Charged, fined and frozen out: The Australian man taking on Asian strongman Hun Sen

Phnom Penh: Son Chhay has been searching for a new place to live here lately, but he’s not been planning to move for the reasons most tend to.

The 67-year-old vice-president and frontman of Cambodia’s opposition Candlelight Party is house hunting because his home in Phnom Penh, and a flat he owns in north-western Siem Reap, have been frozen by a court since last November.

Son Chhay has lost his properties in Cambodia.Credit: AFP

Charged with defamation for daring to suggest there was vote stealing during last year’s local commune elections, the veteran politician was found guilty and ordered to pay $US1 million ($1.45 million) in damages to Prime Minister Hun Sen’s long-ruling Cambodian People’s Party, or CPP.

Without that kind of money to his name his properties are to be sold off – unless he can have the conviction overturned in a final Supreme Court appeal.

“They will take my house and I will have to move somewhere,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age this week. “I’m still looking for a place to rent and live.”

A dual Cambodian-Australian citizen who splits his time between Phnom Penh and Melbourne, where his wife and five adult children live, Chhay has found himself in the crosshairs of a renewed crackdown on dissenting voices in Cambodia ahead of a general election in July.

Thach Setha talking to the media in 2014.Credit: AP

Fellow Candlelight Party vice-president Thach Setha was arrested last month, for allegedly writing bad cheques 20 years ago, and the party has complained of being subjected to intimidation and threats since it emerged from the ashes of the banned Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) a year ago.

To top it off, this week Voice of Democracy, one of the last independent media outlets in the country, was ordered closed by Hun Sen, further jeopardising prospects for a free and fair election.

If it seems like Cambodia’s 70-year-old leader is sticking to an old playbook, having ruled in the south-east Asian kingdom since 1985, that’s not far from the mark.

In the year before the last election in 2018, another prominent news entity was closed, the opposition CNRP was dissolved, and the CPP won all 125 seats, rendering Cambodia an effective one-party state.

Cambodia Prime Minister Hun Sen seems determined to keep a grip on power.Credit: AP

The recently formed Candlelight Party does not pose as great as threat as its antecedent – not least because dozens of CNRP members were jailed for treason, many in absentia after fleeing abroad. With five months until the vote, it has not been disbanded.

But Hun Sen has put it on notice, warning last month there were only two alternatives to respond to criticism of his ruling party deemed to cross the line. “One is to use legal means and the other is to use a stick. Which of these two do you prefer?” he said.

None of this is any great shock to Son Chhay, an opposition MP from 1993 until the CNRP was wiped out in 2017, and for years an outspoken advocate for democracy and campaigner against corruption and land grabbing.

“If you are in politics in this country you know all the risks you are taking, so [there is] nothing unexpected,” he said.

He is sanguine about coming under legal assault himself, and determined to push for change.

He believes there is a greater role for Australia to play. He settled in Australia in 1980, the year after the ousting of Pol Pot’s murderous Khmer Rouge.

Chhay returned to Cambodia in the early 1990s, but is respected in his adopted home to the extent that he was awarded the Order of Australia in 2010 for services to Cambodia and its diaspora community.

“Australia is important to Cambodia. [Former foreign minister] Gareth Evans was the man who initiated the peace process in the first place, and it took a lot of time and money and effort. We can’t just sit back and pretend everything is OK in this country,” he said.

“You cannot treat the opposition like the enemy and throw them in jail. Cambodia is different to other nations because we have been guaranteed democracy and respect for human rights under the Paris Peace Agreement.

Prime Minister Albanese meets Hun Sen last November. The Albanese government is keen to strengthen ties in the region.Credit: James Brickwood

“The people who signed the agreement, including Australia, have the obligation to monitor this. I would like to see Australia take more action.”

Geopolitical considerations weigh heavily on this front for the Albanese government, which is attempting to strengthen relations in south-east Asia in the face of a rising China and is wary of poking its nose in other’s business, something which is not taken to kindly in the region.

Australia’s new ambassador in Phnom Penh, Justin Whyatt, did express concern over the closure of Voice of Democracy and federal Labor backbencher Julian Hill, who has been a vocal critic of Hun Sen’s regime, also unleashed this week, saying: “Australia must be careful not to lend credibility to sham elections.”

But with activists also having been jailed in greater numbers in the past two years, Phil Robertson, the Asia deputy director of Human Rights Watch, argues the response to the situation on the ground in Cambodia needs to be much tougher.

“The international community needs to wake from its slumber over Cambodia,” he said.

“There needs to be an urgent campaign of public pressure on Prime Minister Hun Sen and his government to respect rights, or risk be termed as a failed democracy – and treated that way in terms of aid and trade.”

Having been in power for almost four decades, the Cambodian strongman is considering eventually passing the baton, although not far.

He has anointed his 45-year-old son Hun Manet – the deputy chief of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces and head of the Royal Cambodian Army – as his preferred successor.

He even had him tag along to Beijing last week as he met with President Xi Jinping, who hailed China’s “ironclad ties” with Cambodia.

Hun Manet is being groomed to succeed his father.Credit: EPA

While they were there, Chhay and the Candlelight Party were rousing supporters in Siem Reap, where they held their party congress last Saturday, reporting 10,000 attendees.

Candlelight is attempting to position itself as the party not only for reform but for Cambodian youth. Cambodia has the youngest population within ASEAN.

The results of the nationwide commune elections last June show the extent of the fight it has on its hands – the Candlelight Party won just over 20 per cent of votes as the CPP prevailed in a landslide, claiming 73 per cent of the overall tally.

Even a similar performance in July, though, would leave Cambodia with something it hasn’t had for five years – an actual opposition in parliament.

As Chhay well knows, anything could happen between now and then, but with his houses or not he has vowed to press on.

“I survived the Khmer Rouge, I left Cambodia for Australia in 1980, and I told myself that I would find a way to return and do something for the country,” he said.

“I cannot abandon what I have done. Especially when you try and convince people that democracy is good for [them], when we’ve been through a very difficult time, you cannot run away from it. It’s still my responsibility.

“I have a good life in Australia and my mother always said, ‘Are you crazy to come back here?’ She’s 91-years-old now. But life is very short, and I am happy to spend the rest of my life doing good for the people.”

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