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

by Joel Brinkley

  Jean-Pierre de Margerie, head of the World Food Program office in Cambodia, observed that “lots of people here think food security is inventory. They refer to total production. But food access is the biggest problem. In fact, it’s huge. Between 1.4 million and 1.5 million people are chronically food insecure,” meaning they cannot get enough food to supply 2,000 calories a day. Aware of this, while government leaders sold off much of Cambodia’s rice, and pocketed the proceeds, they also asked the Asian Development Bank to donate rice for Cambodia’s poor. “The food-security concern in Cambodia is not whether the country is capable of producing sufficient food to feed its own population,” said Arjun Goswami, the bank’s country director. “It has been capable for several years now. The concern is whether” any of this abundance is made available to the nation’s own people.

  While rice sacks were stacked on trucks and ships for export, the Asian Development Bank declared an “unprecedented food-security emergency” and budgeted $38 million in “emergency food assistance”—$38 million worth of rice. That was the rice the people of Dang Rung village said they never got.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  If education is the answer for Cambodian society, as so many experts assert, then the nation is lost. In a nationwide survey only 2.6 percent of Cambodia’s schoolteachers said they were providing students “a high-quality education.” That should be little surprise. Education is by its very nature a reflection of the society it tries to teach. So every foible and folly that crippled the nation can be found in the schools.

  Every day, just before Chhith Sam Ath’s two young sons headed out the door for elementary school, their mother gave each of them a small wad of cash. As soon as they entered the classroom, they handed the teacher their money. So did all the other students, one by one. Children who didn’t make the daily payments were likely to get bad grades. In some schools they were sent home or forced to stand in the corner until it was time to leave.

  Tens of thousands of poor families do not send their children to school because they simply cannot afford to pay the bribes. In Cambodia, school has never been mandatory, so these children may end up working in the rice paddies, or else their parents take them to Thailand to beg. The International Labor Organization estimated that 38 percent of Cambodia’s children between ages seven and fifteen worked at least part-time. “We can see them in restaurants, children selling things on the street. Pulling carts. Working in brick factories. Picking trash at dumps,” said Rong Chhum, president of the national teachers’ union. Others worked in neighboring countries as beggars or prostitutes. “A lot of children do not have any education at all.” And so another generation is lost.

  The problem isn’t just children who don’t go to school. For those who do choose education, “you go to school and learn how to bribe people,” said Chhith Sam Ath, a nonprofit association leader, shaking his head. Teachers, in turn, had to give some of their bribe money to their principals. “We are required to pay 2,500 riel, 5,000 riel,” between 50 cents and $1.20, “to the principal at the end of the month,” Rong Chhum said. Principals, in turn, had to pass some of that money up to the local Education Ministry office. An NGO study called that “a facilitation fee,” required before the ministry would release salaries and other state funds for the schools.

  These fees and payments are all but untraceable. All government salaries and payments were made in cash, and they were not documented. “Everyone in government is paid in cash,” said In Channy, president of Acleda Bank. In fact, “77 percent of the economy works on cash.” What’s more, that USAID corruption investigation said, “the national budget was described to the assessment team as non-existent or in even more derisive terms.” Without a budget, there could be no accountability.

  Bribing teachers was an evergreen story in the nation’s newspapers. In late 2009 the Phnom Penh Post reported that the economic crisis had pushed teachers to double the amount of their bribes. “Oung Bunoun, 12, a third-grader at Tuol Svay Prey, said students have to pay money to their teachers, and that if they don’t, they will receive lower grades,” the paper wrote. “A teacher from Phnom Penh’s Anuvath primary school, who declined to be named, said Monday that she has to collect money from her students because she cannot feed her family with the salary provided. ‘It’s not only me that takes money from them but also the other teachers,’ she said. ‘So why can’t I?’ Chea Cheat, president of the Municipal Department of Education, acknowledged that the department allows teachers to take money from students but said it would take action against any school that forces students to pay more than 500 riels.” Even the education minister, Im Sethy, considered the bribes an unavoidable fact of life. “Our policy is to cut down on these irregularities, but if you look at the living conditions of these people, it’s understandable,” he said with a matter-of-fact tone.

  Because of the bribes, poverty, and other factors, 15 to 20 percent of the nation’s five and six year olds never entered school. The percentage was probably higher; the statistics conflicted. For those who did go to school, “the average class sizes are 75–80 students,” the education minister said. “It’s very hard for the teacher.”

  “After the first year, already 10 percent of them drop out,” said Teruo Jinnai, head of the UNESCO office in Phnom Penh. “And then 10 percent after that. And by the time they finish the 6th grade, half of them are gone.” Just under 13 percent go on to high school, and fewer still graduate. About 3 percent go on to college.

  The percentages can be far lower in rural areas. “I would say only half go to school,” said Mou Neam, village chief in Bon Skol, just west of the Vietnam border. “The village school goes up to the sixth grade. The few who go on to the higher grades go up the road to another school, two kilometers away.”

  In Dang Rung village in Pursat Province, village chief Kok Chuum said, “Fifty children entered first grade this year. Only two are in high school, and they will probably drop out after grade 9,” when public education is no longer free.

  The few students who reached high school had been so well schooled in the art of bribery that they had learned how to buy their way to a diploma. High school teachers would sell them answers to tests; they would also take money to change a grade or cover up absences. All of it came to a head at final exam time each summer. “It’s like a battlefield,” Education Minister Im Sethy said.

  In the classroom students collaborated. They collected a pool of cash, two or three dollars each, and offered it to the teacher when he walked in with the final-exam papers. If he accepted the bribe, a student would then photocopy the answer key and pass it out to all the others who had contributed. If the teacher wouldn’t play along, then street vendors sitting at folding tables outside the school sold answer sheets of uncertain provenance. Photocopy shops set up satellite businesses outside large urban schools, and each year newspapers published photos of students mobbing the vendors. In 2009 the Cambodia Daily quoted sixteen-year-old Kanhchana saying, “It will be a tough time for us during the exam if the teachers will not accept money.” Another student, Nhan Theary, added, “We can do everything by ourselves, but the result will not be so good.”

  Every year Rong Chhum, the teachers’ union president, issued a warning: Don’t allow the students to cheat! That seemed counterintuitive since it was his members, the teachers, who facilitated the cheating. But the union took the position that their members had no choice but to take money because their pay was so low—as little as forty-five dollars a month.

  Each year Im Sethy asked the Interior Ministry and the army to send squads of police and soldiers to the schools, and sometimes the officers shooed away the answer-key vendors sitting at tables. Other times they looked away. “Year by year we try to make it better,” Im Sethy said. “For example, this year I ordered that the photocopy centers in schools be closed. We spread out the desks” so students could not share answer keys. Nevertheless, Rong Chhum disagreed. “The students pay off the police. It was the same as last year. The
re was still a lot of cheating.” The result of all this, he said, “is 75 percent of public school students move through the system without getting even a basic knowledge of the subjects they study.” He said this with a tone of dark certainty and a determined stare. “The majority of students seem to know nothing.”

  Students applying for medical school proved the point. In 2008 1,800 students took the entrance exam. To pass students had to get at least half of the answers right. Only 369 of them managed even that. The students rallied and protested and screamed and yelled until finally the medical school relented and said a score of 25 percent was enough to enter medical school, which entitled another 507 students to pass. Still, more than half the test takers, after cheating and bribing their way through school, had been unable to answer even one question out of four correctly.

  At the National University of Management, “We used to require a thesis for graduation,” said Seng Bunthoeun, the vice rector. “But students would just copy old cases. They cheated. So we dropped it.” Just like their forebears, the students had managed to graduate but had learned little if anything at all.

  When King Norodom first handed sovereignty over his state to France in 1863, the occupiers found a nation almost uniformly illiterate. Cambodia had not a single school, just those temple classes, where monks taught the children about Buddhism, the Cambodian oral tradition, and perhaps how to read sacred texts. Historians have concluded that the education system changed little, if at all, between the Angkorian period and the early twentieth century.

  A primary goal of educators remained to reinforce the social hierarchy. Historian David Ayres showed that the Buddhist notion of individual helplessness is the central factor in that process. As he wrote, “Students were equipped to become citizens in a system in which they were taught to refer to themselves as slaves and to willingly accept the necessity of their subservience to individuals of higher social status.”

  From their earliest years Cambodian children learned that ambition and personal aspiration should not, could not, be a part of their character. Be satisfied with the life you have, the monks told them, no matter how poor or menial. Education “simply took children from the rice fields and then gave them back to the rice fields.”

  Girls were instructed to expect even less. They were not permitted to attend even the temple classes. Instead, their mothers taught them subservience and docility. Nothing embodied that idea more than the Chbab Srey, a piece of traditional literature that described a woman’s place in the home, written in the form of a mother talking to her daughter. One passage said: “Dear, no matter what your husband did wrong, I tell you to be patient, don’t say anything ... don’t curse, don’t be the enemy. No matter how poor or stupid, you don’t look down on him. ... No matter what the husband says, angry and cursing, using strong words without end, complaining and cursing because he is not pleased, you should be patient with him and calm down your anger.” The Chbab Srey was required reading in the schools until 2007, when Ing Kantha Phavi, the minister of women’s affairs, managed to convince the Education Ministry to pull it from the curriculum. Nonetheless, she acknowledged, “it is still taught in rural areas.” This in a nation where more than 80 percent of the people lived in rural areas.

  Into the early twentieth century, the nation had not a single middle school, high school, or college. The French built the first high schools and middle schools in the 1930s, all of them in Phnom Penh. But the French occupiers weren’t interested in educating children for the betterment of Cambodian society. No, these children were trained specifically to become administrators in the French colonial government. As government employees, they received better than decent pay, by Cambodian standards. Better still, the young bureaucrats immediately found themselves sitting astride the flow of graft money. Could there be a better job?

  In the 1960s King Sihanouk began building more and more schools, even though almost no one in the nation was educated or equipped to teach. The building of schools did have the ancillary effect of involving the government in village life for the first time in Cambodian history. However, the paucity of educated teachers was a problem that would linger for decades.

  In 2008 Suomi Sakai, head of the UNICEF office, explained why, on average, it took ten years for a child to finish elementary school. “One reason is teacher training; some of the teachers in rural areas have no better than a third grade education.” In the mid-1950s fewer than 1 child in 60 managed to complete elementary school. Just 1 child in 3,000 made it to high school.

  Even with his new schools in chaos, Sihanouk decided to build a university system. A technical college opened in 1964 whose primary mission was to teach agronomy and other skills related to agriculture. But the students showed no interest. More than 90 percent of the technical university’s 1,300 students majored in the liberal arts, the course work they needed to get a lucrative government job. They wanted to be modern-day mandarins. Just 117 studied agronomy. Sihanouk was appalled. “Students must adapt themselves to various professions,” he declared. “Unfortunately everyone wants to be a red tape artist.” He repeatedly warned that his government simply did not have enough jobs for everyone. The students ignored him, and most graduates remained unemployed.

  But then the French had structured the primary and secondary education system to train Cambodians for government service. Sihanouk advocated reform, but it never came. Almost fifty years later, in 2009, Women’s Affairs Minister Ing Kantha Phavi noted, “It’s still the dream of every Cambodian to work in government. They can make a lot of money,” she added with a smile, while offering the slippery-finger gesticulation for corruption. “Very few get hired now, but it is still the dream. These other areas,” engineering, agriculture, technology, “they are not attractive subjects.” What’s more, “a lot of parents don’t like to see their children working in these other areas.”

  Students remained so focused on becoming mandarins that the state had little choice but to build the National University of Management. It opened in its current form in 2004 and immediately became the most popular college in Cambodia’s university system. “We have 15,000 students, and ours is by far the most popular major,” said Vice Rector Seng Bunthoeun. “We teach them law, economics, history, English, general culture. But students don’t like courses not related to management”—usually, he added, “because their parents push them to do that. They want to join the government, but each year the ministries take only about 30 students.” So only about 10 percent of his graduates actually found jobs. “I try to help them,” but he faced the same problem university rectors confronted during Sihanouk’s time.

  Sun Thun taught social studies to middle school students in Kampong Thom Province, north of Phnom Penh. He offered lessons in democracy, human rights ... and corruption. That’s what got him into trouble. “My teaching on corruption is short,” he said, thrusting forward a tattered paperback textbook. “It’s all in here.” He tapped the book urgently with his index finger. “But I explain it with real examples of corruption from the community. For example, during exams students have to pay money to teachers to pass. They have to pay money so they can cheat on the exams.”

  The principal somehow heard about this bit of course work and reported Sun Thun to the district office. An official charged him with “unprofessional behavior” and ordered him transferred to a school in the province’s hinterlands. Sun Thun refused, and the teachers’ association organized large demonstrations in Kampong Thom and Phnom Penh, outside the Education Ministry. Sun Thun was also the Cambodia Independent Teachers’ Association local representative. He appealed, and the transfer was stayed while the appeal was considered.

  Sitting in the yard outside the Kampong Thom office of the teachers’ union, Sun Thun was dressed as a professional in a striped white shirt with a button-down collar, shirt tail out, and black pants. Agitated, angry, arms waving, his expression squint-eyed wary, he leaned far forward, almost as if he believed he needed to be in physical contact
for his words to hold meaning. How did the school learn what he was teaching in his classroom? “The principal sneaked over to listen to me,” he said, shaking his forefinger. “He knows I am president of the CITA,” the teachers’ union. “I started a debate on the budget and the payroll of the school,” highlighting the inevitable kickbacks and corruption. “So the principal is not happy with me. A teacher, to be principal of the school, must make payoffs to his superiors. The teachers have to pay him or buy food or beer. I didn’t pay him. That’s why he turned me in, that plus my questions about the school budget.”

  Principal Te Kim Sien denied it all. “Sun Thun did wrong and abused his professional position,” he said in his dark office that doubled as the school storeroom (like most, this school had no electricity). He wore a pink T-shirt and a grave expression. “I will not allow him to stir up trouble here anymore.” He went on: “We don’t sell exam results here. In Baray District, I have never heard of paying for exams.” Keng Vantaa, a young teacher sitting beside him, chimed in without being asked and offered a confirmatory rebuttal. “We don’t have to pay to get jobs. Teachers here are not interested in promotion. We like teaching. So there’s no need to pay anyone.” While insisting that not a hint of corruption tainted the school, the principal and his friend showed little hesitation describing the school system’s underbelly. As illustration, they pointed to a new one-story classroom building.

  Cambodia had held elections again in the summer of 2008, and this time Hun Sen, using all the aboveboard and underhanded tactics employed in previous elections, won a decisive majority. He needed no coalition partners. (He’d recently managed to change the law so the winner needed only 50 percent of the vote, not two-thirds.) Ranariddh had retired from government and taken a position in the royal palace.9 And Sam Rainsy became a strident opposition leader with no role except to complain.