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US Sponsored “Regime Change” in Cambodia? Opposition Leader Bragged About US-backed Sedition
By Tony Cartalucci
Global Research, September 08, 2017

Url of this article:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-sponsored-regime-change-in-cambodia-opposition-leader-bragged-about-us-backed-sedition/5608140

Featured image: Cambodian opposition leader Kem Sokha (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Cambodian opposition leader Kem Sokha was recently arrested on charges of treason. While the Western media has attempted to portray the charges as politically motivated, Sokha’s treason is not only quite real, he openly, eagerly bragged about it on the Australian-based “Cambodia Broadcasting Network” (CBN).  

The Phnom Penh Post in its article, “Kem Sokha video producer closes Phnom Penh office in fear,” would quote Sokha who claimed (emphasis added):

And, the USA that has assisted me, they asked me to take the model from Yugoslavia, Serbia, where they can change the dictator Slobodan Milosevic,” he continues, referring to the former Serbian and Yugoslavian leader who resigned amid popular protests following disputed elections, and died while on trial for war crimes.

“You know Milosevic had a huge numbers of tanks. But they changed things by using this strategy, and they take this experience for me to implement in Cambodia. But no one knew about this.”

Sokha is referring to the openly admitted US-engineered regime change mechanism known as “color revolutions” and in particular the successful overthrow of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

It is also mentioned in the article that Sokha has traveled to the United States every year since 1993 to “learn about the democratization process.” A video of Kem Sokha with US Senator Ed Royce in Washington DC openly calling for the deposing of the Cambodian government has also been published by CBN.

US Regime-Change Represents Destabilization and Destruction, Not Democracy 

As admitted by the New York Times in its article, “Who Really Brought Down Milosevic,” the United States, not the people of Serbia, overthrew the Serbian government – not in favor of the Serbs’ best interests, but for Washington’s own self-serving interests.

The New York Times would write:

American assistance to Otpor and the 18 parties that ultimately ousted Milosevic is still a highly sensitive subject. But Paul B. McCarthy, an official with the Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy, is ready to divulge some details…

…McCarthy says, ”from August 1999 the dollars started to flow to Otpor pretty significantly.” Of the almost $3 million spent by his group in Serbia since September 1998, he says, ”Otpor was certainly the largest recipient.” The money went into Otpor accounts outside Serbia. At the same time, McCarthy held a series of meetings with the movement’s leaders in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro, and in Szeged and Budapest in Hungary. Homen, at 28 one of Otpor’s senior members, was one of McCarthy’s interlocutors. ”We had a lot of financial help from Western nongovernmental organizations,” Homen says. ”And also some Western governmental organizations.”

The successful overthrow of the Serbian government by agents working on behalf of Washington served as a template for other, similar operations including the 2011 “Arab Spring” that has left North Africa and much of the Middle East ravaged by war, failed states, and human catastrophe.

In an April 2011 article also published by the New York Times titled, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” it was stated:

A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington.

The article would also add, regarding the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED):

The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department.

Those participating in overthrowing their nation’s government with foreign aid are by definition traitors – and with Cambodia’s Kem Sokha and his entire Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) implicated in and admitting to an identically foreign-organized conspiracy against their own nation as took place in Serbia and across the Arab World, it seems that charges of treason are more than warranted.

Readers should take note that nations targeted by US-engineered regime change – from Serbia to Ukraine, to Georgia, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen – all have suffered immeasurably since. For the Cambodian government not to follow through with uprooting Sokha and the US networks built up across Cambodia to support foreign subversion, would be the height of irresponsibility, inviting nothing less than the same sort of destabilization and destruction in Cambodia still unfolding in other nations targeted by US political interference.

Kem Sokha’s eagerness to indenture himself – and were he come to power, his entire nation – to US interests is perhaps the greatest indicator that he in no way represents the sort of democratic progress he claims to be bringing to Cambodia. Democracy – a process primarily of self-determination – cannot exist if Cambodia’s future is being openly determined in Washington D.C. instead.

This article was originally published by Land Destroyer Report.

Disclaimer: The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in this article.