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

by Joel Brinkley

  During the campaign Hun Sen promised Te Kim Sien’s school a new building with twelve classrooms and a reception hall. On election day the building was partly built, and the lumber for the rest lay stacked beside it. It happened, though, that the majority of voters in the Baray District where Sun Thun taught had voted for the Sam Rainsy Party. The day after the election, workers showed up and hauled all the lumber away. “All construction materials were removed during the night and later sold at auction,” Sun Thun said at the time. “I think the CPP spent a lot of money here, and when they didn’t get the votes, they became spiteful.” The episode received negative attention in the news media, and the workers eventually returned—with new marching orders. “After hauling away all of the lumber for the school after the election,” said Keng Vantaa, “they built a new building, but the metal was so cheap they could not build two stories, as needed. So we got this.” He pointed to the small one-story building with two or three classrooms. That did little to address the school’s shortage of class space.

  The school also had too few teachers, and like the majority of schools nationwide, most of them worked only part-time. They left early, cutting their classes short, or skipping them altogether, so they could work second jobs. The workday for middle and upper schools was supposed to be from 7:00 to 11:00 a.m. and then from 2:00 to 4:40 p.m., but “five teachers leave early every day because they have a job with an NGO,” Sun Thun said. They didn’t show up for their afternoon classes. The principal downplayed the problem. “Most of the teachers, their wives work,” he averred. “But some have a grocery store, say, and leave early to work there.”

  This problem sprang up as a result of a directive from Phnom Penh intended to discourage teachers from demanding bribes from their students. “We are going to allow them to work after school—tutoring, for example,” Im Sethy said in 2008, when he was deputy education minister. “We are encouraging teachers to solve their own problems.” So teachers began taking after-school jobs that soon evolved into during-school jobs, including paid tutoring—while still taking bribes from their students.

  Te Kim Sien may have been innocent of everything Sun Thun alleged, but across the country school principals were often considered part of the problem—as corrupt and self-interested as anyone in government. Many had paid their supervisors for their appointment, and so they felt entitled to recompense.

  In another part of Kampong Thom Province, teachers at Phat Sanday secondary school charged their principal with billing the school district for ghost teachers, a hallowed Cambodian tradition. When the principal heard of the complaint, he held back (and probably kept for himself) two months of overtime pay belonging to the seven teachers who complained.

  In Prey Veng Province, in the Southeast, the teachers’ association pointed out that the principal of Neak Leung secondary school had built a fence around his house next to the school, extending it onto school property, grabbing more than 125 square yards. The principal professed to be trying to protect the land from “land-grabbing villagers,” and Hoem Sophal, the provincial school director, offered a flippant explanation. He claimed that the teachers “were involved” in the principal’s land grab, too. He didn’t explain how. But then Hoem Sophal had little regard for teachers anyway. A few months earlier they had accused him of skimming from their salaries. His explanation then: He was volunteering as a monk and could not respond to the allegations “until I leave the monkhood.” With all of that, for most teachers education remained a joyless profession.

  Kdep Sokhin, a handsome young man, was one of those rare students who stayed in school through the twelfth grade. Then he attended a teachers college for two years. After that he started work at a small elementary school in western Kampong Thom Province, earning forty-eight dollars a month. One summer afternoon nineteen children, seven girls and twelve boys, all of them eleven or twelve years old, sat in his classroom at desks that had been drawn on, carved, and otherwise defaced by generations of children. They wore simple uniforms, black pants and plain white shirts. The girls’ shirtsleeves offered a small white decorative bow, a rare feint toward formality.

  Only the windows lit the room; this school, too, had no electricity. Two canisters holding clean water sat on a table by the door. Teninch-high lettering on the side told everyone that UNICEF had provided this. In 2003 UNICEF also built the bathrooms out back, a large sign said. Now the toilets were cracked, broken, and home to spiders and their webs. A ditch latrine beside it was the new bathroom. Elsewhere on the small school yard, a bare concrete pavilion served as the lunchroom. Two fire pits, each with three rocks, held up rusty grates.

  Inside, Kdep Sokhin lectured about long division while writing examples on the chalkboard, smiling at the children as he spoke. He, too, wore a white shirt and jet-black pants, though stripes of yellow dust filled the creases behind his knees. He was twenty-six and had been teaching there for four years. “Teaching’s not really fun,” he said when class was over, that smile still affixed to his face. “The children are easy, but it’s hard to survive on this salary and have money to buy petrol for my motorbike. There are only two teachers here and 143 students in grades 1 to 5.”

  On that day, however, his classroom was less than half full. “So many are absent. Some of the children went off with their fathers to work in paddies in Thailand.” A teachers’ union survey that year found that 54 percent of the nation’s teachers said they do not teach regularly and “took no notice of students.” The teachers blamed the government for this attitude, saying they weren’t paid enough. But for Kdep Sokhin, the bigger problem was the other teacher at his school. “He wants to transfer to another school, near his family. I would be alone if he left. I have no idea where another teacher would come from.” Most likely Kdep Sokhin would have 143 students all to himself.

  In 2009 the World Bank published a special multivolume report on education and competitiveness. It echoed concerns that had been reverberating among donors and the nation’s leaders for decades. Cambodia cannot grow until it “reforms its education system,” the report said. As long as the workforce remained unskilled and barely educated, Cambodia will remain “the biggest laggard” in Asia. The year before, the International Republican Institute had surveyed the Cambodian public. Seventeen percent of the respondents said they had no education, while another 49 percent said they had attended only one or two years of primary school. So, in 2008, two-thirds of the public was barely literate. Pollsters spoke to 2,000 people face-to-face nationwide and said the survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percent. The World Bank said that had to change if the Cambodians expected to become prosperous enough even to catch up with their neighbors. Other figures in the survey seemed to verify that. Almost 80 percent of the respondents said they earned less than one hundred dollars a month. Half of Cambodia’s people earned less than fifty dollars a month. That’s six hundred dollars a year.

  Then in early 2010 the government gave an answer of sorts. Its new National Strategic Development Plan set back the nation’s education targets, such as achieving universal enrollment and literacy. The previous plan, published in 2006, had offered the fanciful idea, for example, that 75 percent of all students would attend both primary and middle schools by 2010. When January 1, 2010, arrived, however, only about 30 percent of the nation’s students were enrolled in middle school. The number had barely budged since 2006. So the government changed the goal—to 51 percent by 2013. Similarly, the earlier plan had promised that at least half of all children who lived in what it called “remote” rural areas would attend elementary school by 2010. Well, 2010 had dawned, and the government was far, far from its target. The new goal: By 2013, 22 percent of the little boys and girls who lived in remote areas would attend school.

  Carol Rodley was deputy chief of mission in the U.S. Embassy during the late 1990s. Back then, just a few years after the UN occupation, “I heard a lot of distress about the state of the education system,” she said. “They talked about the co
rruption in schools. It was shocking and really, really distressing to the middle class.” She returned to Cambodia as U.S. ambassador in 2008 and quickly discerned a change. The anger had faded. In fact, it had disappeared. Instead of being upset, people were now simply dispirited. “They don’t talk about it anymore. Now it’s the status quo.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Twenty-seven-year-old Leang Saroeun didn’t much like his job. He worked for Lt. Col. Ou Bunthan of the Cambodian military, stationed in Pursat Province. The colonel hired him and his wife, twentytwo-year-old Let Ting, to chop lumber and do other chores. Shortly after they took the new position and moved into a small cottage on the officer’s property, however, Ou Bunthan told them the job had another, sinister, element.

  After warning him not to tell anyone, Ou Bunthan ordered Leang Saroeun to help him smuggle endangered species for sale to China and other places. In July 2009 the colonel sent him to pick up a pangolin that a poacher had captured in a protected national forest. Pangolins, also called scaly anteaters, were in danger of extinction. Capturing them was illegal in Cambodia and most of the world. Native to Southeast Asia, they are large beasts that some people refer to as walking pine cones. Their scales and claws are razor sharp, allowing them to climb trees, and they can grow to be six feet long, including the tail.

  Leang Saroeun picked up the young animal, stuffed it into a bag, tied it to the back of his motorbike, and drove back toward the colonel’s home. During the drive, though, the pangolin managed to claw his way out of the bag, jump down, and scamper into the woods. Leang Saroeun screeched to a halt and ran after the beast, but it was nighttime. Chasing after the beast in the dark was hopeless. Still, he searched for hours but finally gave up and drove home. When he called his boss to relate the bad news, Ou Bunthan was furious. “He accused my husband of selling it to someone,” Let Ting related. A live pangolin was worth hundreds of dollars. “He told the colonel he didn’t sell it. It ran into the forest.” The colonel was not mollified. The next morning Ou Bunthan called, his voice icy, and summoned Leang Saroeun to his house twenty yards away. Let Ting stayed back at their cottage, but a few minutes later she heard her husband screaming and ran out to see what was wrong. “He was on fire, all over his body. He ran off and jumped into a cistern full of water. He climbed out and walked to the road, then slipped and fell down. He could not get up. He never walked again.” Sobbing, Let Ting ran to him. A local police officer passing by stopped and “took pity on us. He drove us to the hospital.” There, Leang Saroeun told his wife what had happened. “My husband told me he poured five liters of gasoline over him and then lit him with a cigarette lighter. My husband couldn’t run away. The man had his pistol pointed at him and would have shot him to death.”

  Leang Saroeun was shuttled from hospital to hospital over the next several days but finally died. He’d been burned over 80 percent of his body, said Ek Sonsatthya, a nurse at one of the hospitals. “He was burned like a grilled fish,” said his older brother, Map Narin.

  Ngeth Theary, a local human-rights worker, had photographed him. The picture showed parts of his clothes still fused to his charred skin. Most of his face was black, locked in a terrible expression of pain and horror.

  Cambodians are a conflicted people, generally passive, quiet, nonthreatening—but also capable of extraordinary violence and brutality. Their history and religion have taught them “not to exhibit extremes of behavior,” observed Youk Chhang, who runs the Documentation Center of Cambodia. It collects records of the Khmer Rouge era. “So when they hold it in for so long, when they do resort to violence they get very emotional, which leads to extremes of violence.”

  Ing Kantha Phavi, the minister of women’s affairs, is also a medical doctor, and she offered a clinical explanation, saying, “I think a lot of people are hiding a lot in their subconscious. You can see a person, perfectly normal, and then an hour later see him transformed into another person who will kill you.” Part of it, she and others said, is the post-traumatic stress disorder so prevalent in society. Extreme anger and violent outbursts are common symptoms. But there’s more.

  Experts have found that compromise is next to impossible in Cambodian culture. A team of Swedish anthropologists in the mid-1990s studied Cambodian society and came to this conclusion. For Cambodians, like most Asians, they noted, few things are more important than saving face, protecting personal dignity. Yet “there is no cultural tradition for reconciling contrary opinions—or even for the acceptance of the existence of contrary opinions,” the Swedes wrote in their book, Every Home an Island. As a result, in any debate one side or the other is certain to lose face. “So when Khmer men resort to violence—when young men form gangs, or when a husband beats his wife, almost to death,” they are “impotent human beings who act out of frustration because their ‘cultural heritage’ offers no other way out of a humiliating situation. In most cases an act of violence is preferable to the loss of face.”

  Raoul-Marc Jennar, a Belgian who worked for the United Nations in Cambodia for many years, concluded that “killing was an everyday act, the automatic almost direct consequence of the negation of differences.” Actually, following Jennar’s logic, killing was an automatic tactic for eliminating differences of opinion. Quinn, the former ambassador, also found this personality characteristic remarkable. “We Americans are inculcated in the art of compromise,” he said. “Not there. That’s just not part of the Cambodian character.”

  Clinicians have found striking uniformity in Cambodian behavior and psychological state. “Cambodia is fascinating,” said Daryn Reicherter, a psychiatrist who treated Cambodians in San Jose, California, and in Cambodia. “Unlike a lot of other countries, there is no diversity to the client population. There’s a single story. Ask any of them, and you get the very same story. I wouldn’t do it, but I could write the note before I even see the client. They all have major depressive disorders. They drink. I’d ask women if they had been raped. Every one of them said no. I told a case worker: ‘It’s amazing, none of them were raped.’ She told me all of them had been raped, but they wouldn’t talk about it to a man.”

  In most societies conflicts can be resolved in court. Not so in Cambodia. Leang Saroeun’s death proved the point. It produced a couple of newspaper stories. Nothing long or prominent, just another episode in the running catalog of injustice, misery, and death. But when one reporter asked Top Chan Sereyvudth, Pursat Province’s chief prosecutor, what he intended to do, the prosecutor said he was waiting for the police report before considering the case, then added, “But it is slanderous to say that Ou Bunthan burned Leang Saroeun.” How could he know that before he’d even seen the police report? The answer: Top Chan Sereyvudth was the face of injustice in Cambodia.

  Top Chan Sereyvudth was a little man, maybe five foot four, with a bit of fuzz on his chin that some might mistake for a beard. A few months earlier, through a bureaucratic sleight of hand, he had managed to have a case transferred from Banteay Meanchey Province, on the other side of the nation, into his own courtroom. The case in question involved a dispute with four villagers over ownership of some land. These villagers were locked in argument with none other than Top Chan Sereyvudth himself, who stood to gain five acres if he won the case. Bringing it into his own courtroom, where he was the prosecutor, therefore proved convenient. He managed to dispatch the quarrelsome villagers to jail. Given the graft and general inequity that plagued the courts, that would normally have been the end of it—if not for Chhay Sareth, council chief for Pursat Province.

  Chhay Sareth had been out of town during the prosecutor’s escapade, but he heard about it when scores of the victims’ friends from Banteay Meanchey began raucous demonstrations in the center of town. “I was just informed that there were angry people in the street,” the council chief said. “I was one hundred kilometers away. The case was getting bigger and bigger. I thought, ‘If we don’t stop it, Hun Sen will hear about it!’ I told the police, ‘Please don’t do anything.’” After hu
rrying home, he called in the protesters, heard their story, and ordered the police to ensure their security—afraid, he said, that someone would order a grenade attack on these people, “and then they would blame the government for mistreating its own people.” A few days later the case moved to trial.

  By now the governor’s concern was well known, and the trial judge, In Bopha, let the four men go. When asked why, he chose his words carefully. “It was determined that the crime was committed in Banteay Meanchey province and was out of our jurisdiction. So I ordered it forwarded back to Banteay Meanchey under article 290 of our code.”

  Not to be outdone, Top Chan Sereyvudth took the case to the court of appeals and asked that court to hold the men in jail during the appeal, he told a Cambodia Daily reporter. (It was too late; the men were already gone.) But when the reporter asked about the five acres he stood to gain in this dispute, the prosecutor abruptly hung up the phone.

  It was because of people like Top Chan Sereyvudth that In Bopha, a judge in the same Pursat courthouse, paused for a moment when asked about Leang Saroeun’s death and finally said, “In this case, from my point of view, the victim should not seek help from any institution under government control.” Let Ting’s only option, he said, was “go to an NGO for help.”

  When I approached Top Chan Sereyvudth outside his office and said I wanted to talk to him about both the land case and Leang Saroeun’s death, he said he had an urgent appointment, bolted to his car, and slammed the door. His driver whisked him away.