PP Post
Breaking: CNRP leader Kem Sokha arrested for 'treason'
Sun, 3 September 2017
Mech Dara, Ananth Baliga and Shaun Turton

In a dramatic midnight arrest, opposition leader Kem Sokha was taken into custody by around 100 police over accusations of conspiring with a foreign power and treason and sent to Tbong Khmum province’s Trapeang Thlong prison, according to an Interior Ministry official.
Sokha and his bodyguards were taken away after police raided his home just after midnight on Sunday after a 2014 video clip, originally published by Cambodian Broadcasting Network in Australia, was posted to Facebook in which he purportedly admits to getting assistance from the United States to effect a regime change in Cambodia.
While Sokha’s whereabouts were initially unclear, Khieu Sopheak, spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said that a court had ordered the opposition leader be sent to Trapaing Thlong prison in Tbong Khmum province.
“We cannot let him run anywhere, and he had taken money [from] foreigners to organise and follow foreigners to topple the government … He did not use the word ‘vote’, but he said to ‘change’ and ‘topple’.”
A government statement last night said Sokha had been arrested for “conspiracy with [a] foreign power” under Article 443, which comes with a sentence of 15 to 30 years.
“This conspiracy is an act of treason,” the statement read. “t clearly proves the conspiracy between Kem Sokha and the accomplices with a foreign power, which harms the Kingdom of Cambodia.”
The arrest follows weeks of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories put up by Facebook user “Kon Khmer” and parroted by government mouthpiece Fresh News alleging foreign interference through pro-democracy NGOs, and more recently taking aim at Sokha's Cambodia National Rescue Party for being trained by foreign groups to replace the Cambodian People's Party-led government.
The CNRP released a statement condemning the arrest of their leader and called for Sokha’s unconditional release.
CNRP lawmaker Long Botta also confirmed that Sokha had been sent to prison in Tbong Khmum, potentially to prevent any mass demonstrations from being held in Phnom Penh.
He said the speech made in Australia was being portrayed in mostly government-aligned local media outlets as Sokha being a spy attempting a coup to overthrow the government.
“Whether the CPP will eliminate the party, I could not imagine it yet,” he said. “Maybe they try and gather all the testimony or documents so they can arrest all the leaders.”
Human Rights Watch’s John Sifton called the arrest at “setback for Cambodia’s human rights situation”, saying it was time for the international community to put Prime Minister HE on “notice”.
“The international community, which provides a major percentage of the Cambodian government’s annual budget, should put HE on notice that if he doesn’t reverse course, it will be impossible to consider next year’s elections free and fair,” he said.
Prime Minister HE’s son, Hun Manith, took to Facebook to decry the opposition leader as a traitor.
“Kem Sokha betrayed Cambodia. He confessed to have long term plans with the United States of America… Thank[s] to him, we now know who [is] the Third Hand.”

AlonzoPartriz wrote: ↑Sun Sep 03, 2017 4:03 amThe real plot happening here is between the CPP and China who has been training, supplying and funding the CPP to undermine democracy.

I don't think China has any anti-democracy policy for Cambodia. This is simply about money. Anti-US, perhaps.

And I think you're ignoring the glaringly obvious attempts by the US themselves to undermine. They may claim to be motivated by democracy, but any idiot can find a list of their old allies, many of whom were fascists, drug-dealers, tyrants and human rights abusers

Here is a list of 35 tyrants etc. they supported, which, ironically, includes Pol Pot.

http://www.alternet.org/world/35-countr ... terrorists

35 Countries Where the U.S. Has Supported Fascists, Drug Lords and Terrorists
Here's a handy A to Z guide to U.S.-backed international crime.
By Nicolas J.S. Davies / AlterNet
March 4, 2014, 5:36 PM GMT

1. Afghanistan
2. Albania
3. Argentina
4. Brazil
5. Cambodia

When President Nixon ordered the secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia in 1969, American pilots were ordered to falsify their logs to conceal their crimes. They killed at least half a million Cambodians, dropping more bombs than on Germany and Japan combined in World War II. As the Khmer Rouge gained strength in 1973, the CIA reported that its "propaganda has been most effective among refugees subjected to B-52 strikes." After the Khmer Rouge killed at least 2 million of its own people and was finally driven out by the Vietnamese army in 1979, the U.S. Kampuchea Emergency Group, based in the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, set out to feed and supply them as the "resistance" to the new Vietnamese-backed Cambodian government. Under U.S. pressure, the World Food Program provided $12 million to feed 20,000 to 40,000 Khmer Rouge soldiers. For at least another decade, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency provided the Khmer Rouge with satellite intelligence, while U.S. and British special forces trained them to lay millions of land mines across Western Cambodia which still kill or maim hundreds of people every year.

6. Chile
7. China
8. Colombia
9. Cuba
10. El Salvador
11. France (I included this because not many know about it)
In France, Italy, Greece, Indochina, Indonesia, Korea and the Philippines at the end of World War II, advancing allied forces found that communist resistance forces had gained effective control of large areas or even entire countries as German and Japanese forces withdrew or surrendered. In Marseille, the CGT communist trade union controlled the docks that were critical to trade with the U.S. and the Marshall plan. The OSS had worked with the U.S.-Sicilian mafia and Corsican gangsters during the war. So after the OSS merged into the new CIA after the war, it used its contacts to restore Corsican gangsters to power in Marseille, to break dock strikes and CGT control of the docks. It protected the Corsicans as they set up heroin labs and began shipping heroin to New York, where the American-Sicilian mafia also flourished under CIA protection. Ironically, supply disruptions due to the war and the Chinese Revolution had reduced the number of heroin addicts in the U.S. to 20,000 by 1945 and heroin addiction could have been virtually eliminated, but the CIA's infamous French Connection instead brought a new wave of heroin addiction, organized crime and drug-related violence to New York and other American cities.
12. Ghana
13. Greece
14. Guatemala
15. Haiti
16. Honduras
17. Indonesia
18. Iran
19. Israel
20. Iraq
In 1958, after the British-backed monarchy was overthrown by General Abdul Qasim, the CIA hired a 22-year-old Iraqi named Saddam Hussein to assassinate the new president. Hussein and his gang botched the job and he fled to Lebanon, wounded in the leg by one of his companions. The CIA rented him an apartment in Beirut and then moved him to Cairo, where he was paid as an agent of Egyptian intelligence and was a frequent visitor at the U.S. Embassy. Qasim was killed in a CIA-backed Baathist coup in 1963, and as in Guatemala and Indonesia, the CIA gave the new government a list of at least 4,000 communists to be killed. But, once in power, the Baathist revolutionary government was no Western puppet, and it nationalized Iraq's oil industry, adopted an Arab nationalist foreign policy and built the best education and health systems in the Arab world. In 1979, Saddam Hussein became president, conducted purges of political opponents and launched a disastrous war against Iran. The U.S. DIA provided satellite intelligence to target chemical weapons that the West helped him to produce, and Donald Rumsfeld and other U.S. officials welcomed him as an ally against Iran. Only after Iraq invaded Kuwait and Hussein became more useful as an enemy did U.S. propaganda brand him as "a new Hitler." After the U.S. invaded Iraq on false pretenses in 2003, the CIA recruited 27 brigades of "Special Police," merging the most brutal of Saddam Hussein's security forces with the Iranian-trained Badr militia to form death squads that murdered tens of thousands of mostly Sunni Arab men and boys in Baghdad and elsewhere in a reign of terror that continues to this day.
21. Korea
22. Laos
The CIA began providing air support to French forces in Laos in 1950, and remained involved there for 25 years. The CIA engineered at least three coups between 1958 and 1960 to keep the growing leftist Pathet Lao out of government. It worked with right-wing Laotian drug lords like General Phoumi Nosavan, transporting opium between Burma, Laos and Vietnam and protecting his monopoly on the opium trade in Laos. In 1962, the CIA recruited a clandestine mercenary army of 30,000 veterans of previous guerrilla wars from Thailand, Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines to fight the Pathet Lao. As large numbers of American GIs in Vietnam got hooked on heroin, the CIA's Air America transported opium from Hmong territory in the Plain of Jars to General Vang Pao's heroin labs in Long Tieng and Vientiane for shipment to Vietnam. When the CIA failed to defeat the Pathet Lao, the U.S. bombed Laos almost as heavily as Cambodia, with 2 million tons of bombs.
23. Libya
24. Mexico
25. Myanmar
After the Chinese Revolution, Kuomintang generals moved into northern Burma and became powerful drug lords, with Thai military protection, financing from Taiwan and air transport and logistical support from the CIA. Burma's opium production grew from 18 tons in 1958 to 600 tons in 1970. The CIA maintained these forces as a bulwark against communist China but they transformed the "golden triangle" into the world's largest opium producer. Most of the opium was shipped by mule trains into Thailand where other CIA allies shipped it to heroin labs in Hong Kong and Malaysia. The trade shifted around 1970 as CIA partner General Vang Pao set up new labs in Laos to provide heroin to GIs in Vietnam.
26. Nicaragua
27.Pakistan;
28.Saudi Arabia;
29. Turkey
30. Panama
31. The Philippines
32. Syria
33. Uruguay
34. Yugoslavia
35. Zaire

Are they really surprised many nations don't want them around?

"Here is a list of 35 tyrants etc. they supported, which, ironically, includes Pol Pot."

Yes, that was indeed a shameful decision on the part of the US govt. Remember however the Thais and Chinese also supplied military aid and refuge to the KR. I also suspect that improved relations between the US and Vietnam have much to do with China's desire to keep the US out of Cambodia. Essentially for the same fear they have of the US potentially occupying N. Korea.

mauser765 wrote: ↑Sun Sep 03, 2017 10:18 am

AlonzoPartriz wrote: ↑Sun Sep 03, 2017 4:03 amThe real plot happening here is between the CPP and China who has been training, supplying and funding the CPP to undermine democracy.

I don't think China has any anti-democracy policy for Cambodia. This is simply about money. Anti-US, perhaps.

Whatever the official policy, China supports one party rule. They have given weapons and training recently, along with joint military exercises and loads of water cannon which have been distributed throughout ths provinces. China had Cambodia veto the South China sea vote, and has recently had it criticize the CNRP/ US for breaking its one China policy.
What Tara says is true. They don't want Cambodia under American influence. But it's a stretch of the imagination to say that the majority of Cambodian people don't want change. Nothing to do with America, even though they would like it to be. This whole thing wouldn't be happening if it weren't highly probable they wouldn't win the next election by reasonably fair means.
So, China want HE in power and he is working with them supporting the SC Sea and one China. Their massive pay off to HE was military aid and training and the biggest investment portfolio Cambodia has ever known.

General Mackevili wrote:Get your bulletproof vests on:

I just had to pop over to lucky supermarket and there are heaps of cops along sotheros and Sihanouk blvds, stationed every 100-200m apart from each other. Didn't think to get a pic but you could sense they were ready for something. They looked like they were getting some barricades ready to block the roads if needed.

If I venture out of the apartment again today (not very likely) I will snap a few pics as I fly by.

AlonzoPartriz wrote: ↑Sun Sep 03, 2017 8:45 am

takeoman wrote: ↑Sun Sep 03, 2017 8:13 am Regarding the timing, if the intention is to 1) obtain a conviction, 2) ban the CNRP, 3) declare a state of emergency, 4) postpone the election, they probably couldn't put of acting much longer. As far as upsetting the majority, here n the sticks the news has, so far, been greeted with total indifference.

Do you live in one of the poor MFI villages? If you do,, I think you may in for a nasty surprise. Otherwise your outlining sounds accurate enough, but knowing HE a bit better in these last moves, I expect he has even more up his sleeve.

Why would he need so long to find a conviction? I'd say he could do it two or three days.
He may have been diagnosed with some terminal illness, and as he sees it, it's now or never for the Hun dynasty.

I live in an old, well established village in what was once "Ta Mok country", have weathered several Cambodian elections without any nasty suprises. HE is never predictable, and there will no doubt be many more twists and turns to come. I wouldn't under estimate the role of several others, such as Sar Kheng and Tea Banh in what transpires.

This from the Guardian.

Cambodia's strongman PM digs in with arrest of opposition leader

Kem Sokha, key rival of three-decade ruler HE, bundled away in police raid and accused of treason and foreign conspiracy as election looms in 2018

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Agence France-Presse in Phnom Penh

Sunday 3 September 2017 01.23 BST Last modified on Sunday 3 September 2017 01.29 BST

The Cambodian opposition leader, Kem Sokha, has been arrested accused of treason, according to the government, in the latest of a flurry of legal cases lodged against critics and rivals of the strongman prime minister, HE.

The surprise arrest raises the stakes as HE’s political opponents, NGOs and the critical press are smothered by court cases and threats ahead of a crunch general election in 2018.

HE is determined to extend his three-decade rule and withstand the burgeoning popularity of the main opposition Cambodia National Rescue party (CNRP).

The government statement alleged “a secret plan of conspiracy between Kem Sokha, his group, and foreigners that harms Cambodia”, adding he was arrested early on Sunday.

“The above secret conspiracy is the act of treason,” the statement said, without giving further details of the alleged crime.

Kem Sokha is the leader of the CNRP which has been battered by court cases, bans and threats against its key figures.

He was handcuffed and “taken away by 100-200 police without warrant after they raided his home”, his daughter Kem Monovithya said in a Twitter post.

On Saturday night a pro-government website – Fresh News – alleged that Kem Sokha had discussed overthrowing HE with support from the United States.

It did not provide any evidence for the claim.

Last week the US expressed “deep concern” over the state of Cambodia’s democracy after the government there ordered out an American NGO and pursued a crackdown on independent media.

Among the media in the firing line is the well-respected Cambodia Daily, which often criticises the government.

It faces closure on Monday if it fails to pay a US$6.3m tax bill, a threat it says is a political move to muzzle its critical reporting.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... ion-leader