Tag: Sam Rainsy

But rather than see the day as a liberation, the ruling party's detractors, including Sam Rainsy, the exiled acting leader of the dissolved opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), have branded January 7 as the start of an occupation by an historic enemy. "Even today, Cambodian politicians, from Prime Minister Hun Sen and opposition leader Sam Rainsy on down, spend much of their energy fighting an old civil war which has little relevance to the problems facing most of Cambodia's 15 million people." "Without Vietnam, I was about to get killed right away because I was in jail already. Siphan said Sam Rainsy, who has long taunted Hun Sen with accusations of being a Vietnamese puppet, had no understanding of the importance of January 7 due to not living under the Pol Pot regime. "Sam Rainsy was living abroad; they never came across the suffering from the killings of the Khmer Rouge. Nee and his family followed the Vietnamese for around 15km as forces poured across the border, sending the Khmer Rouge scarpering west. He later joined the CNRP in 2012 before passing away four years later. "January 7 was a victory day but also a sad day [because] Vietnam violated Cambodian autonomy," Sovann told The Phnom Penh Post in 2001. "After January 7, from year to year Vietnamese have put pressure on all kinds of freedom of expression in Cambodia and the fate of Cambodia was decided by Vietnamese." But Hun Sen's efforts to paint himself as a national saviour did not make sense for young people who had never known war, genocide or the origins of the ruling party, he added.