Cambodia's Curse (14 page)

UN officials were apoplectic. They’d pulled off successful elections despite everything that had happened before. They’d redeemed themselves, even received congratulations from the secretary-general and kind regard from leaders around the world. Now all of it was falling apart. Cambodia’s leaders, all of them, were plotting, scheming, bribing, and backstabbing to come out on top, as if the election had never taken place. You could be sure that Hun Sen had paid off those provincial leaders who’d gone along with this secession ploy. Sihanouk was calling in all his markers. And Ranariddh prepared to play his trump card: his dad. That’s how Cambodia’s leaders had always behaved.

This time was supposed to be different. For the very first time, the people of Cambodia had spoken. Nearly all of them had voted. They had embraced democracy and stated their wishes. The world had just
spent $3 billion to make this happen. And by God, the UN vowed, Hun Sen and all those royals could not simply pretend that the voting had never occurred and go on as they always had.

But the secessionists began attacking and burning UN offices in their new “autonomous zone.” A UN spokesman declared: “This is not acceptable.” Even with all that outrage, though, the UN had nothing to hold up as a threat but this: “The international community is sure to react to further provocation.” In public, Akashi continued insisting that the elections had been fair and free; the UN had full confidence in the results. But he did write a private letter to Hun Sen, and there he made no attempt to hide his disbelief in Hun Sen’s disavowal of responsibility for the secession threat. With his own staff under attack, and the UN’s reputation on the line, Akashi demanded to know what Hun Sen planned to do about this.

Two days later, the newly elected National Assembly met. Sihanouk addressed the body and told the assemblymen: “We must not make this day the beginning of the end of Cambodia. We have to find a way to avoid the partition of Cambodia.” He spoke as if this were some alien threat that had to be repressed, though the leader was his own son, a man who had served for many years as Sihanouk’s “chief of protocol.” Minutes later another of his sons, Ranariddh, offered a resolution to reinstate Sihanouk as king again, to give him “full and special powers inherent in his capabilities and duties as chief of state in order that he may save our nation.” The assembly immediately approved the motion by acclamation. His son’s secession ploy was proving to be quite useful for Sihanouk, too. He called the assembly’s resolution “historic and invaluable.”

Later that day, Hun Sen made his own grand play. He traveled to Kampong Cham Province, less than one hundred miles away but still part of the so-called autonomous zone, and reported back: Good news! This province is back under central government control! His ploy was transparent. All the secessionists were members of Hun Sen’s government, and so were all of the breakaway provinces. Hun Sen
seemed to be hoping no one would notice that and instead proclaim him the hero who had saved the nation. That’s not exactly how it worked out.

In the end, Sihanouk prevailed on Ranariddh and Hun Sen to share power—while he would once again serve as king. Ranariddh agreed this time because he was to be designated “first prime minister,” since he had actually won the election. Hun Sen would be second prime minister. Hun Sen agreed only because he knew who would really be in charge. As for Prince Chakrapong, he simply slunk away, over the border into Vietnam.

Hun Sen, Ranariddh, and Sihanouk had sat in that ornate conference room in Paris two years earlier, each conniving to achieve an outcome that would place himself on top. Now, it seemed, each of them had come quite close. Sihanouk was king, but without all the powers he had held before 1970. Both Hun Sen and Ranariddh were heads of the government, but they had to share power.

Nevertheless, through all of its history, only one absolute leader had ruled Cambodia. All three men had accepted the new arrangement—but only temporarily. Each of them wanted to be the nation’s absolute ruler and remained determined to make that happen. As Hun Sen had said a few years earlier, “You can talk about sharing power in Paris, but not in Cambodia.”

The UN blessed the agreement as the best that could be achieved for Cambodia—and for itself. Prince Sihanouk was not so generous. A foreign-press interviewer asked him what had been achieved with almost $3 billion and an election. “It was a waste!” Sihanouk declared with a dark grimace and a firm shake of his fist. “I apologize. I present my apologies to the United Nations. We did not deserve those three billion dollars because the way we handled it was so bad, so bad.”

T
riumphant, 22,000 UN personnel began packing to leave in the fall of 1993. The United States opened a full embassy and confirmed Twining, its chief of mission, as ambassador. Many other nations set up new embassies, too.

Cambodia was launched as a new democratic nation, a friend to the West. “There was a lot of optimism in the air,” Twining observed. Most surprising of all, former archenemies Hun Sen and Prince Ranariddh seemed to be getting along. A famous photo, in the
Far Eastern Economic Review
, showed both men, in 1994, wearing matching formal white Asian shirts and offering slightly bowed, smiling homage to each other and to the world. “You know, I would listen to them talking to each other,” Twining said, “and they would affectionately refer to one another as ‘big brother’ and ‘little brother.’”

Behind closed doors, however, a power struggle was already under way. Ranariddh was supposed to be the first prime minister, the top leader, but the government as it stood the day he took office was simply a vast, unbroken patronage network for the Cambodian People’s Party—from Hun Sen’s office all the way down to the village chiefs. Ranariddh needed to wrest control from Hun Sen and the CPP. This
wasn’t driven simply because of the prince’s natural expectation that he should control the government he was elected to lead. More important, he had to find “rewarding jobs” for members of his party. A rewarding job in Cambodia was one that placed the officeholder amid a lucrative patronage stream.

Ranariddh and Hun Sen decided to divide up the ministries. And once the prince had learned which ones were his, he laid down the résumé requirements for anyone who hoped to hold a senior position. Ranariddh wanted to see his applicants’ bank statements. “The price list quoted by Funcinpec officials for jobs in the administration ranges from $200 to $3,000, depending on how good the position will be for extracting bribes,” Veng Sereyvudh, a senior Funcinpec officer, told the
Nation
at the time. After all, he added, unlike Hun Sen, the new Funcinpec ministers “come with empty hands, and they need houses.” Hadn’t the kings of Angkor used the same system to choose their mandarins?

The real question the leadership had to address was, who was going to be Cambodia’s new patron. After all, the national tradition of dependency had continued for centuries now. In recent history, after the French patrons had left, the United States was the first generous benefactor, in the early 1970s. Then came the Khmer Rouge years, when China kept Pol Pot and the other leaders rich and fat while they starved and killed millions of their countrymen. “The group of decision makers lived very well,” said Mey Meakk, Pol Pot’s secretary. “But the poor people who served them, the working class like me, we were still very, very poor.” So, in that way at least, Pol Pot had carried on the traditions of Cambodian leaders through the centuries.

Then came the Vietnam occupation. While Hanoi served as occupier and patron, the newly appointed Cambodian ministers had little if any previous experience in government—or as managers of a sophisticated graft network. In any case, under the Vietnamese, resources were scarce. So when Twining first met Hun Sen, “he lived in a modest twostory stucco house downtown.” On the first floor was a meeting room with a carpet on the floor and seating for six or eight people. Upstairs
were a small dining area, a kitchen, and a couple of bedrooms. The entire place probably did not exceed 2,000 square feet. Obviously, Hun Sen had not yet tapped into a lucrative money stream. (Later, by comparison, even his deputy, Sok An, had a home the size of a small hotel—five stories and about 60,000 square feet of living space.)

In 1992, the United Nations had arrived with billions of dollars to spend. The nation was awash in cash, though little of it went into the government treasury. Every project the UN undertook offered opportunities for graft—or theft. All that UN money bloated the Cambodian economy. A lot of people got rich. But then, at the end of 1993, the UN and all of its money and expertise were gone. That left “a huge vacuum,” Twining observed. “In the government, there wasn’t a lot of experience.” Among the new ministers, “there wasn’t a lot of education.” But hadn’t that always been true of Cambodia’s mandarins? They were there primarily for the money. After the UN left, they worried: Who would step up? Who would be the new patron, the next funder? How could those new Funcinpec officers build their mansions and buy their fancy new cars? A hint of a possible answer had come in Tokyo a year earlier. There, in June 1992, thirty-two nations had come for a conference to talk about how to rebuild Cambodia. Everyone was confident that the country would soon have a new democratic government. But the nation’s infrastructure—homes, schools, hospitals, roads, railways, power networks, and water systems, practically everything—still lay in shambles.

William Draper III, administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, told the conference that Cambodia remained “a critical test for the post–Cold War world,” and its case was “especially poignant, not only because of the immense human suffering that has already taken place there, but because Cambodia was the unwitting victim of superpower confrontation.” Now, Draper suggested, it was time to repay Cambodians for all of this, with “one of the largest and most complex development challenges ever faced by the international community.” Draper said the secretary-general had asked him to come up with an estimate of the reconstruction money needed right
away, and he had it now: $595 million. Then a parade of world leaders stood up to talk about how important the mission was and how eager they were to help. China’s vice foreign minister, Xu Dunxin, promised to be generous and pumped up Beijing’s good friend Sihanouk. “Under the leadership of Prince Sihanouk,” he said, “the Cambodian people will overcome their difficulties.”

When the day had ended and each nation had turned in its pledge sheet, the world promised to provide Cambodia with $880 million—30 percent more than Draper had requested. The UN authorities were to manage that money since, in 1992, they still occupied the nation. In truth, though, as the violence increased in the following months, most of the countries held back their pledges. But for the Cambodians, perhaps the most encouraging development of that meeting in 1992 was that the donors were promising to put on another of these funding conferences the next year.

Sure enough, just a few weeks after Hun Sen, Ranariddh, and Sihanouk announced their tripartite governing agreement in the summer of 1993, the French staged another funding conference, in Paris. The mood this time was different. The donor nations weren’t just trying to help another poor, beleaguered place. Now they had ownership. They had paid billions of dollars to give Cambodia this chance. They were heavily invested in the outcome. So the attendees pledged another $119 million while promising to begin delivering the rest of the $880 million offered a year earlier.

In Washington that fall Quinn, the deputy assistant secretary of state, warned Congress that after the United Nations closed shop and sent its people back home, the United States should not turn away. Cambodia still faced major challenges. Not least, “traditional political problems like corruption could come to the fore and weaken the new government,” because “Cambodia lacks the institutions and adequate numbers of trained personnel needed for a mature democracy.”

That same fall Japan reported that many nations were beginning to make good on their pledges, to the tune of $714 million so far—while
the United Nations said Cambodians had spent only $330 million of that money on the projects for which the money was intended. Where did the other $384 million go? Just a bookkeeping error, the new Cambodian government explained; we don’t have systems in place yet to keep accurate records of the aid we receive. Undeterred, donors pledged another $773 million in 1994. Ranariddh had read a note from his father to the group in which Sihanouk urged them to fund a “new unconditional Marshall Plan” for Cambodia.

 

A year passed, and Paris was planning still another donor conference. But by now the donors were growing concerned. What had happened to all of that money they had already given? Representatives from several of the donor countries, including the United States, met with government officials in February 1995 to discuss the matter. Twining said he and the other ambassadors, concerned about the growing indications of corruption, had “all been talking about it among ourselves.” One civil servant complained to Twining “about his minister siphoning off so much money that there was very little left to run the ministry.”

The state seemed to be falling headlong back into its old corrupt ways. Police had begun setting up unofficial checkpoints on the highways where they pulled over drivers and shook them down. Schoolteachers were demanding bribes from students every day as a condition for staying in class. And then, of course, there was the disappearing foreign aid. At the least, Twining said, “we were talking about raising the civil-service salaries so the teachers didn’t have to take 50 riel from their students” every morning.

At the February meeting Twining told the group, “All of the donor countries want to continue to support democracy and development in Cambodia,” but “some of them are concerned about corruption and concerned about transparency. 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.” He urged the government, Hun Sen and Ranariddh, to make clear that they stood firm against corruption.