The Case of Kea Sokun

On June 16, an appeals court in the western Cambodian city of Battambang upheld the 18-month prison sentence against Kea Sokun, a rapper who was convicted last year for lyrics critical of the government. During the short hearing, judges ruled that the 23-year-old should serve his full sentence, nine months of which he has already completed.

Sokun was arrested in September of last year, after the Cambodian Ministry of Culture brought complaints over lyrics that were critical of the government’s response to social issues such as the economy.

In particular, the authorities zeroed in on the lyrics of two rap songs by Sokun – “Khmer Land” and “Sad Race” – which have garnered over 4 million and 1.1 million views on YouTube, respectively. The lyrics of “Khmer Land” address Chinese investment in Cambodia and the government’s suppression of civil rights, and accuse Prime Minister Hun Sen’s government of ceding territory to Vietnam, a potent nationalist trope.

During Sokun’s trial late last year, the lyrics of the two songs were subjected to detailed scrutiny. The prosecution’s case hinged on lyrics about “rising up” and “standing up,” which they said constituted “incitement to commit a felony or cause social unrest” under Article 495 of Cambodia’s Penal Code.

The judges ultimately agreed, and sentenced Sokun to a year and a half in prison, alongside fellow rapper Long Putheara, then 17, who received a sentence of five months. (According to Licadho, a local human rights group, Long Putheara was given a lighter sentence after he apologized to the court.)

Six months of Sokun’s initial sentence was suspended, and with time served, he is set to be released within two months. But his case stands as a good example both of the increasingly repressive methods employed by Hun Sen and the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) to sustain their hold on power, and of some broader dynamics in Cambodian politics.

On the first count, a detailed recent report on the case by the American Bar Association (ABA) lays bare not just the flimsiness of the specific case against Sokun, but also the broader weaponization of the law to quash criticisms of the CPP government and its elites.

“While Sokun’s case raises issues concerning his rights to fair trial and freedom of expression, it is not an aberration in Cambodia,” the report states. “Frivolous criminal charges are used to stifle dissidents and critical voices. Although Cambodia is a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliamentary body, one ruling party has dominated the political system for decades.”

Sokun’s case is just one of a wave arrests of activists and opponents that has intensified in recent years. The retrospective threshold event was the September 2017 arrest of Kem Sokha, the president of the popular Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), on charges of treason, and the dissolution of the party on similar grounds two months later.

The abolition of the CNRP, which made significant gains at elections in 2013, left the CPP free to run virtually unopposed at elections in July 2018, which saw it win all 125 seats in the Cambodian parliament. Despite, or perhaps because of, the storm of ensuing criticisms of the United States and other Western governments, Hun Sen’s government has since set about eliminating those few sources of opposition that remain.

Sokun’s case also indicates the special sensitivity that accompanies border issues in general, and the Vietnamese border specifically. Few Cambodians have forgotten Vietnam’s slow absorption of the former Khmer territories in what is now southern Vietnam from the 18th century onward, and many believe that Hanoi still has designs on annexing what remains of Cambodian territory.

Indeed, from its origins in the early 20th century, Cambodian nationalism has been twinned with a profound fear of erasure. In his landmark 1991 essay “Cambodia Will Never Disappear,” Anthony Barnett wrote that “in addition to pride in a unique greatness, most expressions of nationalism contain a fear of extinction.” While in many countries this fear is usually confined to the extremes of the political spectrum, he wrote, “in the case of Cambodia it is central. There can be few countries where the theme has been accorded such weight.”

The question of Vietnam – and its supposedly ingrained and enduring hunger for “Khmer” land – has been a particularly sensitive issue for Hun Sen, given that he and his party were installed in power by Vietnam after its overthrow of the murderous Khmer Rouge government in January 1979, and have since retained close links with Vietnam’s governing communist party. Throughout the 1980s, when Hun Sen’s Vietnam-backed communist government was at war with three resistance factions based along the Thai border, the latter frequently accused it of delivering Cambodia into the jaws of annihilation. When a United Nations peacekeeping mission was dispatched to Cambodia in 1992-93, introducing Cambodia’s current multiparty democratic system, these tropes quickly became a staple of electoral politics.

The outcome was a political climate in which pro-democracy activism and opposition to the CPP are often inseparable from potent ethnonationalist and anti-Vietnamese appeals. For years, opposition politicians have paired their calls for liberal reforms and appeals for the support of Western democracies with descriptions of Hun Sen and the CPP as Vietnamese puppets aiding its final conquest of the country. In an interview I conducted with Sam Rainsy in 2014, he compared to Cambodia to Palestine and partition-era Poland – nations that were wiped from the map. Kem Sokha has publicly described S-21 prison, one of the key repository of Khmer Rouge horrors, as a Vietnamese-staged spectacle.

The lyrics to Kea Sokun’s track “Khmer Land” recapitulate a similar theme:

Cambodian territory is only the size of a fist.
Before it was wide, big enough to reach Thailand.
But now it gets smaller, and it makes me think —
Losing it little by little, it is hard to see.

Later in the song, he continues,

Watch out: Our map is in someone else’s hands
While the other race is encroaching
While we are breaking up
They will encroach on it.

Sokun’s use of these themes, and the considerable popularity of the track, suggests that they have passed to Cambodia’s younger generation, and will likely continue to underpin the country’s political dynamics in a complex relationship with struggles for greater democratic freedoms long after Hun Sen and his rivals have passed from the scene. It also suggests that as Hun Sen’s government seeks to efface all signs of meaningful opposition, it will continue to crack down on such expressions all the harder for their historical and political potency.

None of this is to say that the Cambodian government is right that this sort of speech should be outlawed on the grounds of “incitement,” or anything else. On the contrary, a good argument can be made that unfettered discussion about Vietnam, and its supposedly enduring designs on Cambodia, is the only way of bleaching an old myth of its power and laying the foundations for a more tolerant future.