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Later, in a speech near Prey Lang forest, Rainsy declared that “the
yuon
are taking the
Khmer land to kill the Khmer people.”
4
Rainsy's political schizophrenia was mirrored within the CNRP itself, which tried sim-
ultaneously to court Cambodian voters, NGOs, foreign donor governments, and the dia-
spora Cambodians whose donations kept the party afloat. The result was a policy grab-
bag which included scattered pledges to end corruption, boost wages, put Hun Sen on trial
at the Hague, and clamp down on the Vietnamese. Policies were cased in the language
of human rights and of nationalism. Some were clearly beyond the realms of possibility;
others were contradictory. The imperative of short-term alliance-building preceded any
clear notion of how many of these policies were to be achieved in practice.
The CNRP encompassed a similarly wide range of political traditions. Figures like Mu
Sochua, who rose to prominence during her legal spat with Hun Sen in 2009, represen-
ted what might be termed the “Berkeley wing” of the party—educated abroad, urbane,
progressive, antiracist. But many others in the CNRP still clung to the anti-Vietnamese
resistance dogmas of the 1980s, believing Hun Sen's government to be illegitimate by
definition, a “puppet” administration beyond electoral redemption. In June 2014, during
a speech at Wat Sammaki Reangsey, Kem Sokha went so far as to blame Vietnam for the
bridge stampede at Diamond Island (Koh Pich) which killed 353 people and injured many
hundreds more during the 2010 Water Festival. “They created the scene to kill Khmers at
Koh Pich,” he said.
5
In this way, politicians like Sam Rainsy and Kem Sokha simply mirrored the uncom-
promising attitude of the CPP. Like successions of Cambodian parties and regimes, each
party saw itself as the exclusive embodiment of the national interest, standing against the
forces of chaos and foreign infiltration—a stance that justified any political backflip, any
inversion of principle.
Hun Sen's opponants, too, knew the art of the mirage. Since UNTAC, the language of
democracy had been a passport to international support. Whatever their degree of person-
al conviction, activists and politicians had learnt to speak the language of their foreign
patrons. But when Cambodians took to the streets in 2013 and 2014, few of them did so
in the name of abstract ideals. Most focused on concrete issues of social and economic
justice: higher wages, better working conditions, an end to evictions, the release of protest
leaders. The language of democracy and the calls for UN intervention coexisted with the
usual myths and narratives of Cambodian politics: the appeals to outside powers, the in-
verse fear of outside domination.
In December 2013, when Ou Virak of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights con-
demned the CNRP's use of racial rhetoric, he received death threats on Facebook from
web users who branded him a “
yuon
.” The reaction to his remarks showed that there was
nothing inevitable about Cambodia's transition. While the internet helped disseminate the
