*An icon fades in Cambodia*
By Sebastian Strangio
Asia times, April 1, 2010
(*Comments: This article is one of the most comprehensive and
well-researched on Sam Rainsy as an opposition party leader in Cambodia.
However, it did not probe far enough the relationship between his father and
Sihanouk, which has had a restraining factor on Sam Rainsy as an opposition
leader. As Sihanouk has now given his enormous political weight to support
Hun Sen in exchange for Hun Sen’s support against the possibility that the
former king might be called at least to testify if to be tried in the
current Khmer Rouge Trial, has enormously restrained Sam Rainsy’s ability
and flexibility as an opposition leader. Sam Rainsy must be careful with
Sihanouk otherwise, Sihanouk may come out even stronger to denounce Sam
Rainsy father in that 1959 attempted coup by Sam Rainsy’s father against the
former king. *
* *
*Perhaps, the most revealing fact about Sam Rainsy’s character as a person
and as a party leader, is the fact that is not very open to new idea, and
tend to be very secretive and autocratic in all decision making in his
party. Which led one former party member to comment that: *
* *
*“For example, Ken Virak was a member of the SRP's Steering Committee who
left to form his own party - the People's Power Party (PPP) - in 2007 after
becoming disillusioned with the SRP's internal workings. He said the SRP had
given up its role as a democratic opposition party "step by step" and that
its steering committee - nominally in charge of party decision-making - no
longer had real power. ***
*
**"There is no democracy inside the party. Most of the decisions are made
only by a minority of members who are powerful in the party and associated
with Sam Rainsy," he said. "I found that before every election, members of
the party always broke away because of the political decision-making and
partisanship," he said.“ *
*Like most Cambodian political leaders, Sam Rainsy most obvious weakness is
his lack of clear conceptuatlization of strategy and tactics to gain voters,
according to Ou Virak, an local NGO leader, when he made this comment:*
*"He said the SRP's lack of **concrete** policies has personalized its
frequent spats with the government and the lack of party vision has dragged
it into various unwinnable battles with the CPP-controlled parliament.
"There's no proper analysis or real policy," said Ou Virak. "If you're going
to oppose something or are you in a position to offer anything, that's
different?" *
*The rest of article is concerned with the fatigue of the donors, and Sam
Rainsy seems to have lost contact with the Cambodian people by staying
abroad. Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. April 28, 2010) *
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PHNOM PENH - By uprooting six wooden border markers last October along the
Vietnamese border, Cambodia's opposition leader Sam Rainsy again cast
himself in the familiar role of a thorn in the flesh of authority.
Earlier this year, a court sentenced Rainsy to two years in prison in
absentia for uprooting the posts. He now faces additional misinformation
charges that carry a possible 18 years in prison. He has been stripped of
his parliamentary immunity twice in the past year.
Though his Sam Rainsy Party (SRP) remains the kingdom's biggest proponent of
Western-style democracy, Rainsy's decision to go into self-imposed exile in
France to continue his campaign against alleged Vietnamese incursions into
Cambodian territory
has raised questions whether the 61-year-old politician has lost his
direction and his party its past relevance in a fast-shifting *political* *
landscape*.
Premier Hun Sen, who in 1997 ousted his long-time rival Prince Norodom
Ranariddh in a bloody factional coup, has successfully *consolidated* his
position at the center of the country's politics. Hun Sen's Cambodian
People's Party (CPP) has presided over a period of rapid *economic growth* -
between 2004 to 2007 *gross domestic product* grew at an average of around
10% - and *the party*'s continued success at the *ballot box* has
demonstrated that the majority of Cambodians are willing to overlook its
more authoritarian tendencies in *exchange* for economic progress.
Meanwhile, the past year has been a tumultuous one for the SRP, which
controls 26 seats in Cambodia's 123-seat *National Assembly*. Aside from
Rainsy's border imbroglio, SRP lawmakers Mu Sochua and Ho Vann both lost
their parliamentary immunity after being accused of defaming senior CPP
officials. These political stand-offs earned attention in the chambers of
the US Congress and the European parliament in Brussels, but it's unclear
whether the SRP's antagonistic strategies have maximized it's chances of
leveraging Cambodia's demographic changes (as much as half of the population
is under 24 years of age) into medium-term political gains.
By some assessments, the party has declined since its mid-2000s peak, a
trend illustrated by its failure to capture the voters who withdrew their
support from the royalist Funcinpec party after it split along factional
lines in 2006. "All those votes should have gone to the SRP, and they
didn't," said Ou Virak, president of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights.
He said the SRP's lack of *concrete* policies has personalized its frequent
spats with the government and the lack of party vision has dragged it into
various unwinnable battles with the CPP-controlled parliament. "There's no
proper analysis or real policy," said Ou Virak. "If you're going to oppose
something or are you in a position to offer anything, that's different?"
The SRP's campaigns against Hun Sen's authoritarianism and his cozy ties to
former invader and occupier Vietnam have done little to change the country's
political or economic realities. The CPP continues to control all three
branches of government, as well as a large swathe of the print and broadcast
media.
At the 2008 polls, the CPP captured over 58% of the popular vote and notched
90 National Assembly seats - more than the two-thirds majority needed to
pass laws unanimously. The SRP increased its parliamentary representation
from 24 to 26 in 2008, but its share of the popular vote remained steady at
around 22%.
Over the same five-year period, the vote for the royalist movement - once a
powerhouse of Cambodian politics under the Funcinpec party - shrank from
20.8% of the vote to just over 10%. Most of those lost votes were usurped by
the ruling CPP, despite its long-time and often heated antagonism towards
the royalist party.
Another political observer said that SRP's failure to capitalize on the rift
in the royalist movement represented a "huge" missed *opportunity* for the
party and that its recent political theatrics, including the border post
stunt, had "steered the party way off message".
"They talk about party leaders being persecuted on the basis of esoteric
rights that many Cambodian people have very little ownership of. They've
adapted to appeal to outside constituencies rather than Cambodian voters,"
the observer said.
Sorpong Peou, a professor of political science at Sophia University in
Tokyo, concurred that the SRP's appeals to distant international
organizations focused on democracy promotion and good governance have
achieved little for the party domestically, where it remains "at the mercy"
of Hun Sen and his ruling party.
"[The CPP] is willing to allow a degree of opposition in order to legitimize
its domination and uses this type of legitimacy to gain international
support," she said. "In this sense, the opposition's appeals have little
real impact on domestic politics."
To be sure, Rainsy has been down before only to bounce back. Between 2005-06
he lived in self-exile in France for a year after being stripped of his
parliamentary immunity and ordered jailed for 18 months on criminal
defamation charges. He only returned to Cambodia in February 2006 after
recanting comments he made about Hun Sen and receiving a royal pardon from
King Norodom Sihamoni.
This time, though, Rainsy faces a less accommodating international landscape
given the recent diplomatic overtures to Hun Sen's government made by the
United States, which has prioritized a policy of counterbalancing China's
rising regional influence. For years, Rainsy benefited from the US's
antagonistic approach towards the government, a policy influenced by a
bloody 1997 grenade attack on a peaceful opposition rally that many claim
was orchestrated by members of Hun Sen's *personal bodyguard* unit.
Ou Virak said that one new problem for Rainsy is that repeated petitions to
international organizations - one of the few cards the leader has left to
play - could be falling on increasingly deaf ears. "You can do it once or
twice, but governments get fatigued, donors get fatigued ... You're running
a risk of people no longer paying attention," he said. "Eventually he'll
have to take it to the next level and that means facing possible
imprisonment." He added: "He's no Aung San Suu Kyi. He's not going to come
back."
*Donor darling*
When Sam Rainsy returned to Cambodia from France in 1992, he was a rising
star in the royalist political firmament. A founding member of then-prince
Norodom Sihanouk's Funcinpec party in 1981, Rainsy had risen through the
ranks to become an elected parliamentarian during Funcinpec's stunning win
in the United Nations-backed 1993 elections and was appointed minister of
finance in the Funcinpec-CPP coalition government.
His ascent, however, was short-lived and the fall that followed set the tone
for a political career that would be marked by a consistently adversarial
relationship with the government. In October 1994 - just over a year after
his appointment - Sam Rainsy was dismissed from his post in a major cabinet
reshuffle following his criticisms of the corruption and nepotism that
plagued the coalition. The following year, his continued criticisms led to
his expulsion from the party and the loss of his National Assembly seat.
At the time of its founding in 1995, the Khmer Nation Party (KNP) - the
SRP's predecessor - was a breath of fresh air on the Cambodian political
landscape. Unlike the CPP - which secured its support through a patronage
system established in the 1980s - and Funcinpec, which traded heavily on the
prestige of the monarchy, Sam Rainsy's new party put liberal democratic
principles front and center. At the time, he said his expulsion from
Funcinpec would give him the opportunity "to mobilize millions of people"
sharing the same ideals.
Even with its egalitarian bent, the SRP's constituency to this day remains
overwhelmingly urban. In 2008, it won six of its 26 seats in Phnom Penh and
five in urban Kampong Cham, as well as three each in Kandal and Prey Veng,
both densely populated provinces close to the capital. In half of Cambodia's
24 provinces and municipalities - among them the most remote and least
populated - the party failed to win a single seat.
Caroline Hughes, an associate professor of governance studies at Murdoch
University in Australia, claims that the SRP is not totally to blame for its
poor electoral performances in rural areas, where the CPP used intimidation
and patronage to secure votes. She said Sam Rainsy - a "donors' darling" in
the early 1990s - has gradually become a more "marginal" figure because of
waning international support, a rift with the Cambodian union movement and a
concerted campaign of violence and intimidation against his supporters that
included the bloody 1997 grenade attack.
"I don't think we can blame the SRP for the weakness of the Cambodian
political opposition when the government has worked consistently to reduce
the political space for any kind of organized activism on any issue," she
said.
Others, however, believe the party's growth has been stunted by the erosion
of its own internal democratic processes and by the constant threat of
defections and government intimidation. The SRP, Ou Virak said, is "like a
scared child" frightened by the threat of infiltration by the ruling party
and suspicious of newcomers. "There are some good people in the party that I
know that cannot move up in the ranks," he said. "There are some very good
people who were left out."
For example, Ken Virak was a member of the SRP's Steering Committee who left
to form his own party - the People's Power Party (PPP) - in 2007 after
becoming disillusioned with the SRP's internal workings. He said the SRP had
given up its role as a democratic opposition party "step by step" and that
its steering committee - nominally in charge of party decision-making - no
longer had real power.
"There is no democracy inside the party. Most of the decisions are made only
by a minority of members who are powerful in the party and associated with
Sam Rainsy," he said. "I found that before every election, members of the
party always broke away because of the political decision-making and
partisanship," he said.
Ken Virak said that all opposition groups, including the new Human Rights
Party (HRP) and his PPP, must unite if they are to have a chance at cutting
into the CPP's majority at the next national election, which must be held by
2013. But a united opposition is still a distant threat to CPP dominance:
proposed mergers between the SRP and HRP and two remaining royalist parties
have all foundered on personal disagreements between their leaders.
*Political family*
Born in Phnom Penh in 1949, Rainsy's formative years were influenced by
Cambodia's rough and tumble politics. His father, Sam Sary, was a key member
of Sihanouk's Sangkum Reastr Niyum government, but fell from grace after he
was implicated in the so-called Bangkok Plot of 1959, an attempt to topple
the government with the support of Thailand's right-wing Field Marshal Sarit
Thanarat.
Sam Sary disappeared in 1962 and was presumed killed, possibly by the
government. Shortly afterwards, Rainsy's mother, In Em, took the remaining
family members to live in France, where he was educated and remained for the
next three decades. In a recent Phnom Penh Post interview, Rainsy described
his father's death as a "traumatizing" experience, but said that his
political views permeated the family and influenced the trajectory of his
own political development.
Certain pivotal events in Europe, including the Soviet invasion of Hungary
in 1956, were topics of conversation at the dinner table and went some way
to forming the ideals that grew into the SRP's blend of liberal
internationalism with appeals to Khmer nationalism.
"When it came to Southeast Asia, my father was in favor of a strict
neutrality - that Cambodia should not move closer to the communist world,"
Rainsy said. "This has marked my background and my conviction that communism
is oppressive - that freedom is essential and that we have to fight for
[it]."
Rainsy said that despite being founded largely on his own initiative in
1995, the KNP - renamed the SRP in 1998 because of legal disputes over the
KNP name - had grown into an "organization of its own" linking Cambodia with
Khmer communities abroad. He also downplayed his role as the party's
figurehead, referring to it as an "anachronistic" notion.
"If it was a one-man show, the show would have stopped a long time ago given
all the problems that we've been facing," he said.
Rainsy said that the SRP was the only party in Cambodia that holds organized
elections from the grassroots, a system that was in strict opposition to the
CPP's centrally controlled networks. "They appoint their cadres - their
apparatchiks - at the grassroots, but we are the only party that has
organized elections," he said. Similarly, the "loss" of the former Funcinpec
vote was largely "due to intimidation and vote-buying in non-transparent
elections", Rainsy said - a claim the opposition has made consistently since
the July 2008 election.
Asked how the party might erode the CPP's entrenched network of patronage
and make electoral headway in rural areas, Rainsy said that current and
future demographic changes were swinging voters towards the SRP - a factor
reflected in the party's recent formation of a new youth congress. "It will
take less time than one might imagine now because of the progress of
technology, information, communication and education," he said. "History is
accelerating."
Koul Panha, executive director of the Committee for Free and Fair Elections
in Cambodia, a local election monitor, said Rainsy retains substantial
political capital for taking a principled stance against corruption in the
1990s and maintaining it has a party platform ever since. He believes the
party's main challenge is improving its public relations.
"I think he still has that credibility. He resigned from a key position in
government and showed he is that kind of politician," he said. "The problem
is how to communicate that credibility to the people." It's likely to remain
a problem for the party as long as Rainsy campaigns on issues that appear to
have more resonance with foreign audiences than with local voters.
*Sebastian Strangio** is a reporter for the Phnom Penh Post in Cambodia.*
(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.
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On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Hong Chi Kong <[email protected]>wrote:
> First, I've thought it is El Professore from Philippine, On the second
> thought , it could not be him
> because El Profssore never wrote any articles that I'd read so far without
> an even a single
> quote.
> So, do you know who wrote that article?
> This article must touch the nerve of the SRP real bad.
>
> --- On *Tue, 5/25/10, PuppyXpress <[email protected]>* wrote:
>
>
> From: PuppyXpress <[email protected]>
> Subject: Color Coding?
> To: "camdisc" <[email protected]>
> Date: Tuesday, May 25, 2010, 11:07 AM
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: <[email protected] <http://mc/[email protected]>>
> Date: Tue, May 25, 2010 at 9:47 AM
> Subject: Color Coding?
>
>
>
> http://about-cambodia.blogspot.com/2010/05/color-coding-political-preferences.html
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
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> This is an unmoderated forum. Please refrain from using foul language.
> Thank you for your understanding. Peace among us and in Cambodia.
>
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>
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>
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and that's your own self."
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