Ethnicity and Local Governance

This article in the PP Post reports about the upcoming administrative elections for district and provincial level councils. It highlights accurately that having members of those councils elected by members of commune councils, virtually all of which are dominated by the ruling party, is not going to enhance democracy.

Neither is it going to enhance representation or voice for indigenous peoples. Those groups tend to be under-represented on commune council and the representation gap is much greater at higher sub-central levels of the state, not least due to requirements for Khmer language literacy and formal education. Thus it is highly likely that those elections do not contribute to bridging this representation gap or to enhancing indigenous peoples’ participation.

This is particularly disappointing in light of the strong provisions about enhancing indigenous peoples’ participation made in the government’s Strategic Framework for Decentralization and Deconcentration Reforms.

Among other things, it states that “ the reform will introduce systems and procedures as ensure that people, especially women, vulnerable groups and indigenous minorities can participate in decision-making at provincial/municipal, district/khan and commune/sangkat levels.”

It is sad to see that the government appears to have backtracked on those commitments.

This article on VOA reports that the Cambodian parliament haspassed draft legislation to provide for financing for two Chinese hydro dams in the Cardamon Mountains, costing more than $1.3 billion.

The article mentions environmental impacts but not those on indigenous peoples whose homelands will be flooded.

More details on the range of impacts of those dams can be found in this Reuters piece in IHT and this one in the Asia Times .

Details and findings from the ELGC team’s visit to the area can be found here, here and here.

This article in the Vietnamese news informs that a delegation from Vietnam’s National Assembly’s Council of Ethnic Minorities is visiting Cambodia, to exchange information regarding ethnic minority policy.

It is of course a good thing that ethnic minority policy receives attention from high ranking Cambodian officials in Cambodia, including Heng Samrin and Sar Kheng. Not least because Cambodia does not at this stage have any active minority policy.

Guessing from the selection of provinces mentioned in the article (Ratanakiri, Mondulkiri, Pursat and Battambang), the visit focuses on what are widely considered indigenous peoples in Cambodia. Vietnam is not known to treat these minorities very well, which helps explain why substantial numbers of their members flee from Vietnam to Cambodia but never the other way around. Arguably, when it comes to the treatment of minorities, Vietnam has more to learn from Cambodia than the other way around. One specific concern here is that, while both countries have voted in favor of the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Vietnam explicitly rejects the notion that there are any indigenous peoples in that country. On this view, the declaration does not apply to any group inside Vietnam.

Cambodia, in contrast, has so far at least implicitly accepted that Cambodia’s Highland Peoples are indigenous peoples and that the rights contained in the declaration apply to them. In many ways it would be unfortunate if Cambodia were to move towards to Vietnamese position on minority rights.

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A slightly revised version of below post has now been published as a letter to the editor in the Phnom Penh Post: Why do minority tongues really face a grim future?

A recent article in the Phnom Penh Post entitled “Minority tongues face grim future” accurately highlights that the languages of Cambodia’s indigenous minorities are threatened. But it is misleading and inaccurate in attributing the threats those languages are facing. In its sub-heading, the article states that those languages “are being eroded by global forces beyond the control of government initiatives designed to revive them”. But the forces of economic development and integration invoked in the article are in many important ways shaped by deliberate government decisions, though not exclusively. Furthermore, those statements imply that there are “government initiatives designed to revive” indigenous languages. But there are no such initiatives in Cambodia and nothing in the article suggests otherwise. The initiatives under discussion are either not government initiatives or they are not designed to revive indigenous languages. The article fails to elaborate on a wide range of government initiatives that contribute to the erosion of those languages.

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This post sketches major challenges involved in accommodating the rights and interests of Highland Peoples in the design and implementation of decentralization in Cambodia. These challenges should be understood in light of international norms of indigenous peoples’ rights as detailed in legal instruments (such as UN Declaration of IP Rights, ILO Convention 169) as well as specific policies of various D&D donors (such as WB, UNDP, DANIDA, ADB and others). These norms not only re-affirm indigenous people’s access to common citizenship rights but they lay out positive minority rights aimed at protecting the equal enjoyment of common citizenship rights for minority members. Essential to most of these rights is some measure of self-government or autonomy along with rights to lands, natural resources, language and many others.

Inevitably, realizing those rights involves the devolution of powers essential to maintaining a distinct society to political subunits in which members of indigenous groups form a majority and the formalization, incorporation and development of their distinct minority institutions and languages. Inevitably, D&D reform creates a framework that is, or is not, capable of realizing indigenous rights. Currently, not only is the framework incapable of this, but its design and implementation arrangements undermine the institutional, cultural and natural resources that indigenous peoples rely on for the realization of their rights.

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This is an assessment of indigenous peoples (IP) safeguards under the Worldbank-support Rural Investment and Local Governance Project (RILGP) in Cambodia.

RILGP is the main funding mechanisms for local commune councils throughout the Kingdom and provides substantial project management, policy making and implementation support to the state at all of its levels.

The assessment finds that RILGP operates, since project inception, in a state of non-compliance with the letter and spirit of Worldbank policy on indigenous peoples. The gulf between Bank-policy and RILGP-practice has only grown with the recent expansion of project scope to all Cambodian provinces (with the exception of one) and state-reform at all sub-central levels of governance.

RILGP practice not only violates Worldbank policy but also those of UNDP (UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), UNDG Guidelines on Indigenous Peoples’ Issues (2008), which has recently joined RILGP with substantial investment, through the Project to Support Democratic Development through Decentralization and Deconcentration (PSDD). Because those recent UN instruments on indigenous peoples have much stronger provisions in governance-related areas, RILGP-contradictions with those policies are even more profound.

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ELGC’s Stefan Ehrentraut was recently interviewed about this blog for the Ethnicity and Democratic Governance Project’s (EDG) newsletter. EDG is an international Canadian-based 5-year major collaborative research project focusing on the governance of ethnic diversity. Read the interview here.

This paper on ‘Minorities, the State, and the International Community in Cambodia: Towards Liberal Multiculturalism?’ was prepared by ELGC’s Stefan Ehrentraut for a conference at the Center for Khmer Studies (CKS) on ‘Mainland Southeast Asia at its Margins: Minority Groups and Borders’.

Pilot Indigenous Community in Andoung Kraloeng

Much advocacy by and on behalf of indigenous peoples in Cambodia has focused on the drafting and implementation of the land law’s provisions for indigenous communities’ communal title to land. There have been relatively high hopes that, once the first communal land title has been issued to an IPC, replication of the pilot process in other indigenous communities will provide security of land tenure and help reduce in-migration and land-grabbing, both widely seen as critical for the survival of indigenous minority cultures. Plans exist in various NGOs in Mondulkiri Province to replicate the model piloted in Andoung Kraloeng in other indigenous communities. The pilot project is young and the team’s visit was short but indicates some issues that may become obstacles to this initiative meeting the high hopes it has raised.

Read the full Mondulkiri Report here as PDF file, either with Photos (1.8MB) or without photos (89KB).

Approach to the IPC from the national road

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