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.
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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