The article “Garment workers pressured to vote in looming Cambodia elections” published in the Nikkei Asian Review – 05 Jul 18 – provides us with several arguments that will be used against the Royal Government of Cambodia and the ruling CPP during the election campaign.
Most of the quotations in this article are from Khmer people who do not live in Cambodia, but in Thailand. Journalism from abroad… Like those who used to report from the bars in Phnom Penh during the American war.
Let's review some of the published arguments.
“Since the violence in 2014, nobody dares to protest”. Who started the violence in 2014 ? Who tried to provoke a regime change by non democratic methods ? Evidences have been collected since then that the CNRP was behind that coup attempt. To deny such statement, there have been many demonstrations since 2014 to support various causes without the violence provoked by the CNRP. During the funeral of Mr. Kem Ley, in 2016, there were hundreds of thousands of people expressing freely their support to this political analyst widely seen as a political opponent.
Based on quotations from migrant people working in Thailand who do not plan to return home from voting because they neither have the money nor the desire to vote, the article tries to give the impression that the turnout of the coming election could be drastically lower in comparison to the last national and local elections.
But voters turnout never depended on the vote of Cambodian workers abroad, which has always been marginal.
“Some of the 19 minor opposition parties have been accused of being puppet parties of the CPP”. That some of these parties were opposed to the ruling party during the previous elections is never said by the so-called “political analysts”. And if those parties reached a lower result than the CNRP or before the SRP and the HRP, it is because they refused to use the nationalism and the racism that made the success of Sam Rainsy and Kem Sokha – someone who denied the reality of Pol Pot S21 Security Centre (Tuol Sleng) and said it was created by the Vietnamese ! That other opposition parties have been recently created by genuine opponents of the CPP, most of them former CNRP activists, is also hidden by the mainstream media.
“A garment worker said that a supervisor warned that factory bosses would check for evidence that staff had voted (…) if our fingers are not inked we will face problem”
To implement the right to vote is a moral obligation in a democracy. And the freedom of choice is fully respected when there is a choice as it is the case in 2018.The call for boycott is simply a denial of the fundamental requirement of democracy: the need to participate in the democratic life of the country. A boycott called from abroad is a coward way to wash ones hands from the future of the country.
But we must go deeper following this kind of statement. What is at stake in the real word? If the EU, as requested by Sam Rainsy, suspend the opening of the European market to Cambodian exports, the garment factories will close, around 1 million workers will loose their job and it will impact their relatives.
Sam Rainsy is campaigning the European institutions to sanction Cambodia. The results of Sam Rainsy efforts will be the destruction of the Cambodian industry and the return to poverty of millions of people.
It is absolutely normal that the owners of the factories want to protect their industrial activities and the jobs of hundreds of thousands of workers against the fanaticism of a racist and populist politician who doesn’t care about the fate of the ordinary people and the development of the country.
Dr Raoul M. JENNAR
Political analyst
