"RELEASE!"
Judicial Machine Rolling…
John Vink | 16 July 2014
The 5 opposition CNRP lawmakers who were arrested for incitement to violence following yesterday’s outbursts of violence (see HERE)
during a demonstration requesting freedom of speech are being tried at
the Phnom Penh Municipal Court. About 500 CNRP supporters gathered at
the blockade set up by the riot police to prevent access to the court,
soon joined by CNRP lawmakers.
The implacable logic of the ruling CPP on issues regarding justice
which amounts to ‘What we are doing is always legal and what the
opposition is doing is illegal when we decide it is’ is spread out in
the open again.
For the armed forces to use lethal weapons, shoot demonstrators or
even kill them, instead of applying well known crowd control techniques,
for municipal guards to consistently provoke violence because of an
uncontrolled behaviour does not, for the ruling party, justify any
prosecution or arrest. When one protest, out of dozens of protests in
the previous months, turns violent at the hand of CNRP supporters, the
judicial machine quickly sets in and targets not the perpetrators, but
those who supposedly incited the violence. Why can’t it target those who
ordered the excessive violence used by the armed forces?
Because the prevailing logic within the ruling party is one of
old-fashioned politics based on developing antagonism, of machismo
muscle flexing, on supposedly clever ‘divide to reign’ strategies.
It certainly is not a logic which sets out to benefit ALL Cambodians.
Additional edit at 1:00PM: the simple notion of impartiality is
totally absent within a fraction of the population. Even the Red
Cross/Crescent, supposedly representing the essence of impartiality
worldwide, seems to be contaminated by partisan politics in Cambodia:
the municipal guards beaten up by protesters yesterday received 25$ from
the Cambodian Red Cross. Has the Cambodian Red Cross ever visited
those, innocent or not, shot by the military or beaten up by the same
municipal guards in the previous months?
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