Cambodia Hosts ASEAN-China Youth Leaders Symposium

2011-06-25
Xinhua

Approximately 65 youth leaders from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and China (ASEAN- China) gathered here on Saturday to build closer regional friendship relations and cooperation.

Speaking at the opening of the two-day symposium on Saturday, Cambodian Minister of Education, Youth and Sports Im Sethy said the symposium was both timely and significant in terms of commemorating the 20th anniversary of the ASEAN-China dialogue relations.

"The meeting is a great opportunity for youth leaders from both sides to share their prospective and experience for mutual understanding, regional cooperation, and leadership development," he said. "It is also to exchange their invaluable views on achievements, challenges and future direction of ASEAN-China strategic partnership."

TV Show Inspires Future Cambodian Leader

Chhem Pe and Sophal Yun at Battery Park in New York City

FrontLines - February 2010
USAID

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia—A reality show based loosely on America’s “Apprentice” and “American Idol” is testing the leadership and debating skills of promising young Cambodians.

The USAID-funded “Youth Leadership Challenge” is giving Cambodian youth new opportunities to develop the next generation of leaders in a country where the median age is 22. With 2.1 million viewers, the show recently completed its sixth season and airs nationally on CTN, Cambodia’s most popular TV station.

Each season begins with 16 contestants. During weekly episodes, contestants are divided into two teams that compete in challenges such as organizing a petition campaign or a book drive. At the end of each episode, contestants vote off two fellow cast members. In the final episode each season, two finalists compete in a debate and the audience chooses the winner by texting in their votes.

Each season’s winner has the opportunity to visit the United States, an incentive that is highly prized by Cambodian youth and helps attract strong contestants. The private sector is capitalizing on the show’s popularity through sponsorship deals, which currently account for 23 percent of its budget, up from 7 percent during the first season.

Many former contestants have used the show to further their studies and careers. Kong Sorita, a 22-year-old international relations major, used the skills she learned on the show to win an election for student body president at Pannassasstra University, Cambodia’s most prestigious university.

During the 15-day campaign period, she formed a committee that polled students about their concerns and expectations and used the data to develop a platform. Kong won three times as many votes as her competitor.

After graduation, Kong plans to pursue a career in Cambodia’s diplomatic corps and eventually run for political office, perhaps even prime minister.

“International relations is not a very popular choice for women students in Cambodia, because they are afraid of getting involved in politics,” she said.

“Competing in the ‘Youth Leadership Challenge’ has given me the confidence and skills I need to pursue a career in this field.”

In September 2009, Sophal Yun, the winner of season four, and Chhem Pe, the winner of season five, visited New York City and Washington. Their twoweek study tour combined sightseeing in both cities with educational enrichment. In Washington, they toured the U.S. Capitol and attended a congressional hearing, enabling them to see firsthand how an open, democratic government functions.

“My parents are very proud that I earned my way through the program—and especially the trip to the U.S.,” said Chhem.

At age 19, Chhem was the competition’s youngest winner and came from a poor family in rural Cambodia. After gaining national prominence in the competition, he is making plans to attend university and study international relations and rural development.

“This program will help shape the skills that I will bring [to my career],” said Chhem.

Youth Leaders Encouraged by US Visit

Norin Toch and Sarita Nuch

By Nuch Sarita, VOA Khmer
Washington
29 August 2008

Click here to listen to the Khmer audio program

The Leadership Development Training Program, hosted in the US between Aug. 23 and Sept. 7, included two Cambodians, selected after their participation in a televised game show in Cambodia.

Lalune Sreang and Norin Toch both said as guests on "Hello VOA" Thursday they had been encouraged by the training program, which seeks to expose them into US politics, government and lifestyles and presented the opportunity to meet high-ranking US officials.

Participants met with Lorne Craner, president of the International Republican Institute, which sponsored the trip, as well as Karen Johnson, executive vice president of the National Organization for Women, and others.

"Most of the American people are very helpful, honest and friendly," Lalune Sreang, who won the IRI-sponsored television contest "Cambodian Best Youth Leadership Challenge" in 2008, said Thursday. "American women are strong and independent, but women in Cambodia face adversities in participating in politics and civil society."

Lalune Sreang said she would like to see Cambodian women have "equal access to every level of educational and vocational training and in the professional field."

Norin Toch, who won the "Leadership Challenge" in 2007, said the trip had been a good opportunity for him.

"I want in the future other Cambodian youths to come and learn about this program, which is to increase youth's visibility and influence and to encourage them to take the lead in action," he said Thursday. "The Cambodian government needs to promote and encourage young Cambodians in democratic and development processes in order to fight against corruption and maintain sustainable peace in Cambodia."

The Apprentice Goes to Civics Class

Judges and contestants gather in the boardroom to decide who will be "going home" at the end of each episode of Youth Leadership Challenge.

A reality TV show brings U.S.-style democracy to Cambodia.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007
By Suzy Khimm
Posted at slate.com

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia—With her button-down blouse, plastic-frame glasses, and impeccable résumé—youth delegate to the United Nations, research assistant on rural economic development—Heng Socheata seems like an unlikely maverick.

"I didn't tell my friends to watch the show," the 21-year-old accounting student said. "If I won, it'd be OK. But if I failed, it'd be kind of embarrassing."

Socheata is among the young stars of a new reality TV show that quietly subverted the political orthodoxy of Cambodia's heavily censored broadcast networks—seven public and private stations all under the thumb of the ruling party. Part Apprentice spinoff and part civics class, the Youth Leadership Challenge replaces Donald Trump's aspiring moguls with 16 citizen-heroes who race around the capital collecting signatures for a neighborhood clean-up petition, producing a social-advocacy video, and soliciting donations for an orphanage.

In the show's inaugural season, which concluded last week, contestants were quick to adopt the true spirit of the genre: Reduced to tears one moment, they gave on-air confessionals the next. There have, for sure, been a few cross-cultural adjustments. Trump's trademark "You're fired!" was deemed too harsh for the Cambodians, two of whom were instead told to "Go home" each week. The prize for the last do-gooder standing was a trip to America, still the promised land for Cambodia's young and ambitious.

The program was the brainchild of the International Republican Institute, a USAID-funded and U.S. Republican Party-backed group that collaborated with the Youth Council of Cambodia to produce the show. IRI, along with its sister organization, the National Democratic Institute, was founded during the Reagan administration to aid U.S. efforts to promote—in some critics' parlance, "export"—democracy abroad, with offices now in Iraq, Haiti, and more than 40 other geo-strategic hot spots. Both groups still recall the spirit of the Cold War years, focusing on political-party development, civic mobilization, and election monitoring to promote "the nuts and bolts of democracy," according to Jerome Cheung, NDI's resident country director in Cambodia.

Of course, that the United States once bombed Cambodia in the name of such ideals isn't lost on this new wave of political missionaries. But Cambodia, unlike Vietnam, was forced to recover from Year Zero and the mass murder of nearly 2 million citizens. By 1992, when the U.N. occupation began, many Cambodians were ready to let in the phalanx of Western donors and aid groups at its door and begin the country's fitful transition to democracy.

Under the guise of its competitive theatrics, the Youth Leadership Challenge makes an indirect but unmistakable challenge to a government that continues to censor broadcasts of unfavorable news items, miniskirted entertainers, and portions of congressional hearings that seem threatening to the ruling party. In one high-profile crackdown, the IRI-backed Cambodian Center for Human Rights hosted a public forum that led to the arrest of CCHR director Kem Sokha and four colleagues on charges of defaming Prime Minister Hun Sen in late 2005, provoking an international outcry.

Barely a year later, the Youth Leadership Challenge featured a free-flowing debate about the national law prohibiting adultery, a bill mandating military conscription, and sex education in public schools. Between the frenzied yelps of the timekeeper, the contestants expounded, rebutted, and, occasionally, grabbed the microphone away from one another. "I don't know how we're supposed to argue against what we believe in," Socheata admitted in a fit of offstage nerves, moments before making the case for why women shouldn't be allowed to hold high political office.

According to local media trainer Moeun Chhean Nariddh, the program's unscripted antics have helped usher in "one of the most serious and political programs in Cambodia. … All networks are either censored or self-censored, as everything is controlled by or affiliated with the ruling party."

Local observers are still wondering how the kids have gotten away with it. For years, IRI had been commonly perceived as supporting the opposition Sam Rainsy Party—an allegation bolstered in 1997 when an IRI staffer was wounded in a grenade attack on an opposition rally he was attending, as well as by Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell's long-standing calls for "regime change" in Cambodia. (Cynthia Bunton, IRI's Asia director, maintains that the organization has always been nonpartisan.)

Over the years, however, the ruling Cambodian People's Party has only continued to consolidate power, bolstered by Hun Sen's strong-arm tactics and an expanding grass-roots base. Many believe the SRP has lost its critical bark since its eponymous leader's return from self-imposed exile in France last year. The CPP accepted IRI's offer of political training for the first time in its history last fall, and IRI has been able to explore alternative means of cultivating a more open society in Cambodia.

"You have a hole in the boat, and water is coming through that hole," explained Thun Saray, director of Adhoc, a leading rights organization. "You have to plug the hole without making the boat turn over."

Certainly, the reality show's contestants hardly come off as radicals; they're the good kids, overachievers chosen from nearly 200 candidates. But the program has capitalized on their youth and ambition by leaning on another infamous U.S. export: American cultural mystique.

In a country where 70 percent of the population is under 30, Cambodians have an overwhelmingly positive opinion of the United States, as IRI's own 2004 poll confirmed. Bunton emphasized that the show's organizers "tried to tweak [the program] to be relevant to Cambodians." But the competition's big prize is hardly an afterthought. "That's why everyone wanted to be on the show—to go to the U.S.," said contestant Sorn Sarath, 24, who had already posted a photo of the U.S. ambassador on the wall of his volunteer-staffed NGO, the Student Movement for Democracy. The first Youth Leadership Challenge winner, Hing Soksan, 26, is another SMD staffer who introduced himself in an interview as an orphan and a future NGO officer. Unable to find a suitable job in Cambodia, Soksan hopes to use his trip to the United States "to learn from American leaders … and make Cambodia have more freedom than it has now."

At the same time, the contestants are hardly guileless consumers of everything Amerik. For them, the show's most outrageous task wasn't canvassing pool halls or handing out condoms on Valentine's Day, it was being criticized on camera. In a culture where "losing face" remains cause for shame, the judges dissected the contestants' leadership flaws—then had them turn on one another.

"In Cambodian culture, we don't say these things directly. We have to save face," said Socheata. "I've learned how to go after people directly. You have to be very good at seeing the weak points of other people, and you have to go back after them."

For one of the judges, that unrestrained public criticism lies at the heart of the show's edifying mission. "It's part of American culture—the competition of ideas," said Theary Seng, the Cambodian-American director of the Center for Social Development. "In a market economy, everything goes through a refining process, and the best idea or product will surface."

Trump couldn't have said it better himself.

Suzy Khimm is a writer based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. She has contributed to the Christian Science Monitor and Los Angeles Times.