Cambodia Vote to Exclude Most California Expatriates

The vast majority of California’s large community of ethnic Cambodians has apparently lost the right to vote in this country’s coming national elections, a U.N. election official indicated Friday.

Reginald Austin, director of the electoral unit for the U.N. Transitional Authority in Cambodia, said in an interview that only a “few thousand” expatriate Cambodians had managed to register by the close of registration in late January.

“It’s a terrible shame,” said Kim Kethavy, a service station owner from Lakewood, who has formed his own political party for the election, scheduled for May.

Unofficial statistics collected by U.N. officials suggest that there are 200,000 to 250,000 Cambodians in the United States, most living in and around Long Beach, which is often described as the second-largest Cambodian city after Phnom Penh. There also are 100,000 Cambodians in France and 25,000 to 30,000 ethnic Cambodians in Australia.

Most Cambodians now living abroad fled before the fall of Phnom Penh to the Communists in April, 1975, and were the cream of Cambodia’s business and intellectual class.

Austin said that, under a compromise reached with the four factions in Cambodia, registration was conducted only in this country, where prospective voters could be challenged by party officials. Voters had to show that they are natives of Cambodia and had at least one Cambodian parent. Those born overseas had to have at least one Cambodian parent and a Cambodian grandparent, an apparent effort to screen out ethnic Vietnamese.

The voting in May will choose a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution for the country and form the first freely elected government, ending a civil war that has lasted since Vietnam ousted the radical Khmer Rouge guerrillas from power in early 1979.

For the “relatively few” Cambodians in Long Beach who made the trek to Cambodia during the 12-week registration process, there is an additional obstacle to voting. Austin said the current plan is to have only one voting location in the United States--at U.N. headquarters in New York.

He said he hopes a way can be found to have a separate polling place in California, where most of the ethnic Cambodians in America live. “It’s hard to expect all those in California to travel halfway across the world to vote in New York,” Austin said.

Kethavy, the Lakewood politician, said that, despite their great interest, most Cambodians in the United States could not afford to travel to Cambodia to register for the U.N.-supervised election. The factions argued that anyone unprepared to come back to Cambodia is not ready to exercise the responsibility of voting.

Austin said his electoral component had registered 4.62 million Cambodian residents 18 and older, which he said is 96% of those eligible to vote. The work of the election unit is the most widely praised part of the U.N. peacekeeping effort in Cambodia.

If the estimate of nearly 400,000 expatriates is correct, they would have constituted a sizable percentage of the electorate had they registered in greater numbers.

Only Cambodians in refugee camps in Thailand have been given an extension to register to vote once they return to the country.

Austin, who is from Zimbabwe, said the United Nations had devised a system to ensure that voting irregularities are kept to a minimum. Voters were issued registration cards and fingerprinted.

There has been a spate of reports that both the Khmer Rouge and Phnom Penh government officials have begun seizing the registration cards in remote areas to intimidate voters or to stop them from voting.