The top UN official in Cambodia has recommended that the government—rather than the National Election Committee—be “responsible” for allowing the dissemination of political party messages and platforms during the 2003 elections, a suggestion that drew heavy fire from NGO officials.
“[The UN] recommended that the government should be responsible for allowing the different political parties to broadcast their messages, not the NEC,” said Dominique Ait Ouyahia McAdams, resident representative for the UN Development Program.
“To make the NEC accountable for fair and equal media coverage of the campaign of the political parties does not make much sense,” she said.
McAdams gave her comments at a two-day national conference on elections in Cambodia which ended Wednesday.
“There is a need to adopt a legal instrument that would attribute clearly the responsibility and accountability of fair access to the media where it should lie—to the Royal Government of Cambodia through its Ministry of Information,” she said.
If government agencies are responsible for allowing equal access to political parties on state-run television, then they can be held more accountable, McAdams said. Her recommendation was heavily criticized by NGO officials, who saw it simply as the transfer of control over political speech from one government agency to another.
“I cannot imagine a development that would more quickly lead to an election being called not free and fair than to hand to the government in power—the ruling party, no matter who it is—the right to provide…information on elections to the media,” said Ann Olson, the Knight International Press Fellow for the International Center for Journalism, based in Washington. She made her comments Wednesday at a panel discussion on media access.
“This is not the role of the Information Ministry—its role is to speak for the government. It can never take the role that an independent election body should fulfill, and to pass to it that power is to ensure that election information will not be fair and accessible to all people,” Olson said.
Eric Kessler, resident representative for the National Democratic Institute, also questioned the validity of the UN’s recommendation.
“This is an easy way to fix a very difficult problem,” Kessler said.
“I think the UNDP has the ability to fix the problem, but this may not be it.”
Funcinpec President Prince Norodom Ranariddh, whose remarks closed the election conference Wednesday, agreed that the NEC needed to be reformed and that political parties did not have equal access to explain their policies to voters.
But he emphasized that it was the NEC’s role to “educate and disseminate information to the voters.”
During the 2002 commune elections, the NEC was criticized for banning the televising of voter information roundtables and was accused of limiting the amount of impartial information provided to voters.
But Prum Nhean Vichet, media officer at the NEC, defended the NEC’s record during the 2002 elections and blamed a lack of funds for the limited media access.
He compared the 2002 commune elections to the 1993 and 1998 elections, during which he claimed the UN and European Union spent “millions” on media. He said the NEC information office had only $70,000 to spend during the 2002 commune elections.
US Ambassador Kent Wiedemann also spoke Wednesday at the conference.
Although Wiedemann praised the February commune elections as “a major step forward for Cambodia,” he also said that the incidents of violence against political candidates during the election “diluted the purity of the democratic process.”
He also came out strongly against the NEC, saying that the lack of access to information in the national media also hindered the otherwise smooth elections.
