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

by Joel Brinkley

  At the end of 2009 the National Assembly finally adopted the new penal code, and Cheam Yeap, a senior CPP lawmaker, said, “I would predict that the anti-corruption law will be approved during the first three months of 2010.” Then in mid-December the Council of Ministers approved the draft bill one more time and said it was being sent to the National Assembly for approval for the third, or possibly even the fourth, time. Hun Sen issued a statement, saying, “The former Royal Cambodian Armed Forces Supreme Command headquarters in Phnom Penh will be the home for the new national anti-corruption body.” But no one outside of government was being allowed to have a look at the draft bill.

  In January 2010 Hun Sen said, “The anti-corruption law will be adopted in the near future.” In March the parliament said it was beginning to debate the bill all over again. By then even the NGOs had grown weary and resigned. For several years the government had refused to show anyone its draft bill, causing concern that the reforms it promised would be hollow. The office of Douglas Broderick, the UN chief in Cambodia, put out a statement, saying that “to its knowledge, no draft bill has been shared with interested stakeholders, including civil society, since 2006.” Even if the government ever did manage to enact a law, wouldn’t it go the way of the Land Law, the Domestic Violence Law, and every other law the nation’s leaders had enacted under pressure, since King Norodom promised the French he would end slavery in the 1870s?

  The anticorruption bill “doesn’t really matter anymore,” Sara Colm, the longtime head of the Human Rights Watch office in Phnom Penh, said with a resigned, war-weary tone. Hun Sen seemed to be offering the same point when he told a group of businessmen, “The anticorruption law will not be a magic pill that will eliminate corruption.”

  He was certainly right. On March 11, 2010, fifteen years after Hun Sen first promised to enact anticorruption legislation, the National Assembly finally passed the bill, by a unanimous vote of the ruling party’s members. Everyone else had walked out because it was clear the new law was a cynical ploy, “nothing but an attempt to impress foreign donors,” the Human Rights Party asserted. Around the city Cambodians and foreigners shook their heads and sighed—disappointed, deflated.

  The law was doomed by design. The very heart of any effective anticorruption law, anywhere in the world, must be the public declaration of assets. For years and years donors and diplomats in Cambodia had made that point so many times that it grew to be a mantra. Only when an official’s holdings are held up to public scrutiny can anyone see whether his financial dealings are aboveboard. The new Cambodian law stipulated that asset declarations would remain secret. The only people who could see the corrupt officials’ accounts were other corrupt officials—if the declarations were made at all. And since the entire process was to be kept secret, who would ever know?

  Far from being independent, the new anticorruption body would report to the Council of Ministers, made up of the very officials the new unit would likely need to investigate. Sok An, the deputy prime minister, who lived in that 60,000-square-foot house theoretically purchased with his government salary, was the council’s chairman. The anticorruption body reported to him.

  To make matters worse, the law forbade gifts, or “commissions” (i.e., bribes), to government officials in exchange for favors, such as forest or land titles. But that provision had an exception. These gifts were permissible when they were “in accordance with custom and tradition.” Well, paying bribes for government positions, or for economic opportunities, had been “custom and tradition” for 1,000 years. Finally, the law gave the government authority to file defamation or disinformation suits against anyone who filed a complaint that “leads to useless inquiry.” Imagine what would happen to anyone who filed a complaint against any influential government official.

  Om Yientieng, a Hun Sen crony, was the longtime head of the government’s existing anticorruption unit, and the prime minister appointed him head of the new body. A look at his existing operation offered a picture of the way the new anticorruption body would likely operate. The most visible symbol of his office was a small sign hanging from the side of a building on a busy street in downtown Phnom Penh. “Office for the Complaints on Corruption,” it said in English and Khmer.

  To reach the building entrance, complainants have to squeeze through a parking garage crammed with motorbikes and a few cars. The building’s proprietor sits in a corner of the garage, watching television. A policeman questions anyone trying to enter the building and then says the complaints office is on the fourth floor. The elevator is broken, but to the left is a dark, dingy stairwell with industrial matting worn through at the steps’ edges, laying bare gaping holes that look decades old. On the fourth floor gold-colored plastic sconces in the stairwell lobby have no bulbs. Instead, fluorescent tubes flicker and hum, casting scant light. A photocopied piece of paper on one door says “Office for Receiving Complaints,” suspiciously in English. Who was the office’s true audience?

  Inside is a small room, maybe ten by twelve feet, with three desks, two of them empty, and no place for the complainant to sit. Navanny Son, the complaint receiving officer, pulls out an unoccupied desk chair. “We ask the person to fill out a form,” he explains, holding one out. But then many adults can’t read or write. He nods and adds, “We take the information if the person cannot write.”

  What exactly is his job? “Here, we only wait to receive complaints,” he answers. I ask how many have arrived today. Navanny Son and his secretary look at each other and giggle. Okay, how many so far this year? Navanny Son nods to his secretary. She looks up the number on her computer and then says, “I dare not answer the question.”

  “Some months,” Navanny Son acknowledges, “we don’t get any complaints.”

  For the few complaints that do come in, “we have our expert groups look at them,” says Neath Mony, another worker—one of ten employed in the complaints office. “If it is about land, we send it to the National Land Authority. If it’s about courts, we send it to the court. We send it to whichever institution is involved.” In other words, the office sends each complaint to the very office the complainant is accusing—with the complainant’s name attached. “We ask that institution to let the complainant know what happened,” Neath Mony says. You forward the note; that’s all? “We do have an investigations unit. I don’t know what they do. The investigators do investigate some irregularities. Their work is secret”—just like the anticorruption agency chartered under the new law promised to be.

  In 2009 more than 2,000 donor and NGO organizations were based in Cambodia—more per capita than most anyplace in the world. And the money they disbursed per person far exceeded the average for poor countries receiving foreign aid. Some donors were huge government agencies, like the U.S. Agency for International Development or the Department for International Development in Britain. Others were large international organizations, like the United Nations, World Bank, or International Monetary Fund. Still others were small, local groups, like the Alliance Association for Rural Restoration. It appeared to have fewer than a dozen employees.

  Overall, so many donors and NGOs were pursuing projects in Cambodia that they were tripping over each other. Several reports on their work noted that many didn’t coordinate with each other and ended up spending time and money on duplicative projects. The government often had no idea what they were up to. “Some of them, particularly the smaller ones, I don’t know what they are doing,” said Im Sethy, the education minister. No matter. The foreigners stationed in Cambodia savored the lifestyle. “People move here just because it is a nice place to live,” said Sara Colm of Human Rights Watch. “There’s Internet, restaurants.”

  For many aid workers this was a delightful change, given where they had been based before. Jean-Pierre de Margerie, head of the World Food Program office in Phnom Penh, had just moved from a posting in North Korea. Richard Bridle, head of the UNICEF office, and Douglas Broderick, head of the UN’s mission in Cambodia, had been stationed there
, too. In Pyongyang they led controlled, constricted lives. “The government was always playing mind games,” de Margerie recalled. Phnom Penh, in comparison, was quite pleasant.

  But for the WFP and other UN agencies much of Cambodia was still listed as a hardship post, just like North Korea or Burma, with commensurate salary supplements. In those other countries, though, they couldn’t walk along the riverfront and stop in any of half-a-dozen espresso bars and pick up one of the two better than average English-language newspapers.

  Teruo Jinnai, head of the UNESCO office in Phnom Penh, had worked previously in Tanzania—and Rwanda “just after the genocide,” he said. By comparison, he said, Cambodia was like a ball of clay that he could shape any way he wanted. “Here I have found my own passion. Here, I can work and cause the result I am after. In France, or America, you don’t see results. But here I can set my own target. If I want Cambodia to be like this or that, I can see the result. So that gives you more power, more energy, more passion.”

  Critics of the donors and NGOs often noted that they favored expensive Basque, northern Italian, and Japanese restaurants that charged more for a meal than some Cambodians earned in a year. That may have been unfair; you don’t have to live like the people you are helping to be compassionate and effective. Nevertheless, it was clear that these people had a lifestyle they wanted to protect.

  Though their work was challenging, it was often rewarding. Many were highly paid, and Cambodia charged no income taxes. They could live in sumptuous homes and hire as many servants as they wanted.

  If they cut off aid to the government, as the human-rights groups were demanding, many donors would lose their jobs, or at least their postings. In a Brookings Institution report entitled Aid Effectiveness in Cambodia, two Cambodian economists argued that donors were eager to begin programs that required their continuing participation and assistance because they “wish to maintain their presence in Cambodia.” The donors’ favorite project: good governance, an objective certain to require many years of work. So far it had produced few if any useful results. At one point in 2008, the Brookings study found that donors were pursuing 1,300 different projects nationwide, and 710 of them were ongoing, meaning they required a continued donor presence to keep them running.

  So what happened each year when the donors’ meeting came around again? Hun Sen stood before them and one more time said, this year, we are going to reform education, health care, land usage. Every year human-rights groups and opposition candidates cried out: Hold back your donations until they end land seizures, illegal logging and corruption, until teachers stop selling test scores and doctors stop demanding bribes!

  But most every donor in the audience had spent the past few months negotiating contract renewals with their home states or organizations, agreements allowing them to continue their work for the coming year. Here at the meeting they were to announce what they were now planning to do and how much they intended to spend. Human Rights Watch and the others were asking them to rip up their new contracts and go home, jobless.

  Naturally, none of the donors said that bleak possibility was the reason they would not hold back aid. Instead, they argued, “If you hold back money, the people most affected would be the poor,” explained In Samrithy, the NGO liaison coordinator for the Cooperation Committee of Cambodia, a donor umbrella group. He acknowledged that corruption was so rife that government officials helped themselves to money and goods that donors had dedicated to the poor. Even when they “distribute rice to the poor who they have evicted from their homes—they take some for themselves,” said Kek Galibru, director of Licadho, the human-rights group. “They can’t help it. It’s a habit.” Still, In Samrithy said, “the poor won’t get the services they need,” if aid is cut off. As for the corruption, he explained it away. “Some money goes this way or that way. But it’s useful if some of it reaches the poor. Not all of it does, but some does. That’s better than nothing.” That was a popular rationalization among donors.

  A few months after parliament passed the 2010 anticorruption law, a routine government census turned up about 2,000 ghost workers—phantom employees whose salaries went into their supervisors’ pockets. The government declined to prosecute, saying, “We must first warn those individuals who are getting money from ghost names,” as Cheam Yeap, a senior member of parliament, put it.

  The next month, Hun Sen addressed the annual donors’ conference once again and promised one more time that soon “we will have the capacity to fight against this dangerous disease” because “corruption will damage our institutions.” The donors awarded him $1.1 billion—the largest pledge in a generation.

  Some Cambodians and others remained astounded by the donors’ behavior—even people who worked for them. “I don’t understand their policy,” said Chhith Sam Ath, executive director of another donor umbrella group. “The government has learned that the donors are not serious.” He leaned forward in his chair and spoke softly, as if he were confiding a secret. “They do not stand behind what they say. Sometimes I don’t think some of the donors are really here to fight corruption.”

  Year after year the foreign donors continued meeting with the smiling health minister who flattered, and coddled, them. They reached agreements to begin new projects and then joined their friends or lovers at the new Greek place for dinner. After the donors handed over the money to build a new health clinic, the deputy minister took out enough to pay his son’s school tuition bill. The assistant minister took enough to buy new tires for his car. His deputy simply stuffed some cash in his pocket. After all, government commerce was carried out entirely in cash. When the clinic was finally built, so little money was left that the contractor had to use cheap and flimsy building materials, raising the real risk that the structure would collapse in the next big storm—just like that new school building in Kampong Thom.

  Broderick, the lead UN officer, was a big, beefy New Yorker, a UN bureaucrat who seemed primarily interested in projecting a positive image of the UN’s work. He sat in a large leather chair, surrounded by several cabinet officers. “The donors and the international community are getting smarter,” he asserted. “We are chipping away at the edges. We are drilling down on the corruption issue where it affects the people.”

  In contrast, Richard Bridle, director of the UNICEF office, one of Broderick’s agencies, complained that donors remain complacent, “unable to change. We are too comfortable with our control mechanisms.” The donors “are embedding and enabling the mentality of dependency,” said Theary Seng, who was director of a local advocacy group, the Center for Social Development. The Cambodian government, after all, had been dependent on foreign patrons since the Angkor empire fell in the fifteenth or sixteenth century—the Thai, the Vietnamese, then the French, the United States, the United Nations, and finally the world’s NGOs and donors.

  But some donors pointed to Theary Seng and the other critics and said: Look, this government is not so bad. “There’s a free press,” Peter Jipp, a senior specialist with the World Bank, offered with a cheery grin. “You don’t find that in other states—Laos, Vietnam. There’s a developing civil-society network. So, in the parlance of the donor community, these are the champions!”

  Kek Galibru saw all of that as a bitter irony. “At least the government can use us,” she said. “Our presence helps them a little bit. They need money from the international community, so they can say: Look at Licadho. They are free!”

  Mu Sochua, a senior Sam Rainsy Party parliamentarian, liked to take her case to Washington, just as her boss, Sam Rainsy, was wont to do. “In Cambodia, the pillars of democracy are all there,” she told an audience at the National Democratic Institute. “But you have to look at the quality, the functions. It’s really just a facade.”

  So it also seemed for newspaper editors. Michael Hayes, founder and executive editor of the Phnom Penh Post, was a cynical, hard-bitten journalist from Massachusetts, but he acknowledged that the government needed the semblance of a free pres
s to keep the donors happy. Still, Hun Sen sued the paper for defamation in 1994 and threatened to sue several times after that.

  Khmer-language papers were generally affiliated with the government or political parties and were fairly predictable. But they, too, were targets of the government’s wrath. In the summer of 2008 two men speeding by on a black motorbike with dark-tinted faceplates shot and killed Khim Sambor along with his twenty-one-year-old son as they walked down the street in downtown Phnom Penh. Khim Sambor was a reporter for the Khmer Conscience, an opposition newspaper, and not surprisingly the paper had been writing critically about the government. That year, the government sued twenty-five journalists for defamation or related pseudo-offenses. Defamation lawsuits Hun Sen filed against several opposition newspapers in the summer of 2009 forced some of them to close.

  By and large, though, the government did not worry so much about the two English-language newspapers. Hardly anyone in the country could read English, only donors, diplomats, and some government officials. Still, even those papers could be only so free.

  For most of its life, until 2008, the Post published once a week. “When we were weekly, I would read everything,” Hayes said. “Sometimes I would cut out stuff or change the tone” to keep from angering government officials. He pointed to that day’s paper. Inside was an interview, and the interviewee had said something critical of the government. “I sent a message to my staff: ‘We have to be more careful. We could get nailed for this!’”

  Sure enough, in 2009 the government sued the Cambodia Daily for defamation, saying it had quoted an opposition politician who criticized the Cambodian military. The paper had made no accusation. It had simply quoted someone else. Isn’t that what newspapers are supposed to do? Still, Judge Sin Visal told the court, “The article published in their paper caused confusion among the Cambodian people and damaged the dignity of the military officers.” The government did not review or censor stories before publication. But lawsuits and intimidation forced editors to censor themselves.