In the play, unavoidably, there are two
main actors: good and bad. They reflect the reality happening in our society.
The “bad” always tries to explore all means of trick to defeat his/her
opponent. In most circumstances, and often is, if someone is in danger, they
try to “help” worsen the situation.
Seeing this scene, I ask myself, for I
used to work as an NGO staff, if the NGOs operated in Cambodia are “bad” or
“destructor”? That’s why the Royal Government of Cambodia, most of the time,
says that “most of them what they do is only to blame or criticize the
government of being misconduct in this and that field.” Meanwhile, from the
civil society organization point of view, as NGO, they see the government as
the one who restricts their freedom of expression and activity. To this, I can
view the stand point of both parties: they
define the words “who we are?” differently. They, therefore, hardly come to
conclusion of the same common; in fact, they bear the same interest of
developing and improving Cambodian society as a whole, unless they don’t think
so. However, some civil society organizations would argue that “for the
government does not provide them a chance to talk to.” As a result, both
parties, the NGO and the Cambodian government, work on their own way, and
often, try to capture the fault of one another’s.
In developing process, I see, both
parties could not be neglected each other. This explains why one is upset of
being ignored by the other. They need each other to join hand together to deal
with problem. And if they separately define themselves as “different”, then, it
would be hard for them to sit down together on the same table and share
hardship. In so doing, on one hand, the problem is still there, and they, on
the other hand, create another conflict of misunderstanding. In the same token,
in term of policy making, if the government itself works alone, the outcome
would not be great for it would only reflect one part of society rather than as
a whole. As we would hear: two is better
than one – two brains could think more critically than one brain; and in
one battle field, there will be only loser and winner, it is not good for both
for their goal is not to defeat each other but to help develop a country.
Providing a space for the civil society
organization to work with is a must task the Cambodian government should
consider; while, the NGOs itself should changing its habit, I talk only in
Cambodian situation and only reflect to some NGOs as far as I experienced, of
blaming the government to constructive criticism, I bet, Cambodia would move
forwards faster and a changing society for we have almost 3000 NGOs running in
Cambodia.
