Mech Dara, one of Cambodia’s last remaining independent journalists, was arrested yesterday outside the crime hub of Sihanoukville where so much of his reporting was focused in recent years. The arrest was conducted with a flamboyant show of force by a six-car barrage of military police and plainclothes officers at 3:57 p.m. by the Sre Ambel toll plaza. After nearly 24 hours in detention, his location was confirmed by Cambodian authorities as Kandal Provincial Prison, indicating a charge of incitement to commit a felony.
Mech Dara’s is an all-too-common story for actors operating within the region’s rapidly constricting civic space. Nonetheless, his arrest may be viewed as particularly tragic given the global public interest benefit of his acclaimed work. Moreover, it is a particularly telling one about the nature of the operative regime in Cambodia. This may still be “Hun Sen’s Cambodia” but it is his son Hun Manet’s government now, and it is high time for global governments to stop pretending this dynastic succession has facilitated anything other than a sustained spiral into total criminal autocracy.
Dara’s investigations in recent years have focused on state-affiliated transnational crime and related human rights abuses, generally, and how an industry of slavery-fueled cybercrime has overtaken his country, in particular. Conservative estimates by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime and the U.S. Institute of Peace have Cambodia’s scam industry bringing in over $12 billion per year, an amount equivalent to nearly half the country’s GDP. These figures are well established today, as are the evidenced linkages between the Cambodian ultra-elite and the criminal syndicates that operate these scam centers. But, back in 2021, none of this was understood and none of the attention this issue now justly enjoys was even remotely on the horizon.
Rather, it was a small band of local journalists and activists who gradually pieced together a massive story of state predation and extraction. None told that story more doggedly or at greater personal risk than Mech Dara, and within a short window of time, the accumulated evidence had become undeniable.
Over the last three-and-a-half years, as the issue has burst onto the global scene, Dara’s expertise has played a pivotal role, via his own bylines, his extensive freelance work with global media outlets, and the significant network he has developed with key sources at the community level. It is not an overstatement to suggest that anyone who today reaps vocational benefit from their “industry expertise” on Cambodian crime networks or trafficking patterns owes a significant debt to Mech Dara.
Resulting from the storm of exceptional reporting he helped generate, greater momentum has also built in the policy domain for concerted actions to constrain a now globally damaging Cambodian kleptocracy.
For instance, just two weeks ago, in the most significant policy action in the forced scamming phenomenon to date, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Ly Yong Phat, a Cambodian senator, advisor to the prime minister, and criminal oligarch par excellence.
For good reason, many Cambodians speak of Ly Yong Phat and his peers in hushed tones as “untouchables” in a society marked by elite impunity. Yet, for years, Dara has said the quiet part out loud and has persistently worked to uncover and publish horrific tales of abuse and complicity abounding from Ly Yong Phat’s business interests. While it is farfetched to imagine Dara playing an integrated role in the targeting of U.S. sanctions, he will doubtless be viewed by the regime as the chief local antagonist.
Accordingly, it is difficult not to see Dara’s arrest as something of a retaliatory move by the Cambodian government – a means of reasserting its sovereignty and sending a shot back across the bow of American hegemonic muscle. “You sanction, we repress.” Of course, it will not be framed this way. Just as in the shuttering last year of the media outlet VOD, a spurious alternative rationale will be offered via official state channels, but these will be paper thin at best.
Even if this is not tit-for-tat retaliation for Ly Yong Phat’s sanctioning, there is no realistic account in which Dara’s arrest was not politically motivated. His work has doubtless caused party elites significant and mounting discomfort for years. Those elites have fully captured Cambodia’s legal system and have a well-documented history of waging one-sided “lawfare” against their enemies. And, for all their notable deficiencies, Cambodia’s courts are remarkably efficient in bringing about the wishes of their patrons. Once charges are levied, Cambodia boasts a nearly flawless conviction rate.
Nonetheless, significant advocacy is needed to ensure maximum pressure is exerted by key embassies on Dara’s behalf. The U.S. embassy should be at the top of the list due to: 1) its relative level of influence; 2) some level of responsibility to protect the State Department’s annually designated TIP Heroes; and 3) the potential role U.S. sanctions played in precipitating this arrest.
As the world observes this veritable death blow to the Cambodian press, it is vitally important that we continue finding ways to tell these stories well. Ultimately, telling them well means accepting the inconvenient but overwhelming evidence of profound state involvement in transnational (and ecological) crime, and thinking carefully about what this stark reality implies about a way forward.
Constraining mafia states like Cambodia is exceedingly difficult. It is also an issue of escalating global importance and one which lacks a clear blueprint. In her excellent recent title “Autocracy, Inc.,” Anne Applebaum offers a starting point. She suggests we cannot approach this monumental task through the lens of competition against individual autocratic states (China’s vassal states in this case). Rather, democratic governments and activists should view themselves as warring “against autocratic behaviors wherever they are found both at home and abroad.” If we don’t, the malignancy of such behaviors will cost us far more than the revenue lost to the predatory Cambodian elite.
More targeted individual sanctions and criminal prosecution against corrupt, rights-abusing, and repressive officials are certainly a part of this “war.” Yet, we need to look further if we want our most powerful policy mechanisms to serve more than a symbolic function. We must close the vast array of entry points for transnational kleptocracy which mar the global financial system. Shell companies, anonymous real estate transactions, and private equity loopholes have no place in an open, democratic society. But, beyond even these big picture anti-money laundering reforms, there are things we can do today.
We can and must support the courageous democratic activists, journalists, and rights observers like Mech Dara who are working at great personal risk to bring kleptocratic practices to light in Cambodia and elsewhere. We can demand that our local and federal law enforcement agencies and the military-intelligence community proactively and collaboratively investigate state-sponsored financial crime impacting American citizens. We can identify ways to combat and debunk the propaganda that offers cover to degrading and extractive political actors in the U.S., Cambodia, and beyond. We can work to hold tech firms accountable for the crimes and disinformation flourishing on their platforms and contributing to their bottom lines. There’s much more but this would be a good start.
Southeast Asia’s transnational crime epidemic offers an unprecedented moment of aligned interest as citizens from all over the world are being victimized by kleptocracy en masse. It is incumbent on us to take advantage of this momentum. As Applebaum notes in the epilogue to her book, “the behavior of nations are not merely calculable pieces in a game of Risk. They can be altered by acts of cowardice or bravery, by wise leaders and cruel ones, and above all by good ideas and bad ones.” Dara’s actions are emblematic of this hopeful claim. His current plight should suggest that it’s high time for the right acts, leaders, and ideas to take center stage.