More US
democracy for Cambodians
Here we go
again. And again. And yet again.
No one could
possibly keep track of the number of times right-wing US politicians have
issued commandments to Cambodians about how Cambodians ought to organise
themselves.
How do they find
the time to do it? There are only a total of 535 members of the US Congress –
the House of Representatives and the Senate. There are more than 317 million US
citizens whose welfare these Congresspeople have to look after, not to mention
millions of more non-citizens whom they have to persecute and deport. That’s
around 593,000 citizens per Congressperson, even if there were no overlap.
So if the
average Congressperson never slept or ate or sent out dirty Facebook pictures
or did anything else except think about the citizens they represent (not
including the non-citizens they need to deport), that average Congressperson
could, in one year, devote 53 seconds to each of his/her assigned citizens.
And yet, some
Congresspeople, like Republican Ed Royce of California, still manage to make
the time to study the economic and political situation of Cambodia, to learn
its history, to read its constitution and its laws, to immerse themselves in
its culture, to get to know its people, so that they can prescribe what
Cambodians should do, confident that their ideas will solve all of Cambodia’s
problems just as they have solved all the problems of the United States.
Actually, what I
wrote above is not 100% accurate. The Congresspeople don’t quite do it all by
themselves. They have regular payroll staff who help them keep track of the
needs of their allotted 593,000 citizens. And for keeping track of places like
Cambodia, they have people on a more irregular, but still substantial, payroll.
Congressperson
Royce, according to an article in the 2 December Cambodia Daily, had the
assistance of Kem Sokha, the deputy leader of the Cambodian National Rescue
Party. The unbiased, objective information from Kem Sokha enabled Royce to
declare that what Cambodia really needs is for Hun Sen to resign as prime
minister.
If you think it
strange that the leader of the party that won the election should not be prime
minister, that’s because you don’t understand US democracy. At the Long Beach
gathering where Royce spoke, Kem Sokha praised Royce because “he wants to see
Cambodia have real democracy as US citizens have”.
In the real US
democracy, Royce’s party, the Republican Party, has a solid majority of 234 out
of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives. It won these seats in the
2012 election by getting 46.9% of the nationwide vote. The Democrats, who
received nearly 1.5 million more votes than the Republicans (48.3% of the
total), got only 201 seats.
So it’s easy to
see why a CNRP leader would look to the US Republican Party for inspiration.
Like the Republicans, in the most recent election the CNRP came second,
receiving fewer votes than the CPP. And since the election, Kem Sokha and Sam
Rainsy have never stopped shouting that this minority of votes entitles them to
a majority of seats in the National Assembly: if that’s how they do it in the
US, we should do it here. Didn’t the US invent democracy, after all?
The CNRP deputy
leader has other ties with the US Republican Party. He has been handsomely paid
by it for his efforts to introduce US-style democracy into Cambodia. As the
Cambodia Daily article noted, Kem Sokha was given $450,000 by the International
Republican Institute when he set up the Cambodian Center for Human Rights in
2002. A member of the IRI’s board told a Congressional committee in 2004: “IRI
has supported the Cambodian Center for Human Rights (CCHR) since its inception
in 2002”. In November 2004, IRI official Ron Abney told an interviewer that IRI
funding for the CCHR in that year was around $900,000 (http://nearovipen.tripod.com/cambo36.html).
In the Long Beach event, Sokha said he had “personally been financially
supported by the American government to extend democracy for more than five
years”.
I haven’t seen
figures for the amount of funding in the other years, but clearly US-style
democracy doesn’t come cheaply. If it weren’t for US generosity, Cambodians
probably couldn’t afford it.
In 2007, Kem
Sokha decided to return – openly – to politics, and he resigned as president of
the CCHR. But there is something a little odd about the timing. Sokha set up
the CCHR in November 2002, and he resigned from it in March 2007. That is a
period of less than four and a half years. Yet Sokha said he was “financially
supported by the American government” (via the IRI) for more than five years.
That strongly suggests that some of his support was delivered before and/or
after he headed the CCHR – when he was a Funcinpec senator or the leader of the
Human Rights Party.
Of course,
Cambodia has no law against political parties accepting donations from
foreigners. This may be an area where Cambodian democracy lags behind the US
variety. In the US, politicians are forbidden to accept donations from
foreigners, even if the donors weren’t given that money by their government. If
it happens, both the donors and the receiving politicians can be jailed.
In fact, if a US
politician retired from politics to set up an NGO called, say, “Good Things for
America”, and this NGO received millions of dollars from foreign NGOs that were
funded by foreign governments, and after a few years the politician returned to
politics as head of a new party called “American Good Things Party”, it’s a
safe bet that politician would face some probing and possibly embarrassing
question from his local prosecutor. Maybe this is a case where Cambodia should
imitate US democracy.
Oh, by the way:
the California gathering at which Royce and Sokha revealed their hopes of
exporting US-style democratic minority rule to Cambodia was a fundraising event
for the CNRP.
By Allen
Myers