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

by Joel Brinkley

  But in the twenty-first century individualism, this shared personality trait, ensured that Cambodians would remain hungry and illiterate. By and large they could not, would not, stand up and advocate for themselves.

  Imagine that Bulgarians or Indians, Malay, Bolivians, Poles, or citizens of most any nation ruled by a government styling itself as a democracy instead sold off the nation’s harvest each year, leaving its people without enough to eat. Evicted thousands of people from their homes, burned down their houses, then dumped the residents into empty fields and sold their property to a developer. Amassed vast personal fortunes while 40 percent of the children were so malnourished that they were growing up stunted. Allowed schoolteachers to demand bribes from six year olds and doctors to extort money from patients, letting them die if they did not pay. Presided over a state in which 80 percent of the people lived under conditions little changed from 1,000 years earlier so that everyday lives remained simply battles for survival. Would any of these other populations stand for this? Even in Iran, a brutal theocracy, the people arose in furious opposition to the government in 2009 for far less.

  But Cambodia is home to a world-class paradox. In 2010, 60 percent of the nation’s population was born after 1979, when the Khmer Rouge fell from power. “You’d think,” said Kent Wiedemann, the former American ambassador, “that if these people look around at their neighbors and see that they are relatively more prosperous, they would not want to spend their lives grubbing around in the mud, in the rice paddies. They would demand something more from their government.”

  As it happens, though, the International Republican Institute conducted national surveys of Cambodians every few years to gauge their view of current issues. Their pollsters spoke to people nationwide, urban and rural, young and old, well-off and poor. The IRI was the U.S.government funded agency that employed Ron Abney, who was injured in the 1997 grenade attack. The agency’s leaders had long disliked, even loathed, Hun Sen. Yet year after year the group found that 75 or 80 percent of the Cambodian people said they were satisfied with their lives. They expected nothing more. The country, these people said, was going in the right direction.

  The Cambodia Daily reported on one of those surveys in February 2009. It showed that 82 percent of the respondents said the country was on the right track. Some other headlines in the same paper read, “U.N. Agencies Alarmed by Jump in Child Malnutrition,” “Prosecutor Accused of Bias in Land-Dispute Case,” “Panelists Criticize Government’s Lack of Budget Transparency,” “Banteay Meanchey Man Charged in Rape of Two 6-Year-Olds,” and “Prime Minister’s Son Promoted to Rank of 1-Star General.”

  The poll respondents said they were happy because the government provided infrastructure: roads, bridges, wells, schools. Kimber Shearer, a director of the International Republican Institute’s Asia Division, tried to explain the seemingly contradictory finding, saying the “people specifically give credit to Hun Sen for building all of this—no matter who really built the schools.” In fact, foreign donors, or Hun Sen’s oknya, built most of the infrastructure that Cambodians appreciate. The poll findings were not new. In 2003 the Asia Foundation conducted a similar survey and came up with similar results: Only 9 percent of the population said “the country is headed in the wrong direction.”

  Hun Sen’s government touted these surveys as validation, a fact that certainly rankled the IRI’s leaders. But the principle behind the people’s point of view kept Hun Sen in power. If 80 percent of the people lived hardscrabble, subsistence lives in the countryside—quite literally hungry, barefoot, and illiterate—what did they care about the newspapers that reported about criminality, corruption, or malfeasance? The papers didn’t circulate where they lived. Even if they did, they couldn’t read them. Most people did have television, but the government controlled all of the stations. Regular news-program fare showed Hun Sen standing in a village, pointing to an oknya, and asking him to build a new road or bridge, “presented as requested.” “Control of the electronic media is a serious problem,” Ambassador Mussomeli asserted. “Until they open up TV and radio, no, you cannot have a free and fair election.”

  Local human-rights groups put all sorts of reports on their Web pages that detailed government abuses. Licadho’s site featured reports like these: “Police and Military Burn and Bulldoze Houses During Land Eviction in Cambodia’s Northwest” and “Cambodian Teacher Convicted of Defamation in Land Dispute with School Principal.” But who saw these reports? Journalists and other NGOs, perhaps. In 2009 the Cambodian Chamber of Commerce reported that Internet penetration nationwide stood at .0014 percent. About 20,000 of the 13.5 million Cambodians had an Internet subscription. (Still, in 2010, the government started discussing Web censorship, saying, “If any Web site attacks the government, or any Web site displays inappropriate images such as pornography, or it’s against the principle of the government, we can block all of them.”)

  Javier Merelo de Barbera Llobet lived in western Cambodia for more than two years, helping villagers as a worker for Jesuit services. He spoke to dozens of them during the 2008 election campaign, and he said he observed a constant theme: “People were very afraid of the CPP losing. They were very afraid of change.” After all, for centuries change in Cambodia has generally led to misery or death.

  Chan Sophal, chairman of the Siem Reap provincial council, said his government “is encouraging the people to change their way of living. Train them in business farming, chickens or pigs. Give them microfinancing.” But wasn’t he dealing with an intensely conservative population that resisted change? “In your question, you are proving my reality. The biggest challenge we have is facing the state of mind of our people. They don’t want to change. This will require lots of time; this will need education.” In the meantime, “our goal, if we can achieve it, is improved infrastructure—better roads, bridges, and irrigation for remote rural people.”

  The governor pointed to a similar problem. “A big part of this challenge now,” he said “is fishing.” The government was trying to enforce a ban on fishing during the spawning season; fish stocks were severely depleted. The problem was, for all of time Cambodians have eaten rice and fish and very little else. The annual flood of the Tonle Sap River washed millions of fish into the Tonle Sap lake. Water from the lake flooded rice paddies even miles inland, carrying fish spawn.

  At the evictee site for HIV/AIDS patients outside Phnom Penh, the residents dragged through the afternoon, still depressed about losing their homes in the city a few days earlier. They were dispirited and hungry. But then at dusk, one of them walked down to the rice paddy behind their tiny refugee camp, dropped a small net into the water, and came back with a few dozen tiny fish, each at best two inches long. The mood in the camp suddenly changed. Children giggled; smiling parents eagerly gathered sticks and started little fires in their earthen cauldrons. Dinner was here! Who was going tell these people they couldn’t fish?

  Nonetheless, Hun Sen ordered a fishing moratorium in 2009. If you eat fish roe, the prime minister told his people in a television address, it’s like eating thousands of fish. But convincing Cambodians to stop catching fish was as unlikely as persuading them to stop growing rice—or to accept microloans and start agribusinesses, as council chief Chan Sophal was proposing.

  Chnok Trou was a fish hauler on the shores of the Tonle Sap lake, in Pursat Province. Her job was to carry the fishermen’s catch from the boats to the wholesaler at the end of the dock. She lived in a bamboo hut that might have been eight feet long by eight feet wide and six feet high. As the Tonle Sap flooded each year she and other fish haulers lugged their homes away from the water’s edge and up a slope in stages, five times as the water rose, and then back down in stages as the water receded. She lived at the end of a long line of these little huts, dozens of them, most with TV antennae strapped to the end of bamboo poles, high in the air, swaying in the breeze.

  Chnok Trou was idle just now. The fishing ban “has been here every year for generations,” she
explained. “But this year they are very strict about it, more than any other year.” She said she had saved money from last season and hoped it might help her get through this ban. In past years “there was still some fishing” during this, the spawning season. She shook her head. “We may run out of money this year. If we do, we will borrow until next year to buy food.”

  Just then a motorboat pulled up to shore in front of her. Four men wearing straw hats began unloading half-a-dozen large blocks of ice, each one six feet long. They piled the blocks onto a truck bed and drove off. What was the ice for? Chnok Trou looked embarrassed. She paused a moment and then whispered: “To keep the fish fresh.”

  Sit You Sous, the sixty-one-year-old blacksmith who lived near Pailin, said he voted for the CPP year after year “because of the support for poor families, the development and the construction.” He pointed to a small wooden bridge over the stream that ran beside his house. “Also because they liberated the country on January 7, 1979, so I vote for them out of gratitude—and for keeping us safe. They are the ruling party, and I trust them.”

  About that time, the Gallup polling organization made public a major survey it had conducted throughout the world over several years, asking tens of thousands of people to score their own well-being. Were they “thriving,” “struggling,” or “suffering”? Cambodians’ own view of themselves was darker than that of any other Asian nation. Just 3 percent of Cambodians said they were thriving, 75 percent said they were struggling, 22 percent were suffering. But then most of them simply believed that was their lot. Asked if he was satisfied with his life, Sit You Sous nodded. “Yes, I am. Like the old people used to say, life is hard, but I survive.”

  Mu Sochua, an opposition member of parliament, said her party had striven to use the “change” mantra that opposition parties offered worldwide. With so many destitute, miserable people, how could they not want change? “But we can’t use change anymore,” she acknowledged with a frown, “because the people don’t want change.”

  Thirty-six-year-old Ten Keng lived in deep-rural Battambang Province, near Pailin. She grew corn and made just enough money to feed her family. Ten Keng volunteered that she was illiterate. But, in a conversation, her manner was chilly, unwelcoming. She was dismissive of government. “They don’t do anything for us.” Her only real interaction came once, when she contracted malaria and had to go to the hospital. “I had to pay 60,000 or 70,000 riel to the hospital,” fifteen or twenty dollars, she said. “But then when the doctor came to see me, he said I should pay him another 50,000—as an incentive. This was at Battambang hospital. I got good care after that.” What did she see ahead for herself and her nation? She pursed her lips and shrugged, as if to say, “I don’t know. That’s not my business.”

  EPILOGUE

  In 2002 the Cambodian government sold the rights to explore for oil off its coast to Chevron Oil Company. Of course, the government said nothing publicly about this and never disclosed how much money it received or where it went. Chevron was mum, too. After having worked in Burma for many years, the company’s policy, it seemed, was to avoid mixing politics with business wherever possible.

  Within a year Chevron found oil, though the size and marketability of the deposits remained unclear. Then in 2005 Chevron put out a statement, saying, “We are very encouraged to find oil in each of the first four wells of this drilling program.” Two years later the International Monetary Fund ventured an estimate. Within a decade, it said, Cambodia could begin taking in $1.7 billion in oil revenues each year. That’s when the panic began.

  Cambodia chartered a new national oil company, and Hun Sen gave the oil portfolio to Sok An, the deputy prime minister. The new company operated in total secrecy; one human-rights group charged that state oil-company employees were forbidden even to use the telephone. Hun Sen talked about using the profits to reduce poverty and promote development. No one believed him.

  The IMF urged Cambodia to pass financial-management laws before pumping even the first gallon of oil. John Nelmes, the fund’s resident representative, said, “One of the keys is that they have to put in place strong macro-economic management. That means budgetary policy that is sound and that directs money toward productive uses.”

  His advice was the first in a chorus from donors and diplomats who warned that setting up a state-owned oil company from which corrupt officials could skim profits was the perfect formula for afflicting Cambodia with still another serious malady: the oil curse. The World Bank pressured Cambodia to sign the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, an international agreement that would require public disclosure of oil and gas revenues. “This is a big thing for Zoellick,” said a senior World Bank official. Robert Zoellick was the bank’s president. But in 2008 Hun Sen refused and called external criticism of his oil policies “crazy.” Then, in the fall of 2010, opposition politicians grew so frustrated about all of this that they wrote a plaintiff letter to twentytwo U.S. senators, saying, “Cambodia is ripe for disastrous extraction of our oil reserves” because the government was granting “99 year concessions for enormous swaths of land” over presumed oil reserves “in exchange for private pay-offs to a small number of associates at the top of the ruling party.” As usual, that brought no useful result.

  But what would happen if oil wealth began sloshing over Hun Sen’s government with no oversight or control? Donors and NGOs feared he would not have to put up with them any longer. As Kek Galibru had put it, now “the government can use us. Our presence helps them a little bit. They need that money from the international community.” With oil wealth the government might not need donor money any longer. Would Hun Sen shut down Licadho, take over the newspapers, tell USAID and the World Bank to mind their own business? “This has been in our minds for some time,” said Guimbert, the World Bank officer in Phnom Penh. “The little that has come out now suggests that the pockets of oil are more scattered and may be less commercially viable. That could be a blessing in disguise. But I don’t want to discount the black scenario. It could still happen. That’s why we have to try to develop systems” that bring transparency to government spending. “And, yes, there is a sense of urgency here.”

  Then in 2010 the reason for the urgency became clear. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation into whether one oil company paid a $2.5 million bribe to government officials in 2007 for the right to look for oil. At that time, one government minister, Lim Kean Hor, called the payment “tea money,” a euphemism for an under-the-table bribe. When Hun Sen learned of the SEC investigation three years later, he said the money had gone into a “social fund” for schools and hospitals. “It’s not under-the-table money.” But he refused to say exactly how the money had been spent. Traveling the country, talking to governors, looking at schools and hospitals, no one told me of any significant new projects. And, of course, the new anticorruption agency chose not to take up this case.

  As if that were not trouble enough, late in the decade China became Cambodia’s single largest donor. When donors pledged almost $1 billion in December 2008, $257 million of that came from China. Beijing actually spent billions more to build dams and roads and other infrastructure. And, of course, China’s aid came with no strings—except that Hun Sen had to endorse Beijing’s “one-China” policy on Taiwan. He did, and after that the Chinese couldn’t have cared less whether he enforced an anticorruption law or ended land seizures. “Loans or grants from China have released Cambodia from certain kinds of political pressure from international countries,” Hun Sen once remarked. As Hun Sen dedicated a new bridge China had built for him in 2009, he lauded his new friend—once the Khmer Rouge’s patron state, as he had caustically complained in previous times. “A total of $6.7 billion of Chinese capital has been used in Cambodia,” he boasted. Chinese aid, he added, “helps strengthen Cambodian political independence.”

  So where is Cambodia heading? “I have become so dispirited,” lamented Yeng Virak, executive director of the Community Le
gal Education Center. He sighed heavily and shook his head. “The foreigners, the donors, they say Cambodia is so much better off than in the past. But I feel sad and worried. We are falling off a cliff!”

  One resident of the Boeng Kak lake community in Phnom Penh watched the fetid water rise under his floor as the developer continued pumping sand. On the side of his house, he painted a declaration: “Stop evictions!” The government sued him for defamation.

  “It’s just like the kingdom again, but now it’s the twenty-first century,” Keo Phirum said with as much wonder as anger. He was a provincial counselor for the Sam Rainsy Party.

  When the government finally enacted an anticorruption law of sorts in 2010, ruling-party legislators rushed the bill through parliament, giving opposition lawmakers and civil-society leaders almost no time to study it. Douglas Broderick, head of the UN offices in Phnom Penh, noted publicly that the government had not shared a draft of the bill with anyone since 2006. Right away, Foreign Minister Hor Namhong sent him a threatening letter, complaining of “flagrant and unacceptable interference in the internal affairs of Cambodia.” The foreign minister warned that “repetition of such a behavior would compel the Royal Government of Cambodia to resort to a ‘persona non grata’ decision.” The government would expel Broderick—heir to the UN authorities who tried two decades earlier to give Cambodians a fresh start in the world. After that, Broderick insisted that he had to keep a “low profile” in the state his organization had spent $3 billion to create.