Wishing Cambodia well as it peaceably moves forward

ON a visit to Siem Reap in Cambodia some years ago, an expatriate Malaysian there intimated an open secret: that Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen is an admirer of Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

The Cambodian leader certainly has length in office and staying power to more than match ours.

But will Hun Sen carry that admiration a step further and one day emulate Dr Mahathir by becoming the instrument for the birth of a New Cambodia?

Is long-exiled Cambodian opposition leader Sam Rainsy signalling that with his latest political stunt — making a highprofile Malaysia stopover on the way home after being prevented from boarding a flight from Paris to Bangkok?

His ostensible reason was to lead protests back home on Cambodia’s independence day over the past weekend.

But Rainsy is still in Kuala Lumpur and bound to generate as much political buzz as he can, with a meeting with parliamentarians of both sides of the house upon the personal invitation of Nurul Izzah Anwar.

If this does not signal a New Malaysia, nothing does.

We have a long-standing aversion to interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, a much-maligned tenet within Asean, to which both countries belong.

I suppose loudly protesting the sorry plight of Myanmar’s treatment of its Rohingya community is a humanitarian gesture not amounting to poking our nose into that country’s internal matters.

But in much the same way as Rainsy now does in Malaysia, Nurul’s father, Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, was hailed as either a reformasi fellow traveller or a fellow people-power icon on visits to Indonesia and the Philippines while an oppositionist.

So Rainsy may be said to be on a well-trodden and politically-acceptable path in his current Malaysian sojourn.

Nothing more, nothing less. And let us all not be detracted from the fact that while Hun Sen may be an autocrat, he comes from a long line of Asian autocrats who, while human rights activists loath, nevertheless may be categorised as serving, on balance, the greater good of their countries and peoples.

Cambodia today — after decades with no other leader than Hun Sen — is an economic dynamo that has immeasurably changed the lives of ordinary Cambodians.

All the more remarkable considering that he had to pick up from the utter destruction caused by the murderous Khmer Rouge regime before.

Not untypically nor surprisingly, Cambodians, especially the younger set with no memory of the Khmer Rouge and its senseless brutality, expect something more than being materially better off.

Institutions are still weak, with the result that corruption and other social ills are rampant. Such understandable popular aspirations find regular expression through elections the country regularly holds.

But with the passage of years, and Hun Sen and his ruling elite as entrenched as ever, keeping a tight political grip may only get that much harder going forward.

And he has proven that he can be as much a political stuntman as his enduring nemesis, Rainsy.

Both Hun Sen and Rainsy are getting on in years. For the sake of their country and the stability and wellbeing of Asean as a whole, they probably need another political dialogue above the din of current political chatter.

Malaysia offers probably the useful reality check that regime change (the political tsunami of a year ago was nothing short of that) is never ever a bed of roses, with probably as many reversals as advances along the slippery path ahead.

Moreover, Malaysia is on the cusp of hoped-for sustainable economic modernity while Cambodia, despite its obvious economic strides, still has a way to go in this regard.

If what happens now in advanced democracies tells us anything, it is that the proposition that political liberalisation or full democratisation takes precedence and everything else follows is nothing but an admittedly still highly seductive myth.

Most if, not all, recent Asian success stories follow an almost identical trajectory: a singleminded pursuit of economic progress at the expense of political development, under the steady hand of a durable, driven and relatively benign autocrat.

Political liberalisation invariably comes later, if at all.

Dr Mahathir, after all, made the recent observation that most people would rather be living under a democratic political set-up. There can be no senseless absolutes nor one size fits all, obviously.

Such practical wisdom as espoused by a Malaysian leader who can justifiably claim like no other to have seen and done it all is not to be sneezed at.

Malaysians naturally wish Cambodia well as it moves peaceably forward.