Excellencies Members of the Royal Government
Excellencies, Ambassadors of Foreign Countries to the Kingdom of Cambodia,
The Management and Members of the National Police & Royal Cambodian Armed Forces,
Ladies and Gentlemen Professors, National Police Officers and all the Students!
Today, It is my pleasure to be here with Excellencies, Ladies, Gentlemen, Distinguished National and International Guests to confer diplomas to 838 graduates of the Police Academy of Cambodia, right after the successful senate elections for the third mandate on Sunday, 9 January, 2012.
Taking this auspicious opportunity, I would like to highly value and praise H.E. Sar Kheng, Deputy Prime Minister and Minster of Interior, the management of both the national police and civil administration of the Ministry of Interior for the collective effort that results in numerous achievements in the sub-national administration reform program and the great success in maintaining security and social order for the cause of socio-economic development and the people. At the same time, I would also like to praise the management, professors and the entire staff of the Police Academy of Cambodia, who have worked very hard to train the national police force, who are responsible for law enforcement, to enhance effectiveness in maintaining security and social order to create a favorable condition for the restoration and economic development as well as poverty reduction. At the same time, I also praise and congratulate all the students, who studied very hard and firmly followed the school rules and directives to achieve today’s success.
In addition, I highly value the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, the Judiciary Institution, the Royal Academy of Cambodia and a number of universities for the good cooperation in sending respective professors according the curriculum of the Police Academy of Cambodia. At the same time, I also would like to thank to friend countries, national and international organizations for giving support to the Police Academy of Cambodia. In this spirit, I would like to reiterate my support and further encourage the management and officials of the Police Academy of Cambodia to continue your great work to realize new achievements in providing public services and contributing to socio-economic development. Thanks to our effort so far, our society has progressed forward from day to day. Those achievements have indeed responded to the needs of our nation and raised Cambodia’s reputation and advantage on international arena.
Along with my sincere congratulation to all graduates of the Police Academy of Cambodia, I would like to take this opportunity to recall historical archives and great achievements achieved by our national police over the last 33 years. As mentioned in the welcoming remarks, the Pol Pot regime totally demolished the structure of the national management system, including the structure and system of the national police. In addition, public civil servants, members of armed forces, police officers, academia, professors, students were targeted for demolition by the regime. After the nation was liberated from the Pol Pot Regime on January 07, 1979, the policy force was reinstated and called “People’s Police” while the country was faced by the lack of human resources and left in ruin by the war and genocidal acts. The priority mission of the people’s police at that time was to work closely with civilians to prevent the return of Pol Pot regime, safeguard villages and communes and fight against the intrusion of Pol Pot’s armed force that always want to retake control of villages and communes, burn houses, rob and kill villagers. At that time, the people’s police have scarified themselves to maintain peace enabling people to return home, to look for and reunite with family members and relatives so that they could rebuild their houses, villages and communes. The people’s police have been gradually strengthened and expanded through experiences learnt from real practices as well as training programs, mostly short programs to shape the direction and work needs from stage to stage, that is “implement, learn and compile experiences at the same time”.
Owing to all these efforts, the People’s Police force, in cooperation with village and commune militia as well as with people nationwide, effectively contributed to preventing the return of genocide regime, protecting the lives and properties of our people, and protecting our hard-earned social achievements. In general, many police officers injured, lost their lives or become disabled in those efforts; all these heroic and priceless sacrifices for the cause of peace and social progress seen nowadays. On behalf of the people and Royal Government of Cambodia, I would like to write these down and always remember all these merits, which are for the great cause of Cambodian nation and people.
The People’s Police force continued to further progress. In the new phase after the national election in 1993, the police force was reformed into “Cambodian National Police” while the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of National Security were merged into the current Ministry of Interior. At the same time, police forces from other Khmer factions that are the signatories of the Paris Peace Agreement were integrated under the framework of “One National Police Force”, except the Khmer Rouge faction that walked out from the agreement. In that phase, capability development of the police force was carried out with the aim to ensure that police force becomes one national police force through dissemination workshops on the Constitution, human rights, democracy, state of law, especially on the knowledge enhancement that ensures National Police at that time can solve complex situations, control anarchic weapons and ammunitions, illegal gun firings, armed robberies, kidnappings, and protect the lives and properties of our people at the districts and communes near Khmer Rouge’s controlled areas, which walked out from the Paris Peace Agreement, and continued armed struggle to return to power again.
Since the end of 1998, the Khmer Rouge’s political and military organizations were completely dissolved by the implementation of “Win-Win” policy, which allowed us to end the chronic war and fully create peace, independence and sovereignty. Under the “Win-Win” policy, some police officials were selected from the Khmer Rouge separated force and integrated with the commune and district police structures; and that could be considered as the last integration of Cambodian National Police.
Since then, our National Police Force received great attention on the improvement in quality, capability and professionalism in the framework of reform programs for armed forces, legislations and justice system. Short, medium and long terms capability development training sessions both in the country and overseas have been conducted continuously in order to strengthen the capability of our National Police in maintaining national security and public order that are aimed at promoting the state of law and sustained socio-economic development. In addition, at present our National Police has progressed and grown through many phases, experiences and achievements in its contribution to peace, political stability, security, social orders in the country and the region under the global framework through the cooperations between our National Police with the polices of the neighboring countries and other organizations in the region as well as in the world.
Nowadays, the social works and development require the capability, skills and vocational developments of our National Police in a clearer systematic framework. In order to respond to these demands, the Royal Government has decided to change and promote the “Royal School of National Police” to “Police Academy of Cambodia”. In parallel, the Ministry of Interior had also worked hard to established 6 regional national police schools, converted the National Police School at Dey Ith to the Higher Vocational Police School and created Higher Technical Police School. In general, for the past 12 years all these training institutions have worked hard to train national police in more than 1000 sessions with the participations of more than 70,000 police personnel. All these achievements are stem from the collective efforts of the management of the Ministry of Interior and the management of National Police at all levels.
We all know very well that firm stability and progress are owing to correct evaluations on the situation. Situations always evolve from time to time, so we necessarily need to adjust the development according to the real situation. In this regard, Cambodia has clearly determined that peace, political stability, security and social order are the prerequisites for the successful implementation of reform programs in order to achieve growth, employment, equity and efficiency as stated in the Rectangular Strategy of the Royal Government. In this context, all levels of the National Police are required to strengthen quality, capability, professionalism, and constantly need to develop their own vocational capability and virtues in order to answer the needs of the social development that is evolving rapidly.
For an instance, at present we are in the trend of globalization that is endlessly evolving. This trend has both positive and negative effects on the economic and social development, the maintenance of security and public order in our country. In reality, these two effects are mixed hence we need to improve our capability in the management, and direct the positive effects to our national socio-economy and security. Advance in technology has facilitated social networking and information dissemination and receiving. However, this advancement also made it easier for criminals to use technology in negative ways to commit crimes such as terrorism, cross-border crime, drug and human trafficking and so on. In the spirit, the Ministry of Interior has to keep making effort to fight against all issues by not letting Cambodia be safe-haven for criminals, to crackdown completely any emerging offenses with strong commitment, and not allow any inappropriate conduct within police force.
In this sense, to prevent and to crack down crime aiming at ensuring virtuously national security and social order in current of globalization and ever evolving socio-economic development, I would like to lay out a number of recommendations related to building capacity and human resource development of national police force and work efficiency of national police as follows:
First. Continued strengthening of capacity of police force at all levels and all branches who law enforcer to be with high professional skill, obeying the law of state, promoting respect of human rights, protecting the freedom of people by strictly respecting professional ethics of conduct, loyal to profession, strong discipline, dignity and cleanse in equally serving the people. In addition, we must jointly eliminate any misconduct in police force in order to maintain and improve credibility in national police force aiming at ensuring the participation of people in preserving security and public order.
Second. Continued improvement of professional skill for the whole national police force by ensuring that all police officers must undergo training capacity building regularly in police training centers from both actual practice and lesson learns from various crime cases or events that are taking place in society, region and the world. In overall, we have created training and capacity development system for national police through establishment of police academy of Cambodia, regional police schools and numbers of technical police schools, what deserve attention are to raise training quality of police academy of Cambodia and other training centers and to provide appropriate and enough allowance. Moreover, these training institutes should ensure training standard in responding to social evolution and state of offense in the country, the region and the world. In addition, police academy of Cambodia must promote cooperation with similar institutes in the region and in the world to draw experiences and make cooperation.
Third. With regard to the recruitment of trainees, as I already mentioned police is law enforcing force, so that all police in position should get a proper training to improve their capacity. In the sense, General Commiserate of National Police should cooperate with police training institutes to reassess all police at each unit who has not received training in order send them for training in approach training while working, for fulltime training or for short course etc. These kinds of trainings should be conducted for senior police officers with respect to leadership, formulating national security policy and strategy and maintaining public order in short term, and from short term to long term. Separately, regarding sending official s for trainings, we should avoid tradition of sending official who are not working regularly or inactive, or whom the agency is considering with whom to work with, while some officials after having undergone training had to loss regular job or displaced to new job that is irrelevant of training. Therefore, from now on national police must have appropriate incentive policy for officials who receive training, especially those who obey discipline and make good score during each training. Moreover, police cadets who have been recruited must receive training at national police training institute according their specialty before assigning them to any task in order to ensure efficiency of public service.
Fourth. Training and capacity building for police is the most important tasks, but even more important is to utilize trained skills and competence with honest and highest professional ethics in order to protect and serve people equally and to serve the whole society with justice. These are moral and value of training and capacity building that all policeman must remember and behave during work implementation.
Fifth. At the moment, what is worrisome security and social order is traffic accident, accident in society and narcotic drug, those issues destroys people’s lives and wealth, much of social capacity and resource. In order to cope with this problem, relevant ministry agencies and authority, national police force and law enforcing competence forces must cooperatively raise awareness on preventing accident in society, traffic accidents, and implication of narcotic drug and promote law enforcement strictly and regularly nationwide. At the same, all police training institutes must examine these cases deeply in order to organize special training courses aiming at building capacity for national police in preventing to effectively reduce those accidents.
Sixth. In order enhance public service by national police 24 hours over 24 hours and people‘s participation in ensuring public order and security at locality, all ministry-agencies, all levels of local authorities, national police force and all competence force must continue implementing Commune-Village Safety Policy regularly at all commune-village nationwide in conformity to spirit and duty to ensure security social order for the nation and the people. Moreover, attention must be paid to building and strengthening capacity of national police force into professional force, honest to profession, with technology, with high sense of responsibility, following the law, respect of human right, honestly serving the people and become fully qualified for integrating with countries in the region and the world on equal position and right.
In summing up, ensuring security and social order as well as building capacity of national police requires support and participation from all ministries agencies and stakeholders. In this spirit, on the half of the government of Cambodia , I would like to request ministries-agencies, training institutions to cooperate with and support Police Academy of Cambodia and any training schools of national police in order to achieve quality and efficiency of training objectives for Cambodia’s national police.
Once again, I would like to convey deepest gratitude to government and policy institutions of friend countries and all national and international organization that provided moral and material support for training of Cambodian national police force so far and requested for continued support to bolster and improve capacity of Cambodian national police force.
At the end, with celebrating degree awarding ceremony for 838 graduates of Police Academy of Cambodia, I would like to wish Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, board of management, professors, police officers and cadet of Police Academy of Cambodia four gems of Buddhist blessings: Longevity, Nobility, Happiness and Strength.
