Cambodia clampdown
The scarred nation is getting more authoritarian
The Asian nations that are moving toward or away from democratic rule range across a wide spectrum. Cambodia, under dictator and ex-Khmer Rouge officer Hun Sen, is clearly moving away from democratization.
Mr. Sen’s government’s latest outrage was to have its politicized high court on Thursday ban the major opposition party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party. Mr. Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party, almost a straight-line successor to the brutal Khmer Rouge, thus becomes in effect the single party in a one-party state. Mr. Sen, now 65, has been in power as prime minister since 1985.
Americans are correct to ask what this has to do with the national interrest. The answer, which we have been recently reminded of by the Ken Burns series on the Vietnam War, is indirect causality. Cambodia was drifting along in a sort of post-French colonial torpor in the 1960s, under Prince Sihanouk, as the Vietnam War and U.S. involvement in it heated up. In a fury induced by the failure of thousands of U.S. troops injected into the Vietnamese conflict to win the war, President Richard Nixon authorized a major bombing campaign in Cambodia with no declaration of war. It was designed to interdict North Vietnamese supplies into South Vietnam via the so-called Ho Chi Minh trail. American aircraft ultimately dropped more than a half million tons of bombs on Cambodia, more than on Japan in World War II.
It didn’t work, but Cambodia became first a target and then, until now, a repository for American bombs. It is arguable that the bombing, and the trauma to Cambodian society that it caused, was one of the sources of the conflict and beastly approach to governance in Cambodia, including the “killing fields,” that followed.
Whatever the genesis, it is certainly true that Cambodia has remained ill-governed and pretty much devoid of popular representation in its governing process ever since. It is also true that the United States is now not in much of a position to do anything about it. The only country apart from Vietnam, whose people the Cambodians dislike and distrust, that the Cambodians pay any attention to is China. Apparently Hun Sen, a model of a cruel, autocratic despot, took a shine to President Donald Trump at the recent Southeast Asia summit in Manila.
Mr. Sen also said he intends to stay in power for at least another decade, which will be even easier with the opposition party, the CNRP, formally quashed. Elections are in principle scheduled for next summer.