CNRP tries to balance foreign powers
A heightened global profile for the opposition CNRP since last year’s disputed election has brought with it a new challenge: balancing multiple foreign relations. The party’s campaign to delegitimize the CPP government has taken on multiple faces over the past nine months as opposition leader Sam Rainsy and his deputy, Kem Sokha, have punctuated their domestic appearances with foreign diplomatic trips. At an event in December with the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee chairman in Los Angeles, CNRP Vice President Kem Sokha lauded the U.S. as a beacon of liberal democracy. Mr. Sokha said that he had been “financially supported by the American government for more than five years” in his work promoting democracy in Cambodia. The following month, Mr. Rainsy told a Chinese television station that the opposition had “never received a single dollar from Western powers” and that the opposition party completely supported Chinese territorial claims against Vietnam in the South China Sea. … Carl Thayer, a Southeast Asia expert at the Australian Defense Force Academy in Canberra, said that the opposition’s political opportunism was simply being exposed amid its rising prominence since the CNRP’s surprise gains in the July election. “Sam Rainsy has always played the international community,” Mr. Thayer said. “It’s his backbone against the Hun Sen government. In the past, he’s run off to the E.U. and to the U.N. to back him, and there’s no limit. He is a supreme political opportunist and now sees that China is very important to the Hun Sen regime, and is playing to that.” Mr. Thayer noted that Mr. Rainsy’s attempts to woo China have had at least some impact, pointing to a report critical of Mr. Hun Sen published by China’s state news agency, Xinhua, near the height of the CNRP’s protests in Phnom Penh last year. …
Alex Willemyns
http://www.cambodiadaily.com/news/cnrp-tries-to-balance-foreign-powers-57074/
