Hun Sen to bar Sam Rainsy from running in next general election+

PHNOM PENH, Feb. 24 (AP) - (Kyodo)—Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said Wednesday that opposition leader Sam Rainsy will not be allowed to run in the 2013 general election, calling him a traitor on border issues.

Speaking to graduate students in Phnom Penh, Hun Sen said while Cambodia is in conflict with Thailand over a border dispute, Sam Rainsy has diverted the nation's attention to a border issue with Vietnam.

Hun Sen said Sam Rainsy's action would split the country's armed forces and cannot be "tolerated."

Sam Rainsy, leader of his self-named party, was sentenced Jan. 27 in absentia to two years in prison for having led villagers to uproot border markers on the Cambodia-Vietnam border in October last year.

Sam Rainsy, who lives in exile in France, has defended his action which he said was carried out after villagers showed him wooden poles that had been planted in their rice fields by Vietnamese authorities and "complacent" Cambodian counterparts.

He said the poles were planted 200-300 meters inside Cambodian territory and the villagers uprooted them "to symbolically show their refusal to give up ancestral rice fields they had been cultivating since 1979 and to be deprived of their livelihoods."

The Cambodian and the Vietnamese governments have rejected Sam Rainsy's accusation as groundless.

On Monday, the government warned it would take legal action against Sam Rainsy, accusing him of distributing false border maps.

Cambodia holds a general election every five years, and the next election will be held in 2013.

Hun Sen said the opposition party will not be barred from running in the next election, but not Sam Rainsy, warning that he will be put in jail if he returns to the country.

In the 2008 election, Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party won 90 seats in the 123-member parliament, followed by the Sam Rainsy Party with 26 seats, with the rest taken by three minor parties.

Hun Sen, who has ruled the country since 1985, is often criticized by opposition parties and both local and international human rights groups for having used his power to suppress and silence the opposition.