Following a noble vision or just tagging along?

by School of Vice 

Yet again as it has done throughout its ignominious rule, this regime is showing no qualms or scruples whatsoever in reneging on even its own pledges and declarations as it seeks to silence even peaceful gatherings of women, workers and civilians at a public venue ["Freedom" Park] to mark - among other things - the International Women's Day, also known as the United Nations (UN) Day for Women’s Rights and International Peace. The UN is and has been an important instrument in helping to restore 'peace and stability' after the long period of armed conflict and violence in the seventies and eighties as well as ensuring this restoration would be accompanied by the establishment of the "rule of law" and democratic pluralism where human rights and freedom of assembly and the exercise thereof are core principles and tenets of the national constitution itself.

Whereas 'peace and stability' can be said to have been realised to an extent, the next component of the UN's effort and the PPA to install democratic governance still leaves so much to be desired. That this is the case has been cataloged and analysed by so many onlookers and writers on Cambodian affairs and recent history, and in particular, the CPP regime's dreaded ability to thrive on the back of a war torn nation's prolonged misery and agony has been attributed to one ex-KR commander's Machiavellian instinct that verges on the nihilistic extreme [if indeed, the term 'nihilistic' or nihilism itself is open to such variation or gradation!]  combined with his pathological lust for blood and his reliance on violence and terror as his ultimate recourse in dealing with political threats posed by opponents.

Politics as an art and practice is not a precise science - it steers and veers along routes partly foreseen and envisaged and partly unforeseen and contrived by its practitioners to fit in with what these practitioners believe to be the best possible option in light of the circumstances of the day. What these practitioners believe is in turned governed and dictated by their conditioned state of mind and character trait or nerves which can fluctuate according to the changing colour of emotions or moods, and to detected external threats of which the best or most odious of Machiavellian among them have a keen, but dispassionate or detached instinct over.

When we ask why so many innocent lives have been lost and no concrete results have been shown in favour of the victims' untold pain and sacrifice, we can only partly attribute such moral challenge and question to the man who sits pretty and self-assured on the heaps of those innocents' corpses. The most direct and pertinent question we must ask is whether those pretending to be his protagonists understand even the state of their own psyche and emotions, and whether these forces have been shaping their conducts and guiding their resolves to the overall benefit and good of a nation they claim to love and protect or, indeed to its grievous detriment? What have gone wrong since the UN sponsored landmark election in 1993? Who had led his nation like lambs to the slaughter since then by negotiating 'peace and reconciliation' with the man who has nothing but contempt for rivals and adversaries who go by their hearts instead of their heads and who refuse to tap into the far greater array of weapons and forces already positioned behind them through their unequivocal will and aspirations? Is there any known people or nation on earth that do not value freedom and dignified existence? What lessons, if any, have the Opposition leadership drawn from this suicidal legacy? Is it that far more important for Mr Subedi to have something positive to report in his regular update on the country's troubles so that the UN can wash its hands off the Cambodian situation yet again because the parties are to all intent and purposes committed to overcoming their differences via peaceful dialogue and negotiation? Even while ordinary citizens continue to be steamrolled over, intimidated and shot at in the streets?  

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Post by អ្នករាយការណ៍ពិសេស.