BY ALLEN MYERS
PHNOM PENH — The Cambodian People's Party (CPP) won a decisive victory on July 27 in elections to Cambodia's National Assembly. However, the two largest losing parties are attempting to mount a campaign against the result.
The CPP is claiming that the vote (it will not be officially declared until August 8, but all parties are allowed to have representatives present during the counting) will give it 73 seats in the 123-member legislature, Funcinpec 26 seats and the Sam Rainsy Party (SRP) 24.
In the 122-member outgoing Assembly, the CPP had 64 seats, Funcinpec 43 and the SRP 15.
Twenty smaller parties also competed in the election but failed to win any seats. The electorates consist of 24 provinces and cities that elect from one to 18 members, depending on the number of voters. Voting is for party lists rather than individual candidates, and the number of seats won is proportional to a party's vote in each electorate. The CPP came first in every province and city except Phnom Penh.
Both Funcinpec and the SRP have challenged the CPP estimate of the final outcome, but a non-governmental election monitoring organisation that is often highly critical of the CPP government gave an almost identical evaluation of 72, 26 and 25 seats, respectively, for the three parties.
These results are also fairly close to the vote in commune council elections held throughout the country in February 2002.
The recent election campaign did not feature much real political debate. Prime Minister Hun Sen announced that he would not campaign, leaving that task to other CPP leaders while he engaged in activities such as helping farmers plant rice.
Funcinpec, although it has been a coalition government partner of the CPP for the past five years, chose to run as an opposition party and an increasingly strident critic of the government.
This created a conflict between Funcinpec and the SRP as to which was the "real" opposition. In the weeks before the official opening of the campaign on June 26, things became quite heated as a number of leading Funcinpec officials, including a member of the National Assembly, announced they were joining the SRP, and then half a dozen SRP parliamentarians defected to Funcinpec.
The two parties competed primarily in efforts to whip up national hatreds as a weapon against the CPP. Partly, this relied on unsupported and unspecific claims of territory "lost" by Cambodia in recent years. One such claim, that Cambodia had recently lost 5000 square kilometres, was repeated regularly by Funcinpec's leader, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, who never cited a source. A CPP minister pointed out that this statement was apparently based on an erroneous figure in an ASEAN document that had been retracted years ago.
Both opposition campaigns, however, focused mainly on inciting hatred and fear of Cambodia's Vietnamese minority. Already during the voter registration period at the start of this year, the SRP lodged numerous objections against alleged "illegal immigrants" from Vietnam. Nearly all were rejected by the National Election Committee (NEC) because they were based on nothing more than the voter's supposedly Vietnamese name or appearance.
This did not stop both Ranariddh and Sam Rainsy from claiming that vast numbers of Vietnamese were flooding into Cambodia for the purpose of voting for the CPP. The SRP proposed that the Cambodian-Vietnamese border should be closed for two weeks before the election (Funcinpec said a few days would be sufficient). But it was hopeless anyway — pro-SRP newspapers had earlier declared that "millions" of Vietnamese (out of 6.3 million registered voters throughout Cambodia) were already present and registered.
Predictably, this chauvinist campaign produced several incidents in which gangs of thugs attempted, and in a few cases succeeded, in preventing ethnic Vietnamese from voting.
'Fraud' claims
In addition to national chauvinism, both the SRP and Funcinpec relied heavily on predictions that the CPP would organise "vote fraud". The "evidence" consisted of generalities about the CPP being "communist" and "dictatorial", plus paranoiac interpretations of quite ordinary events. For example, earlier this year the NEC managed to register 93.95% of the over-18 population as voters for this election. This did not prevent the SRP and Funcinpec from denouncing the result and claiming that the unregistered 6.05% were their supporters (both parties claimed all of them), who had been prevented from registering by alleged CPP tricks.
Similarly, after the February 2002 commune elections, in which about 80% of registered voters participated, both Funcinpec and the SRP claimed the other 20% as their supporters, who were prevented from voting by the CPP. How they were able to determine the political views of non-voters, and how the CPP would have known which voters needed to be blocked, and how the CPP could have found a generalised voting disincentive that worked only on Funcinpec or SRP supporters — these were questions that were never addressed.
This theme is already being repeated in regard to the latest election, in which more than 83% of registered voters cast ballots. For example, in a few areas flooding made it necessary to move voting stations. According to the losers, this was a CPP conspiracy — if the CPP didn't cause the rain, the commune election committee managed to find a way to inform CPP voters of the new location, but conceal the change from SRP/Funcinpec voters.
In most countries, the kinds of objections to the election results being raised by the SRP and Funcinpec would be dismissed out of hand. (This is not to say that every specific complaint is invalid; many are no doubt justified.)
Moreover, the conduct of the election was closely observed virtually everywhere by more than 29,000 Cambodian and more than 1000 international monitors. Most gave a generally positive assessment. For example, the European Union delegation, the largest group of foreign observers, said that the CPP victory reflected the will of the voters and that it had found no violations that would call for a recount or re-vote
US interference
But there are two important factors in Cambodian politics. The most important is the support for the Sam Rainsy Party from the most right-wing elements of the US Congress. Typical was the bill introduced by Kentucky Republican senator Mitch McConnell to coincide with the Cambodian election, which called for a 50% increase in proposed US aid to Cambodia, provided that Hun Sen is no longer the prime minister.
Although the bill has no chance of becoming US law, it was used by Ranariddh and Sam Rainsy to tell Cambodians that voting for the CPP would harm them economically.
The second factor is the Cambodian constitution, which requires a two-thirds majority to approve a new government. This clearly undemocratic provision was part of an effort to restore some cohesion and a spirit of compromise after many years of civil war, by virtually requiring a coalition government, or at least one which is supported by some minority parties. But it is now being abused by Funcinpec and the SRP in an effort to prevent a government being formed.
The two losing parties have both declared that they will not join or vote to endorse a government in which Hun Sen is prime minister. Since Hun Sen was unambiguously declared the CPP's only prime ministerial candidate well before the election, the opposition parties are attempting to block the clearly expressed preferences of the voters.
One of the most regrettable aspects of this election is that it occurred without any public discussion of Cambodia's expected joining of the World Trade Organisation at its meeting in Mexico in September.
The government seems to believe that WTO membership is nothing more than a form of reintegration into the "international community", comparable to Cambodia regaining its UN seat after the years during which it was given to the US-backed Khmer Rouge. Some observers who have been following the discussions say that, in this lax environment, the Cambodian negotiators have ignored some of their instructions and concluded an agreement without requesting concessions that would have been automatically available to Cambodia as one of the least developed countries.
An opposition that was really concerned about democracy would have demanded a discussion of WTO membership and its conditions. The SRP and Funcinpec were too busy inciting anti-Vietnamese hatred even to mention the issue.
From Green Left Weekly, August 6, 2003.
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