Cambodia slides into despotism

In one of the last editions of the Cambodia Daily newspaper, the headline ran as follows: “Descent into outright dictatorship”. It ran above a picture of Cambodia’s main opposition leader being arrested in a midnight raid.

The independent English-language newspaper, which began publishing in 1993, was shut down last week by the prime minister, Hun Sen, in response to its reporting on his regime’s assault on the rights and freedoms of Cambodians.

With the arrest of opposition leader Kem Sokha, Hun Sen has stepped up repression, exposing his insecurity ahead of a general election scheduled for July 2018 that threatens to end his three decades in power.

He has ordered his citizens to refer to him as “glorious supreme prime minister and powerful commander”, vowed to stay in office for “not less than 10 more years” and openly threatened a return to civil war if his party did not win the election “at all stages”. Coming from a former commander in the Khmer Rouge, which instigated a genocide in the 1970s in which millions died, these are not idle threats.

For decades, Hun Sen’s autocratic tendencies have been constrained by his country’s reliance on western aid, which is usually tied to good governance and democracy benchmarks.

But billions of dollars in state-driven investment from China in recent years have allowed him to indulge his true political inclinations.

Hun Sen’s vow to fight against “puppets of foreigners” is laughable given his reliance on Beijing — and Cambodia’s de facto position as a client state of China. Tellingly, amid the international condemnation that followed last week’s crackdown, the only country to express support for Hun Sen’s “effort to uphold national security and stability” was China. London, September 8.