Quite Random

Panic on the streets

It’s official – there’s a 48–hour alcohol ban in Cambodia this weekend to coincide with the elections. People have had a nasty habit of getting drunk and shooting each other in past elections, so all pubs, clubs and shops have to hide their booze. Watch out for panic buying from the liquor stores on Friday afternoon and confused-looking Westerners wandering the streets on Saturday with only watermelon shakes to comfort them.

It’s going off at Preah Vihear. When Dave and I went there it was as peaceful and quiet a place as you could wish to be in, but now the Thai and Cambodian military have hundreds of troops building up on either side of the border, AK-47s hanging off shoulders, and people even talking about mounting machine guns on the road to Siem Reap in case of some last stand against a Thai invasion of Cambodia. This kind of thing is nothing new – Siem Reap means ‘Siam Defeated’ after all – but when the Thais have F-16s and thousands of soldiers on their side, and practically all of Cambodia’s tanks are sat in museums, the Thais appear to have the upper hand. That won’t stop Hun Sen saying he saw the Thais off with their tails between their legs by writing to the UN, which obviously means he needs to be reelected in case anyone else thinks about invading Cambodia.

I’m due to leave Cambodia on 2 August – that is, if there aren’t tanks on the runway of Siem Reap airport and Thai soldiers burning the hotels of Siem Reap to the ground.

Election

Biking to the Sangkheum Center the other day, I rode past about a thousand Funcinpec supporters on all manner of trucks, pick-ups and other vehicles, all dressed in yellow t-shirts and yellow baseball caps. All of the pick-ups had Funcinpec logos on the side, and every other truck had fifteen-inch speakers hanging off it, blaring out Khmer pop music and ear-splittingly loud voices chuntering on, presumably, about how great Funcinpec was.

Riding back into town after work I passed the same vehicles riding out of town, still blaring. It’s election time and the Khmer way of election campaigning is to pile as many people as possible, and then about ten more, into a pick-up truck and drive around town creating a noise that would constitute a health hazard and subject of a 500,000 signature petition in England.

Everything comes to a head towards the end of this month in a country that’s only just getting used to elections after years of American bombings, Khmer Rouge atrocities and Vietnamese occupation. Only ten years ago now, Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge soldier who defected to the Vietnamese in 1977 and was installed by them after their invasion of Cambodia, staged a bloody coup against his co-prime minister, and he has been in power since. He’s done well. Depending on who you listen to, he’s worth between several million and several billion dollars, with his fingers in everything from illegal logging to the sale of half of the land in Cambodia to foreign property speculators.

It’s highly unlikely that Hun Sen is going anywhere – his ruling Cambodian People’s Party is expected to win this election. For all of Cambodia’s problems, life has got better for many over the last ten years and few might want to rock the boat. Nevertheless, nervous noises have been made about potential violence in the wake of the elections, even the dissolution of the monarchy, and a journalist for an opposition newspaper was murdered in Phnom Penh recently, along with his son. The murder may have had nothing to do with the election, but this is the perfect time for conspiracy theories. The latest is that food being imported from Thailand has been poisoned by Thais embittered at the naming of the Preah Vihear temple, located on the Thai-Cambodian border, as a World Heritage site after a diplomatic balls-up which has forced the resignation of the Thai Foreign Minister.

I now have less than three weeks left in Siem Reap, and then it’s time to go back to England and pick up whatever passes for normal life for a while. Again.