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Recently, the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF) Commander-In-Chief issued the order to recruit 1,100 Cambodian young men to join military in four districts of Oddar Meanchey province and then sent them to border front line in order to protect Cambodia territory and sovereignty from entering the neighboring countries’ incursion, following the flare-up of border dispute with Thailand near Preah Vihear temple.
After issuing the order to select youths, aged from between 18 and 30 years, who can read and write and are taller than 160cm, villagers in border provinces are concerns for the irregularity of recruitment procedure.
Politicians and right workers express their concerns for irregularity of the process of army recruitment as following:
- There will be the injustice for the poor people to be selected to join army, but the rich and the powerful will be not faced with army recruitment.
- The newly recruited military will be at risk, while being sent to station at the disputed border without training them a few years in advance.
- There will be corruption and the military’s rank being filled with the names of soldiers that don’t exist.
According to the military conscription law passed in 2006, Cambodian youths are needed to join military for 18 months of training, but recruiting Cambodian men to join army without properly training and to be sent to disputed areas is to make them to live at the high risk. And the mean to recruit new military to protect territory is not the good way to solve border dispute with Thailand.
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It is good that politicians and right workers expressed concerns over the recruitment but the truth is that I have never seen any children from the rich and powerful people ever serve in army [during Sihanoukist or Lon Nol or this vey moment], and I doubted that politicians and right workers concerned would not their children to join the army too.
Young people at the border decided to join the army for many reasons, and one of them is stand by side by side with other comarde to protect mother land.
What the politician and right workers concerns is good but i still hope that they will not allow their sons to join army. By the way, they will pay bribery to the government officials in order to not mobilize their sons to be military if their sons are selected. Therefore, only the poor children and family will join army.
So, the government have to pay enough salary for them to live on. As I used to hear and see, the senior military leaders always take advantage of junior soldiers.
It is good to have this law for a country, but moreover there should be equal to all the people when coming to the implementation stage. There is no doubt today that the law is bias to a group of people.
When talking about recruiting people to protect country, I do support the idea, but when people were treated differently that’s the matter.