Sok Eysan, a CPP spokesman, considers himself a “foot soldier” for the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, waging battle against critics and foes at the behest of higher-ranking commanders.

By Sun Narin | VOA Khmer | June 25, 2018
អានអត្ថបទ​នេះជាភាសាខ្មែរ

Phnom Penh, Cambodia The course of Sok Eysan’s life was set one day in 1979 as he wandered the streets of the Cambodian capital, desperate and alone.

It was shortly after the defeat of the Khmer Rouge regime at the hands of the Vietnamese military, which was trying to set up a new government.

In a quest to reunite with his elderly mother, the 33-year-old former teacher had struggled from the countryside to the capital city of Phnom Penh on whatever transport he could find, still wearing the ragged black uniform all citizens were forced to wear under the communist regime. He had no other clothes.

As he passed by the newly established Ministry of Economy, a group of Vietnamese men called out to him. Perhaps they sensed that he was an educated man – a commodity in short supply in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia because the regime had killed intellectuals.

“They asked me where I was from,” he recalled in a recent interview with VOA Khmer. “After they learned that my background was in teaching, they asked me to work there. The Vietnamese experts said I was a knowledgeable person who could help contribute to rebuilding the country.”

He accepted the offer, and his life in politics began. Shortly after starting work as a statistician, he was promoted to become a deputy chief of staff. And the following year he formally joined the Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party, the progenitor of today’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP).

“I worked there, so there was nothing to think about,” he said. Becoming a party member was not technically mandatory, but in practice it would have been difficult to rise through the ranks without joining.

Still, Sok Eysan was enthusiastic about his new government. As he sees it, the CPP’s leaders – Hun Sen, Heng Samrin, Pen Sovann, (who later preceeded Hun Sen as prime minister), and Chea Sim, all Khmer Rouge cadres who defected to Vietnam and later ousted the regime – saved him and millions of others from death.

This is an attitude common to many older Cambodians, who still recall the days when the party was the only thing standing between them and the Khmer Rouge. The party was also the only game in town back in the 1980s, when Cambodia was a one-party state.

Born in eastern Cambodia’s Svay Rieng province in 1946, Sok Eysan attended university and then worked a teacher at a secondary school in his hometown. Later, he became a high school principal. In 1972, in the midst of a civil war between the U.S.-backed Lon Nol regime and Pol Pot’s communist Khmer Rouge forces, he moved to Phnom Penh to study law.

When the Khmer Rouge seized power in April 1975, they forced the entire population of the capital out of the city on a long march to the countryside. Sok Eysan, his wife and their family had no idea where to go. They began walking toward the northeast and eventually ended up in Kratie province.

Luckily for them, Sok Eysan’s father in-law was a farm machinery technician who had skills critical to Pol Pot’s ruthless vision of forging an agrarian utopia. Sok Eysan believes this saved their lives, as Khmer Rouge officials largely left the family alone.

But he was not untouched by the regime’s brutality. Khmer Rouge soldiers shot and killed his father. His younger sister died of starvation. He became separated from his mother, and he himself was forced to labor long hours in paddy fields.

It is this experience that has made him fiercely loyal to the CPP, he says.

“We survived because of the CPP. And our living conditions, which started in misery, have progressively improved because of the CPP,” he said.

From Civil Servant to Party Mouthpiece

Sok Eysan spent another decade working at the Ministry of Economy, rising to become deputy minister before he was forced to leave the position after the 1993 elections.

Cambodia had become a multiparty democracy under the terms of the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements. Another party, FUNCINPEC, won the country’s first post-Khmer-Rouge-regime elections. CPP government officials had to make way for an influx of appointees from the rival party.

A role was found for Sok Eysan, as an adviser to CPP President Chea Sim and later as the director general of Apsara Television and Radio, a government-affiliated media group. He then stood as a CPP candidate for parliament in 2008 and was elected as a lawmaker for Prey Veng province.

Due to his media experience, Sok Eysan was appointed as one of three official party spokesmen in 2015. Since then, he has been perhaps the best-known voice of the CPP, and much of his day is taken up answering questions from journalists.

He also promotes the party during a show broadcast several days a week on Facebook, “True Voices for the People.” In the two-hour program, which is produced by Bayon Radio, a station owned by Prime Minister Hun Sen’s daughter Hun Mana, he receives prescreened calls from listeners who generally praise the CPP and criticize the opposition.

“The CPP will lead the country forever. From this generation to the next generation, the CPP will continue leading.”

He says he considers himself a “foot soldier” for the party, doing battle against critics and foes at the behest of higher-ranking commanders.

The supreme commander in this scenario is, of course, Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has now led the country for over 30 years and declares that he intends to stay in power for at least another decade. Sok Eysan says this is a feasible goal because of the CPP’s “good party policies.”

“The CPP will lead the country forever,” he declared. “From this generation to the next generation, the CPP will continue leading. This is sustainable.”

However, some critics argue the opposite, saying that the ruling party has clung to power only through repressive tactics, and that it is unhealthy for a single group to lead the country for so long.

Over the past year, the CPP has quashed its primary opposition, the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), by arresting its leader for alleged treason and having the party dissolved by judicial order.

The coming election will feature a multitude of tiny parties, but international human rights groups and the United Nations have said it will not be free and fair in the absence of the CNRP

Sok Eysan rejected that notion, saying that the CNRP had essentially dissolved itself because it was full of criminals.

“Some say the CPP was afraid of losing the election, which is why it dissolved the party. But why was the CNRP dissolved? It was because of its illegal offenses, not because the CPP dissolved it. They made themselves dissolved,” he said.

“I think the CNRP can’t compete with the CPP under any circumstances,” he added.

As a party spokesman, Sok Eysan is now in the delicate position of having to argue that Cambodia is a thriving multiparty democracy, while also insisting that no party will ever challenge the CPP’s supremacy, and that the party’s main rivals deserve to be jailed and exiled. However, he does not see this as a contradiction.

“This is normal for a multiparty democracy with a contested field. The contender doesn’t want their opponent to be strong. Every party is the same. Other parties also want to break the CPP, but they can’t,” he said.

Old Party for a New Generation?

Despite his regular appearances on Facebook, Sok Eysan does not use the social media site himself, nor does he see why it is more valuable than traditional news sources.

“It is not useful for me. I don’t want to get news via Facebook. I read the papers, listen to the radio and watch TV,” he said.

Sok Eysan is especially perplexed by the freewheeling online culture that allows users to speak their minds freely and mock the powerful.

He showed a VOA journalist several Facebook images lampooning him. In one, he had the body of a coconut and the hands of an ape, and was dressed in a hat bearing an image of the the flag of Vietnam, Cambodia’s historic enemy and mistrusted neighbor.

“Facebook users Photoshopped me like that. Doesn’t it affect my rights and freedom? Is this rights and freedom?” he asked.

“If there is no mechanism to patrol it, it becomes anarchical,” Sok Eysan said of the internet.

This attitude was widespread among the CPP’s top brass a few years ago, allowing the more internet-savvy CNRP to nearly pull off an election upset in 2013. The opposition party used Facebook to skirt restrictions on opposition media and drum up support among voters.

Now, however, the CPP has scrambled to catch up. Prime Minister Hun Sen and other senior officials maintain vigorous Facebook presences to boost their appeal. At the same time, the CPP has sought to clamp down on online speech by targeting Facebook users who criticize the government and forming an inter-ministerial committee to monitor what Cambodians say on the internet.

Still, demographics may be working against the ruling party.

The CPP has campaigned on the slogan “the party that gives life” for decades now. Its message to Cambodians has been that they owed their lives to the party’s leaders for ousting the Khmer Rouge in 1979, and should vote for them in gratitude.

But that concept might not be as resonant with younger Cambodians as it was with Sok Eysan and others of his generation, who lived through the Khmer Rouge years.

Two-thirds of Cambodia’s population of around 16 million are under 35 years old. They have no firsthand knowledge of the Cambodian civil war, and have grown up amid rising prosperity and relative openness to the outside world, an attitude far removed from the insular political landscape of the post-Khmer Rouge period.

In the last election, these young people formed the core of the CNRP’s support. Many voted for the opposition because they were frustrated with corruption and cronyism and wanted to see what was possible under a new government.

However, Sok Eysan is optimistic that the CPP will maintain its supremacy if young people simply listen to their parents and educate themselves about the source of Cambodia’s prosperity: the ruling party, which he sees as a kind of parent to the nation.

“The CPP has around 5.5 million members,” he continued. “How many children do they have? And youths don’t walk along with the CNRP. They follow their parents. They grow because of their parents. They progress because of their parents and they can study because of their parents.”

Nearly 40 years after he was first recruited into the government, Sok Eysan is as passionate as ever about the merits of the party he serves. He says he is convinced that a change in government is unnecessary, and hopes Cambodians will trust the CPP to continue leading the country indefinitely.

“New parties might be novelties, but they don’t have a deep meaning as sweet as the CPP’s,” he says. “The achievements of the CPP are plain for people to see: national benefits and the realization of the people’s wants and needs.”