Over a decade after the United Nations claimed as a success story the restoration of democracy in war-ravaged Cambodia, the Southeast Asian country is exposing this achievement to be much less than what it has been vaunted to be.
Democratic processes like elections are meant to create societies that work for a country’s citizens. But Cambodia does not have a functioning government – over six months after the third general elections it has had since a 1991 accord brought peace to the country.
In fact, a key contributor to the deadlock between the three main political parties – the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), the royalist FUNCINPEC party and the Sam Rainsy Party – is a condition enshrined in the country’s democratic constitution.
It states that a political party needs a two-thirds majority of seats in the Cambodia’s 123-member National Assembly to form a government after a national poll. Because of this high demand – in contrast to the universal practice of political parties needing only a simple majority to rule – the governments formed after the 1993 and 1998 polls were coalitions.
Fence-mending among the rival parties would lead to a way out, but the prospect of a political alliance emerging after last year’s poll has been shot due to the bitter rivalry between the CPP, led by Prime Minister Hun Sen, and the other two main parties. The CPP won 73 seats at the July polls.
However this week, Cambodia’s former finance minister, Sam Rainsy, who leads the party that bears his name, revealed during a visit to Bangkok that there had been a slight thaw in the frosty relations. He was quoted by Thursday’s ‘The Nation’ newspaper as saying he had dropped his refusal to join Hun Sen in forming a government.
Yet he stressed it would not be easy, since his party and the FUNCINPEC, which have just united under a new political banner called the ‘Alliance of Democrats’, have set preconditions for the CPP to meet as part of any political deal. They include changes to the justice system, the electoral process and anti-corruption measures.
The two previous elections also gave rise to similar factionalism and signs of incompatibility between the main political parties.
The country’s 1993 constitution, which was adopted by the parliament shortly after that year’s poll, had received the blessing of the United Nations. At that time, the United Nations had a special mission running the affairs of Cambodia for 18 months as the country embarked on a journey from decades of war to peace.
”The two-thirds clause had some validity at that time, because Cambodia was in a process of national reconciliation,” Kao Kim Hourn, executive director of the Cambodian Institute for Cooperation and Peace, a Phnom Penh-based independent think tank, told IPS. ”The need then was for consensus building and bringing Cambodia’s many political factions together.”
But now, Kao asserts, this provision has proven to be more bane than boon. ”The clause is no more an asset, but has become a political liability. It has become a problem given the difficulty it poses in us getting a new government after an election.” Continuing political violence has also not helped the picture painted by the United Nations when its special mission left Cambodia in December 1993 – that it had spurred a nation traumatized by genocide, war and occupation to take the path to stability.
In a report released this week, the independent Cambodia Human Rights and Development Association (known by its French acronym ADHOC) declared that 2003 was the country’s most violent year since the 1998 elections.
Thirty-three activists were murdered last year, including 12 from the Sam Rainsy Party, 10 from FUNCINPEC and 11 from CPP, the Phnom Penh-based ADHOC revealed in its annual report.
The year also saw anti-Thai riots in January, the murder of high-ranking officials, a Buddhist monk and a judge, the report added.
In addition, Cambodia witnessed attacks on a radio journalist, a popular female singer and, most recently, the murder of its most prominent trade union leader.
Today, critics of the world body argue that the United Nations must shoulder some responsibility for Cambodia’s troubled times.
”The UN has to bear the responsibility for failing to create a viable political environment in Cambodia in the early 1990s,” Sunai Phasuk, analyst at Forum Asia, a Bangkok-based regional human rights lobby, told IPS. ”The chaos there today is the result of how the UN approached the problem of restoring democracy.”
The only emphasis was on bringing together the disparate political forces in the country to create stability, said Sunai. ”The elections of 1993 and the country’s constitution that was adopted soon after were the ways through which the UN sought to achieve that goal.”
But the United Nations did not ”create an enabling environment for the newly imposed democratic culture to grow,” added Sunai. ”We have been deeply skeptical of the U.N.’s ability when it comes to elections and the political process being introduced to war-ravaged countries.”
The United Nations will also find it hard to ignore Cambodia’s political climate since the turmoil has created yet another stumbling block to a still unfulfilled mission – the setting up of the U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal to prosecute the former leaders of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. Between 1975-79, when the Khmer Rouge ruled the country, over 1.7 million people died from torture, starvation and illness.
After close to five years of at times testy negotiations, UN officials had been hoping that the law to create the special tribunal would be passed soon after the July election.
But as Mu Soc Hua, Cambodia’s minister for women’s and veteran’s affairs, told IPS, ”Because of the deadlock, no laws have been passed in the National Assembly.”
Likewise, she said that due to the absence of a government, the legislative body has not approved the budget for 2004.
This reality should give supporters of the United Nations a reason to pause, said Sunai, the human rights activist. ”The timing is appropriate, because of the present calls to get the UN involved in the electoral and democratic process in post-war Iraq.”
