People’s Power and the Road to Democratic Freedom

Friday, October 01, 2010
Op-Ed by MP

However, the call for democracy transcends even nationalistic calculations and or geo-political necessities – certainly, it is no ‘pie in the sky’, as jibed by some quarters – but everything to do with what right-minded people everywhere perceive to be intrinsic to their social conditions and fundamental to their existence as free men and women; as natural an endowment as the oxygen they inhale or the very breath they take.

CAMBODIA – it seems – has more urgent issues to grapple with than pondering over past events, and while one does not wish to be diverted from matters more deserving of public attention, occasionally a question is raised, maliciously or disingenuously, out of pettiness or cheap propaganda ploy, perhaps, to vex and confound perceived ‘opposition’ to the current regime. One of such questions is why present opponents and critics of the Phnom Penh government failed to protest the Pol Pot regime’s violations of Cambodian people’s human rights in the 1970s.

It is a question that most Cambodians themselves would have raised, not just Mr Rainsy and or his supporters, many of whom, one should think, are surviving victims of Pol Pot's regime themselves, were too young at the time or had been born after that regime’s fall, and as such have as much cause to oppose and detest tyranny and political repression as does anyone. This is a political and historical issue that concerned not only small countries like Cambodia and the largely dysfunctional, ineffectual body of the UN, under whose charge we not only witnessed the Cambodian genocide, but also a host of other mass killings and atrocities conducted on a similar scale around the world, such as Uganda, Rwanda, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia and so on.

One recalls also that a number of Khmers living abroad at the start of the Pol Pot regime did respond to the call to return to their home land where they were received by the likes of Khieu Samphan and Ieng Sary, before being sent to the countryside, Tuol Sleng and other prisons to die and suffer like the rest of the Khmer people.

One should note that the helplessness and isolation of the Cambodian people had not been concluded in 1979 as a result of the Vietnamese invasion (billed as 'liberation' of Cambodia from the clutches of Pol Pot), and whether like under the previous years of Pol Pot's reign of terror, the country had firmly been a powerless pawn on the chessboard of Cold War politics, one is nevertheless entitled to ask of the Vietnamese leadership then and now as to what exactly they were doing between 1979 and the time the Paris Peace Accords were signed in the early 1990s? Even foreign journalists and aid workers coming into the country at the time could not travel anywhere without being shadowed by agents and police in plain clothes. There were also forced labour projects like the infamous ‘K5’ (brainchild of Le Duc Tho) which resulted in the loss in several thousands of Khmer lives through starvation, malaria contraction and other forms of untreated diseases, not to mention the wholesale destruction of the country's forests and ecology, carried out in line with the project's strategic military designs aimed at depriving anti-Vietnamese resistance of a valuable natural protective cover in time of armed clashes.

One further recalls Vietnamese delegations to Democratic Kampuchea applauding that regime for its ‘far-sightedness’ in social measures as well as ‘admirable achievements’ in various fields, including the evacuations of urban population and mobilisation of the masses to perform forced labour in the countryside. So one could see here where many a concerned Khmer overseas might have found it inconsequential or powerless to protest the suffering of their compatriots between1975-1979, the Vietnamese leadership, on the other hand, had opportunities to make such a protest, but instead feigned ignorance of what was happening during the same period, and might have gone on a while longer with this conciliatory, non-interfering approach, had they not been pressed unduly by other developments that posed an immediate threat to Vietnam’s/ Hanoi’s political security or stratagems.

Vietnam could also have called for international intervention or resolution over the Kampuchean crisis. After all, it was essentially a humanitarian issue, even if it would have been difficult to get the UN Security Council to act upon the matter in light of Cold War considerations at the time, but it opted not to, and instead used KR defectors and recruits among survivors to front its 200,000 strong troops to oust the DK regime. In addition, by attributing the overthrow of this murderous regime to Pol Pot’s former soldiers and victims, the Vietnamese also hoped to institute a domestic home-grown alliance made up of former KR elements and their victims which would prove to be sufficiently popular and strong enough with which to neutralise and pre-empt any possible return to power of a genuine patriotic (perhaps, ‘anti-Vietnamese’) movement in time to come.

Those cheap propaganda quips about the lack of interest on the part of civil groups, activists etc. over the atrocities committed during the KR regime, meant to rebuke or discredit democratic opposition to this current one, is quite beneath amusement and contempt. If anything, the real and pertinent question needing to be posed is why Cambodia continues to be subjected to this political isolation and restriction, to which even civilised critique and dissenting voices are perceived as 'extremist' and seditious, whilst a catalogue of outrageous ill practices carried out in the name of national 'development' and 'stability' are tolerated and encouraged even? No?

This leads to another question: why calling for democracy and 'People's Power', of which there was none in the country's recent governing history? Well, actually, the absence of genuine democratic tradition and practice is precisely why the people and the nation are easily manipulated by external powers and by their compliant surrogates closer to home.

No government could claim with an iota of moral force or feasibility to represent the Khmer people whilst their rights as free men and women as well as their dignity as humans are not embedded to its laws and manifested through its conducts. Therefore, to ask why genocides and atrocities had been allowed to take place in history is to ask the same question of the prevailing of tyranny in place of democratic rule and freedom for all under the umbrella of the Constitution and the Rule of Law.

The easiest thing for Khmers anywhere to do would be to turn their backs upon their compatriots living in Cambodia. The hardest will be to see through their struggle for liberty and self-mastery over their own nation’s destiny via any form of affecting solidarity, without being distracted by the ploys and plots of scheming, self-serving and rapacious elements, which simultaneously fear the democratic rise in People’s Power and thrive upon the majority’s continued isolation and enslavement.

However, the call for democracy transcends even nationalistic calculations and or geo-political necessities – certainly, it is no ‘pie in the sky’, as jibed by some quarters – but everything to do with what right-minded people everywhere perceive to be intrinsic to their social conditions and fundamental to their existence as free men and women; as natural an endowment as the oxygen they inhale or the very breath they take.