Posted
on February 16, 2014 by letters2pppapers
The numerous misrepresentations and
distortions in the report of the Electoral Reform Association are more than
enough to make it clear that this was a political project intended to discredit
the 28 July general election, not an objective study of the electoral process.
But if anyone has any doubts about that conclusion, there is further,
indisputable, evidence.
This evidence is the propaganda
campaign carried out by a leading figure of the ERA a month and a half before
the release of the ERA report, a campaign that misrepresented what the NGOs
involved in the ERA had discovered or concluded about the conduct of the
election. This campaign succeeded in misleading the Cambodia Daily and
therefore, presumably, many of that paper’s readers.
Laura Thornton is the head of the
Cambodia office of the National Democratic Institute, a US government-funded
organisation that appears to be the directing force of the ERA. On two
successive days in October, Thornton gave interviews to the Cambodia Daily
in which she claimed to be revealing the results of Cambodian NGOs’
observations of the election. The Daily ran major stories based on these
interviews in its 29 and 30 October editions.
In an earlier article (http://www.thecambodiaherald.com/opinion/detail /3?token=MzZjYzIx MDdiMjY4MTZhZTIyOWYzYWZhYzk0N2I4), I quoted one of
Thornton’s claims in the interviews, namely her statement that the Center for
Advanced Study had conducted a nationwide survey which found that “29.5 percent
of citizens attempted to vote on election day, but were unable to”. As Thornton
told the Daily, “this number of disenfranchised voters had the potential
to have changed the outcome of the elections”. But as a moment’s thought makes
clear, NDI and/or CAS overreached themselves: the figure is so large as to be
absurd, and is furthermore contradicted by the observations of other NGOs.
The alleged CAS survey has never
been made public, but it didn’t need to be, since it had already served
Thornton’s purpose of publicising the idea that large numbers of Cambodians had
been deprived of their right to vote.
One day earlier, Thornton had
provided the Daily with what she said were “excerpts” from the upcoming
ERA report:
“… on election day the warnings
became reality, as eligible citizens with accurate identification were turned
away from the polls, while at the same time busloads of people unknown by the
community were trucked to polling stations to vote using no identification or
ICEs.
“If those large numbers of
disenfranchised citizens had been allowed to vote and if illegal voting had
been prevented, it is unclear what the true election result would have been.”
It certainly sounded as though the
ERA had the evidence of wrongdoing: busloads of people without any
identification at all (not even Vietnamese army ID cards?) being taken around
the country to vote. If you couldn’t find a bus in Phnom Penh on 28 July, now
you know the reason.
It may be that Thornton missed her
true calling. She should have been a screenwriter for Hollywood B-movies. Neither
of the paragraphs she “quoted” for the Cambodia Daily is in the ERA
report.
I could not force myself to read the
ERA report a second time, but I did word searches for “warnings”, “busloads”,
“trucked”, “no identification or ICEs”, “disenfranchised citizens” and “true
election result”. None of them occur in the ERA report.
The only thing I could find in the
report that comes close to part of the quotation in the Cambodia Daily
is “… eligible citizens with valid identification were turned away from the
polls, while at the same time voters reported seeing people unknown in their
communities voting by using ICEs”. So “busloads” become “people” – how many? –
who didn’t happen to be known to some – how many? – voters interviewed by an
NGO that is not identified.
In short, Thornton put one over on
the Cambodia Daily. She provided the paper with juicy-sounding
“excerpts” guaranteed to discredit the election and create an atmosphere in
which other ERA accusations were more likely to be believed. When the report
was finally made public six weeks later, maybe no one would notice that the
“excerpts” didn’t exist.
By
Allen Myers
