Cambodia’s Terrorism Trump

Cambodian soldiers donning US military gears during the forced eviction in Proma village, Kratie province (Photo: The Phnom Penh Post)

April 4, 2013
By JULIA WALLACE
The Cambodia Daily

"Alleged terrorist plots, each more improbable than the last, emerge every few years in Cambodia."

PHNOM PENH — Cambodian terrorists materialize in the unlikeliest of places: sparsely populated jungles and tiny farming villages, human rights NGOs and opposition political parties.

Two weeks ago the Cambodian National Police triumphantly announced they had unmasked a group of terrorists in a suburb of Bangkok: six men, including three Buddhist monks, from the Khmer Krom ethnic minority who had fled to Thailand seeking political asylum. They were brought back to Cambodia under mysterious circumstances and immediately thrown in jail.

They belong to the Khmer National Liberation Front, an obscure, quixotic opposition group founded by a Cambodian refugee in Denmark that objects to the policies and practices of Prime Minister Hun Sen. The Cambodian police claim the men were plotting a violent uprising against the government. Phil Robertson, the deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, says they are a very minor group of peaceful dissidents.

“I suspect that the Cambodian government may have wanted some scapegoats to raise national security alarms in advance of the July elections,” Robertson told me this week from Bangkok.

It wouldn’t be the first time. Alleged terrorist plots, each more improbable than the last, emerge every few years in Cambodia, often conveniently involving pamphleteers, minorities and members of the opposition. It seems that Hun Sen, ever eager to cast himself as the only viable force for stability in a country that was mired in civil war for decades, is following the successful autocrat’s basic rule: If your political opponents don’t seem dangerous enough, conjure up some more frightening ones.

In 2007 it was the Empire Movement, which the authorities accused of forming an insurgent army in an isolated part of central Cambodia and planning to take over parts of Thailand and Vietnam. It turned out that the movement’s members — several of whom were Muslims belonging to local opposition parties — fell for a convoluted case of entrapment and joined the supposed guerrilla group thinking it was an NGO that built toilets and wells.

In 2009 it was the Tiger Head Movement, a half-dozen armed bandits in the remote northeastern province of Mondulkiri. They were accused of conspiring to plant small bombs at a monument in Phnom Penh commemorating Vietnamese-Cambodian friendship. And their alleged ringleader, a member of a formerly powerful opposition party, was sentenced to a total of 46 years in prison.

The human rights activist Pen Bonnar, who has worked with indigenous communities in the far northeast for over a decade, was forced to flee to Phnom Penh in 2009 after a local judge threatened to prosecute him for terrorist activities — for his work organizing land-rights protests. A member of Parliament from the Sam Rainsy Party, a leading opposition group, was jailed for a year on charges that he had formed an armed rebel band because he had tried to create a group to monitor the Defense Ministry. Other low-level officials from the party have also been accused on dubious claims.

The list goes on and on. And when it’s not “terrorism” the government slaps dissidents with, it’s charges like “forming an illegal armed force” and “secessionism.”

Meanwhile, despite no evidence that any serious terrorism has taken root in Cambodia, among Muslims or any other group, the U.S. government has increased cooperation with Hun Sen on counterterrorism.

Washington has provided high-tech processing technology for Cambodia’s international airports, a $6 million nuclear-radiation detector for its main port and substantial support for the National Counter-Terrorism Committee — which is chaired by Hun Sen and recently moved into a new $1.6 million office in Phnom Penh. The committee’s elite military arm, the National Counter-Terrorism Special Force, is trained by the U.S. Special Forces and headed by Hun Sen’s 35-year-old son, Hun Manet, already a two-star general.

It’s far from clear whether Washington’s resources are being used as intended. Last year, residents of Broma, a tiny cassava-farming village in central Cambodia, who were trying to resist eviction by a Russian agribusiness firm were confronted by military forces, who accidentally shot dead a 14-year-old girl. To justify its use of force, the government claimed the villagers were involved in a “secessionist plot” and then jailed several of the most vocal anti-eviction activists. Photos subsequently emerged of the Cambodian soldiers during the crackdown. They were wearing U.S. army-issued gear.

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Julia Wallace is managing editor of The Cambodia Daily.