US must defend Cambodian democracy in 2023 as it did in 2013
Photo: Stringer Cambodia—Reuters via Kootneeti.
It is now ten years since long-time Cambodian opposition leader Sam Rainsy and I finished work on his autobiography published shortly before Cambodia’s elections of July 2013. Pressure from Western countries in 2013 was one factor which allowed Sam Rainsy, who was then and is now exiled in Paris, to obtain a “royal pardon” to allow him to enter the country just before the election held in July that year.
The West’s attention to the destruction of Cambodia’s fragile democracy in the ensuing years has flagged. Some Western countries appear content to simply accept the regime at face value and signal that they are dealing with a government with a legitimate democratic mandate. Cambodia has national elections scheduled for July 2023 for which the opposition looks likely to be banned, as it was in 2018.
Why bother pretending that Cambodia is democratic? The elections as they stand are a waste of time. Their only purpose and function is to ensure international legitimacy. Such legitimacy, if it can be had, is a powerful tool in the hands of the Cambodian dictatorship, or any other. The West’s lack of sustained attention to such dictatorships creates a self-fulfilling prophesy. Alibis are easy to find. Cambodia is not democratic because it can’t be/should not be/never has been democratic. There is always another crisis to deal with right now. That is at least true, but other authoritarians are emboldened when the West treats dictators as legitimate. These things have externalities.
Maybe Westerners who worry about such things are guilty of Orientalism, or taking a negative view of non-Western societies on the basis of partial evidence? The trouble with that idea is that turnout rates in Cambodian elections, local and national, since 1993 have consistently put the turnouts in many Western national elections to shame. Cambodians clearly want democracy and are clearly not getting it. It has an aspirational value which is absent in Western countries where it is taken for granted. What is disappointing to me as a European is that Britain and, to an extent the countries of the European Union, have done little to address the dismantling of the democracy which they helped to establish in Cambodia by being signatories to the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements.
Cambodia’s last non-state controlled media outlets, the Voice of Democracy, was closed this month when the government suddenly cancelled its license. There is certainly no outlet in Cambodia which would publish my piece which appears in The Kootneeti, based in India.
US must defend Cambodian democracy in 2023 as it did in 2013 (thekootneeti.in)