Propaganda, Politics and Violence in Cambodia: Democratic Transition Under United Nations Peace-Keeping: Democratic Transition Under United Nations Peace-Keeping by Steve Heder & Judy Ledgerwood

Author:Steve Heder & Judy Ledgerwood [Heder, Steve & Ledgerwood, Judy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, Public Affairs & Administration, Social Science, Political Science, Regional Studies, General
ISBN: 9781315285870
Google: F4cYDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-09-16T12:55:17+00:00

Why CPP Lost

It appears that the SOC/CPP strategy backfired in two key respects. First, Cambodians really wanted peace and wanted to vote for peace more than for a particular party. SOC propaganda said that FUNCINPEC was in league with the Khmer Rouge, would cut a deal with the Khmer Rouge, or was in fact the Khmer Rouge. The people wanted peace, which for many Cambodians meant coming to some kind of settlement with the Khmer Rouge. People hoped that peace could come about with a settlement that brought home low-level PDK cadre, ordinary NADK combatants, and people who over the years had been grabbed as porters or who had ended up in PDK areas of influence simply because the lines of control shifted over time. In many areas of the country, those whose return was hoped for included the brothers, cousins, and husbands of people living in neighboring regions under SOC influence. The SOC propaganda campaign against members of opposition political parties offered no hope of such a reconciliation, only the prospect of a never-ending search for more “enemies” and “targets”—and the violence that this entailed. And SOC violence in the rural areas backfired. At the local level, political realities are directly observed and personally felt; in a village of two hundred people or even a town of several thousand, people know what is going on by word of mouth. You can say on national television that a party worker was killed by the Khmer Rouge—as TVK eventually said of Hou Leang Ban22—or that the FUNCINPEC Party people shot each other in order to blame SOC. But at the village and district levels, people knew precisely who was engaging in acts of violence. They could see it and hear it for themselves. They feared it. This kind of state violence against its own people was rejected at the polls.

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