Saturday, July 21, 2007

SRP: Child Soldiers in Africa, Child Voters in Cambodia

21 July 2007
CHILD SOLDIERS IN AFRICA, CHILD VOTERS IN CAMBODIA

In Africa, tribal leaders further their war-aims by manipulating children to become soldiers. In Cambodia, the government took the first step towards enlisting children in becoming pawns to be manipulated by the ruling party at the polls ["People Now Eligible for National ID at Age 15," Cambodia Daily 20 July 2007].

The issuing of ID cards to adults over the past few years has been a highly politicized process. It was one of the main administrative tricks used by the authorities to artificially inflate the number of votes for the CPP and decrease the number of votes for the opposition.

Now that 900,000 Cambodian children have been authorized to receive a National ID card, we should expect this mass of young people to be the subjects of the newest version of election manipulation. At the outset, it is likely that cards will be selectively issued, so that the children of CPP supporters will easily receive a card while children of opponents will be denied them through administrative barriers. When the children then come of age, more CPP supporters will already have been registered.

It is also possible that the age listed on the ID card is increased by at least a year. In this case, 16 year olds could claim to be 17, thus making them eligible to vote in next year's National Assembly election.

We should also suspect that these young people will be the targets of bribes and other forms of manipulation on voting day. In 2007, many illegitimate voters, including people under 18, were bribed by CPP authorities to cast ballots using ghost names that are intentionally kept on voter list. This new crop of young people will be particularly vulnerable to this kind of bribery and manipulation next year.

In order to stem this flow of abuses, ID cards should be issued only to those young people who are 17 years of age – those who will legitimately be eligible to vote in next year's election.

SRP Members of Parliament

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is one of CPP's strategies to use the NEC as its tool. The NEC body itself help coordinate the way CPP raise in order to cheat/get adventage on opposit parties because NEC's management is under CPP control.