OPINION
The United States is a country overflowing
with democracy. For this reason, it has long been necessary for the US to
export at least part of its democracy, to prevent those at the bottom of US
democracy from drowning in it.
Nearly half a century ago, US democracy was
exported to Cambodia in the bomb bays of B-52s. Sadly, the US democracy dropped
by the B-52s didn’t really take hold here, probably because of climatic
differences. Nevertheless, the US government persisted throughout the 1980s,
quietly backing a group called “Democratic Kampuchea” until it became obvious
that DK was withering and dying out.
But lower-level US people were still drowning,
so Washington had to come up with another way of exporting democracy. Some
bright spark in a think tank came up with the International
Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute:
government-funded non-government organisations (yes, really) that would help to
spread US-style democracy to countries where it hadn’t yet taken hold (the
evidence being that the people there hadn’t voted as they would have voted in
the US).
The IRI and the NDI aren’t really different
from each other, despite the need to maintain the fiction that US Republican
and Democratic foreign policies are alternatives. There is usually an amicable
division of labour between them. For instance, when the US government decided
to overthrow the leftist President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in 2002, the
funding and encouragement of the coup plotters were left mostly to the NDI –
probably on the theory that the “liberal” NDI could get away with more than the
“conservative” IRI could do before Chavez caught on. Conversely, if you’re a
conservative dictator having frictions with the US, you should probably tell
your secret police to focus on what the IRI is up to. Nobody ever said that
international coup-organising is simple.
None of the above is meant to imply that the
US government is trying to organise a coup in Cambodia. It probably isn’t, if
only because it is preoccupied now with wars or coups in other places where it
feels its democratic principles are more threatened. But stay tuned.
In Cambodia, the IRI and NDI have divided the
tasks of government-funded non-government organisations in an unusual way,
perhaps in an effort to avoid being typecast. The IRI has conducted public
opinion surveys, which usually show that a large majority of Cambodians are generally
in favour of the course being followed by the government. Meanwhile, the NDI
has been conducting surveys that imply that the government is trying to prevent
people from voting. These two positions seem contradictory, but US-style
democracy seems to like contradiction.
The NDI’s latest claim on the subject was
reported in the Cambodia Daily on 30 October. The article quoted
Laura Thornton, NDI’s country director, as saying that, according to a survey,
“29.5 percent of citizens attempted to vote on election day, but were unable
to”, and that “this number of disenfranchised voters had the potential to have
changed the outcome of the elections”.
Curiously, more than 24 hours after the
article was published, no information about this survey was available on the
NDI website or anywhere else on the internet except the Daily’s web page. Is
the NDI in the habit of giving “scoops” to the Cambodia Daily? Or did
the NDI have so little confidence in its own analysis that it decided to try it
out first in just one location?
Whatever the explanation, the situation makes
it impossible to know whether unanswered questions in the article stem from the
NDI or from the Daily reporters. And such questions there are
aplenty.
For a start, the article doesn’t report the
number of people surveyed, which is indispensable for judging the reliability
of any survey. Nor does it say clearly how the respondents were selected. It
does imply, however, that the selection was not random, since Thornton is
quoted as saying that a survey aim was “to assess the impact of candidate
debates organised by NDI”. Thus it appears that the people surveyed had
attended, or at least were aware of, NDI-organised candidate debates, and were
to that extent not typical Cambodian voters.
Another unanswered question is whether the
surveyors simply accepted people’s word that they were properly registered and
had tried, unsuccessfully, to vote. In every country where voting is not
compulsory, there are larger or smaller numbers of people who don’t register or
who register but don’t vote. However, in the recent Cambodian election, there
was considerable social pressure – both from the National Election Committee
and other officials and in the form of large and enthusiastic election rallies
– to be part of the election process, to vote. And the mere act of asking
someone why they didn’t vote suggests that non-voters are a bit odd,
if not actively anti-social.
So there may have been pressure on non-voter
respondents to exaggerate their efforts to vote. It would therefore help to
judge the reliability of the survey to know whether it took this possibility
into account, and precisely how the questions were phrased. Did the surveyors
ask to see evidence that people were registered, such as the receipt that is
issued when people enrol? Did they ask whether respondents had sought to find
their names on the publicly posted voters list prior to election day, as the
election authorities encouraged people to do? How many respondents answered the
survey by saying things such as “No, I never got around to registering” or “I
moved into this commune after the registration closed, and my old commune is
too far away” or “I was sick on election day” or “I was going to vote, but my
cow got away and I had to go find it”? We don’t know the answers to any of
these questions.
Probably the strangest aspect of the article
is that it doesn’t tell us what the majority of interviewed non-voters said.
Thornton told the Daily that 32.6% couldn’t find their names on the
voters list, and 15.2% “said they were prevented from voting by polling
officials”. Those are the only figures in the article, and they add up to only
47.8% of respondents who said they tried to vote but were unable to do so.
What was the problem for the majority, for the
other 52.2%? Were they blocked from reaching the polling station by flooding?
(If so, was the flood arranged by the CPP government?) Or were they intimidated
by the racist mobs that surrounded some polling stations at the urging of CNRP
leaders, preventing ethnic minority Cambodians from entering?
More unanswered questions concern the 15.2%
who said they were blocked from voting by polling officials. Since polling
officials are hired by the commune, it would be good to know what percentage of
these incidents happened in communes where the CPP is a majority of the commune
council and what percentage where the CNRP has the majority. Were these blocked
voters offered any reason for being blocked? If so, was the reason a valid one
or not?
More questions – not about the survey, but
about the attitude and/or knowledge of the NDI – are raised by Thornton’s
comments to the Daily in which she accuses the NEC of preventing
political parties’ access to the voters list. The accusation is simply bizarre.
Voters lists are publicly displayed at every commune office for several months
before the election. They can be freely accessed by anyone. Can the NDI be
unaware of this? Or does it simply not care about facts?
In any case, the behaviour of the opposition
indicates that it really isn’t interested in the voters list. When the list was
being officially updated at the end of last year, the Sam Rainsy Party and Kem
Sokha’s Human Rights Party both boycotted the entire process.
This kind of contradiction and confusion
doesn’t instil much confidence that US democracy is going to be a hit in
Cambodia this time around either. But we can at least be thankful that the NDI
doesn’t – yet – have any B-52s.
