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

by Joel Brinkley

  By 2009, three years after the eviction, Andong had settled into a community of sorts, shambling bamboo huts sinking into the mud along soggy, rutted dirt paths, most too narrow for a car to pass. Un Phea was gone, working in Pailin Province, harvesting corn and cassava. Sam Nhea, her twenty-three-year-old brother, was staying in her house. He was asleep on a front porch, a wooden platform he had added to her house two weeks earlier. Only shreds remained of the dengue-fever warning poster that had been tacked to the side of the house. Sam Nhea said he’d tried to tear it down. But he was an indolent sort and hadn’t finished the job. He said he worked construction but had stopped work to take care of his son. “He has a cold; he is not so healthy.” The boy lay naked on the wooden porch beside his father. He was five years old but looked to be about the size of a three year old. At noon, he was motionless, lapsing in and out of consciousness. When awake, his face offered only a blank stare. His father lifted the boy up by his hands. He was only about thirty inches tall. Here was malnutrition and stunting in the flesh. The boy could stand on his own as his father held his hands. But he was mute, and his big brown eyes did not evidence any awareness of his surroundings. His father let him down slowly, and once again the boy lay flat on the hard wooden porch and closed his eyes.

  A tiny three-year-old girl laying in a hammock looked to be in the same shape. She was the size of an infant. “My wife usually breastfeeds her,” Sam Nhea said, pointing to the tiny, motionless girl. “That and some rice and maybe a sweet cake. But she’s not here now, so we just eat rice. I buy rice every day, one kilogram. This feeds four people, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Since my wife is away, I’m too busy to take them to the hospital.”

  How would he take them even if he had time? “I would have to borrow a motorbike.” But he acknowledged he did not even know where the health clinic was. As we left, he lay down on his new porch and fell asleep again. Passing by an hour later, he still slept as his sick children lay quietly beside him, barely conscious.

  Trying to institutionalize this wretched camp, the CPP appointed a village chief, Chhin Sarith. He built a real house with a concrete foundation and sat at a table in his two-car garage, beside an old Toyota. “Sam Nhea, he worked as a street sweeper,” he said. “He was a drug addict. Amphetamines. He says he gave them up in 2008.” The chief ragged on his neighbor without restraint. “He was also a trash scavenger. Sometimes he worked as a beggar.”

  Almost 1,400 families now lived at Andong. Directly behind the last row of homes, the rice paddy picked up again. But out by the highway, some rich person, probably an oknya, had built an eighteen-hole golf course, the Royal Phnom Penh Golf Club. Hun Sen played there from time to time.

  Chhin Sarith talked up the benefits of this evictee camp. “Yes, people say they are still angry. It’s normal in this community for people to feel that way. But they know that where they lived before was not legal. Here we have the right of ownership. I consider myself lucky because I now have a piece of land—my own personal property. Here we are far away, yes, but in the old place my children did not go to school. Here they do. There are no drugs, no crime here, unlike the old place. Living here is far better.”

  Un Sophal disagreed. She was Sam Nhea’s mother and lived down the road. All of her five children lived in Andong. She was forty-five and missing half of her bottom teeth, all on the right side, as if someone had slugged her. “I have no choice but to live here. I have no place else to live.” Without being asked, she told of the day, still fresh in her mind, when they were evicted from their homes. “The police, 300 or 400 of them, were there. They said if we refuse to leave they would bulldoze down our homes. They put us on trucks and took us out here and dumped us. There’s no business out here except picking bamboo and other wild things from the forest or shellfish out of the lake, three or four kilometers from here.”

  A friend was making dinner as Un Sophal talked. She had mixed mashed rice with water until she had a thin gruel, a batter. She poured it into a frying pan resting on a three-arm concrete fire pit stuffed with burning twigs. As the batter hardened into a yellowish crepelike form, she filled it with bamboo sprouts that Un Sophal had cut up with a little knife. Then she folded over one side of the rice crepe.

  “I am still angry, but I can’t do anything to them,” Un Sophal said, her voice hard-edged, more than three years after she and the rest of her family had been violently evicted. “I just keep it in mind. The CPP kicked us out of there, mistreated us a lot.” She was waving the knife over her head. “No electricity, no power, no water. Nothing!”

  Thousands upon thousands of people, evicted from their homes, lived in makeshift camps like Un Sophal. Meanwhile, the government’s enablers were meeting regularly in Phnom Penh, helping ensure that Hun Sen could continue abusing his people at will.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In March 2008 the assorted NGOs, donors, and foreign governments that had been giving money to Cambodia since 1992 met in Phnom Penh once again to make their pledges for the coming year. As usual, the U.S. ambassador addressed the group, which included Hun Sen and almost every cabinet member.

  Ambassador Mussomeli had thought about what to say, and in the end, addressing Hun Sen and the rest of his government, he told them, “In all candor, we, your development partners, are perplexed by the apparent lack of priority given to the anticorruption legislation. Anticorruption is the base of your development strategy and central to everything you hope to accomplish—yet, after ten years, the law remains in draft.” Since Charlie Twining’s time in office, most of Mussomeli’s predecessors had said more or less the same thing.

  In fact, by the time Mussomeli took his turn, the anticorruption law had become a uniquely Cambodian chimera lost in a shell game. Thirteen years had passed since Hun Sen, trying to mute growing donor concern about corruption, had first promised to approve the law—thirteen years since Ambassador Twining had warned, “We are not threatening to cut our support at this time, but it is true that there is a lot of competition for our aid dollars.” For the following few years nothing much happened but more promises—until no one was paying attention any longer as the nation fell into chaos culminating in 1996 and 1997, with the grenade attack, the “coup,” and the ugly aftermath. Soon after, however, pressure to pass the bill resumed. Donors, NGOs, and interest groups began publishing reports that were reflections of their growing frustration. In 2000, for example, the International Crisis Group published a widely read report entitled Cambodia: The Elusive Peace Dividend. “Cambodia remains a strongman state,” it asserted, “replete with lawlessness, human rights abuses, grinding poverty, corruption, bloated security forces, and an economy thriving on prostitution, narcotics trafficking, land grabbing and illegal logging.” The government, it insisted, must enact the law.

  That same year, the Council of Ministers finally approved the anticorruption bill and passed it on to the National Assembly for final passage. But then, another year passed, and the next word was that the Council of Ministers Secretariat was once again “examining the law,” the same one it had already approved twelve months before.

  Donors were growing frustrated and angry. Ian Porter, director of the World Bank office in Phnom Penh, warned at a donor meeting that if Cambodia did not make progress fighting corruption, including passage of the law, “support will not be at the same level.” He was the first prominent donor to warn Hun Sen, once he became the nation’s sole leader, that the donors would hold back money if the government did not pass the bill. Hun Sen then promised to have an anticorruption law “ready for debate by June 2003.”

  For 2001 and 2002 the donors gave Cambodia $615 million. Then in 2003, as promised, Hun Sen put the bill before the National Assembly for a vote. That was when the assembly, out of the blue, decided that seven-eighths of its members had to be present for the vote. For some unexplained reason, just enough CPP members failed to show up so that the vote could not be held. Nonetheless, that transparently disingenuous effort was enough to satisf
y the donors. They gave Cambodia $635 million that year.

  The yearlong postelection stalemate began the next month, but soon after it ended the World Bank published its own broadside, Cambodia at the Crossroads, in November 2004, just before the donor meeting. The 143-page publication spoke of “weak governance and the failure to control corruption and enforce the rule of law, underscoring the country’s limited institutional capacity and the lack of trust among the elite—and strong resistance to reforms from powerful invested interests.” But for the first time, the bank also laid blame on itself and other donors. “Cambodia’s international development partners are strongly committed to Cambodian development and are anxious to be a part of the solution. But they may also be part of the problem. The failure to speak out for Cambodia’s poor with one voice or to link financial and technical support to performance and outcomes has sent mixed signals to the country’s leadership, which has shown itself adept at doing just enough to win donor support.” Porter, the director, threatened again: “If there is little progress, then we would certainly be concerned that the overall pledges for Cambodia could well come down.”

  That year Hun Sen vowed, “The government will encourage the ratification of an anti-corruption law as soon as possible.” Late in 2004 he explained that a draft of the law “has been already prepared and needs some further review and the final approval of the National Assembly.” At the donors’ meeting he shook his fist as he said that corruption represented a “life or death” struggle for the nation. Charles Ray, the American ambassador at that time, then accused the government of misusing aid money “for personal gain” and demanded “verifiable and successful investigations and prosecutions of corruption cases. According to some accounts, not a single case of corruption or embezzlement has ever been prosecuted before a court in Phnom Penh.” Undeterred, donors gave $504 million that year.

  In the summer of 2005 the draft bill was still languishing at the assembly, but the government promised to pass it that year. “To free society from corruption, I believe that we need good laws and good governance both in public management and private business,” Hun Sen averred. “The draft law has emerged, and we are opening the debate on the law.” But once again nothing happened, and by 2006 some international observers were growing so angry that they took up a new strategy.

  A coalition of human-rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and the Asian Human Rights Commission, tried to stiffen the spines of the other donors who always seemed to look the other way and hand over their money regardless of performance. “Since the last donor meeting,” the group said, “the government has made no tangible progress in meeting its commitments. The courts are still used to conduct sham trials, impunity prevails in government abuses.” And then it issued the annual call: “Donors should make it clear that continued assistance will depend on the government keeping its promises,” including “passing asset disclosure and an anti-corruption law that meets international standards.”

  Basil Fernando, executive director of the Asian Human Rights Commission, cautioned, “Donors should not be lulled into thinking the situation has improved. This is a decade-old pattern: assurances by the government right before the meetings, followed by return to the old ways afterward.” The next day donors pledged to give Cambodia $601 million.

  Later in 2006, the law still had not been passed, and Hun Sen offered a new stratagem. Cambodia, he told the donors, had to pass a new penal code before it could enact an anticorruption law. “I would like to inform” the donors, he said, “don’t misunderstand that the government lacks will.”

  In 2007, inexplicably, the draft law was no longer at the National Assembly awaiting a vote. Now, Hun Sen, said, “it is in the final stage of discussion with detailed consideration among the government ministries and institutions concerned before it is forwarded to the National Assembly and the Senate for approval.” Later that year the bill seemed to have regressed even further. Hun Sen told a conference on economic development that he was “determined to prepare an anti-corruption draft law.”

  Next came word that the draft bill was back at the Council of Ministers, which had first approved it seven years earlier. That year, the human-rights groups’ annual press release was even more strident; key passages were in boldface: “Donors should hold the Cambodian government accountable!”

  Hun Sen stood before the donors once again in 2007 and declared, “The fight against corruption in Cambodia must remain a very high priority for the government, and in that context, the passage of an anticorruption law would be very important.” At about that time, the prime minister began building himself a massive mansion on the most important corner in central Phnom Penh. It had four stories plus a basement and looked to offer 10,000 to 15,000 square feet of living space. A heliport sat atop the roof. He still kept his country estate with the eighteen-hole golf course—all of this, in theory, purchased with his government salary. The donors gave him $689 million, 15 percent more than the previous year.

  In 2008, the year Mussomeli spoke, Khieu Kanharith, the government spokesman, said the National Assembly would pass the bill within a month. But then the next month Deputy Prime Minister Sok An revealed that the Council of Ministers had reviewed only “40 of the 700 articles of the new Penal Code,” two years after that project had begun. After the new penal code is finally complete, Sok An added, “the government will continue to inspect the anti-corruption law.”

  The annual donors’ conference came at the end of the year, and opposition lawmakers including Sam Rainsy pleaded with the donors not to give money until the government enacted the long-awaited law and took “concrete measures to stop grave violations of Cambodia’s laws and serious violations of human rights,” as Rainsy put it. “It’s a ritual, an annual ritual between the government and the international community,” lamented Ou Virak, president of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights. “They said exactly the same things last year, the language is the same, the outcome is always the same—we finish the ritual with a stamp of approval, and then it’s back to business as usual.”

  One more time Hun Sen opened the meeting promising he would finally pass the bill. He tried to sweeten up the group, declaring out of the blue, “We are better off to keep the forests as a national reserve and not try to get money from logging.” An easy promise to make, for by then nearly all of the valuable trees had already been cut down. Recent UN and International Monetary Fund (IMF) studies had found that between 1.7 and 3.4 percent of Cambodia still consisted of what they called “primary forest.” The Cambodian Forestry Ministry put the number at 59 percent.

  Even so, the donors appeared pleased. They showered Hun Sen with gifts unimaginable. They gave Cambodia almost $1 billion, more than any time since the early days of the modern state, nearly double the amount the government legitimately took in from taxes, fees, and other revenues. The next year promised to be a good one for builders and flat panel–television dealers.

  A few months before that meeting, Carol Rodley was sworn in as the next U.S. ambassador to Cambodia. She had been deputy chief of mission in Phnom Penh, the number-two position, when Ken Quinn was ambassador ten years before. And a few months after the $1 billion meeting, she agreed to speak at a rally and concert several NGOs were staging to emphasize the need to fight corruption.

  More than 50,000 people showed up, filling Phnom Penh’s Olympic Stadium. Rodley was just one of several speakers, and even she admitted that most of the audience likely came for the performers. Young people filled the seats. On that date anyone born the year Hun Sen first promised to enact an anticorruption law would be old enough to attend high school.

  In her speech, just like her predecessors, Rodley urged the Cambodian government “to deliver on its promise to enact the anti-corruption law.” She quoted the USAID study from a few years earlier, the one that said corruption gobbled up as much as $500 million—enough, she said, “to build 20,000 six-room school buildings” or “to pay every civil servant in Cambodia an
additional $260 per month.” And with that she was more specific than any previous American ambassador had been. She was the first to describe exactly what Hun Sen could be doing for his people with the money he and his aides were stealing.

  The government was enraged. The Foreign Ministry issued a warning to her and other ambassadors that “the diplomatic corps must maintain their neutrality and refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of Cambodia.” Rodley’s remarks, it added, were “based on a biased assessment” that the government “absolutely refutes.” The Council of Ministers expressed its “sadness.” Om Yientieng, head of the government’s putative anticorruption unit, called the speech “irresponsible. We don’t accept her statement, and we do not understand it.”

  In spite of the furor, the embassy refused to react. For weeks, when reporters called, all they would get was: No comment. Later, Rodley told me, “I have to admit I was a little surprised. A lot of those were things I had said many times before. They were not new. There have been several similar estimates.” Then she vented. “What I learned from this is that these people have a long way to go to get the thickness of skin that you need to live the life of a public official.”

  A few days before that conversation, the embassy held a Fourth of July celebration. Representing the government was the minister of defense. As usual, scores of diplomats, civil-society leaders, and Cambodian government officials were there. Just before the party began embassy staff wheeled in a six-foot-tall Statute of Liberty ice sculpture. It served as a metaphor for the Western effort to bring democracy to that place. The evening heat was typically torrid. The statue’s torch melted away by six thirty, and Lady Liberty’s left arm fell off just after seven o’clock.