By Colin Meyn
The Diplomat
Western donors face a conundrum as Hun Sen continues to ignore calls for fair elections.
Less than six weeks before national elections are set to
be held in Cambodia, there are officially no opposition
parliamentarians—they were summarily stripped of their membership
by a 12-member committee made up entirely of representatives of the
ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) earlier this month for alleged
infractions of internal rules. You are also unlikely to see any of the
opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party’s candidates for National
Assembly on TV, as the state and CPP-friendly media owners have decided
to allot only 30 minutes a day on one television station to non-ruling
parties.
In his daily speeches broadcast across the nation on radio and
television, Prime Minister Hun Sen has made sport of lobbing pot shots
at the opposition party and its leaders while his CPP has refused to take part in debates and public forums
prior to elections. In the provinces, CNRP organizers have complained
of systematic disruptions of opposition campaign stops and destruction
of their campaign signs.
The list of potential problems with Cambodia’s upcoming elections
doesn’t end there. More than a million eligible voters will not be able
to cast their ballot because their names do not appear on official voter
roles, while about a million “ghost voters”
– people who don’t actually exist – remain on the lists, according to
research from U.S. nonprofit National Democratic Institute.
CNRP President Sam Rainsy
faces an 11-year jail sentence if he returns to the country and the
party’s acting president, Kem Sokha, has recently been threatened with
lawsuits and legal action for allegedly denying Khmer Rouge atrocities
and for supposedly paying for sex with a 15-year-old girl, a charge made
by Hun Sen in one of his speeches last week. The country’s election
commission is stacked with members of the ruling party and refuses to
heed calls for reform. Hun Sen’s government is determined to hold
elections on July 28, but democracy in Cambodia seems to be falling
apart.
The UN’s special rapporteur for human rights in Cambodia, Surya
Subedi, has warned that, without reforms, the coming elections will not
meet international standards of legitimacy. “There are major flaws in
the administration of elections in Cambodia and urgent and longer-term
reforms are needed to give Cambodians confidence in the electoral
process and in the workings of the National Election Committee,” Subedi
said in a report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva last year.
But international calls for free and fair elections have brought
about only adversarial responses from the administration of Hun Sen,
which is showing no signs of cowing to pressure for reform. A U.S. State
Department statement calling for the reinstatement of CNRP members of
parliament and the inclusion of all political parties in free and fair
elections earlier this month was called “colonial”
by CPP lawmaker Chheang Vun, who asked that the American embassy in
Phnom Penh relay a message to Washington that Cambodia would not be
following the its advice.
Responding to the EU’s announcement that it wasn’t sending election
observers, the NEC said that it was a sign of the international
community’s faith in Cambodia’s government. “[A]s we grow stronger both
socially and economically and can run our own elections, they
[international observers] will automatically decrease,” said NEC
Secretary General Tep Nytha in an interview with the Cambodia Daily
newspaper. Alain Vandersmissen, the EU delegation’s minister-counselor,
noted that Cambodia was yet to address many of the shortcomings that the
EU had pointed out after the 2008 elections, including the lack of an
independent election commission and unequal access to the media.
Rather than ramping up its rhetoric, the major Western donors who
have spent millions over the past two decades to install a democratic
system in Cambodia are scaling back their financial support for
elections. The EU, which in previous parliamentary elections has sent
thousands of monitors, has decided against participation this year. The
UN Development Program, which in the past has supported balanced
political coverage on state media, had its “Equity News” program shut
down by the government earlier this year and will not be involved in
covering this year’s election campaign.
“There has been a reduction in funding for election related
activities compared to 2008, when the amount of funding for elections
was enormous—a huge UN program, huge EU program, lots of activities you
don’t have this year,” Laura Thornton, resident director of the National
Democratic Institute in Cambodia, told The Diplomat. “Has that
caused change—the pulling of funding as the anti-carrot pushing for
reform, I don’t know.” But if the past is any indication, it won’t be,
Thornton said. “Recommendations in terms of elections have been the same
over last ten years, everyone has come to a consensus on what those
changes should be—media access, voter registration, issues related to
impartiality of NEC—whether EU diplomats or civil society, and we have
seen hardly any progress on that. The efforts of groups focused on
election reform to advocate and lobby for change have not been
successful.”
With previous diplomatic efforts at promoting democracy in Cambodia
having shown little promise, the remaining options available for Western
donors are either tying democratic reforms to development programs or
sanctioning Cambodia and its leaders, steps which donor countries, who
continue to pledge over a billion dollars in aid to Cambodia each year,
might have a difficult time justifying, said Carlyle Thayer, a Southeast
Asia expert at the Australian Defence Force Academy. “Foreign countries
have a hard time with Cambodia. If there were no elections, it would be
easier, but there is an element of free press, there are opposition
parties and they speak out. It is a procedural democracy…but not liberal
democracy, where the opposition can flourish and journalists aren’t
killed,” Thayer said, noting that more significant offenses are
happening across the border in Vietnam “and all [Western countries] are
doing is saying they won’t sell them weapons.”
Most importantly, perhaps, the CPP remains more popular than its
rivals. A survey of 2,000 voters conducted by the International
Republican Institute in January found that 79 percent of respondents
thought the country is “generally headed in the right direction” under
CPP rule. “No matter how stacked elections are, it would be hard to
argue that, even with a level playing field, that the CPP would not
win,” Mr. Thayer said.
Beginning with widespread efforts to promote democracy in Cambodia
when the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia organized the country’s
first democratic elections in the country in 1993, donors have struggled
to get the CPP to play along with their rules. After losing the first
popular vote to Funcinpec, a royalist party headed by Prince Norodom
Ranariddh that now holds only two seats in parliament, the CPP refused
to concede elections and Hun Sen was made second prime minister
alongside Ranariddh. Four years later, Hun Sen took outright control of the government
during three days of factional fighting that saw Funcinpec battling the
CPP on the streets of Phnom Penh. Since then, the CPP has only
consolidated its control of Cambodia’s democratic systems – it won 64
seats in National Assembly in 1998, 73 in 2003 and 90 in 2008. In
commune elections last year, the CPP came away with more than 97 percent of the country’s 1,633 commune chief positions.
As efforts to loosen the CPP’s grip on power are beginning to be seen
as futile, democratic donor countries are directing resources
elsewhere, according to John Ciorciari, a Southeast Asia scholar at the
University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. “Years
of democracy and governance programs have not turned the tide in
Cambodia, and some may be turning to other pastures where the prospects
for a democratic surge look brighter–namely Myanmar,” he said.
The worst-case scenario for these Western donors would be that by
pushing Cambodia too hard for reform, Mr. Hun Sen’s administration decides to turn toward China,
which has ramped up its lending and no-strings-attached aid to Cambodia
in recent years. Nonetheless, having historically taken the lead on
international efforts to promote democracy in Cambodia, the U.S. should
remain engaged in democracy building in Cambodia and wait out an
inevitable turn in popular sentiment against China, according to
Ciorciari. “Too much Western caution on democracy promotion would be
unwise. China's approach to aid and investment in Cambodia wins it
friends among elites but is already beginning to generate public
consternation. In the long run, a U.S. policy that couples democracy
promotion with pragmatic engagement is the most likely to deliver
positive results for Cambodia and its Western partners,” he said.
3 comments:
I NEED JUSTICE FOR MOTHER IN-LAW ,
AND I NEED JUSTICE FOR HIS #2 WIFE
Hun Sen has many mistresses, including Him Sivorn, Ork Borey and Pisith Pilika who was ordered assassinated by his wife, Bun Rany. On top of these mistresses there are well known that he also slept with underage girls also.ហ៊ុន សែន មានស្រីកំណាន់ជាច្រើន ដូចជា ហ៊ឹម ស៊ីវន អោក បូរី និង ពិសិទ្ធិ ពិលីកា ជាដើមដែលនាងបានត្រូវភរិយាលោក ហ៊ុន សែន គឺ ប៊ុន រ៉ានី បានបញ្ជាឲ្យគេសម្លាប់។ ជាងនេះទៅទៀត លោក ហ៊ុន សែន ក៏បានរួមភេទជាមួយកុមារីក្រោមអាយុផងដែរ។
20 June 2013 3:47 am. Not only you, 15 million Khmer need justice. AH Kwak Hun Sen needs to be prosecuted for his killing of Pisey Pilika.
I support you.
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