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

by Joel Brinkley

  The donors knew all of that. The papers reported it. They also knew that their image was poor, their effectiveness questionable. They realized that their continued support of Hun Sen and his government served as a prop holding him up. They knew that many of the senior government officials who told them how concerned they were about corruption were sitting on fat wallets. “There are some reformers in the Finance Ministry,” a senior World Bank official observed. “But I think even they are corrupt.” So, some donors were taking small, tentative steps to address the problem. “Good governance” was the catchphrase for this.

  However, even those projects faced justifiable skepticism. “Since NGOs cannot seem to have any influence on government, they say it’s better to get good governance projects going,” said Peter Manikas, who managed the National Democratic Institute’s Asia programs. “Why they think that would possibly work is beyond me.”

  One World Bank governance project served as the poster child for this kind of absurdity. In 2009 the bank allotted $20 million for a program called Demand for Good Governance, intended to help “grassroots groups, independent media, trade unions, etc.” demand “transparency and accountability” from the Cambodian government, the bank said. “It will enhance the capacity of non-state actors to constructively engage with the government in support of better development outcomes and improved governance.”

  So what was the bank going to do with that $20 million? Hand it over to the government. Stephane Guimbert, the economist in the bank’s Phnom Penh office, spoke about this plan with a straight face that betrayed not even a hint of recognition that the whole idea was ludicrous. “A small component of this money goes to nongovernment actors,” or NGOs, he noted, and then explained that the bank had asked the government for permission to do even that. “But we think the government itself could do a number of things to improve transparency. If there is no information coming out of government, what good does any of this do? The public is not going to accomplish anything.” He sat in the bank’s comfortable, air-conditioned conference room, at a conference table where bank officers often worked on white boards to lay out their development plans. “All sorts of scenarios have been piloted in Cambodia,” he acknowledged with a smile. This was one of the rooms where bank officials plotted their forestry and landregistration programs—while failing to look up, out the window, to see army officers felling the forests and developers burning residents’ homes.

  “This is like a jungle to them,” said Ok Serei Sopheak, a former government official who was serving as a consultant to the World Bank. “It’s not very easy to understand the mind-set of this place.”

  Foreign medical NGOs didn’t look out the window often enough, either. Ask any one of them what had been accomplished in the past few years, and he would most likely say: We defeated HIV/AIDS! Prodded and funded by foreign governments and private groups, Cambodia reduced the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the general population from more than 3 percent to just under 1 percent—a major public-health victory. But that laudable accomplishment masked a darker truth.

  Medical experts working in Cambodia allowed the nation’s health policies to be determined by the priority or caprice of officials in Geneva, Washington, or Berlin—not Phnom Penh or Battambang. That gave the country a skewed health policy that made little effort to address the patients’ most pressing needs.

  “Everybody talks about AIDS,” complained Dr. Sin Somuny, executive director of Medicam. “It affects 0.09 percent of the population. Well, diabetes now affects 10 percent of the population. But no one talks about that. Funding for diabetes is twenty-five to thirty times less.”

  O’Leary, director of the World Health Organization office, explained that international donors “want to give money to the big thing of the moment. Right now,” in 2009, “it’s influenza,” better known as swine, or bird, flu.

  Beat Richner, that hospital director from Switzerland, was scornful. “They care about bird flu because a bird may fly to California,” he said. “But a mosquito flies only 120 meters.” Hence, the dearth of funding for malaria or dengue fever, two mosquito-borne illnesses. “Two years ago 22,000 children in this country had dengue fever. But did the WHO care? No. They cared about bird flu.”

  When he spoke only nine people in Cambodia had contracted swine flu, but Richner’s hospital was full of children afflicted with malaria, dengue fever, encephalitis. Not one Cambodian hospital had a bacterial lab, but donors did put one in a French medical-research clinic in Phnom Penh—to conduct swine-flu tests. “Infectious diseases, infectious diseases,” Sin Somuny said, shaking his head. “If you care about the lives of the people, it should not just be infectious diseases.”

  “You know, beggars can’t be choosers,” countered Dr. Paul Weelen, another WHO official. “Donors set the agenda for what is done in these countries. Where there’s no money, not much is happening.”

  When Charlie Twining was ambassador, just after the UN occupation and the first national elections, “our countries put a lot of money into the UN operation,” he said, “and we pushed hard to have the UN and other agencies open offices there. We very much wanted to see the apparent success continue. We were very much drawn into that way of thinking.”

  Now, said Broderick, the UN chief, “we are pretty much at a stalemate, and there is a lot of frustration.” He was speaking about the debate over corruption, but that was a comfortable metaphor for the donors’ larger presence in society. “We continue to engage the government” but seldom gain much from that. “We need to move away from the narrowminded focus on the law and find individual entry points” direct to the Cambodian people. Meantime, the government had learned to play the donors like a fiddle. “It’s not uncommon for senior opposition leaders to be charged and convicted without evidence, and to be subsequently pardoned” to “soften up international donors before crucial pledging conferences,” the United Nations Human Rights Council noted in 2008.

  Government officials also used the donors’ complacency as justification for their own behavior. When a human-rights group issued a statement criticizing the government for failing to pass the anticorruption law, Information Minister Khieu Kanharith shot back, “If the government was not good, then donors would not have provided aid to Cambodia. They have not provided us with millions of dollars for useless spending.”

  And so the donor community talked and then talked some more. While continuing to give Hun Sen the money that kept him in power, more and more every year, they eagerly awaited the opening of exciting new restaurants or cultural attractions. “You know, there was a small theater at the Royal University, a subcampus, in 2002 and 2003,” said Jinnai, head of the UNESCO office. “But then the government sold the site to a developer in 2004, and they tore the theater down. Another theater burned down. They sold that land to a developer, too.” Though for most people working in Cambodia, this parable would bring to mind images of land seizures and corruption, not so for Jinnai. Instead, he went on with a wistful tone, saying, “Culturally, 2002 and 2003 was a good time here. I’m still hungry for this sort of culture now.”

  The United Nations and the developed world spent more than two years and $3 billion to redeem Cambodia in 1992 and 1993, bring it back from the abyss, and offer it a doorway into the modern age. Then the world turned away, and the nation fell back into habits that had pertained since the Angkor era. For a while, particularly after the “coup” in 1997, the United States and some other nations grew angry and tried to punish Hun Sen. In time, though, the world simply gave up. Their efforts had failed. To them, Cambodia had become just one more sad little state, like Senegal or Laos—beyond redemption, of little note. All the while, donors and NGOs made a home in Cambodia. They lived well and did good work. Each one could take pride in some small accomplishment, a problem assuaged, a life improved. But they also grew to be enablers.

  By 2010 donors had given at least $18 billion. The government relied on them to provide social services, then took credit for most every
thing they did and boasted about these “accomplishments” at election time. Government officials also maintained their comfortable lifestyles by ladling money out of the donor accounts. In fact, “the government has succeeded in persuading donors to pay salary supplements to its employees with remarkable regularity, despite regulations in virtually every donor organization against doing so,” the USAID corruption study noted.

  Just before the $1 billion donor meeting in December 2008, Heng Samrin, the CPP’s honorary president, blithely promised once again that the government “will ensure sustainable development, poverty reduction, the promotion of the rule of law and equity in social justice, as well as the elimination of land-grabbing, deforestation, illegal fisheries resources and the prevention of national income loss and the strengthening of public order.” Standing at a podium, he was the picture of smiling beneficence.

  Yet by 2010, 80 percent of Cambodia’s people remained desperately poor and barely educated. Cholera broke out nationwide soon after the dengue-fever epidemic abated, while malaria, tuberculosis, and dysentery remained commonplace. Almost 1 Cambodian of every 10 had diabetes, while World Health Organization figures showed that every year nearly 10,000 people, most of them children, died of diarrhea-related illnesses, all of them easily preventable. Five women died during childbirth every day.

  The government had passed a law in 2009 legalizing land seizures in certain circumstances and also began selling off governmentministry buildings in prime downtown locations, relocating workers to the suburbs. Oknya Lao Meng Khin bought one building belonging to the Ministry of Cults and Religion. (His companies were also behind the eucalyptus plantation in Pursat Province and the destruction of Boeng Kak lake.) Another developer with close connections to Hun Sen was given permission to buy the colonial-era government headquarters compound in downtown Siem Reap. The provincial government moved to new buildings more than ten miles from the city center.

  Meanwhile, Hun Sen, trying to show he was sensitive to overspending during the world economic crisis, promised that “we won’t spend money buying cars for government officials.” A few weeks later the government said it had signed a fifteen-year contract with a limousine service to provide one hundred Mercedes Benz 280S sedans, with drivers, for those same government officials. In the meantime, outside the capital 95 percent of the nation’s roads remained unpaved.

  The Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association reported that in 2009, 235 “human rights defenders” had been charged with crimes for doing their work—more than ever before. Life expectancy remained stuck, at sixty-one. So had the average per-capita income, at somewhere between $500 and $600. But 42 percent of the children still suffered from stunting. Fewer than 20 percent of Cambodian families who lived outside of the cities had access to a toilet or clean water. At least one-third of the people lived on less than $1 a day.

  What, exactly, had $18 billion in aid accomplished? “The pain, the suffering continue, in spite of Cambodia being the highest per capita recipient of foreign aid, for more than five years,” Bert Hoak and Ray Zepp wrote on a Cambodia news blog in 2008. Hoak had owned a bookstore and guesthouse in Phnom Penh for many years; Zepp wrote a travel guide about Cambodia. They, like so many foreigners who held affection for the state and its people, were growing ever more distressed. “The deforestation increases, in spite of foreign aid,” they wrote. “The human rights abuses, the killing of journalists and editors, dissidents and others continues, and will continue, in spite of foreign aid. Our continued aid will only serve to prolong the misery, to prop up a despotic regime, to prolong the ecological devastation, even to the point of no return.”

  In 2007 the Cambodia Daily reported, “There had been brief discussion of postponing the next” donor meeting “until an anti-corruption law is enacted, said a Western diplomat on condition of anonymity. That radical proposal, however, didn’t last very long before it was shot down.”

  What would happen if the donor community did in fact stand up to Hun Sen? What if they stood together as one and announced that they would withhold all but humanitarian aid until Hun Sen lived up to his promises to address the donors’ concerns about education, health, food security, corruption, sanitation, land seizures, and the rest?

  In the meantime, the World Food Program would continue delivering school meals. Other organizations would help poor patients receive ID cards, enabling them to receive free medical care. Every manner of direct humanitarian aid to the poor could continue. But all of the other initiatives, the “governance” programs and others from which government officials fed, would be put on hold. Sure, Hun Sen and Sok An could continue seizing land and selling it to oknya—even sucking sand from the river bottoms and selling it to Singapore.

  But most government employees would find they had to live on their actual salaries, fifty or seventy-five dollars a month. More important, the developed world would be delivering a strong statement—stronger, even, than the one the UN occupation offered, since Cambodians quickly realized then that the UN was a toothless, clawless tiger. Now, after decades of complicity and neglect, the developed nations would at last declare: We are here for the Cambodian people. It is your job to serve them.

  The government’s invulnerability, its invincibility, might be thrown into doubt. When the CPP could no longer reliably provide for its members, perhaps the model would begin to break down. Maybe, just maybe, after 1,000 years, Cambodia’s rulers might finally be forced to give the people their due.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I eng Sary was a key intellectual architect of the Khmer Rouge approach to governance. In the 1950s he attended school in Paris with Saloth Sar—Pol Pot—and there they planned their genocidal revolution. While the Khmer Rouge held power, Ieng Sary served as foreign minister.

  After the government’s fall, after the disclosure that 2 million people had been killed, after years of bloody insurgency, Ieng Sary took up Hun Sen’s offer of amnesty in 1996 and, in time, simply moved back to Phnom Penh, where he settled into a mansion, by Cambodian standards, in a housing development for ruling-party officers—just down the street from the Senate Golf Range. There he lived comfortably among his former victims, protected by legions of bodyguards.

  For foreigners working in Cambodia, donors or diplomats, this seemed little different from allowing Joseph Goebbels or Rudolf Hess to move back into their Berlin homes after World War II to live out the rest of their days in peace and comfort. Yet Cambodians found it utterly unremarkable that a Khmer Rouge leader lived openly among them. Ask anyone how that could be, and all you’d get back was a puzzled look.

  If nothing else, Ieng Sary fed the state’s omnipresent culture of impunity. If he, with the blood of 2 million people on his hands, faced no penalty, no censure, no retribution, how hard was it to accept the killing of a journalist here, a trade-union official there, a crane operator riding his motorbike down the street—even a servant thrown off the roof? As Theary Seng, the advocacy-group director, put it, the Khmer Rouge crimes remained “the baseline. This is thirty years later, but we are still comparing ourselves to the Khmer Rouge. Today, the government can say it took 10 lives, or even 100 lives—but what’s that compared to 2 million? That’s still the Cambodian standard,” and most foreign governments felt the same way.

  Maybe most Cambodians were quiescent about living among the former Khmer Rouge killers. But foreign diplomats were appalled. As Thomas Hammarberg, the UN human-rights officer in Phnom Penh in the late 1990s, delicately put it, “This led to a contradictory situation. First, it became obvious that it would no longer be possible to avoid a real discussion about justice.” At the same time, he noted that in the days leading up to the “coup” in 1997, both Hun Sen and Ranariddh were actually courting the Khmer Rouge, hoping to recruit their fighters for the battle to come.

  Still, Hammarberg and others at the United Nations were convinced that these mass murderers, the Khmer Rouge leaders cavorting around town, must be put on trial. In April 1997, the Unite
d Nations Commission on Human Rights passed a resolution requesting Hammarberg “to examine any request by Cambodia for assistance in responding to past serious violations of Cambodian and international laws as a means of bringing about national reconciliation, strengthening democracy and addressing the issue of individual accountability.”

  The United Nations wanted at last to put the Khmer Rouge leaders on trial. Actually, the Vietnamese had already tried to do the same thing. In 1979 they staged a show trial and condemned them to death, in absentia. (Later, King Sihanouk pardoned them.) But the UN, in another bureaucratic understatement, called that trial “flawed.” One could only wonder why the United Nations wanted to jump into that pool again after the “flawed” occupation and election just a few years earlier. But for human-rights officers, the reemergence of the Khmer Rouge leaders in everyday Phnom Penh society was such an affront that they could not help themselves.

  In the days before the “coup,” Hammarberg had asked the co–prime ministers, Ranariddh and Hun Sen, if they would like to ask the United Nations for help in staging a trial. They both agreed, though one can only imagine what was running through their minds. At that moment both were focused on the certain battle ahead. And when thinking about a trial, Hun Sen could not help but consider that he and many members of his government were former Khmer Rouge officers. Nonetheless, they both signed a letter asking for help, because, they said, “Cambodia does not have the resources or expertise to conduct this very important procedure.” They were too busy to argue about this now; there’d be time to undo it later.