Saturday, December 28, 2013
What is the Electoral Reform Alliance?
After weeks of
build-up, in December a new organisation finally released its promised report
on the 28 July national elections. The organisation is the Electoral Reform
Alliance, or the Election Reform Alliance, as it is also called in some press
accounts. What precisely the organisation consists of is a bit of a mystery,
because the ERA doesn’t seem to have a website, it has not publicly named any
officers or reported on an organising meeting, and if it has ever done anything
besides producing the report, I have not been able to find any record of it.
The ERA’s report has
on its cover a graphic displaying the logos of 20 NGOs. Eight of these are
called “Contributing Organizations” and 12 “Endorsing Organizations”. This
raises more questions than it answers.
Do “contributing” and
“endorsing” refer to the 20 organisations’ relationship to the ERA, or to the
report? If the former, is an “endorsing organisation” a member of the ERA, with
a shared responsibility for the organisation’s activities, including other
activities if it has any? If so, how does that responsibility differ from the
responsibility of a “contributing organisation”?
On the other hand, if
“contributing” and “endorsing” refer only to the groups’ relationship to the
report, doesn’t that indicate that the ERA is not really an organisation, but
is only a name invented to give unwary readers the false impression that the
report was prepared by some kind of body that is bigger and more authoritative
than the usual band of NGO critics?
A further question
about the ERA concerns whether it is a Cambodian or foreign organisation. While
nearly all of the 20 contributors and endorsers are Cambodian, a central role
appears to be played by an agency that was created and is funded by the US
government, namely the National Democratic Institute. Of the other seven
“contributing organisations” listed in the report, two do not state how their
“electoral programming” activities are funded; two state that theirs are funded
by the NDI and US AID; one is funded by the European Union; one is funded by
the European Union and a foundation created by billionaire currency speculator
George Soros for reshaping the world in the image of George Soros; and one is
funded by other NGOs, whose sources of funding I have not tried to trace.
Hence it appears that
the ERA “contributing organisations” are not contributing nearly as much as the
United States and, to a lesser extent, European governments. “The printing of
this report was made possible by the generous support of the United States
Agency for International Development (USAID)”, says the acknowledgement on the
inside front cover. And it was not only the printing that was made possible.
The dominance by
foreign agencies was reflected in some of the build-up to the release of the
ERA report. For example, an article – better described as PR puffery – that
appeared in the 29 October Cambodia Daily was
based entirely on comments about and quotations from the report by Laura
Thornton, the local director of the NDI.
The report “will tap
into some of the unhappiness over the election results and actually create a
grassroots demand for reform”, Thornton enthused to the Daily. She went on, “From our viewpoint, we are
talking about a complete overhaul: rewriting election laws, revamping the NEC
[National Election Committee].”
It seems not to have
occurred to either Thornton or the Cambodia Daily that
there is anything inappropriate about unelected organisations, funded and
directed by foreign agencies, attempting to “create a grassroots demand”,
overhaul election procedures and rewrite the country’s election laws. Indeed,
given this attitude, it is a bit surprising that the ERA sees any need for
Cambodians to vote at all. Perhaps the NDI has not yet explained to the local
“contributors” what it explained to the right-wing forces it funded and
encouraged to carry out a coup against Venezuela’s elected president in 2002.
The above remarks give
some context to the ERA report’s repeated calls for various aspects of
Cambodian elections to be controlled by “independent” or “impartial”
organisations, for example: “Reforms must focus first and foremost on establishing
a truly independent, non-partisan, transparent, and accountable election
management body”; “The government should consider an independent, politically
impartial broadcasting regulatory authority …”; “Independent observers have
made the following recommendations …”.
What is obvious from
any reading of the report is that, by “independent”, these NGOs mean themselves
and their foreign allies: “This report was compiled based on the research
conducted by various independent organizations [the ‛contributing
organizations’] …”; “…independent broadcasting by
stations Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA)”; “… no independent NGOs were
allowed to witness” an
internal NEC investigation; “Further reforms must be made to the structure,
processes, and membership of the NEC including the establishment of anindependent selection committee consisting of
representatives from diverse sectors (academia, NGOs [surprise!], legal
organizations, etc.).”
The NGOs’ confidence
that Cambodia would be a better place if they were in charge of it is matched,
logically, by their distrust of anyone who has been elected to a position
(after all, no one ever became an NGO executive through a public election).
Thus the NGO authors are quite contemptuous of commune councils, precisely
because they are elected; they regularly combine any mention of councils with
the warning that, being elected, they are “partisan” and therefore might be
biased: “An impartial, unelected professional local body should be assigned or
created to register voters, removing this responsibility from the elected and
partisan commune councils.”
Well, yes, a partisan
composition is the normal result of elections to any body in countries where it
is legal to form political parties: the people elected are usually party
members. Perhaps the ERA will eventually go to the source of the problem and
advocate removing the power of the National Assembly to pass legislation, since
its members are unmistakably partisan. The NA’s powers could then be passed to
an impartial, unelected professional national body selected by the ERA’s
contributing and endorsing organisations from among their own executives.
[I intend in a further
article to deal with some of the specific complaints and recommendations in the
ERA report.]
By Allen Myers
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