Author PICH Keomorakath
Nationality Cambodia
Posted on Wednesday, 24 04 2019
In 1993, the UN tried to bring democracy to Cambodia.
Is that dream dead?
In the early 1990s, the international community - through what was then the largest-ever UN peacekeeping operation - made an idealistic attempt to remake broken, war-ravaged Cambodia into a functioning liberal democracy.
Twenty-five years later, Hun Sen, the man who ran the country before the UN arrived, remains in charge and Cambodia is on the eve of a one-sided election widely seen as marking the end of that era.
Sophorn understands the value of a free vote. His early years were spent in a children's work collective during the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, a four-year reign of terror in which some two million people died, including his own father. He muddled through school after Vietnamese forces toppled the radical Maoists and occupied his country.
Then in 1992, when he was in his last year of high school, the UN's blue helmets arrived in Cambodia. He stumbled into the international peacekeeping mission after using his rudimentary English to help an Indian officer and his wife buy things at a market in rural Prey Veng province.
"It was the first time that I could talk English with a foreigner in my life," he said. "He asked me, 'would you like to work for Untac [the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia]?'"
More than 20,000 military, police and other personnel of all nationalities had flooded Cambodia, which had been largely cut off from the outside world since 1975. The international contingent was there to do something the UN had never done before: take control of an independent state's administration and set up and run national elections. It was also meant to help bring about a ceasefire between the various warring factions, disarm their forces and repatriate thousands of refugees languishing in camps on the Thai border.
Tens of millions of dollars poured into one of the world's poorest countries, sending inflation soaring. Thousands of women entered the sex trade due to the arrival of UN personnel, and HIV/AIDS infections spiked.
But the UN's arrival also created thousands of jobs and myriad business opportunities for canny Cambodians, and corrupt officials.
Sophorn was soon trained as a voter registration officer. He travelled from village to village spreading news of the upcoming election and signing people up to vote. The mercurial and beloved Prince Norodom Sihanouk - the jazz-loving, French-speaking
former king - had returned following years in exile, and after living through a nightmare many Cambodians were optimistic that their country might return to a previous era of peace.
"I think, by Untac, everybody felt happy because the king came back and we were expecting… that the country would be okay, would be as good as the past," said Sophorn.
Tim Carney, an American who ran Untac's information and education division, said a priority for his office, which established Cambodia's first ever independent radio station, had been to convince people that their votes would be kept secret. This was no small matter for a population which had lived under the paranoid Khmer Rouge, which boasted of watching over its populace with "the eyes of a pineapple".
Mr Carney began the mission with high hopes that the Khmer Rouge - who went on to spend the 1980s waging a guerilla war against the Vietnamese-backed government of Hun Sen - would give up their fight and participate in this UN-organised election.
They had signed the Paris Peace Accords in 1991 that paved the way for Untac. It was a peace deal designed to end a conflict that had been fuelled by bitter Cold War enmities between the major powers, who supplied arms and money to the different Cambodian factions.