Cambodian Premier: National Ownership, the Key to Sustained Peace

Samdech Akka Moha Sena Padei Techo Hun Sen, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Cambodia, has laid stress on the “national ownership”, saying that is the key to success and sustained peace.
“[…] peace and nation-building can only be achieved by local stakeholders in the conflicting-country. Other countries cannot perform the roles of those stakeholders in achieving these objectives. In this regard, I would like to emphasise that ‘national ownership’ is the key to success and sustained peace. In other words, other countries cannot transplant political value and system upon any country, as these fundamentals need to be indigenously developed corresponding to the political, economic, social and cultural contexts of each individual country,” he said in his keynote address at the “7th World Rally of Hope: Think-Tank 2022”, organised by the Universal Peace Federation on Sept. 12 via videoconference under the theme “Peace in the Asia-Pacific”.
At present, he added, one geo-political event in the region that has attracted a great deal of international attentions is the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and the total take-over of Kabul by the Taliban. This event is a grim and bitter reminder of what happened in Cambodia on April 17, 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh which was marked with utmost grief. That Cambodia and the Cambodian people remember the tragedy and are determined to preventing such a similar event from happening again.
Clearly, geo-political landscape in the Asia-Pacific region is fast-changing with the global power shifts and geo-political rivalries getting more complex and delicate with utmost dangers, Samdech Techo Hun Sen said, continuing that unfortunately, to some extent, geopolitical fault lines have been re-drawn, which could render the tendencies for atypical disruptions, i.e. small states are being under mounting pressure to choose sides against their will and interest
“In fact, Cambodia is an example of a model for others to draw experiences from. Our full peace has been built from the participation of all relevant parties in the country. I would like to emphasise that in the early 1990s, Cambodia could not achieve the full peace even after the international community spent about US$ 2 billion. The war prolonged until December 1998, when Cambodia was able to achieve the full peace after the implementation of the Win-Win policy to find a political solution among ourselves. In this regard, I re-emphasise that we must have “national ownership” in peace-building and nation building in the post-conflict period,” the Cambodian Prime Minister underlined.

Source: Agency Kampuchea Press