Cambodia bans SMS

This is shockingly daft.

SMS text messaging has been banned in Cambodia over the weekend amid fears of political unrest as the country votes for local government administrators, election officials said Friday.

The announcement came on the final day of campaigning before the Sunday polls, as thousands of ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) supporters rallied in the capital Phnom Penh, snarling traffic for hours.

“Most people are using cell phones which can receive campaign messages from political parties. On these two days, the environment must be quiet, according to the law,” the National Election Committee said in a statement.

Not only is such a move patently undemocratic, it’s all but guaranteed to achieve nothing in the way of quelling social unrest or stifling political discussion during the “cooldown” period.

For starters, Khmer fonts for the average telephone are virtually unheard of. But, really, that’s besides the point. The fact is, an overwhelming majority of the Cambodian population is illiterate. And poor. So in practice such a ban would only effect registered voters who also own a telephone and can read English.

That’s a pretty small group. Significantly less than 1% of the population. It is, however, exactly the kind of people that vote for Sam Rainsy. Still, it hardly seems worth the effort.

UPDATE: The Cambodia Daily reported April 2 that COMFREL, the country’s election-monitoring group, had trained hundreds of its people to report on election problems to a central database via SMS.  Saorla has more.