veun sai district, Ratanakkiri province – Adventure travelers may think they are observing a land that time forgot. Swathed in bright-checked kramas, hill tribe women wake before dawn and walk to market slinging loads of corn or bamboo on their backs and smoking thick palm-leaf cigars.
But in reality, the region is in the midst of rapid change. Lured by the promise of development, hill tribes are coming down from the mountains, and their communities face a host of new challenges and opportunities.
The temporary arrangements that result are sometimes bizarre. The villages of Kok Lak commune are almost empty most of the year, except for children who stay behind for school while their parents go to the forest to make a living. The villagers relocated to land suitable for rice and vegetable farming, but many still don’t know how to grow these crops.
Now the people of Kok Lak will have a chance to shape their own destiny by voting in the Feb 3 commune council elections.
But local elections are a far cry from local democracy. A brief visit suggests the villagers of Kok Lak have little understanding that their vote could affect their futures. This problem may not be unique to Kok Lak, but endemic to a political system that has yet to orient itself toward local issues and solutions.
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The ethnic Kavets of Kok Lak have moved repeatedly between the upland forests and the banks of the Se San River since the 1950s, when the government first tried to integrate them into mainstream society, according to a year 2000 study by Swedish anthropologist Malin Hasselskog.
The most recent relocation started in 1996, when the government’s Seila program, supported by the UN Development Program, offered buffaloes to families to be used for lowland rice paddy cultivation. At about the same time, officials were discouraging hill tribe members from farming in the new Virechey National Park.
CPP commune candidate Preuk Bloam is a big fan of the resettlement process. There is now a wide trail into the commune, people wear shoes, and they even see the occasional moto. More importantly, resettlement allowed Preuk Bloam to set up an informal school, where students learn reading, writing and farming under the shade trees.
“Now that we live in a fixed village, it is easier to teach the children,” he said. “They don’t have to move from place to place.”
Villagers now have their own houses, land and fruit trees, noted Funcinpec candidate Chan Thoeung. They are also closer to the market. “People are happy because we can see development, and can buy things from the store,” he said.
But settling down has also caused problems, said Pit Kanhem, a Kok Lak commune resident and district agriculture official who educates farmers on behalf of the NGO Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFP).
Local people still lack buffaloes and cows, he said. There is not enough land to go around. Many farmers, accustomed to slash-and-burn farming, are still not experienced in lowland farming techniques.
“Some people complain that they’re not used to [rice farming] and some don’t have experience in growing fruit trees,” Pit Kanhem said.
Still accustomed to a semi-nomadic lifestyle, most farmers still spend much of the growing season up in the forest. “These are showcase villages for the local government,” said Gordon Paterson, an adviser to NTFP. “The people come back to the villages to keep the government happy and spend the rest of the time up in their [forest] hamlets.”
When they are in the lowlands, the villagers cut the evergreen forests, which are more ecologically valuable than the bamboo forests they slash-and-burn in the uplands. “There is no sustainable land management in place,” Paterson said.
But candidates and villagers alike seemed not inclined to connect the elections and parties to their daily concerns.
“Because I love CPP,” said Preuk Bloam, when asked why he chose to run as a CPP candidate. “I mean I love it personally. I love CPP, but I love Funcinpec, too.”
“I want to work with the CPP for the development of this area,” said Chan Thoeung when asked why he chose to be a Funcinpec candidate. Asked what he thought was the difference between the parties, he said, “I personally love Funcinpec. In the past the King ruled Cambodia.”
After praising the upcoming elections because they will allow villagers to participate in government, Chiek Bun Ma makes an appeal to the visiting journalists:
“Please give a message to the King and the Prime Minister to kindly stop the commercial fishermen from blocking the fishing grounds. Four years already, we have not had any fish to eat.”
Chiek Bun Ma did not seem to realize that the local government he will help elect might have a say in the matter.
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There could be any number of reasons for the apparent lack of political dialogue in Kok Lak. Like the rest of Ratanakkiri province, it is largely dominated by the CPP. The ruling party received 68 percent of the Kok Lak vote in 1998 and 75.6 percent in the province. The Sam Rainsy Party is fielding candidates this year in only 25 of Ratanakkiri’s 49 communes, none in Kok Lak.
Many villagers in Kok Lak are illiterate and many of the candidates themselves lack political sophistication. Preuk Bloam, the CPP candidate, said he could not remember which party he favored in 1998. “I only saw the box and I checked it,” he said. Later, he recalled that he voted for the party that had handed out gifts shortly before the election. That was the CPP.
Chan Thoeung, the Funcinpec candidate, said he didn’t know how he would prepare for the campaign. “The campaign will be broadcast on TV and radio,” he said. “I’ll just stay home and let the people decide.”
According to an international election observer, one reason for the lack of dialogue may be that the three major parties are not training their candidates to identify and campaign on local issues.
“Nobody seems ready to address local issues,” the observer said. “Elections aren’t about who gives the best vitamins or the T-shirts; it’s about issues. There’s no concept of that, and it seems that none of the parties want to push it because they’re afraid to develop local campaign strategies.”
The focus on a national platform, not local issues, was apparent last week at Ratanakkiri’s Funcinpec headquarters, where women candidates were undergoing campaign training in preparation for the campaign. “We’re reading the political platform, and being taught what to do for the council elections,” said Teng Bottephy from Labansiek commune, Banlung district.
Teng Bottephy said government distributions of rice and other goods to her commune went only to CPP supporters, no matter what their income was. She said that would change if she were elected.
Other issues pose more difficulty.
“Commune [leaders] fenced off several properties for sale, and local people have no place to live. They must live under the market roof or on a small piece of land,” she said. “I could not poke my nose into that because the land is titled. But we could prevent it from spreading.”
Asked what separates Funcinpec and CPP in Ratanakkiri, Funcinpec deputy chief Khoeu Hon immediately began discussing border integrity near the Gulf of Thailand—a major national issue, but far from a burning issue in Ratanakkiri’s communes.
What does top Ratanakkiri residents’ list of concerns are land grabbing and rampant logging, said Paterson, citing a recent informal NGO survey. More than two-thirds of Ratanakkiri residents are from ethnic hill tribes who traditionally managed their lands communally. Now those lands are being sold to the highest bidder, often with the help of local officials, Paterson said.
The new commune councils could help local communities protect their lands from outside interests, Paterson said, or they may instead enhance the authority of local officials who are selling out their fellow villagers. Paterson gave the example of a village chief who has facilitated several land purchases that have angered the community. Now he is the top CPP candidate in his commune and favored to win.
Another question is how much control the new commune councils will have over local resources. The commune election law specifies that the commune administration has no authority over “forests.” Future ministerial subdecrees, not yet passed, will specify what that means.
The new land law passed in August makes allowances for communal land rights, but implementation of that law also depends on subdecrees that have not yet been drafted. Paterson said it is unclear what role the commune councils will have in land titling or allocation.
But the election of commune councils may at least broaden the power base for decisions on local issues. Sok Khan, 42, was a CPP official in Chey Oddom commune, Lumphat district, until he became fed up with what he saw as corruption and switched to the Sam Rainsy Party, for whom he is now a commune candidate.
“The CPP in Lumphat isn’t very strong because the local people know that CPP officials benefited from logging and they didn’t see any development in their areas,” he said.
Sok Khan says he has a chance of winning, but expects the CPP to again try to sway voters with gifts. CPP’s deputy headquarters chief in Ratanakkiri, San Bun Choeun, said the party would no be distributing gifts during the campaign.
