Kem Sokha trial a death blow for Cambodia democracy
samlot chit
Kem Sokha trial a death blow for Cambodia democracy
Cambodian opposition leader Kem Sokha once again will have his day in court as his trial for alleged treason resumed on Wednesday (January 19), more than 52 months after he was first arrested on the charge.
Sokha, 68, was president of the country’s only viable opposition party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), when it was forcibly dissolved in November 2017, only weeks after his arrest.
He faces up to 30 years in jail if found guilty, though most analysts don’t think prison time is likely. More probably, he will be convicted but then swiftly handed a royal pardon by Prime Minister Hun Sen, who wants to resurrect Sokha as a political servitor or force his final resignation from politics.
“I have been waiting for so long for the court to proceed again so that these affairs can be finished,” Sokha told reporters outside the court, according to news agency reports. “Today, I hope the court will decide to drop the charges against me so that we can move forward to national reconciliation.”
Ou Virak, president of the Phnom Penh-based Future Forum think tank, thinks the trial is likely to be a “quick one,” and speculated that the Phnom Penh Municipal Court could give Sokha a suspended sentence, even after convicting him of treason, sparing him a stretch in jail and allowing Hun Sen to negotiate some sort of deal with Sokha.
“I don’t think [Sokha] will be allowed to go back to politics immediately. That will have to come from a political negotiation,” Ou Virak said.
So far, there have been 14 court hearings as part of Sokha’s trial, which started in January 2020 but was postponed two months later when the Covid-19 pandemic began to affect Cambodia.
Then Cambodian opposition leader Kem Sokha is escorted by police from his home in Phnom Penh on September 3, 2017. He was arrested and charged with treason. Photo: AFP
‘Fabricated conspiracy theories’
For the most part, prosecutors have rested their case on insinuations about receiving foreign donations during his time as president of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, a local NGO he founded in 2002 but left five years later to found his own political party.
Prosecutors are also thought to be relying heavily on a videotaped speech Sokha gave in Australia in 2013, in which he appeared to boast about receiving money from Western donors to promote democracy at the same time as referencing coups in the Balkan states.
Sokha’s defense team, who are appealing for all charges to be dropped, say his comments are being wildly taken out of context and appealed in early 2020 for the whole video, not just the prosecutor’s two-minute snippet, to be shown.
The US Ambassador to Phnom Penh, W Patrick Murphy, has called allegations of American involvement “fabricated conspiracy theories.” Washington has pointed out that several US-funded agencies, which were banned in Cambodia in 2017, provided training for the CNRP and the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP).
“The resumption of Kem Sokha’s trial in Phnom Penh after an almost two-year hiatus doesn’t alter the fact that these bogus, politically motivated charges should have never been brought against him in the first place,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch, in a statement.
“This whole charade has been about preventing anyone from using the ballot box to meaningfully contest Hun Sen’s leadership, which is particularly important as commune-level elections are scheduled to be held across the country in mid-2022,” he added.
The CNRP was forcibly dissolved in 2017 by order of the Supreme Court, which accused the opposition group of plotting a US-backed coup. Its 55 parliamentarians were stripped of their seats – and most swiftly fled the country – while the party’s locally-elected posts, which it had won only months earlier at a commune election, were divvied up between smaller political parties.
Hundreds of CNRP activists and campaigners have been jailed or repressed. The ruling CPP, which has been in power since 1979, went on to win all 125 seats in parliament at the 2018 general election, securing its near-monopoly on all political positions.
Supporters of Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) gather in a rally on the last day of the commune election campaign in Phnom Penh on June 2, 2017. Photo: AFP / Tang Chhin Sothy
A compromised court
Few observers believe Sokha will get a fair hearing. Most institutions of the Cambodian state, particularly the judiciary, are deep in the pockets of the ruling party. Dith Munthy, the Supreme Court chief justice who ordered the CNRP’s dissolution, sits on the CPP’s elite Permanent Committee.
Government lawyer Ky Tech, who led the prosecution against Sokha in early 2020 and fought the case for the CNRP’s dissolution, was made a member of the ruling party’s decision-making Central Committee in 2018.
It isn’t clear how long the trial will take now that it has resumed. The government claims it doesn’t interfere in judicial matters. Hun Sen can request a royal pardon for Sokha only after the trial and if the prime minister thinks his release won’t harm national security and public order, government spokesman Phay Siphan told Voice of America this week.
But allowing Sokha to sit in a prison cell won’t serve Hun Sen’s political purposes, analysts say. Most say Hun Sen wants to find a way of re-creating the mirage of democracy in Cambodia, in order to placate Western criticism of his country, at the same time as ensuring an opposition party is never truly capable of mounting a real electoral challenge.
“A pardon would only happen if the benefit of a pardon to Hun Sen was greater than its cost,” said Sophal Ear, associate dean and associate professor at the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University.
“We shall see, but right now, there’s no indication that [Hun Sen] is in a particularly generous mood. In any case, the goal was always to split Kem Sokha and Sam Rainsy,” he added.
“Unless there’s more fire than smoke, I don’t see a pardon coming down the pike.”
Hun Sen needs the Sokha situation to be wrapped up quickly. Cambodia partially lost European Union trade privileges in 2020 because of its democratic-backsliding, and Sokha’s detention was one of Brussels’ reasons.
It now also faces the possible loss of similar zero-tariff privileges with the United States, its largest export market, for similar reasons. Washington ordered a review of Cambodia’s place in its Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) scheme last month.
Prime Minister Hun Sen will steer ASEAN in 2022. Photo: AFP / Tang Chhin Sothy
ASEAN controversy
Neither will Hun Sen want his last year in the international spotlight before his retirement marred by Western complaints about Sokha’s treatment.
Cambodia serves as the rotational chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc this year, which has already started controversially with Hun Sen’s visit earlier this month to Naypyidaw to meet with Myanmar’s ostracized junta leader. Several ASEAN states had lobbied against the visit.
Phnom Penh will play host to dozens of ASEAN-related international gatherings this year, with world leaders arriving for the ASEAN Summit later in the year. Hun Sen will also be expected to represent ASEAN at international summits, including this year’s G-20 meeting.
Last month, the CPP Central Committee voted to name Hun Sen’s eldest son, the de facto military chief Hun Manet, as the party’s prime minister candidate, a long-planned succession that is likely to start after next year’s general election.
Hun Sen will likely want his political rivals decimated before any dynastic handover. That could be achieved if Sam Rainsy is kept isolated in exile and Sokha retires from frontline politics, knowing his liberty rests on Hun Sen’s pardon, which the prime minister could find ways of revoking if Sokha doesn’t follow the script.
The CNRP narrowly lost to the CPP at the 2013 general election and, after a strong showing at local polls in 2017, many thought it could have won the 2018 general election if it had been allowed to compete.
Hun Sen’s goal is to permanently divide the CNRP, which was formed in 2012 by merging Sokha’s party with the eponymous group of Rainsy, the country’s main opposition voice since the early 1990s and who has been in exile since 2015.
The opposition pair, who never exactly saw eye-to-eye when the CNRP was a legal entity, remained on common ground after the party’s dissolution. But massive cracks have appeared in recent months.
Cambodian opposition leaders Sam Rainsy, front left, raises the hand of Kem Sokha in 2014. The relationship between the two has always been fragile, but has now become strained. Photo: AFP / Tang Chhin Sothy
A split in the ranks
In late November, Sokha appeared to distance himself from his long-time opposition colleague Rainsy. “I call on Mr Sam Rainsy and his groups to stop abusing me by using my name and photo in connection with their political ambitions, which confuse the national and international public,” Sokha stated in a Facebook post.
This was likely a reference to allegations that Rainsy was behind the reformation of his old party, the Candlelight Party, that had mostly merged with the CNRP in 2012.
Sokha’s daughter, who occupies key positions in his faction of the now-banned party, publicly lambasted Rainsy for “racism” and “sexism,” and called him a “narcissistic, abusive, gaslighting, sociopathic partner.”
The split, which Rainsy has tried to play down but Sokha hasn’t said anything about since December, would destroy what is left of the CNRP and ensure Hun Sen faces no real political threat. Cambodia’s dozens of smaller parties lack any real support or momentum.
Last year, the Phnom Penh Municipal Court sentenced in absentia Rainsy to 25 years in jail, and Mu Sochua and Eng Chhai Eang, two of the party’s vice-presidents, and six other former party lawmakers, to 22 years. All are in exile and are unlikely to be allowed to return to Cambodia for many years, if ever.