December brings out behaviour that sometimes Christians can’t even explain. Sure, the 25th signifies a significant holiday (for most that being pre-Boxing Day or the day before you get out and buy more stuff you don’t need, except this time at a steep discount), but the normally agnostic Cambodian government is getting into the spirit of giving during the pre-holiday season and decided loving thy neighbour (but hopefully not coveting his wife) is the right thing to do. Rockefeller Without Borders breaks this political love-in down into stocking-stuffer chunks while sipping egg nog that our dear office tea lady, Lekna, made from an internet recipe she’d found while searching ‘Christmas drinks needing rum or they are pretty much undrinkable’.
As we know, the political Christmas wish lists were prepared months ago, but it seems our eager – and generous – prime minster couldn’t wait to share something rather extraordinary with his neighbour at the National Assembly, opposition leader Sam Rainsy. Not only did the prime minster agree to giving Mr Rainsy a “rank equal to prime minister”, he provided it without the pressure of Rainsy having to do prime ministerly things. How good is that? Being PM is hard. You have way too much authority to do things people don’t want you to do, which means you have way too many people complaining about what you did – then turning around and complaining about what you didn’t do. You can never win. As ‘prime minister lite’, Rainsy can get the same great benefits of being PM – traffic cleared for you, the best table at any restaurant, reserved parking spot at Aeon Mall, Putin’s phone number, you name it – all while being able to say: “Oh, sorry, that was the other prime minister” if someone comes to him with an annoying complaint. Sure, prime minister lite might not be so great in comparison to, I don’t know, drinking a lite beer: you don’t get the full impact, and eventually you just become bloated and tired and go home feeling like you didn’t have that much fun because people kept bumping into you and spilling their drinks on your shoes and not apologising (never mind the endless trips to the toilet where, due to budget cuts, only one urinal is operational, the hand-dryer is broken and the paper towels are empty).
Prime Minister Hun Sen didn’t want the early Christmas unwrapping to stop there, though. A speech at a Phnom Penh university graduation ceremony gave the public a firsthand look at a team of adults playing Santa in Range Rover sleds. Waving his hands towards a metaphorical sack of surprises for those both naughty and nice, the impartial prime minister outlined “Twelve points of imbalance in the Kingdom”, going so far as to admitting that some problem areas had expanded under his government’s leadership, words which sent the festive bells ringing, giving his opponents hope this new-found humility will continue into 2015 (unlike that sorry-but-this-has-expired-already gift card your uncle gave you last year for caramel lattes at Brown Coffee). Pleased with these early unravellings, veteran members of the opposition went so far as to say such generosity had never before been seen in more than 20 years of politics in this country, declaring themselves relieved by this ‘shift in Hun Sen’s mindset’ (and his decision to use recycled wrapping paper that didn’t harm any Ratanakiri trees). Opposition deputy leader Kem Sokha wasn’t so convinced, however, calling for more street demonstrations if additional demands aren’t met and quoting – rather cynically, perhaps – Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol: “Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh. The father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs.”
Whatever your political, religious or lite beer affiliations, we must all remember ’tis the season to be jolly. Peace, love and the reality that Lekna was right: we do have to put a lot more rum in our egg nog to make it drinkable.