Potemkin Democracy - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 101

the country's 1,621 commune chief positions. As the results rolled in, international ob-
servers from the donor countries signed off on the process in the usual hollow language
of “progress” and “challenges.” The UN Development Programme (UNDP), which had
helped devise the commune election law and was eager to declare its intervention a suc-
cess, declared that the National Election Committee had “produced a credible election un-
der difficult circumstances.” 34 Those difficult circumstances, of course, were a conscious
strategy of the CPP. But by the bloody standards of past elections, donor agencies could
claim a marginal improvement.
Shortly afterward, in an address to the National Press Club in Washington, Rainsy
made an impassioned call for “international standards in Cambodia,” lamenting that the
world always seemed to accept state-sponsored intimidation, violence, and electoral ma-
nipulation, “so long as it is always a little less than the last time.” 35 In response to criti-
cisms, Hun Sen shot back: “What are international standards? I don't understand. Inter-
national standards exist only in sports.” 36
For Funcinpec, the commune elections were a disaster. Concerned about its “lapdog”
status, Ranariddh had rearranged the deck-chairs, welcoming Prince Sirivudh back as
secretary-general and shuffling his cabinet. The new-look party hoped to win 40 percent
of the vote. 37 When it failed to achieve even half that amount, Funcinpec began to dis-
integrate. Royalist officials resigned, spawning a school of electoral minnows like the
“Hang Dara Movement” and the “Norodom Chakrapong Khmer Spirit Party.” The more
principled members of the party joined Sam Rainsy or entered civil society. Among the
most prominent of these was the Funcinpec senator Kem Sokha, who quit the party in
late 2002 and became the founding director of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights,
set up by IRI with $450,000 in USAID funds. Many more royalists joined Hun Sen, who
guaranteed them government posts and the security of a place in the party's patronage
tree. “I lost faith in the Funcinpec leadership,” said one former royalist minister who de-
fected to the ruling party. “It was so bad already, I didn't want to get my name tainted.”
Besieged by inducements and threats, Funcinpec stumbled in the 2003 national elec-
tion. The party won just 20.8 percent of the vote, slipping back to third place behind the
SRP, which won a respectable 21.9 percent. Now the CPP was truly dominant, winning
47.3 percent and boosting its share of National Assembly seats to 73 out of 123. But the
CPP still fell just shy of the two-thirds majority required to form a government, giving
Ranariddh and Rainsy another chance to pressure Hun Sen with the threat of political
deadlock. The election was followed by nearly a year of stalemate and political gymnas-
tics as Sihanouk and the three parties attempted to hammer out yet another coalition deal.
As in 1998, Ranariddh and Rainsy joined hands—this time they called themselves the
“Alliance of Democrats”—and pressed for concessions. Chief among their demands was