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AUSTRALIA

Hun Sen's Cambodia a mirage on the Mekong

  • 14 November 2014

I had long since completed my posting to Cambodia as Australian Ambassador 1994-97, the decisive years of the post-UNTAC struggle for power between Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) leader Hun Sen, royalist party leader Prince Ranariddh, dissident democratic leader Sam Rainsy, and King Sihanouk. 

Today just two of those players are left standing: Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) leader Hun Sen and Sam Rainsy, leader of a newly invigorated and resurgent opposition coalition, the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP). Ranariddh retired from politics in 2008, and his Funcinpec party is no more: its most impressive leaders like Mu Sochua moved to Sam Rainsy’s party and now its successor CNRP.  The much-loved and hugely talented King passed on in 2012. His successor King Sihamoni is strictly apolitical. 

Rainsy and his deputy CNRP leader Kem Sokha (an experienced democratic politician who founded the Human Rights Party in 2007) skilfully pursue an agenda of social reform and Cambodian nationalism, and have built a young constituency of human rights idealists and have-nots with much to gain and little to lose in challenging the CPP ascendancy. 

Hun Sen’s CPP – which had grown ever stronger in the elections of 1998, 2003 and 2008 as it cemented its control of local government in the regions – had its first shock reverse in 2013. Its share of seats in the National Assembly was slashed from 90 to 68. The CNRP won the remaining 55 seats and is now within clear striking distance of taking power at the ballot box in 2018. A shocked CPP is finding its old levers of power and patronage working less and less well in this rapidly changing and urbanising society and economy. 

In July 1997, when the mounting hostility between Hun Sen and Ranariddh erupted in open war, a small group of Western and ASEAN ambassadors had agreed (at some risk to our careers) to advise our governments not to take sides. We knew that Hun Sen had the power and leadership skills to win on the ground. For our governments to prop up Ranariddh (now negotiating secretly with armed remnants of the Khmer Rouge) would have risked reigniting the 1978-91 civil war and destroying everything that the UN peace settlement had achieved in 1991-93. 

Our advice was heeded in capitals. Over the next 16 years, Hun Sen skilfully consolidated political and economic power: destroying, intimidating or buying off adversaries, mostly peacefully, to a point where Cambodia seemed well
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