Cambodian Church has to watch out for lull before storm

After a tumultuous past, the Church in Cambodia marked a century of Christianity on Jan. 27 in the southeast nation with robust ties with the current government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, one of the longest serving leaders in the world.

Cambodia marked the event with Prime Minister Hun Sen advocating harmony among all religions.

“During the time of war, religion also suffers. Look at what has happened in Ukraine. For Cambodia, thanks to peace, we are prospering,” Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge battalion commander, said.

The first mission in Cambodia was conducted by the Portuguese friar Gaspar da Crus of the Dominican order in 1555 but his efforts did not succeed.

At the anniversary function, Hun Sen was referring to the Christian Missionary Alliance in 1923, which resulted in a Khmer translation of the Bible.

The Catholic Church in the Buddhist majority Cambodia is small with the clergy comprising mainly missionaries drawn from multiple nationalities. However, they have managed to localize the liturgy despite a dark past behind it. 

Some of them, like Apostolic Prefect Enrique Figaredo Alvargonzález of Battambang, one of only three Catholic administrative units in Cambodia, refuse to sit on the oars and mingle with the crowd.

The Jesuit prelate has already earned the sobriquet of “Bishop of the Wheelchairs” because of his Good Samaritan work among handicapped people and refugees since 1985.

After Cambodia started to change from war to peace, in 1998, things were going well for the tiny Cambodian Church with only about 35,000 Catholics in a population of 17 million.

Contrary to the colonial days when Europeans were the flag-bearers of missionary activities in Asia, the Mission Cambodia is managed by missionaries drawn from the Asian nations of Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, India, and the Catholic majority Philippines. There are missionaries from more than 20 nationalities in Cambodia.

Last year, the Church received a shot in the arm with a local person appointed as apostolic perfect of Kampong-Cham. Father Pierre Suon Hangly was installed on Oct. 1 last year to look after eight provinces in eastern Cambodia.

It was not an easy task for the missionaries, as the faithful also changed their nationalities like the clergy. Catholics in Cambodia are Thais, Vietnamese, and Cambodians.

There are also believers who are neither Vietnamese nor Cambodians. They are minority groups, from the mountains, to add up to the variety and diversity of the Cambodian Church, a pot filled with many ethnicities and exclusive cultural identities.

During the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979) almost all 73 churches were destroyed and the Catholic cemetery near Phnom Penh cathedral was converted into a banana plantation.

Working to create an agrarian society, the Khmer Rouge terrorized Cambodians. Approximately 2 million died, including all the nation’s Christians, from overwork, starvation, disease, or execution.

So, few Christians can today boast of their faith dating back to the Khmer Rouge days.

Nothing was published; no one could visit a relative sans nod; and everyone was asked to put on peasant work clothes.  A handful of leaders exerted full control on everything in the country, but they remained in hiding.

An interrogation center in Phnom Penh, a prison code-named “S-21,” alone became the site of more than 15,000 executions. In 2010, after years of delay, the first trial of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal got underway and it awarded an additional 19 years of imprisonment to Kaing Guek Eav (known as Duch), who had been in charge of “S-21.” 

The unrest and the civil war in the country ended in 1998 when Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, died and his movement fell apart. Pol Pot learnt the rudimentary of communist revolution from the French Communist Party. As a student on a scholarship to study radio electronics in France, Pol Pot, his original name Saloth Sar, spent more time on party activities than on his studies.

With his death, for the first time in 30 years, Cambodia was at peace.

The Cambodian Church got a new lease of life with new-found stability in the country. But the missionaries have to walk the talk to build the Church by playing their supporting role in a country which witnessed a massive American aerial bombardment in 1973 though the US and Cambodia were not at war and no U.S. troops were endangered by Cambodia.

The bombing, aimed to slow communist attacks on Phnom Penh, wreaked havoc in the thickly populated countryside.

The current constitution awards Buddhism the state religion status and provides for freedom of belief and religious worship. But there is a law that prohibits offers of money or materials to convert and bans non-Buddhist groups from proselytizing publicly in the former communist nation.

The current peace in the country can go topsy-turvy as Hun Sen has managed to crush the opposition to his plans to run for reelection this year, before handing the baton to his son, Hun Manet, after the 2028 polls. 

By that time, the 70-year-old will have served as prime minister of Cambodia for 43 years.

Currently, his Cambodian People’s Party, that replaced the Khmer Rouge in 1979, is facing little threat to its power since the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) was disbanded in 2017 by the country’s Supreme Court.

As general elections are scheduled for July 23, a court sentenced exiled opposition leader Sam Rainsy to life in prison in October 2022. The court also removed all political rights of Rainsy who has been living in self-exile in France since 2015.

Finding a place as one of the longest-serving leaders in the world, Hun Sen on Jan 16 marked his 38 years in power by meeting with 5,000 journalists in the capital Phnom Penh. 

He is known as the “strongman Hun Sen”, but critics have termed him an “authoritarian figure” with a tardy human rights record.

Human Rights Watch in its annual report, published on Jan. 12 this year, said Hun Sen has intensified a crackdown on the opposition, as well as activists and media, since last year.

The tiny Church in Cambodia has to watch out for the lull before the storm.