Cambodia in 2013: The Winds of Change

Cambodia

For a Cambodia that has revealed few surprises over the last two decades, 2013 proved to be a year of unprecedented volatility. Along with persisting conflicts and violence over land grabs, labour exploitation and environmental degradation, Cambodia’s political landscape of 2013 was taut with tension in Thai-Cambodia relations over the Preah Vihear temple that even the November ruling of the International Court of Justice at the Hague has yet to quell, and anxieties engendered by the national elections in July that locked the country in a political impasse, setting off mass mobilization at a level it had not seen in decades. King Norodom Sihanouk’s cremation in February marked the end of an era, evoking an ever-looming question about the role and future of the monarchy in Cambodia. The year closed with the theft of the Buddha’s relic from Udong, the historic final resting place for Khmer monarchs, that brings to the fore concerns about corruption, lawlessness, and general moral failings of the nation where the overwhelming majority of the population is Buddhist.

Politics

While many looked on in anticipation with the customary dose of jadedness, this year’s elections, with eight contending parties, brought both a replay of previous election dramas as well as some unexpected developments. Despite the nervous atmosphere that preceded and followed the casting of the ballots on 28 July, marked by pre-emptive deployment of military police units from the provinces to the capital, and despite early instances of violence directed at peaceful protestors, there was a noticeable restraint on the part of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), once again the declared winner of the elections, that can be read as a sign of the system’s increasing political maturity or the astuteness of a regime that recognizes the volatility of the situation.

The decline in political violence notwithstanding, the elections were marred by irregularities, intimidation of members and leaders of the opposition parties, suppression of the media, allegations of fraud, overall lack of accountability and utter disregard for recommendations repeatedly made by the United Nations and donor countries for electoral reform; failure of Phnom Penh to heed earlier appeals had led British election monitors to refuse involvement in the recent elections. Among the contentions was the question of some 1.2 million voters reportedly missing from the voter registration list and evictees who, because of party affiliation or documents lost during their eviction, could not register to vote, an issue that election monitors and rights advocates had flagged before the election as a potentially serious problem that had to be but was never addressed. A survey of three communes in Phnom Penh conducted by the Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia (COMFREL) found that at least 3,600 evictees were refused registration. Transparency International election observers also reported “large-scale disenfranchisement”, noting that at least 60 per cent of the polling stations voters could not locate their names on the voter list and that an “unusually high number” of temporary identity certificates that can be used to vote, which some estimated to be at 500,000,¹ were issued by the government. In December, the Electoral Reform Alliance (ERA), a coalition of eight nongovernment organizations (NGOs) advocating electoral reforms, released a report detailing irregularities during the 2013 elections. Their recommendations for reform echoed the calls of the European Parliament, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Australia, the Philippines, and the US for increased democratization. Though the US ambassador was present at the swearing in of the new National Assembly, the embassy in Phnom Penh and legislators in Washington called upon the National Election Committee (NEC) “to conduct a full and transparent investigation into all credible reports of irregularities”.² The CPP-dominated Constitutional Council of Cambodia, however, rejected all complaints filed by the opposition regarding election results as lacking “reasonable proof”, conceding only to one instance of staff level “technical mistakes” in Kratie province that it claims had no impact on the electoral outcome.

Citing widespread irregularities, the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), the...