Cambodian Constitutional Law, Article 31, stipulates ‘Every Khmer citizen shall be equal before the law, enjoying the same rights, freedom and fulfilling the same obligations regardless of race, colour, sex, language, religious belief, political tendency, birth origin, social status, wealth or other status.’
I doubt the above article is practised in daily living. Are we equal? Asking this question, I remind myself of one quote from the ‘Animal Farm’ in which the pigs who represent the ruling bodies announce that ‘All of us are equal, but some are more equal than others.’ It’s true enough that all of us are equal mentioned in the law; in real life, however, we are not. The rights we can ‘enjoy’ are only those allowed by the ruling bodies and people with high social status because they are actually those who decide what we can do. Those people can otherwise enjoy the rights without restrictions. I am going to focus on road traffic in this writing.
What do you feel when you are stopped by the police for some high-ranking government official’s vehicles to pass by? Are we equal to use the roads while we have already paid the road tax? In this sense, we are not equal although we are said to be given the same right to use the road. There is such an resentful excuse that they are busy people who have to be in hurry to deal with important issues. Sometimes I feel that it’s just a kind of show-off. At the same time, I don’t think that all of us are actually fulfilling the same obligations. This morning I witnessed a bias traffic police officers did to the road users because of their differences in social ranking or political status. Two cars turned right one after another while the red light was flashing on. The first car was a Lexus with a note on the windshield that it’s a government official’s car, while the Camary following is a car of general public. To my surprise, the Lexus was let go when the police saw the note, while the Camary was stopped and the owner was invited out of the car and ‘lectured’ on her breach of the traffic law. It is apparent that they were treated unequally. This should be one of the reasons that I despise the traffic police officers, and please accept my apology if any of the readers here actually is or has a good traffic police officer as relative or friend. The traffic officers tend to seek to fine women and girls rather than men because they rarely complain and just give away money to settle the fine. Are rules of laws work better on women than on men? I guess so. I believe that there should be some officers who have conscience, who wish to maintain a society governed by law, and who also wish to serve the general public equally, but it is someone up there who distorts their belief, choice and commitment.
In this unequal society when power and wealth are valued, everyone seeks to obtain them so as to be feared of and to avoid fulfilling the same obligations as other people do. I resent this power. I wish for another holy power which can defeat it. We wish to be EQUAL and actually EQUAL.
