Hun Sen’s Counterproductive Attempt to Tame Vietnamese Online Critics

In May, President of the Cambodian Senate Hun Sen ordered Cambodia’s Deputy Prime Minister (DPM) and Minister for Foreign Affairs Sok Chenda Sophea to work with Vietnam to identify people using Vietnamese-language comments to insult him on TikTok and Facebook. Hun Sen complained about being attacked in comments listed under a video about the proposed Funan Techo Canal project that has sparked controversy in Vietnam, and demanded that the Vietnamese government take action.

Hun Sen’s demand is likely to be futile and counterproductive. The Cambodian leader must know that Hanoi has little ability to control the online posts of the many on his long list of online critics, including “citizens of Vietnam, overseas separatists or bilingual ethnic Khmer Krom”. (The Khmer Krom is a Khmer-speaking community in southern Vietnam whose demand for indigenous status has not been recognised by Hanoi.) In Vietnam, the government exercises online control through monitoring and selective intervention, often in the form of requests for social media platforms to remove anti-government content. It is unreasonable to think Vietnam would mobilise resources to check one social media network when there are over 70 million active Vietnamese social media users just for Hun Sen.

Some Vietnamese scholars suggest that the Vietnamese government should “mitigate the unwanted pique [against Cambodia] among the populace” for the sake of good relations with Cambodia but there is not much Hanoi can do, especially with overseas Vietnamese.

Leaning on Hanoi to tame Vietnamese online users has provoked a backlash. Since 20 May when Hun Sen first aired his complaint, a dozen more posts on his TikTok channel (with 995,000 followers), and his Facebook (14 million followers) received hundreds of critical comments, a clear sign of escalation. Apart from verbally abusive and nationalistic comments, there were heartbreaking stories by Vietnamese women about their male family members being killed or injured in Cambodia, indicating the topic is still raw in Vietnam many years after the 1978-89 war.

Eight years ago when Hun Sen was Cambodia’s premier, a similar spat broke out between him and a female Vietnamese Facebooker who accused him of “turning his back on Vietnam despite the country sacrificing blood to save the Cambodian people from genocide”. (This followed Cambodia’s decision not to support the 2016 ruling of an international tribunal in The Hague for the Philippines against China’s claims over the South China Sea.) Over 2,000 Vietnamese joined in to denounce Hun Sen by repeating a popular Vietnamese narrative that his regime was ungrateful to Vietnam. The Cambodian counter-narrative, propagated by Khmer nationalists and the Sam Rainsy Party in the recent past but censored in Vietnam, claimed that the Vietnamese harboured expansionist intentions towards Cambodia and always wanted to impede the latter’s development and sovereignty.

These incidents are the latest to underscore how Cambodia’s relationship with Vietnam is shaped by competing narratives of a long history of opposing grievances that have been allowed to fester for many decades.

Instead of shifting the responsibility to Hanoi, Hun Sen, who is fluent in Vietnamese, could make use of his power and online popularity to initiate a meaningful reconciliation process with the Vietnamese public. Arguably, he holds an advantage over Vietnamese leaders who officially own no personal social media accounts, due to strict rules.

For instance, he could send a clear signal of moving away from the mantra of “time-tested brotherly friendship” to recognise Cambodia-Vietnam relations as troubled and fraught. That would help at least some in Vietnamese society to realise that diplomatic relations are often governed by realpolitik, rather than expecting a sense of eternal gratitude between neighbours for past favours.

Instead of shifting the responsibility to Hanoi, Hun Sen, who is fluent in Vietnamese, could make use of his power and online popularity to initiate a meaningful reconciliation process with the Vietnamese public.

However, Hun Sen must first offer an explanation about a problem concerning domestic and overseas Vietnamese netizens. Ninety per cent of an estimated 400,000 to 700,000 ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia remained stateless, according to Minority Rights Group. Phnom Penh’s decision in 2018 to grant just 70,000 of them temporary residency permits left the issue unresolved. This issue was “ignored by Cambodian human rights activists” and needs strong and courageous action from the top.

It is worth noting that these recent arguments have galvanised overseas Vietnamese in the US, many of whom were former war refugees from the Mekong Delta region. Some still have familial relationships with the abovementioned stateless migrants in Cambodia.

These anti-Cambodian grievances have drawn the attention of Vietnamese diasporic media, evidenced by a popular video report by a Texas-based vlogger about the displaced Vietnamese community at Tonle Sap lake (with 586,000 views) and a TV programme from California, highlighting an alleged negative impact of Cambodia’s proposed canal project on the ecosystem in the Mekong Delta. Like how Vietnam cannot control its social media users entirely, Cambodia cannot censor over two million Vietnamese-Americans.

A future-oriented, open debate with the participation of historians, media and civil society from both countries could be held to address unresolved bilateral issues. The purpose should not be to score points and to dismiss the interlocutors but to go beyond competing narratives. This is so that both sides can cast light on the emotional undercurrents of grievances and seek common understanding and forgiveness.

Two years ago, a Cambodian scholar Kimhong Heng wrote that reconciling conflicting views on Vietnam would help Cambodian politicians of all political colours to move forward. Today, such a suggestion is also valid for the Cambodian-Vietnamese relationship.

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