Political Leadership
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Notorious Court in Cambodia
The heated up political tension orchestrated by Hun Sen is to simply use the court as his experiment tool of throwing fire into a cold water. CNRP has boldly claimed its nonviolence and culture of dialogue during this tension.
How much have we known the notorious court in Cambodia?
State authorized this private security guard to beat the peaceful protesters.
Khmer people believe that in the past our court system was using “oath or swear” conducting to ensure individual sincerity and integrity. The state administration was “Deva-Raja” or “Cult of Personality” that King was named Universal Ruler. There are no scientific evidence to ensure the preciseness resulting from those swearing testimonial performance, and how much the state performed free and independent procedures.
In the West, Thomas Hobbs aggressively criticized the “State of Nature” in
A man blinded the court not to see those violent chasers on a motorist. Photo courtesy: Facebook
which holy man is the ruler. Hobbs called such ruler “Leviathan” who critically proclaimed their specific legitimacy from the sky angel.
During the Khmer Rouge regime, the court was also set up to legitimize their brutal leadership. Now, it has inherited to the present Cambodia government under Hun Sen leadership, the same court has been used to threat and jail the dissents.
The 11 protesters were jailed by the court in the charge of national insurrection happened immediately after Hun Sen warned in his televised speech.
How Cambodia country as an institution can bring down the leader(s), tycoons, or politician(s) who have pervasively and evidently abused the power to deviate the neutral and independent court of Cambodia?
This puzzling question has remained unanswered.
In Canada, looking from my daily lenses, the smallest problem happened, it has been brought up to the court, at the same procedure with the biggest problem. For instance, if I was driving in high speed, the road-camera or
The two latest protesters are jailed including one in custody in the charge of assisting national insurrection happened after Hun Sen warned during his televised speech.
onsite policeman will send or hand me the ticket with proof of photo, and the ticket gives us two options: to pay voluntarily or to appeal to the court. The biggest problem, Prime Minister or Minister or high profile entity, shall face with the court at the same procedure like everyone if those committed legal fault.
One of the citizenship obligations is to sit as jury in the court. This is an encouragement for all to learn about the legal procedures and understand this common duty.
Cambodian people have been bitterly suffered by the court system. With no doubt, leader has blinded them for their own advantage.
Political Paradigm of Pragmatism from the Khmer Youth part 29
Public Policy and Policy Platform of the Political Parties
This part (29), the author Mr. Sophan Seng renewed his talk regarding the Public Policy and Policy Analysis that are the cornerstone for the Policy Platform Crafting. By exposing the finding from Asia Foundation on their survey to collect political opinions from the Cambodian constituents, the summery of key recommendation for the political parties, are following:
1. Corruption is perceived as the biggest problem facing Cambodia. Including a counter-corruption objective in a political party platform will broadly appeal to the electorate’s desire for change. While individual politicians can increase their popularity by leading highly visible counter-corruption campaigns in the run-up to the next national elections, a greater degree of transparency in the conduct of political parties can counter feelings of distrust of political parties, as the survey findings demonstrated.
2. At the local level, poverty, unemployment, and associated issues are perceived as the biggest problems. Visible commitment at the local level to addressing the root cause of these issues will likely be highly popular.
3. Although vote buying or gift giving may still be an effective strategy for getting out a party’s own supporters, it is clear that in Cambodia it is not effective in changing how voters choose to vote. Parties that wish to attract new voters would be better off spending their resources to develop and publicize programs attractive to the electorate at large.
4. It is clear that the public favors political decentralization, with very large majorities in favor of directly elected officials at all levels. Although political parties would prefer to retain control over the selection of officials, there is a huge potential electoral payoff for any party willing to embrace political and fiscal decentralization.
5. The political parties in Cambodia have failed to differentiate themselves in the public mind, and due to the nature of the electoral system, it is likely that voters associate the parties more with their leaders than with specific programs. Developing a detailed platform that can be distilled into four or five bullet points, to be repeated over and over, will differentiate the parties in the public’s mind. Periodic polling will help determine if their messages are sinking in and to gauge their popularity with the general public. These polls will then allow parties to fine-tune their messages as they prepare for the 2018 elections.
These five bullet-points are wholly derived from the finding. It is imperative to comprehend that these recommendations subsumed from the research don’t mention the border effort to protect from neighboring encroachments. This absence might be caused by:
– The borderline issues are more sensitive issue that shall not build strong foundation for the nation in sustaining development, and it is regarded as more polarized than unified within a nation-state if the state institution is not strong.
– It is possible that the researchers didn’t include questions towards the respondents, or the general opinions are too vague on the issue.
In brief, the key recommendations to the political parties are:
– Crafting robust policy platform to anti-corruption
– Family economy improvements through creating more jobs and increase price of their agriculture products as well as to provide them cheap or free healthcare and seniors salary etc.
– Focus more on robust policy and genuine political will than to encourage vote-buying
– Need more decentralized and delegate administration of the party than to consolidate the central power, or organize candidate elections than conduct direct nomination.
– Parties must prepare well-informed information on their political policy platform than to persuade vague personalities to attract the voters.
At the end, the borderline trigger to maximize nation’s interests is imperative but they must be putting aside the attack on each other.
Political Paradigm of Pragmatism from the Khmer Youth part 28
This part (28) which is broadcasted by CMN Khmer Radio in July 12-13, 2015, the author Mr. Sophan Seng continued to discuss the Sun Ray Policy Platform phase 3. For this phase, different from phase 1 and phase 2 on lifting up and building up shadow cabinet of the opposition party CNRP respectively, the author talked about the importance of Public Policy, the meaning of it, and its theoretical and practical frameworks to adding towards the meaningful Policy Platform of a political party.
According to Bardach Eugence, a meaningful public policy analysis consists of eight steps:
1. Define the Problem
2. Assemble Some Evidence
3. Construct the Alternatives
4. Select the Criteria
5. Project the Outcomes
6. Confront the Trade-offs
7. Decide
8. Tell Your Story
The author himself had experienced during his schooling for the courses on Public Policy Analysis by joining practicum with the office of Honolulu city mayor. His analysis mainly focused on the Political Participation for the Neighborhood Board policy of the city. While his key criteria were “cost benefits, administrative feasibility, and political 
acceptability” to be used for his study, the concepts of efficiency, equality, political acceptability, and robustness etc. are widely useful for analysts.
Drawing from these contextual frameworks, Cambodia political parties are in need to focus on policy than to focus on leader figures as also claimed by Asia Foundation, in which the author shall discuss in details for the next part of “Political Paradigm of Pragmatism from the Khmer Youth” program.
Political Paradigm of Pragmatism from the Khmer Youth part 24
This 24th part was broadcasted by CMN Radio on Sunday, June 14, 2015 in which our author Mr. Sophan Seng elaborated on how political institution 
in Cambodia should be pragmatically built for a sound democratic political system. At the moment, Cambodia has evolved into government leadership party and opposition leadership party. But the political deficit is resting on not-in-balance between government leadership party and opposition leadership party in pushing for genuine democratization.
The author has compared the current status of Cambodia’s two political parties as standing in different positions: Cambodian People’s Party is standing on the top of the hill, while the opposition party Cambodia National Rescue Party is standing on the ground. The uphill struggling of the opposition party to take the stage of government leadership is like an 
activism struggle. This competition has posited “none fair play” in a sound political system of democracy like it has been implemented in Canada, the UK, and Australia.
Our author suggested many different phases of “Sun Ray Political Platform” which shall be aired in the following weeks.