Commune councils have been given responsibility for security and public order; social and economic development; and general wellbeing of the citizens. Village heads are also expected to work with the council to meet these objectives.
It has been shown that there are many issues of public order in the communes, including the vexed problems of illegal fishing, land seizures, domestic violence and gangs. I did not pursue the question of public order in interviews. It was evident in relation to law and order, as in the case of illegal fishing, that councils were somewhat powerless to control events due largely to the involvement of officials, influential people and, often, the police and military. In this situation the councils had no effective backing from the law and the justice system. There was, however, in these cases and in other public order matters, a close engagement with the NGO backed associations which supported villagers’ rights and sought council involvement in resolution of the issues. People remained sceptical of councillors’ impartiality in cases involving powerful outside parties, but also recognised that the council was limited in what it could do in the face of gangs and domestic violence. These are widespread problems in Cambodia and it is reported that up to 60 per cent of a commune chief’s time may be spent on mediation of disputes even though the village chief was more likely to be consulted first, while elders were also important mediators ahead of the police.111 The most prominent personal security concerns nominated by the people were gangs, while councillors considered land conflicts to
109 Village interviews. 110 Discussion with NGOs.
111 Kim Ninh and Roger Henke, "Commune Councils of Cambodia: A National Survey on their
Functions and Performance, with a Special Focus on Conflict Resolution," (Phnom Penh: The Asia Foundation, 2005), 42-57.
be the main problem.112 Although dispute settlements made locally are usually honoured, there remains an underlying apprehension about the impartiality of council mediators.
There was also concern that opposition political party representatives were regularly intimidated and were unable to conduct their normal political activities or participate fully in commune council functions.113 Minor party councillors were simply not informed of meetings and kept ignorant of council information to which they should have had access.
People interviewed were widely sceptical of the commune councils, saying they only looked after their own, had no power over police and military, and were not interested in the villagers – especially the poor. It was telling too that the people felt that without the NGOs and Seila they would be left to their own devices. Some interviewees were sceptical of the political affiliations of councillors and considered that they put their party interests, or at least policies, ahead of the commune wishes, and that party members got preferential treatment. Two surveys of commune councils suggest that party members are favoured while another found that while the villagers claimed there was no preference for party members, 30 per cent of councillors themselves believed there was bias.114 This indicates that there is a need for civil society associations to be alert to local political activities and to be free to openly challenge undue preference to party members.
These are new challenges in a society with strong traditions. It is evident that the role of elders and village heads in dispute resolution in Cambodian society has survived the Pol Pot years and the disruption of the Vietnamese and later UNTAC periods.115 The survival of aspects of traditional society are also evident in the
112 Ibid., 42; and Biddulph, "Landlessness: A Growing Problem," 13.
113 Several minority councillors cited cases of intimidation in private discussions.
114 Biddulph, "Landlessness: A Growing Problem," 24. See also Kim Ninh and Henke,
"Commune Councils of Cambodia," 32.
115 While some have argued the whole fabric of Cambodian village society has been destroyed
this has been refuted by others. Among the former see: Judy L Ledgerwood, "Rural Development in Cambodia: The View from the Village," in Cambodia and the International Community: The Quest for Peace, Development, and Democracy, ed. Brown and Timberman (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Asia Society, 1998); Kim Sedara, "Reciprocity: Informal Patterns of Social Interactions in a Cambodian Village near Angkor Park" (MA, Northern Illinois University, 2001); J Ovesen et al, When Every Household is an Island: Social Organisation and Power Structures in Rural Cambodia (Stochholm: Uppsala University, 1996); UNESCO, Between a Tiger and a Crocodile: Management of Local Conflict in Cambodia - an Anthropological Approach to Traditional and New Practices
cooperation that takes place directly between families, relatives and friends when certain forms of assistance are required, in ‘community’ activities which take place around ceremonial needs such as weddings and funerals where the village may provide general assistance, or when people are organised by village heads, commune councils, NGOs or other agencies for local development.116 This illustrates the changing roles of commune councils, new legal frameworks and new relationships of power arising from modernisation which fall outside the traditional framework and influence dispute settlement.117 The implications for the more traditional, less educated, or less aware villagers is that they may be increasingly unable to depend upon the security of the village traditions and become more vulnerable to conflict through failure to understand and adapt to the new power sources, and to establish patrons connected to them. Village associations supported by NGOs can play a useful role in urging councillors to respect and to protect the people’s rights and to find just solutions to disputes.118
Patron client relations are important since they are, on the one hand an exercise of status and power by the patron, while on the other hand they are a source of support and security for the client. They may have positive benefits in the village community.119 However, as it is not always the case that the parties can deliver the level of service sought by the other, and so the relationships can be quite flexible in Cambodia where the parties involved may simply vary their allegiances to meet particular circumstances. Patrons may be drawn from kin, the rich, monks or
(UNESCO, 2002); and Pierre Lizée, Peace, Power and Resistance in Cambodia: Global Governance and the Failure of Conflict Resolution (London: Macmillan, 1999).
116 Timothy Hugh Conway, "Poverty, Participation and Programmes: International Aid and
Rural Development in Cambodia" (PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1999), 253.
117 Caroline Hughes, "Conflict Management: A Village-Level Approach," Cambodia
Development Review 5, no. 2 (2001): 8-11. Kim makes a similar point that “reciprocal norms in the village are being transformed, while the influence of the cash economy is changing the nature of reciprocity in the village”, Kim Sedara, "Reciprocity: Informal Patterns of Social Interactions in a Cambodian Village," Cambodia Development Review 5, no. 4 (2001): 5-8. Also Bottomly notes that “logging has also placed the governance systems of some highland villages under stress. Villager elders, who in Tampuan and Kreung villagers have traditionally played a central role in mediating over village conflicts, appear to be feeling their increasing exclusion from decision-making processes concerning the logging.
Bottomley, "Contested Forests," 587-606.
118 Robin Biddulph, "Study on the Performance of the SEILA Provincial Investment Fund:
DFID-SIDA Permanent Advisory Team," (SPM Consultants; Oxford Policy Management, 2004), 13-14.
119 See especially Meas Nee, "Social Reconstruction in the Post-Conflict Situation"; and Meas
Nee and Joan Healy, Towards Understanding: Cambodian Villages Beyond War (Sydney: Sisters of Saint Joseph, 2003).
traditional healers and the educated (who are treated with considerable deference by Cambodians). However, other important patrons are those with positions in the administration or those who have access to outside funding through association with development assistance agencies such as NGOs.120 Patronage also provides a mechanism of protection for illegal fishers and land grabbers as well as gang leaders who may often be the children of influential persons. Thus, rather than institutional governance processes promoting democratisation and development in accordance with donor strategies, patronage networks appear, to some extent, to have infiltrated and appropriated them to serve their own purposes of power and wealth accumulation.
Although the councils have development responsibilities, and the Village Development Committees are active in meetings to identify priority projects, there seemed to be a certain ambivalence towards the planning process and outcomes. Village Development Chiefs I met really had little to say about the process or about what sort of schemes were being considered.121 Although it was not possible to form a view on whether participation and empowerment were being realised from the local planning process, people generally considered they had benefited from the council projects in the past, although some attribute it to Seila, NGOs or generous people rather than to the councils.122 It will be shown in the next chapter that the majority of development plans proposed by councils for funding through provincial and line department programmes are ignored, leaving very limited sums of money for council run projects (around US$10-15,000 per council). Councillors pointed out they could do little with such small sums. Surveys support these views with the interesting observation that while people appreciated the council activities and contribute to them, they were less likely to consider their standard of living had improved as a result.123
120 See Judy L Ledgerwood and John Vijghen, "Decision-Making in Rural Khmer Villages," in
Cambodia Emerges from the Past: Eight Essays, ed. Judy L Ledgerwood (Southeast Asia Publications, 2002), 109-11.
121 Biddulph, "Study on the Performance of the SEILA Provincial Investment Fund," 22,
suggests VDCs only active if they have support of outside agencies.
122 See also Kim Ninh on participation – 60 per cent knew about meetings, 40 per cent had
participated at least once. Kim Ninh and Henke, "Commune Councils of Cambodia," 27-34.
123 Biddulph, "Study on the Performance of the SEILA Provincial Investment Fund," 22. He
also notes that councillors were aware of “discontent” but were frustrated they could do little with their small funds.
When I put it to one council member that the councils could not meet the demands of the people for development and asked whether some problems might be too big for the communes to manage and might therefore be taken to a higher levels of governance, he quashed any such suggestion saying that the communes had to be self sufficient and to find their own solutions.124 There is a sense of unrealistic expectation in this attitude which appeared to have more of a party policy ring than a governance imperative. It is reflected, too, in the view of the agriculture department that, despite all the inherent obstacles to agriculture in Cambodia, poverty can be reduced through improvements in small-scale agriculture and the corresponding focus on agricultural training and techniques, rather than infrastructure development. In the villages visited there was a positive relationship between the NGOs and the councillors on a quite regular basis. Councillors and Village Chiefs attended several of the association meetings and were open to questions – even though responding along strictly formal lines in most cases. The associations are an important nascent civil society which will be essential for effective and democratic local government. They will also need to broaden their base across communes and on a province wide basis at least to become politically effective advocacy groups.
While the fieldwork focused on the issues confronting people, it was unable to undertake a detailed assessment of the function of the commune councils. Governance at the village and commune level is strong on process as defined by the decentralisation laws, but not yet working with an open and effective civil society which is able to countervail the influence of party, powerful persons and the central government influences in the commune councils. As with local governance everywhere, there are questions of participation and representation in the creation of local policy and the making of decisions affecting service delivery to the community. This will be looked at in the next chapter. The MOPS study discovered a strong negative attitude towards governance issues to the extent that people in seven of the nine villages were scared to talk about such issues and were afraid of being “disappeared” by powerful interests.125 Similar fears – “they had guns” – influenced people’s reluctance to claim their rights.126
124 Village interviews 25/3/05.
125 Cambodia Development Resource Institute (CDRI), "Moving Out of Poverty," 75. 126 Ibid., 79.
Line departments
To look at these matters in the context of human security however, we need to be aware that governance is not only about the commune councils but involves line department functions as well. Councillors seemed fairly reluctant to be in direct touch with line agencies or police on a regular basis to press for adequate services. This applied even to education and health departments which had initiated procedures for representation on school committees and for monitoring local health centres respectively.127
The obscure relationship between provincial authorities and line departments, and provincial responsibility for commune councils are both discussed in the next chapter. However, the people’s comments to me on the poor performance of government departments were supported and well summarised in a rare public meeting between villagers and Provincial Officials in Battambang in April 2005.128 Opened by the Deputy Provincial Governor on behalf of the Governor, the meeting was based around presentations by provincial officials followed by questions from the villagers. Thus, the meeting also provided opportunity for villagers to ask about policies and performance in many areas of concern to them including health and education, agricultural needs and employment issues, policing and justice.
Officials were asked about the inadequate services reaching villages, informal payments and exclusion from proper health care. They were defensive and reiterated policy statements, noting that delivery of services was not always perfect and all were learning. While the responses of military, police, health, agriculture and education officials all reflected a lack of control over the performance of their personnel and shortcomings in service delivery, there were no suggestions of solutions other than that villagers should know and expect their rights. The basis for poor performance lies in the institutional cultures as well as the poor pay and, perhaps in some cases, limited capacity of officials. One of the more telling statements was that by the health official who highlighted the issue of control over
127 Leonardo G Romeo and Luc Spyckerelle, "Decentralisation Reforms and Commune-Level
Services Delivery in Cambodia" (paper presented at the Workshop on Local Government Pro-Poor Service Delivery, Manila, 2003), 13. See also Biddulph, "Study on the Performance of the SEILA Provincial Investment Fund," 20.
128 The two day conference on 25-6 April 2005 was organised by KAWP for villagers and
officials to hear from and to question each other. There were some 220 participants including Provincial department representatives, 14 Commune Council representatives and a number of NGOs.
quality of health services by noting that only a very small proportion of private chemist outlets in Battambang township were registered as required by law. So, he warned, there could be no guarantee of either the qualifications of the dispensers or the quality of the products they were selling.
These sessions highlighted the responsibility recognised by government to provide services, while at the same time demonstrated the inability of government to implement its own policies. A major excuse commonly claimed for poor performance is that the level of salary for public servants is so low as to discourage any real commitment to the job. This failure of government departments to carry out their responsibilities has, as shown above, a direct negative impact for human security in rural Cambodia. This issue will be pursued further in the next chapter.