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Two separate incidents in the past week in Cambodia–a crackdown on protestors and a scuttling of the minimum wage demands for garment sector workers–are raising serious questions, again, about who the Hun Sen government is out to serve. Not the majority of its electorate, by the looks of it.
Fifteen people, including 10 female land rights activists, three monks and two members of the opposition party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party or CNRP, were arrested in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh last week. Of the 15, the Phnom Penh Municipal Court in a snap trial convicted 10 and sentenced them to a year in prison, according to local news reports.
On Tuesday the U.N. human rights envoy to Cambodia, Surya Subedi, urged the government to respect the law, local newspaper The Cambodia Daily reported.
“It saddens me to see the courts being used again and again as a tool of the executive,” the paper quoted Subedi saying in a statement. “The lack of judicial independence is one of the central obstacles to achieving the just, inclusive society that Cambodians strive for.”
“Those who seek to exercise fundamental freedoms can be arrested, charged and convicted, on little or no material grounds. For such cases, justice in the heavily backlogged judicial system can be remarkably swift,” Subedi said.
This came on the heels of condemnation by Human Rights Watch which called the arrests “politically motivated”.
Brad Adams, Asia Director at Human Rights Watch said in a statement, “The Cambodian government’s latest crackdown on peaceful protest makes a mockery of promises of democratic reform. The country’s donors should publicly condemn this escalating wave of abuse. Failure to speak out will only encourage the ruling party to further close political space and block any hopes for progress toward a genuine multi-party democracy.”
The arrests remind us of a complaint filed by a handful of Cambodian citizens earlier this year in July at the Hague against a group of politicians, security chiefs and business tycoons, alleging that a systematic and sustained land grab by them amounts to a crime against humanity that needs to be tried at the InternationalCriminal Court.
The women who were arrested were residents of the controversial Boeung Kak Lake area. As I reported in a story for Forbes Asia in October, Boeung Kak Lake was once the largest body of water in the city and a scenic spot for villagers, and also served as a main drainage basin for managing Cambodia’s intense monsoons. The government leased the 133-hectare area in 2007 for 99 years to Shukaku, a company owned by Hun Sen cronies- Lao Meng Khin, who is a senator in Hun Sen’s government, and his wife Yeay Phu, for $79 million, or $0.60 a square meter. In 2011 the government approved their plans to build luxury hotels, condos, shopping malls, a hospital, a school and residential and commercial buildings at a cost of $2 billion.
Since then the lake has been mostly filled with sand, and three-quarters of the 4,000 families living around it are gone, evicted, their houses razed or inundated with mud, and drainage in the area blocked–all amid repeated clashes with the police and military.
The women protesting last week, some of whom had been forcefully evicted from Boeung Kak Lake, were arrested when they were protesting outside City Hall the municipality’s failure to relieve severe flooding of their neighborhood. The police deemed the protest demonstration as unauthorized and detained seven women and charged them with obstructing traffic. In a summary trial the next day, November 11, lasting less than three hours, a Phnom Penh court convicted all seven and sentenced them to the maximum penalty of one year in prison and fines of two million riel (approximately $500), according to Human Rights Watch.
When three more women and a monk gathered outside the court to protest these convictions, they too were arrested and charged with aggravated “violent resistance against a public official acting in the discharge of his or her duties.” They too were given a summary trial in a Phnom Penh court and sentenced to one year in prison.
The other incident that also took place last week was related to a hike in minimum wage for the garment sector, negotiations for which had been on for the past several weeks. The government announced an increase of 28% in minimum wage in the garment sector, taking it to $128 a month, instead of the $140 that the workers had demanded, as I had reported.
“Unions campaigned intensely for what they felt was a fair increase given the industry’s revenue and rapidly escalating living costs, particularly in Phnom Penh,” said John Thompson, Senior Analyst at UK-based risk analysis firm, Maplecroft. “While the increase will be a boost to workers’ monthly disposable income, they are likely to continue to struggle to afford basic expenses, as wages barely break the poverty threshold and inflation remains high.”
While the two events aren’t related, they took place in quick succession and the message was clear – the rights of workers and of poor people were disposable.
Taken together, these might fuel afresh tensions between the CNRP – whose electoral base comprises largely of the young, labor class, and the Hun Sen-led Cambodia Peoples Party or CPP which is supported by the business community and the older generation which, current developments not withstanding, still looks up to the party and its leader as the people who managed to free Cambodia from the terrifying reign of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the mid 1970s during which period nearly two million Cambodians were killed. Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge officer, was appointed Cambodia’s prime minister in 1985, a post he has held ever since.
Says Ryan Aherin, senior Asia analyst at Maplecroft, “the tensions over the arrests, combined with the unions’ dissatisfaction with the wage increase, will likely push the CNRP and independent labor unions to coordinate opposition to the government. The dissatisfaction with the lack of democratic reform and wage increase is likely to lead to more strike action backed by the independent unions and CNRP.”
Not the best news for the Cambodian people.
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