A recent series of assassinations of people linked to Cambodia's political opposition, including this week's slaying of a top union leader, has created an atmosphere of fear and sent a message that killers can run free, human rights advocates said.
"I think that the killings here are sending a message of threat," said Pa Nguon Teang, spokesman for the independent Cambodian Center for Human Rights. If nothing changes, "serious human rights violations will happen more and more," he said Friday.
Chea Vichea, who was president of Cambodia's Free Trade Union of Workers and affiliated with the country's main opposition Sam Rainsy Party, was fatally shot Thursday in Phnom Penh.
In October, a reporter for a radio station run by the opposition FUNCINPEC party was gunned down in front of the station, and a popular singer was shot as she left a relative's home in Phnom Penh. She remains in critical condition at a Bangkok hospital.
No arrests have been made in these cases.
A number of activists with the FUNCINPEC and Sam Rainsy parties were also killed in what the parties allege were politically motivated attacks in the run-up to, and after, last July's inconclusive general elections.
A report by the Cambodian Center for Human Rights on acts of political intimidation from November 2002 to November last year says that 15 members of the Sam Rainsy Party were killed, along with nine FUNCINPEC members and four from the ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP).
The opposition parties and the CPP have yet to form a government after months of fruitless negotiations, and the motivations for the attacks remain unclear.
"For some in the ruling party, political killing is the default method for eliminating stubborn but peaceful opponents," Steve Heder, a Cambodian specialist at London's School of Oriental and African Studies, said.
Om Yen Tieng, senior adviser to Prime Minister Hun Sen, said they haven't made any conclusions about the motivation behind the latest killing since the investigation was not finished.
"We want justice," he said in French yesterday. Some cases take longer than others, but "we haven't forgotten the guilty."
The CPP, led by Prime Minister Hun Sen, took power in 1979 after a Vietnamese invasion ousted the ultra-leftist Khmer Rouge, which is suspected of killing 1.7 million Cambodians during its 1975-79 rule.
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