Lies, damned lies and superstitions...

Mr and Mrs Hun Sen wept at the scene of the Diamond Bridge tragedy that consumed hundreds of Cambodian lives; a public tragedy that in many's educated opinions could have been avoided. Reproduced

Editorial by School of Vice

Mr Hun Sen's public offer to his long-time adversary - Mr Sam Rainsy - to swear on their lives [or "to die by any means conceivable", in his own words] if the recent [landslide] election results for his CPP ruling party had been rigged may have raised some educated eyebrows, consternation, or invited ridicule and laughter from some quarters, but this is not a resort he would shun or shy away from when cornered or under pressure to explain dubious aspects of his public conducts or records. 

There are a few reasons for this. First, because he feels that there are questions over his actions that cannot be ignored through silence on his part alone. The country he rules over is no longer as isolated from the world community or as 'closed' internally as witnessed under the KR rule of the 1970s when people's movement would be subjected to surveillance and regimentation around the clock. The KR regime forbade people from owning any radio set or listening to non-regime broadcast via such devices. Only Sihanouk who lived under house arrest at that time had been allowed the privilege of following news about his country relayed from abroad, namely the BBC and other American sources. 

Today, on the other hand, having shut down virtually all sources of independent news outlets, Mr Hun Sen faces few detractors on the public information scene. 

Social media channels and other exiled ["self-enforced", of course!] news organisations recently expunged or operating under constant threat and fear of the CPP regime's trumped up legal charges and punishments may carry on serving their audience who have any practical access to their services. His immediate concern is not with these groups of news audience, however, but rather this concern lies with that vast portion of the country's population outside of the major towns and cities who still have few precious alternatives or choices, in so far as public information and current news broadcasting services are concerned, beside what regime-controlled news channels are accessible to and for them. 

Second, the point to note here is that this sea of audience - in the main - remain as poorly informed or altogether misinformed as their counterparts had been in the 1970s when Mr Hun Sen was rising through the rank as a KR's military cadre before the regime's purges against the supposedly Vietnamese-aligned Eastern Zone command forced him to flee over the border into Vietnam. Mr Hun also will have known from his years of communist indoctrination and Vietnamese tutelage the importance of having a grasp over one's human topography or terrain or 'being able to know what it's like to be in another person's shoes', as he once revealed in an interview with a foreign reporter. 

Not that it is hard to take to 'swearing' on his own life or any of his family members, if that's what is required to demonstrate his 'sincerity' on any given social matter, since he himself belongs squarely in this insular world and culture of the Cambodian peasantry. Not long ago, and provoked by Mr Kem Sokha's [former opposition CNRP leader and now imprisoned] allegation that he [Hun Sen] was "afraid of losing the elections" in a published interview, he vented his anger at Sokha, calling him "A-Kuk" - derogatory term for a criminal or convict in Khmer, yet explained afterward that the description was a "normal reference" among the peasants for such undesirable elements. 

Further, superstitions are rife among Cambodia's rural folk; an unfortunate state of mind or affair that is not lessened by the lack of quality in public education in general, the absence of equitable social administrations needed to resolve social issues of conflict and injustice when these arise, in addition to centuries of resignation under despotic rule and repression.

Third, and to sum it up, Mr Hun Sen simply does not care as to how any of his words and explanations may be understood, rendered or greeted outside that sphere of his targeted audience, including many or most party members who flock to his ruling CPP for a share of economic patronage. In the wake of Mr Kem Ley's brutal assassination in July 2016 [a prominent and much-loved social critic] Mr Hun Sen also came out to deny his personal involvement in that event, yet at the same time he warmed against those who voiced their views over the nature of his murder or who might have been behind it! A few have since been forced to leave the country, and at least one, Mr Kim Sok [another social critic] is still serving his prison sentence for ignoring this warning. 

It is this backdrop of enforced fear, tyranny and 'superstitions' that led many Cambodians to decide to attend the ballot stations last month rather than "boycotting" the event, if only - for many more of them still - to invalidate the ballot paper by either crossing every box on it or leaving all the boxes blank in protest. Among many random voters, particularly, the youths employed at the garment factories and in other services sectors, opinions diverged, sometimes, heatedly so prior to the election day. "Participating in this election would only confer legitimacy upon the ruling party. Is that what you really want?", argued one.

"It's fine for you lot living where you live to call for the election boycott. In our village, local officials came to check our fingers to see if there was any print stain on them!"... said another. For the vast majority of paid workers of voting age everywhere, however, just the fear of landing themselves in some sort of trouble with their employers alone; a fear deliberately manufactured and spreaded among their rank by pro-regime propagandists across social media platforms and by a campaign of dark rumours of this character in the leadup to the elections, was enough to make their minds up as to their voting obligation. There was no substantiated evidence or basis for believing for instance that any substantial number among garment workers would have been dismissed or had their wages deducted had they failed to turn up at the polling stations given the factories' reliance on their labour. Bear in mind too that most of these workers are migrants from the rural provinces.

Moreover, for a man so obviously willing to put his all before the sacred and the divine, including his own precious mortal life as his ultimate test of good faith, he has chosen nevertheless to live fortified by thousands of armed guards and military hardware of various kinds that could only incur hundreds of millions of dollars over the decades at public expense, and all this, in a still largely impoverished nation. 

What matters to Mr Hun Sen is how to convince those who have no choice but to hear his transmitted voice and 'reasoning', and one way of achieving this is to convince himself convincingly!

Well, either that or this is altogether another mental syndrome still mysterious to science...