Cambodians can teach us not to take democracy for granted

I’VE been lucky enough to be a witness to a range of dramatic political events. During the years I worked in Fianna Fáil headquarters, for example, I had a bird’s eye view of controversies during the Lenihan-Robinson Presidential election in 1990 and the collapse of the Reynolds Government in 1994.

In 2000, I spent a summer watching the American Presidential election campaign and got to attend the Democratic Convention for Bill Clinton's farewell address to his party.

However, nothing will compare with what I witnessed on the first day of polling in the United Nations sponsored democratic elections in Cambodia in 1993.

Ten years ago this week, I was in Cambodia working on a short-term contract as an International Polling Station Officer for the United Nations.

I was one of a group of 25 Irish politicos, lawyers, public servants and others who volunteered for the one-month assignment.

After training and a week as guests of the Japanese military peacekeepers in Cambodia itself, each of us was dispatched with an interpreter, an armed policeman, and a UN jeep to spend 10 days setting up and running one of the polling stations being established at schools and pagodas all over Cambodia.

My assignment was at a polling station in a bleak collection of shacks, which doubled as the local primary school for 400 children, in a small village in the southern province of Takeo, about 70km from the capital Phnom Penh and around 50km from the Vietnamese border.

We lived in makeshift accommodation in the schoolhouse itself and spent a few days before polling doing final training with local staff and liaising with local political parties about arrangements for the voting.

Sunrise comes in Cambodia at about 5am local time. On the first day, the polling station was due to open at 8am and was to stay open for three days. However, we were woken shortly after 5am by the sound of crowds gathering outside the polling station.

There were hundreds of people of all ages. It was an amazing scene of colour and carnival. Many had walked though the night to get to the polling station. There were hundreds of women, many holding toddlers and suckling babies.

Groups of young men sat around smoking home-made cigarettes. All expected to have to wait to vote so they had brought pots and pans to cook in. Some had already started fires for breakfast. They were in no rush.

They giggled in amusement as this lone westerner and local staff tried to get the voting operation up and running amidst the good-natured chaos.

The Cambodians had never seen democracy before and they embraced it as the best defence against the return of oppressive regimes and as the best hope of economic development. By lunchtime on the first day almost 1,500 people had voted almost 90% of all those who were due to vote at that polling station over the three days.

At about 11 o'clock on the first day of voting, the local Buddhist monks arrived to cast their votes. They, too, had a vested interest in the election nearly all of Cambodia's 60,000 monks were killed during the Pol Pot years.

Any consideration of Cambodian history explains this passion for new politics. Before travelling I had read a lot of the writings of journalists like John Pilger and William Shawcross which catalogued the tale that was the tragedy of Cambodia. It was a war-torn history of brutal and corrupt leaders, incessant US bombing of suspected Chinese supply routes through Cambodia during the Vietnam War and then the genocide perpetrated by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

Of course, years before I had seen Roland Joffé's moving film, The Killing Fields. However, it was only when I was actually in Cambodia that the true extent of that country's tragedy became apparent.

In 1994 Cambodia held many dubious distinctions. The World Health Organisation rated it that year as the world's unhealthiest country. It had the highest rate of infant mortality in South East Asia. Most tragically, Cambodia had the highest number of landmines per square mile anywhere in the world and inevitably, therefore, it had the world's highest number of amputees per head of population.

The poverty was visible and chronic. In rural areas, the bleak flat terrain was dotted with raised wooden huts in which families of six or seven lived and farmed a surrounding plot of paddy fields. They had a pig and a buffalo cow to supplement the family's basic diet. They had enough to eat, but it was almost always rice.

As you travelled the countryside, one could imagine how the failure of one or two year's harvest, or the ravages of civil war again, could bring this agrarian economy to complete collapse. Those who had written about Cambodia talked about how Cambodia's trauma simmers just below the surface, and how every Cambodian family had been touched by the Pol Pot holocaust. The Cambodian deputy presiding officer I worked with was just 23 years of age. He had little English, but enough to tell how both of his parents had been killed one night 15 years previously by what he called "the Pol Pot clique".

My interpreter had lost her husband in an assault by the Pol Pot secret police. Her children had died during the mass starvation brought about by the dictator's disastrous social experiment in an all-peasant economy. She was now hoping that UN dollars would enable her to complete her medical training and allow her to build a new life.

Before being sent off to polling stations, some of us took a trip to the capital Phnom Penn and some of the killing fields memorials nearby. It was a ghoulish and disturbing reminder of how Pol Pott systematically destroyed the country's educated class by genocide. In all he killed almost a million of his own people between 1975 and 1977.

Most of the Irish election monitors who travelled to Cambodia in 1993 got together last Saturday night to mark the 10th anniversary of our trip. Some have been back to Cambodia to monitor elections or on development projects since.

Ten years on, Cambodia is a rapidly changing country, especially in the cities. There is still much agrarian poverty, but things are improving. Cambodia has been able to leapfrog some stages of development. For example, it has gone from no phones to a mobile phone system.

Politically, things are better but precarious. The 1993 election was somewhat inconclusive and was resolved only after the return of the former monarch. A coalition government of the two largest parties has run the country since. Elections were held again in 1998 and new elections are due to be held at the end of July. The Cambodian government and the UN are also negotiating the establishment of a tribunal to try former Khmer Rouge leaders.

If my Cambodian experience taught me one thing, it was that there are many luxuries which we in the West take for granted, not least our developed political culture. The scenes at the polling station I was responsible for in 1993 were repeated throughout Cambodia. In all, 95% of the electorate had cast their ballots by the close of voting on the first day a phenomenal figure compared to the numbers turning out at elections in Ireland or in any established western democracy.

Democratic politics is something we have come to take for granted in this part of the world. The Cambodians have had no such luxury.