Geopolitics behind a Cambodian conviction
By Sebastian Strangio
PHNOM PENH - Early on November 24, 2000, about 70 gunmen slipped into the
center of Cambodia's capital city. After drinking and singing traditional songs
at a karaoke bar, one unit of men moved towards a series of government
buildings armed with AK-47 rifles, grenades and B-40 rocket launchers.
After seizing control of the city's railway station, they sprayed bullets at
the Ministry of Defense and Council of Ministers and lobbed a grenade as a
nearby gas station. The Cambodian military engaged the attackers in a
firefight, scarring many nearby buildings with bullet holes. They quelled the
ragtag militia, leaving eight dead and around 14 wounded, after an hour of
fighting.
In the wake of the attack, an obscure group calling itself the
Cambodian Freedom Fighters (CFF) took credit for the violence. The group's
ethnic Khmer leader, Chhun Yasith, a Long Beach, California-based accountant,
at the time made no attempt to hide his intent to overthrow the government of
Hun Sen, Cambodia's long-serving prime minister. Despite the failure of the
"coup" attempt, Yasith boasted that he would continue working to topple the
"tyrannical" regime by force. "Next time," he told a journalist in 2004, "we
will attack the whole country."
The 53-year-old Yasith's threat came to an abrupt legal end last month, when a
US district court judge sentenced him to life in prison for his role in the
attempted coup. In a hearing at the court on June 22, prosecutors said the CFF
was ordered to carry out "popcorn" attacks on soft targets such as karaoke bars
and nightclubs before launching the all-out assault to overthrow the government
on November 24. The CFF leader was charged with violating the US Neutrality
Act, a 200-year-old law banning military operations against nations with which
the US is at peace.
A tearful Yasith told the court he felt he had to do something for his native
country and that he formed a rebel militia to avenge the murder of his father
by the communist Khmer Rouge. "I've been punished because I failed, that I'm
not good enough to overthrow that government," the Los Angeles Times quoted him
as saying. Chhun Yasith's attorney, Richard Callahan Jr, said he would appeal
the sentence.
Cambodian officials welcomed the sentence, describing the November 2000 coup
attempt as a "clear terrorist act". "We applaud the decision taken by the US
government to prosecute Chhun Yasith," Foreign Minister Hor Namhong told
reporters after signing an agreement with Japan for the construction of a new
bridge across the Mekong River. "We welcome the elimination of terrorism and
not just terrorism in Cambodia and the US, but in all regions where it
threatens people's security."
The decision comes at a time of warming US-Cambodian relations after years of
open antagonism and follows on a similar court action against another
California-based group that threatened to overthrow by arms Laos' communist
regime. President Barack Obama has initiated policies to counter-balance
China's rising commercial influence in the region, including last year's
reclassification of Cambodia and Laos as no longer Marxist-Leninist states that
opened the legal way for US Ex-Im Bank loans and financing.
Later this year, the US is scheduled to hold its first joint military exercises
with Cambodia, in an operation to be known as Angkor Sentinel. Earlier, the two
sides enhanced security-related cooperation after high-profile terror suspects
were found to have traveled freely in Cambodia.
Accountant cum rebel
Some have long questioned whether the CFF had the capacity to carry out the
attack on its own. Opposition leader Sam Rainsy, the president of the Sam
Rainsy Party (SRP), charged that Hun Sen orchestrated the "coup" as a pretext
to crack down on government critics. He told the Phnom Penh Post in December
2000 that the reaction to the coup had "killed many birds with one stone".
About 200 people were detained in the 12 days following the attacks, many
without warrants as required by Cambodian law, US rights lobby Human Rights
Watch reported in December. Yasith was tried in absentia in Phnom Penh in June
2001 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Richard Kiri Kim, a fellow US citizen
who directed the CFF forces in Phnom Penh, was captured following the attack
and remains in prison on a life term.
Rainsy described Yasith, a member of the SRP until he was thrown out for
misusing party funds in mid-1998, as a man too taken with wine and women to
orchestrate a coup. "He didn't have enough money to pay for his airport tax or
his last hotel bill," Rainsy was quoted as saying. "He is not a serious guy."
Indeed, Yasith was an unlikely armed militia leader. A Time magazine article
from 2001 described him as "a doughy, chino-clad little man", while a reporter
for The New York Times said he looked "more like a bowling pin than a warrior".
But the bespectacled Yasith, who arrived in the US as a refugee from Cambodia
in 1982 and lost family members to the murderous Khmer Rouge regime, harbored a
steely resolve to overthrow Hun Sen's government.
In October 1998, a year after bloody factional fighting saw Hun Sen vanquish
many of his opponents in the royalist Funcinpec party, Yasith traveled to the
Thai-Cambodian border where he joined with anti-government dissidents and
founded the CFF. The group's aim: to liberate Cambodia from "communist
dictators and Vietnamese puppets".
After the failure of the 2000 coup attempt, Yasith boasted that he would
continue working to topple the government by force and that non-violent
political action would not succeed against Cambodia's authoritarian regime. He
held fundraisers - some aboard the Queen Mary, the former cruise ship moored in
Long Beach, California - where attendees vowed to overthrow Hun Sen's
government by force and pledged tens of thousands of dollars towards the cause.
The CFF - like similar radical anti-communist Vietnamese and ethnic Hmong
groups - was the most radical manifestation of the latent anti-communism
underpinning America's Indochinese diaspora. Carl Thayer, a professor at the
Australian Defence Force Academy in Sydney, has described the CFF as "a fringe
group nurtured in the hot house of anti-communist emigre life in the United
States". He added, "I do not think the CFF has much support among the Cambodian
diaspora in the US."
Congressional allies
But the relationship between Yasith and the US government, which notably did
not arrest him until 2005, was at one stage cosier. In a 2004 New York Times
profile of the CFF, then journalist Joshua Kurlantzick argued that the tacit
support of conservative American congressmen and the George W Bush
administration's pursuit of regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan provided
"political cover" for the CFF's activities. "The Bush administration's stand on
regime change in rogue nations has created a moment in which the murky, often
secretive advocacy of insurgency abroad has suddenly gained credence,"
Kurlantzick wrote.
The group was also helped by the open advocacy of "regime change" in Cambodia
by prominent members of the US government. In June 2003, Kentucky's Senator
Mitch McConnell and two colleagues introduced the Cambodia Democracy and
Accountability Act to the House of Representatives, a law that promised the
resumption of full foreign assistance to Cambodia providing that Hun Sen was
"no longer in power".
Words of support from Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher - who told
Kurlantzick that the US should "evaluate the chances of any type of armed
resistance" against Hun Sen - also provided implicit sanction for the CFF's
activities. "Now that the White House has embraced the idea of regime change in
Iraq and other rogue nations, the Cambodia hawks are getting a hearing, and the
CFF remains free to plot in Long Beach," Kurlantzick concluded.
Yasith's arrest in 2005, however, marked a policy shift and an end to the
relative impunity enjoyed by California-based Indochinese rebel groups.
Although many such organizations, including anti-communist Vietnamese groups,
"skirted the classification of terrorist" in the years after the September 11,
2001, attacks, warming relations between Phnom Penh and Washington caused a
waning US tolerance for the CFF.
As the two countries gradually put their Cold War enmities behind them,
Cambodia's cooperation in the US's global "war on terror" could easily be
linked to Cambodian "terrorist" groups operating in the US. "No doubt there
were pressures going both ways: Cambodian cooperation for US action against the
CFF," Thayer said.
As US relations have warmed with communist Laos, US law enforcement has also
taken a conspicuous hard turn against Hmong exiles who fought alongside the US
during the Vietnam War.
In June 2007, the Department of Justice arrested nine ethnic Hmong exiles and a
retired US colonel for planning the so-called "Operation Tarnished Eagle", an
alleged armed plan to overthrow Laos' communist regime.
Although the charges against General Vang Pao, the Hmong's former insurgent
leader and still widely respected among the Hmong diaspora, were dismissed the
following year, the former US soldier and 11 Hmong still face charges. On June
24 this year, a grand jury in Sacramento, California, handed down an updated
indictment alleging the group attempted to "acquire and furnish military arms,
munitions, material, personnel, and money to insurgents in Laos to conduct
military operations against the government of Laos".
In sentencing Yasith last month, District Court Judge Dean Pregerson gave a
good indication of changing US government attitudes towards Indochinese rebel
groups. "I don't think Mr Chhun is an evil human being," he said of the
defendant. "I think he's had a tragic life - and had the misfortune of being
born in a place where terrible things were happening."
He also said that for organizations advocating violence against America's new
Southeast Asian allies there would no longer be lenience. "I do not want to be
the person who does not say to all those groups that, if you conspire against
the US, that the US will tolerate or be lenient to you."
Sebastian Strangio is a reporter for the Phnom Penh Post in Cambodia.
(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about
sales, syndication and
republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road,
Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
