| |
THE ROVING
EYE
Even the Khmer Rouge loves
democracy
By Pepe Escobar
SIEM REAP, Cambodia - After a peaceful Sunday
electoral day, it is widely expected that the Cambodian
People's Party (CPP) of Prime Minister Hun Sen will get
the largest number of votes in the third democratic
elections in Cambodia since 1993. The leaders of the
royalist Funcinpec and the main opposition Sam Rainsy
Party (SFR) may not be as confident as Hun Sen, who
urged all political parties "to be brave and accept the
decision and judgment of the Cambodian people".
Opposition leader Sam Rainsy's judgment on the fairness
of the elections is at best "mixed" - but not as bad as
he feared.
As some of the ballot boxes in the
12,826 polling stations have to be collected in
extremely faraway places deep in the jungle, official
results will only be announced on August 8. The first
preliminary results were expected on Monday evening, and
will be available at the website of the National
Election Committee - www.necelect.org.kh. Apart from the
three main parties, 19 smaller parties are contesting
the 123 seats in the National Assembly. A total of 6.3
million Cambodians - roughly half of the population -
were registered to vote. Voter turnout has been
estimated around 80 percent - and included such infamous
characters as Nuon Chea, 77, the Khmer Rouge's No 2
under Pol Pot, who voted in the former Khmer Rouge
stronghold of Pailin and declared himself a supporter of
democracy. If the announced United Nations-Cambodia
joint tribunal really takes off, Nuon Chea will
certainly be one of the high-ranking former Khmer Rouge
officials tried for genocide.
At 9am on Sunday
in the boom town of Siem Reap, close to the Angkor
temples, 209 voters - mostly country folk and workers in
the tourism industry - had already been to the ballot
boxes "donated by the government of Japan". They
overwhelmingly voted CPP. The justification was roughly
the same, as explained by Cheam, a soldier in the
Cambodian Army: "Because when the Khmer Rouge was here,
only Hun Sen fought them. [Funcinpec leader] Prince
[Norodom] Ranariddh and Sam Rainsy were not even inside
the country."
Local monitors - not European or
Japanese - maintained strict vigilance in Siem Reap as
well as in Angkor villages such as Qvean - a 10-minute
drive by motorbike from Angkor Wat. At least 30 percent
of Cambodian voters are less than 25 years old. That's
the case of Nuch. She is 20, got married only four
months ago and stopped school in seventh grade to sell
cold drinks to tourists. Nuch hopefully wants to upgrade
to a job in a hotel in Siem Reap. She says: "All my
family voted CPP. I followed my family." She believes
that Hun Sen - who visited her village only a few days
ago - "has been good for poor people".
Intimidation during these 10 recent years of
democratic Cambodia has changed from gangsterism to more
subtle practices. According to Human Rights Watch, there
was wide distribution of "gifts" in the Siem Reap area
in the run-up to the elections, in exchange for public
oaths in which villagers pledged allegiance to the CPP.
Many were asked to thumbprint written documents - which
they are unable to read - in front of CPP officials, who
threaten to repossess the "gifts" or deny any future
assistance in case the CPP is not elected. Village
chiefs all over rural Cambodia are basically loyal to
the CPP. Only in the countryside is it starkly visible
how the majority of Cambodians still fear criticizing
the government in public.
According to UN
figures, 36 percent of the 12 million Cambodians live on
less than 50 US cents a day - the price of a cold drink
sold by kids in front of Angkor Wat. What does rural
Cambodia want? It's very simple. Urban Cambodians want
jobs and education. Rural Cambodians need education most
of all.
Cheu lives in a shack with his family of
eight in the middle of a dazzling rice paddy, with no
electricity and of course no satellite TV - only half an
hour by motorbike from the Angkor temples. His ancestors
may have been laborers for the court of the 12th-century
"Devaraja" (God King) Jayavarman VII, who introduced
Mahayana Buddhism as the official, state-sponsored
religion and put the finishing touches on the fabulous
walled city of Angkor Thom. Like most of his neighbors,
Cheu is illiterate and cannot tell the difference
between the logos of the parties contesting the
election. He wants at least a school in his area. He
says the parties have made many promises, but until now
he has not seen anything.
Last Friday - the last
day of campaigning - it was pure madness in Phnom Penh,
with huge rallies around town by the three main parties
mixing with a non-stop exodus in cars, buses and
motorbikes of people going back to vote in their home
villages. There were stunts aplenty. Prince Ranariddh
landed in a cow pasture in the countryside with his
helicopter loaded with 10,000 flag-waving Funcinpec
supporters, and urged them to apply "people power",
Philippine- and Indonesian-style, to send the CPP
government away. CPP supporters endlessly sang a Khmer
song that could be roughly translated as "wear the
shirt, don't take it off" - the CPP way of saying you
should stick with people you know. It was a free-for-all
in the booming smuggling routes between Thailand and
Cambodia: all customs checkpoints were closed up to
election day - another strategy to induce people to vote
CPP.
The garment industry is the main pillar of
Cambodia's economy. There were only a handful of
factories in 1993, during the first democratic elections
supervised by the UN. Now there are more than 200,
managed by bosses from Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan
and South Korea, and employing more than 210,000 people.
Eighty percent of the garments are exported to the
United States. These exports earn Cambodia about US$430
million a year.
The garment-industry boom led to
the appearance of a new social group in Cambodia: sons
and daughters of peasants who become part of an urban
proletariat. The Xinglong factory north of Phnom Penh is
one of those places - rows and rows of sewing machines
under big metal fans, where nobody wears protection
masks and there are plenty of cases of people fainting
because they did not get enough to eat.
Cambodian labor laws are not medieval anymore.
The laws applied to the garment industry could even be
compared to Thailand's and Malaysia's: minimum wage of
$45 a month, better pay for extra hours, union rights
and right to strike. But according to Cheam, a worker at
the Xinglong factory, the fact is almost 80 percent of
businesses don't pay the minimum legal wage, and there's
not much the Ministry of Labor can do about it. Stories
abound of smaller factories controlled by Chinese bosses
who don't pay the legal salary and force people to work
extra hours.
This is one of the key
constituencies that voted Sam Rainsy on Sunday. The
opposition leader is sure to get their vote because
since the early 1990s he has helped to put in place the
first independent unions, who in turn supported him in
his political battle against Hun Sen's CPP. For the CPP
- originally a communist party - the unions are a
political threat. No wonder they have been under attacks
by the so-called Pagoda Boys, a bandit militia linked to
the CPP. Apart from the political parties themselves,
the independent unions are the only social movement that
has sprung up from Cambodian civil society. But it
remains to be seen whether these new Cambodians spinning
the wheel of globalization turn out to be the swing vote
capable of eroding the subtle intimidation tactics of
the ruling CPP.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times
Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
