Cambodia’s most important opposition party is protesting outside the US embassy for publishing praise for the son of the country’s long-ruling prime minister ahead of this weekend’s local elections. The embassy doesn’t delete the post on Facebook.
Tuesday’s post honored the primary Cambodian student to graduate from the distinguished U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. She quoted recent graduate Vithyea Phann, 23, who described Prime Minister Hun Sen’s powerful eldest son as “certainly one of my biggest idols.”
This caused dissatisfaction within the opposition Cambodia National Salvation Party, which can compete with Hun Sen’s party for local government seats across the country on Sunday. The vote is a guiding think about national politics ahead of the 2018 general election, wherein Hun Sen seeks to take care of his three-decade dominance.
“An example of US failures. The United States promotes Cambodia’s ruling elites who don’t share American values and interests,” opposition party spokeswoman Monovithya Kem wrote on Twitter together with a link to the Facebook post. It showed Vithyea Phanna in a white military uniform.
Alicia Edwards, a spokeswoman for East Asia and the Pacific Affairs on the State Department, said the United States was “strictly impartial and doesn’t endorse candidates in any country’s elections.”
She added that the embassy’s social media content reflects the strong ties between the United States and the Cambodian people.
Hun Sen has been prime minister since 1985. In a protracted profession that included a brutal 1997 coup that overthrew his co-prime minister, he used a mixture of deception and brute force to crush his political rivals, destroying the power-sharing arrangement. His iron grip on power showed cracks throughout the last national election 4 years ago, when the opposition made significant gains despite accusations of voting irregularities in favor of his ruling party.
Hun Sen has stepped up threats ahead of Sunday’s vote, repeatedly warning of civil war if his Cambodian People’s Party loses. At an election rally within the capital Phnom Penh on Friday, he said opposition parties would face dissolution in the event that they contested the election results. Last month, Cambodia’s defense minister threatened to “knock out the teeth” of anyone who protested the ruling party’s victory.
Western governments and US lawmakers have criticized the threats. When the campaign launched two weeks ago, the State Department insisted that the Cambodian government “guarantee a political space free from threats and intimidation” and respect freedom of speech for all its residents.
Hun Sen has an ambivalent attitude towards Washington. His eldest son, Manet the Hun, widely anticipated to succeed his father, was the primary Cambodian to graduate from the elite military academy at West Point.
Although he serves as a three-star general, Manet the Hun is politically lively. On Thursday, he campaigned for his father’s party in Kampong Cham province near Phnom Penh.
According to certainly one of its officials, the opposition party filed a grievance with the US embassy over the Facebook post, maintaining that it violated US neutrality. However, the embassy didn’t apologize and responded that it couldn’t remove or edit a social media post unless it was factually incorrect. The opposition official requested anonymity resulting from security concerns about discussing the sensitive topic of Hun Sen’s immediate family.
As stated within the post, Vithyea Phann comes from a military family and was originally assigned to work for Hun Manet within the National Counterterrorism Special Forces in Cambodia. Manet the Hun encouraged him to use to the Naval Academy after he did not get into West Point.
John Sifton, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, said the U.S. embassy shouldn’t “rejoice” a member of Cambodia’s politicized military.
“It’s mainly a branch of the ruling party,” Sifton said.
Hun Sen’s party dominated the media and used its control of the judiciary to noticeably weaken opposition parties and civil society ahead of the elections, he said. The opposition desires to overthrow the ruling party’s control over the seats of municipal authorities, i.e. village clusters.
Corruption and political intolerance are rampant in Cambodia. But Hun Sen brought economic growth and relative stability to the Southeast Asian nation devastated by the Khmer Rouge communist dictatorship within the late Seventies, when 1.7 million people died of starvation, disease and executions.
This article appeared within the print edition of the South China Morning Post as: The opposition was furious that the US embassy was praising the prime minister’s son
