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The Travesty of Cambodia's `Fair' Elections Sunday, August 9, 1998 The July 26 elections in Cambodia were a failure for American foreign policy. Although a majority of the Cambodian people rejected the brutal and corrupt Hun Sen regime, that majority was not enough to remove the regime from power. And despite the rush by many international observers to endorse the elections as free and fair, the entire process was clearlytampered with by the ruling party. Yet the United States, warned well in advance that this might happen, allowed the opposition to be pressured by the Asians and Europeans into joining a political exercise in which the deck was stacked. In this policy, the Clinton administration failed to defend the moral and security interests of both the Cambodian people and the United States. There were 39 parties contesting this election but only three main contenders, which between them won 88 percent of the vote. The first was the ruling Cambodian Peoples Party, the CPP, installed in power by the invading Vietnamese army in 1979. It is led by former members of the Khmer Rouge, the most enduring of whom is Hun Sen. Voted out of office in a U.N.-sponsored election in 1993, it pushed its way back into power that year by threatening to re-ignite civil war. The second was Funcinpec, the royalist party led by King Sihanouk's son Prince Norodom Ranariddh, which won the 1993 election but unwillingly entered an unworkable coalition with the CPP at the timorous Sihanouk's request, and at the behest of a U.N. administration that refused to enforce its legal mandate. That coalition fell apart in July 1997 when Hun Senlaunched a coup. The third contender was the Sam Rainsy Party, named after its leader, an outspoken former finance minister who was fired in 1994 after he denounced corruption within his own government. In the days following the election, international observers trumpeted the fact that they saw no evidence of intimidation or fraud on election day. As one of them, I can confirm that observation. But the election cannot be judged on the events of polling day alone. Unfair and unfree conditions obtained in the months before, and in the counting process that followed, thanks to CPP control over the election infrastructure, the national media and the local administration. Bribery and intimidation were rampant. The international observers were spread thin. In fact, the small number of international observers (500) relative to the number of polling places (11,000) and counting centers (1,900) ensured that even if all teams were at different places at any one time, they were in no position to witness more than a fraction of the polling and counting processes. Moreover, none of the international observers would have known which of the Cambodians at the polls were local CPP officials, whose presence was an intimidating one. But the voters certainly knew. Reports are now appearing in the Western press of actual ballot tampering during the voting and counting processes. The problems with the election began long before the vote. Hun Sen's 1997 coup was followed by months of savage killing during which more than 100 opposition figures died. Despite the requests of the U.N. Office of Human Rights, none of these killings was properly investigated and no culprits have been apprehended. Then, in May, the CPP conducted a thumb-print registration campaign to force the population to join the party. Bribes of food and clothing also were used. In the province of Kratie, which I visited, the governor boasted that he had registered 75 percent of the population in the CPP. Throughout Cambodia, those who refused to join the CPP were identified as opponents of the government, and were subject to discrimination, threats and worse. At least 21 opposition activists were murdered in the month prior to the election, some in the most sadistic manner. For example, one electoral observer from the royalist party, a double amputee named Thong Sophal, was found with his skull crushed, his eyes gouged out, his fingers and one ear cut off, and the skin scraped off his thigh stumps. Hun Sen's police described Sophal's death as a suicide. This sadism is the hallmark of Hun Sen's police and militias. The gouging out of eyes seems to be the one-eyed prime minister's vengeful callingcard. Cambodian society has long been perverted by state violence and impunity. Although there was no way for the CPP to determine who voted for which party, it spread rumors that it was able do so. For many illiterate peasants, whose culture is permeated with belief in supernatural events, those rumors must have had some effect. Even influencing a small minority would have been enough to swing the election. Furthermore, the opposition was denied anything approaching equal access to the mass media. Each party was restricted to five minutes per day on television, while Hun Sen was seen daily for long periods opening schools and hospitals, and pronouncing on national affairs. The vote-counting process has been brought into question by opposition charges of fraud, given credence by the government's behavior. For example, final results have been continually postponed, and promised recounts in areas of irregularity have now been scheduled to take up to two months. The only independent figure in the Fraud and Irregularities Committee of the National Election Committee, Kassie Neou, resigned in disgust. It was recently reported in the Western press that the formula for determining the allocation of seats from raw votes was changed by the authorities on May 28 without publicly informing the opposition parties. The formula gives the CPP, which won 41 percent of the vote, a majority of seats instead of aminority. It is remarkable that so many Cambodians overcame fear and voted for the opposition. As in 1993, the opposition vote would have been even higher had there been no intimidation and manipulation. Even a difference of 10 percent of the votes nationwide would have dropped the official CPP tally to 31 percent. The United States has a considerable stake in Cambodia's future--from a security as well as a moral standpoint. The U.S. government has spent nearly $1 billion trying to implant democratic institutions there, only to see them destroyed by Hun Sen between 1993 and 1997. It has pledged to assist the Cambodian people in bringing to justice all those responsible for the Khmer Rouge holocaust of 1975-78. Furthermore, the United States is greatly affected by the fact that criminal syndicates are using Cambodia as a transit point for world distribution of narcotics and are involved in defoliating Cambodia's forests withunrestricted logging. All these American interests are incompatible with those of the Hun Sen regime. Hun Sen, himself an unrepentant former Khmer Rouge commander, has presided over the restoration with full amnesty of the vast majority of Khmer Rouge commanders and soldiers who were once loyal to Pol Pot. As for the syndicates which flourish in Cambodia today, they are protected by the regime, which lines its pockets with payments from loggers and drug traffickers. No amount of American diplomacy is capable of resolving this incompatibility. Yet, some within the U.S. State Department seem not to have grasped this fundamental point. They act as if only "positive signaling" will cause Hun Sen and his team of recidivists to abandon their criminal ways. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the U.S. response to the terrorist attack on an opposition political rally last year. On March 30, 1997, four grenades were tossed into a peaceful meeting of Sam Rainsy supporters, killing 16 and wounding more than 100. Circumstantial evidence has long pointed to the involvement of Hun Sen's bodyguards. The wounding of an American citizen at the meeting, Ron Abney, triggered an FBI investigation. Yet despite the pleading of several U.S. congressmen and Cambodia's opposition leaders, the contents of that report have never been revealed. Two months ago, Rainsy brought to the FBI's Bangkok office a man who has confessed to being one of the terrorists, and who has implicated Hun Sen's bodyguards as those who gave him orders. Yet the State Department still refuses to provide members of Congress with details. The conclusion that Rainsy and many Americans have drawn from this is that the State Department does not want to upset Hun Sen. Apologists for the Hun Sen regime argue that Cambodia needs stability in order to develop, and that the firm hand of Hun Sen is more able to provide that than the undisciplined and quarrelsome noncommunist parties. But what is the virtue of "development" by defoliation and narcotics distribution? Nor does Hun Sen provide stability. Since the July coup, Cambodia--and especially Phnom Penh--have become totally lawless. Kidnapping of Cambodian businessmen for ransom has reached epidemic proportions. As one foreign witness, the writer Philip Gourevitch, reports in the Aug. 10 New Yorker, the police murder even nonviolent traffic offenders in public with impunity. Cambodia can have a civilized government responsive both to its people's needs and to the security interests of its neighbors only if the Hun Sen regime is removed from power. Earlier this year, the United States could have stood firmly behind the beleaguered opposition parties and supported a boycott of the election until conditions for a genuinely free contest existed. It could now declare the election results unsatisfactory. Instead of taking the moral lead, the United States is preoccupied with not being too far out of step with its European and Asian allies. But these allies, especially the French and Japanese, seem to care more about their regional political influence and investment opportunities than about Cambodia's fate or the struggle against international crime syndicates. Many Western ambassadors in Phnom Penh are mesmerized by the possibility that they can moderate and do business with the Hun Sen regime. In light of its cumulative policy failure, the morally decent new starting point for the United States is to act overtly as defender and protector of the safety of the Cambodian opposition. It must also make clear that it will not permit aid to any Cambodian government that is beholden to drug traffickers or that has ex-Khmer Rouge ministers. The United States should demand, as well, that Thailand arrest the dual Cambodian-Thai citizen who is the principal drug trafficker financing Hun Sen's regime. If instead the Clinton administration follows the European and Asian inclination to appease Hun Sen, it will not only be undermining U.S. long-term interests; it will be committing a final indecent betrayal of a defenseless and downtrodden people. Stephen Morris, a fellow at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, observed the Cambodian elections for the National Democratic Institute on International Affairs.
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