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

by Joel Brinkley

  The WFP fired several Cambodian employees, and newspapers reported that some senior government officials were implicated—though, of course, none were ever penalized. But Hun Sen was contrite. He promised to pay the WFP back, either in rice or in cash.

  As for his formal response to the corruption report, he apparently realized that the annual donors meeting was just a few weeks away. This would be an inopportune time to lash out at the United States, the nation that had paid for the report. So Hun Sen pulled out that old chestnut, always available for troubled moments like this. He promised once again to pass the anticorruption law.

  The amazing thing was that anyone believed him. Hun Sen had first proposed this law in 1995, another moment when donors were restive over corruption. The offer had quieted them for a while, and the government had then thrown up an imaginative array of excuses and roadblocks to explain away the failure to pass the bill. For example, answering questions during the previous donor meeting, Hun Sen had promised to pass the law by the end of June 2003. And in fact, that June a law was brought up before the parliament for a vote. But it failed because the assembly could not muster a quorum. Someone had stipulated that, for this particular vote on that particular day, seven-eighths of the assembly membership had to be present. Every opposition member was there. Somehow, though, just enough members of Hun Sen’s own political party failed to show up. So the proposed law was shelved for another year.

  When the 2004 donor meeting dawned, the donors were in a nasty mood. American ambassador Charles Ray dropped his diplomatic veneer and lambasted the Cambodian leadership. “Ordinary Cambodians,” he told Hun Sen and the state’s other leaders assembled before him, “are subject to a daunting array of small and medium exactions, some paid virtually on a daily basis.” He noted that the corruption report had highlighted the significant loss in revenue due to smuggling, bribes, and other illegal practices. The total, up to $500 million, was roughly equal to the amount the donors gave each year. As an example, payments students made to teachers each morning, starting in the first grade, “suggest that children as young as six are already being schooled in the art of corruption and bribery.”

  When his turn came to speak, Hun Sen put away his usual scornful bombast and did not respond directly to the angry accusations. Cambodia, he said, was “at a crossroads in its difficult journey towards sustainable development and poverty reduction.” He promised again that his administration would pass the long-awaited anticorruption law, aggressively fight corruption, strengthen government institutions, and improve governance.

  All of the donors had heard that before. Some shook their heads and rolled their eyes. When they finally made their pledges the total came to only $504 million for the coming year—almost $100 million less than they had provided at the last meeting. Cambodia had asked the donors to pledge $1.8 billion to be paid over the next three years, “but the donors would have none of it,” Verghese Mathews, the former Singapore ambassador to Cambodia, wrote in the Straits Times. “The donor community has been demanding good governance for years and is not amused at the unacceptably slow pace of reforms.” Now, the former ambassador added, “the signal was clear—future aid would be conditional” on progress. But Hun Sen had heard that before, too, and experience had shown him that he needn’t worry about it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  When the government delivered some emergency food assistance, three hundred residents of Dang Rung village rioted. Some of them saw the sacks of free rice, scores of them, delivered to the village chief. But none of them got any. So they naturally assumed he had given the rice to his family, friends, and CPP cronies, leaving none for the rest of the villagers. “We didn’t see even a grain of rice,” fifty-six-year-old Saing Moeva said with a sneer. He was rolling a cigarette from a plastic bag holding a small bit of tobacco, leaning against a pillar holding up his one-room home. Asked if he had ever received any aid from the government, he chortled as he said, “Yes, every five years,” at election time. “They come around and give us a sarong, 2.5 grams of seasoning, and a scarf.” His sense of humor was rare among Cambodians. In fact, it was quite rare to see Cambodians laugh at all. Given their desperate situation, they seldom even smiled.

  His wife, Mou Chouerm, rose from the hammock under the house and pointed at a small cultivated patch. “I grow mint and sell it at market,” she said, her voice slurred. “I can earn 7,000 riel, maybe 10,000.” That’s roughly $1.75 to $2.50. The slur was the product of an ugly deformity. She’d had a stroke years earlier and lost control of the right side of her face. Her mouth drooped, baring her teeth, almost as if a lead weight pulled at it. She had looked like this since 1985, when she collapsed and her husband decided “to take her where they could treat her with traditional medicine. She had bad spirits, so we went to a secret spirit house about thirty kilometers from here. A traditional drama group played music to chase away the spirits. It didn’t really help.”

  In 1985, during the Vietnamese occupation, professional health care was largely unavailable in the provinces. But the spirit treatment left more lasting damage. Not only did Mou Chouerm and Saing Moeva have to pay about $500 for the ceremony, “we also had to buy alcohol, beef, and other food for those people.” To come up with the necessary funds, the family had to sell half of its land. Now Mou Chouerm still presented an ugly sneer, and they owned so little land that they could not produce enough rice to feed themselves. That is why they were so excited to hear that the Asian Development Bank was donating free rice to the poor.

  A villager working for the local government had come by to take their names and location. But to get to their house, he had to pass a Funcinpec Party sign planted at the head of the dirt track leading to their home. And when he spoke to Saing Moeva, the odds that day were fifty-fifty that he was wearing a Human Rights Party T-shirt. During the recent campaign party workers had come by handing these out for free. “No, no, I am CPP,” he objected, waving his arms, as if to say otherwise would suggest treason. “Any political party can put up a sign.” In fact, those signs dotted the countryside, everywhere. “They asked me, and I said okay, but I didn’t know they would put it on my property.” As for the shirt, “I have only two, and I wear this one sometimes.” He pointed to the other, a blue work shirt hanging from a nail under the house. Animated, he gesticulated urgently toward his pants, his only pair, torn over the left knee. “We are poor; we are very poor.”

  To prove the point, Mou Chouerm climbed the log ladder into their small house. The floor was almost bare. Practically their only possession was a twelve-inch National-brand black-and-white television sitting on a rusted folding TV table, wired to a car battery on the floor. To watch it they sat on the floor. She pointed to the tin ceiling, speckled with bright spots, the tropical sunlight shining through scores of tiny holes—so many that, when it rained, they could take a shower. She shook her head and, unable to shake her anger, she again said: “We didn’t get any rice.”

  Down the dirt road, around a bend, Chan Yat sat quietly on a neighbor’s stoop. At seventy-six, she was ancient. On average Cambodians could hope to live to about sixty. She had few teeth, so her lips curled into her mouth. She shaved her head. The furrows on her face seemed to testify to a difficult life. She was the poorest of the poor, and her reality had changed little if at all since she was born here in this village in 1933. Some of her neighbors now had battery-powered radios and television sets. A few had motor scooters. But nearly all of them lived on what they could forage or grow and slept in hammocks under their bamboo-walled homes. Some of those same huts were standing there, she said, when she was a little girl.

  Chan Yat walked slowly to her own house, leaning on a cane, a bamboo sapling that happened to have a crook at the top. She lived in a miniature Cambodian house on stilts just two feet high. They held up an enclosure maybe five feet by five feet and no more than four feet tall. The walls were woven palm fronds halfway up toward the roof. The upper half was covered with empty Blue Diamond Cement bags ta
cked to the frame.

  She spoke in a whisper. “Yes, I got some rice. A bag, fifty kilograms. The village chief brought it.” Her son, a laborer, normally brought her a bit of food now and then. As she spoke a crowd gathered outside, fifteen or twenty people. Visitors were in town, asking about the rice! The villagers tried to outshout each other. “I didn’t get any,” said a middle-aged woman. “Not a grain. Nothing!” Another woman angrily insisted, “They gave the rice to the people who don’t need it. Those people probably sold it. They didn’t give any to the people who would actually eat it.” She rubbed her stomach as if to say, I am hungry. A scrawny gray cat with a white belly sidled past her, scanning the ground for food. It pounced on a spider.

  As the villagers grew angrier and angrier, Chan Yat, the only one there who had actually been given some of the rice, sat quietly, leaning on her bamboo cane, looking down at the dirt. “People here are very poor,” a man shouted. “We didn’t get any food. We never get any food! It all goes to them,” he snarled, pointing in the direction of the village chief’s house.

  Kok Chuum had heard it all before. He had been village chief for seven years. He was a warm, voluble, soft-spoken fellow with cheekbones so high they seemed to be reaching for his forehead. As he sat at a table in the yard of his small compound, four buildings and sheds holding stores and equipment, he explained, “The food we get is not for everyone.” Chickens, ducks, and pigs wandered about. “There’s not enough. Some years only enough for four families. Some years twenty. We rotate. This year we got four tons, enough for forty families,” more than half the village.

  Even so, some people say they have never been given any rice—not even a grain, they like to say. “I know some people say that, hoping to get more,” he explained in a quiet tone, showing no surprise. “But that’s a lie. I think the problem here is the state of mind. Some people go to the water and come back with empty hands.” He shook his head. His manner was sorrowful, not disparaging. “The way of thinking here is very low. They don’t have any ambition. They go to school and come out without any idea of doing anything.”

  Kok Chuum was in his forties, and like most people his age, he had attended a temple school through the third grade where he did learn to read and write; that’s all. But he was a man in motion, and that had obviously paid off. He was quite prosperous, by his village’s standards.

  Asked what he earns, he offered a counterintuitive answer, for Cambodians, and talked instead about how much he was able to save. “If I don’t have a wedding to pay for or some other big expense, I can save 2 million riel a year.” That’s almost $500, roughly the average per-capita income for Cambodians. A few years earlier he had bought a rice mill—a primitive, almost cartoonish-looking device that sat in a shed. A gas-powered motor turned a ten-foot cloth belt that in turn spun gears, each almost three feet in perimeter. Kok Chuum used it to make rice-based animal feed for sale. The machine cost him $1,400 a few years earlier, “and I have not made my investment back yet.”

  He asked visitors to remove their shoes before climbing the log ladder to his house. Inside, his young daughter watched cartoons on a small battery-powered color television. The house was painted a dark red—the only one in his village with paint. Moralistic public-service posters decorated the walls. One showed a man sleeping under a tree, a straw hat pulled low over his eyes, next to a broken-down cart. His oxen were wandering away. Others offered picture stories preaching against alcoholism, drugs, domestic violence.

  From his villagers came the constant refrain, punctuating every conversation: “I am poor” or “I am hungry.” Kok Chuum had his own personal declaration, offered repeatedly: “I work very hard.” He had learned to rely on no one else. After all, as the CPP village chief, Kok Chuum sat on the lowest rung of the government ladder. The position paid only $10 a month.

  Asked what his government did for his constituents, he answered, “The dikes and canals. And they maintain the road and the bridges.” Just what King Indravarman III had done for his people nearly a millennium earlier.

  Kok Chuum’s remarks, and those of the villagers, did not sit well with His Excellency Chhay Sareth, Pursat Province’s longtime governor and now its provincial council chief. He sat in the provincial government’s council room at one end of a twenty-five-foot conference table that seated at least forty people. Along the wall at the other end loomed a massive video conferencing system with a fifty-inch Sony LCD monitor, a camera on a tripod, and a rack of assorted equipment.

  A few months earlier, Hun Sen had asked every province to install one. He’d been in western Cambodia for the dedication of a new $450 million golf course and sports complex. The prime minister was an enthusiastic golfer. He had built an eighteen-hole course at his country estate, and his official government Web site lists his scores ahead of everything else (“Number of pars: 51 percent”). But while visiting he had ordered each of the twenty-four provinces, the army, and bordercontrol stations to install video conferencing systems because, he said, “This will allow me to give direct orders following my reading of local media.” Ministries and departments should also convert to this “new gadget,” the prime minister added.

  Pursat was one of the nation’s poorest provinces, and the equipment cost between $50,000 and $75,000. Chhay Sareth pointed to it, saying, “We need to use more machinery. Cambodia is behind other countries. We need to get to modern times.” For now, though, he wanted to talk about a more primitive issue, the food aid. He leaned forward, pushing down hard on the table as he said in a sharp tone, “The government cannot satisfy everyone. The food aid is very limited. The people like to say the authorities don’t take care of them. But sometimes the people don’t receive the food aid because they are not home. They are away—job migration—and when they get back it is too late. But the poverty is not from this food-aid confusion. It’s from laziness. Or, the people have lost the land they had for farming.” Then the governor sat up straight, hands on his hips. “I don’t agree that most people don’t trust the government. I am here, president of the provincial council, and we lead from zero. Pol Pot killed everything. We are still rebuilding.”

  Chhay Sareth relaxed a bit and sat back in his chair. He wore a tan safari suit and gold wire-rim eyeglasses, an outfit identical to the one Hun Sen often wore.8 Unlike some other governors, he did not present an ostentatious show of wealth. A plastic pen stuck out of his pocket; on his wrist he wore a simple gold watch and on his left hand a small diamond ring.

  His people, Chhay Sareth acknowledged, live a life that “is a kickback to centuries ago. This is Cambodia’s tradition.” He was hardly the only official to refer to abject poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, disease, and premature death as “Cambodia’s tradition.” He concluded, “I cannot say what my council will do, but we have a work plan, and we need to improve agriculture.”

  So say his colleagues, nationwide. In 2009 the parliament changed the law to give the provinces more money and greater control of their fates. To manage this it set up new provincial counsels. Flush with this new authority and the promise of new cash, a half-dozen governors and council chairmen described their vision for the twenty-first century. But, to a man, they echoed Chhay Sareth’s tenth-century ideas.

  Chan Sophal, chairman of the provincial council in Siem Reap Province, dressed in that same tan safari suit, the same gold-frame glasses, told of his ambition: “Better roads and irrigation for remote, rural people.” His gold watch bore small images of the CPP’s three iconic leaders, Prime Minister Hun Sen, Deputy Prime Minister Sok An, and Chea Sim, president of the senate. Viewed from across the chairman’s desk, the three tiny faces brought to mind old publicity photos of The Three Stooges, Moe, Larry, and Curly. “Give them a better capability to farm,” chairman Chan Sophal continued. “Help them improve their land so they can grow more rice.”

  In Kampong Thom Province, north of Phnom Penh, council chairman Nam Tum wore exactly the same uniform and offered a similar plan. “For a long time, people
have relied on the tradition, living on forest products. We need to change the Cambodian tradition so that people don’t live by nature anymore. Then we could have a real free market.” He sat in the lobby of the governor’s mansion in one of those high-back luxury-wood chairs with serpentine carvings. Two rows of these chairs faced each other, twelve of them in all. Behind him, hanging high on the wall, were portraits of the king and queen mother. Two brown lizards crawled over the queen’s face. “We must solve the problems of the agriculture sector so it can grow. The well-educated people were killed by the Khmer Rouge. So today’s younger generation, the people who are trained and educated, if we want to grow as a nation we need to send these people back to help the farmers improve their rice.”

  In Battambang Province, Governor Prach Chann’s safari suit was linen, not cotton. A gold pen stuck out of his breast pocket. He sat on one side of a conference table for twelve people, a microphone at each place. His massive, richly carved luxury-wood desk loomed at the end of the room. His views were consistent with those of his counterparts in other provinces: “The way people make a living is traditional. We want to pursue conservation and development to maintain our regional culture related to the development of agriculture.” But like several of his colleagues, he also blamed his people, saying “their poverty is from laziness.”