Published in
The CAMBODIA DAILY
Tuesday, July 4, 2006
SRP Only Asks For Compliance With Basic Democratic Principles
In “SRP Demands Quota Or It Will Boycott Poll” (June 29, page 12), you quoted SRP officials as saying: “The Sam Rainsy Party will boycott the national village chief elections if the CPP does not agree to share a set number of the positions with the SRP, regardless of the outcome at the polls.”
Actually, what the SRP is demanding is compliance with basic democratic principles. Among these principles, the government only invokes “majority rule.” But any democracy must abide by at least two other principles: respect for the rights of the minority, and a system of checks and balances.
Through different forms of pressure on elected commune councilors and abuses of “majority rule” in Cambodia’s 1,621 commune councils that are convened to elect village chiefs, the ruling CPP has managed to maintain its absolute control over virtually all the country’s 13,000 villages. Two minority parties, SRP and Funcinpec, which collected altogether 42 percent of the popular votes at the last national elections in 2003, have been given virtually no rights whatsoever in the management of villages.
The CPP, which gathered 47 percent of the votes in 2003, remains the only party that controls the people’s life at the village level without any checks and balances.
For the municipality of Phnom Penh, which is divided into 76 communes and 690 villages, manipulations of the commune councilors’ votes were such that they allowed the CPP to secure the control of all the 690 villages, except 2 for the SRP. This represents a blatant distortion of the will of the people since the SRP won over 50 percent of the popular votes in the 2003 elections.
One can see that for indirect elections such as the ones that have just taken place for village chief positions, the smaller the number of voters, the more easily the CPP can influence them through intimidation and corruption.
When it became clear that the government under the control of the CPP had set the stage for biased elections, most SRP commune councilors decided not to participate in those elections. They were not demanding any “quota”, but only fairness that usually goes with effectiveness in the management of public affairs.
Definitely, the results of the recent village chief elections are no good news for democracy. Moreover, they jeopardize the decentralization process and the attempt to empower grassroots citizens to fight poverty.
Given the powers of CPP village chiefs acting effectively as party agents, thus making more remote the prospects for an even playing field for competing political parties, the recent poll bodes ill for the forthcoming local (2007) and national (2008) elections.
Sam Rainsy
Leader of the Sam Rainsy Party
Actually, what the SRP is demanding is compliance with basic democratic principles. Among these principles, the government only invokes “majority rule.” But any democracy must abide by at least two other principles: respect for the rights of the minority, and a system of checks and balances.
Through different forms of pressure on elected commune councilors and abuses of “majority rule” in Cambodia’s 1,621 commune councils that are convened to elect village chiefs, the ruling CPP has managed to maintain its absolute control over virtually all the country’s 13,000 villages. Two minority parties, SRP and Funcinpec, which collected altogether 42 percent of the popular votes at the last national elections in 2003, have been given virtually no rights whatsoever in the management of villages.
The CPP, which gathered 47 percent of the votes in 2003, remains the only party that controls the people’s life at the village level without any checks and balances.
For the municipality of Phnom Penh, which is divided into 76 communes and 690 villages, manipulations of the commune councilors’ votes were such that they allowed the CPP to secure the control of all the 690 villages, except 2 for the SRP. This represents a blatant distortion of the will of the people since the SRP won over 50 percent of the popular votes in the 2003 elections.
One can see that for indirect elections such as the ones that have just taken place for village chief positions, the smaller the number of voters, the more easily the CPP can influence them through intimidation and corruption.
When it became clear that the government under the control of the CPP had set the stage for biased elections, most SRP commune councilors decided not to participate in those elections. They were not demanding any “quota”, but only fairness that usually goes with effectiveness in the management of public affairs.
Definitely, the results of the recent village chief elections are no good news for democracy. Moreover, they jeopardize the decentralization process and the attempt to empower grassroots citizens to fight poverty.
Given the powers of CPP village chiefs acting effectively as party agents, thus making more remote the prospects for an even playing field for competing political parties, the recent poll bodes ill for the forthcoming local (2007) and national (2008) elections.
Sam Rainsy
Leader of the Sam Rainsy Party
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