*Watch the full interview here.
In mid-October of this year, I had the opportunity to sit down with Mu Sochua, the Vice-President of Cambodian opposition party the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP). After being forced from Cambodia in 2017, Mu Sochua works from exile. Yet, in the past, she has served as the Cambodian Minister of Women and Veteran’s Affairs from 1998-2004 (the first ever woman to hold the post) and as a Member of Parliament from 2008-2017.
Across our hour-long conversation, Mu Sochua was an impassioned interviewee, often providing deeply detailed, yet incredibly direct responses to my lines of inquiry. What shone clear throughout was an image of a deeply principled individual, someone committed primarily to value-driven political action over accession to political power. These motives have shaped much of her career to date and are clear as she continues to seek to mobilize Cambodians abroad and advocate for large-scale political reform in Cambodia, which today remains, as she puts it, “in the hands of [Hun Sen’s] family”.
Mu Sochua was in Montreal for the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, the 1991 agreement which installed an UN-led government and marked a central turning point in the uneven transition away from the tragic period of Khmer Rouge rule towards new forms of government in Cambodia.
Following the Paris Peace Accords, Cambodia continued to struggle with the deep inequalities and political instability that had troubled the nation prior to the settlement. Yet, to Mu Sochua, this decade “was a honeymoon [period] for freedom, for liberty, [and] for civil society to practice and implement what is enshrined in the constitution of Cambodia and stipulated in the Paris Peace Accords.”
During this period, Mu Sochua served, first as Advisor on Women’s Affairs to the Prime Minister, and, after running for a seat in parliament, as Minister of Women and Veterans Affairs, a position which she used to advocate for a greater understanding of gender rights and gender equality within and beyond the political arena.
Since then, however, much has changed. The murder of prominent trade union leader, Chea Vichea on January 22, 2004, drove Mu Sochua to join hands with then finance minister Sam Rainsy in opposition to Hun Sen’s rule. She states that the pair found common ground in their commitment to a “government clean from corruption, clean from any form of development that put at stake the natural resources of the country”.
While opposition remained largely disjointed throughout the 2000s, the CNRP was formed by the 2012 merger of Mu Sochua and Rainsy’s Sam Rainsy Party with the Human Rights Party of present-day CNRP president Kem Sokha. For Cambodian opposition actors, this merger brought about a newfound cohesion that had previously been hard to come by. The party’s pro-human rights agenda, along with their emphasis on raising living standards for all Cambodians drove support for the party, with the CNRP winning nearly 45% of the vote in their first election in 2013.
Throughout this period, the individual and collective freedoms which Mu Sochua has championed have remained under constant threat. While the government continually waffled over prosecution of Khmer Rouge-era actors throughout the 2000s, dictator Hun Sen was increasingly fast to move against those who threatened what now stands as the second-longest rule of any authoritarian leader anywhere in the world. As he is quoted as saying in 2012, “If anyone is strong enough to try to hold a demonstration, I will beat all those dogs and put them in a cage.” Protest over land and labour rights was frequently met with arrest and violence. Growing restrictions on free speech limited opportunities for individuals to voice their opinion in public spaces.
Regardless, the growing electoral threat from the CNRP was the final straw for Hun Sen. In 2017, after the CNRP won over 5000 local council seats in nation-wide communal elections, the unsettled dictator moved decisively against the party, along with most other forms of critical opposition in the country. The supreme court dissolved the CNRP and filed criminal charges against all of the party’s leadership, leaving many of them to either risk arrest or, like Mu Sochua, flee into exile. Today, Mu Sochua is being tried in absentia for charges related to a supposed CNRP conspiracy to overthrow the government. A maximum sentence of 20 years awaits her should she return to Cambodia.
This repression was coupled with a move against the Khmer independent press. In the same year, Hun Sen oversaw the implementation of a litany of laws that, among other things, criminalized the publication of news that “affects political and social stability” or used one’s “own ideas to make conclusions”. As part of this, the state shut down more than 30 independent radio stations and newspapers. Meanwhile, the largest independent English-language paper in Cambodia, the Phnom Penh Post, was bought out by a party friendly to the regime.
This crackdown has been devastating for Mu Sochua’s CNRP. Unlike in Thailand where efforts to dissolve the popular opposition party, the Future Forward Party, led to a large portion of support shifting to the hastily-formed Move Forward Party, the CNRP have, as of yet, been unable to channel their support towards a new electoral vehicle. In the 2018 national elections, the incumbent Cambodian People’s Party won all 125 seats in parliament, shutting out opposition of any form from parliamentary politics.
In face of this adversity, the CNRP and their leadership have continued to work in pursuit of the same goals from exile. “Although our values remain the same… our strategies need to be modified because we no longer have a presence inside Cambodia, we no longer can go to every village in Cambodia, we no longer can speak to our people face to face.” Her voice cracks as she tells me this, “I miss it a lot…”.
Despite their absence, the CNRP’s continued political sway clearly still weighs on Hun Sen and the CPP leadership. Earlier in 2020, the Cambodian state blocked Mu Sochua, Sam Rainsy, and a delegate of CNRP party members from returning to face trial before the courts, the assemblage making it only as far as the Kuala Lumpur airport before being detained and forced to turn back. Meanwhile in September this year, Hun Sen reportedly crashed a CNRP zoom meeting, reprimanding the group for their continued activities. “I have been listening and have entered to listen many times already”, Hun Sen was said to have told attendees.
Today, Mu Sochua’s work focuses on finding different avenues to rally opposition against Hun Sen, in part through lobbying foreign political actors. She makes clear to me that she is not necessarily only interested in the CNRP’s success—instead, the overarching goal is to find a way to re-introduce free and fair elections and re-open spaces for freedom of speech and political dissent in Cambodia.
Altogether, what stood out most about Mu Sochua was her commitment to the fundamentally liberal values of liberty and free expression and her strong belief in democratic modes of political participation. She recites to me her message to local Canadian-Cambodian CNRP members from their chapter meeting the night previous: “Understand the value of your vote, understand that those who you voted for, no matter who you voted for, it doesn’t matter, once they are in the [Canadian] House of Commons, they serve the people.” Part of this has also been about finding pathways for material support for those in Cambodia as well: she is the founder of Courage Fund Cambodia, a group which helps financially support families of political prisoners in Cambodia.
Ultimately, her optimism for the possibility of continued political pressure to produce change in Cambodia keeps Mu Sochua active. “You cannot wait until the [Cambodian] national spirit is gone because that will be the end. There is a moral obligation to wake up every morning and to say [that there] is a journey ahead, that steps must be taken.”
While it remains uncertain when—and under what conditions—she might be able to return to her home country, she remains committed to these principles of advocacy and democratic engagement as she “roll[s] her suitcase from airport to airport”, one city at a time in order to rally support for freedom and democracy in Cambodia.
As she advises me, “Freedom is a common denominator, a global wish for all. [For] young people to have a future that you can be in control of, that [comes]…through your active engagement in politics.”
Find out more about how to support Mu Sochua and her work at Courage Fund Cambodia here.
