In Cambodia, Shifting Allegiances Shape a Tougher Than Usual Election

Gilles Sabrie for the International Herald Tribune

A poster of Prime Minister Hun Sen in Anlong Veng. More Photos »

By THOMAS FULLER | New York Times | 25 July 2013

ANLONG VENG, Cambodia — A decade and a half after the last remnants of the Khmer Rouge capitulated in this northwestern town, the streets are festooned with images of their erstwhile enemy, Prime Minister Hun Sen, who is seeking to prolong his 28 years in power in an election on Sunday. 

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A New Choice for Cambodian Voters

The New York Times

The Khmer Rouge held out in Anlong Veng until the 1990s. More Photos »

 

In one of the many shifting allegiances of post-genocide Cambodia, former Khmer Rouge soldiers proclaim loyalty to Mr. Hun Sen, who drove them from power in 1979 alongside invading Vietnamese forces, ending their murderous attempt to build a peasant utopia. 

After retreating here and fighting Mr. Hun Sen well into the 1990s, Khmer Rouge veterans today credit the prime minister with orchestrating peace, building roads and schools, and helping turn Anlong Veng, once shrouded in jungle and studded with land mines, into a moderately prosperous town. This last stronghold of the Khmer Rouge now has 3G Internet access. 

“It’s like sports — you should join the winning team,” said Nhem En, a former official photographer for the Khmer Rouge who took the haunting and now notorious images of prisoners before they were executed at the infamous Tuol Sleng prison. 

Kong Sing, a former Khmer Rouge medic who lost an eye during the more than two decades of fighting, now works as a veterinarian and lives comfortably in a two-story wooden house. “Of course, it’s strange that we used to be their enemy and now we support them,” he said. “But what should we do? We have had enough of war.” 

Yet despite Mr. Hun Sen’s ability to overcome the resistance of even his toughest enemies, he is finding new challenges from other quarters of Cambodian society in the fifth parliamentary election since 1993, when multiparty democracy was restored. Younger, more restless voters, many of whom were born after the Khmer Rouge scourge, take peace for granted. And voters in the increasingly modern capital, Phnom Penh, are tiring of what is effectively one-party rule. 

As a result, Mr. Hun Sen — who maintains a difficult-to-defeat political machine — faces what analysts describe as a formidable contest, tougher than the governing party is accustomed to and one that features starkly competing political priorities. 

His Cambodian People’s Party is underlining the achievements of the past three decades, including economic growth that hovers around 7 percent. The opposition is focusing instead on issues that preoccupy many Cambodians today: growing corruption and an uneven distribution of wealth in a country where the richest (and often politically connected) drive luxury cars and own villas while their countrymen struggle on amid grinding poverty. 

Opposition leaders are also highlighting the authoritarian ways of Mr. Hun Sen’s government, which keeps tight reins on most news media outlets and closes down organizations viewed as antigovernment. 

It is a paradox of modern Cambodian politics that the end of chaos and widespread starvation is freeing some Cambodians to become more critical. “People are not only thinking with their stomachs anymore,” said Lao Mong Hay, a professor of law and economics. “They are thinking with their hearts, too.” 

The rallying cry of the young opposition supporters in Phnom Penh is “change.” They campaign throughout the city on motorcycles, emblems of greater mobility and incomes than their parents knew. 

The opposition was galvanized by the return last Friday of Sam Rainsy, a former finance minister who fled Cambodia in 2009 rather than face charges in a highly politicized trial. Mr. Sam Rainsy, who was greeted by tens of thousands of supporters at the Phnom Penh airport, was pardoned by Mr. Hun Sen under pressure from the United States and other governments that provide aid to the country. 

But the National Election Committee has ruled that Mr. Sam Rainsy missed the deadline to put his name on the ballot. He says he will contest his exclusion, raising the possibility of a disputed election and clashes between government supporters and those from his Cambodian National Rescue Party. 

In a country without a tradition of reliable opinion polls, the election’s outcome is difficult to predict. Analysts say, however, that Mr. Hun Sen has a great advantage in his tight control of the news media, the patronage machine he has built up over the years for the Cambodian People’s Party and the ability to use the party’s wealth to mobilize support. The party currently controls the overwhelming majority of the lower house, whose seats are up in the election and whose chairman names the prime minister. 

Sok Touch, the rector of Khemarak University in Phnom Penh, said government officials had been telling voters that a vote for the opposition would mean being cut off from government largess. “Cambodia is still very poor,” he said. “But the C.P.P. is getting richer and richer, and it can buy people.” 

Across the country, employees of companies with close links to the government are often treated as foot soldiers of the party. That tendency was on display recently at a newly constructed casino here in Anlong Veng that is owned by a businessman with close ties to Mr. Hun Sen. 

Croupiers, mostly young women in yellow vests and bow ties, had been summoned to the casino’s cafeteria, where a man seated at a table showed them a sample ballot. “There are eight political parties, and the C.P.P. is No. 4,” he said. “If you love the C.P.P., tick No. 4.” 

The past mixes awkwardly with the present in Anlong Veng. Mr. Nhem En, the former photographer for the Communist Khmer Rouge, runs a massage parlor where masseuses wear high heels and heavy makeup. He is also deputy governor of the district. Ten minutes from the center of town, across the street from the casino, visitors can pay $2 to see a pile of ashes in an unkempt vacant lot, the spot where the body of the Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, was cremated in 1998. 

Old Khmer Rouge soldiers, many with visible war wounds, now run small businesses or till the rice and cassava fields. At night, officials from the ruling party project campaign videos on large portable screens, extolling its achievements. 

The opposition is barely visible here, as is the case in many other remote areas. A former Khmer Rouge platoon commander, Teng Sakun, who lost his left foot to a land mine, said he knew nothing about the opposition because he had never seen it represented on television. The Khmer-language news media report little about Mr. Hun Sen’s challengers. 

Mr. Teng Sakun said he could trust Mr. Hun Sen because of the prime minister’s peasant background. (Mr. Hun Sen was himself a Khmer Rouge cadre before joining the Vietnamese forces to overthrow the movement.) 

After decades of turmoil, during which he lived in thatch huts in the jungle, Mr. Teng Sakun now has a grocery shop in Anlong Veng and drives a Toyota Camry. 

That type of trajectory may be one reason that in the last election, in 2008, Mr. Hun Sen’s party won comfortable majorities in all five of the western provinces with strong concentrations of former Khmer Rouge soldiers. 

Elsewhere, the country also seems ready to put the past to rest. Although only a handful of Khmer Rouge leaders have been brought to trial for the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979, the lack of prosecutions is not an issue in the election. 

Mr. Nhem En said that “sometimes” his past taking photos of adults and children headed to their executions haunted him. 

But then he changed the subject to his massage parlor and the resort he plans to open. 

“Of course the past always meets the present,” he said. “But we have to be flexible.”  [how convenient for him!]