Cambodians "cool off" for general election

Cambodians leave Phnom Penh city for their hometown July 26, 2008 for voting day tomorrow. Thousands of migrant workers left the Cambodian capital on Saturday for their home towns and villages to cast their votes in a general election overshadowed by a dispute with Thailand over a 900-year-old temple. REUTERS/Chor Sokunthea

Sat Jul 26, 2008
By Ek Madra

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - Thousands of migrant workers left the Cambodian capital on Saturday for their home towns and villages to cast their votes in a general election overshadowed by a dispute with Thailand over a 900-year-old temple.

Buses and pick-up trucks leaving Phnom Penh were packed as the Southeast Asian nation enjoyed a "cooling off" day on the eve of voting in a poll almost certain to give another five-year term to Hun Sen, Prime Minister of the past 23 years.

All alcohol sales were banned for 48 hours from midnight on Friday, as was campaigning, to let voters get home and calm down after a month of often vitriolic electioneering.

"This shows people's strong enthusiasm to vote," Tep Nitha, Secretary-General of the National Election Committee, told a news conference.

Campaigning was more orderly than Cambodia's previous exercises in a democracy created by the United Nations in the early 1990s to bring an end to more than two decades of war and upheaval, including the Khmer Rouge "Killing Fields".

However, all parties quickly became embroiled in the row over the Preah Vihear temple, which has led to build-ups of troops and artillery on both sides of the border, and raised fears of a border war.

The temple, which sits on a jungle-clad escarpment separating the two countries, is claimed by both sides but was awarded to Cambodia in 1962 by the International Court of Justice, a ruling that has rankled in Thailand ever since.

Cambodia's successful bid to have the ruins listed as a World Heritage site this month inflamed nationalist passions in Bangkok, where street campaigners are trying to overthrow the government. Thailand's foreign minister was forced to resign.

Despite the depth of feeling in both countries, many of Cambodia's 8.1 million voters said they were concentrating on more practical matters, such as choosing a government to oversee a booming economy now threatened by soaring inflation.

"This is a very important day. We have to choose a good leader to create more jobs for us," Svay Sokha, a 24-year-old garment worker, told Reuters as she and her friends waited for a bus to the eastern province of Kampong Thom.

Many of the 300,000 young men and women working in Phnom Penh's garment export sector favour opposition leader Sam Rainsy, a French-educated former finance minister.

However, Hun Sen's former communist but now firmly free-market Cambodian People's Party (CPP) is virtually assured victory, thanks in large part to near double-digit annual economic growth in the past five years.

In the countryside, most voters also favour the CPP as the force that finally put paid to the Khmer Rouge, responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people during Pol Pot's time in power from 1975-79.

Most analysts expect the CPP to win an outright majority in the 123-seat parliament.

Human rights groups say six party activists were killed in the month before polling day -- four from the CPP and two from the Sam Rainsy Party. The numbers are lower than the run-up to the 1998 and 2003 elections.

However, New York-based Human Rights Watch said the CPP's dominance of the broadcast media, as well as harassment of opposition party members, ensured that "conditions are not in place for free and fair elections".