Cambodia pulls out of economic agreement with Vietnam and Laos

Phnom Penh’s withdrawal from the CLV Triangle Development Area pact marks a potentially important shift in Cambodia-Vietnam relations.

Cambodia has withdrawn from a two-decade-old regional economic development agreement with Vietnam and Laos, in a rare concession to opponents who claimed the pact had led to an erosion of Cambodian sovereignty.

On Friday, Prime Minister Hun Manet posted a statement to his Facebook page in which he said that his government had decided to pull out of the Cambodia-Laos-Vietnam (CLV) Triangle Development Area, and had notified Vietnam and Laos of its decision.

While hailing the agreement’s “many achievements,” he accused “extremists” of using the deal as “a political weapon” to attack the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) by alleging it had led to a loss of land and sovereignty to Vietnam.

“Taking into account people’s concerns about territory… we have decided that Cambodia is ending its participation in the CLV-DTA from September 20, 2024, onwards,” Manet wrote, according to a translation from the AFP news agency. He also cited the “political necessity to disarm the extremists and prevent them from using the CLV-DTA to deceive the Cambodian people further.”

The CLV agreement, which was signed in 1999 and entered into force in 2004, was designed to develop 13 once-remote border provinces, including five in Vietnam, four in Cambodia, and four in Laos.

In a letter to its  counterparts in Hanoi and Vientiane, the Cambodian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that “the cooperation mandate has reached its objectives.” Accordingly, “each country is fully capable of continuing and ensuring the development of its respective nation independently.”

Concerns about the CLV agreement began circulating on Cambodian social media back in July, with critics claiming that the agreement had led Cambodia to cede territory and control of natural resources in its four northeastern provinces. On August 11, several thousand Cambodians took part in protests against the CLV agreement in South Korea, Japan, Canada, and Australia.

When a similar protest was announced for August 18 in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, the government treated it as an existential threat. It deployed a heavy police presence around the country, and set up barricades to prevent people from traveling to the capital to attend the protest. The authorities also arrested at least 94 people in connection with the planned protest, according to the advocacy group Human Rights Watch.

The reaction spoke to the potency of the Vietnamese border as a mobilizing issue for the CPP’s opponents. As I noted last month, concerns about Vietnam – particularly, fears of encroachments into Cambodian territory and the effect of unrestricted Vietnamese immigration into border areas – have been an integral part of Cambodian nationalism since its gestation in the first half of the twentieth century. The issue has subsequently been one of the most potent lines of attack for opponents of the CPP, which was installed in power by Vietnam after its overthrow of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime in January 1979, and has since retained close relations with Vietnam.

However, the fact that the government has swung from a defensive crackdown, in which the virtues of the CLV agreement were trumpeted by government-aligned media and chanted by schoolchildren, to a surprise concession to its critics, is a sign that a significant shift in Cambodia-Vietnam relations is underway.

This was already evident with regard to the China-backed Funan Techo Canal. The project, which broke ground in early August, will connect the Mekong River to the Gulf of Thailand, reducing Cambodia’s reliance on Vietnamese ports.

The project is set to have potentially deleterious impacts on Vietnam’s agriculturally productive Mekong Delta region, to say nothing of potential security implications. But Hun Manet’s administration has done little to assuage Vietnamese fears about the Funan Techo project, and refused to share information about its impacts.

Instead, Manet has described the project that will help Cambodia “breathe through our own nose” by reducing its economic reliance on Vietnam, depicted the completion of the project as a totem of nationalist pride, and stated that Cambodia does not need any other nation’s permission. In so doing, it has used rhetoric with a subtle, though unmistakable and historically familiar, anti-Vietnamese valence.

The fact that the government would now take the rare step of acceding to its opponents’ demands to withdraw from the CLV agreement reflects not just its perennial concern about being seen as a puppet of Hanoi. It also points to a possible reversion to the historical mean in terms of Cambodian relations with Vietnam, as China has come to eclipse Vietnam’s historically prominent position in the country.

The friendship between the CPP and its counterpart in Hanoi is historically anomalous. The relationship was forged in the 1980s – an era of hostility between China and the Soviet Union, then the patron of both Vietnam and its client state in Phnom Penh. More than four decades later, the geopolitical winds have changed: China is perhaps now the most dominant economic and political influence in Cambodia, giving the CPP the means of distancing itself from Vietnam and defusing long-standing claims that it dances to Hanoi’s tune. At the same time, many of the personal connections that undergirded the relationship between Vietnam and Cambodia have weakened as the older generation of officials has passed on.

Relations between Vietnam and Cambodia are not about to collapse into open acrimony; there are still enough mutual interests to keep things on an even keel. But it is increasingly evident that the kinship between Hanoi and Phnom Penh can no longer be taken for granted.

By Sebastian Strangio – The diplomat – September 23, 2024