Hun Sen overcame all challengers in Cambodia’s elections in July, including a bid in Washington to unseat him.

In the post-Iraq world order, the Republican Right in Washington relish the idea of "regime change" and expanding the list of governments and regimes they seek to overturn. The country need not be recognizably part of a so-called "axis of evil" with a suspected nuclear capability to become a target. Nobody thinks Hun Sen’s Cambodia has nuclear potential, yet his name is on the list of some senators.

But since October last year, Republican Senator and Chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Mitch McConnell, and his close associates in the International Republican Institute have thrown their considerable political weight and some financial resources behind the election campaign of Cambodian opposition leader Sam Rainsy.

In the run-up to the July 27th election—Cambodia’s third general election since the departure of the UN peacekeeping mission in 1993—McConnell and his chief aide, Paul Grove, called for regime change in a series of editorials in news publications around the world. McConnell announced this past February that only a victory by the "democratic opposition" would be an acceptable result. In June, he and two colleagues introduced the "Cambodia Democracy and Accountability Act", which provides for resuming full foreign assistance to Cambodia, provided that elections are "free and fair" and "that Prime Minister Hun Sen is no longer in power." Insisting that only a defeat for the ruling party is proof of a "free and fair" election is surely a novel definition of democracy.

In spite of voters being constantly reminded by the opposition that voting for Hun Sen will jeopardize US $21.5 million in development aid, the ploy didn’t work. Provisional election results show that the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) still won, with more than 47% of the vote and about 73 seats under a system of proportional representation. Sam Rainsy and his party are expected to end up with 24 seats.

The EU election observer team concluded that the balloting "was a well-conducted election but still a little way to go before Cambodia reaches full democracy."

Some low-level intimidation by village chiefs tarnished what was otherwise a clean election. International and local election observers hailed the process as a further step towards strengthening democracy. Within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) only the Philippines, Thailand and possibly Indonesia after Suharto can boast of stronger democratic roots and institutions.

George Folsom, president of the International Republican Institute (IRI), was less sanguine when he characterized Cambodia as "Zimbabwe on the Mekong." But such scorn ignores that Cambodia’s opposition parties campaigned freely and won a total of 50 seats out of the 123 seat National Assembly; in Zimbabwe, most of the opposition lives in terror or behind bars.

IRI poses as a non-partisan organization that promotes democracy around the globe and trains political parties in all aspects of elections. A casual survey of IRI’s board of directors, however, reads like a Who’s Who of neo-conservative ideologists and longtime supporters of US imperial might, including Senator John McCain, former Ambassador to the UN Jeane Kirkpatrick and Alison Fortier of the Lockheed Martin Missile Defense Program.

The IRI is funded from USAID and taxpayers money via the National Endowment for Democracy but does not represent official US policy. The US State Department and the US Embassy in Phnom Penh have been careful to distance themselves from the more extreme statements of McConnell and the IRI.

In April, an IRI delegation visited Cambodia and concluded, "[a] climate of intimidation and fear pervades the pre-electoral environment" and that "time [is] running out" for radical changes in Cambodia’s electoral machinery. Before a single vote was cast the IRI had pronounced that the election would not be "free and fair." Former UN special representative in Cambodia Benny Widyono commented, "It is clear that for IRI the only free and fair election is [an] election won by the Sam Rainsy Party [SRP]."

The aggressive campaign in Washington against Hun Sen and his victorious CPP and their all-out support for opposition leader Sam Rainsy have less to do with the quality of Cambodia’s fragile democracy, and much more to do with an unfinished cold war agenda.

In 1983, when President Ronald Reagan was waging his global crusade against the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union and IRI was just being launched, Hun Sen was playing a key role in Cambodia’s nation-building efforts after the Khmer Rouge holocaust and was appointed prime minister in 1985.

What the Reaganite Republicans hated most was that regime change which ended the Khmer Rouge genocidal nightmare had been carried out by the "wrong guys": Vietnam. This doubly reminded the Pentagon hawks of their bitter failure not only in Vietnam, but also in Cambodia.

Some of the same right-wing Republicans that are so gung-ho to get rid of Hun Sen today are the same hawks that backed Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the 1980s, in a guerilla war against the Hanoi-backed Phnom Penh government. IRI president Folsom worked at the Pentagon under the Reagan administration.

Sam Rainsy: American Hero?

When Senator McConnell called for regime change in Cambodia it was tacked on to similar calls for Burma. Sam Rainsy was lauded in Washington as the "Aung San Suu Kyi of Cambodia", allegedly hounded and persecuted by a "communist dictator." During an award ceremony in Washington DC in September last year, Senator John McCain presented Rainsy with the IRI-Heritage Freedom Award and paid him fulsome tribute as a "genuine hero for the entire world." The ceremony was jointly sponsored by the rightwing US think-tank the Heritage Foundation, and the IRI, which purported to operate as an impartial observer of the Cambodian election process. Senator McCain happens to be chairman of IRI.

While Rainsy and the neo-conservatives hope to further discredit Cambodian democracy by comparing it with Burma or Zimbabwe, there is a conspicuous lack of support from the rest of the world for such a linkage. Support for Aung San Suu Kyi and the democracy movement in Burma enjoys all-party support in the US, as well as vocal backing from Europe. The obsession to get rid of Hun Sen and endorse Sam Rainsy as the sole light of democracy in Cambodia is not shared by the US Democrat Party, and has no support in the EU or among Asian neighbors. A more sober perspective would accept that although Hun Sen is no great champion of human rights, his authoritarian temperament is not far different from leaders in Malaysia, Thailand or elsewhere in Asean who would never be targeted for regime change.

IRI and Democratic Standards

During the course of this election campaign, the credentials of the IRI and its operations in Cambodia were challenged for the first time. IRI officers have denied showing favoritism towards the Sam Rainsy Party, insisting they are non-partisan and provide training to candidates from all political parties.

But Prince Norodom Rannariddh, president of the outgoing National Assembly, does not share this view. Last November he said, "The truth is IRI manipulates the internal affairs of Funcinpec [the royalist party headed by Rannariddh] in order to entice Funcinpec members to switch to Sam Rainsy." The Cambodia Daily reported that a direct approach was made by an IRI officer to woo one of the royalist party’s most respected members of cabinet, Mu Sochua, Minister for Women’s Affairs.

Last year the IRI held a seminar for Sam Rainsy Party leaders on how to develop their national campaign and IRI’s website made little bones about their allegiances, admitting that "IRI worked closely with SRP." In addition, a recently launched IRI-funded organization, the Cambodian Centre for Human Rights, maintains close links with the SRP.

Personal links between Senator McConnell’s regime-changers in Washington and the IRI operations in Cambodia were less than coincidental. McConnell’s chief of staff, Paul Grove, ran the IRI Cambodia office from 1994 to 1996. Sam Rainsy’s communications chief in the 1997 election, US journalist Rich Garella, took over the same job with IRI in the 2003 election while retaining his membership of the US branch of the Sam Rainsy Party.

Measuring Success

Before the election Hun Sen was becoming increasingly nervous about US senators lobbying against him. The Prime Minister, a renowned chess player, knew exactly how to sacrifice a few pawns to avoid checkmate and moved to improve relations with Washington. Cambodia’s hosting of the Asean and Asean Regional Forum meetings in June provided Hun Sen with opportunities to curry favor with visiting US Secretary of State Colin Powell. A week before Powell’s arrival, Cambodian police detained some alleged Muslim terrorists, signaling Phnom Penh’s support for the US war on international terrorism. In the course of the Hun Sen-Powell meeting, Cambodia agreed to exempt US citizens from being handed over to the world’s first permanent court set up to hear cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Ironically, it was only last April that Cambodia took pride in becoming the first country in Southeast Asia to ratify the establishment of the Rome-based International Criminal Court.

The IRI’s post-election verdict was that the "Cambodian election had fallen short of international standards." Dr Raul Jennar a Belgian political analyst currently working in Phnom Penh queried, "Which international standards are they referring to? If it is the international standard adhered to in Florida during the last US presidential election, then Cambodia comes out well ahead!" Jennar further complained that as election observers, "The IRI clearly does not meet international standards."

Tom Fawthrop is a regular contributor to The Irrawaddy.