Just before the 30th anniversary of Hun
Sen’s first becoming prime minister of Cambodia, Human Rights Watch produced a
75-page attack on him. Perhaps the strangest thing about the HRW document was
the amount of attention it received in the English-language media.
HRW attacking Hun Sen is the kind of story
that editors call “dog bites man”; it’s not news because that’s what dogs do.
HRW has been attacking Hun Sen for as long as can be remembered by anyone who
cares. The latest attack adds little or nothing of substance to the earlier
attacks. The editors who regarded the latest HRW diatribe as newsworthy must be
very young or have very short memories.
They, or their journalists assigned to
treat the document as something serious, must also have very limited critical
skills, because they don’t seem to have noticed a great many pointers that
suggest that HRW’s “report” is not an objective summary of reality but a
propaganda extravaganza.
Back to the Cold War
One of these pointers is the quite public
history of HRW. It is very much a product of the Cold War, having been set up
in the US in 1978 as “Helsinki Watch” to publicise real or otherwise violations
of human rights in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Helsinki Watch proved so useful for US
interests that similar “Watches” for the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Middle
East were created. Eventually they were all amalgamated into Human Rights Watch
in a process so smooth that it alone was proof they were all part of the same operation
from the beginning.
HRW today claims that it does not accept
funding from any government. There is no way for any outside observer to know
whether or not that is true, and it hardly matters. HRW is openly funded by
rich people, most of whom would not have so much spare cash if the US
government made them pay taxes even at the same rate as much less wealthy
citizens, let alone at progressive rates.
In particular, currency speculator George
Soros, who became a multi-billionaire by capitalising on the 1997 financial
crisis that impoverished governments and millions of poor people in Asia, is giving HRW $10 million a year for 10
years. Soros is well known for his hostility to any remnants of the formerly
socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and the rest of the world.
The HRW document’s author is Brad Adams,
HRW’s Asia director. This would not be a surprise to anyone familiar with Adams
or HRW. During his five years in Cambodia (1997-2002), Adams was notorious for
his hatred of the CPP in general and of Hun Sen in particular, and the HRW
document betrays this hatred from the first page – not even pretending to be
objective.
For a start, some intern in HRW went
through probably scores of films a frame at a time to find the most grotesque
facial expression of Hun Sen possible to decorate the cover of HRW’s attack
document. Then, just in case readers are too stupid to realise what is intended
by the still from a video, the title declares: “30 Years of Hun Sen: “Violence,
Repression, and Corruption in Cambodia”.
Did anything besides violence, repression
and corruption happen in Cambodia during the last 30 years? For example, was a
civil war ended? Has there been significant reconstruction of infrastructure?
Are there now thousands more schools than there were 30 years ago? Were the top
leaders of the Khmer Rouge who destroyed Cambodian society in the late 1970s
brought to trial? Is there a booming domestic and international tourist trade
showing millions of people the glories of Cambodia’s ancient civilisation? Has
the country’s per capita GDP increased from well under one dollar a day to more
than $1000 a year? Is Cambodia in “danger” of moving out of the category of
“least developed countries” very soon?
Don’t ask: in this document, anything that
has gone wrong in Cambodia since 1985 or even earlier is Hun Sen’s fault. In
it, nothing good has happened, but if it did, it was due to someone outside the
CPP, and Hun Sen was opposed to it.
Repeat offender
The first Brad Adams falsification about
Hun Sen that I can recall coming across occurred in 2002, when Adams persuaded
the Phnom Penh Post to accept a major article supposedly based on what
Adams called an “official” Thai government document – which it obviously was
not. I pointed out the falsity of that document in the following issue of the Post
(https://letters2pppapers.wordpress.com/archives/pre-2005/a-dubious-document-and-kr-trials/)
and have done so several times since then, but Adams has never publicly
explained or defended his article.
The current document is no more honest,
although its falsifications are usually not quite as blatant as the 2002 Post
effort. It would be tedious and unnecessary to go through them all one at a
time, but I will cite a few characteristic examples.
Adams does his best to blame Hun Sen for
every problem that arose in the K5 program, the unsuccessful attempt in the
mid-1980s to build a barrier along the border to prevent Khmer Rouge attacks
from Thailand. A particularly damning accusation – that Hun Sen friends and
subordinates were given improper exemptions from participating – is cited as
coming from Kong Korm in a 1999 interview with Adams.
Adams describes Kong Korm as “deputy minister
of foreign affairs at the start of K5 and later appointed minister of foreign
affairs in 1987”. It certainly sounds like Adams has the goods here: a former
CPP government official pointing the finger at Hun Sen. Except that Adams
forgot to record one little detail: at the time of the interview, Kong Korm was
an official and a senator for the Sam Rainsy Party (he is still a CNRP
senator). “A senator from the SRP said …” doesn’t sound as convincing as “A
former [CPP] foreign minister said …”.
For his chapter “Hun Sen and PRK Repression
in the 1980s”, Adams again knows how to select his sources. In this case, they
sound more reliable: two publications, one by Amnesty International and one by
the US Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. Only in passing, near the end of
gruesome tales of torture and unjust persecution, does Adams mention that the
two organisations conducted their interviews “on the Thailand-Cambodia border”
– a euphemism meaning that they occurred in camps controlled by the Khmer
Rouge, not exactly an encouraging setting for impartial research on the
government in Phnom Penh.
Sometimes, Adams dispenses with evidence
entirely, simply asserting as fact something that is questionable at best. For
instance, he says that the 1998 elections “were neither free nor fair” without
citing any source whatsoever for this judgment – probably because the main
international observer groups disagreed with him.2
In regard to the 2003 election, he says
that “the election process was denounced by European Union and other monitors”
but provides no references that would allow a check on what these monitors
actually said, how many of them said it and so on. The Australian government’s
ABC Radio, reporting on 30 July 2003, said of the election: “International
election monitors … say they're ‛reasonably satisfied’ that the poll was free
and fair …”
The most recent election is given similar
but more extensive treatment: a series of sweeping assertions not backed up by
any citations whatsoever. For example, Adams asserts that the elections were
“widely condemned as neither free nor fair by domestic and
international monitoring groups” without mentioning that Sam Rainsy campaigned
to dissuade potential monitors from observing the election3 and
without disclosing that the monitors from the International Conference of Asian
Political Parties (ICAPP) and the Centrist Asia Pacific Democrats International
(CAPDI) described the elections as “free, fair and transparent, and, above all,
peaceful, non-violent and smooth”. He describes the voter list as “marred by
CPP-orchestrated fraud and other irregularities”, again without citing any
specifics or evidence, without mentioning that the opposition boycotted the
voter registration process so that it could complain about it later and without
hinting at the existence of the procedures available to anyone to challenge the
inclusion or exclusion of any name on the voter list.
Adams’ distortions about the establishment
and functioning of the ECCC to try senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge and those
most responsible for its worst crimes are grotesque and will be easily
identified by anyone familiar with the reality. As in Adams’ presentation of
other events, any delay or problem is the fault of Hun Sen, and any faltering
step forward is the result of some non-Cambodian overcoming Hun Sen’s
resistance.
This approach is completely in line with
another fact that Adams forgets to tell his readers. From the beginning, HRW
was opposed to the creation of a tribunal in Cambodia, demanding one in The Hague,
in which Cambodians would have participated only as defendants or witnesses.
This is an additional reason, in addition to attacking Hun Sen, for Adams to
misrepresent the real history of the ECCC.
Here I will cite just one instance which
Adams could have learned easily enough if he ever talked to people who weren’t
interested in besmirching Hun Sen. Adams writes that, when the ECCC convened,
the Cambodian judges “prolonged negotiations to establish the court’s internal
working rules, further delaying the start of proceedings”.
Typically (see the final section of this
article), the “source” for this assertion is a December 2006 HRW press release.
What really happened was that, well in advance of the July 2006 meeting of the
judges, the Cambodian government task force for the trials enlisted a US legal
scholar to study Cambodian criminal procedure and the rules of major
international war crimes trials and prepare draft rules for the ECCC based on
those texts. On reading it, one of the international judges proposed adopting
that draft provisionally and then going through it to modify it as necessary.
Unfortunately, other international judges objected and insisted on writing new
rules from scratch. The resulting delay of a year was in no way due to the
Cambodian judges.
The “further” delay in getting the ECCC
under way that Adams refers to occurred because a Cambodian national election
was held in 2003, shortly after the agreement to establish the ECCC was signed
with the UN. After the election, the SRP and Funcinpec boycotted the new
National Assembly, which did not meet for more than a year and therefore could
not ratify the agreement. Adams doesn’t mention this fact, presumably because
it is hard to blame on Hun Sen.
(It may be relevant that another Soros-funded
organisation, the Open Society Justice Initiative, has been extremely critical
and obstructive of the ECCC’s functioning.)
Peculiar ‛evidence’
When Adams does cite sources, it is not
much of an improvement. If we leave aside the executive summary, which has no
footnotes, and the first 15 or so pages of the report, which are concerned with
pre-1979 events and thus irrelevant to Hun Sen’s years as prime minister, the
document contains 122 footnotes appearing to cite evidence for Adams’
accusations.
These citations are often not what they
seem at first glance. For example, there is a footnote to Adams’ assertion that
the bodyguard unit Brigade 70 is “notorious” for a “litany” of misdeeds. But
that footnote only cites the government sub-decree that established the
brigade; it says nothing about any evidence of misdeeds. A discussion of
alleged internal divisions in the CPP in 1994 cites only a Rasmei Kampuchea
report of the appointment of Hok Lundy as head of the National Police.
Even more problematic are the numerous
citations (46 out of the 122) that refer to HRW or Adams himself. A dozen of
these citations are of interviews conducted by Adams. As we have seen, he is
not a critical and perceptive interviewer or a reliable reporter on any matter
connected with Hun Sen.
There are four further interviews listed as
conducted by HRW, not giving the name of the interviewer. Their quality may
perhaps be judged by this example. Footnote 190 is cited in support of the
statement: “CPP-controlled courts [in 1998] filed politically motivated
prosecutions against SRP members on trumped-up charges of attempting to kill the prime minister”. The
note reads in its entirety: “Human Rights Watch interview with Cambodian
judicial officers, Phnom Penh, September 23, 2014.”
Think about that: judicial officers
told HRW that “courts” deliberately filed false charges against SRP members.
There are three possibilities here. One is that the “judicial officers”
themselves were involved in the false charges. Why they would decide to confess
to HRW 16 years later is not apparent. The second possibility is that they had
no first-hand knowledge of the case(s) but were repeating something they had
heard. That would make their testimony irrelevant at best, unless they had
heard it directly from other judicial officers who were involved in the
“trumping-up”, and it would again raise the question of why anyone would come
clean only to HRW so long after the fact. The third possibility is that Adams
and/or HRW aren’t giving us an accurate account, or are retelling the testimony
of unreliable witnesses.
Adams doesn’t tell his readers, but that
passage from the document is apparently a reference to the 24 September 1998
rocket attack on Hun Sen’s motorcade in Siem Reap. I don’t know whether the
police succeeded in finding the real culprits, but the attack itself was
certainly not trumped up: it killed a young boy and wounded three other people;
foreign bomb disposal experts found three other rockets that failed to fire
because they had been soaked by heavy rain (New York Times, 26 September
1998).
‛It must be
true: we said it’
At least 28 of these citations of
“evidence” in fact refer to previous documents of HRW. Fifteen refer to
HRW’s annual World Reports. These contain no evidence, but are merely
summaries of the views of HRW officials (presumably including Brad Adams);
those views may or may not be based on correctly understood and reliable
evidence, but the reader of those World Reports is given no opportunity
to judge this. So the current document’s citations of the World Reports
mean nothing more than: “We’ve said this before”.
In addition to pretending to offer evidence
without doing so, Adams’ procedure here lends itself to a further distortion.
In 1999, a Battambang SRP activist named
Chhum Doeun was murdered. Today, Adams declares that this was an
instance of “violent repression” of the SRP by the CPP, claiming to document
this with a reference to the HRW 2000 World Report. But what the World
Report says is significantly different: “The motive is thought to have
been political …” The 2000 report says that the motive “is thought” to be
political, although it doesn’t say who thought this. Adams in 2015 converts
this into an “instance” of CPP attacks on the SRP, without any suggestion that
this might be open to question.
(This
was the only citation of the HRW World Reports that I checked to see if
Adams cited it accurately; I chose it because it was the first such citation.)
Most
of the 13 other Adams citations of HRW documents are of press releases commenting
on some current event in Cambodia: that is, like the World Reports, they
tell us only what HRW thought about something. Again, Adams may also exaggerate
what these earlier documents said. For example, in regard to the negotiations
to establish the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, Adams claims: “Hun Sen engaged in a
prolonged game of stonewalling UN negotiators, prompting a decision
in 2002 by the UN to pull out of talks with his government”. This is not at all
what the UN officials said at the time, and it is also not what HRW said in the
press release that Adams cites. That release was actually rather vague on the
UN’s motives, but implied that the UN was unhappy with the law passed by the
National Assembly the previous year and signed by the King in August 2001.
The
other three or four citations of HRW appear to be earlier “reports” like the
current one.
Overall,
HRW’s approach seems to be that they are the “good guys”, and therefore the
world should accept what they say; there is no need to check “facts” that
support their views or to consider the evidence of anyone or anything that
contradicts their views. The attempted hatchet job on Hun Sen certainly
exemplifies that attitude.
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1. Nobel
Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman commented on these events: “[N]obody who
has read a business magazine in the last few years can be unaware that these
days there really are investors who not only move money in anticipation of a
currency crisis, but actually do their best to trigger that crisis for fun and
profit. These new actors on the scene do not yet have a standard name; my
proposed term is ‛Soroi’.”
2. Journalist
Susan Downie, who disagreed with the monitors, was honest enough to report what
they said: “... the two main international observer groups effectively declared
voting day and counting day free and fair.” (Australian Journal of
International Affairs, Vol. 54, No. 1, 2000)
3. “Rainsy tells
election observers to stay away”, Cambodia Daily, 25 February 2013.