There was no coup yesterday. It was just another Facebook
rumour. Facebook has its good points, allowing people to stay in real-time
contact, share information and mobilze but it can also be the home of false rumours
passed from one user to another in a digital Chinese whisper.
At one point yesterday, in Sam Rainsy’s car
chatting with him, I received a text message that he was, at that moment,
leading a march of 800 demonstrators to the National Assembly. Where and how
these rumours start is a mystery but they soon take on a life of their own and
are accepted as fact if heard from multiple sources. “How could so many people
be wrong?”
All in quiet in Phnom Penh this Thursday. Other
than a couple of burnt police cars on the day, the elections have been singularly
free of violence, itself a sign of progress in a country in which intimidation
and murder have been regular features of previous elections. The cheating on
the part of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party seems to have been confined to
guaranteeing that more than a million voters in districts where Rainsy is very
popular, had no opportunity to vote. It is hard to overestimate the effect that
Rainsy has on people when he appears, when she speaks. He is greeted like a
rock star.
Rainsy has insisted that there be an independent
investigation into why these million voters could not cast their ballots – an
investigation involving both political parties and independent observers. The ruling
CPP initially rejected such an investigation as unnecessary but has, this past
24 hours, agreed to participate. “They have no choice,” says Rainsy. Neither
the Cambodian people nor the international donor community will accept the
results as they stand at present. There are simply too many well documented
‘irregularities’. As everyone knows, when demonstrations begin, things can get
ugly.
So how does a filmmaker get to be making a film
about the leader of the opposition party in Cambodia? In 1998, working as a one
man band on another documentary, CHANTI’S WORLD, I decided to spend a few
months covering the Cambodian elections from the perspective of Sam Rainsy. The
previous year Rainsy had survived an assassination attempt. A hand grenade was
thrown into the middle of a peaceful demonstration he was holding calling for
the reform of the Cambodian judiciary. Ten demonstrators died.
Rainsy struck me as a man passionately committed
to seeing true democracy flourish in his country and not fearful for his own
safety. A man with a mission, which, when I asked him about it, he replied, “I
want to bring my people out of the darkness and into the light.” Prime Minister
Hun Sen, who had lost the previous election but managed to stay in power with a
variety of stratagems, including a coup, won a landslide victory in the 1998
election. The evidence that Hun Sen owed his victory to massive fraud was
overwhelming but all appeals were dismissed by the National Electoral Committee,
made up of supporters of Hun Sen’s CPP party.
No broadcaster in the world was interested in a
documentary about the leader of an opposition party in a small south east Asian
country who loses an election and, after all, as the BBC told me, “John Pilger
has done Cambodia.” So, I shelved the project thinking that one day in the
future there will be another election and perhaps in that one Rainsy will win.
So, within an hour of my hearing that Rainsy had received a pardon from the
King I had booked a flight to Phnom Penh and here I am covering the aftermath
of yet another election that the CPP insists Rainsy has lost and which Rainsy
insists that he has won. If Rainsy is eventually declared the winner and
becomes Prime Minister there will, I hope, be interest in my documentary. If he
does not win I suspect that there will be little broadcaster interest in a doco
about an opposition leader who has failed yet again to wrest power from the
incumbent Prime Minister. Such is the life of an independent filmmaker.
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