The Trouble With Tyranny

Suong Sophorn, a housing activist, can be seen held by his hair by
Hun Xen's violent cops. He was later beaten up some more (Licadho Video)

Sunday, October 31, 2010
Op-Ed by MP

Such violent seizures of communal and private assets - as seen in a video clip posted in this forum of late – are not the symptoms of collective ills, but rather a tragic manifestation of a society held in hostage by a band of sophisticated and politically well organised thugs.

BACK in the days when Ieng Sary's KR faction was still in control of the Pailin region and Hun Sen was trying to entice him over to his side, it was reported that Hun Sen assured Ieng Sary and his son in a negotiation that there was much he and them had in common, since in his words: "We are Red Khmers like you!” Ieng Sary himself was subsequently granted royal pardon over his involvement during the KR regime, and no one would blame him now if he feels let down since by being made to stand trial for mass murders.

In fact, peace or 'national reconciliation' was not uppermost in Hun Sen's mind at the time, nor, it can be argued, is it the case today when he still finds it to his advantage to exploit the ghosts of the KR and the country's prolonged armed conflict of recent past to scare off domestic and international opinions. In order to make this reconciliation with Ieng Sary more congenial to such opinions, some contemporary writers and observers even went so far as to float the farfetched notion of a 'moderate' Ieng Sary, who like other prominent figures within Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea, had either to follow Pol Pot's ideological madness or perish, and whose leadership of what remained then of KR forces could then be incorporated into the Phnom Penh regime's unified political-military structure. However, it is as well to note that it was not for nothing that Pol Pot and Ieng Sary chose to cement their political alliance through their being married to Khieu Ponnary and Ieng Thirith (who were siblings) respectively since their stay in Paris decades before they came to power; an arrangement, moreover, not uncommon within the circle of the country's economic-political elite, as testified by the intricately formed family tree(s) of the current CPP leadership which sees most of the powerful elements welded together through their children’s marriages as well as other manners of reciprocating nepotism that also bind those not directly tied to this extended Family through blood.

What prompted Hun Sen to make peace with his erstwhile foes like Ieng Sary and Sihanouk was not out of character of someone who has been exposed to a combination of ideological currents and influences sweeping across the developing world in the 1960s and 1970s, including Maoist guerrilla tactics, Vietnamese revolutionary experience, as well as, most enduringly, Stalinist machinations and expedience in face of political rivalries and intrigues. By depriving the former anti-Vietnamese resistance of its most potent military component in the KR, Hun Sen had sought to isolate and weaken the other non-communist forces within that alliance, rendering the Paris Peace Accords a mere ceremonious affair, reducing it in effect to the status of diplomatic and theoretical formality or impotence.

Deprived of any tangible military prowess that can be used as bargaining leverage, these non-communist elements have been reduced to peripheral figures on the nation's political stage, and in this fashion they were indeed in the early 1990s sleep walking naked on their way to reclaim the political throne. By the close of 1997, their collective challenge to the Hanoi-backed CPP regime was over - Prince Norodom Sereivuth (an ally of Mr Sam Rainsy) narrowly saved from certain death for his ill-timed and unwitting remark about personally killing Hun Sen to resolve Cambodia’s problems; Ho Sok was murdered in captivity; another Prince with a rich history of recklessness (Norodom Chakrapong) was found hiding in the cellar of a building out of fear for his dear life; Norodom Rannarith – a politics ‘professor’ back in France - was more than half buried in his political grave; scores of innocent civilians were mercilessly cut to pieces by the blasts of hand grenades outside the symbolic National Assembly; general Nhiek Bun Chhay lost substantial weight, becoming unusually lean after having been made to dodge bullets and evade his pursuers from Tang Krasang outside the capital all the way to O’Smach by the Khmer-Thai border.

Justifying his brutal tactics, Hun Sen pointed to the possibility of the return of the Khmer Rouge to the capital, by way of infiltration, through Funcinpec’s military setup on the outskirt of Phnom Penh and hence to the need to protect ‘my people’ by pre-empting such a sinister scenario before it could assume form. Yet, none of the remains of military officers later exhumed from shallow graves, having been shot in the heads, or the foot soldiers killed or wounded, in the course of the violent coup that year, were in fact, KR or had concrete direct KR links.

It is time the international community and the Khmer people stopped playing into Hanoi’s and Hun Sen’s hands by falling prey to their specious outcries about the sanctity of, or regard for, Cambodia’s internal affairs; about the ghosts of the past which they themselves – who else ? - had a role in bringing to life in order to wreak havoc upon the nation and to terrorise its population, and in so doing, reducing the country to the state of perpetual bewilderment and uncertainty, making it ever dependent upon, and vulnerable to, external influence and pressure; about the need for ‘stability’ that still fails to see the country improving its status among the most rotten, corruption driven nations in the world; a country that still witnesses the transfer of economic and natural resources from the poor to the rich and powerful at alarming rate, resulting in mass evictions on a daily basis throughout the Kingdom, where ‘development’ has seen only grotesque, mammoth-size mansions built to reflect and glorify the elite’s colossal vanity and provincial tastes, and where the supposedly democratically elected Prime Minister positions himself in a constant state of war by surrounding his person with an army of ‘body guards’ on such intimidating and formidable a scale that it would have been an envy of many a Roman Emperor of another era when rulers feared their own subjects and senators in their midst more than they did their distant off-shores enemies. One cannot but wonders as to how many other world statesmen of bona fide democratic credentials can afford or be privileged with such ostentatious personal protection? And is it constitutional, in any event?

With former resistance commanders like Y Chhean and Nhiek Bun Chhay already content to play subservient roles, Ta Mok long since dead, and Rannarith consigned to his royal tomb, replete with the company of his loyal female entourage and tons of worldly treasures befitting the political afterlife of a Norodom, where else might the challenge to Hun Sen’s leadership be coming from? What would the end of his autocratic military regime mean for the country and the people? Who would have the most to lose were this current regime to fall, and not just the end of one man’s senseless, insolent clinging to power, for it is highly unlikely that Hanoi would not attempt to savage or maintain its long term stake in the country, bar a general nationwide campaign of riots and disobedience vis-à-vis Vietnamese backed authorities, in conjunction with the active support of the world community, maybe?

As I mentioned elsewhere in the 1990s, Mr Hun Sen is not constituted in temperament or habit to ply his trade or to stake his political and personal fortune within the avenue of democratic pluralism and the rule of law, with an active, flourishing civil society and civil liberty as their sacrosanct principles, to which national reconciliation and rebuilding must be orientated. The flirting experiment with democracy in 1993 resulting in Funcinpec’s electoral victory as it did, without translating, nevertheless, that outcome into unqualified catastrophe or debacle for the CPP in general, and Hun Sen, in particular, (as the latter still held all the cards, including the command over between 70-80 per cent of the country’s armed forces, and since many leading Funcinpec figures had been no less disposed to accepting bribes and to personal advancement, and therefore, no less prepared to subordinate national interests to these narrow goals than had been their CPP counterparts) was his most daring gamble and venture before democratic opinion.

Yet, in view of the regime’s status of being an artificial creation of a neighbouring power, installed in a hurry through an illegal invasion as well as the diplomatic censure or slight of that regime by the UN and the world body at large, or the lack of their approval and recognition craved by the regime itself, the 1993 election, had it delivered the opposite outcome, would have given the CPP and its Vietnamese sponsors further encouragement and a major moral, propaganda victory; a vindication of their otherwise self-serving ambitions and expansionistic intentions over a small nation with a long unhappy history of being pushed over by its neighbours.

Conversely, the overall incessant, pervasive trend in the erosion of civil and political liberties of varying degrees through a series of random attacks upon, and castrations of, political rivals and the ranks of marginalised, downtrodden citizens, in an effort to curtail, or place the lid upon, democratic opposition and movement, is the clearest indication we have of this tyrant’s determination to put the humiliation of 1993 behind him, and by extension, to deny the Khmer people their deserved place among the civilised world.

In light of the raw violence applied against unarmed civilians in brutal enforcement of social policies such as land grabs and evictions, involving the transfer in land ownership or assets from the public and ordinary citizens to make way for commercial profit-making and to gratify powerful foreign interests such as Vietnam and China even in clear contravention of specific constitutional provisions on these vital aspects of national sovereignty and integrity, a distinction must be drawn, on the one hand, when making allowance for a post-war, post genocide society afflicted with acute moral, social handicaps that can be described legitimately as belonging within the public domain, and the drift in tendency and practice on the part of a minority of mafia – like political syndicate, on the other. Such violent seizures of communal and private assets - as seen in a video clip posted in this forum of late – are not the symptoms of collective ills, but rather a tragic manifestation of a society held in hostage by a band of sophisticated and politically well organised thugs.

There is a difference.