A commune council in Koh Kong province controlled by the opposition party has appointed new village chiefs, a significant step toward making decentralization effective, according to party leader Sam Rainsy.
Ton Seap, Hem Cheav and Ngel Vuthy were nominated and approved by the council of O’Bak Rotes commune in Kompong Seila district, which has three Sam Rainsy Party council members and two from the ruling CPP. The new chiefs were installed Friday.
“There was no permission [from the central government] to do this—on the contrary, there have been attempts by the district and provincial officials to prevent us from appointing new village chiefs,” Sam Rainsy said Monday.
The Sam Rainsy Party won the majority of seats on three of Cambodia’s 1,621 commune councils in February’s first-ever nationwide local elections. Sam Rainsy said the party is moving to install new village chiefs in its other majority communes, Kilometer 6 in Phnom Penh and Phneuv in Kompong Thom province.
Village chiefs traditionally mediate local disputes and communicate between villagers and higher authorities. Appointed in past years by the CPP, they are nonetheless not a formal part of the government administration.
However, the decentralization law states that “To increase the effectiveness of commune administration, each Commune Council shall organize to have a village chief for each village, subject to its commune.” The law provides for the Ministry of Interior, which oversees the commune councils, to draft instructions for the selection and duties of village chiefs.
Sam Rainsy said his councilors couldn’t wait for the ministry to issue instructions. “In order to make [the commune] work, we have to have village chiefs we can work with,” he said. Despite their informal status, “de facto, they play a very important role. Villagers know the village chief better than the commune chief; the village chief has a lot of influence.”
The law does not appear to prohibit communes from selecting village chiefs, since the matter is purely a local one. The areas in which commune councils are prohibited from involving themselves include forestry, national security, posts and telecommunications and foreign policy.
In the next month, the Sam Rainsy Party will attempt to negotiate new village chiefs for the communes in which no party has a majority—communes where, say, the opposition and the CPP each have five councilors and Funcinpec has one. There are 22 such communes in Phnom Penh and about 200 nationwide, Sam Rainsy said.
The party hopes to negotiate with these communes’ Funcinpec councilors—by offering them some of the village chief positions —to get its own slates of village chiefs passed. “At the grass-roots level, Funcinpec is very close to us,” Sam Rainsy said.
On Thursday one such council—Boeung Tumpun commune in Meanchey district—will meet and vote on a slate of village chiefs, Sam Rainsy said.
