Abstract
‘That which is beautiful is often taken away,’ goes an old Cambodian proverb, rooted in the country’s Theravada Buddhist tradition. It is a reference – a sort of Schadenfreude – to the jealousy and envy that drives peers to cut each other down.
Lawlessness and factionalism have also propped up ‘rule of the gun’ rather than rule of law
In some ways, the saying reflects the lack of freedom and the mindset of powerful officials who silence critics in a country that continues to be steeped in the consequences of genocide and civil war from two decades ago. In the 1990s, the Khmer poet Tararith Kho, touched on this motif in his first poem, describing a sprouting convolvulus, cut off as it struggles to reach the water surface to blossom.
In many ways, Kho was, and continues to be, in a good position to make the observation. Growing up near the Thai–Cambodian border in the 1980s, the poet became accustomed to the gun-slinging and civil war that warped his country.
Born one year before the genocidal Khmer Rouge took power in 1975, the writer and poet attended an elementary school with no books and no pencils. Then, while sitting with a group of villagers in a cave, he had an epiphany. He learned for the first time, from a Voice of America radio broadcast, of the fighting between Vietnamese-backed forces and the various guerrilla factions in the West. Many of his friends took up arms in a legion of so-called ‘freedom fighters’.
Kho, who in high school was inspired by the father of Khmer poetry, Krom Ngoy, thought he could better contribute to his country’s reconstruction with the pen. In 2002, he helped start the Nou Hach Literary Journal, a collective that publishes poetry and stories and promotes the work of Cambodian writers.
But when his penmanship attracted death threats by phone and email, the rising star fled his homeland in 2010 for the US, where he took a position as a Scholars at Risk Fellow at Harvard University. ‘Freedom of speech inside Cambodia is truly limited,’ he told Index. ‘Only those whose works promote the government can sometimes receive funding and other support.’
This is a tragedy that writers like Kho are struggling against, after decades of strife left many of its artists and intellectuals dead, its education system corrupt and in tatters, and a single political party (aligned with a number of powerful business tycoons) consolidating power and doing what they could to squash free expression.
ABOVE: Schoolchildren look at A History of Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1979), a textbook about the Cambodian genocide, Phnon Penh, February 2009. Under the Khmer Rouge’s rule, anybody who showed signs of affluence or education faced a death sentence
Credit: Chor Sokunthea/Reuters
It wasn’t always like this. French colonials once called Phnom Penh the charming and pastoral ‘pearl of Asia’, but the largely rural kingdom fell into chaos. The gradual encroachment of the Vietnam War during the 1960s, followed by a devastating American bombing that killed an estimated 200,000 people in the northeast, only set up the country for what was to come.
In April 1975, Khmer Rouge forces advanced into the capital, turning back the clock to what they called ‘Year Zero’, evacuating cities and starting a rural revolution of the peasantry. Over the next three and a half years, anybody who showed signs of affluence or education – writers, professors, doctors, bankers – was put to death. The lucky ones escaped to Thai refugee camps. In all, almost two million people, or about a quarter of the population, were executed or died from starvation, disease or overwork.
The catastrophe left the society broken, even after invading Vietnamese forces ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979. Installing a socialist government into power, they continued to fight a civil war against soldiers who fled to the Thai border.
From 1992 to 1993, United Nations peacekeepers remained in Cambodia for 19 months in what was the most expensive peacekeeping operation ever at the time. The adventurism was, unfortunately, a failed experiment in building democracy. Following an election that handed the prime ministership to opposition leader Prince Norodom Ranariddh, the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) led by Hun Sen refused to release its grip on power. The two sides agreed to have two prime ministers, but, in 1997, Hun Sen overthrew his royal counterpart.
Today, the overwhelming presence of Hun Sen’s personality cult, along with his party’s moneyed patronage networks in every arm of society, continues to stunt free expression. Lawlessness and factionalism have also propped up ‘rule of the gun’ rather than rule of law. Since 1992, ten journalists have been killed in Cambodia, and none of the cases has been resolved as of 2013. Nearly all of them were covering politics and corruption at the time of their deaths, says the Committee to Protect Journalists.
On the other hand, Cambodians generally enjoy greater speech freedoms than their counterparts in the country’s nominally communist neighbour Vietnam, where bloggers and pro-democracy activists are regularly imprisoned on charges of harming national security in their writings. In Thailand, too, several dissidents have been imprisoned since the mid-2000s for the slightest criticisms of the monarchy – a reality that hasn’t quite taken hold in Cambodia, also home to a titular king. Unlike Vietnam, Thailand or Burma, Cambodia has not established a strong system of party or military control over speech.
In an interview with Index, Minister of Information Khieu Kanharith defended the country’s press laws, saying that all those who commit ‘misdeeds in journalism’ – libel, slander, incitement – must be charged first under the 1995 Press Law, which allows plaintiffs to sue for reporting that harms their ‘honour’, regardless of truth. While not ideal, it offers them some protection, since the plaintiffs must go through that law before trying to imprison dissidents using the penal code – which lays out criminal defamation guidelines.
Rights groups often retort that, while Cambodia maintains slightly better speech laws than its neighbours, it reneges on upholding them. When activists bring international attention to issues that the government considers particularly sensitive, the police don’t hesitate to strike them down.
In mid-March 2013, law enforcement launched its latest assault on demonstrators – in this instance, police attacked a group gathered at a park outside the prime minister’s mansion, injuring three of them. They were calling for the release of Yorm Bopha, an activist who led the fight against the eviction of some 3500 households near Boeung Kak – a once-iconic lake in the city centre that, since 2008, has been filled with sand to make way for a high-rise development.
Bopha was sentenced to three years in prison in December 2012 for her alleged role in the beating of a suspected thief, although critics say her arrest is politically convenient.
Because government officials are trying to protect their lucrative business deals from public scrutiny, “land grabs and the illegal timber trade are two common pegs for free speech crackdowns”. They are also used as excuses to jail dissidents who aren’t really involved. In July 2012, Prime Minister Hun Sen accused an opposition radio broadcaster, Mom Sonando, of plotting a bizarre secessionist movement in the remote northeastern province of Kratie – even though he was on a trip to Switzerland at the time. Months earlier, a 14-year-old girl had been killed when police raided homes during a violent eviction. On 15 March 2013, the opposition-aligned pundit was sentenced to 20 years in prison, but an appeals court – to the surprise of many – quashed the secessionism charge. He was released, but given a suspended sentence of four years and four months.
It is an ongoing struggle that reveals that Cambodians, far from being the timid, quiet Buddhists they are stereotyped to be, are actively pushing for change against the domination of party leaders and ruthless business tycoons. For writers like Kho, who once meditated in his poetry on that water convolvulus, it shows that the powerless – even in the face of danger – are willing to push back against the elites who hope to suppress them for their own gain.