Cambodians can remain pawns, or can hang together against Sen's autocracy ~ Tin nóng

While the world's democracies ponder how to use their power and will to shape the world, Cambodian democrats and rights activists can choose to remain pawns while the democracies and the autocracies deal, or Cambodians can "hang together" in their opposition to Sen's autocracy. If they do not, they risk being hung separately by the dictator.

We live in an interdependent, interconnected, globalized world. Cambodians can act, or not.

FOR PUBLICATION
AHRC-ETC-007-2010
August 17, 2010

An article by Dr. Gaffar Peang-Meth published by the Asian Human Rights Commission

CAMBODIA: "Cambodians can remain pawns, or can hang together against Sen's autocracy"

August 15, 2010
Two weeks ago, I presented in this space a contrast of reporter Benoit Bringer's "Cambodge: Les enfants de la decharge" (Cambodia: The Children of the Garbage Dump), a five minute video, and his gallery of photos, showing how Cambodians scavenge Phnom Penh's public garbage dump just to survive; and Andrew Marshall's "Khmer Riche," published in the Jan 12 Sydney Morning Herald, showing the life at the opposite end of Cambodians' economic spectrum – Cambodia's "rich kids" who can spend "$2,000 on drinks in a single night" and whose parents' "newly built neoclassical mansions (are) so large that (Phnom Penh's) old French architecture looks like Lego by comparison."

The contrast serves to forecast Cambodia's unpleasant future, a future the international community sought to avoid when it established the 1991 Paris Peace Accords and invested $3 billion to set Cambodia on a productive course. The current situation in Cambodia and the future it foretells represent an international failure.

Economic Inequality, Conflict, Revolt

Theories abound about economic inequality and its linkage with dissent, unrest, and rebellion by the disadvantaged.

Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC) had linked the well-being of a political community with the well-being of the citizens who make it up, and economic inequality with the revolt of the disadvantaged. His analysis on the causes of revolution—"The passion for equality is at the root of revolution," Aristotle said--has inspired students of politics and theorists until today.
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