Cambodia's strongman Hun Sen faces rising dissent over human rights as country mourns King Sihanouk

Hun Sen is now the second longest-serving leader in Southeast Asia Photo: AP

As Cambodians watch the funeral ceremony for their former king this weekend, Hun Sen, their strongman prime minister, faces growing questions about his authoritarian rule.

David Eimer, Phnom Penh

The Telegraph (UK)

Across rural Cambodia, an estimated 700,000 Cambodians have been thrown off their farms to make way for the so-called economic land concessions that now cover one tenth of the country.

Once she realised Barack Obama was preparing to visit Phnom Penh, Chray Nhim hit on a novel way to publicise the threat she and her fellow villagers were under of forcible eviction from their homes near the airport in Cambodia's capital.

The day before the US president was due to fly in, last November, the 34-year-old mother and 29 of her friends painted "SOS" on the roofs of their houses and plastered them with pictures of Mr Obama.

"I heard that he was coming and so I thought he could help us find a solution," she said yesterday in the one-room house she is still defiantly occupying along with her nine-year-old daughter.

She built her spartan home in 2011 after buying the land it sits on with the savings from her job selling fruit from a barrow. But in October last year, Mrs Chray and the other residents of the ramshackle Thmorkol Village received a brusque letter telling them to vacate their homes within seven days, because they were to be demolished to expand the nearby airport. No compensation was offered by the local government.

Mr Obama was probably oblivious to Mrs Chray's plea for help. But the media attention her unique scheme generated has ensured that, for now at least, her house is still standing.

She is not alone, though, in facing being turned out of her home and losing everything. Since 1991, more than 10 per cent of Phnom Penh's population - around 150,000 people - have been the victims of forced evictions, according to local campaign groups.

Across rural Cambodia, an estimated 700,000 Cambodians have been thrown off their farms to make way for the so-called economic land concessions that now cover one tenth of the country.

Illegal land grabs are the most emotive and prominent of the rights abuses that multiplied in Cambodia last year, according to a report on Friday by the US-based Human Rights Watch. As the country's strongman prime minister Hun Sen has become increasingly authoritarian and repressive, so the number of land, environmental and labour activists being targeted with violence, intimidation or arrest leapt in 2012.

The 60-year-old Mr Hun has ruled Cambodia for 28 years and has vowed to continue as prime minister until he is 90. He has stayed in power by imprisoning his opponents or forcing them into exile, buying votes and manipulating electoral rolls and is notorious for his unreconstructed attitude towards his political enemies.

"I not only weaken the opposition, I'm going to make them dead," he said in 2011, in response to the Arab Spring uprisings and the idea that anything similar could occur in Cambodia. "And if anyone is strong enough to try and hold a demonstration, I will beat all those dogs and put them in a cage."

But with national elections due in July, Mr Hun and his Cambodian People's Party (CPP) now face unprecedented challenges to their rule.

Despite the ruling party's iron grip on the judiciary, military and media that has helped it hold on to power for three decades, there has been a startling rise in dissent. That has been prompted by the extreme inequality of Cambodian society, where the centre of Phnom Penh is now a flourishing haven of imported cars and new apartment blocks, but a third of all Cambodians still lack access to running water.

Even though the economy is predicted to grow at almost seven per cent this year, spurred by Chinese and Japanese investment, a booming garment industry and rising tourist numbers, only a small elite has grown wealthy during Mr Hun's time in office.

"Cambodian politics has evolved from communism to neo-paternalism," said Lao Mong Hay, a Cambodian political analyst and former professor of Asian studies at Toronto University. "It's collusion between business interests and senior politicians enriching themselves at the expense of the country, and then using those riches to consolidate their power."

Now, though, civil society groups are mushrooming. People like Mrs Chray and her fellow villagers are forming themselves into associations to defend their land, to fight the illegal logging of forests or to campaign for labour rights.

Even Cambodia's beer girls, the young women who patrol bars promoting breweries, have unionised themselves, and are demanding fair pay and to be treated with respect.

That surge in activism is a radical departure for a nation with no history of such organisations. "There have never before been groups agitating for social change in Cambodia. For a government that has been in power for so long, it's a worry. These people are voters and the protests create hesitancy in potential investors," said Naly Pilorge, the director of the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights.

The sense that Cambodia is at a crossroads is being reinforced this weekend, with the elaborate four-day funeral ceremony for the country's former King Sihanouk under way. Despite the king's early support for Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge revolutionaries, whose murderous rule of Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 resulted in the deaths of up to 2.2 million people, Sihanouk, who died of a heart attack in October, is still revered by ordinary Cambodians.

Known as the "King Father" for overseeing a bloodless transition from French colonial rule to independence in 1953, he was crowned in 1941 and ruled Cambodia directly for 17 fondly-remembered years, only abdicating in favour of his son in 2004. In his later years, he was often critical of Hun Sen and his government.

That was not lost on many of the estimated half million people who started lining the streets of central Phnom Penh before dawn on Friday.

They waited patiently for hours in the sun to pay their respects, as Sihanouk's elaborate cortege made its way to the towering funeral pyre near the Royal Palace where he will be cremated tomorrow afternoon.

"I think both young and old will miss the King Father. I prefer the way he ruled to this government. He did many great things for the country, like building schools and hospitals," said Chao Sokhom, a 45-year-old shopkeeper from Phnom Penh.

Along with her compatriots, Mrs Chao sat cross-legged on the pavement, hands clasped together in prayer as the King's golden funeral casket rolled slowly by in a procession of floats decorated with Buddhist symbols and escorted by monks, soldiers and politicians. A 101-gun salute boomed out across the city as the late monarch reached his final destination.

Most worrying for Hun Sen, now the second longest-serving leader in Southeast Asia, is that he is increasingly identified as the cause of the land grabs in which farmers are replaced by factories and vast sugar plantations owned by cronies of the ruling party.

Mrs Chray had no doubts about his culpability in her battle to keep her house near Phnom Penh's airport. "I blame Hun Sen the most. He is responsible for caring for the people. He shouldn't be allowing local authorities to take ordinary citizens land," she said.

Such defiance would have been unthinkable even two years ago. A former Khmer Rouge commander who lost his left eye in battle, MR HUN was part of a faction who split from the leadership of Pol Pot and went into exile in Vietnam. He returned after the Vietnamese army invaded the country in 1979 to end the genocidal regime - and he is used to being obeyed.

Mu Sochua, one of only two women ministers in Mr Hun's government between 1998 and 2004 before joining the opposition Sam Rainsy Party, said: "We used to have meetings every Friday, but they weren't cabinet meetings; they were 'Listen to the PM' meetings. How can you discuss policy with a man who is so powerful? Ministers were scared of him. You had to please the big boss." Thin-skinned to the point where he has been known to lie about his golf handicap, and self-conscious of his peasant roots, but ruthless enough to disown his adopted daughter when she came out as a lesbian in 2007, Mr Hun has been brutal in his targeting of the opposition.

Those who highlight the corrupt nature of the CPP's rule face being imprisoned on trumped-up charges, or forced into exile. Sam Rainsy, the leader of the Sam Rainsy Party and Mr Hun's most visible opponent, fled to Paris in 2011 to avoid prison. Activists and journalists receive death threats, or worse. In April 2012, Cambodia's best-known environmental campaigner, Chut Wutty, was shot dead after encountering a group of soldiers and police while investigating illegal logging.

"The challenge here is the culture of fear which is a legacy of the Khmer Rouge, and that is something manipulated by the ruling party," said Mu Sochua.

The party, too, controls the electoral process. "The village chiefs, the commune chiefs, the polling station officials are overwhelmingly CPP people. They manipulate the voter lists; there are more than one million 'ghost' voters," said Mrs Mu. "We have no access to the media, there's no level playing field. If there was a free and fair election in July, we would win."

In an effort to combat the CPP, the Sam Rainsy Party has joined forces with the other main opposition party to contest the July elections as the National Rescue Party. Despite the constraints on them, Mrs Mu expects them to make gains. And while the government is considering introducing a new law designed drastically to restrict the activities of grassroots groups like Mrs Chray's, it may be too late for Hun Sen to stop the growing dissatisfaction with his rule.