Political prince submits to Hun Sen

PHNOM PENH: With Cambodia’s opposition warning of the imminent death of its democracy, the historic rival who once beat Prime Minister Hun Sen in an election said there was no option but to work with the strongman.

Seventy-three-year-old Prince Norodom Ranariddh (pic), Hun

Sen’s opponent in UN-supervised elections in 1993, has horrified Cambodia’s main opposition party with a call for it to be dissolved after its leader was charged with treason.

Ranariddh’s career exemplifies not only the swings in Cambodian politics, but also the way Hun Sen, 65, has used force and cunning to neutralise enemies since defecting from the gen- ocidal Khmer Rouge in the 1970s to help drive it from power.

“Samdech Hun Sen, you want or you don’t want, you like him or you don’t like him, he brings about this national unity,” Ranariddh said, using the prime minister’s formal title.

“According to the law you are not allowed to harm national unity,” the white haired Ranariddh said on Saturday.

Beside him, four aides nodded and pressed together their palms in deferential emphasis.

Ranariddh’s royalist Funcinpec party won no parliamentary seats in 2013 elections, but would be allocated most of those held by the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) if it is dissolved after the arrest of leader Kem Sokha last month.

Alongside the government, Funcinpec has sought a ban on the CNRP because of the arrest.

Kem Sokha and his party dismiss the charges against him as bogus and an attempt to extend Hun Sen’s 32-year rule at the head of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) amid the biggest crackdown on critics of the prime minister in years.

“The prince failed his people when he had the mandate to bring real peace,” said Mu Sochua, a deputy to Kem Sokha who recently fled to exile in fear of arrest.

Although the United States and other Western countries helped secure Ranariddh’s return to Cambodia in the 1990s, he dismissed their criticism of Kem Sokha’s arrest and calls on the government to stop moves to ban the CNRP. — Reuters