10,000 Days

Hun Sen, the Prime Minister of Cambodia has been in power for 10,000 days, and is in the top 10 longest running political leaders in the world. He was a commander for the Khmer Rouge regime and has been part of the government since 1979, when the Khmer Rouge regime was toppled, although given the number of former Khmer Rouge party members that are politicians it could be questioned how defeated it is. 

Last week Cambodia had elections, and whilst I’d been aware since arriving here that it was unlikely that these elections would be particularly fair I wasn’t quite prepared for the scale of it. When I was working at the hospital this morning I started talking to one of the other people that work there, originally about learning English, which is how a lot of my conversations seem to start here! He began telling me about how learning English or French had been banned when he was growing up so his spoken English wasn’t as good as anyone who knew or taught either of these languages was killed. In fact, as he kept talking ‘killed’ was a word that seemed to feature far too often, especially as he talked about more and more recent things. We got around to talking about Hun Sen and his ‘friendships’ with Vietnam and China and the massive amount of corruption in Cambodia. On every level in the government there is corruption, from trying to get your child into school, to getting Cambodian citizenship, to voting. 

This last topic was very interesting, but as we talked about it I had a sinking feeling. It was far worse than I had ever possibly thought and so far from the way politics are at home. I found myself angry at the system and for once actually wanting to do something political, not because of the politics but because of the injustice of the whole system. The top 3 ways he suggested of your vote for the opposition party going astray were:

1.       

When you are registered in your village to vote, if you are known to support the opposition party the head of the village (who is commonly given rice, oil and money from the CPP) can ‘accidentally’ mis-spell your name so that when you go to vote you are not allowed to as your name is incorrectly written.

2.      It is suggested to you that if you don’t vote for the CPP (Cambodian People’s Party) then you will struggle to find a job, make money or live. There is also the slightly less subtle threat of physical violence, and Cambodia has recent history of large numbers of opposition party members being killed. The leader of the opposition party is currently exiled from Cambodia on a prison sentence of 10 years for peaceful protest.

3.      Your vote will go ‘missing’ from the ballot box (he suggested that the people policing the voting station could throw it into the river, which is probably not a bad way to dispose of it given the quantities of water in Cambodia).

One of the other problems is the lack of education especially in the provinces as to how a political system works; when they’ve never known anything different they don’t think much of being given some rice in exchange for a fingerprint on a piece of paper.

Corruption in the Cambodian government was a whole other can of worms. The killing of Chut Wutty, one of the top environmentalists in Cambodia in April could likely be traced back to Hun Sen, and the recent minor protests over forced evictions from homes have led to sudden arrests and prison sentences being quickly given in court. The case of 13 women who were forcefully evicted from their homes as the land had been sold off to a Chinese company and then peacefully protested in Phnom Penh has recently been in the news, to the embarrassment of the government. When their case went to court it was at 5am so that no-one was able to attend or cause a fuss and all the streets around the courthouse were closed off. 

The results of the election were that out of 1633 commune chief positions, the CPP were awarded 1600, and the Sam Rainsy Party and Human Rights parties got 22 and 18 each. Sounds like an equal balance really.

As I started writing this, Flo and I were talking about Hun Sen and she cited the road improvements and schools as an indicator that Hun Sen was actually at least partly good. I viewed this rather as his token work towards Cambodia so that he could trade and make alliances internationally without being able to be branded a leader whom no country could associate with. As the person said this morning, Hun Sen has the military, the police, Sorya company, all the land in Cambodia and all the natural resources in his fist, and at the moment there is not much anyone else can do. Anger is growing at him and the political situation but I think it will take a while before he is overthrown, because as Flo put it ‘he isn’t a good leader, but he is good at being a dictator’.

Sunday 3rd June 2012

3rd June 2012

We’ve been having a bit of a health drive at the moment as we have started PSHE classes and during the hot season several of the kids had infections which would be better to prevent. This started off with the wildly fun mass nit combing sessions of which we had 2 in the first and second week and once a week since. The first time we did it was so horrible and there were so many nits being displaced (unfortunately not dead despite the use of nit shampoo) that I ended up getting nits from helping! I was combing Sreymom’s hair and the nit comb was practically obsolete because there were so many that it was just as easy to pull them out with your fingers. I tried to refrain for fear of looking like a monkey, although I definitely wasn’t about to pop them into my mouth! They seem to have some kind of giant breed of nit here, most of them were half a centrimetre long and I’m sure I never got ones that big when I was younger!

The PSHE classes are very interesting, not least because Khy (the group home manager) ‘translates’ to Khmer for us so that she can explain more than we would be able to. This often means that things get rather contorted along the way and our carefully made lesson plans go out of the window very often! Flo and I alternate who is in charge of planning each week and the week before last was Flo’s turn and the topic was Puberty. This is probably embarrassing enough for kids to have to talk about and I sat in the back of the class in fits of giggles as Flo asked Khy to explain various changes the children could expect. Khy struck upon this rather questionably good idea of using some of the older children as examples of changes that happen during puberty. Perhaps not an altogether bad plan when she is saying look at the fact that Chan Thoeun (one of the oldest boys) is broader, has more muscles and is more hairy than the younger boys, but it gets mortally embarrassing when she is talking about erections! 

It was my turn this week and the topic was Sex Ed. I quickly had to get over any embarrassment I had when I was planning it and then discussing the plans with the group home manager. What started off as a horribly embarrassing discussion about the lesson quickly became a very interesting discussion about different approaches to relationships in Cambodia and Britain and in particular social stigmas. One of the more shocking things she told me was that if on their wedding night a man discovers that the woman he has just married isn’t a virgin he can and usually will divorce her in the morning. It was so foreign to me the idea that a man can just order his wife around and the huge stigmas that she talked about, whilst still present to some small level in Britain are practically non existant in comparison to some of the things she said would be believed in Cambodia. Such as the idea of going for a walk alone with a boy- oh how scandalous!

Soon after my last blog we had a very, very long trip across Phnom Penh to the Jesuit Service ear clinic and to take Sothy to Krousar Thmey to investigate whether they could take him on at the school. It took almost 2 hours to get all the way across town and we got stuck in big potholes more than once, the ill kept roads in the north of the city meaning that our poor tuk tuk was falling apart by the time we got there! I was sitting at the back with one of the caregivers opposite me and one of the kids on my lap so that we could all fit it, desperately trying to stop the rear doors flying open! The trip to Krousar Thmey was a huge waste of time; we didn’t spend more than 10 minutes there and just got told to come back 2 weeks later so that a specialist could see him to gauge the extent of his blindness and deafness. Suspecting that it wouldn’t amount to anything we duly did as we were told and ended up being told that he was in fact deafblind (in case we hadn’t worked that out!) and that they couldn’t/wouldn’t give him one on one teaching as he would require because they felt their resources cold be better used. It was rather frustrating but now that we know for certain that he can’t go there it allows us to look for other options. 

We have been very busy at the moment with lots of things needing done, including community studies, behavior reports for each of the children and a mural painting project I was in charge of which is now almost finished. There is now one of the outside walls with 54 handprints on it that tell testament of the great adventures it was to paint- from Flo having to sit for a day inhaling petrol fumes as she helped them scrub the paint off, to the big smear of blue paint from when one boy tried to rush and ended up sliding across the wall. My community study is currently a (very slow) work in progress on my experience of health and illness in Cambodia. I’m really enjoying doing it and I’ve learnt so much researching it (which is suppose is why they make you do it) but I’m concerned that I won’t have it finished in time and we seem to have more to do with each day that passes. I still can’t believe that I have less than 2 months left at Magna.

Today is the day of the Cambodian elections which were pretty well summed up by Flo asking when I thought the results would be announced and I replied that I thought they could have announced them yesterday, the day before the ‘voting’ took place. There have been a lot of ‘political’ activities taking place at the moment, most of which would be forbidden in British politics for not having anything to do with politics and much more to do with popularity and creating an atmosphere. Loudspeakers have been a common sight around the streets in recent days and have propaganda continually blaring out so that it’s hard to even think about anything else and the word ‘brainwashing’ would be more applicable than ‘informing’. On Friday when cycling to the office for the OVC Meeting I went past a rally for the Cambodian People’s Party with thousands of people attending and 2 things struck me- first that there was lots of karaoke, flags and dancing, but no one actually talking about politics, and secondly that in the entire crowd I couldn’t see a single woman. At least there is some form of election though and accountability however dubious. 

We’ll just have to wait and see what the results are and in the meantime start preparing for Hun Sen’s next 10,000 days.