Welcome to Asia’s newest one-party state

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, Mu Sochua, one of three vice presidents of Cambodia’s besieged opposition party, returned to her apartment in a central Phnom Penh neighbourhood a few hundred metres from Independence Monument. She began stuffing her family photos and winter clothes into suitcases. It might be cold in Morocco; it might be a long winter.

A few hours later, Sochua, one of the Cambodian National Rescue Party’s (CNRP) few remaining senior leaders still left free in the country, caught a flight to Bangkok. The only people who saw her leave were a few trusted allies and a couple of men she believed to be plain-clothes police stationed outside her apartment.

“I don’t feel safe in the country any more,” she said that night from her Bangkok hotel room. She was tired and stumbled over her words. She would join her daughter in Morocco. The grassroots of her party were still strong, she claimed, but still, “it’s the end”.

“Sooner or later, you can’t just keep pulling layers. Sooner or later, it will collapse,” she said.

Sochua’s exit was the latest casualty of a sweeping government crackdown that on September 4 brought down the party’s president, Kem Sokha, for alleged treason, after footage surfaced of a speech he gave bragging about US backing for his political career. On Friday, the Ministry of Interior announced that it would ask Cambodia’s Supreme Court to dissolve the CNRP altogether, acting on a complaint filed by two minor parties.