🇰🇭 Lights out in Cambodia

Hello friends!

Here’s an update from the Mekong region bar Thailand. I underestimated how juicy and well-covered/analysed the immediate post-election weeks would be, so we shall revisit there on Thursday for an update. 

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See you Thursday for a look at the maritime states.

Erin Cook

🇰🇭 Snuffed

It’s official — the Candlelight Party will not be able to challenge the ruling Cambodian People’s Party in the July election. Seasoned watchers saw the writing on the wall weeks ago when the National Election Committee refused to register the party, citing the need for paperwork believed to have been seized by authorities more than a decade ago. The party appealed the ruling to the Constitutional Court but with the judiciary so closely linked to the political elite it was always going to be a non-starter. 

“​​Democracy is dead in Cambodia. That’s how I feel,” Candlelight Party chief Teav Vannol told Al Jazeera. 

Prime Minister Hun Sen doesn’t buy the lost paperwork story and suggested party leadership might have an ulterior motive: “Their purpose, which I analyse here, is that they do not want this party [Candlelight] to participate in this election because they know it will lose. But what they really want is for the foreigners to put pressure on Cambodia,” he told a meeting of garment workers in Phnom Penh last week, as per CamboJA.

Foreign interference concerns are increasingly common in Hun Sen’s recent public speeches. He blamed pressure from foreign governments for his unwillingness to pursue a pardon for political arch-enemy and opposition figure Kem Sokha.

“I was about to ask the King and the court to pardon and release Sokha, but I could not do so because of some untrustworthy foreign diplomats who always shake my hands but meet and invite Sokha to visit their embassies secretly. I do not trust diplomats who insult me or the sovereignty of the country,” he said last Monday as per the Diplomat via the Khmer Times. 

Sebastian Strangio puts this fear in a greater context of Hun Sen’s rule and Cambodia’s post-Khmer Rouge political history: ‘Allegations of foreign interference have long occupied a privileged place in Hun Sen’s rhetorical arsenal. Since the United Nations peacekeeping mission of the early 1990s, Hun Sen has viewed Western democracy promotion efforts less as a form of good-faith advocacy than as an attempt actively to interfere in Cambodian politics and weaken the CPP’s hold on power. This, in turn, has been used as a pretext to crack down on opposition parties and civil society groups.’ 

The bottom line in Strangio’s fantastic piece lays it out well. Given there is now no serious challenge to the Cambodian People’s Party in the July election, that Hun Sen will still frequently lash out at Western observers and diplomats speak to the depths of his feelings on this. 

Elsewhere, the very tough Chhim Sithar, leader of the Labour Rights Supported Union (LRSU) of Khmer Employees of NagaWorld, has been jailed for two years after being found guilty of incitement by a Phnom Penh court. “From the very start of the casino workers’ strike, the Cambodian government has sided with NagaWorld management to persecute Chhim Sithar and the union’s leaders and crush the strike. Instead of respecting workers’ rights to freedom of association, bargain collectively, and strike, the government has used every repressive trick in the book to intimidate their union,” Human Rights Watch’s Phil Robertson told Al Jazeera. 

🇲🇲 Trouble in the neighbourhood

A very interesting one from Irrawaddy as I’m readying to send this one off today. Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang visited Naypyitaw at the start of the month, meeting with various military leaders. It’s sparked a wave of anti-Chinese government protests across the country, with protestors demanding Beijing stops supporting the military regime. Expats from Myanmar held similar demonstrations at the Chinese embassy in London earlier in the month. 

And on the other side of Myanmar’s squeeze, a new United Nations report has identified 22 arms dealers who have equipped the military with weapons since the Feb. 1, 2021 coup. “India should therefore be aware that the arms it provides to the Myanmar military — though relatively limited — are likely to be used in the commission of international crime,” the report wrote, as per DW. 

Russia, China and Singapore remain the top suppliers. “That's because sanctions are not being adequately enforced and because arms dealers linked to the junta have been able to create shell companies to avoid them,”  Tom Andrews, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, told DW. 

Rapper Byu Har was detained last week after posting a video on Facebook in which he criticised rolling blackouts. The minister for electricity is a “fool” and “incompetent,” the rapper said in the video according to BBC. “During the past five years under the old lady, we had 24 hours of electricity, not only that, the electricity bill was [going] down,” he added. ‘It is unclear where Byu Har is being held or what condition he is in,’ BBC reported. 

🇻🇳 Anti-State Propaganda Bae

Another person has been convicted for making a fairly tame criticism of the Vietnamese state online. Peter Lam Bui, a noodle vendor from Da Nang, has been jailed for his viral video in which he mimicked Salt Bae shortly after the Minister for Public Security was busted for going to the meme-chef’s absurdly expensive restaurant in London. Lam was found guilty of spreading anti-state propaganda although he says he merely “expressed his personal viewpoint and exercised his right to freedom of speech.” 

More economic news for Vietnam. Energy imports increased in the first quarter of the year while exports fell. Get used to it, for now at least. “We think that easing global growth, including a fading recovery momentum in China, mean that the depressing outlook for Vietnam’s exports has further to run, casting clouds over the prospect of any rebound in GDP growth,” Oxford Economics said in a note on Monday as it cut its annual GDP growth forecast from 4.2% down to 3.0%. Oof. 

Yeah, whatever. Hanoi will be sticking to the 6.5% expectations thanks, Deputy Prime Minister Tran Luu Quang told Nikkei’s Future of Asia forum last week. “We are accelerating investment to the public sector ... to compensate for some of the areas the private sector can't cover,” he said, adding that the government expects to see these programmes pay off in the second half of the year. Choppy seas and hand-wringing headlines ahead! 

🇱🇦 Welcome to the podium

Bless the Future of Asia forum! Here’s Laotian President Thongloun Sisoulith in one of the very few international addresses I’ve seen him make since becoming president back in 2021. It is of the fire and brimstone variety. 

While he declined to name any particular conflict, he warned that flashpoints around the world “have the potential to escalate into large-scale wars.” Conflict is something Laos knows far too much about and it has made Vientiane “deeply appreciate the value of peace and national independence.” While Thongloun touched briefly on Laos’ chairmanship of Asean next year, he didn’t get into his own country or its current economic predicament, which is a bit of a disappointment to me.