The next-gen leader and the forced video confessions on Facebook

Singapore: On the occasion of her pardon, the teenager in the video wishes to thank her beneficent leaders. She has recognised her guilt and will no longer be angry. Hun Sen, Cambodia’s strongman, “is a symbol of the country”, she tells the camera. His son, Hun Manet, is a “mainstay, a leader, and a shade of peace”.

“I may take this opportunity to thank profoundly Samdech Father [Hun Sen], who recently received an honourable degree for the cause of building and keeping peace, which is his great achievement,” the young woman says in the video.

A young woman locked up for protesting speaks to a camera to thank Cambodia’s leaders for her freedom.

She was released last month after her arrest, aged 18, in August for protesting Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) policies – “plotting”, as the party calls it. For the privilege of freedom, she denounced others and made this video confession. It was edited together with regal stills of Cambodia’s most powerful family and posted under Hun Sen’s own Facebook account as testimony to his own greatness and mercy.

Once, Hun Sen was a soldier of the Khmer Rouge, a regime that killed perhaps 2 million people in the last half of the 1970s. He defected amid leader Pol Pot’s deadly internal purges to help the Vietnamese invader-liberators, who installed Hun Sen as prime minister in 1985.

He has held the post in various iterations since, outwitting and outmuscling all others inside a vaguely democracy-shaped system fed with billions of dollars of wasted and stolen international aid.

Hun Sen sees himself as his nation’s saviour. The CPP’s oppression under his reign is invariably couched as preserving Cambodia’s hard-won stability – resonant in a nation so degraded by war. Even so, CPP thuggery extends beyond Cambodian borders, including to Australia, where his opponents were threatened with beatings.

Hun Sen (right) passed on the prime ministership to son Hun Manet (left) in August last year.Credit: AP

But last year, Cambodian politics underwent an ostensibly seismic shift. Weeks after sweeping mostly opposition-less elections with 120 of a possible 125 lower house seats, Hun Sen stepped down as prime minister and handed the job to his eldest son, Hun Manet. For good measure, other ministers passed on portfolios to their sons, too. Hun Sen became president of the Senate.

Outsiders had hoped, though with little optimism, that Hun Manet, a graduate of the United States’ West Point military academy and with a PhD in economics from England’s University of Bristol, would steer the nation of 18 million people closer to a genuine democracy.

“What we’re seeing under this so-called new leadership is basically an extension of the old leadership, only they are younger,” says Naly Pilorge of LICADHO, a Phnom Penh-based human rights agency.

The organisation, she says, “has been very, very busy with an increased workload”.

In July, 10 members of the well-known environmental group Mother Nature were sentenced to between six and eight years’ jail for “plotting” and “insulting the king”. In August, apparently spooked by events in Bangladesh, the Cambodian government went on an arresting spree, targeting people, most of them young, who opposed a two-decades-old development agreement with Laos and Vietnam.

The woman in the video was arrested on August 18 as part of these protests. Of the 97 names in LICADHO’s “prisoner of interest” file, more than half were arrested in July or August, almost a year after Hun Manet assumed the prime ministership. Pilorge says these are only the ones her organisation knows about.

The newest face on the list is prominent Cambodian journalist Mech Dara. Only last year, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken personally presented Dara with a Hero Award for his investigations into Cambodia’s notorious scam compounds.

Some of Dara’s reporting covered the operations of Ly Yong Phat, a senator, tycoon and Hun Sen adviser, who was hit with US sanctions last month, infuriating the CPP.

Cambodian-Australians protest against Hun Sen’s regime in Sydney’s Hyde Park during his 2018 visit.Credit: AP

Making a show of last Monday’s arrest, half a dozen police vehicles reportedly swooped on Dara’s family car while it was stopped at a toll booth. The government was apparently upset at his social media posts, one of which linked damage at a religious site to a quarrying operation. Outraged international civil society groups say this was just an excuse.

“We lost him for a day and didn’t know his whereabouts,” Dara’s sister Sereyrath tells this masthead. “I telephoned him but did not reach him. His phone was confiscated and not returned yet.”

She was allowed to visit him on Wednesday. “His mental condition is not good,” she says. “Is the incitement charge related to his previous work? I am not sure.”

Dara used to work for Voice of Democracy, a media organisation shut down by Hun Sen early last year. Since 2017, most of the country’s independent media has been cancelled or hobbled so badly with lawsuits that party cronies have bought them out.

A Cambodian boy stands in front of human skulls discovered south of Phnom Penh in 1995. The mass grave contains the remains of about 2000 victims of the Khmer Rouge.Credit: AP

The government “has taken a firm stand to promote freedom of the press”, the Ministry of Information said in response to the criticism of Dara’s arrest. “At the same time, Cambodia, along with the rest of the world, has been combating false information, misinformation and malinformation [sic] to provide people with information security.”

Some Cambodia watchers, speaking on background to protect themselves or their local operations, say the government has only become more authoritarian since Hun Manet officially took over from his father.

But who is really calling the shots? Writing in the Bangkok Post, analyst David Hutt says Hun Sen’s “daily social media musings are interpreted as government policy”.

Fawning Interior Minister Sar Sokha recently announced his “full support” for Hun Sen’s wishes to designate certain organisations as terrorist groups – clear threat to activists, civil society and the opposition.

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the ASEAN summit in Melbourne in March.Credit: AP

Last week, a Cambodian maid was deported from Malaysia for Facebook comments calling the former prime minister “despicable”.

It is stifling in the Candlelight Party’s Phnom Penh boardroom. Lee Sothearayuth, the secretary-general, is fiddling with the air-conditioning and apologising for his ignorance of the buttons. He explains the party has only recently moved in. “Now, we are thinking of moving again,” he says. “The landlord has already given us two warnings.”

The party shares the space with the Khmer Will Party, a pro-democracy ally and potential home for Candlelight candidates if, like last year, the party is barred from contesting elections. “We are the same, so we want to stay together,” Sothearayuth says. “But in Cambodia, it is hard for opposition parties to rent buildings.”

He takes his seat, smiling at the understatement. The CPP has made a sport of arresting dissenting voices or suing them into silence. Last year, Hun Sen declared: “I could arrest you, break your neck and eat you at any time.”

Candlelight Party secretary-general Lee Sothearayuth.Credit: Zach Hope

In the villages, goons pressure grassroots opposition members to switch allegiances, and the defectors’ photographs are plastered almost daily in pro-government media like trophies. As one of several editorials last month opined, “They have seen clearly, no doubt, that the Cambodian People’s Party is the only party to have earned great merits for the nation and the Cambodian people.”

Some go willingly. One told this masthead Candlelight “doesn’t have a clear stance”. Another said he was dismissed because he raised internal corruption.

Sothearayuth claims defectors are paid up to 1 million riel ($360). Some members are intimidated, or their families are harassed. Some are promised well-paying government positions with access to a gravy train of graft, a classic of Cambodian political bargaining.

Clancy Moore, the chief executive of Transparency International Australia, says rates of petty street-level bribes in Cambodia have decreased, but “grand and political corruption … the stranglehold of cronies and patronage politics … both illegal and legal” still flourishes. On the organisation’s corruption index, Cambodia ranks a lowly 158 out of 180 nations.

Still, the country’s economy “blossomed” in the two decades before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the World Bank, which projected growth of 5.8 per cent this year – far better than in neighbouring Thailand.

The “economy is moving fast and leaving people behind”, says a Phnom Penh tuktuk driver, who wishes to remain anonymous. He is parked by the SUVs that tend to block the city’s narrow streets and disintegrating footpaths.

Asked who was responsible, he demurs. “I don’t want to cause trouble,” he says. “What I can say is that I used to earn 50,000 riels ($18) a day; now I earn 20,000.”

The official reason the Candlelight Party could not compete at last year’s elections was that it couldn’t produce documents, previously unnecessary, from the 1990s. It is reasonable to assume the CPP will apply the same tactic with the same missing document next time, so the party is trying – with limited success – to build an alliance of anti-CPP parties to run under the same banner on ballots.

“As the opposition, we don’t see any change,” Sothearayuth says. “It is a new prime minister but the same style, the same policies – policies created by his father.”

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