China jails economics professor who highlighted government’s personnel costs

Yang Shaozheng's sentence comes amid allegations of torture from his legal defense team.

By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin
2023.08.31

Former Guizhou University professor Yang Shaozheng was convicted by Chinese authorities of "incitement to subvert state power" in a closed-door trial in July.

A Chinese court on Thursday handed down a four-and-a-half-year jail term to an outspoken economics professor who had estimated the high personnel costs of the Chinese government, finding him guilty of “incitement to subvert state power,” according to rights website.

The Guiyang Intermediate People's Court handed down the sentence to former Guizhou University professor Yang Shaozheng in a trial behind closed doors on July 29, a post on the Weiquanwang rights website said.

"Yang Shaozheng expressed dissatisfaction with the judgment in court and filed an appeal," the group said. "The reason for the appeal was that this was an illegal trial."

Yang's appeal argued that members of the Chinese Communist Party had presided over the case from start to finish, including the investigation, the prosecution and the trial itself.

"The actions he was charged with fell under freedom of speech and expression, and to criminalize a citizen for exercising those rights was a violation of the constitutional right to freedom of expression," the report paraphrased Yang's appeal as saying.

A key member of Yang's defense team, Zhang Lei, declined to comment when contacted by Radio Free Asia, indicating that he was under a lot of pressure from the authorities, while repeated calls to another member of his defense team rang unanswered on Thursday.

Cost to Chinese taxpayers

Yang, 53, lost his job at Guizhou University’s Institute of Economics in November 2017, on the orders of someone "higher up" the government hierarchy, and was subsequently investigated by police amid a purge of outspoken academics and the adoption of President Xi Jinping's personal brand of ideology across higher education.

Hunan-based dissident Chen Siming said an article in which Yang calculated that party and government personnel cost the Chinese taxpayer an estimated 20 trillion yuan (US$2.75 trillion) annually was likely the trigger for his arrest.

"These questions [he was asking] hit home," Chen said in an interview last month. "He was later expelled from Guizhou University, and then secretly arrested. During this period, lawyers and family members weren't allowed to meet with him." 

Yang spent some time on the run in 2019 after being shackled to a chair and interrogated by state security police for eight hours, around the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.

Just before that stint in detention, Yang had criticized a new wave of ideological training being launched in China's colleges and universities.

He was arrested in secret in May 2021 and placed under incommunicado detention for six months on suspicion of "incitement to subvert state power," before being formally arrested and prosecuted. He is currently being held in the Guiyang No. 1 Detention Center.

His lawyers filed an administrative complaint with the Guizhou provincial state prosecutor on March 3, alleging that state security police were trying to force a "confession" from Yang through torture, which caused him to lose consciousness several times and lose some 25 kilograms (55 pounds) in weight.

The complaint said the abuse took place during the six months he was held under "residential surveillance at a designated location," a type of incommunicado detention frequently used to target critics of the ruling Chinese Communist Party in "national security" cases.

A Guizhou-based lecturer who gave only the surname Yu said Yang, whom she counts as a friend, is a "rare" person in today's China.

"I think Yang Shaozheng knows very well what he was bringing down on his own head when he spoke out like that, but he did it anyway," Yu told Radio Free Asia in a recent interview. "He is a politically brave person, which is a rare thing in our society."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

 

Cambodia’s king calls on lawmakers, government to resolve their differences

But analysts and opposition figures doubt they will heed his advice.

By RFA Khmer
2023.08.21

Cambodia’s King Norodom Sihamoni (C) leaves the National Assembly building in Phnom Penh after the opening ceremony of the parliament, Aug. 21, 2023.

 Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP

In an opening speech to Cambodia’s newly elected parliament on Monday, King Norodom Sihamoni called on lawmakers and the government to reconcile their deep divisions, though political commentators and opposition officials say the effort will amount to naught.

The July 23 elections, won by the ruling Cambodian People’s Party in a landslide, have been widely criticized by Western governments and opposition activists within the country because authorities kept the main opposition Candlelight Party from participating on a technicality.

Three days after the election, Prime Minister Hun Sen – who has ruled the country since 1985 – announced he would step down and hand power to his eldest son, army chief Hun Manet. 

The king, who has served as the head of the country’s constitutional monarchy since October 2004, issued a royal message calling on members of the National Assembly and the government to forge national reconciliation and adhere to the four Brahmanical principles of Buddhism.

Norodom Sihamoni said he expected the new government to win the trust of the National Assembly to develop and strengthen the comprehensive social protection system for Cambodian citizens.

A high degree of unity and solidarity would ensure the strong existence of national identity, promote socioeconomic development and boost morality for the harmony of society, the king said. 

“On this great occasion, I wish the 7th National Assembly to run smoothly and carry out its role with a responsible conscience in order to achieve new successes for the common good of the motherland,” the king told the 125 lawmakers, all of whom except five were from the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, or CCP. The others were from Funcinpec led by Prince Norodom Chakravuth, the king’s nephew.

Hun Sen, former National Assembly President Heng Samrin, and Interior Minister Sar Kheng also were in attendance. 

‘Fake’ election 

Political analysts and opposition officials said the king’s speech reflected his view that the country’s political divisions would harm the nation, though the situation would not likely change.

Um Sam An, a senior official from the banned Cambodia National Rescue Party, or CNRP, said the king’s remarks were intended to guide the new government and lawmakers back onto a democratic path for the benefit of society following what he called “fake” elections. 

The CNRP official also said that the king was likely dissatisfied with the leadership of the previous one-party government, which often persecuted dissidents and opposition groups.

“He warned the deputies to be kind and treat the people well,” Um Sam An said, adding that the political crisis in Cambodia has gotten worse with the holding of “fake” elections this year and in 2018.

“So, he understands that democracy and respect for human rights will only get worse in Cambodia,” said Um Sam An.

Hun Sen dissolved the opposition CNRP in 2017 and later prevented the party’s leader, Sam Rainsy, from returning to Cambodia to stand trial on charges that rights groups said were politically motivated.

Political commentator Kim Sok condemned the new government, saying it was born of the fraudulent elections. 

“This illegitimate government and parliament face a huge reaction from the international community, the reaction of the people who will protest around the world,” he said. “And in the face of both economic and social crises, poverty and unemployment will occur. All these crises weaken our country.”

Knowing these prospects, the king has called for national unity, and that is all his authority allows him to do, Kim Sok added.

CCP spokesman Sok Eysan told Radio Free Asia that the king's statement was a general message to people from all walks of life, and not a reference to the new government or the National Assembly. He also said that national unity depended on the attitude of the opposition. 

Patrick Murphy, the U.S. ambassador to Cambodia, who attended the opening of the National Assembly, sent a positive message to the newly elected lawmakers.

“As the new gov’t. begins its tenure, it can restore multi-party democracy, end political convictions, and allow independent media to reopen & function without interference, he tweeted.

Translated by Sokry Sum for RFA Khmer. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

Hun Sen’s legacy: Cambodia as the family business

After 38 years, Cambodia’s leader is handing his son the keys to the family business. Can it survive without him?

By Alex Willemyns for RFA
2023.08.21

Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen waves during a festival in Phnom Penh, Nov. 21, 2018.

 Heng Sinith/AP

After nearly four decades in office, Hun Sen this week steps down as Cambodia’s prime minister. The National Assembly sat for the first time Monday, one day before the new premier is set to be sworn in. On Aug. 22,  he will hand power over to his eldest son, Hun Manet, who was just 8 years old when his father took charge of a communist regime embroiled in a civil war and held afloat, barely, by foreign aid.

The 71-year-old strongman prime minister is bequeathing his son a country that has changed considerably over the course of his reign. Cambodia is on track, by World Bank estimates, to reach upper-middle income status by 2030, but inequality is rampant and poverty remains widespread.

The government Hun Manet, 45, inherits is one where it pays to have powerful parents. His incoming defense minister, Tea Seiha, is the son of his father’s long-serving defense minister, Tea Banh, who was appointed in 1989. His new interior minister, Sar Sokha, too, is taking over from his own father, Sar Kheng, who has held the top security position for 31 years.

It’s a generational change of government taken to its most literal extreme. The new minister of commerce, Cham Nimol, is the daughter of Cham Prasidh, who ran the ministry from 1994 to 2013. The minister in charge of the civil service, meanwhile, is Hun Manet’s younger brother, Hun Many. Control of Cambodia’s central bank is passing from Chea Chanto, in charge since 1998, to his daughter, Chea Serey. 

In fact, almost a quarter of the 125 ruling party candidates who ran in the July 2023 national election are related, according to a recent analysis by the Cambodian Journalists Alliance Association.

The newest government reflects the Cambodia that Hun Sen has built through decades of political violence and institutional control. It is one where absolute poverty has fallen, but where an idealistic system of electoral government created by the United Nations in the 1990s has been transformed into a constellation of family fiefdoms, glued together only by a knack for corruption.

“It is a ‘clanic’ succession; it is a whole clan renewing itself,” Sam Rainsy, Cambodia’s longtime opposition leader, told Radio Free Asia this month. “The regime has become a hereditary dictatorship.”

Then-Foreign Affairs Minister Hun Sen holds a press conference in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, May 31, 1983. Credit: Francis Deron/AFP

Young reformist

A low-level Khmer Rouge military commander who turned on Pol Pot’s regime two years before its 1979 fall, Hun Sen rapidly rose to power in Cambodia’s Hanoi-backed revolutionary regime. 

In 1985, at the age of 33, he became the world’s youngest head of government and set about negotiating an end to the civil war with then-Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the father of Cambodia’s independence.

Viewed as a reformist at the time, Hun Sen bucked the older conservative wing of the regime to reach an agreement with Sihanouk’s shadow government that resulted in the 1991 Paris Peace Agreement and the U.N.-run elections. 

The globally funded nation-building exercise, estimated to have cost in the end more than $20 billion, was meant to instill in Cambodia a vibrant multi-party democratic system, complete with an independent media and a professional civil service.

Instead, a series of power grabs by Hun Sen – particularly a coup d’etat in July 1997 and the crackdown that followed the rise of Cambodia’s united opposition in 2013 – mean those who openly oppose his rule could at best hope for prison or exile overseas.

Smoke from a burning fuel station billows into the sky as a Cambodian family makes its way out of Phnom Penh amid fighting between forces loyal to the two prime ministers, July 6, 1997. Credit: David van der Veen/AFP

After the 1997 coup, U.N. investigators found evidence that at least 40 of Hun Sen’s political rivals had been executed. In ousting his co-prime minister, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, he effectively overturned the results of the 1993 U.N.-run elections that the latter had won.

It would not be until the 2013 election that a viable challenge to his rule would re-emerge, when two long-bickering opposition parties merged into the Cambodia National Rescue Party and almost came to power in an election they said they only lost due to voter fraud. 

Months of demonstrations calling for a new vote followed. When the protests later dovetailed with a nationwide strike of garment workers calling for an increase in their $80 minimum monthly wage, the government responded with violence. Military police shot dead at least five of the workers, injuring and jailing dozens more. 

Hun Sen was once a hope for change but has become “the one who destroyed the political system in Cambodia,” said But Buntenh, a monk who helped lead protests after the disputed 2013 election before fleeing in 2017 amid a crackdown on regime critics.

“I recognize that he contributed to the rebuilding of Cambodia after the genocide, even though that had included him as a commander of the genocide,” But Buntenh, who now lives in Massachussets, told RFA. Hun Sen also was instrumental in the development of the Paris Peace Agreement. 

“That I accept and I appreciate,” he said. “But the people hate him because he took full control and ruled the country with his entire family, and takes Cambodia, as a nation, to belong to his family.”

An injured Cambodian garment worker escapes from riot police in the compound of a Buddhist pagoda in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Nov. 12, 2013. Police fired live ammunition during clashes with protesting garment workers. Credit: AP

Succession, ‘HBO-style’

Maintaining power has required more than just the violent vanquishment of foes. Hun Sen has also had to keep his own party behind him, even when not everybody has seemed on board.

In the end, Hun Sen’s own succession plan required him to cut similar handover deals with Interior Minister Sar Kheng and Defense Minister Tea Banh.

Such an across-the-board generational transfer is necessary, explained Sam Rainsy, given the “dangerous and sensitive situation” of Hun Sen standing down while two powerful ministers with large security forces behind them could still loom over his son.

“Politically speaking, and psychologically speaking, those older officials cannot work under Hun Manet, so they all have to go,” Sam Rainsy said. “And Hun Sen has to find compensation for his colleagues, so he promised they will be replaced by their sons as well.”

Hun Sen’s plan for his son to be his successor required him to cut deals with Interior Minister Sar Kheng and Defense Minister Tea Banh [pictured], who both have large security forces at their disposal. Credit: Heng Sinith/AP file photo

But it also speaks to the fragmented nature of the government Hun Manet is taking over, one in which he lacks even the power to select his own most important cabinet ministers.

“It all resembles a kind of dynastic, corporate handoff,” Sophal Ear, a Cambodia expert at Arizona State University, told RFA. “It’s ‘Succession’ HBO-style, except within a government.” 

The state is me

Though he’s standing down as prime minister, Hun Sen will hold plenty of prime positions, including Senate president, a role that will make him the acting head of state when King Norodom Sihamoni is out of the country. 

“I’m not going anywhere,” Hun Sen noted in an Aug. 3 speech, in which he also warned he could return as prime minister if Hun Manet is endangered. “I’m just not going to be prime minister anymore – but I will still have power, as the president of the ruling party.”

The role of CPP president may have newfound prominence in Cambodia.

As the government-aligned Khmer Times noted in its report on his speech, Hun Sen pledged to respect the independence of the new government but noted their decisions “must not be different from the policy of the party that has made a promise to the electorate.”

In some ways, it’s a reversion to Hun Sen’s roots, as a young revolutionary trained by political minders from Vietnam, where the Communist Party secretary-general runs the show, and the prime minister, as head of government, implements party edicts. 

Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen takes a selfie with a fan during an inauguration ceremony for a Phnom Penh road project, August 3, 2023. Credit: Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP

Stability, but for how long

At the very least, Hun Sen will be able to say he left behind a system of government that has lasted, said Carl Thayer, an emeritus professor at the Australian Defense Force Academy in Canberra and an election observer during the 1993 U.N.-run elections.

“Hun Sen will bequeath to Cambodia the longest-serving and most stable regime since Cambodia attained independence in November 1953,” Thayer said, even if the outgoing premier “also will go down in history as the destroyer of multiparty democracy in Cambodia.”

Hun Manet’s government, he added, will have a chance to “overcome baggage from the past” and forge new policy paths, as it searches for legitimacy. 

Hun Manet, son of Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun, shows his inked finger after voting in Cambodia's general election, in Phnom Penh, July 23, 2023. Credit: Cindy Liu/Reuters

One of the weaknesses of a personalist authoritarian regime is its reliance, at the end of the day, on its central persona. 

Rainsy, the opposition leader, said that while the passing of ministerial fiefdoms from parent to child across the regime this week was meant to shore-up Manet’s position, there are no long-term guarantees.

“As long as Hun Sen is in good health, as long as he can show authority and threaten everybody, then this can last,” he said. “But the very day Hun Sen shows a sign of weakness, the day that his health deteriorates to the point that his authority is not as it is now, Hun Manet will not be able to hold onto his position.” 

The making of Hun Manet

Is the son with a Ph.D. in economics ready to take over for his strongman father?

Jack Adamović Davies for RFA Investigative
2023.08.07

Hun Manet and his wife, Pich Chanmony, gesture during a campaign rally in Phnom Penh on July 21, 2023.

 Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP

Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen, who is stepping down later this month after four decades in power, has often suggested he is the reincarnation of a 16th century king. 

And he occasionally imbues his successor, Hun Manet, with similarly mythical powers. In public speeches and to his biographers, Hun Sen has insisted that blinding light shot out from a centuries-old Banyan tree upon his eldest son’s birth.

“Five hundred people saw the light. That was when Manet was born,” he told the authors of Strongman: The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen in December 1997. 

The anecdote, with its mythic overtones, seems calculated to portray Hun Manet as destined for the same kingly greatness as his father. But, speaking just four months after he ousted his coalition partners in a bloody coup, Hun Sen went on to tell the biographers that not only did he not want his son to walk the same political tightrope as he had, he did not think then-20-year-old Hun Manet would be well suited to it.

“I would like to be the last member of my family who was involved in politics,” Hun Sen is quoted as saying in Strongman. “I would rather see [Manet] working as an assistant to a politician, helping in national reconstruction, and not become a politician himself. … It seems he is interested in study, in research, in making recommendations rather than doing things himself.”

Hun Manet was appointed prime minister by royal decree on Monday and is poised to be sworn in on Aug. 22, following last month’s one-sided election. With the 45-year-old now taking the helm, many Cambodians are wondering what the rare moment of change will mean for the country. He is a trained economist and an experienced general. But as a politician he remains a cipher; and only time will tell whether he has his father’s autocratic tendencies. 

Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen [left] stands with his son, Hun Manet, after graduation ceremonies at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in 1999. Credit: Reuters

‘An innocent guy’

Those who knew Hun Manet as a young man offer accounts not dissimilar to Hun Sen's. They recall a humble and conscientious youth, mild-mannered almost to the point of timidity and determined to carve out a career for himself in development economics.

Hun Manet enrolled at West Point military academy in 1995, the first Cambodian ever to have done so, and one of fewer than 10 non-U.S. students in a class of more than 900. He struggled initially with communicating in English and was bewildered by cultural phenomena such as hazing, he told his father’s biographers in 2003.

Kevin James, who roomed with Hun Manet for two years, described him as a “tolerant individual who, at the time anyway, didn’t have any presumptions about any one person being different from any other.”

They got on so well their first year that they elected to bunk together again in their second, James told RFA.

“I had zero complaints about living with Manet. He was friendly, and a kind and considerate roommate. He didn’t cause any issues, and he tolerated my smoking in the room,” recalled James, who is now a lieutenant colonel in the 101st Airborne Division. “He was an innocent guy with no airs, and this is coming from a guy from rural Pennsylvania – I was occasionally shocked at how innocent he was.”

Having gained a bachelor’s degree in economics, Hun Manet continued his studies at New York University. There, he researched whether Cambodia would benefit from land reform for his 2001 master’s thesis. Back home, meanwhile, his father was beginning to parcel out the country to cronies and foreign investors in the form of economic land concessions. By 2014, according to a lawsuit, such ELCs had displaced 6% of the Cambodian population.

As his father’s government continued to enrich its powerful tycoon class at the expense of the poorest, Hun Manet appeared increasingly interested in learning how the world’s worst off can be lifted out of poverty. He took an internship with the World Bank, during which time he was posted to the Congo, according to a Facebook post by Hun Sen. Afterwards, he moved to the United Kingdom, where he undertook a doctorate at Bristol University. 

“He was an able student, always polite and respectful, and hard-working,” his Ph.D. supervisor, Jonathan Temple, told RFA last year, adding that he expressed a desire to work in development economics. “I did not learn about his family background until his studies were well advanced.”

Hun Sen’s family, including Hun Manet [back, fourth from right] and his wife, Pich Chanmony [back, fifth from right], pose during a visit by the ousted Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and former Thai Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat in Nov. 2009. Credit: Reuters

Family values

If his studies brought Hun Manet geographically and perhaps intellectually far from his family, there was little sign that he left their orbit.  

In his second year at N.Y.U., Hun Manet and his then-teenage siblings spent $550,000 on a four-bedroom house in New York’s Long Island suburb, despite the fact that all were unemployed and their father’s official salary was just $12,000 a year. (In the year 2000 when the purchase took place, the house equaled 1,600 times the average annual Cambodian salary.)

In 2006 Hun Manet married Pich Chanmony, the well-connected daughter of a Labor Ministry secretary of state and minister attached to the prime minister. They would go on to have three children. As with his four siblings, whose spouses are the scions of powerful families, Hun Manet’s marriage reflected a growing dynasty intertwining business, politics and personal life. 

In November 2011, Pich Chanmony and the son of tycoon Choeung Sopheap (whose husband is ruling-party senator Lau Ming Kan) incorporated Phnom Penh Toll Way Co. Ltd. Soon after, the company won the $10.5 million contract to renovate and then collect tolls on Veng Sreng Boulevard. 

A month after toll collection started in November 2015, Hun Sen had announced that the government would buy the company out. Today, Pich Chanmony chairs four companies and is on the board of another six, according to the Commerce Ministry registry. 

Cambodian soldiers stand guard at Preah Vihear temple in Preah Vihear province, in 2008. Credit: Chor Sokunthea/Reuters

The battle for Preah Vihear

Any ivory tower dreams Hun Manet might have harbored dissipated shortly after he left Bristol in February 2008. A long-running border dispute with Thailand over the Preah Vihear temple complex boiled over into live fighting in June of the same year. 

The clashes were well timed for Hun Sen, who used them to drum up nationalistic support ahead of the July elections. He also took the opportunity to put his son’s West Point education to the test, placing him in charge of Cambodian forces around the temples, and sending him back when tensions flared again in 2011.

The world took notice. Robert Willard, the U.S. Navy admiral in charge of American forces in the Pacific at the time, told a U.S. congressional committee that by sending Hun Manet to Preah Vihear, Hun Sen appeared to be grooming him as his “heir apparent.”

“This conflict builds Hun Manet’s credentials as a military leader and hero who defended national sovereignty against an external threat,” Willard told the committee.

The boy who would be ‘king’

In the following years, Hun Sen’s sons and sons-in-law took on greater roles in the government and military while his daughters became business magnates, but it was increasingly clear that Hun Manet was indeed being positioned for the top job. 

By 2015, the topic was the focus of a rare interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, with signs that the young then-lieutenant general was growing more excited by the prospect.  

After spending most of the conversation quietly trotting out the Cambodian People’s Party line about the dangers of upending the status quo, Hun Manet's mask slipped toward the end. The interviewer first asked him how long his father planned to stick around. A smile broke across his face, and laughing, he chided the interviewer: “Cambodia is a democracy; as long as the people want him to.” 

His smile grew larger when she asked, “If the people want you to, you would be prime minister?” 

“Not no, not yes,” he said.

Tea Banh [left], minister of National Defence, places the insignia of a four-star general on the shoulder of Hun Manet, commander of the Royal Cambodian Army, during a promotion ceremony at the Ministry of Defense in Phnom Penh on April 20, 2023. Credit: Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP

As speculation around Hun Manet’s future role mounted, he received promotion after promotion, moving rapidly up the military ranks. He spoke rarely with reporters and closely guarded his public image. While other members of his family today have a robust social media presence, showing off expensive watches and private jets, Hun Manet maintains only professional accounts and keeps his children mostly hidden from view. (Requests to Hun Manet for an interview went unanswered.) 

At times, he has shown little tolerance of criticism. In 2016, he complained to the press that he had been met with protests by the Cambodian diaspora wherever he went in Australia.

“Why are they looking down on me, causing divisions and conflicts?” he asked reporters. 

Ou Virak, president of the Phnom Penh think tank Future Forum, said past conversations with Hun Manet left him with the impression that the future premier was sincerely interested in tackling corruption and encouraging development. But along with the premiership, Hun Sen has also bequeathed his son a country whose power structures were forged in violent struggle and are precariously interlocked. Given such an entrenched political system, anything that upsets them could be disastrous for Hun Manet personally.

“At his stage, politics is still a zero-sum game to him, it could be dangerous for his family [to accept change],” he noted. 

Additional reporting by RFA Khmer's Keo Sovannarith. Edited by Abby Seiff

 

 

Meta rejects its oversight board’s advice to suspend Hun Sen’s Facebook account

In response, Cambodia allows the popular platform to operate in the country, but bans board members from visiting.

By RFA Khmer
2023.08.30

Meta rejected a recommendation by the company's oversight board to suspend the Facebook page of former Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen (shown) for six months.

 Tang Chhin Sohty/AFP file photo

Facebook parent company Meta Platform Inc. this week rejected the advice of its oversight board to suspend Hun Sen’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, where the former Cambodian leader had threatened violence against political opponents.

Meta said in a statement on Monday that while it would remove the content that led to the review, it would not ban Hun Sen’s use of the site, citing the company’s “commitment to voice” in its protocol on restricting the accounts of public figures.

"Upon assessing Hun Sen’s Facebook Page and Instagram account, we determined that suspending those accounts outside our regular enforcement framework would not be consistent with our policies, including our protocol on restricting accounts of public figures during civil unrest,” the company said.

But Meta also said its protocol is not designed for situations where a history of state violence or human rights restrictions have resulted in ongoing restrictions on expressions for an indeterminate period of time.

“Applying the protocol in those circumstances could lead to an indefinite suspension of a public figure’s account, which (apart from fairness issues) could be detrimental to people’s ability to access information from and about their leaders and to express themselves using Meta’s platforms,” it said.

The company noted that in this case it had “applied appropriate account-level penalties associated with that action.”

Facebook is enormously popular in Cambodia, and Hun Sen, who ruled the country for 38 years, often uses it to communicate to the public and to attack political opponents. Hun Sen passed on rule to his son, Hun Manet, following elections in July that were deemed a sham. 

Board banned from Cambodia

The controversy surrounded a live video streamed on Hun Sen’s official Facebook page of a speech in January during which he made statements viewed as threats of violence against his political opponents. 

Meta initially referred the case to the oversight board because it said the matter “created tension between our values of safety and voice.” The board, which operates independently from Meta, advises the company on ethics issues.

On June 29, the oversight board ordered the removal of the video and called for an immediate suspension of Hun Sen’s Facebook and Instagram accounts for six months. It marked the first time that the oversight board instructed the company to shut down a government leader’s account, RFA reported. Hun Sen then called on his social media followers to switch to rival platforms TikTok or Telegram.

In response to Meta’s latest decision, Cambodia said Tuesday it would allow the California-based company to continue operating in the country, but banned the 22 members of the oversight board from visiting, accusing them of “interference into Cambodian affairs.”

“The decision reflects the integrity of contents posted on the official Facebook page of Samdech [honorific] Hun Sen,” it said.

Article19, a rights group that advocates for freedom of expression, declined to comment on the reversal and referred RFA to the International Commission of Jurists, or ICJ, an international human rights group based in Geneva, Switzerland. 

In March, the ICJ submitted a public comment to Meta’s oversight board concerning Hun Sen’s video, saying that the company had a responsibility to moderate content on its platforms in line with international human rights law and standards. 

Daron Tan, a legal adviser at the ICJ, told RFA that he could not comment on Meta’s latest decision, but that his organization was monitoring the company’s ongoing assessment of the feasibility of updating its newsworthiness allowance policy to state that content that directly incites violence is not eligible for this exception.   

“The newsworthy allowance has, to date, not been applied consistently or transparently,” Tan said in an email. “As we have repeatedly emphasized, discretionary exception should generally not be available for forms of expression that are prohibited under international human rights law, such as expression inciting violence.”

“It is especially critical to impose a restriction where there is a strong risk that the inciting words of a powerful actor like a Prime Minister may be acted upon,” Tan said.

Translated by Sovannarith Keo for RFA Khmer. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcom Foster.

Chile launches push to find people disappeared in Pinochet era

National Search Plan aims to locate remains of people who were forcibly disappeared during post-coup authoritarian rule.

The Jose Domingo Canas memorial house in Santiago, Chile, displays photos of people who were arrested or went missing under the leadership of Augusto Pinochet on August 30

 [Ivan Alvarado/Reuters]

30 Aug 2023

As Chile approaches the 50th anniversary of its 1973 coup, the country’s government has launched an initiative to search for people who disappeared during the authoritarian rule of General Augusto Pinochet.

Progressive President Gabriel Boric announced the National Search Plan on Wednesday, saying that the country deserves answers about the fate of the people who remain missing. The push coincides with the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances.

Pinochet came to power in the military coup, which saw the overthrow and death of the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende.

During Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship, 1,469 people went missing as a result of forced disappearances. Of that number, 1,092 disappeared after being imprisoned, and 377 were executed, but their remains never returned.

“We had the illusion that they were alive, but over the years, we realised they weren’t,” Juana Andreani, a former detainee and friend of a person who disappeared, told the Reuters news agency.

“At least they should tell us what happened to them, what was done to them. That is the worst part of these 50 years.”

Pinochet’s rule came amid a wave of military United States-backed coups in Latin America during the Cold War period.

Reporting from Chile’s capital Santiago, Al Jazeera’s Lucia Newman said successive Chilean governments have failed to seriously search for the disappeared people since Pinochet left power in 1990.

Newman noted that mass graves have been previously discovered in Chile near former interrogation centres, but not all the human remains found have been properly examined or identified.

“The forensic science has advanced quite a lot, so there is hope that at least some of the disappeared will be identified, even if it’s just a bone,” she said.

“A lot of people here told me, even if it’s just a little piece of the person that went missing that [they] can bury, that will help a lot to put their pain to rest.”

Earlier this week, a 42-year-old lawyer, who was taken from his family at birth during the Pinochet era, met his biological mother for the first time after finding her through DNA tracing. He had been raised in the US.

“I was suffocated by the gravity of this moment,” Jimmy Lippert Thyden told The Associated Press after reuniting with his mother in the Chilean city of Valdivia. “How do you hug someone in a way that makes up for 42 years of hugs?”

On Wednesday, Boric said justice had taken “too long” for the victims.

“This is not a favour to the families. It is a duty to society as a whole to deliver the answers the country deserves and needs,” the president said, as reported by the New York Times.

Victims and their relatives have called for the Chilean armed forces to release more information about the fate of missing people.

“Obviously, the higher ranks of the armed forces are responsible. What did they do with the corpses?” Carlos Gonzalez, who was jailed and tortured by the military during the dictatorship, told Reuters.

“It can’t be that we don’t know what happened with around 1,000 Chileans. This just can’t be.”

Advocates have also pushed for US files related to Chile to be made public.

Earlier this week, the US Department of State declassified a 1973 intelligence briefing to then-President Richard Nixon informing him of the “possibility of an early military coup attempt” in Chile, days before the putsch took place.

The US has admitted to engaging in covert propaganda operations against Allende even before his election. It also funded opposition groups during his tenure.

“Broadly speaking, US policy sought to maximise pressures on the Allende government to prevent its consolidation and limit its ability to implement policies contrary to US and hemispheric interests,” a 1975 US Senate report reads.

But it remains unclear whether Washington played a direct role in the coup.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES