PEA REANG/SITHOR KANDAL DISTRICTS, Prey Veng province – The faces of the ruling party’s senior leaders dominate the dusty roads between Phnom Penh and Prey Veng.
Hardly a kilometer goes by without a sign emblazoned with the image of Prime Minister Hun Sen, National Assembly President Heng Samrin and Senate President Chea Sim gazing upon traveling motorists.
Prey Veng, a southerly province dominated by rice farming, has long been a stronghold of the ruling party, with many CPP leaders hailing from the area.
But now, on entering Prey Veng province along the newly paved National Road 8, and squeezing in beside the ubiquitous images of the CPP triumvirate, there are two new, yet familiar faces on roadside signage.
Standing hand-in-hand below a orange-colored disc, symbolizing a rising sun, signs bearing the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) leaders, Kem Sokha and Sam Rainsy, appear with as much frequency as the CPP’s devada logo.
The majority of the 11 National Assembly seats that are being contested in Prey Veng will likely go to the ruling party in the July 28 national election, (the CPPcurrently hold 8 of those seats), pockets of opposition support have sprung up.
Results from last year’s commune elections show that the CPP lost 12 communes to the opposition SRP and the Human Rights Party (HRP) in last year’s commune election—the largest number of communes in any single province in the country.
Villagers within the communes who voted for the opposition said they have grown disenchanted with the ruling party’s promises of prosperity.
The rising costs of gasoline and fertilizer coupled with the lowered prices for the agricultural goods they produce have led to harder lives with no improvement in sight, they said. A lack of jobs in these areas has also resulted in a mass migration of the young and not so young to other provinces, and even overseas in search of decent work and a steady, if modest salary.
Others have less specific goals in mind, and like Chhorn Mon, 56, of Pea Reang district’s Reab commune, they just want a change; a change to see if a government other than the country’s historic rulers, the CPP, can do a better job.
“I want change because in the more than 30 years, I would say it’s been about the same in terms of living,” Mr. Mon said.
“I want to change the leader because the CPP ruling party wins every election.”
With more than 80 percent of Reab villagers dependent on subsistence rice farming, the promises of the SRP before last year’s commune elections—lowered gasoline prices and $10 per month for pensioners—were very appealing, and this was reflected in the polls, with SRP taking 55 percent of the vote.
“The people like Sam Rainsy’s policies,” explained Mr. Mon, a farmer who doubles up as a barber along National Road 8—which brings in an extra 10,000 riel a day, or about $2.50.
According to Mr. Mon, the CNRP—a party formed from a merger between Mr. Rainsy’s SRP and Mr. Sokha’s HRP—will lower gas prices and the price of fertilizer. They also promised villagers that once they are in power, $10 a month would be provided to citizens over the age of 65—a sort of national pension.
Mr. Mon also said he was tired of the pre-election promises of the government, which are immediately forgotten once the elections are over.
“They always slowly start to develop the commune right before elections, but right after, they stop doing everything. They would build a dirt road before elections, and then they wouldn’t finish it after,” he said.
Some 20 km away in Sithor Kandal district’s Prek Changkran commune, in which 80 percent of the villagers are silk weavers, the story was similar, but respect was great for Mr. Sokha than Mr. Rainsy.
“The people like Kem Sokha better than Sam Rainsy, because when bad things happened to Sam Rainsy, he exiled himself to another country,” Prek Changkran commune chief Choem Kimhan said, adding that the commune’s perception of Mr. Sokha is that he is “more politically involved.”
According to Mr. Kimhan, the HRP garnered almost 50 percent of votes in Prek Changkran during last year’s elections, compared to the CPP’s modest 34 percent. The remaining votes went to SRP, he said.
Mr. Kimhan attributed the HRP’s win to nothing more earth-shattering than the concerns of the local silk weaving community.
Silk weaving used to provide about 80 percent of the commune’s employment, but with the rising cost of silk yarn and the dropping price of hand-woven Cambodian silk cloth, Mr. Kimhan said many villagers were choosing to leave the traditional business, and the province too, in search of other work.
Kek Yim, 55, a silk weaver who has lived in the commune all her life, said imported silk yarn from Vietnam used to cost $70 per kg, but now the cost has risen to $100. In addition, the price of a 4-meter bolt of hand woven silk cloth at the market has now dropped from $50 to $30 in the past two years.
Cheaper, machined-silk imports from China and Vietnam have elbowed out the time intensive, hand-woven silk that was once the pride of Cambodia.
“It’s become very difficult so most of the young people go to Thailand to work. Only the old people remain here to make silk,” Ms. Yim said, adding that she has two children working in the transportation industry in Thailand.
“We believe that HRP will help us raise the price [of Cambodian silk] again,” she said, adding in a low voice that since the commune elections, the silk weavers have also come under political pressure—and are in fear.
“The CPP people keep saying I am with the opposition now…. We are afraid of our security because we voted for the opposition,” Ms. Yim whispered, declining to elaborate further.
At the local market, Chhuon Chheng, 61, a vendor selling household goods, said his commune has seen great improvement over three decades. A dirt road now connects their once-remote commune to National Road 8, which takes them directly to Phnom Penh, and three schools have opened in the area. But this development means nothing if there are no jobs, and no young people, and the commune is now a ghost town compared to its former self, he said.
“I’ve noticed that all my old customers are gone because they have left to find work at other places. It’s become very difficult for my business,” Mr. Chheng said, explaining that his previous take-home of about 2 million riel a month, or about $500, has now dropped to less than $200.
Despite his commune’s strong support for the CNRP, Mr. Chheng remained very doubtful that the province, much less the country, will ever see a change in leaders.
“I don’t know if it is possible for anyone to unseat Hun Sen,” he said.
“The opposition has good policies but right now, they do not have any power in hand so I don’t know if they can affect any change.”
With just weeks to the election, some major public relations issues have confronted the CNRP: First, there was the release of an audio file in which Mr. Sokha apparently said the infamous Khmer Rouge prison Tuol Sleng was fabricated by the Vietnamese. This was followed by the appearance of an alleged long-time mistress demanding financial redress.
Mr. Hun Sen has also publicly accused Mr. Sokha of paying a 15-year-old girl for sex, and claimed that he had knowingly broken the law to save the opposition leader from being arrested.
Adding substance to the long-standing criticism by the opposition that state institutions and the ruling party are now a single entity, police and court officials have declined to comment on the prime minister’s confessions.
In Prey Veng, voters’ opinions of these issues fell squarely down to party lines. People supporting the CNRP believe that the audio file was doctored; staunch CPP supporters were greatly angered by the Tuol Sleng audio clip.
“I cried when I heard Kem Sokha saying that Tuol Sleng is a fake fake prison site. That was terrible,” said Sroung Sophorn, a 40-year-old owner of a small restaurant in Sithor Kandal district’s Prey Doeum Thnoeng commune. She added that she believes many voters would be turned off by his admission. A fervent CPP supporter, Ms. Sophorn quoted a proverb to illustrate the importance of the country remaining in the hands of the ruling party.
“I support the CPP because my parents told me that the CPP gave us our second life. ‘The shelter lies under the tree, but who will plant this tree?’” she said.
The HRP’s win in Prey Doeum Thnoeng commune was a narrower one, besting the CPP by a mere 22 votes. This has resulted into a turf war, with many houses proudly displaying yellow-and-blue stickers supporting the CPP.
Yen Yeam, 73, whose modest residence has been left conspicuously free of stickers, said this change of heart in the area, which previously voted only CPP, was due to the few campaigners who visited his commune before the commune election last year. With the rising prices of fertilizer and gas, Mr. Yeam said the HRP’s promise to raise the price of rice—which has dropped from 1,000 riel per kg to 800 riel in less than a year—was appealing.
“Gasoline is now more than 5,000 riel a liter and it has been increasing year by year,” he said.
He has kept his political allegiance “very secret,” he said, as do most of the people in his commune.
“Before the last election, a lot of CPP campaigners were here and only a few people came to campaign for the HRP,” he said. “Yet the HRP won. So we know what’s in the minds of the people even if they don’t say a word.”
This commune also faces the same exodus as its neighboring silk-producing Prek Changkran. With more than 800 people migrating out of Prek Doeum Thnoeng last year in search for work domestically and overseas, commune chief Svay Sen estimated that the number of residents leaving had increased by about 60 percent each year.
Mann Min, 59, sadly recounted the gradual departure of her five children to Thailand and Phnom Penh, pointing at glamour photos of them hanging in her wooden house, a sparsely furnished elevated home that she shares with her husband, two cows and a few roaming chickens.
“My eldest son left to work in Thailand three years ago as a farmer, and his younger brother went there right after Khmer New Year this year,” she said, adding that her daughters are all in Phnom Penh in the garment factories.
The land in Prey Veng cannot sustain life beyond the most basic needs, she said. “The farm here supports only the household but it is not for making money.”
Despite their tough life, her husband Phorn Phoeun said they would always support the ruling party because of their role in expelling the Khmer Rouge regime on January 7, 1979. That day granted him a new lease on life, which previously he spent digging canals while facing starvation at the hands of the Pol Pot regime.
“When I think back to that day, I feel like I had been rescued from the dead,” he said. “I don’t think I could have survived if there was no Hun Sen, Heng Samrin and Chea Sim.”
