Time for a Bit of Khmer Politics
Nutty politics time – another month, another party. The latest one is not headed by a prince for a change. Being entitled ‘The Khmer Republican Party’, you’d think it sounded innocuous enough – if you had no idea of Cambodian history.
In 1970, as the Vietnam War raged and America wasn’t carpet-bombing neutral Cambodia, the beloved king was ousted in a coup by a general with the palindromic name of Lon Nol, who inaugurated a republic.
The CIA officially had nothing to do with the coup and presumably had no inkling that he’d drag Cambodia into the war on America’s side. By any standards the general was a complete lunatic, using black magic and auguries to determine battle strategy and once spending three days huddled with his closest advisors choosing a suitable national orchid for Cambodia at a time when the Khmer Rouge were raining rockets on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.
The Americans eventually gave up on him and also gave up consulting him as they continued their slaughter, the army was demoralised by the incompetence and the lack of ammo (which their senior officers had sold to the rising Khmer Rouge who then used it to shoot them). His five-year disastrous regime was the direct cause of the country being taken over by the Khmer Rouge – no one could conceive of a regime worse than his.
It’s his son who has launched this new party. I learned of this on a streaming news ticker which gave no details; Google brought up nothing and I eventually found an item in the newspaper on page 16. The only mention of the son through Google was from a fairly distasteful news item in 1981. A friend currently back in America found the party’s web-site which is ‘under construction’ with the phone number of the party headquarters. It was a donut shop in California. Honestly! If you knew Cambodian politics you’d realise that it isn’t a wind-up either. You also know that the biggest expat Cambodian population is in Long Beach, California and they control the donut empire. No, donuts aren’t Cambodian.
Another news item that might strike you as surreal but actually makes sense here concerns The World Food Program. This is the UN agency that feeds the hungriest people in the world. Cambodia is near the bottom of the list of countries with malnutrition and the WFP has had a presence here for years, doling out about 25,000 tons of rice per year.
Three years ago WFP officials went to a warehouse to find the entire stock had been nicked (who says fraud isn’t funny – the starving victims aside?) but to their credit they kept going until just recently when they ran out of money – presumably the usual donors can’t afford to kill Iraqis and fed the hungry at the same time. The appeal for new donors to supply rice brought forth an unexpected volunteer – after a bumper harvest the Cambodian government is giving the WFP 2,000 tons of rice to feed hungry Cambodians.
There was even a sensible news item this month: the prime minister gave a speech outlining the four most important challenges facing the government this year – drug trafficking, violent youth gangs, the high fatal road traffic accident rate and land-grabbing. I noted that the West’s pet horrors of paedophilia and human trafficking are not in the top 4, which puts these serious issues into a sensible perspective.
It’s a good list – whether the government will actually achieve any progress is another issue (*cough* Amerikan president’s State of the Union addresses *cough*), but clearly they’re not sexy enough and too similar to Western societal problems to interest any ‘caring’ donors. The PM likes to spice up his long and fascinating speeches with the odd sound-bite – here’s the latest: “China is a very big country with 1.3 billion people. If the Chinese all urinated at once, they would cause a great flood.” He was being complimentary by the way; they have the power but they considerately restrain themselves by staggering their peeing.
Sralang Apsara
