PM Calls on Diaspora to Visit Cambodia

[geovalin]

When many Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) officials travel abroad, they often face protests by the resident Cambodian population, including Prime Minister Hun Sen’s eldest son in Australia last week, prompting Mr. Hun Sen to take to Facebook yesterday and invite Cambodia’s diaspora to ignore “propaganda” and see the country for themselves.   “Please, brothers and sisters – especially grandfathers and grandmothers living abroad for a long time, who just listen to bad propaganda that is not true, with facts coming from partial persons – come to visit our country,” the prime minister wrote.  
 

“Just making propaganda without true facts is useless for the nation and people also stop believing them,” he added, stressing that Cambodia under his long reign had seen numerous developments after decades of war. Hundreds of thousands of Cambodians fled the Khmer Rouge violence in the 1970s – and the subsequent guerrilla war against Vietnamese and government forces in the 1980s – first to refugee camps over the border in Thailand and then in large numbers to France, Australia and the US.
 

The 2010 US census lists 276,000 citizens identifying as ethnically Cambodian. Australia’s most recent census notes that more than 35,000 citizens cite Cambodia as their country of birth. The diaspora has traditionally supported Cambodia’s opposition parties, with 150 Cambodian-Australians protesting last Friday in front of a restaurant in Melbourne, where Hun Manet was due to speak.

 

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