Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-01-19-Speech-4-248"
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"en.20060119.31.4-248"2
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".
Mr President, Cambodia was a peaceful neighbour to Vietnam, until foreigners intervened in its affairs at the beginning of the 1970s. In Vietnam, war raged over the reunification of the Northern and Southern sectors of what had once been a French colony, with America wishing to keep the south as its own sphere of influence. The suspicion that the Vietnamese guerrilla movement, which fought for the reunion of North and South, was making use of supply routes running through inhospitable parts of Cambodia was reason enough for the Americans to intervene and bring it under the control of a friendly government.
Since then, Cambodia, formerly so peaceful, has been a country at odds with itself. It appears that state power, having been achieved with so much difficulty, must not be put at risk in any way. A tradition has developed of parties being no more willing to enter into coalitions with others than they are to tolerate opposition. First, there was a government friendly to the Americans, which was followed by Pol Pot’s pro-Chinese reign of terror and then, with Vietnamese help, the government of Hun Sen. Subsequent elections have produced results that have made it virtually impossible to form governments with widespread support.
Various parties are unwilling to cooperate with each other, wanting instead to rule on their own. This attitude has now resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of opposition members of parliament. Journalists, human rights activists and trade unionists are also arrested on charges of defamation. The consequence of all this is that the police and the judiciary are being turned into instruments of political in-fighting. For the moment, I do not get the impression that the opposition is much more democratic than the party in government. All the political forces in Cambodia should abandon this sort of behaviour.
Up to now, the outside world has failed to help Cambodia develop a tolerant democracy. It is worth recalling that Pol Pot’s bloodthirsty regime remained internationally recognised for a long period of time, even after being defeated, the only reason for that being that the new regime under Hun Sen, which had liberated the country from that band of murderers, was suspected of maintaining friendly relations with its Vietnamese neighbour. In future, Cambodia must get a quite different message. Europe must not take sides on the basis of considerations that the Cambodians find incomprehensible, but must consistently stand up for human rights and democracy, irrespective of who is in power."@en1
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