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Cambodia
stumbles toward elections
By Alan
Boyd
SYDNEY - With 90 percent of commune and
village chiefs in his pocket, along with most state poll
monitors and all six TV networks, Cambodian Prime
Minister Hun Sen has evidently felt no pressure to
campaign for next Sunday's national election.
So
it was during the 1998 poll, when the former guerrilla
fighter quietly slipped into the rural heartland while
his closest rivals, Prince Norodom Ranariddh and Sam
Rainsy, fought in the hustings for the scraps.
On that occasion the incumbent Cambodian
People's Party (CPP) snared 41 percent of the vote,
compared with 31.5 percent for Ranariddh's royalist
Funcinpec, which would return as a chastened junior
coalition partner.
Ironically, Ranariddh was the
first to sound the alarm, during the late 1980s peace
negotiations on Cambodia's decade-old civil war, against
the pervasive power base that Hun Sen had assembled in
his absence.
While the three resistance factions
fought a half-hearted war of attrition from bases along
the Thai border, the Vietnamese-based regime in Phnom
Penh was investing its political future in the
government apparatus.
By 1991, when the Paris
peace treaty ended the war, commune chiefs were
full-time party recruiters, a middle-class elite close
to the regime controlled commerce, and even the village
postman was under Hun Sen's patronage.
Now, when
the favors are being pulled in at election time,
opposition parties are subjected to a climate of
intimidation that has understandably raised questions
over the future of Cambodia's faltering democracy.
"Given that these same officials are typically
charged with overseeing important aspects of the
electoral process, voters ... have little confidence in
the free expression of their political rights or the
neutrality of the electoral process," Washington-based
Human Rights Watch reported in a study released last
week. "Many voters feel it is useless to file complaints
with the provincial election committees or local
officials about violations of the electoral law."
On the other hand, there has been markedly less
violence than in either of the two previous polls, with
fewer campaign deaths and less overt harassment of
opposition parties.
While diplomats scoff at Hun
Sen's claims of a growing political maturity, the CPP
does have its supporters among the educated business
classes, which see only economic and social decline in a
return to the factionalism of the 1980s.
The
1993 election produced a clumsy compromise that was
designed to achieve a government of national unity:
Ranaridhh and Hun Sen were declared joint premiers, an
unworkable arrangement that the CPP ended with a bloody
1997 coup.
With the royalists in disarray, and
former cabinet minister Sam Rainsy unable to make an
impression on the electorate, Hun Sen has achieved a
relative degree of stability. But one outcome is that
the focus has shifted to more explosive issues such as
health and jobs.
It is the mounting social
frustrations, in a nation weary of unfulfilled talk of
postwar development, coupled with a perception that the
CPP is too absorbed in making money for its business
friends, that could provide the greatest challenge to
Hun Sen's grip on power once the campaigning is over for
another five years. More than 30 percent of Cambodians
are living below the poverty line, according to the
World Bank, while the average life span is only 56.4
years, one of the lowest rates worldwide. The infant
mortality rate is an alarming 95 per 1,000 live births.
Despite significant improvements in the past
decade, about 20 percent of children never go to school.
Only 17 percent of boys and 14 percent of girls attend
high schools, and 90 percent of these students will
leave before Grade 12.
Although the economy is
expected to expand by 5 percent this year and 5.5
percent in 2004, the 80 percent of Cambodians who live
in rural regions have seen little improvement in their
livelihoods in the 12 years since the end of the war.
The key word among policymakers has been
"stability", with the government running up sizable
budget deficits to rebuild business confidence and
attract investment from abroad that can create
jobs.
"In the first five-year development program
[1996-2000], we had to concentrate on achieving growth
conditions for the macro-economy, which we have now
achieved. Inflation is down, tax revenues have risen and
we have sustainable growth," Planning Minister Chhay
Than told a seminar. "The second five-year program will
focus on poverty reduction, but the government needs to
combine this objective with rehabilitating
infrastructure and improving industry and agriculture,"
he said.
Other political parties have proposed
taking the popularist route by tackling poverty first.
Funcinpec and Rainsy say they would release more funds
from tourism, which is primed to become the biggest
source of foreign exchange.
Aid groups such as
the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, the source of
much of the government's development cash, prefer the
more plodding CPP approach, but they are demanding
greater accountability. This month the World Bank
withheld US$6.3 million of a disbursement that was to be
used to underwrite the demobilization of 15,000 soldiers
from Cambodia's bloated armed services due to
"misprocurement" on a contract. Another $2.8 million
will have to be returned.
"Misprocurement was
declared because the contract was awarded to a company
that was subsequently found to have not met the
specified requirements of the bid documents," the bank
stated. Local press reports have hinted at corruption
arising from a business relationship between the
contractor and senior members of the government.
Key trading partners such as the United States
are also stepping up the pressure for more transparency
and improvements in human rights in return for Cambodian
membership of global forums such as the World Trade
Organization (WTO). The US is scheduled to decide this
week whether Cambodia fulfills the terms for WTO entry
in September, after negotiations were earlier completed
with seven other review countries, including Japan and
South Korea.
One issue that reportedly concerns
Washington is land reform, which the CPP has promised to
pursue during its next term despite ongoing tensions
over squatting rights on land that was abandoned during
the civil war. Hundreds of thousands of villagers who
fled from the Phnom Penh forces in 1979-91 to camps in
Thailand returned to find their plots occupied by CPP
sympathizers, who are in no hurry to move.
With
the CPP controlling all but a dozen of the 1,600 rural
communes through its own cadres, who function equally as
marketeers and dispute mediators, the issue has so far
been contained. However, tensions have grown in the
buildup to the poll.
"Like all Asians,
Cambodians have an emotional attachment to their land
that goes well beyond political affiliations or even
development objectives," said a diplomat.
"I
think land reform might be a real test of Hun Sen's
political acumen. Here we have an issue that could have
social implications if it is mishandled, particularly if
there is any substance in media reports of corrupt
dealings by some members of the government," he said.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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