Cambodia

Of the major figures from the Indochina Wars of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, there are now very few left. Vo Nguyen Giap, military commander for the People’s Army of Vietnam, is still alive, though over one hundred years old. Some of the wartime leaders from Laos remain alive. A few mid-level figures from the American side are still around, though the senior army and civilian leaders are all gone. On Monday, Beijing time, the biggest figure still alive from that period, former King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, passed away. He had been ill for some time, and was constantly traveling to and from Beijing for hospital care, so this was not a huge surprise. The king also had become less relevant in Cambodia in recent years, handing over the throne to his son Sihamoni, no longer writing his frequent missives in French —and often in a penname— criticizing the government or the general state of affairs in the country, and finding the power of the monarchy curtailed severely by longtime prime minister Hun Sen. Several recent newswire stories actually have portrayed Sihamoni as a kind of prisoner in the royal palace in Phnom Penh, able to do virtually nothing without it being approved by Hun Sen —though, of course, Sihanouk actually was a prisoner in the palace during the 1975-1979 Khmer Rouge period, when he was kept under house arrest and, to Sihanouk’s eternal shame, forced to cook his own food. There are already many obituaries released that describe Sihanouk’s enormous importance and contradictory, even maddening, traits: A deep love for his country combined with a patriarchal view of  “my people” as needing his benevolent guidance always; a skilled political mind that for a time navigated the minefield between the United States, Vietnam, Cambodia’s communists, and China, yet also broke down completely at times, leading Sihanouk to withdraw from public life or be bested, as at the Paris Peace Accords, by men like Hun Sen; a desire to expand education in Cambodia by opening many new schools in the 1950s and 1960s yet a willingness to abandon his countrymen to the grim fate of the Khmer Rouge, which Sihanouk understood to be a coming atrocity, warning his own personal aides not to return to Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and instead remain in France, as Elizabeth Becker has noted. Not noted in many obituaries, however, is one important point. At several times during his reign, Sihanouk made noises about opening Cambodia up to true multi-party democracy, but he never could really do so, preferring instead to keep all parties under the thumb of himself and the royalist establishment. At times, his beneficent monarchical style proved effective —in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, he made many judicious and foresighted decisions for his country. But though he is hardly the only one to blame for Cambodia’s current political state, his inability to ever move beyond his patrician, monarchical, and authoritarian style left a legacy of big man rule that Hun Sen, for years Sihanouk’s antagonist, has readily adopted. Today, in fact, the true heir of Sihanouk is not his son Sihamoni, who sits on a far less valuable throne, but rather Hun Sen, who controls Cambodia the way Sihanouk once did.

Laura Speyer is an intern for Southeast Asian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Just three years ago, Chinese vice president Xi Jinping claimed that “Sino-Cambodian relations are a model of friendly cooperation.” This week, Vice President Xi may have reason to reassess Cambodia’s willingness to “cooperate” with—some might say “obey”—its powerful neighbor. The issue highlighting power dynamics between the two countries is the extradition of Patrick Devillers, a French citizen allegedly involved in the increasingly bizarre imbroglio surrounding Bo Xilai and his wife Gu Kailai, who is suspected of murder. Two things happened on June 13: first, the Cambodian government arrested Mr. Devillers at Beijing’s behest, although the Chinese government did not specify what charges they wished to investigate. Second,  He Guoqiang, a member of China’s powerful Politburo Standing Committee, arrived in Cambodia for a three-day goodwill visit during which he negotiated a series of loans worth $430 million.  There are no official connections between Beijing’s arrest and extradition requests and the generous loan provisions. Still, the Chinese government might have had reason to believe it could trade monetary aid and investment for a few pesky evaders of the Chinese penal system—it has happened before. In December 2009, China requested the extradition of twenty Chinese nationals, members of the Uighur ethnic minority, who had escaped to Cambodia following the July 2009 riots in Urumqi. Amid an international outcry, Cambodia deported all twenty Uighurs, including two infants. Cambodian leaders made the claim that the Chinese nationals had entered Cambodia without the proper documents, and were simply being deported according to Cambodia’s usual policy toward illegal immigrants. One day after the group returned to China, Vice President Xi arrived in Phnom Penh with almost $1 billion of foreign investment, loans and grants. Yet this time around, Phnom Penh seems to be standing up to pressure from its northern neighbor: Cambodian Foreign Minister Hor Namhong said on Friday that “the decision is already made. We’ll keep him here and won’t extradite him anywhere, not to France or China.” China’s extradition treaty with Cambodia gives China sixty days to supply evidence of Mr. Devillers’ alleged crimes, and then gives Cambodia sixty days to respond, so Mr. Devillers’ future is still uncertain, but for the moment it appears that the Cambodian government’s attitude toward China has changed significantly since the Uighur deportation in 2009. One possible reason for the change is that Mr. Devillers is a French citizen. The New York Times coverage of this incident alleges that Cambodian elites still maintain strong ties to their former colonizers, including keeping their financial assets in France, and France has far more sway in Cambodia than the Uighurs or any Uighur organizations. Angering Beijing, on the other hand, could have real consequences for the Cambodian economy. China is reportedly  Cambodia’s biggest investor and aid donor. Chinese companies have invested an estimated $10 billion since 1994, not to mention the $302 million loan package that the Chinese government approved in February, and the most recent grants. Publically refusing a request from such an important economic partner may suggest that Phnom Penh is hoping to compensate for China’s growing regional influence. In the economic sphere, the Cambodian government might be trying to balance China’s clout by developing closer economic ties with its ASEAN partners. One example is trade with neighboring Vietnam, which has nearly doubled over the past several years from $950 million in 2006 to $1.8 billion in 2010, in addition to the $2.2 billion dollars that Vietnamese companies currently have invested in Cambodia. Prior to this incident there have been few indications that the Cambodian government takes issue with China’s increasing influence, either within its own borders or more broadly throughout Southeast Asia.  Cambodia holds the rotating ASEAN chair this year, and there was little serious discussion at the ASEAN meetings in Phnom Penh earlier this year of the South China Sea, even though other ASEAN members, like Vietnam and the Philippines, desired a strong, united ASEAN statement on the issue.  Some Southeast Asian observers have suggested this was because Prime Minister Hun Sen did not want to make the South China Sea a priority at the meetings. Thus far, the official Chinese response to Cambodia’s noncompliance has been fairly muted, particularly when one considers the frequency and enthusiasm with which Beijing reprimands its other neighbors, showing both Beijing’s pragmatism and, perhaps, its comfort with its overall relationship with Hun Sen.

Earlier this week, another of the foreign judges on the Khmer Rouge (KR) tribunal quit: Laurent Kaspar-Ansermet from Switzerland. According to press reports and his own statement, he quit because of continuing interference in the tribunal by his Cambodian counterpart, Judge You Bunleng, who apparently was trying to block the tribunal from investigating and possibly prosecuting any more KR suspects beyond the tiny handful of top leaders already charged. The KR tribunal is going from bad to worse. Another foreign judge, Siegfried Blunt from Germany, quit last fall, making the same allegations of Cambodian justices interfering to stop any new investigations and possible prosecutions of former KR leaders. Of course, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has long been opposed to any more investigations, or really to the concept of the tribunal at all — he has told people that he essentially wanted to bury the KR period and not look back. Although Hun Sen, a former KR cadre, was low-ranking enough that he never would have been touched by the tribunal, he has many allies who conceivably could have been, and he probably just does not like the concept of the tribunal pushing harder into the past of important figures in Cambodia, a precedent he does not want to set for his own government. Hun Sen and other government leaders’ argument that prosecuting more top KR figures would lead to civil war again in Cambodia is utterly ridiculous; after years of destructive war, no Cambodians are interested in more large-scale conflict, and, in any event, Hun Sen has such tight control of the security forces at this point, and of society, that war is impossible. For years, I thought the KR tribunal was still worth it, despite its long delays, despite the fact that Pol Pot died in the jungle without any real trial, despite the possibility that many of the top KR leaders were so old that they would never do any real jail time, and despite the significant expense of the process (paid by foreign donors). It might not cure impunity in Cambodia, but it would make a statement, it would reach a broader audience in Cambodia that had not learned about the Pol Pot era, and it would lead to real, important confessions like those of former jailer Kaing Kek Iev (better known as Duch). But now, with the tribunal becoming ever more of a farce, I’m starting to change my mind.