Buddhist clergy divided over controversial poll
>> PHNOM PENH: Buddhist monk Sao Chanthol will cast his ballot for Cambodia’s ruling party today, but the vote has exposed a deep fracture in the 60,000strong clergy with some planning to stay home to protest a ban on the opposition in what is now effectively a one-party state.
From daily alms collections by monks to the countless temples, Buddhism is entwined with Cambodian life.
Monks were given the right to vote in UN-sponsored elections in 1993 as Cambodia emerged from the ravages of civil war and rule by the Khmer Rouge, which killed a quarter of the population, targeted religious groups and turned pagodas into prisons during its 1975-1979 reign.
Chanthol, the head abbot at Wat Langka in Phnom Penh and one of the most senior monks in Cambodia, said premier Hun Sen helped bring peace and restored the nation’s Buddhist institutions, reflecting a widely-held view of the strongman leader as a stabilising force.
“He liberated the country from the dangers of genocide. He brings development and unity,” the saffron-robed monk said, from one of the oldest pagodas in the city which is covered in ornate murals depicting Buddha’s life.
A clock bearing the visage of Hun Sen and his wife Bun Rany hangs inside the main hall, a tell to the allegiances of the monks there.
“My whole life I have voted for the Cambodian People’s Party,” he added.
Hun Sen has combined political savvy and force to hold onto power for more than three decades.
One pillar of his control resides in alliances with the clergy, where loyalists try to galvanise support for the CPP among the country’s 60,000 monks.
Supreme Patriarch Tep Vong, head of the country’s largest Buddhist sect and a backer of Hun Sen, has asked monks in the past not to get involved in “people power” movements.
But in the months before the election, the patriarch urged faithful to vote.
“Hun Sen and the CPP have harnessed every agent of the Cambodian state... to pressure the people to vote,” said Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division.
“The Buddhist committees overseeing monks are no exception.”
But despite the top-down control, outspoken monks risk being defrocked for protesting corruption, environmental degradation and land grabbing.
Many supported the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) before it was banned last year as Hun Sen cleared the decks for the election.
Frustrated at the lack of an alternative, some monks are planning on staying home.