Potemkin Democracy - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 109

king who would steer clear of politics. Sihamoni inhabited the Royal Palace, but it was
Hun Sen, unbound for the time being by effective opposition, who would rule.
With Sihanouk out of the way and the royalists neutralized, Hun Sen turned his sights on
his last real rival, Sam Rainsy. As the price of its access to lucrative government posi-
tions, Prince Ranariddh had agreed to aid the CPP in its efforts to split and sideline the
SRP. One official described the strategy as “squeezing their membership at the bottom
and scaring their leadership at the top.” By late 2004 the CPP's attention had turned to the
SRP's “shadow” cabinet, which monitored government ministries and collected sensitive
information on their activities. A particular target was Cheam Channy, the SRP's shad-
ow defense minister, whose wide network of military informants was proving a particular
embarrassment for Hun Sen. But while SRP shadow interior minister Ou Bun Long fear-
fully jumped ship to Funcinpec, Channy refused to turn. So Hun Sen's military intelli-
gence chief Mol Roeup cooked up a story that Channy's informants constituted a “secret
army” seeking the overthrow of the government. 63
Rainsy, meanwhile, was being squeezed in the courts. Hun Sen sued him for defama-
tion after Rainsy accused the prime minister of responsibility for the March 1997 grenade
attack, and Ranariddh filed a separate suit challenging claims he had taken bribes to join
the new government. On February 3, 2005, the National Assembly voted to suspend the
parliamentary immunity of both Rainsy and Channy, as well as their party colleague Chea
Poch, who had also accused Ranariddh of pocketing payoffs. Rainsy and Poch fled the
country; Channy was snared and held at a military prison.
The trials that followed were episodes in crude political theater. In August a military
tribunal found Channy guilty of trying to form an “illegal army” to topple the government
and sentenced him to seven years' jail. No evidence was presented tying Channy to the
accusations and he pleaded to the judges that he had “never done anything even close to
what the charges against me say.” 64 Four months later Rainsy himself was found guilty of
criminal defamation and sentenced in absentia to 18 months in prison. From his bolt-hole
in Paris, the SRP leader thundered that Cambodia was becoming “more and more like a
fascist state” and slammed Funcinpec for doing “whatever the CPP tells them.” 65
The attacks on the SRP were accompanied by the opening of a second front against
Cambodian civil society. In October 2005 police arrested Mam Sonando, an independent
radio broadcaster, and Rong Chhun, the head of an independent teachers union. Both
were accused of criticizing a new supplemental border treaty with Vietnam, which, like
its predecessor treaties in the 1980s, had been widely attacked for ceding territory along
the country's eastern border. Three more arrests followed. Yeng Virak, an activist with
the Community Legal Education Center, was detained on New Year's Eve and hauled be-
fore an ashen-faced judge at the municipal court, who fumbled through papers bearing