Political Common Sense

By Jayakhmer


The dispute between our elected officials namely between the most powerful man in Cambodia and a helpless member of parliamentarian takes on new twists and turns. The battle is being fought internationally. Mu Sochua has been attracting a lot of international attentions especially from the US Congress. This proves yet again that Samdech Prime Minister Hun Sen and his advisors have miscalculated the impact.

In the afternoon of September 14th, I attended the meeting at Berkeley. The Goldberg Room at Boalt Hall Law School where Mu Sochua gave a talk was a small room and was packed with about less than 200 people. All the seats were taken; I stood against the wall listening to a courageous woman telling her struggles in her motherland to a friendly and sympathetic audience.

“I will not compromise,” Mu Sochua repeated several times as she described the human rights situation in Cambodia.

Listening to Mu Sochua, I could not help but wonder how we came to this point politically.

I certainly understand her position as an elected Cambodian woman fighting against the most powerful man in the country with the circumstance within which her parliamentary immunity was stripped; her lawyer was threatened to be disbarred and consequently withdrew himself from the case; and the Phnom Penh Municipal Court rejected her lawsuit against the Prime Minister but honored the counter lawsuit by the Prime Minister that everyone including herself knew from the start she had no chance.

On July 24, 2009, of course, the court rendered a verdict of guilty for defaming the Prime Minister and sentenced Mu Sochua to a fine of 10 million riels ($2,500).

As I looked around the room full of concerned and interested students and scholars, I was a bit embarrassed. Cambodia is such a small country about the size of the state of Missouri with a minuscule national budget if we compare to that of California’s and other states’ in the union, and yet it manages to have so many problems. “Why can’t we get our act together or why can’t we get along,” I wonder quietly.

It would be simplistic and a gross generalization to say that “we fight each other like dogs and cats.” There are reasons why we fight. When we fight, each side wants to win.

If any one thinks that Mu Sochua has been a recalcitrant and an unweaving politician in this fight, one should equally, if not more, blame the Prime Minister for creating this political atmosphere. The Prime Minister should have been advised to say, “I am very sorry.” As strong willed and as determined as Mu Sochua, she would have accepted the apology.

The case would have been closed.

Although this is just my conjecture, the Prime Minister should fire all of those advisors if he was advised to pursuit this case with Mu Sochua or and the case with Professor Yash Ghai, the UN Special Envoy on Human Rights in Cambodia in the recent past. Those advisors or the ideas of fighting Mu Sochua and the special envoy on human rights were short-sighted and incompetent for they failed to think through some of the most important issues that make Cambodia appears to be worst than the bad situation the country is already in.

Why CPP chooses to treat member(s) of the minority party this way is beyond me for CPP and its leadership already controls every powerful position in the country. CPP, as a major political party, should be magnanimously working with minority parties to truly fine solutions to improve the country together. That includes the Human Rights issues.

As long as we have a political system with multiple-party structure, it is common and expected to have political fighting.

Political fighting is healthy as long as we remember that winning a political opponent by loosing the respect of the world is not worth winning. And winning the respect of the world but loosing oneself in the process is also worthless.

A true patriot respects and even loves his/her political opponent. After all we are members of the same human race of small nation that barely can sustain itself without the outside’s supports. Our dignity as a human race and as a nation lays on the question of how well we can build each other up and not on how effectively we can destroy each other.

Political common sense requires that a politician always gives his/her opponent a way out with dignity.