Holiday in Cambodia

I flew back home to Phnom Penh two days before the election. The plane was quiet and the stewardesses bored – they topped my wine up twice in a fifty minute flight from Bangkok.

I asked my cab driver on the way home if he thought there would be any problems with the election.

“Not for me,” he said, “because I don’t vote.”

He was quite comfortable talking about it. He told me that to him, not being registered was the safest option.

“The CPP know how you vote,” he said. “I don’t want to vote for them, I can’t vote against them – so I don’t vote at all. I’m happy.”

Hun Sen’s CPP, or Cambodian People’s Party, had held their power through four UN-supervised democratic elections and there was no reason to suspect that this one would be any different. In the past they had used some distinctly undemocratic tactics to ensure their ongoing popularity; gifts of rice, cloth or cash to entire village who voted CPP, plus violent bullying of constituents, kidnapping or beating of candidates, destruction of ballot papers. Nowadays, most people only entered opposition politics for the bribe they received to leave it again.

“Phnom Penh will be very quiet this weekend, you will see,” my cab driver told me. “It is a holiday all weekend. Nobody can work. They must go home to their province to vote. So the only people in town will be the young people who were born here, and the people like me who can see no point in turning up.”

I scanned through the paper to see what I had missed. Hundreds of people were reporting their names had been left off electoral lists. There had been an acid attack against an opposition candidate in the provinces, and a savage drive-by murder of a journalist who was working for Hun Sen’s main political rival Sam Rainsy. The journalist’s son, caught in the shootout outside the busy Olympic Market in Phnom Penh, was also killed. No arrests had yet been made.

International commentary on the elections acknowledged these issues but still talked cautiously of a fair and free process. In comparison to previous election violence, they reminded us, this was a “marker of progress.”

Meanwhile, Sam Rainsy was offering villagers payment to come forward and report CPP members who had offered them money for a “clean finger”[1]. His party held around one fifth of available seats, mainly around Phnom Penh. Royalist party FUNCINPEC had done little but squabble and splinter over their 26 seats won in 2003, and were expected to slip into obscurity after this election. I checked out their website – it was getting around 20 hits a day, less than my brother’s blog.

When I arrived at the office I found a walky talky and an eight page evacuation plan on my desk. “Just in case things get bad,” the HR coordinator told me.

“But they’re not likely to, though, are they?” I asked him.

He sighed, whether from relief or frustration, I could not tell. “No,” he said, “we think these elections will be very quiet.”

* * *

Democracy may symbolise rule by the people, but just like monarchy, autocracy, dictatorship, despotism, there’s still only one person at the top of the pyramid of human need. The majority decides – but what if the majority is wrong? What if the majority is stupid, or self-interested, or frightened? What if the majority changes its mind?

Cambodia has had its fair share of democracy – in fact, since independence, the country has always been ruled by the appointed leader of a ruling political party, though actual elections were few and far between for about twenty years.

It was actually one of the terms of independence in 1954, when a forum in Geneva carved out a little Switzerland for South East Asia. Communism was firmly entrenched in Moscow and Beijing, pushing through Korea and Vietnam, and nobody was sure what never-colonised Thailand was capable of. So King Sihanouk was awarded independence for his country on the basis of elections, democratic constitution and true, transparent neutrality.

Understandably, King Sihanouk was excited by the concept of democracy for his country. He promptly placed his ageing father back on the throne, dropped back to the title of Prince, and entered politics to win his first election in 1955. Democratic elections continued all the way through to 1970, and Sihanouk’s right-wing royalist Sangkum party won every time.

Khmer communism existed from the early 1960s – how could it not, given the setting, the influences, and the feudally royalist government.of the times? Phnom Penh culture was too conservative to tolerate bohemian communist ideas, and so the movement based itself in the remote hills of Ratnakiri province, where it found ready recruits in discontented minority ethnic groups who had been treated shamefully by the French and forgotten by the Sangkum era.

Marked out early for leadership in this ragged band of revolutionaries was a former school teacher turned soldier named Saloth Sar. A few years later he would take the alias Pol Pot - and redefine our global understanding of inhumanity.

In 1967, the Khmer Rouge was born on the other side of the country from Pol Pot’s hideaway, with a peasant uprising in the Thai border province of Samlot. Like many promising revolutions, it started over tax, fuelled by clear discrepancies of wealth and opportunity that were worsening under Sihanouk’s administration.

Sihanouk was in France at the time of the Samlot uprising, and the man in charge of restoring peace to the province was General Lon Nol. Though he wrote it off as a small, contained insurgency, by the time he was through an estimated 10,000 people had been killed.

By this stage, almost everyone seemed to be calling themselves either socialists or communists. Pol Pot’s mountain revolutionaries had taken the name of Kampuchea Communist Party, or KCP. The term Khmer Rouge was originally used to describe Sihanouk’s challenges from the left; on the right, another anti-Sihanouk faction was dubbed Khmer Bleu.

In 1970, while Sihanouk was out of the country again, Lon Nol took over as leader of the Sangkum Party, and therefore of Cambodia, in a successful coup backed happily by Khmer Bleu support.

This is where it gets really confusing. Despite the fact that Sihanouk was royal, and conservative, and the advocate of economic fiefdom that led to peasant insurgencies in the first place, the farmers remained loyal to him. Lon Nol represented town, money, military might and US-style anti-communism. With the help of KCP positioning, Sihanouk began to represent freedom, democracy and people power. Exiled in Beijing with no actual power at all, he made an ideal (and willing) crowbar as the communist factions began to prise their way into every province of Cambodia.

The days of neutrality were over forever. The KCP/Sihanouk in-country alliance was called Front Uni National du Kampuchéa (FUNK), while Sihanouk hastily constructed a China-backed government-in-exile known as Gouvernement Royal d'Union Nationale du Kampuchéa (GRUNK). Their in-country nemesis was Forces Armées Nationales Khmères (FANK), the conservative Khmer Bleu forces of Lon Nol now actively recruiting among Phnom Penh youth thanks to US funding. But it was a terrible time to be FANK – as well as trying to predict the military strategies of the KCP, General Lon Nol was obliged to face up to Vietnamese invasions and border skirmishes and provide troops to support US incursions on Cambodian soil.

Lon Nol was neither popular nor intelligent as a leader, especially outside the country’s capital. Using Sihanouk’s name as a promise of future stability, the KCP demanded loyalty from villages and towns as FANK retreated towards Phnom Penh. Reports of KCP atrocities worsened as the country sped towards Year Zero, 1975.

By the time the Khmer Rouge arrived in Phnom Penh there was no FUNK, GRUNK, FANK or election in sight. Now everything was simply Khmer Rouge – good and bad, well-meant and evil, freedom fighter and murderer, Sihanouk and Pol Pot – all rolled into one massive unstoppable genocidal disaster.

One of the first things the Khmer Rouge did, besides rounding up all the educated middle-class residents of Phnom Penh and head them out towards extermination, was to rename the country. Democratic Kampuchea.

* * *

So. That’s why nobody stopped Pol Pot – because the Khmer Rouge pushed out US interests, the bridges to Europe were burned, the breakdown of neutrality led to alliances between communist governments that in theory were working towards the same goals. It may have gone for much longer if the Khmer Rouge had not tried to claim Mekong Delta territory that had been Vietnamese for decades.

A full-scale invasion in the last week of 1978 saw Vietnam push back all the way to Phnom Penh. In order to defeat Khmer Rouge forces, Vietnam was suddenly faced with the responsibility of liberating and administering a country incapable of fending for itself. Their first years of occupancy were plagued by heavy fighting and casualties, a disastrous famine caused by deliberate destruction of crops, and an actual strengthening of the Khmer Rouge influence through Thai and US backing to strike a blow at Vietnam communism.

It was called a civil war, though it was Cambodian fighting Cambodian on behalf of the highest bidder. People were freed from their bound servitude on state farms or brought back from refugee camps, given guns and told what side they were on. It was at this time, and not during the time of Pol Pot, that between 4 million and 6 million landmines were sown into Cambodia’s best farming land.

The Vietnamese finally tired of this thankless occupation in 1990 and withdrew, leaving their top Cambodian ally Hun Sen in charge as prime minister. The UN reinstated a tired and sad Sihanouk as president (a few years later he would gratefully take back his pre-1954 title of King and leave politics forever). They also encouraged the country towards election in 1993, with the people voting in Sihanouk’s son Prince Norodom Ranariddh of the newly formed FUNCINPEC as their first choice.

A sore loser, Hun Sen formed an uneasy alliance with Ranariddh. Together they agreed in 1994 to outlaw the Khmer Rouge, a law that gave Hun Sen increased power as he started to jail, execute and assassinate potential rivals in the name of peace for his country.

In 1997, with the following year’s elections in their sights, FUNCINPEC began to hint that they might be prepared to recognise the Khmer Rouge. It may seem like a crazy sort of election promise, until you consider that the Khmer Rouge existed for ten years before and fifteen years after Pol Pot’s leadership, that countless soldiers who had started fighting as children, who had planted landmines and taken lives and talked of ideals to stifle their humanity, were now officially criminals, their sacrifices and causes worthless.

(Of course not all Khmer Rouge became starving disillusioned farmers making up stories about their past. Many of them, the smart ones, joined the CPP.)

The concept of revalidating the Khmer Rouge, especially those within his own ranks, was extremely threatening for Hun Sen. After a bloody and terrifying fight on the streets of Phnom Penh, he abolished the coalition and seized full power for the CPP.

By the time of the next election in 1998, several FUNCINPEC politicians and military officers had disappeared or gone into exile, and all remaining Khmer Rouge strongholds had been blown apart. There was nothing to stand in the way of CPP democracy now; Hun Sen won by a landslide.

* * *

That makes two coups that have spat in the face of Cambodia’s democratic process. Lon Nol’s 1970 coup had devastating results for Cambodia. And 1997? Actually, for many Cambodians, the events that brought Hun Sen to his current level of power are not remembered as sinister or regrettable – because since then, the country has at least been at peace.

If you include the three years he was forced to share with Prince Ranariddh, Hun Sen’s leadership has marched on uninterrupted for nearly 30 years. He is by no means a great man. Nobody describes him as lovable, or charismatic, or inspirational. His personal weaknesses are well-documented: selling government-owned land for personal profit, changing borders in Vietnam’s favour, taking a high-profile mistress who was later found murdered (though it was Hun Sen’s wife, according to the tale, who ordered the hit). His personal wealth, and that of his family members, is immense and highly suspect.

But in the leadup to this election, the attitude seems to be, learn to live with it. In fact, some political commentators have suggested that Hun Sen’s popularity is legitimately growing, as trade increases, malls open, roads are fixed and the fireworks on Victory Against Genocide Day get more impressive each year.

“He has kept our country stable,” a colleague explained to me, “and that’s a big thing for us. The last thing we want is any more fighting.”

My evacuation plan warned me to stay inside on election day, but I felt it was my democratic right to at least go out for breakfast safely on a Sunday morning. The streets were eerily deserted and all my usual haunts were closed, so I headed down to the riverside where there’s always a latte available for the right price.

The joint was jumping, crowded with tall white people wearing flak jackets which read: “Cambodia 2008: Official election observer.”

“Do you have shoooo-gar?” they were asking loudly. “Shooo-gar!”

I wondered idly if any of them would sell me their jacket, or if they liked to keep them all as souvenirs of democratic intervention – this one from Zimbabwe, that one from Afghanistan. Patting each other on the jacketed back for a job well done, under the circumstances.

“And by the way,” I imagined saying when they knocked back my offer, “if you’re all here chowing down on paninis, who’s actually observing the election?”

I don’t suppose they had a real sense of urgency with Cambodia 2008. If the results of the election were written before anybody even turned up to the polls, rushing breakfast probably seemed like an unnecessary discomfort.

When preliminary figures were released the next day, FUNCINPEC had dropped as predicted from 24 seats to 2. Sam Rainsy Party had maintained their one fifth hold. And Hun Sen’s CPP had snatched back the seats that FUNCINPEC could not keep, giving them their greatest ever majority of 92 seats from a possible 123.

Sam Rainsy is upset about it, and has called for rallies, but there’s no real passion in the public’s response. Everyone, from my cab driver to my colleagues, knows it’s unfair and undemocratic, but they’re hesitant to do anything about it.

I don’t know how long this “peace at all costs” apathy will last. Now that the economy of Cambodia is improving, the discrepancy of wealth is starting to hurt again. Ten years ago, only the foreign UN workers (and Hun Sen) had money. Now, the most ostentatious houses, the most expensive cars, belong to openly corrupt and unashamed Cambodians. The weddings, the whiskey, the Lamborghinis, seem like an immature taunt to the poor. Come and stop us… if you dare…

But then, I suppose that was the impetus behind the first peasant uprising, all those years ago, in sleepy little Samlot town. If any of those original dissidents are still alive, how their heads must spin to think of what they caused.

Yes. The elections were quiet this time around.

[1] To ensure only one vote per person is cast, each voter has their finger dipped to the knuckle in indelible ink at the polling booth. It takes a week or more to wash off.