Cambodians and the Law

Cambodians have a deep-seated disrespect of all laws and regulations unless it involves their hallowed traditional rules of preserving their daughters’ virginity and arranged marriages as well as the ceremonies on all Buddhist holidays, which they celebrate with great aplomb, somber expressions and humble demeanor, alas without great conviction (the elderly Khmer whom I very much respect will hopefully excuse my cynicism).

Much has been written on forums and blogs, not to mention the local newspapers both English-language and Khmer, and the social media, foremost among them that huge advancement of Western civilization and now world-wide culture, Facebook, about the new traffic law, as it is commonly called in online parlance.

I do not want to repeat all those gripes written and otherwise expressed both orally and electronically, but this law is symptomatic of the state of the Cambodian mind in terms of how to live together within certain boundaries and in a civilized manner. Man laid down rules of how to live together in a group, tribe, or later in states since the beginning of time. Without these rules or laws anarchy would rein.

Now to look at Cambodian roads one might get the impression that this sector of Cambodian life is indeed somewhat anarchic, or perhaps only chaotic. But not only there, in fact in most other cases they flout what officialdom had prescribed. They build houses wherever and in any fashion they want, they settle on land without asking who the owner is, they believe they are due a share of something whether they earned it or not. Polygamy is outlawed in Cambodia. Nevertheless, wealthy, mostly elderly, man have a young and beautiful mistress, semi-officially called the second wife or small wife (propuen chong).This attitude and self-righteousness is the cause of and fuels many conflicts. And then, of course, if a law prohibits certain actions there is always money that can pave the way around a law so officials may look the other way or in direct violation of the law even sanction such illegal actions. A good example is the former practice of granting concessions for large pieces of land for rubber plantations. The designated concession may have been a protected natural habitat or national park. But time and again one could find that these old and environmentally valuable trees were cut down in exactly those spots with official approval. The export of precious hardwoods is another example.  This has been going for decades and the government is unable to stop it. The more egregious cases of clear violations of the law at the highest level involve people who killed somebody, whether in an accident or otherwise, just come to a settlement with the survivors who then don’t press charges. The same system is ingrained for rapes. The perpetrator simply pays some retribution to the victim and her family and then the prosecutor does not see the need for any official action although a myriad number of laws have been flagrantly ignored and broken. In fact, this constitutes another criminal offense. There is a duty to prosecute, whether or not the civil claim had been settled or not. A crime was committed and this requires a punishment.

But let’s take the recent new traffic law as an example par excellence how things work. The law was passed a year or so ago. One would think plenty of time to educate the population about the new regulations. The majority of traffic is motorcycles. The aim was to curb the many traffic fatalities that afflict the county. The law to wear a helmet had been in place already. Now both driver and pinion rider need to wear one. From now on there are only two adults and one child under 6 (?) allowed on a bike. The government convened a committee to hammer out a strategy on how to implement the new law. They came up with the brilliant idea to use about 1750 policemen nationwide, yes, nationwide, to man traffic posts. In Phnom Penh there are over 1 million registered motorcycles but only approx. 90,000 people with a driver license. Countrywide that number is probably unknown. So all unlicensed drivers would need to get a license. Many of the motorcycles, especially in Sihanoukville, had not been registered as the owner had not paid the import tax and duty for it, a prerequisite for getting it registered. In order to get a license they would all need to take a test and pass it. Those tests are a joke insofar as you practically could not fail. The people supervising the test are there to help you check the right answers if you pass them a little something.  But, of course, there is also a fee for the license itself involved.

Now come January 01 police began pulling over cars and motorcycles for infractions of the new law. This being Cambodia it goes without saying that the people who hadn’t had a license did not get one all these months the previous year, notwithstanding the fact that TV had reported on the subject many times. As for the registration, that probably was pretty much unaffordable for most people. So they simply did nothing about it. The rural people simply claimed not to know that a new law even existed – I am sure in some cases that’s even true. According to newspaper reports the police pulled over 80,000 vehicles the first 3 or 4 days and collected an almost similar amount of money. The enforcement provoked a veritable shitstorm on Facebook.  As the PM maintains a very active Facebook page he was swamped with comments.

The Prime Minister, lately somewhat suffering from statesman-like credibility because of the Sam Rainsy issue, took it to heart and swiftly rendered some of the sections suspended, e. g. the driver licenses – for motorcycles less than 125 cc none is needed, over 125 cc you need to get one but won’t have to take a test and getting the license is free. So why not have everybody get one? The registration requirement got a moratorium of I believe 6 months. So here you have the parliament who passed a law – this why it is called the legislature, one of the three pillars of democracy – and then you the Prime Minister, part of the executive branch who without even as much as a stroke of the pen but with an announcement on Facebook nixed part of a law. Wouldn’t that have been a job for the parliament? Of course, he did issue an executive order the next day and promised the assembly would later follow up with a change in the law.

So one can now easily understand why the Cambodian population, from the poor ignorant peasant to the well-heeled city dweller, simply doesn’t respect laws. They see how it is simply ignored and has been for decades at all levels of society so why should they comply with regulations that are against their personal, possibly only momentary, interests. During the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea there were strict laws that applied only to the general population. The party hierarchy had always been exempt unless somebody had rubbed somebody higher up the wrong way. After the 1993 elections, the ruling party simply contested the outcome, threatened secession, and managed to stay in power. Impunity is a widely practiced concept. When it served their purpose the law could be interpreted to fit their needs.

How can compliance with the law be taught to the general education – only in schools, right? This will, of course, only work if there is an educational system in place that would know how to do that. But with absenteeism and corruption as much part of a teacher’s life as everywhere else, this could never reach the broader future generation. This has been going on to this day and this is why even, perhaps especially, the younger ones just say, ‘Who cares?’

So it is no wonder that you can hardly see anybody after January 01 on Cambodia’s rural roads wear helmets, let alone the person on the back wearing one too. 3, 4 or even 5 people on one of those small rickety motorbikes are no rarity either. I haven’t been to Phnom Penh lately; reportedly it is slightly different there but in Sihanoukville one cannot see any noticeable change on the streets. Now they are forming a committee to study how to change the new traffic law to encompass the needs of all people. Who drew up the law in the first place and did the members of the assembly deliberate on it at all? Where was the opposition’s wisdom? Didn’t any of that go into the process at all?

Snakes

I am going to write about real snakes, not about the human kind. Snakes are widespread in SE Asia so it won’t come as a surprise when visitors or locals come across one. Most people will freeze up and scream (females) for fear or run away forgetting that most of the snakes, like everywhere, are harmless and will slither away from us. Of course, better safe than sorry, so it definitely is wise not to get too close to them. There are quite a few of the poisonous sort. Please refer to this website for further information and advice.

http://www.cambodia-sihanoukville.com/cem-pages/cem-cambodia-wildlife-snakes.html

Hardly a week goes by where we don’t have a snake incident at our house. I have two dogs that routinely hunt smaller snakes. They grab it at the middle and shake it so it doesn’t have the opportunity to bite because their head is flopping around like crazy. Just the other day, though, they encountered a larger one which raised its head in typical snake fashion and my good dogs with their instincts shied away from a direct attack. My help killed it with a shovel. It was the Indo-Chinese spitting cobra. They did kill the smaller one though. The cobra made good fare for people in the nearby village.

On the prowl

Got it

Real small - but can be poisonous too

Spitting Cobra (poisonous) and harmless snake - but both dead

One time they had caught and thought they had killed a smaller snake already. So one dog got closer again to sniff at it and promptly got bitten in the nose. It was a poisonous snake and we had to rush him to a vet to get him a shot of anti-dotes. Poison takes longer in a dog to circulate through the system. According to the vet where it might take 1 hour in humans it takes 6 hours in dogs. His nose was a bit swollen for a while but he recovered fully and was soon back in the game.

New Year's Eve in Sihanoukville

Big Party like Every Year - Maybe Even Bigger This Year

Entrance

The New Behemoth Hotel

The Entrance 

The Cambodia Beer Concert

The Beach 

Never miss a chance to sell something

The Anchor Concert

The Angkor Concert

TheVIP Concert

Parking Lot Cambodian Style

A local beauty - trying out a new job as a bartender

I am no VIP but I was invited to the VIP concert but couldn't stand it after an hour or so - the noise was deafening.

Death Deferred or Dying in the Countryside

Recently my wife got a call from a cousin of hers in Kratie province alerting her of the impending death of one of her aunts – she is 91 years old. The aunt had asked to see my wife in her final days or even hours. My wife is very close to this aunt as she was one of the major figures in my wife’s early life. My wife is a victim of the Pol Pot era and its aftermath. Her mother left her father for another man – a Khmer Rouge fighter. In those days many people did believe that the Khmer Rouge regime would be better for Cambodia and her mother fell for it. This was shortly before they overthrew the Lon Nol regime; plus this was in the countryside where people by and large are more gullible anyway. My wife’s father got killed by an American bomb that was mistakenly dropped on a Lon Nol army convoy believing it was Khmer Rouge, Viet Cong or even North Vietnamese; her father served as a medic in the army at that time. This aunt along with the grandmother, gone a long time now, then raised my wife until the age of 12 or so. Memories are a little blurry about the exact time.

So naturally she wanted to go and say good-bye to her. We made our way all the way up to Kratie province which is, after all, about 600 km - on Cambodia’s roads at that, although most of them are quite passable now.

When we got there we could observe closely how Cambodians deal with their elderly, which is a stark contrast to how many Western people treat their old parents or grandparents. The aunt lay motionless on a mat; she hadn’t eaten in days and had barely drunk the minimum to keep her alive. She was really frail and emaciated. Her closest relatives kept a constant watch over her. A lay priest came by in the evenings and spoke to her about general Buddhist teachings and old stories from their lives in the village, all the time being ready to call a monk from the nearby pagoda to give her what Catholics would call the last rites. They massaged her with Eucalyptus oil and tried to make as comfortable as possible.

Initially she hardly moved when her daughter told her that we had arrived. But she slowly turned and looked at us with what seemed like unseeing eyes. She appeared really dazed. Her relatives propped her up into a sitting position and we talked to her. When I entered that family almost 20 years ago and visited her from the U. S. at that time, she had taken a real liking to me, kept saying hallo, and good-bye, and started saying ok, and so on - real nice for an old lady. She especially liked hugging which I did from the first time I met her. Cambodians are not in the habit of doing this. So I hugged and held her close and finally, she recognized me and touched my arm feeling whether I was healthy,  not just skin and bones like her. We had brought fruit and shredded dried pork, a real favorite of hers. After a while my wife started feeding her and she began to eat to everybody’s surprise. We took pictures of us with our phone and showed it to her which elicited a real smile from her. She appeared to have gotten back a will to live. We reminded her that when we had told her way back of our decision to make our home in Cambodia in a year’s time she said, ‘But I will be dead by then.’ That was 7 or 8 years ago. So we told her the same thing will happen now. She will live to be 100, don’t worry. Just think of the last time you said something like this. She smiled again. We spend a good 3 hours with her that evening and came back the next morning to say good-bye. She was very coherent and it seems she had shaken off that resignation to impending death. In fact, she was quite cheerful when she said bye, bye to us and waved just like she had all the years before when we visited her.

In the meantime a month has passed and she is still alive today. If we don’t see her again, at least we had given her a few happy moments.

Ohm Im and myself

Ohm Im and her daughter Sehm

She is eating.

The Wat in Sombok

The European Parliament’s Resolution on Cambodia

It certainly was an overwhelming show of support for Sam Rainsy and his international endeavors to put pressure on the Cambodian government to allow him back into the country without threat of imprisonment for a dubious court sentence.

The explanations for the arrest warrant given by various government spokesmen are, of course rather ridiculous. This is a conflict between the opposition leader and the PM, not the Foreign Minister. Who are they trying to kid here? The excuses put forth are so transparent as to be laughable. Additionally and this is what the government officials seem to forget is that Cambodia is a signatory to a U. N. convention that prohibits double jeopardy. For those who don’t know what this is: if somebody has been tried in a court of law in a signatory’s country that person cannot be tried again in another signatory’s country for the same matter. Since Sam Rainsy prevailed in France the sentence in Cambodia which was passed later contravenes that convention and is illegal by international standards. Cambodia does not much care about international standards always citing its sovereignty. Cambodia, however, is not alone with this stance. Many other signatory countries to that convention disregard this and other U.N. conventions at will, most notably the United States – Guantanamo, torture, illegal wars (Iraq), come to mind. So it actually is no great surprise that Cambodia does the same thing, although one would wish that they used more erudite reasoning for their actions.

Colloquially speaking, one could say Sam Rainsy, on the other hand, has always been pushing the envelope. The Vietnam border issue is as trumped up as many of the government’s legal maneuvers against him. His outspoken racism is also clearly an incitement for possible riots. Common people may not fully understand the implications of how serious such matters are. It is surprising that his rhetoric hasn’t led to more serious clashes with the ethnic Vietnamese in the country. A look to Europe would show them what such rhetoric can lead to. Refugees are attacked because leaders of right wing groups encourage them with their hateful speeches. For a while he toned it down somewhat but the beatings of two fellow opposition MPs at the hands of thugs was enough for him to call the PM a dictator and fascist. Never mind that he later apologized for this. The opposition party clearly encouraged overseas Cambodians both in New York and in Paris to demonstrate against the PM on his visits there. Demonstrations in other countries are an expression of free speech and sanctioned by those countries’ constitutions but whether overseas Cambodians in greater numbers would really have cared about the PM's visit there is highly doubtful. New York has a minuscule Cambodian population. One could assume that they were bused in from Massachusetts. Although Paris surely has a larger Cambodian community they tend to live outside Paris where it is more affordable. Rents are sky-high in Paris. It stands to reason that many of them were encouraged to travel to the city. The government may have played the same game, but what’s right for the goose is right for the gander.

This all provoked the PM’s ire. He, never one to mince words, called Sam Rainsy the son of a traitor. Earlier  he had called him the leader of thieves. The consequence of that ire was the sudden invocation of a past dormant court sentence and swift issuance of an arrest warrant. Sam Rainsy being Sam Rainsy chose not to return from a visit to Korea. He instead has been seeking international support in the Philippines and more significantly in Europe. Why he didn’t lobby the U. S. government or the Congress may have been due to the fact that the Asian-Pacific meeting was being held in Kuala Lumpur at that time and the U. S. president was in attendance. Barack Obama even shook hands with the PM and invited him, but along with all the other Asian heads of state too, to the U. S. next year.

In seeking international support he could obviously only turn to European countries. Those governments and the parliaments there had their hands full with the refugee crisis and how to cope with it. They obviously had no time for Sam Rainsy and his problems with the Cambodian PM.

The European Parliament, on the other hand, has always had an open ear for Sam Rainsy. He must have some influential proponents of his cause. That resolution had been prepared and was ready for a vote when he arrived in Strasbourg.  But what effect will that resolution have?

It did contain a paragraph that the parliament would ask the European Commission, which is the executive branch, to suspend some $400 million in aid for the years until 2020. Most of that aid is for humanitarian and human rights efforts. EU member countries pledged around $1.8 billion from 2014 to 2019. The European Union is the largest partner in terms of aid for Cambodia. That aid, though, comes from individual European countries and is given by the national parliaments and governments, not by the European Commission.

As with all European Parliament resolutions concerning foreign policy they don’t carry much weight in the great scheme of things. This resolution on Cambodia is a very nice symbolic victory for Sam Rainsy but in the end it won’t achieve any of the goals set forth in it. Cambodia went through the motions and immediately protested vehemently again citing its sovereignty but will most surely just continue to ignore it.

Sam Rainsy also did not consider one significant factor in his international efforts. Europe is too busy with its own problems. The U. K. might even leave the E. U. which would weaken it considerably. The common European currency is in danger, as many economists see it, and the refugee crisis could actually be the beginning of the disintegration of the European Union, as some prominent European politicians, including Prime Ministers, see it. The Cambodian issue, if it were an issue there at all, is a non-issue.

The European Parliament does not even have the power to rein in wayward, for lack of a better word, nations like Hungary and Poland, both members of the EU. Hungary recently stripped its Supreme Court of its powers, giving the prime minister almost absolute authority, and Poland just elected a new government that is about to repeat this. This is against the EU statutes but the European Parliament is powerless or unwilling to do anything about it. In the face of the current problems this might only hasten the split-up of the EU, which currently is in a precarious state.

As a consequence, Sam Rainsy achieved a victory but will still remain the Don Quixote in Cambodian politics fighting his war with the powers-that-be from his exile. And what’s new about that?