Posted
on February 5, 2014 by letters2pppapers
In previous articles on the report
of the so-called Electoral Reform Alliance, I have called attention to a number
of distortions and false suggestions or conclusions. Generous readers might
attribute many of the errors in the report, not to deliberate ill will, but to
ignorance or illogic on the part of its authors.
Here, however, I will focus on an
aspect of the report that leaves no room for doubt that it is an act of quite
conscious falsification by at least some of the NGOs using the label of the ERA
to present their attacks on the National Election Committee and the conduct of
the 28 July general election.
On page 45 of the ERA report there
appears this passage: “In Kandal, where polling station 1204 was closed early
due to violence, CNRP only needed 166 votes to gain an additional seat and 200
people registered on the voter list in station 1204 were unable to vote.
According to LEMNA [Law on the Election of Members of the National Assembly]
Article 111, if there are serious irregularities that could have affected the
election result, re-election should be completed within eight days.”
The passage is very carefully
worded. It doesn’t say explicitly that the CPP used violence to stop people
from voting at polling station 1204 and by doing so probably deprived the CNRP
of an additional seat. But that is clearly the impression that would be taken
away by readers who have no other source of information about station 1204. The
reason the ERA didn’t say this explicitly is that the report’s authors knew
that if they did so, it would be easy to expose them as liars. So they phrased their
falsehood in a way that would allow them, if necessary, to claim: No, no,
that’s not what we meant; you misunderstand us.
What the ERA knows but doesn’t tell
the reader is that the CPP had nothing to do with the violence at station 1204,
which was located in S’ang Phnom commune, S’ang district. The violence there
came from a mob whipped up by the rhetoric of the leaders of the CNRP.
According to an election observer from the Heinrich Böll Foundation, “a large
group” of people who had already voted remained at the polling station. (This
is what Sam Rainsy and Kem Sokha had publicly urged their followers to do.)
This mob then physically prevented other would-be voters from entering the
polling station. (See http://www.boell.de/en/node/277689.)
The Heinrich Böll observer said the
mob alleged that the voters they blocked were not registered locally. But the
only way to determine that would have been to allow them into the polling
station and then check their names against the voter list – something that the
CNRP representatives would have been able to do if they had any doubts about a
voter. And although Licadho tried to use the incident against the electoral
authorities, observers for that NGO discovered that the blocked voters were in
fact on the Kandal voter list. They were workers at a local quarry who had
previously voted in their varied home provinces but had registered in Kandal
because their employer objected to them taking several days off to return and
vote. There is nothing improper about voters changing their registration to the
province where they are employed.
Furthermore, 1204 was far from the
only polling station where people were blocked from voting, but the ERA is
strangely silent about these other incidents.
For example, shortly after the
election, the British newspaper Guardian described a mob of CNRP
supporters physically blocking ethnic Vietnamese who are Cambodian citizens and
were properly enrolled on the voters list. The reporter interviewed one of the
people prevented from voting. A woman of 60, she was born in Cambodia to a
family that has been here for generations. She told the journalist: “The
opposition youth blocked us, yelling: ‛Yuon! Yuon! Go away! Don’t let them
vote.’ I tried three times with help from police officers but couldn’t vote.”
Only seven or eight kilometres to
the east of station 1204, the station at Khet Oudam in Traeuy Sla commune,
S’ang district, was besieged by another racist mob. According to the 29 July Cambodia
Daily, of 15 ethnically Vietnamese families who were properly registered,
only five were “able to make their way past the angry crowd … to vote”. The
story quoted a fisherman who was prevented from voting: “Most of us have lived
here for three generations. I have an identity card and my name is on the voter
list. I am a citizen, so why can I not vote?”
Another ethnically Vietnamese
Cambodian citizen, a 38-year-old woman who had lived in the village since 1980,
was blocked by an angry mob on her first attempt to vote, but later succeeded
with police help: “I went again at 8 a.m. And police were there and helped me.
They told people that I had an identity card and escorted me inside. I was
shaking.”
Licadho also observed the racist
violence at Traeuy Sla commune and reported: “… a large group of several
hundred local residents were blocking individuals from voting apparently due to
their alleged Vietnamese ethnicity … A neighbor of one of the blocked
individuals stated that the man was [a] long term resident of the area. Local
residents in this station expressly stated that they were blocking the
individuals in question from voting due solely to their apparent ethnicity.”
Observers from Licadho also noted
similar incidents of racist mobs blocking voters in Russey Keo district of
Phnom Penh, Leuk Teik district of Kandal and Preah Sdach district of Prey Veng.
Licadho is one of the “contributing
organisations” to the ERA report, so the ERA can hardly claim to be ignorant
about these instances of mobs blocking Cambodian citizens from voting. But the
report’s only reference to violence in the election dishonestly implies that
the CNRP was the victim of the violence rather than the spur for it. The words
“racism” or “racist” do not occur in the ERA report.
No one can know with certainty how
the Cambodians blocked from voting at station 1204, Traeuy Sla and elsewhere
would have voted if they had been able to get past the thugs who blocked their
way. But it is clear that the thugs thought that those voters were not supporters
of the CNRP; that is why they blocked them.
Yet the ERA report complains that
the pro-CNRP violence at station 1204 should be a reason to have a re-election
– that is, to give the CNRP a chance to do it again. If the CNRP trailed by
only 166 votes, maybe in a re-election racist mobs could block an additional
167 suspected CPP voters. And if they don’t quite succeed then, the ERA could
say that the violence in the re-election requires a re-re-election.
Both by what it suggests and by what
it doesn’t say, the ERA report is a shameless and shameful defence of racist
violence. And the report’s clear bad faith on this issue certainly argues
against the possibility that its numerous other errors are simply honest
mistakes.
By Allen Myers