POLITICS-CAMBODIA: Violence in Poll Campaign Tests Democracy

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jan 25 2002 (IPS) - Cambodia is moving closer toward achieving another milestone in its political life — the first-ever attempt at democratically electing local governments — but is unable to shed the violence and intimidation that dogs this South-east Asian nation.

By the time the official campaigning for the Feb. 3 poll period began on Jan. 18, human rights groups and election monitors had documented 15 election-related killings and close to 250 cases of intimidation, threats and harassment. Most of these had occurred over a one-year period, from early January 2001 until Jan.5, 2002.

“Political violence is affecting the surrounding atmosphere of election contests in almost every province, but is particularly severe in a handful of western, central and south-east provinces,” states a report by the Bangkok-based Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL), which is monitoring the election process in Cambodia.

The disturbing pattern of poll-related violations has seen little change in recent weeks. On Sunday, the body of Vat Din, 55, a candidate for the opposition Sam Rainsy Party, was found floating in the Mekong River in a northern province.

The ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) is being singled out by both ANFREL and Human Rights Watch (HRW) for fuelling most of the violence, since the victims have been members of the opposition Sam Rainsy Party and the royalist Funcinpec party, which is led by Prince Norodom Ranariddh.

“Fifteen opposition party members and commune council candidates have been killed since the start of 2001, including two women candidates who were shot dead during the first week of January 2002,” states the New York-based rights watchdog HRW in a background note released ahead of the elections.

The CPP, led by Prime Minister Hun Sen, has denied such charges, and also dismissed accusations of trying to buy votes by offering gifts and cash to some of the six million of the country’s 11 million people eligible to vote.

Ironically, a principle reason for such violence stems from the significance of the February poll to elect representatives to run the 1,621 local administrative units, called communes. Each of these units consists of four to seven villages.

“The CPP knows that the stakes are very high, for it is a poll that will determine who will control grassroots power in the future,” says Sunai Phasuk, research and information coordinator at ANFREL. “We are talking of a dramatic shift in Cambodian politics through the democratic process.”

To ensure that it prevails at the commune council elections, the CPP has given out the message to its party cadres that “winning at all costs matters,” adds Sunai. “At the party level, it has been a consistent policy that an election defeat is not acceptable. This has intensified the struggle.”

Cambodia watcher Watcharin Yongsiri is hardly surprised by CPP’s campaign strategy, since this party stands to lose much if defeated by the opposition parties.

“For the last 20 years, the commune leaders have been CPP appointees. They have been controlled from the centre,” says Watcharin, a researcher at the Institute of Asian Studies at Chulalongkorn University here in Bangkok.

She expects little help from the country’s police department to stem the violence, since “most of them are from the CPP or have strong links with the party”.

For their part, the Cambodian police have rejected a recent report by the United Nations about the “unacceptable” levels of poll- related violence. The police have blamed the deaths of candidates on personal disputes, rather than on political reasons.

Still, Prime Minister Hun Sen has called on officials to help curb the murders and crimes. “Authorities must monitor and curb in advance all crimes — kidnapping, murder, threats, intimidation and ambushes,” he was quoted as having told the media.

Cambodia’s record of political violence and the impunity enjoyed by its perpetrators have varied over the last three decades, so the February poll is yet another test of the country’s transition to democratic rule. Previous polls have been held for the National Assembly.

The worst violence took place when the country was ruled by the genocidal Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979. It was responsible for deaths of more than 1.7 million people from torture, starvation and illnesses, during its drive to recreate an agricultural society.

Bitter political divisions have continued since then, even after the Khmer Rouge’s ouster in 1979 by the CPP, with the help of the Vietnamese army. At the time, Funcinpec in alliance with Khmer Rouge had been fighting a low-intensity war against the CPP-led regime.

The 1991 Paris peace accord got the rival groups together and a U.N. international presence came to Cambodia, followed by a U.N.- sponsored poll in 1993. More than 100 people from Funcinpec were killed during election-related violence that year.

The CPP and Funcinpec became allies in the coalition that ruled Cambodia after that poll, which led to a multi-party democracy, if a volatile one. But the two parties fell out again in July 1997 after Hun Sen accused Ranariddh, his co-premier under a power-sharing accord, of trying to oust him.

The dominance of local authorities by the central government in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh is not of the CPP’s making, but a tradition introduced by the French colonisers.

When France created the commune councils in 1908, it gave little independence to the local authorities and virtually no power to the people to elect their representatives. The communes served as administrative units for the French to control the colonised Cambodians and to raise taxes.

In fact, CPP has been credited for changing the controls introduced by the French and going for the first poll next month to democratically elect representatives to local bodies.

Already, this shift has led to another milestone in Cambodia’s political culture — the country’s first-ever electoral debate at the local level. It took place over the weekend in Kampot, a provincial town, where for more than two hours the four candidates had to field questions from each other, a moderator and the villagers.

“It is up to the society, the people, to take care of ensuring democracy works,” says Chaiwat Satha-Anand, director of the Peace Information Centre at Bangkok’s Thammasat University. “Democracy is not about elections only but about people being able to influence change.”

“The current signs from Cambodia are good — elections for local authorities,” he adds. “But the society will have to ensure that elections are seen as a legitimate process, accepted culturally. This will lead to a reduction of violence, it has been shown, since there has been an expansion of democratic space.”