Cambodia's ruling party romped towards victory in landmark local elections yesterday, but rivals said intimidation and other abuses skewed the result of what many saw as a dress-rehearsal for a general election next year.
Initial results from Sunday's polls suggested Prime Minister Hun Sen's ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP) would retain control of most of the 1,621 village communes, following the first local polls since independence in 1953.
Opposition leaders Prince Norodom Ranariddh and Sam Rainsy said they would accept the result but they and poll monitors denounced pre-poll irregularities such as intimidation, gift-giving and curbs on opposition access to the official media.
"The election was free, but it was not fair," Ranariddh told reporters.
"The election seems to be acceptable in terms of representing the will of the electorate," said US Ambassador Kent Wiedemann. But he noted that the pre-election process had been marred by violence and unequal access to the media.
The communes -- clusters of villages -- are Hun Sen's powerbase. His party has controlled all communes for two decades since Vietnam toppled the Khmer Rouge regime.
More than 20 political activists were killed in the run-up to Sunday's elections. Police said there was no political motive for any of the killings.
"We cannot say exactly how many percent this or that party won, but we see the CPP has won most of the communes," said Koul Panha, director of the Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia.
But he said there were doubts over whether the poll was fair.
"Intimidation and gift donations went hand-in-hand and must affect this result," Koul Panha said.
Latest preliminary results for 10 provinces and Phnom Penh -- released by the government's National Election Committee (NEC) -- show the CPP as winning 575 communes, the Sam Rainsy Party winning 10 and Ranariddh's royalist FUNCINPEC party winning two.
"According to the preliminary results we received from 15 [of 23] provinces, the CPP has taken almost 70 percent of the vote," Leng Sochea, chief of information at the NEC, said.
Some observers have said that as well as violence, the government's pre-election "gift-giving" ceremonies and Hun Sen's domination of coverage in Cambodia's broadcast media had skewed the result.
But voter enthusiasm was high -- about 90 percent of the 5.2 million Cambodians registered to vote turned out for the election in a country of 11.5 million people.
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