Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Rainsy's anti-Vietnamese baiting reflected a basic political calculation. When it came to
mobilizing ordinary Cambodians, folktales about Vietnamese avarice were much more
potent than anything contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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Rainsy's political strategy was also conditioned by the political climate in which he was
forced to operate. After 1998, CPP repression prevented the SRP from establishing any
effective presence in the countryside, home to some 85 percent of the electorate. In rur-
al areas, far from the haven of Phnom Penh, being a Rainsy supporter was a dangerous
occupation—a fact that became increasingly clear as Cambodia prepared for commune
elections scheduled for February 2002. These local government polls were the corner-
stone of a UN- and donor-driven “decentralization” plan, designed to devolve power to
local levels of government. The communes had been under firm CPP control since the
1980s and played a huge part in the lives of ordinary people. CPP commune authorit-
ies appointed village chiefs, who together controlled everything from land transactions
and marriage licenses to the registrations of voters at election time. This gave many rural
Cambodians the impression that it was the party that provided them with basic services,
rather than the government, a point that was driven home by the CPP's ubiquitous blue
party billboards, present in nearly every village in Cambodia. More decentralization, the-
oretically, meant more democracy.
It was another mirage. The CPP agreed to reforms to keep the donors happy, and
then simply worked around them. A new commune election law, drafted in consultations
between UN officials and dissimulating Cambodian bureaucrats, had little effect on the
conduct of the poll, which proceeded along familiar lines. SRP activist Phoung Phann
was shot dead at his home in Kampong Cham. The corpse of the Funcinpec candidate
Ros Don turned up near a roadside in Siem Reap, his head bludgeoned in. Police marked
his death as “accidental.” Human rights groups could find no hard evidence linking the
killings to top levels of government, but they spread fear in the run-up to the poll.
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At the same time the CPP made efforts to soften its image. After its defeat in 1993,
the party had gotten into the “hearts and minds” business. Its national patronage networks
were converted into organs of Western-style electioneering; at election time, flocks of
party activists, wearing white T-shirts and baseball caps with the party logo, trooped
through dusty villages, handing out rice, sarongs, dried noodles, and packets of MSG.
Ok Serei Sopheak, a former resistance fighter brought on as a CPP electoral strategist in
1998, told me that the loss five years prior had jolted party leaders into action. Winning
elections meant winning votes, he told me, which in turn meant “giving what people want
in their daily life.”
The result was a program of rural construction which recycled crony money into
schools, roads, wells, and Buddhist temples that were presented as gifts from Hun Sen
