Labeling buildings by sustainability; cost-benefit summaries showing reduced long-term costs: Architects, activists, construction managers, developers and government officers are coming together and raising action plans for Phnom Penh’s urban future.
Election NGO Comfrel mustered fewer than 2,000 observers on Sunday; Nicfec only around 20 — both mere fractions of total polling places. Political pressure and loss of funding have decimated groups that once provided leading assessments of Cambodian elections.
As Kampong Speu’s Metta forest is rapidly destroyed, locals’ allegations against Brigade 70 soldiers are multiplying: a monk’s phone confiscated to prevent photos of forest clearing, seven Buddha statues destroyed, and the land sold to tycoons for dirt mining.
This year’s election was marked by a tidal wave of support for the ruling party. As preliminary results come in, just four out of the country’s 1,652 communes voted in opposition commune chiefs, all from the Candlelight Party.
Counting has begun at 23,602 polling stations across the country. Polling officials are emptying ballot boxes and sorting through ballots. Other officials will start writing party names on blackboards and whiteboards for the tallying of votes.
Polls opened at 7 a.m. across Cambodia giving more than 9 million registered voters the chance to vote for their preferred political party and elect 1,652 commune chiefs.
The Candlelight Party describes Muoy commune as an opposition stronghold in Preah Sihanouk, where communities without land titles face precarious futures. A candidate who spent two years in jail over a land dispute thinks the issue will be his ticket to victory.
Ahead of the June 5 vote, the country currently has only one commune chief who is not from the ruling CPP: the KNUP’s Da Chhean in Banteay Meanchey. Chhean is now working with the CPP.
After the highs of forming government in 1993, the royalist Funcinpec, which has been plagued with infighting, now has candidates trying to reinvent the party’s image to appeal to younger voters.
The CPP made a show of strength on Friday morning with a road rally that filled Hun Sen Boulevard with a river of white-clad supporters, while the Candlelight Party also gathered supporters in a march from Chbar Ampov.
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