By
supporting Beijing on South China Sea matters at the recent ASEAN meeting in
Laos and allegedly assassinating a harsh critic of his regime Kem Ley, it looks
like Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen painted a bull’s eye on his own
back. But it will take a year or two to find
out if his opponents can hit the mark.
At the
ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Conference in Laos on July 24, Cambodia’s
intransigence on behalf of the PRC (China) in matters South China Sea was not
as big an issue as it usually is.
The
Philippine delegation of the new Duterte administration was apparently not very
interested in provoking the PRC ahead of the upcoming bilateral discussions on
the South China Sea, so the group eventually came together around a toothless
communique that failed to invoke the UNCLOS arbitration ruling, thereby
pleasing the PRC and advocates of ASEAN consensus, while evoking the scorn of
China hawks in the region and around the world.
John
Kerry sidestepped the South China Sea controversy and concentrated on
extracting a declaration concerning the rather remote North Korean menace
instead, perhaps in hopes of extracting an Obama legacy achievement from that
unpromising dispute.
I think
the US is reasonably satisfied with the current state of play regarding the
South China Sea and is in a holding pattern until Hillary Clinton and her team
of China hawks enter the White House in February 2017.
Nevertheless,
impatience with Cambodia is getting pretty pronounced, especially in pivot
strongholds Australia and Japan.
Japanese
Prime Minister Shinzō Abe went in strong on Cambodia to support The Hague
ruling and the Japanese press chose to play Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen’s
irritated refusal as an unexpected rebuff.
I suspect that nobody seriously expected Hun Sen to ditch the PRC for
Japan, and Abe’s intention was to show Vietnam that Japan was firmly in its
corner to the point that it would happily and openly provoke Cambodia.
In
Australia, China hawks point to Cambodia as the epitome of ASEAN dysfunction,
and evidence for the need to switch to a “coalition of the willing” led by the
US, Japan, and Australia to shape the response to the PRC in the South China
Sea.
To deal
with the Cambodia issue, the idea of discarding the consensus formula or
watering it down with an “ASEAN X” formula—by which various ASEAN states could,
according to their individual enthusiasm, craft their own responses while
remaining, at least nominally, under the ASEAN aegis — has been bruited.
There is
another solution that would resolve the conundrum to the satisfaction of the
anti-PRC forces: regime change in Cambodia that would place a democratic,
West-friendly, more China averse administration committed to ASEAN unity and
“centrality”— the buzzword of the moment — in power.
Regime
change is in the back of everybody’s mind, especially Hun Sen’s. Hun Sen is the world’s longest-reigning
strongman, who has employed skullduggery and violence to keep himself on top of
Cambodia’s political and economic pile for three decades, and has vowed to
remain there at least for another decade.
Disenchantment
with his regime is growing — Hun’s party was able to maintain its parliamentary
majority in the legislature in 2013 thanks only to pervasive thuggery — and he
has apparently thrown himself into the arms of the PRC in return for the
uncritical financial and political backing that a strongman with fading support
craves.
Think of
Cambodia as another Myanmar: a corrupted Chinese satellite whose
vulnerabilities make it a tempting target for Western rollback against the PRC.
Problem
is, there is a distinct shortage of attractive opposition horses to back for
foreign governments.
The main
opposition party, the CNRP, is a throwback émigré-backed outfit that has
planted its flag on overt anti-Vietnamese chauvinism. Led by San Rainsy, the CNRP was midwifed by
the International Republican Institute (funded by the NED) and supported by US
Republicans when anti-Vietnam strategizing was the name of the game in
Washington.
Today,
the linchpin for US and Japanese agendas in Southeast Asia is Vietnam; and
enabling a new Cambodian government founded on anti-Vietnamese zealotry is not,
I expect, at the top of everybody’s priorities.
Therefore,
consigning Hun Sen to the dustbin of history may not become a US priority until
a more attractive opposition force comes along.
Preferably
something indigenous, pro-democracy, pro-human rights and less big-money
boss-man — like the movement that Kem Ley was fostering before his
assassination in Phnom Penh on July 10.
For China
watchers, Ley looks something like Ilham Tothi, the jailed Uyghur activist from
Xinjiang.
Tothi
tried to color revolution between the lines, working the limited space allowed
by the PRC authorities to advance Uyghur cohesion, identity, and activism while
not running afoul of PRC law. His
success alarmed the PRC to the point where he was imprisoned by the PRC on
trumped-up charges and his network of followers harassed and suppressed.
Tens of thousands of
people attend a funeral procession to carry the body of Kem Ley, an
anti-government figure and the head of a grassroots advocacy group, “Khmer for
Khmer” who was shot dead on July 10, to his hometown, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia
July 24, 2016. REUTERS/Samrang Pring
Ley had
considerably more space to work in, since Cambodia is a democracy of a certain
kind. He had midwifed the creation of a
new grassroots political party and then stepped away from it, ostensibly to
concentrate on his research and analytic work but also, possibly, to insulate
himself from political exposure so he’d be able to stay out of jail and
continue to work and write even if the government cracked down on the party.
Whatever
his considerations, he was gunned down in what was asserted to be a dispute
over an uncollected debt but is widely considered to be an assassination. Associates reported he told them he was being
tracked, and he pointed out men with walkie-talkies monitoring his meetings.
As to why
Ley was killed, all the accounts contain a rather hanging reference to the
release three days prior of a Global Witness report, Hostile Takeover: the
corporate empire of Cambodia’s ruling family.
Journalistic
omerta seems to inhibit the dot-connecting one would expect in this story.
The
Global Witness report was clearly intended to embarrass Hun Sen before the
Cambodian people, weaken him politically, and also provide a basis for limiting
foreign aid and governmental investment to the Cambodian government. It employed “data journalism,” combing
corporate records for damning links, similar to the exercise exposing Xi
Jinping’s finances that was spiked at PRC insistence, causing a major meltdown
at Bloomberg.
Global
Witness’s organizational mission is to protect victimized citizens of
resource-rich countries from exploitation of their national wealth by corrupt
governments either working directly or in cahoots with multinational
corporations.
Specifically
targeting a politically corrupt elite represents something of an expansion of
its brief, though Global Witness did provide a similar indictment of the
Burmese junta; and Cambodia has historically been one of the focuses of its
work.
Global
Witness was founded by George Soros, so the color revolution narrative works
itself into the Kem Ley story, along with the inference that the authors of the
report seriously underestimated the backlash a regime change hit piece might
provoke from its targets.
Ley had
been on VOA Khmer for an English-language interview and had carefully distanced
himself from Global Witness while endorsing the report and its value as a tool
for transparency and reform (as in, “I’m not sure what the objective or
direction of the Global Witness report’s author…”).
If this
was meant to place a safe distance between Ley and the London authors of the
report — while permitting him to praise and use its data and conclusions —
perhaps it didn’t work and Hun Sen lashed out at the nearest and most
vulnerable target for his wrath.
It’s also
possible, by the way, that some other furious branch of the Hun family had Ley
killed without Hun Sen’s prior knowledge and approval.
Global
Witness dipped its toe into allegations of criminality, stating in the report
it had obtained information from “confidential sources” (footnote 247)
concerning holdings by Hun Sen nephew Hun To, who has been linked to big-time
drug dealing allegations in the Australian media. In retrospect, advertising that Global
Witness was collecting tittle-tattle from informants about a drug dealer
connected to the ruling family may not have been some of its best work.
In any
case, if Hun Sen ordered the assassination of Kem Ley, it wasn’t some of his
best work, either. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of grieving and
indignant Cambodians lined the roads to witness Ley’s 70-kilometer funeral
procession, and the cause of an indigenous, localized anti-Hun Sen political
movement was probably advanced far more by his death than by the Global Witness
report.
Tom
Malinowski, the U.S. State Department’s Assistant Secretary for Democracy,
Human Rights, and Labor, went to Cambodia and delivered condolences to Ley’s
wife (who is now seeking asylum in Australia).
At a
press conference, he was asked about the PRC grant of $600 million to support
the upcoming elections among other things, which is unsurprisingly viewed as a
cash grant to assist Hun Sen in buying the elections.
Malinowski
replied:
More and
more Cambodians are getting their information from media that nobody can
control – from media that they control…
… I hope
that it is the government’s intention to have a free and fair election in 2017
and 2018. I think that if anyone has contrary intentions, there are certainly
things that they can do that would be unfortunate but I think that they will
find that, as we have seen in Burma and as we have seen in Sri Lanka and many
countries over the last few years, it is very hard to deny people their voice
and their choice.
By siding
with the PRC and by allegedly assassinating Kem Ley, it looks like Hun Sen
painted a bull’s eye on his own back.
But it will take a year or two to find out if his opponents can hit the
mark.
Peter Lee
runs the China Matters blog. He writes on the intersection of US policy with
Asian and world affairs.
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