Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land

by Joel Brinkley

  After the bulldozers had wreaked havoc for a day, the villagers decided they would stage a sit-in at the forest’s entrance. Um Huot, who had grown to be the voice of the protesters, organized it. He was a middle-aged man with an expression of serious purpose locked on his face. He sat on a small wooden porch in front of his modest home, under a corrugated metal roof, and explained the crime in stark terms. The Vietnamese occupiers, the Khmer Rouge, and others had deforested millions of acres in Pursat Province over the previous thirty years. Vast areas of land were clear-cut and now offered only stumps and weeds. Why, then, Um Huot asked, does Lao Meng Khin need this particular plot of land—the only forested land left—for his eucalyptus plantation? “There’s plenty of empty land. Why don’t they use some of that?”

  The answer, Um Huot knew, was that the eucalyptus-plantation proposal was simply a cynical trick, a rationale for the rape of the area’s last forest that made no sense to anyone who looked at it with any care. But then, who could challenge Hun Sen? Who could point out these fallacies? Did anyone have leverage over him? Or did Hun Sen and the rest of the Cambodian government, as so many diplomats and human-rights workers complained, live behind an unassailable shield of impunity?

  Um Huot managed to recruit eight hundred villagers for the sit-in. They brought sleeping mats and stayed at the forest entrance around the clock, trying to block the bulldozers. And as so often happened in Cambodia, at 12:45 a.m. someone crept out of the woods and threw a hand grenade into the field of sleeping villagers. Eight people were wounded, fortunately none fatally. Um Huot decried the attack. The police, following the script, said the protesters had themselves ordered the grenade attack so they could blame it on the government. Why else was no one killed? It happened that Peter Leuprecht, the UN human-rights envoy, was in Phnom Penh at the time, and he exclaimed, “I deplore this grenade attack that was launched against peaceful protestors, and I hope that a serious investigation will be carried out.”

  As usual, no one was ever arrested or charged. The only positive result occurred a few days later when the Ministry of the Interior, responding to outrage from diplomats and human-rights officers, temporarily suspended the clear-cutting operation. Um Huot and the others viewed it as a stay of execution. They returned to the forest to pursue their livelihood—fully aware that they were living on borrowed time.

  The fracas at the forest served as a coda to the World Bank’s efforts to reform forestry management. Over the months leading up to the grenade attack, all of the bank’s initiatives crumbled under the weight of official corruption and, within the bank itself, institutional torpor and incompetence.

  In December 2002, 150 people gathered at the Forestry and Wildlife Ministry to protest ongoing deforestation at numerous sites around the country. Thousands of villagers were losing their livelihoods, just like those people in Pursat. The government loosed the police on the protesters. Officers kicked them and attacked using electric batons. Seven people were hospitalized; one was killed. Global Witness, the government’s forest monitor, issued an acrid, accusatory report. Hun Sen, furious, fired Global Witness and kicked its investigators out of the country—something he had probably wanted to do for a long time.

  Hun Sen had hired Global Witness only because the donors had left him little choice at that time. In the following years, he had bristled and bridled as he watched the group work against his interests. “We have the right to terminate visas for anyone who dares to abuse our national sovereignty, our political rights and inflict damage to our reputation,” he said. “I will sue Global Witness because it has accused Cambodian police of killing people and injuring several others.” After he dismissed the group the investigators left. But soon others arrived. Like a hound that sniffed a covey of quail, Global Witness could not let this investigation go. It didn’t need a government contract or Hun Sen’s permission. The group would finish its investigation and publish a report on its own.

  The World Bank soon ran into troubles of its own—from its own internal office of investigations. For years, the bank had worked to reform the government’s forest-concession program—the one that sold vast swaths of forest to oknya and other wealthy businessmen. The fruit of the bank’s effort was the bogus logging moratorium and other theatrical administrative orders. Meantime, the trees, millions and millions of trees, continued falling all over the country. Trucks loaded with lumber clotted the state’s roads. Hun Sen and his cronies grew ever richer from the concession payments that went directly to them, not the government.

  In 2006 World Bank investigators from Washington found that their officers in Phnom Penh had so single-mindedly pursued concession reform and phony regulations that they’d ignored what was really going on. If they had bothered to lift their eyes from their desks and look out the window, they would have seen that the government had authorized “an estimated 3–4 million cubic meters of illegal logging,” the investigators’ report said. Yet all the while Ian Porter, the bank’s Cambodia office director, lauded the enactment of new regulations. He seemed to have forgotten that the state had issued similar regulations years earlier. Shortly after taking office in 1993, Hun Sen and Ranariddh had announced a new rule that said timber exports were now “prohibited under any circumstances.” Why did the bank think the new promises were any more believable?

  Over the years, dozens of Cambodians told the bank’s executive officers about the continuing deforestation. As the bank investigators finally put it, falling into World Bank internal jargon, “Bank was frequently made aware of numerous complaints of harms to local communities due to cutting of resin trees. Bank’s failure to consider and investigate these problems does not comply with OP 4.01 and OP 4.36.” In other words, the international communities’ initiative to save Cambodia’s forests was in shambles.

  Against this backdrop the government faced national elections once again in the summer of 2003, the third since the UN occupation. The players remained the same, as did the issues. Violence diminished a bit. Still, opposition officers were killed, the CPP intimidated voters by multiple means, and all the parties tried to buy votes. Turnout dropped by about 10 percent over the previous elections in 1998. Analysts hypothesized that many voters realized that the election would not, could not, bring any real change. Whatever happened, they seemed to believe, Hun Sen would cling to power, while Ranariddh and Rainsy would scheme to maneuver the results to their own advantage.

  Yet when the votes were tallied, Hun Sen found himself in a fix once again. This time the CPP won 47 percent of the vote, the Sam Rainsy Party 22 percent, and Funcinpec 21 percent. A variety of smaller parties won the rest of the vote, but none of them wound up with enough to claim a seat in parliament.

  The CPP had “won,” but Hun Sen still did not have the two-thirds supermajority needed to form a government. He would have to reach out to at least one of the opposition parties. Either one could push him over the top. But Rainsy and Ranariddh were not going to shake his hand so easily this time. Or so they said.

  The two men formed a coalition called the Alliance of Democrats—a name intended to show the differences between their outlook and Hun Sen’s. They created a platform, listing the demands that had to be met before they would join a governing coalition. Any Cambodian reading these conditions could immediately see their true intent: to effectively remove Hun Sen from power. This time Rainsy and Ranariddh had come up with a particularly clever scheme to overturn the election results, one that their fans in the international bleachers happily embraced. Both Rainsy and Ranariddh said they would not join any government unless Hun Sen signed a pact confirming these points:

  • The government would establish a new nonpartisan National Election Committee. King Sihanouk would appoint the chairman and vice chairman.

  • In each village nationwide a village committee representing all three parties would replace the CPP-appointed village chief.

  • The parliament would enact a new election law to make elections freer and fairer by, for exampl
e, opening broadcast media to all candidates.

  • The three parties would agree on judicial reform to remove the government’s control of the court system.

  • The parliament would pass an anticorruption law, and the government would establish an independent anticorruption commission (nine years after Hun Sen first proposed that idea).

  Further proposals were intended to break Hun Sen’s control of the government bureaucracy, the military, and the police. Finally, if any party chose to withdraw from the coalition, the parliament would have to take a vote of confidence in the government. If the government could not win that vote, new elections would be held—under the new, presumably fairer election law.

  Having lived under Hun Sen’s many-handed control of Cambodian governing institutions for a decade, the Alliance of Democrats knew precisely how to block him at every turn. Well aware of Rainsy and Ranariddh’s intentions, Hun Sen refused to sign. His spokesman, Khieu Kanharith, said simply, “It is absurd for the losing parties to issue demands to the winning party.”

  The deadlock dragged on, month after month, and true to form Ranariddh spent most of his time at his home in Paris, saying he would come back when Hun Sen conceded. Rainsy hopscotched between Paris, Sydney, and Washington, still trying to convince foreign leaders of Hun Sen’s perfidy.

  Hun Sen, meantime, continued in power as if nothing had changed. Brazen murders of opposition leaders continued at a brisk pace, and in January 2004, four months into the election stalemate, two men on a black motorcycle with license plates removed, wearing helmets with dark-tinted faceplates, pulled up to a street stall where a man named Chea Vichea was reading a newspaper. They shot him dead and then sped off.

  Chea Vichea was the nation’s most prominent labor leader, president of the Free Trade Union of Workers of Cambodia. He had organized numerous workers’ rights marches and demonstrations. He was a member of the Sam Rainsy Party. His death haunted the CPP for years—especially after the courts trumped up charges against two obviously innocent men and sentenced both to long prison terms.7 The CPP was following what was now standard and established practice: Peel away some opposition-party members with blandishments and bribes. Kill the rest.

  This behavior wasn’t restricted to the Sam Rainsy Party, either. In January 2004 assailants broke into Meach Youen’s home while he was sleeping and shot him in the face with an AK-47 assault rifle. He was an important Funcinpec official and the fifth opposition figure to be murdered in just that month.

  The tactic was remarkably effective. Typically, a CPP enforcer would call or visit an opposition-party officer and offer him a senior position in government, one that came with the sobriquet “his excellency,” along with a rich down payment and a coveted spot amid the cash flow. The officer could visit the Toyota dealer and drive home in his new Land Cruiser that very afternoon. It was an offer he could not refuse. Say no, the officer well knew, and he could end up like Chea Vichea or Meach Youen by the end of the week.

  The defections and killings steadily reduced the opposition parties’ strength. A few weeks later, as Rainsy’s bargaining position slowly dissolved, he proclaimed that his party and Ranariddh’s would merge. Ranariddh didn’t have much to say about that; he was still in France. But Ranariddh had betrayed Rainsy before. Perhaps, Rainsy certainly thought, this would lock him in. At the same news conference he once again warned that Hun Sen was about to kill him and, true to form, appealed to his foreign friends to protect him.

  A few weeks later the two parties formally announced a “merger,” as planned, but that lasted only a short while. In June Ranariddh finally struck a lucrative deal with Hun Sen that allowed his party to enter a coalition with the CPP—and leave Rainsy out in the cold.

  Ranariddh had needed the previous months to negotiate the arrangement he wanted. The merger with Rainsy’s party had been simply a bargaining tool. Under the resulting deal Hun Sen and Ranariddh would split “commissions,” the payments oknya and others made to Hun Sen or Ranariddh to buy land for deforestation, commercial development, mineral mining, or other exploitative purposes. Sixty percent of these payments would go to Hun Sen, 40 percent to Ranariddh, Steven Heder reported in Southeast Asian Affairs.

  When word of this leaked out, Funcinpec and Rainsy party members began tripping over each other in the scramble to pay Ranariddh large sums for the government positions they hoped to hold. Most of the money was wasted. In June, eleven months after the election, Ranariddh agreed on a platform for the new government that included not a word of the Alliance of Democrats’ reform platform—or any place for Sam Rainsy Party members. Hun Sen would remain as prime minister, Ranariddh as president of the National Assembly.

  Once again, Rainsy got nothing. Soon he was almost all by himself. Over the summer more than a hundred members of his political party defected to Funcinpec, Ranariddh’s party. Ranariddh held a welcoming ceremony at his party headquarters and told the Rainsy Party deserters, “I will send the list of defectors to Prime Minister Hun Sen and let the government offer appropriate positions to them.” Twisting the knife in Rainsy’s heart one more time, he also urged more of his party members to defect.

  But Rainsy was not the only one he betrayed. Ranariddh had worked out his own lucrative deal, and in the process he had abandoned his own party, too. Funcinpec would now control the Ministries of Health, Rural Development, Tourism, Public Works and Transport, and Education as well as Culture and Fine Arts. With the possible exception of Public Works and Transport, none of the ministries offered any opportunity for significant graft. Once again, Hun Sen and Ranariddh had worked everything nicely for themselves, while doing nothing for their allies—or for the Cambodian people.

  A few weeks after the new government took office, the U.S. Embassy greeted the duo with a comprehensive and devastating research report on what it called “grand corruption.” It showed that government officials stole up to $500 million each and every year—about half of the state’s annual budget—almost every dollar the government collected on its own. The other half of the budget consisted of donations from NGOs.

  In effect, the government chieftains left the care of the people to foreign donors while using the state’s own money to care for themselves. “The Royal Government of Cambodia collects very limited legal revenues, as large sums are lost to smuggling, bribes and other illegal practices,” the report concluded. “Further losses are experienced once revenues enter the state financial system. Informants estimated annual diversions from government coffers ranging between $300 and $500 million.”

  A team of American consultants, working for USAID, had worked for much of a year and laid out a stunning description of a pervasive patronage system that affected every facet of Cambodian society. “Grand corruption involving illegal grants of logging concessions coexist with the nearly universal practice of small facilitation payments to speed or simply secure service delivery. Police and other officials demand small bribes in numerous guises. Students across the public school system pay unofficial daily fees to supplement salaries of teachers and administrators, and perhaps fill the pockets of highlevel ministry officials. The same is true in public health, where access to services is often contingent on supplemental payments to doctors, nurses or other health-care personnel.”

  Among their findings was a pernicious tax system. As in most nations, taxes were collected ostensibly to pay for health, education, social development, and other state services for the people. Instead, each time a tax collector visited a business, he told the owner that he would forgive the tax debt if the businessman paid him a somewhat smaller bribe instead. Most businessmen complied—to save money and possible trouble if they refused. “Some observers have argued that such payments are taxes in another form. While there is some truth in this observation, this form of corruption places businesses in a legally and morally ambiguous position, tainted by their own actions, and readily subject to additional, irregular exactions from officials. The costs to citizens-at-large are even gre
ater. Low formal tax payments lead to poor health and education services and second-rate infrastructure. And because potential foreign and indigenous investors refuse to do business in Cambodia, few jobs are created, and additional legal revenues are foregone.” For these and many other instances of depravity and turpitude, the consultants found, no one was ever punished:

  Corruption is structured more or less as a pyramid, with petty exactions meeting the survival needs of policemen, teachers and health workers, but also shared with officials higher in the system. Patronage and mutual obligations are the center of an all-embracing system. Appointment to public office hinges on political connections or payment of surprisingly large sums, and these payments are recouped through a widely accepted right to collect bribes. And impunity is the norm.

  No one involved with the patronage of the state is punished, whether for massive pillaging or petty theft. In fact, those most at risk are individuals and organizations that dare to resist corruption. Most Cambodians regard resistance as a futile act.

  The report was devastating. As Hun Sen considered his response, still another scandal spilled out, first reported by the Phnom Penh Post. World Food Program officials discovered in August 2004 that about 4,000 tons of rice worth more than $2 million had been stolen en route to some of the nation’s poorest areas, where it was supposed to feed Cambodia’s most malnourished children. The thieves then sold the stolen rice for cash.

  The WFP fed millions of children in desperately poor countries worldwide. Typically, it provided school lunches, as an inducement for parents to send their children to school. The lunches, rice and fish, were often the only meals the children would get each day. WFP and UNICEF surveys found that at least one-third of Cambodian children were malnourished. The WFP classified the situation as “alarming.” UNICEF data showed that about 40 percent of Cambodia’s children were “stunted” for lack of nutrition, and 10 percent suffered from wasting, meaning essentially that they were starving to death. Given those numbers, it was no surprise that one child in ten died before reaching age five. That is why the theft of WFP rice was so devastating for the children who were to have eaten it. Most likely, some of them died as a result, as the thieves should certainly have known.