At the Bonna Business Center, a tiny Internet cafe near the opulent mansion of Cambodia’s long-
ruling Prime Minister Hun Sen, coffee is served with a big lump of dissatisfaction.
“They talk about seven percent economic growth,” said Ou Rithy, 27, who hosts weekly political discussions at the cafe with other young Cambodians. “But I’m still a poor man.”
He blames Hun Sen’s ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), which won a recent general election widely criticized as rigged, but lost the nation’s heart and soul — its restive, tech-savvy and increasingly outspoken youth.
About 70 percent of Cambodia’s 14 million people are under 30, a demographic whose growing political clout is challenging the country’s aging and corrupt leadership, while breathing life into a once-moribund opposition who have called for the mass protests that began yesterday.
Hun Sen cheated his way to victory in the July 28 election and it has vowed to protest until an independent committee is formed to investigate alleged voting irregularities, the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) said.
Hun Sen has denied the allegations.
According to initial results, the CPP won the election with a greatly reduced majority, revealing widespread unhappiness with Hun Sen’s iron-fisted rule despite rapid economic growth.
CNRP leader Sam Rainsy urged supporters to “pray for peace” at yesterday’s protest, but many fear it could lead to months of political deadlock or even violence. In recent days, thousands of riot police armed with batons and shields have rehearsed crowd control methods in Phnom Penh’s parks.
It is Hun Sen’s biggest crisis in two decades, threatening to destabilize the tiny Southeast Asian nation with strong economic and political ties to China.
Cambodia owes its youthful demographic to its tragic past. Whole generations were wiped out from 1975 to 1979, under the “Killing Fields” regime of the Khmer Rouge, when more than 1 million people were killed or died of disease.
Hun Sen has long hailed himself and the CPP for rescuing the country from the ensuing years of chaos and poverty. However, such appeals increasingly fall flat with young people born long after the Khmer Rouge’s terror ended.
“Young people want social justice, they want jobs, and they want a good education system,” said Ou Rithy, a political science graduate who has watched many peers desert his home province of Pursat to seek work in neighboring Thailand.
Soaring use of smart phones and the Internet have allowed young Cambodians to sidestep the government’s strict control of television, radio and newspapers.
In 2008, when Hun Sen easily won the previous election, only about 70,000 people had access to the Internet, according to government statistics. By last year, that number had soared to 2.7 million, helped by a similarly exponential rise in mobile phones. There are now more cellphones used in Cambodia — 19 million — than there are Cambodians.
Also accelerating communication since the last election is the Khmer-language version of unicode, a computing encoding standard used for different languages and scripts. This allowed Cambodian Internet users to easily write and share information in their own language.
“Even those who don’t speak English can still create Facebook accounts in Khmer,” said But Buntenh, 34, a Buddhist monk and blogger at the Bonna Business Center.
State media routinely ignore opposition rallies. This news blackout encouraged many Cambodians to seek information from social media, usually with just a click on their phones.
Despite its large campaign
budget, the CPP underestimated the frustrations of ordinary Cambodians and the opposition’s growing popularity, president of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights (CCHR) Ou Virak said.
“It wasn’t until shortly before election day that we started to see the impressive level of youth involvement,” he said. “Even then people weren’t sure to what extent this would impact the actual results.”
More than a third of the country’s 9.6 million eligible voters are under 30, although many work abroad and do not cast ballots, the Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia said.
The CPP has limited youth appeal. Hun Sen is 61 and has vowed to rule until he is 74. Its youth wing is widely regarded as a political vehicle for Hun Sen’s youngest son, Hun Many, 30.
The opposition CNRP has a more youthful image, with Koul Kanha, director of the Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia, calling it the
“Facebook party.”
Formed last year after the merger of two parties, the CNRP owed part of its resurgence to social media. Photos and video of alleged election fraud also went viral thanks to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
The government did not attempt to shut down the social network, despite many users posting critical — and sometimes racist and vulgar — remarks about CPP figures.
Hun Sen disavowed a Facebook page bearing his name after Sam Rainsy repeatedly taunted him for having fewer “likes.”
The rise of a youthful opposition to Hun Sen could signal a “Cambodian Spring” similar to the popular but often ill-fated movements against authoritarian rulers in the Arab world, some analysts say.
Ou Rithy disagrees.
“Young people don’t want a revolution, they want evolution — a gradual change based on non-violence,” he said.
Sam Rainsy has accused the CPP of colluding with the National Election Committee to steal 2.3 million votes from his party. He disputes results showing the CPP won 68 seats in parliament to the CNRP’s 55.
Hun Sen has vowed to form a government despite the opposition’s campaign.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
BOMBARDMENT: Moscow sent more than 440 drones and 32 missiles, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, in ‘one of the most terrifying strikes’ on the capital in recent months A nighttime Russian missile and drone bombardment of Ukraine killed at least 15 people and injured 116 while they slept in their homes, local officials said yesterday, with the main barrage centering on the capital, Kyiv. Kyiv City Military Administration head Tymur Tkachenko said 14 people were killed and 99 were injured as explosions echoed across the city for hours during the night. The bombardment demolished a nine-story residential building, destroying dozens of apartments. Emergency workers were at the scene to rescue people from under the rubble. Russia flung more than 440 drones and 32 missiles at Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to visit Canada next week, his first since relations plummeted after the assassination of a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver, triggering diplomatic expulsions and hitting trade. Analysts hope it is a step toward repairing ties that soured in 2023, after then-Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau pointed the finger at New Delhi’s involvement in murdering Hardeep Singh Nijjar, claims India furiously denied. An invitation extended by new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to Modi to attend the G7 leaders summit in Canada offers a chance to “reset” relations, former Indian diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla said. “This is a
RSS