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Issue NUMBER 1649
Strikes paralyse Bangladesh
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TUESDAY, june 18, 2013
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CNRP looks to members for backing Cheang Sokha
THE Cambodia National Rescue Party has initiated a large-scale campaign to rally their supporters by collecting thumbprints for a petition to be submitted to the National Assembly demanding the reinstatement of sacked lawmakers, party officials said yesterday. Their announcement came as opposition lawmakers submitted a letter to the Constitutional Council yesterday morning appealing for the reinstatement of their parliamentary positions and asking the council to rule the June 5 expulsion of 29 MPs illegal. Previously, the party has argued that the move was unconstitutional while legal analysts have said it does not comply with the “spirit” of certain laws that the representatives have been accused of breaking. CNRP spokesman Yim Sovann said yesterday that the petition campaign was collecting thousands of thumbprints from selected local council members at the village, commune, district and provincial level throughout the country, aiming for 20,000 in a week. “We decided to take thumbprints from [local] council members because we don’t have enough time to do this…before the election campaign kicks off,” Sovann told the Post yesterday, adding that 3,000 thumbprints had already been collected in Continues on page 4
Protesting against defeat Boeung Kak Lake residents protest on the sand dunes of their community in Phnom Penh’s Daun Penh district after municipal police blocked activists from exiting the perimeter yesterday. HENG CHIVOAN
sTORY > 3
‘Welcome to the gutter’ Stuart White Analysis
I
N JUNE 1998, during the lead-up to contentious national elections, the body of Funcinpec activist Thong Sophal was found in a dry canal bed in Kandal province. His fingers and left ear were missing, and the flesh on his legs had been flayed off, leaving only bone, according to numerous international media and NGO reports. Sophal appeared to have ultimately
How elections evolved from savagery to spin died from at least one heavy blow to the head. Police at the time ruled the death – the fourth royalist killings so far that month – a suicide. Fifteen years later, as Cambodia enters a new election cycle, there have been no reports of political killings, much less torture on the level of that was undergone by Thong Sophal. However, with a whirlwind of controversies besetting the leadership of the
newly formed Cambodia National Rescue Party, it’s beginning to look like Cambodian politics have found another, more sophisticated method of
Election 2013 execution – character assassination. “I think that the resort[ing] to violence has backfired, and undermined the
credibility of the ruling party, and there has been a lot of pressure from inside and outside to end this kind of violence,” political analyst Lao Mong Hay said. “And now we come to a stage of arousing public disagreements … against the opposition, and also legal action.” In recent days, CNRP acting president Kem Sokha has found himself at the centre of not one, but two distinct controversies, both of which have
erupted into court cases. In the first, the former Human Rights Party head was accused of referring to the events that took place at infamous Khmer Rouge torture centre S-21 as a Vietnamese fabrication. Just days later, a woman purporting to be Sokha’s estranged mistress showed up at a CNRP rally demanding money for child support for what she said were the couple’s two adopted children. In the following days, the Continues on page 6