The Suicide of Cambodian Democracy

"Cambodia’s Fading Hopes" by Julio A. Jeldres, in Journal of Democracy (Jan. 1996), 1101 15th St. N.W., Ste. 802, Washington, D.C. 20005.

After almost two decades of terror, repression, and genocide, Cambodia held United Nations–supervised elections in 1993 that were supposed to be a landmark on the road to democracy. Nearly three years later, that destination still seems very far off, reports Jeldres, an Australian who served on the staff of Prince (now King) Norodom Sihanouk from 1981 to 1991.

In the May 1993 elections, the royalist FUNCIN-PEC party—founded by Sihanouk in 1981 to fight the country’s Vietnamese conquerors and now led by one of his sons, Prince Norodom Ranariddh—promised national reconciliation and a battle against corruption, and it scored a major victory. The party won 45 percent of the vote and 58 of the 120 Constituent Assembly seats. The Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), successor to the party created by Vietnam’s communist regime to rule as its proxy in Cambodia after the 1978 Vietnamese invasion, finished only a strong second. A new constitution subsequently restored the monarchy.

But the CPP, by threatening civil war, "strong-armed" Ranariddh into a coalition government, with the prince as "first prime minister" and CPP leader Hun Sen as "second prime minister." Much of FUNCINPEC’s public support has since vanished.

The "marriage of convenience" (as the prince described it to his shocked supporters) "played right into the hands of the CPP’s hard-bitten cadres, who control most of the governmental apparatus to this day," Jeldres points out. The "marriage" keeps international aid flowing to the government and gives it international recognition.

In "postcommunist" Cambodia, graft and corruption are barely concealed, Jeldres says. Prince Ranariddh himself reportedly received a $1.8-million small plane from a Sino-Thai businessman suspected of drug trafficking. Many FUNCINPEC officials have learned to imitate the CPP style, making "heavy-handed efforts to stifle critics in the press, parliament, and civil society." Meanwhile, the Khmer Rouge—the anti-Vietnamese communists who killed two to three million Cambodians between 1975 and ’78, when they ruled the country—have set up a government-in-exile in western Cambodia and are continuing to wage a guerrilla war.

Jeldres is encouraged by the rise of prodemocracy "groups of students, women, [and] human rights activists." Local elections are scheduled this year and parliamentary balloting is set for 1998. But the Phnom Penh government’s performance has been so poor that Jeldres fears that "a crisis of legitimacy may be brewing."