PHNOM PENH – On a wet afternoon several dozen activists keep watch outside the offices in Phnom Penh of the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), the main opposition group. For six weeks Kem Sokha, the party's vice president, has been holed up inside — sleeping in an office and daring authorities loyal to Hun Sen, prime minister for 31 years, to come and get him.
One supporter says he is there to act as an observer, should the government make a move; he thinks plainclothes police officers are lurking a little way down the street.
The standoff is the latest chapter in a strange saga that started in March, when recordings of flirtatious telephone conversations, purportedly between Kem Sokha and his hairdresser, were leaked online. The courts say he has failed to comply with a summons for questioning in connection with the case.
The details are murky, but the ruling Cambodia People's Party (CPP) has suggested that the tapes implicate the opposition politician in soliciting a prostitute. The hairdresser is suing him for $300,000, which she claims he promised to give her. Separately, a social-media starlet and once-vocal opposition supporter claims she was defamed by criticism of her heard on the tapes.
Several foreign ambassadors have trekked to Kem Sokha's hideout, embarrassing the government. Perhaps the CPP was hoping to drive Kem Sokha into exile, along with the CNRP leader, Sam Rainsy, who did not return from a foreign trip in November after authorities said he might be made to serve a two-year jail sentence for defamation dating to 2011. The case hinges around a speech in 2008 in which Sam Rainsy claimed that the then-foreign minister had colluded with the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime (which the ex-minister denies); many thought Sam Rainsy had been pardoned.
The legal troubles of Sam Rainsy and Kem Sokha look like being part of a wave of politically motivated prosecutions to neuter the opposition ahead of local elections next year and a national vote in 2018. At least 20 opposition MPs, members and supporters are behind bars on various charges — all of them arrested or convicted within the past 12 months. Three of them are serving 20-year sentences.
In April, four people working for Adhoc, a local human-rights charity, were imprisoned, too. They are accused of trying to influence the testimony of the hairdresser, to whom they had offered legal advice and some financial support. Naly Pilorge of Licadho, another human-rights group, says the crackdown has been uncommonly swift and broad.
All this highlights the collapse of a truce struck by Cambodia's two main parties in the middle of 2014. Back then the CNRP agreed to end a boycott of parliament and to wind down large protests that had erupted after a fairly narrow victory won by the CPP in an election the previous year. The opposition was promised seats on the election commission, which had long looked like an arm of the ruling party. Recent proceedings against a member of the newly reformed commission may be an attempt to recapture it for the government.
