HUN SEN likes doing issues his personal method. Cambodia’s prime minister has dominated the nation for 37 years and counting. Glad along with his personal efficiency, he banned the primary opposition celebration in 2017. In January he flew to Myanmar, deciding that he was the person to convey peace to that nation, racked by struggle because the military seized energy final 12 months.
This didn't go down nicely within the area. ASEAN, the membership of South-East Asian international locations to which Cambodia belongs, has a hallowed custom of consensus, and final 12 months determined to shun Myanmar’s junta. In 2022 Cambodia holds the bloc’s chair, which rotates yearly. So the timing of Mr Hun Sen’s go to was unlucky. It may need helped create the impression that the bloc thought-about the junta legit, remarked Malaysia’s overseas minister. In trade, the generals provided no actual concessions to Mr Hun Sen.
So the “cowboy” diplomat, as he has been dubbed, has had a tough trip, recalling the final time his nation wielded ASEAN’s gavel. In 2012 Cambodia scandalised the area by showing to behave as a proxy for China, blocking the discharge of a joint ASEAN assertion on the tussle between China and several other South-East Asian international locations over competing claims within the South China Sea. Cambodia started to be seen as a Chinese language client-state. In 2020 Bilahari Kausikan, as soon as Singapore’s most senior diplomat, prompt that ASEAN may someday be pressured to expel Cambodia as a result of it had fallen into China’s orbit.
The episode in 2012 haunts Cambodia’s authorities to at the present time. It noticed this 12 months’s chairmanship as an opportunity to “redeem” itself, says Elina Noor of the Asia Society Coverage Institute, an American think-tank. Taking a tough line towards the junta would counter the notion that it was an ally of authoritarians and the stooge of China, which has urged ASEAN to befriend the generals. Mr Hun Sen, who's 70, might by no means chair ASEAN once more, and so that is one in every of his final alternatives to “refashion” his picture on the world stage, says Aaron Connelly of the Worldwide Institute of Strategic Research, a think-tank in Singapore.
But Mr Hun Sen couldn't resist making overtures to the junta. That's as a result of he sees himself as a peacemaker who helped convey an finish to struggle in his personal nation, says Mr Connelly. Myanmar is proving trickier, nevertheless. On February seventeenth, simply six weeks into his chairmanship, he introduced he would bequeath the disaster to his successor to resolve: “I’m damned if I do, and damned if I don’t, so simply let or not it's.”
For the remainder of his chairmanship, Mr Hun Sen will most likely do as his diplomats recommend and attempt to distance himself from China. Following precedent, Cambodia didn't invite junta officers to an ASEAN retreat on February sixteenth, and hopes to carry conferences with a rival authorities composed of deposed lawmakers. Western governments will most likely shrug. Cambodia is one in every of China’s closest allies within the area. It's Cambodia’s greatest supply of assist and funding, and helps pay to improve a naval base. But Cambodia claims to not need to select between America and China. Now is likely to be a very good time for Western international locations to check its readiness to strike a greater stability. ■
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