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Cambodia's prime minister, Hun Sen, has finally gotten the hang of elections, if not of democracy. On July 27, Cambodians went to the polls for the fourth time since the 1993 U.N.-sponsored elections provided Cambodia an opportunity to move beyond its serial tragedies of war, mass murder, invasion, and occupation. Preliminary results, expected to be confirmed on Friday, give Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party a victory. There will be another victory as a result of the election: Hun Sen will win his campaign to consolidate power while becoming respectable in the eyes of the international community. But no one believes Hun Sen was ever prepared to give up power peacefully. In 1993, he lost to the royalist Funcinpec Party but forced his way into a governing coalition anyway. In 1997, a grenade attack on a demonstration by rising opposition leader Sam Rainsy left several dead. Shrapnel injuries to an American democracy worker brought in FBI investigators who have still not released the results of their investigation. Journalists and U.N. investigators reported that Hun Sen's bodyguards took part in the attack and police hindered efforts to help the victims. Months later, Hun Sen launched a coup to seize complete control. Dozens of opposition figures were murdered, others fled abroad. Eventually, Hun Sen undertook a new election, in which there were dozens of esa political assassinations. This year, violence played a much smaller role than in the past. A briefing by the national police on the eve of the election asserted that there were many fewer deaths of political party activists compared to the past. Human rights groups agree. Instead, they believe, violence has been replaced by more subtle, but no less effective, forms of intimidation. Hun Sen and his party draw much of their support from the countryside. Government aid and services are disbursed through village chiefs who control important aspects of local life. In some places, villagers were told that cash gifts were actually loans to be repaid in the event the party lost. Elsewhere, village chiefs induced voters to take oaths of allegiance to the party, collected and withheld voter cards, and made threats on property. In Siem Reap province, where I watched the elections with a Khmer friend, village chiefs led their villagers to vote. By staying close to the poll, they and other officials violated election rules. A Cambodian election monitor admitted that she didn't know what the nearby village chiefs looked like and wouldn't know if they had behaved improperly during the day-long vote. At the same polling station, a villager identified a CPP functionary with authority for land titles sitting in a prominent place outside the station during the balloting. A Funcinpec activist reported a threat relayed from a district official through a relative. Even aside from these fresh incidents, fears from the past linger. Murders from previous campaigns have gone unsolved and unpunished. The prospect of instability and violence is a serious concern for Cambodian voters who expect - even if they don't want - Hun Sen to win, and hope opposition parties do not contest the vote. Hun Sen's intransigence influences the international community as well. Diplomats convinced he will never give up power peacefully display an antipathy to the main opposition leader, Sam Rainsy, a former finance minister who runs on an anti-corruption platform. Despite the obvious intimidation tactics, state domination of the media, and other flaws, America's State Department stated that "the mechanism for a credible election" was in place. America plays confusing and contradictory roles in Cambodian politics. Over several years, the American Embassy in Phnom Penh has given the impression of favoring Hun Sen. Meanwhile, the International Republican Institute, whose employee was wounded in the 1997 grenade attack, has grown more and more closely associated with Sam Rainsy. In the State Department's view, an election that passes muster would be desirable. America appears to be interested in resuming long-blocked aid, especially if Hun Sen provides an acceptable resolution to a few outstanding cases of violence. Southeast Asia's importance in counter terrorism would be one motivation to do this. China's growing influence another. Moreover, Sam Rainsy has some serious problems - if not blood on his hands. His statements include persistent racist rhetoric directed against Cambodia's ethnic Vietnamese. Shortly before the election he compared the Vietnamese presence to the "Jew occupation of Palestine." None of these problems will be solved by the entrenchment in power of Hun Sen. It would have been better to insist upon democracy 10 years ago than to turn a blind eye to Hun Sen's first brutal, now stealthy tactics. It is not, however, too late to devise an American policy toward Cambodia that staunchly defends the democratic process. Simply accepting elections, even ones in which violence has become less necessary, should not be the business of America.
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