Theft and the Tyrant

 

 

by School of Vice

 

"Oriental despots’ are no longer what their predecessors once were in the past, even as recent as in 1970s Cambodia when they had been able to execute their monstrous ‘social engineering’ and mass killings to their hearts’ content behind a closed political and geographical border or iron curtain.
The notion that ‘property is theft’ has been taking on an altogether whole set of meanings under this regime over the last four decades. 

 

‘Theft’ is a tightly politically organised and led campaign and is divided into three broad categories: a) internal, b) external, and c) oligarchic or elitist. In the first instance, ‘theft’ is responsible for providing the means to buy off the country’s leading business sectors and groups by way of nepotism and illicit dealings that are the prevailing customary norms and practices in social relations. To ensure or minimise room for distrust and betrayal marriage among the political and business elites offers the best and most common form of solution. For the ruling elite, stability means having control over the business community and the economy, so it’s only natural to have the latter group on board politically too. When Funcinpec government’s young finance minister Sam Rainsy sought to reform this set of practices by introducing a more progressive, transparent one in the early 1990s he quickly earned himself resentment and grievances among segments of the domestic business elite, not to mention among his political adversaries in the CPP as well as the resentment from his own boss in Funcinpec! 

In the second instance, externally, theft enables the ruling regime to extend this pattern of domestic patronage and reciprocation into international relations and foreign policy. The regime’s cordial relations with the Australian government throughout this time in its egregious existence; a major regional ‘Western democracy’ located off the coast of Indonesia and a country where close family members of Hun Sen as well as other prominent regime figures store their ill-gotten assets offers a luminating case in point. However, by far the most destructive and injurious to the nation is the theft that the Hun Sen regime extends to Hanoi [and perhaps, to a ‘lesser extent’, Beijing] in exchange for continued diplomatic backing and political alliance. Unlike Vietnam – a nation that has a habit and history of swallowing up neighbouring territories and integrate them into its own – neither Australia nor China shares direct physical national borders with Cambodia. Yet, it could be argued that Chinese presence and investment in Cambodian locations such as Kg Som and Koh Kong could pose as grave a threat to Cambodia’s sovereignty or territorial integrity in the foreseeable future.  

In the last instance, theft is the ultimate prize and reward for Hun Sen and cronies and the single-most important factor that makes all other exchanges and dealings possible. Just as the plunder of natural resources like the environment and the illegal ceding of territory here and there along the Eastern border to Vietnam serve to lubricate and thus strengthen relations and ties with that country, this theft that translates into billions of dollars in personal and corporate assets and stakes in banking institutions and related bodies is what holds the regime together in one piece in spite of all its excesses and abuses.
The media, the armed forces, micro-finance institutions and the like all owe their existence to this personal form of theft and, all must function as personalised auxiliary instruments to the man acting as Tyrant.