Phnom Penh, Cambodia – Cambodian rapper Kea Sokun was once jailed for his hard-hitting lyrics, but that didn’t stop him from going ahead with his latest release, Workers Blood, set to scenes of striking garment workers beaten up by military police. At least four workers died in the protests.
“They fought for their rights, for freedom, the pursuit of justice full of obstacles,” Sokun raps in Khmer. “I would like to commemorate the heroism of the workers who sacrificed their lives.”
Within days of the song’s release on January 3, the ninth anniversary of the government’s deadly response to a major strike by garment workers, the Ministry of Culture warned that the music video contained “inciting content that may cause insecurity.” and social disorder.
The leaders of the human rights organizations that commissioned the song were soon detained for questioning. Police threatened legal action unless the video was removed from the websites and Facebook pages of the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (LICADHO) and the Center for the Alliance for Labor and Human Rights ( CENTRAL), say representatives of rights groups. .
“Every year we publish [about the anniversary of the protests] and we don’t have any problem so why now when we only use old footage with a song about a real event why is it incitement? Am Sam Ath, LICADHO’s director of operations, told Al Jazeera. “We consider the order to remove the video as a violation of LICADHO’s right of expression.”
National police spokesman Chhay Kimkoeurn claimed no threats were involved and said the police were merely seeking to “educate” human rights groups.
“We’re not threatening them with legal action, but if they don’t obey the law, we will enforce the law,” he told Al Jazeera, referring to “incitement” to commit a crime, a vague charge commonly leveled against those considered to have criticized the government. government.
The song, commissioned by two Cambodian rights groups, was to raise awareness about a brutal crackdown on garment workers that took place in 2014 that left at least four people dead. [Courtesy of LICADHO and CENTRAL]
The Workers Blood censorship is part of an ongoing campaign against freedom of expression in Cambodia that is intensifying ahead of national elections in July. Nearing his fourth decade in power, Prime Minister Hun Sen outlawed the main opposition party ahead of the last election five years ago, and is now preparing to hand over control of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) to the son of him Hun Manet.
Civil society organizations, opposition politicians and rappers are forcefully reminded of the limits of what can and cannot be said in an increasingly restrictive society.
“I think the government is trying to legitimize itself and this is a period of transition of power, so they see civil society as a threat,” Khun Tharo, a program manager at CENTRAL, told Al Jazeera. “The government feels that this song has really discredited [them].”
A song that seeks justice
While Cambodia’s music industry has exploded in recent years, few rappers other than Sokun have dared to include direct social commentary in their songs. Other rappers who have spoken out against the government’s actions have faced death threats or have been forced to apologize publicly.
“I always want to use songs as mirrors to reflect the reality of society,” Sokun told VOD, an online media outlet in Cambodia, last year. “I just want to tell the truth.”
Having grown up in a poor household near the Angkor Wat World Heritage site and dropping out of school in his teens, Sokun was arrested and sentenced to a year in prison in 2020 for a series of nationalist songs that touched on themes like Cambodia. borders, and filled with ruthless takedowns of the rich and powerful.
A judge offered to release Sokun if he apologized for his lyrics, but the rapper refused and served the sentence, boosting his popularity in Cambodia.
The 24-year-old now has more than a quarter of a million subscribers on his YouTube channel and continues to tackle political issues and injustices, producing a song describing his imprisonment and another about the filling in of Phnom Penh’s lakes for development.
But it was Workers Blood that shocked the government because it was a reminder of the scale of the garment worker protests that began in late 2013, says Sabina Lawreniuk, a researcher at the University of Nottingham who studies the garment industry in Cambodia.
Tens of thousands of workers took to Veng Sreng Boulevard in Phnom Penh to demand higher wages and the government was eventually forced to double the minimum wage to $160 per month. Since then, it has raised wages annually, even as aggressive new union laws have also been introduced that human rights groups say are aimed at stifling independent union organizing.
“Labor politics in Cambodia is explicitly entangled with electoral politics in a way that other human rights issues and struggles in Cambodia are not,” Lawreniuk told Al Jazeera. “That huge mobilization of people really made the government uneasy.”
The protests came after a disputed 2013 election, when Cambodia’s National Rescue Party scared the CPP by capturing a large chunk of the vote on a platform calling for wage increases for garment workers and civil servants.
Kea Sokun is a very popular rapper in Cambodia and was previously jailed on “incitement” charges. [Courtesy of Kea Sokun]
The Veng Sreng protests only ended after police and military forces began firing into the crowd, injuring dozens and killing at least four people on January 3, 2014. One protester, 15-year-old Khem Sophat, he remains missing to this day.
“I have no hope they will find him, his friend said he was shot and he lay down on the street,” Sophat’s father, Khem Soeun, told Al Jazeera. “My son was very sweet, he was always helping the family.”
Sophat had lied about her age to get a job at a garment factory and sent money to her parents every month, her father said. The last time she saw his son was nine months before the protests when she visited him for the Khmer New Year holidays.
“After he went back to work, he never came back,” Soeun said. “Her mom hers, when she heard the song [Workers Blood]she cried all day, it reminded her of Veng Sreng street.”
The deaths were the result of “indiscriminate shooting and excessive use of force by military police,” according to an investigative report produced shortly after the protest by labor rights group Asia Monitor Resource Center. No one has ever been held responsible for the deaths of the workers.
“Waiting for justice for nine years, a long time passed and no one accountable, longing for a solution,” Sokun raps. “The eyes saw the truth, unforgettable, engraved in the minds of those who live.”
Vorn Pov, president of the Informal Democratic Association of the Independent Economy (IDEA), was bloodily beaten by government security forces at the protest. As a prominent labor activist associated with Veng Sreng, Pov was questioned by police about Sokun’s song and then forced to remove it from Sokun’s organization’s Facebook page, even though IDEA had not sponsored the song.
“When you listen to Sokun’s song, it’s shocking, like it’s still new and fresh and so unfair to the victims,” Pov told Al Jazeera. “I feel like this society cannot be trusted to find the truth when injustice occurs.”
Avoiding the ‘red line’
Culture Ministry spokesman Long Bunna Siriwadh did not elaborate on what specifically about Workers Blood triggered the incitement charge.
“I don’t analyze the meaning, I just talk about the principle of law and social order,” Siriwadh told Al Jazeera, claiming that Sokun could continue making songs. “He can continue to do whatever he wants. But don’t cause disturbances in society, respect the law, it’s that easy.”
Hun Sen drew a clear red line in a recent speech, warning the opposition party and other potential critics that criticism of the ruling CPP would be met with legal action or violence. The CPP has already sued one of the vice-chairmen of the opposition Candlelight Party for $1 million in defamation damages after he claimed there were problems with the electoral process, and this week police arrested another Candlelight leader for allegedly issuing a bad check.
In the run-up to Cambodian elections, free speech is often restricted, and while restrictions may be relaxed later, things are never quite the same again, according to Lawreniuk, a researcher at the University of Nottingham.
“While it seems that authoritarian control tightens around election time and then releases, in reality the power of government has always been consolidated over time,” Lawreniuk said. “That is what has enabled this slide towards de facto one-party rule.”
Prominent rights group LICADHO says the move to remove the video infringes on their freedom of expression. [Courtesy of LICADHO and CENTRAL]
Sokun, who has remained largely silent since the crackdown, declined to comment for Al Jazeera, saying he was now experiencing “a lot of problems in his life.” But he has denied that the song violated the law.
“There’s nothing wrong with the song, there’s no riot incitement,” he told Voice of America shortly after the video was censored. “We want the authorities to do justice to the victims, but instead they take action against the one who publishes [the song]I regret this.”
The original posts may have been deleted, but Sokun’s song continues to be widely shared on social media on other pages and platforms. If the government’s goal was to prevent the music video from being seen, it hasn’t worked, said Tharo of CENTRAL.
“Now it has gone viral,” he said. “I think we have reached our goal, because the idea was to create a public feeling of remembrance. [about Veng Sreng].”
Source: news.google.com