The UN Sponsored Elections of 1993: Were They ‘Free and Fair’?

Readings:

Doyle, Michael W.

1995  UN Peacekeeping in Cambodia: UNTAC’s Civil Mandate. New York:

International Peace Academy Occasional Paper.

Heder, Steve and Judy Ledgerwood

1996  Politics of Violence IN Propaganda, Politics and Violence in Cambodia:

Democratic Transition under United Nations Peace-keeping. Armonk,

NY: M.E. Sharpe, p. 3-49.

Ledgerwood, Judy

1994  UN Peacekeeping Missions: The Lessons from Cambodia. Asia Pacific Issues,

11 (available on this website).

On May 23-28, 1993 Cambodians went to the polls to vote in an election organized by the United Nations. It was a frightening and very moving day. The Party of Democratic Kampuchea (PDK), otherwise known as the Khmer Rouge, waged a propaganda campaign telling citizens to oppose the elections. They proclaimed that anyone who voted in the election organized by the “UNTACists” and the "Vietnamese puppets," as the Khmer Rouge referred to the State of Cambodia (SOC), would be considered "traitors to the nation." This propaganda line played daily on the Voice of the Great National Union Front, Khmer Rouge radio. It was also the message of armed propaganda teams who infiltrated into villages at night in some parts of the country and threatened people with death if they voted.

The UNTAC electoral and military components were faced with agonizing decisions about whether or not to open polling sites in specific villages. The electoral staff, most of whom had been living on the ground in the district towns for months, and who worked entirely with local staff, pushed for higher numbers of polling stations to ensure the highest possible turnout. The military, responsible for security for the sites, argued for limiting the number so that their forces would not be stretched too thin.

In Kompong Cham province, where I spent the month before and during the election and which is the most densely populated province in the country, the decision was made to extend the polling period so that troops could be deployed at every site. By doing so, electoral workers could open polling sites in every district in the province.

Military intelligence sources reported Khmer Rouge resupply into the area, including B-40 shoulder mount grenade launchers and 107 mm. rockets. The best guesses were that Khmer Rouge soldiers had been ordered to attack polling sites. Everyone held his or her breath. The question was, would Cambodians risk going to the polls?

On the morning of May 23rd it was pouring down rain in Kompong Cham and in many other parts of the country. But from the very first hours that the polls were open, the question was answered. Not only were they going to come to vote, they were clamoring to be the first to do so. Long lines formed at polling stations throughout the country. People stood in the rain for hours. As they came out, they were beaming. The atmosphere was happy, even jubilant. People had dressed in their best clothing. UNTAC radio carried live interviews with voters in different parts of the country. Voters held radios in line and gathered on porches to listen. They knew that this massive turnout was happening not only in their community, but also throughout the country and it fed the festive mood.

By the end of the day on May 23, approximately 2.1 million Cambodians had voted -- 42 per cent of the voters had voted on the first day. There were scattered incidents of violence over the six-day voting period. Most involved shells landing near polling sites. The polling sites under fire were closed, but most reopened after SOC soldiers repelled the attackers. By the third day, over 85 per cent of the registered voters had cast their ballots. During the last three days, small mobile teams pushed into marginal areas. Turnout was small as most people had already voted. In the end, more than 90 per cent of the registered population voted in the election. This is testimony to the bravery of the Cambodian people, and their desire to see peace in their country.

Before I can begin my discussion of whether or not the UNTAC organized elections in Cambodia were "free and fair," I should provide some historical and political context for this discussion. In the spring of 1989, the Peoples’ Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) changed its name to the State of Cambodia, and announced sweeping reforms. These included reinstating Buddhism as the state religion and allowing for a free market economy. The most important of these reforms allowed for the private ownership of land, and the government began issuing deeds to some farmers. In September of 1989, the Vietnamese withdrew their military forces from Cambodia. Although there were clearly some Vietnamese soldiers in the country, in advisory capacities and as technical trainers, the consensus was that Vietnam had withdrawn.

The developments in Cambodia paved the way for a series of negotiations that eventually resulted in the signing of the Paris Peace Agreement on Cambodia in 1991. This in turn led to what was at the time the largest UN Peacekeeping mission in history. The total cost was estimated at two billion dollars. The mission deployed more than 22,000 personnel, including 15,000 soldiers.

UNTAC, or the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, was divided into eight major components: the military, civilian police, electoral, human rights, rehabilitation, repatriation, civil administration and information/education. Military battalions were deployed throughout the country to provide security; engineering battalions worked to repair the country’s roads and bridges, and United Nations Military Observers or UNMOs were responsible for monitoring cease-fire violations (see Ledgerwood 1994).

I worked for the Information/Education Division of UNTAC. This division produced propaganda for the UN designed to inform the population about the goals of the mission and most importantly about the upcoming election. The Information/Education Division was in theory also supposed to "control" the local Khmer media. What we in fact ended up doing was monitoring the Khmer media and calling attention to the most egregious violations of the Paris Agreements. I read newspapers, monitored radio and television broadcasts and wrote reports for UNTAC on their contents. I also traveled throughout the country to gauge the extent to which information from various sources was being received in the countryside. This was then fed back into UNTAC production -- i.e. people need more programming on X or Y.

What the vast majority of rural Cambodians saw of UNTAC, besides their ubiquitous white Land Cruisers and Nissan pickups flying down the country roads, were the electoral staff and civilian policemen who were posted throughout the countryside in district towns and who traveled to villages during voter registration and polling. They were also likely to have seen UNTAC military patrolling -- Uruguayans, Pakistanis, Indians, Poles, French, and so on.

To return to the central question of this lesson, were the elections that were organized by the UN "free and fair"? There are two ways to frame an answer to this question. The first is in a narrow and literal sense. Was there, as the SOC asserted, "conclusive evidence" of "massive irregularities" and "voter fraud" perpetrated by UNTAC?

The second, more encompassing, and far more interesting question is was there a "neutral political environment" in the period leading up to and during the election as stipulated in the Paris Agreement? Did the atmosphere of political violence and intimidation unduly influence the outcome of the election? Given the pre-election violence, did the voting generally reflect the will of the electorate? What follows is a brief discussion of each of these two ways of viewing the problem, which concludes that the election was relatively fair.

"Massive irregularities": SOC charges of Voting Fraud

On May 30th, 866,498 ballots had been counted nationwide. The Cambodian People's Party, the political party of the SOC was winning 44 percent to FUNCINPEC's 37.8 percent. On May 31 as the counting passed 1,800,000 ballots, or 43 percent of the total vote, FUNCINPEC was in the lead with 36.7 percent of the vote to CPP's 35.3 percent. Everyone -- including SOC, including most "experts" inside UNTAC, including the Khmer Rouge -- had thought that SOC/CPP would win the election. Suddenly SOC officials had to face the possibility that they might lose.

On the evening of May 31, Chea Sim and Sar Kheng, the head of the party and the head of the Ministry of Interior of SOC respectively, and Hor Nam Hong, the foreign minister, met with Mr. Akashi, the Special Representative of the Secretary General, his deputy, Mr. Sadry, and Professor Austin, the head of the UNTAC Electoral Component. The SOC officials charged that there had been irregularities in balloting and voting in four areas of the country and asked that a new vote be held in these areas. They were assured that all complaints would be investigated, but were told that there were no plans for new elections.

On June 2, the SOC/CPP withdrew its party agents from the counting centers, saying that the irregularities amounted to fraud and that the polling was therefore unjust. The SOC officials demanded that UNTAC stop broadcasting the results of the count as the numbers came in. On June 10th the counting was completed and FUNCINPEC was declared the winner of the election with 45.47 per cent of the votes, CPP had 38.22 per cent, and the Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party (BLDP) 3.81 percent. Since no party had a two-thirds majority as required by the agreement, nor could they get such a majority through an alliance with the smaller third party, the two top vote getters would be forced to form a coalition government.

In a daring lunge to retain power by force, or at least bluff their way to a larger portion of the spoils in the new coalition, "renegade" members of the SOC leadership declared the provinces east of the Mekong to be an "autonomous zone." UNTAC personnel were threatened and UNTAC offices attacked and ransacked in an attempt to force them from these eastern areas. Members of opposition parties were driven from these provinces. Some disappeared. After only a few days the "renegades" relented and dropped the secessionist movement, but the media campaign that questioned the results of the elections continued.

The charges focused on three main issues. One was the issue of broken seals on the ballot boxes. The second was whether or not party observers had been allowed into the areas where the ballot boxes were stored at night. The third focused on whether or not people could have possibly voted multiple times. Without going into details of each of these and other, more minor issues, let me just highlight some sample stories of this genre of complaints.

Each ballot box was sealed in two ways. The metal lid slid into place and it was fixed first with a metal band with a plastic clip on the end with a number code. Second, there was also a blue plastic seal with another code number attached. Both seals were applied at the polling site. The boxes were then stacked in trucks and driven to the district offices where they were stored. Eventually they were moved by truck, boat or helicopter to the provincial tally sites. Because of the conditions of Cambodia's roads, these boxes bounced around. In some cases the seals broke. UNTAC electoral officials realized that they had a problem and on the first day of the election set up a procedure whereby party agents were on hand when the trucks were unloaded into the safe havens. If any boxes had broken seals, they were resealed in front of the party agents. Party agents could witness this unloading into the storage areas, but they were not allowed to spend the nights in the safe havens with the ballot boxes. No one was allowed inside the safe havens, which were guarded by UNTAC military.

The numbers of boxes that allegedly had problems and the circumstances surrounding these stories of bursting boxes grew increasingly bizarre as the stories were told and retold. For example, in Chea Sim's June 9 letter to Yasushi Akashi, he writes "a[s] to information recorded at UNTAC's tendered ballot counting center [in Phnom Penh], 96 boxes arrived with broken locks or seals, 211 boxes arrived without locks or seals, and 39 arrived with new seals. There were even four ballot boxes that arrived at the counting center without both lock and seal! In all, there were 350 tendered ballot boxes with problems..."

Two points should be made. First, both the lock and the seal prevented the lid of the box from being slid open. So rather than adding the numbers together, in fact the only boxes from this counting station that might have been opened would have been the four boxes with broken seals and locks -- not 350 boxes. The total number of votes that might have been tampered with was not large enough to affect the outcome of a single seat in the election, let alone the entire election.

In cases where seals or locks were broken the boxes were isolated and counted separately. In no case did these results vary significantly from the patterns of the overall count. In the case of the two sets of boxes with broken seals in the city of Phnom Penh, the percentage of CPP votes was 33.1 per cent and 31.4 percent to FUNCINPEC's 52.7 percent and 54.5 percent. This was against a backdrop of a total outcome for the city of 39 per cent CPP and 55.3 per cent FUNCINPEC. There was no evidence that the boxes with broken seals were tampered with.

Some boxes with broken seals were mixed with other boxes before counting, because not to do so would have violated the secrecy of the ballot -- all district boxes were mixed, so that no one could know how a single voting site had voted. UNTAC was then accused of not following its word to isolate these boxes.