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

by Joel Brinkley

  A few years earlier, when Kent Wiedemann was ambassador, angry officials in Washington had pulled back from any real involvement with the state, a result of the “coup.” “We don’t have any major national interests there,” Wiedemann had explained. “So we say, let’s make human rights the principal or perhaps the only foreign-policy objective.” This, of course, meant that the embassy was constantly battling Hun Sen and the CPP, the villains of human-rights advocates. That was the embassy Mussomeli inherited—even though the formative experience in his mind was the U.S. bombing and invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War.

  By now all of the major State Department figures who had been players during those heady days of the UN occupation and the first elections in 1993 were retired or working in positions far removed from this issue. More than fifteen years had passed since Secretary of State James Baker had pushed Cambodia to the top of America’s foreign-policy agenda for a few months in 1990. The UN occupation in 1992 and 1993 was now a historical footnote—too far past to be part of the active political debate, too recent to be in history books.

  Since then the United Nations had placed smaller, less ambitious peacekeeping forces in Eritrea, East Timor, and Darfur, among other spots. The world had tried to face up to more recent genocidal spasms in Bosnia, Sudan, and Rwanda. Although far more people died during the Khmer Rouge era than in any of these later murderous rages, Pol Pot’s crimes against humanity no longer seemed so unique.

  Now, as Mussomeli served in Phnom Penh, the United States was at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the State Department, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Christopher Hill, was so preoccupied with North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program that he liked to say, “People are calling me the assistant secretary for North Korea.” Hill had met Hun Sen once, when he was in Phnom Penh for the dedication of a new U.S. Embassy building. That was the time Hun Sen had arrested two human-rights activists, and, when Hill asked about them, Hun Sen promised to let them go, saying, “I am releasing them as a gift to you.” Talking about Hun Sen a few years later, Hill still held his nose. “This is not a guy you are going to confuse with Thomas Jefferson,” he said, straining to maintain a diplomatic veneer.

  All of this meant that Mussomeli was free to formulate U.S. policy for Cambodia more or less on his own. No one else really cared. So he set out to right a wrong, as he saw it. No, he was not trying to make up for the bombing of Cambodia. Still, this was his turn to make a difference.

  In 2007 he told Washington he wanted to restore direct aid to the Cambodian government. Hill got the request and approved it without a great deal of thought. “The ambassador was all in favor of it,” he explained with a shrug. But then, on reflection, he added, “That doesn’t mean we are just going to hand money over to some minister.”

  The Hun Sen haters in Congress had moved on, too. “It became very, very clear to us that he was a permanent fixture,” said a senior congressional official who had been deeply involved in Cambodia issues. “When the administration comes up with a coherent policy, Congress steps back.” As Twining, the former ambassador put it, “You know there’s now an international consensus that we have to deal with Hun Sen. Cambodia—it’s just not worth fighting over anymore.”

  “There’s a status quo now,” said Richard Solomon, the former State Department official who had helped negotiate the UN occupation. “And it’s better—certainly better than it was under the Khmer Rouge.” In the end, for Washington and much of the world, that seemed to be enough. They’d given up on the promise of the UN effort the United States had helped start. They’d turned away.

  No one in Washington even seemed to notice when Hun Sen, in 2005, dropped public observance of October 23, the day in 1991 when all Cambodian factions including the Khmer Rouge signed the Paris Peace Accords and agreed to lay down their arms and seek a new day for their nation. Once a national holiday, this was no longer an event Hun Sen felt any need to celebrate. As Sam Rainsy put it, the world seemed to be saying, “If you continue living like you did a thousand years ago,” when Jayavarman II reigned, “you are still better off than you were during the Khmer Rouge.”

  Hun Sen was pleased. Mussomeli’s relationship with him improved and became the closest since Ken Quinn had served as ambassador. The ambassador appreciated having the ability to see Hun Sen when he needed to, like the time, he said, “when they were renovating the park” across the street from the old parliament building, where the 1997 grenade attack occurred—since renamed Hun Sen Park, for the man most people thought was responsible for the murderous attack. “And as part of process, they were going to take out the monument to the grenade victims. I asked Hun Sen about this. He swore he didn’t know anything about it. But he stopped it.”

  Still, Mussomeli fully recognized that Cambodia was riddled with debilitating problems. He had lunch with Hun Sen’s son once, and waiters were serving the meal when Mussomeli pointed to one of them and said, “You could throw him off the roof, and no one would touch you.” His host protested: “If my father found out, he would put me in jail forever!” Mussomeli retorted, “But he’d never find out because everyone would be afraid to tell him.”

  While Mussomeli tried to strike a balance in America’s relationship with Cambodia, elsewhere in his embassy the staff was still working full-throttle to expose corruption and related government villainy. No other embassy remained so obsessed. “We are the outlier,” acknowledged Erin Soto, the USAID office director.

  Her office sponsored a broad range of efforts, some of which seemed quixotic. This was particularly true of the program to train Cambodian journalists in investigative reporting. Even the program director, Mike Fowler, wondered about its efficacy. “It’s absolutely problematic,” he said, shaking his head. “You write an investigative story here, and you’ll end up being charged and put in jail.”

  Another program was far more ambitious but reached a similar conclusion. In May 2008 a convoy of motorcycles and rickshaws pulled up in front of the National Assembly building to deliver a petition signed by 1.1 million Cambodians from across the nation—almost 10 percent of the population. Most of the signatures were actually just thumbprints, since few Cambodian adults could write their own names. The petition urged the assembly to pass the anticorruption law that had been languishing for almost fifteen years. The U.S. Embassy paid for the petition drive. “Our assessment was that there was not the political will to pass the anticorruption law,” Soto said. “When political will does not exist, it must be built.” Up to then, nothing else had worked. Neither did this. The drivers of those motorcycles and rickshaws were unloading the boxes when a national assemblyman came out to greet them. He told them the assembly refused to accept the petition.

  Mussomeli said he preferred a low-key approach to all of this. “I think the effective way to deal with the corruption problem is not to pontificate. It is to talk about destiny rather than morality. ‘You are so far behind your neighbors, Vietnam and Thailand. You will become a vassal state if you don’t take this last chance to compete. You cannot afford the luxury of corruption.’ That’s what I tell them. You know,” he added, “when you say critical things, they are genuinely afraid the West is trying to undermine or subvert the government. In fact, we should be able to offer criticism as a concerned friend.” But he quickly learned that being a “concerned friend” of the Cambodian government was difficult work.

  At about the time the United States restored direct aid in 2007, the British NGO Global Witness finally published its report on illegal logging. Three years of research produced a ninety-four-page document, entitled Cambodia’s Family Trees. It documented what most Cambodians already knew, that “a kleptocratic elite, led by Hun Sen, is stripping Cambodia’s forests.”

  Cambodia’s luxury-wood trees had been a source of wealth for Cambodians since the beginning of time. After the Khmer Rouge fell from power, their soldiers demonstrated for the first time that the trees could be harvested in bulk
and sold abroad. They introduced Cambodia to the concept of deforestation. Learning from their example, almost as soon as Hun Sen took power in 1993 he had made his deal with his co–prime minister, Ranariddh, to split the proceeds from illegal logging. The two of them wrote the secret letter to the Thai prime minister saying that, effective immediately, only the Defense Ministry had authority to export timber. Part of the motivation was to undercut the Khmer Rouge. But if that had been the order’s only purpose, the two would not have kept it secret.

  Secret as the order may have been, the result was quite visible. While Charles Twining was chief of mission and then ambassador during the early 1990s, he said he discovered that “the military was heavily involved in forestry issues.” He urged the government to control that, he said, but as he saw it, “the state had such weak institutions then.”

  Once the military got a taste of the logging business, it became an addiction. As the problem grew worse and worse, the World Bank pushed the government to hire Global Witness as the nation’s forest monitor. But then in 2002 Hun Sen angrily expelled the organization’s investigators. Others filtered back in to continue the work, until finally they published their report.

  It decried the duplicitous system under which Hun Sen had awarded his oknya vast tracts of forested land as “plantations,” like the bogus eucalyptus farm in Pursat Province. Global Witness mapped the broad network of illegal logging, cataloged the bribe payments, and named names—dozens of government officials, army officers, as well as the prime minister’s relatives and cronies who were said to be complicit. It asserted that Hun Sen’s 4,000-man bodyguard unit “serves as a nationwide timber trafficking service. It transports illegally logged timber all over Cambodia and exports significant quantities to Vietnam.” The haul from one illegal lumber mill alone amounted to $13 million a year.

  Hun Sen was livid. As usual, he refused to discuss the findings and instead assaulted the organization that offered them. First he forbade any Cambodia newspaper to report on the Global Witness document. When the French-language paper Cambodge Soir ignored the threat, the government fired the editor and shut the paper down. Lem Pichpisey, a reporter for Radio Free Asia, fled to Thailand after his life was threatened because he, too, reported on the Global Witness investigation. Hun Sen’s brother Hun Neng warned: If anyone from Global Witness comes back to Cambodia, “I will hit them until their heads are broken.” The report had said his wife and son were involved in the trade. For his own part, Hun Sen made a point of describing his contempt with one of his trademark metaphoric barbs: “This can probably be explained in the same way that dogs are happier to lick the bones found in the domestic waste.”

  But the truth was, for all the foment over the Global Witnesses report, by the time it was published, in June 2007, most of Cambodia’s luxury-wood trees had already been felled. Illegal logging, deforestation, was a dying business. Hun Sen and his oknya had already moved on to a new line of work: seizing and selling off Cambodia’s land—even if Cambodians lived on it.

  On June 6, 2006, soldiers and police showed up in the middle of the night outside Un Phea’s crude home in the Sambok Chap neighborhood near central Phnom Penh. They threw her family and more than 1,000 others into the street and then torched their shelters before Un Phea and the others had time even to retrieve their meager belongings. Then soldiers herded all the residents onto truck beds and ferried them fifteen miles out of town, to an area called Andong. There, soldiers dumped them in a rice paddy without so much as a bottle of water or a tarp for cover. “Even the landowner is scared,” Yeng Virak, executive director of the Community Legal Education Center, said, recalling that night. “He had not been told. Suddenly there are 1,000 people on his land.”

  After that the soldiers left—though a few stayed behind to turn away the aid workers who came out to drop off emergency rations. As if all of that were not traumatic enough, incidents like this set off many people’s preexisting mental illnesses. “Older traumas, they are going to influence current responses to things like land seizures,” said Nigel Field, the psychologist who studied PTSD among Cambodians. After all, that scene Quinn had witnessed with his fiancée, atop the Vietnamese hill on the Cambodian border in 1973, was eerily similar. Khmer Rouge soldiers had thrown residents out of their homes, then burned them to the ground and trucked the people off to a relocation camp.

  “Out here, I cannot make business,” Un Phea complained two years later, with considerable understatement. “They dumped us here and gave us no money, no land title. Nothing.” She sat in the mud outside her shanty house—one small room with palm-frond walls and roof, on poles three feet off the ground. One of her naked children sat underneath, eating a small bowl of rice. Un Phea was peeling bamboo shoots into a plastic bowl—still seething. “Before, I sold water and some eggs in front of the royal palace and made a good living. Here it is hard to work.”

  In Phnom Penh the community had electricity, clean water, and, for what they were worth, schools and medical clinics. Most people had jobs. There in the rice paddy, they had none of that. They were now a forty-minute drive from downtown, past the airport and a sign that said “Bon Voyage. See you again.”

  “We have to buy water from the water seller,” Un Phea said, nodding toward an earthen cistern beside the house. Mosquito larvae seemed to roil the water surface. An NGO had tacked a poster to her shelter’s front wall. In Khmer and English it warned of dengue fever, a mosquito-borne illness that was epidemic that year. But of course, Un Phea couldn’t read.

  Her case was among several thousand more or less similar land seizures across Cambodia in the previous few years. The government said at least 3,000 people were appealing the seizures to a government agency set up for that purpose.

  The problem was not entirely new. “Land conflicts were there even before UNTAC left,” Twining said. “I pushed the government to create land records, but that didn’t seem to go anywhere.” Back then much of the land the government seized was covered with trees the military wanted to harvest. But as the trees began to run out—replanting was not a Cambodian practice—the government and its friends began eyeing the land itself. They seemed not to notice the people who lived on it.

  Valuable property in Phnom Penh, like Un Phea’s neighborhood, was the favored target. The Swedish anthropology team that studied Cambodia in the mid-1990s noted that during the Vietnamese occupation, “land was state property, and this idea still lingers. So, every time a title is recognized, it is felt that ‘the State’ is giving away its property,” although “they are responsive to bribes.”

  When this trend, kicking poor people out of their homes and dumping them somewhere outside of town, began in earnest in the late 1990s, diplomats and donors pushed the government to pass a law regulating land seizures. “It was just a big, horrible problem,” said Wiedemann, who was U.S. ambassador then. “During the Khmer Rouge time, all the titles were destroyed, and when the people came back from the refugee camps in Thailand, they just settled where they could. When the government decided they wanted the land, they just told them, in effect, we have the guns, now get off! So we pressed them to pass the law.”

  In the late 2000s Phnom Penh was booming, and when a developer spotted a choice piece of land, he simply paid off the proper official to win a newly minted land title. “What happens is they bribe the judge, and then they have the title,” said Javier Merelo de Barbera Llobet, who served as an aid worker in Battambang. “Then they can prove the land is theirs.”

  “It’s a very effective way for developers to do it,” said Yeng Virak, of the Community Legal Education Center. The government has “the paper, and you pay for it.” After that, the victim’s only choice was to take the case to court. But the land’s new “owner” had bought the deed from Hun Sen, and, and if forced to, he would defend it in Hun Sen’s courts.

  When that was done, the new owner had only to rid the property of its residents—almost always poor, uneducated people. Once the developer had paid fo
r the new title, the government sometimes charged the residents with trespassing and vandalism and threw them in jail. In one typical case soldiers helped the Heng Development Company expel residents from a piece of property the company had “bought” in Kandal Province. Soldiers opened fire and wounded several residents who refused to leave. The Phnom Penh Post reported that the developer bought 9,900 acres and then decided he wanted some adjacent property, too. When those residents refused to sell, the developer went back to Phnom Penh and bought another title for that land as well. Soldiers opened fire again as they chased these new victims away.

  The Land Law, enacted in 2001, attempted to address this dilemma by giving anyone who lived on a piece of land for at least five years ownership and the right to a legal title. Well, like so many of these laws, the government never wrote the enabling regulations and chose not to enforce or abide by it. And as property values rose—in 2007 land in downtown Phnom Penh cost about the same as land in downtown Chicago—the land seizures escalated into an epidemic.

  NGOs and other donors took up the cause and tried to hold workshops to apprise villagers of the Land Law’s protections. The government would not countenance that. On more than one occasion provincial authorities sent a fire brigade to disperse the workshop by spraying everyone with a fire hose. “Fire brigades is one way they do it,” said Youk Chhang. “But they also disperse crowds with electric batons, kick you with their boots, beat you. It’s so wild! There are cases where they beat people to death.”

  As the eviction problem grew to a frenzy, the nation’s newspapers carried two, three, four, or more stories about land seizures every single day. Human-rights groups cataloged evictions affecting 79,155 people in 2007, and the number rose in following years. The seizures grew ever more brazen. The State Department’s 2009 human-rights report recounted one episode in dry diplomatic language: