In a strongman state a Trump order extinguishes flickers of freedom

PHNOM PENH – His father was marched to a forest and killed, like so many victims of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Before he was led away, the father told his young son Uon Chhin to stand up and speak the truth, even if it might compromise his liberty.

Decades later, Mr Uon Chhin became a journalist during the muckraking heyday of the free press in Cambodia.

But in 2017, he and a colleague at Radio Free Asia were charged with espionage. Their nine-month imprisonment presaged an evisceration of human rights in Cambodia by Mr Hun Sen, the long-time leader who refashioned a young democracy into a dictatorial dynasty.

Now, the slashing of US foreign aid and President Donald Trump’s executive order in March to gut US-funded news media like Radio Free Asia and Voice of America are erasing what little space for free speech remains in Cambodia. Thirty projects funded by the United States Agency for International Development have been cancelled, including those supporting civil society and an independent media.

It is a tectonic shift in this South-east Asian nation, which was once a laboratory for internationally mandated democracy-building in the post-Khmer Rouge era, then later devolved into a strongman state.

And it underscores the rise of another power, China, eager to influence a small country desperate for cash and for a model for developing its fast-growing economy.

Like China, Mr Hun Sen celebrated Mr Trump’s executive order targeting Radio Free Asia and Voice of America. Silencing these US-funded news organisations, he said, would be a “a major contribution to eliminating fake news, disinformation, lies, distortions, incitement and chaos around the world”.

Two years ago, Mr Hun Sen nominally handed over power to his oldest son, Mr Hun Manet. Educated at the US Military Academy at West Point, Mr