Senior CPP lawmaker Chheang Vun on Friday denounced eight arrested CNRP officials as anarchists and said that Tuesday’s violent clash at Freedom Park was worse than riots in January in which military police shot dead at least five protesting garment factory workers.
Speaking at a press conference at the National Assembly, Mr. Vun said that opposition protesters had come to Freedom Park with rice sacks full of wooden clubs and a premeditated plan to beat the notoriously violent Daun Penh district security guards .
Opposition supporters on Friday chant for the release of eight CNRP officials, including seven lawmakers-elect, who are being held in pre-trial detention at Prey Sar prison on charges of insurrection and incitement to commit a felony. (Siv Channa/The Cambodia Daily)
As part of the CPP’s ongoing effort to shape the narrative of Tuesday’s clash, which has been used as a pretext to arrest seven CNRP lawmakers-elect, Mr. Vun during the two-hour conference played a series of videos that he said were evidence that the detained opposition officials were guilty of incitement and insurrection, as charged.
“They dumped sticks. The majority of the sticks are iron sticks. This proves they beat up securitypersonnel ,” Mr. Vun said, as a video showed a man pull a sack of clubs out of a tuk-tuk and empty it on the road.
Mr. Vun said that these clubs “do not belong to security personnel because security personnel carry black sticks.”
However, the same clubs that are emptied out of the rice sack and onto the road in Mr. Vun’s clip can be seen in numerous videos posted to YouTube and Facebook. In those videos, the crude clubs are clearly wielded by men wearing the Daun Penh district security guard uniforms.
In one clip, men wearing the dark blue uniform can be seen unloading bags of clubs from a truck belonging to the municipality and dispensing them among their ranks before walking toward the crowd that had gathered on Norodom Boulevard to ask the government to “free the Freedom Park.”
The opposition protesters, led by CNRP public affairs chief Mu Sochua, had put up a giant orange banner along the razor-wire barrier surrounding the park.
When the men in the security uniforms descended on the protest, swinging clubs and tearing down the banner, CNRP supporters chose not to run. Instead, they used plastic flagpoles to jab at the aggressors.
But rather than attack the protesters, as has become the security guards’ habit in recent months, they retreated, running in various directions away from the angry opposition protesters.
“We can see that the security personnel did not take any action,” Mr. Vun said of the fleeing guards.
The other state security forces deployed to the protest, including municipal riot police, stood idly behind the razor wire surrounding the park, looking on as a number of the district security guards were beaten bloody.
“This is the very first case that they [CNRP supporters] beat up security personnel strongly,” Mr. Vun said.
He said that the carnage following the lethal suppression of a garment worker demonstration on Veng Sreng Street in January, when military police indiscriminately fired AK-47 rifles into a crowd of protesters, could not compare to the injuries inflicted on the district guards on Tuesday.
“It did not carry horrible images like this,” he said, comparing the Veng Sreng clash to Tuesday’s violence.
Mr. Vun played a number of clips showing people beating men wearing the district security uniform, though they mostly used their feet, hands, helmets, flagpoles and rocks, rather than the wooden clubs that he claimed the CNRP had distributed among the crowd.
On the day of the clash, CNRP spokesman Yem Ponhearith, who was not at Freedom Park, took responsibility on behalf of the party and apologized for the violence, saying that there were no agent provocateurs involved.
However, Nuth Rumduol, who was at the protest and has since been arrested, said in an interview on Wednesday that imposters had infiltrated the protest and led the savage beatings of guards.
Mr. Rumduol said he had seen men wearing the district security uniform depositing the clubs among the opposition supporters and then urging them to attack.
“So then the protesters just followed those third hands to fight back because they thought they were real protesters,” he said.
“When the clash was happening, the ones who were seen dropping the clubs among the protesters ran back to their people.”
Another video circulated on Facebook this week shows a man in a dark blue uniform tossing a sack full of wooden clubs onto the road at the same time that security guards were being isolated and beaten.
Khuong Sreng, deputy Phnom Penh governor, said that Mr. Rumduol’s claims were false and defended the lack of police support for the security guards.
“Generally, we don’t want to use armed forces to face people and protesters, that is the reason we sent the security personnel,” he said.
“We didn’t expect the incident to turn out that way.”
Mr. Rumduol was arrested along with CNRP chief of security Long Ry, who is also a lawmaker-elect, at Mr. Ry’s Phnom Penh home on Thurdsay afternoon.
On Friday, according to their lawyer, they were moved to Prey Sar Prison, where they joined Ms. Sochua, her assistant Oeur Narith, and elected lawmakers Keo Phirum, Real Camerin, Men Sothavrin and Ho Vann in pre-trail detention.
The French Embassy said Friday that it had been able to visit Mr. Sothavrin, a French national, in prison. The U.S. Embassy said it was still trying to get access to Ms. Sochua, a U.S. citizen.
Local rights group Licadho reported on Friday that police were now seeking an eighth elected CNRP lawmaker, Meach Sovannara, for questioning in relation to the Freedom Park clash.
Kirth Chantharith, spokesman for the National Police, confirmed that police would make more arrests but declined to give names of those wanted.
A host of human rights groups on Friday released statements condemning the charges that have been levied against the CNRP lawmakers-elect present at the protest.
Ravina Shamdasani, spokeswoman for the U.N.’s commissioner on human rights, said the U.N. was “concerned about the very serious charges which were brought against them, including ‘insurrection,’ given the widely observed efforts by opposition leaders to calm the protesters and stop the violence during the clashes.”
Thun Saray, president of local rights group Adhoc, called on the government to stop using ill-prepared district security guards to break up otherwise peaceful demonstrations.
“The government must, once and for all, rein in its law enforcement personnel and stop using unofficial guards and hired thugs to repress peaceful protests,” he said.
At the National Assembly press conference, Mr. Vun said that he couldn’t understand the outrage about the deployment of the district security guards, who have mercilessly beaten journalists, monks, women and other protesters since last year’s election.
“I don’t get the outrage,” he said.
“When security personnel—who are in charge of protecting public order—try to instruct the people, they abuse them so they hit people in order to maintain social stability,” Mr. Vun said.
“As I have shown in the video, the anarchist people beat the security personnel. If the security personnel beat these people back, they are not wrong because they are a group of anarchists, not citizens.”
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