practices rather than relying on theoretical, uncorroborated guesswork. Ho Chi Minh died before his dreams of Vietnam's political independence and re-unification were realised, but these events were a certainty in his mind long before his death.

As someone rightly pointed out in this forum, Mr Hun Sen's grim social legacy will outlive his death, but even that, in my view, constitutes only Cambodia's subsidiary burden. The greatest challenge that remains to be met is how to dislodge Hanoi's institutional apparatus in all walks of Khmer life.

The Vietnamese leaders are aware of what might happen should the Khmers rise up in revolt, as they had done in the past. For Hanoi, the stake has been raised a great deal more with the presence of Vietnamese settlers in the country, hence the practical precautions it has now put in place to subdue and pre-empt potential popular unrests. However, while the Khmers may be a tolerant people, they are also a proud race, and living in perpetual subjugation is not something any people seek.

Ethnic or racial harmony mediated through social integration mechanisms is not a given a priori, especially, where certain ethnic groups are favoured and endorsed with opportunities and privileges while other groups are neglected or abused. The best that Hanoi could hope for is what they have achieved over the Chams, the Montagnards and the Khmers in Kampuchea Krom through a combination of violence, ethnic genocide, interbreeding, and extirpation of indigenous entities. The centuries-long emasculation of these peoples' voices would have gone entirely unnoticed by the rest of the world had it not been for the advent in global technology and communication in the post-modern era.

Ethnic integration or assimilation is a phenomenon far better mediated through civil, democratic channels where citizens stand together as equals before the law irrespective of their ethnic status or backgrounds. State institutions have a part to play in ensuring that all citizens enjoy the same entitlements to rights and duties, but no state or party organ should be in a position to marginalise and discriminate against any legal subjects along nationality lines in obeisance to, or compliance with, the will and imposed agenda of another state – as the present regime has been doing to the detriment of Cambodia’s national interests.

The Vietnamese leadership has calculated (perhaps, accurately) that the Cambodian nation would not be set free to determine its own destiny without adversely impeding on Vietnamese imperial influences and advantages in vital areas. In the past, Vietnam’s sense of security and her own territorial expansion necessitated the incorporation of smaller neighbours into her manageable domain as they provided Vietnam with geographical and strategic buffers against hostile powers. But what of today’s continued domination over the same states? And at what cost to Khmer nationhood as such? I’ll leave these questions for readers to ponder on.

MP