Indigenous woman who has been involved in struggles to retain her community's land since the mid-2000s, in rice cultivation field in Northern Cambodia. Author's pic.
This article is part of a series on ‘confronting authoritarian
populism and the rural world’, and linked to the Emancipatory Rural Politics
Initiative (ERPI). The
article opening the series can be read here.
In Cambodia, political violence in the run-up to
the 2018 general election signals a move away from an explicitly populist
authoritarianism towards a deeper authoritarianism. Cambodia burst onto global
news headlines in late 2017 when the Supreme Court dissolved the main
opposition party, but behind this political spectacle lay a series of smaller
legal changes, political violence and geopolitical shifts that set the stage
for the turn to deeper authoritarian rule.
Cambodia’s brand of populist authoritarianism
For more than thirty years, the world’s longest
serving Prime Minister has been the archetypal populist strongman. He and his
party (the Cambodian People’s Party, or CPP) combine terror and censorship with
personalised political handouts, promises of post-war stability, and a veneer
of democracy.
CCP leader President Hun Sen election banner in the 2013 elections.
This regime depends on funds channelled through networks
of political and business elite who are awarded land and mineral concessions in
return for donations to the ruling party. At the same time
as rural areas have become ‘sacrifice zones’ for the enrichment
of domestic and international elite, rural voters have long been the
most consistent and reliable supporters of Hun Sen’s government. In Cambodia’s
post-genocidal context, many rural people crave the stability and the ‘gift
giving’ that Hun Sen’s regime has provided.
In Cambodia’s post-genocidal context, many rural
people crave the stability and the ‘gift giving’ that Hun Sen’s regime has
provided. This has allowed the party to marginalize opposition and build an
elaborate system of mass patronage and mobilization.
Opposition party election rally, 2013. Authors' pic.
But in the past decade, land grabbing and logging
have had serious impacts and rural people have become more outspoken and
connected with disaffected urban voters. The 2013 national election was the
ruling party’s worst outcome since 1998, with a united
opposition (the CNRP) winning 44% of the vote. Strikes erupted in the aftermath
of the election and persisted for half the year until military police shot dead
five protesters. Then, in the June 2017 sub-national (‘Commune’) elections, the CNRP shocked the ruling party
by winning almost half the popular vote and gaining 482
commune seats, up from a mere 40 seats in the previous election. This was a
wake-up call that the CPP were at risk of being unseated in the 2018 National
Election.
Authoritarianism sheds its populist skin in rural areas
After the commune elections, the ruling party
stepped-up press censorship, extra-judicial violence and threats of military
intervention. A series of quiet law changes have facilitated the
criminalisation of civil society and political opposition.
The Law on NGOs and Associations limits the ability
for people to gather without registering with the Ministry of Interior and
increases surveillance of NGOs. Amendments to the Law on Political Parties led
to the resignation of long-time leader of
the opposition, Sam Rainsy, in February 2017. Further legal moves
that year introduced legislation that
allowed the government to easily disband political parties, which was used to
shut down the main opposition party eight months later. The media is also targeted; changes to the
national media code enabled the government to shut down 19 independent radio
stations as well as the long-running newspaper The Cambodia Daily. A series of quiet
law changes have facilitated the criminalisation of civil society and political
opposition.
By late 2017, with critical media outlets silenced
and activists fearful of open protests, the way was opened for the government
to launch an outright attack on the political opposition. Just after midnight
on Sunday 3 September (the day before shutting the Daily), over one
hundred armed soldiers broke into CNRP leader Kem Sokha’s
house and detained him without warning. He was later
charged with treason.
In November, the Supreme Court dissolved the
opposition party, re-assigning its seats and banning 118 individuals from political
activities for five years. In February 2018, the National Assembly passed Thai-style Lèse majesté laws that forbid insults to the monarchy,
along with a series of vague changes to the Cambodian Constitution, including a
change that would allow the permanent removal of voting rights for convicted
felons.
As the CPP close media outlets and attack
opposition parties, they are also bolstering their own propaganda machine. The Phnom
Penh Post was slapped with a phony tax bill and sold off in May 2018 to a
CPP-aligned businessman who has claimed full editorial
approval, causing the editor in chief and key journalists to quit to maintain
integrity.
The state news app, “Fresh News”, spreads pro-government propaganda across
Facebook and other state-run media. New pro-government research
institutions, a ‘spy school’ to develop surveillance
technologies, and the creation of an inter-ministerial working group to produce
anti-opposition propaganda are being used to justify state violence.
Cambodia has been emboldened by the rise of China’s infrastructural support outflanking western
donor funds to Cambodia, and Trump’s near-total disengagement
on Southeast Asia, coupled with his own attacks on US media. Hun Sen
has seized upon people’s latent anti-western sentiment, aggressively deploying ‘us/them’
rhetoric to draw suspicion over the opposition party and western-funded
media and NGOs.
Rural people left in the dark
What we see in Cambodia currently is the failure of
a populism built on the backs of natural resource rents. Support for the
government has broken down as the population grows tired of naked resource
extraction, cronyism and inequality.
House on Economic Land Concession land that soldiers have threatened to burn down. Author's pic.
We won’t know until the July 2018 elections and its aftermath whether
this radical redrawing of the Cambodian political landscape is a short-term
crackdown prior to the 2018 election, or a ‘new normal’ of naked
authoritarianism.
We do know that what is happening is truly bad. In late 2017, we interviewed
fifteen journalists who work with rural communities. They told us
repeatedly about the pervasive loss people are experiencing in the wake of the
crackdown: loss of media’s potential to hold the political elite accountable;
loss of rural people’s voice; and loss of hope for rural social movements.
Journalists were especially critical of what is left: social media platforms
that authoritarian actors can easily co-opt to reshape what is considered
‘news’. From the journalists’ vantage point, the closure of independent media
has left rural people “in the dark… their voice is lost”.
However, rural activists and networks of farmers
throughout the Cambodian countryside are resilient and creative; they show that
there is potential for things to be otherwise. The darkness is not total.