‘Petulant’ prince eyes return to Cambodian politics

Michael Peel in Bangkok

The Financial Times

©AFP

Hun Sen, Cambodia’s prime minister and Asia’s longest-ruling leader, is notorious for the political tricks he’s used to survive in office for the past three decades.

Now the former Khmer Rouge commander has a striking new weapon — an eccentric prince whom he once overthrew in a coup, but has returned to the fray as an ally for the man who humiliated him.

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The strange tale of Prince Norodom Ranariddh, prime minister for four years in the 1990s, is a sign of the underlying tensions in this manufacturing hub in Southeast Asia where a protracted power struggle is taking place in the distant but lingering shadow of the Khmer Rouge’s 1970s atrocities.

Criticised by some for being remote from ordinary Cambodians, the prince has a tendency to mercurial behaviour that saw a US diplomat attack him as “childish and petulant”, in a 2004 cable published by WikiLeaks and entitled “Cambodia’s man who won’t be king”.

He attracted controversy while in office for buying a Fokker F28 airliner for the royal court — mainly, he says, for use by his father, the popular King Sihanouk.

Passed over for the throne in 2004, he was battered legally after losing office, via court cases over alleged property fraud and adultery that he and others say were trumped up for political reasons.

But now the 71-year old prince is selling himself as an agent of royalist revival and a partner to the ruling Cambodian People’s party against opposition forces. While he says he wants to unite the fractured royalist cause and the politically divided country, his re-emergence on the political scene raises questions about the extent of his ambitions.

Of his one-time nemesis Hun Sen, he says: “I never forget — but I have to pardon.” Yet later in the same interview, he contradictorily suggests that foreign diplomats should shun Hun Sen.

The intelligent way is to not always think about the past

- Prince Ranariddh

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Since its overthrow in the years before the Khmer Rouge and the death of King Sihanouk in 2012, the royal family has lost much of its authority. Funcinpec, the monarchist party, has plunged dramatically from nominally leading the government 20 years ago to winning no seats at all in the disputed 2013 polls.

Those elections sparked a year of on-off protests by opposition Cambodia National Rescue party supporters, angry at what they see as the corrupt enrichment of a small elite during a decade when growth averaged more than 7 per cent a year.

Mr Hun Sen saw off the immediate threat to his rule in July by doing a deal to reform the election process in exchange for an end to the opposition’s boycott of parliament.

The prince — who this month returned as head of Funcinpec — says the party can woo back lost supporters and help secure more time in power for Hun Sen, who is still only in his early sixties.

“They rely on royalists to bring about stability,” said the prince, “And stability means that Samdech [an honorific] Hun Sen at least would continue to rule this country.”

Play Siphan, a government spokesman, echoed the prince, proclaiming that Funcinpec and the CPP could work together “like husband and wife”. Of Prince Ranariddh he said: “I am really happy to have him back in politics.”

This air of mutual admiration has fuelled suspicions that — after the shock of nearly losing power at the ballot box — the prince’s re-emergence is a government ruse to split the vote of the CNRP, which has attracted royalist supporters. The prince denies he is being funded by Mr Hun Sen or the CPP, although he admits Funcinpec is broke and has even had to sell off its buildings.

“I would dream that he would support me [with] some money,” the prince said. “For the time being, they support me politically, because I think that it is in their interests as well to support Norodom Ranariddh.”

Mu Sochua, a top official at CNRP, insisted the prince’s new alliance with the CPP posed no threat to her party. “Prince Ranariddh is not an asset to the CPP; he is a liability,” she said. “He has lost all credibility.”

Few people think that Prince Ranariddh will be prime minister of Cambodia again, or indeed its king. But his reappearance says something about the fluidity and uncertainties in a country that until recently seemed among the most politically immutable in Asia.

The prince himself tacitly acknowledges the unlikeliness of his renaissance — but maintains that it is still possible. As he put it: “The intelligent way is not to always think about the past.”