Category: Government and Society

Today’s Khmer Times newspaper has this article about a woman jailed for throwing a shoe at a billboard image of the prime minister!  The prime minister regularly reminds the people that he is not a dictator and government spokesmen repeat again and again the claim that human and civil rights are respected.  Does this look anyone has freedom of speech?  Basically it shows how weak and insecure the current government is when they feel they need to prosecute such a trivial event.

Last month Prime Minister Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party won all 125 seats in the legislature.  That would be a truly remarkable accomplishment in a real election in a real democracy.  But the CPP didn’t play by the normal rules.  First the leadership of the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) was arrested and jailed or forced into exile.  Then the party itself was declared illegal and dissolved.  Since the CNRP was the only strong opposition party, it’s no wonder that the CPP took all the marbles.

Hun Sen faced a barrage of international criticism for not allowing a free and fair election.  He anticipated that so in the eighteen months before the election, he encouraged (maybe even created) opposition parties which “contested” the election he won so handily.  Of course because they were small, new, and inexperienced—and so many, the nineteen opposition parties couldn’t capture much of the vote.  Hun Sen touted their participation in the election, though, to counter claims that it was a one-party election.

Another move after the election, to further counter the claims of a rigged election, has been to release the opposition members his courts had jailed before the election.  See the headline above.  The opposition leaders had been nullified during the campaign and now are no longer a threat so he appeals to the king to issue royal pardons and he thinks it makes him look good and “kind” (his word).  I think most people see through that ruse, though.

Transparency International rates the countries of the world according to how people perceive corruption in different areas of business, civic, and social life. TI is now rating 180 countries and Cambodia is 161 on the list. That means there is a LOT of corruption in Cambodia.

Example No. 2: Our Deaf Development Programme needs to take one of our students across the border to Thailand for medical treatment she can’t get in Cambodia.  I asked our social worker to find out about getting her a passport. The answer comes back that the Ministry of the Interior can’t give her a passport now because the minister is away and the minister has to deal with the girl because she is deaf.  What the h*** does being deaf have to do with having a passport?

The probable answer is: [1] the passport office person really is that incompetent that she thinks a deaf person needs something different to get a passport, or [2] someone in that office sees this as an opportunity to make money off a young deaf woman who needs medical care.

Transparency International rates the countries of the world according to how people perceive corruption in different areas of business, civic, and social life.  TI is now rating 180 countries and Cambodia is 161 on the list.  That means there is a LOT of corruption in Cambodia.

An example: I was talking to our business manager about filling in a new, long government form about taxes.  He spent hours on it and took it to the tax office and they rejected it and told him to do it over.  He took it back, reworked it, and resubmitted it only to have it rejected again.  When he asked why, the official told him: “You can’t do this.  You have to let me do it.”  In a free translation, that means: You can submit this as many times as you want, but it’s never going to be accepted until you let me do it for you–and you pay me.

There was no way the ruling party–the CPP, the Cambodian People’s Party–was going to lose the election last Sunday.  The CPP-controlled legislature and courts had the main opposition party declared illegal and forced into exile or imprisoned the opposition leaders.

One of the opposition leaders in exile in France called for a boycott of the election but that was a dismal failure because the CPP made a big issue of the “clean finger” campaign (the index finger is dipped in ink when a person votes) and basically threatened to prosecute anyone who didn’t vote, and they know the person didn’t vote if there’s no ink on his or her finger.  (There’s no law that says a person must vote but that’s irrelevant to the CPP.)  Also the CPP can see which villages or other area had a low voter turnout and then that area could say goodbye to any hope of a new school or road or other service.

The only alternative left for those who wanted to protest was to go to vote but then invalidate the ballot by marking no candidate or several candidates.  The headline above shows that is what nearly 9% of the country did.  Approximately 600,000 ballots were declared invalid.  In the last election in 2013, only 1.6% of the ballots were invalid.  Everyone knows what the huge jump in invalid ballots means but the government can claim that they had a large turnout that makes the one-party election “legitimate.”