Cambodia's Curse (29 page)

This behavior wasn’t restricted to the Sam Rainsy Party, either. In January 2004 assailants broke into Meach Youen’s home while he was sleeping and shot him in the face with an AK-47 assault rifle. He was an important Funcinpec official and the fifth opposition figure to be murdered in just that month.

The tactic was remarkably effective. Typically, a CPP enforcer would call or visit an opposition-party officer and offer him a senior position in government, one that came with the sobriquet “his excellency,” along with a rich down payment and a coveted spot amid the cash flow. The officer could visit the Toyota dealer and drive home in his new Land Cruiser that very afternoon. It was an offer he could not refuse. Say no, the officer well knew, and he could end up like Chea Vichea or Meach Youen by the end of the week.

The defections and killings steadily reduced the opposition parties’ strength. A few weeks later, as Rainsy’s bargaining position slowly dissolved, he proclaimed that his party and Ranariddh’s would merge. Ranariddh didn’t have much to say about that; he was still in France. But Ranariddh had betrayed Rainsy before. Perhaps, Rainsy certainly thought, this would lock him in. At the same news conference he once again warned that Hun Sen was about to kill him and, true to form, appealed to his foreign friends to protect him.

A few weeks later the two parties formally announced a “merger,” as planned, but that lasted only a short while. In June Ranariddh finally struck a lucrative deal with Hun Sen that allowed his party to enter a coalition with the CPP—and leave Rainsy out in the cold.

Ranariddh had needed the previous months to negotiate the arrangement he wanted. The merger with Rainsy’s party had been simply a bargaining tool. Under the resulting deal Hun Sen and Ranariddh would split “commissions,” the payments
oknya
and others made to Hun Sen or Ranariddh to buy land for deforestation, commercial development, mineral mining, or other exploitative purposes. Sixty percent of these payments would go to Hun Sen, 40 percent to Ranariddh, Steven Heder reported in
Southeast Asian Affairs
.

When word of this leaked out, Funcinpec and Rainsy party members began tripping over each other in the scramble to pay Ranariddh large sums for the government positions they hoped to hold. Most of the money was wasted. In June, eleven months after the election, Ranariddh agreed on a platform for the new government that included not a word of the Alliance of Democrats’ reform platform—or any place for Sam Rainsy Party members. Hun Sen would remain as prime minister, Ranariddh as president of the National Assembly.

Once again, Rainsy got nothing. Soon he was almost all by himself. Over the summer more than a hundred members of his political party defected to Funcinpec, Ranariddh’s party. Ranariddh held a welcoming ceremony at his party headquarters and told the Rainsy Party deserters, “I will send the list of defectors to Prime Minister Hun Sen and let the government offer appropriate positions to them.” Twisting the knife in Rainsy’s heart one more time, he also urged more of his party members to defect.

But Rainsy was not the only one he betrayed. Ranariddh had worked out his own lucrative deal, and in the process he had abandoned his own party, too. Funcinpec would now control the Ministries of Health, Rural Development, Tourism, Public Works and
Transport, and Education as well as Culture and Fine Arts. With the possible exception of Public Works and Transport, none of the ministries offered any opportunity for significant graft. Once again, Hun Sen and Ranariddh had worked everything nicely for themselves, while doing nothing for their allies—or for the Cambodian people.

 

A few weeks after the new government took office, the U.S. Embassy greeted the duo with a comprehensive and devastating research report on what it called “grand corruption.” It showed that government officials stole up to $500 million each and every year—about half of the state’s annual budget—almost every dollar the government collected on its own. The other half of the budget consisted of donations from NGOs.

In effect, the government chieftains left the care of the people to foreign donors while using the state’s own money to care for themselves. “The Royal Government of Cambodia collects very limited legal revenues, as large sums are lost to smuggling, bribes and other illegal practices,” the report concluded. “Further losses are experienced once revenues enter the state financial system. Informants estimated annual diversions from government coffers ranging between $300 and $500 million.”

A team of American consultants, working for USAID, had worked for much of a year and laid out a stunning description of a pervasive patronage system that affected every facet of Cambodian society. “Grand corruption involving illegal grants of logging concessions coexist with the nearly universal practice of small facilitation payments to speed or simply secure service delivery. Police and other officials demand small bribes in numerous guises. Students across the public school system pay unofficial daily fees to supplement salaries of teachers and administrators, and perhaps fill the pockets of highlevel ministry officials. The same is true in public health, where access to services is often contingent on supplemental payments to doctors, nurses or other health-care personnel.”

Among their findings was a pernicious tax system. As in most nations, taxes were collected ostensibly to pay for health, education, social development, and other state services for the people. Instead, each time a tax collector visited a business, he told the owner that he would forgive the tax debt if the businessman paid him a somewhat smaller bribe instead. Most businessmen complied—to save money and possible trouble if they refused. “Some observers have argued that such payments are taxes in another form. While there is some truth in this observation, this form of corruption places businesses in a legally and morally ambiguous position, tainted by their own actions, and readily subject to additional, irregular exactions from officials. The costs to citizens-at-large are even greater. Low formal tax payments lead to poor health and education services and second-rate infrastructure. And because potential foreign and indigenous investors refuse to do business in Cambodia, few jobs are created, and additional legal revenues are foregone.” For these and many other instances of depravity and turpitude, the consultants found, no one was ever punished:

The report was devastating. As Hun Sen considered his response, still another scandal spilled out, first reported by the
Phnom Penh
Post
. World Food Program officials discovered in August 2004 that about 4,000 tons of rice worth more than $2 million had been stolen en route to some of the nation’s poorest areas, where it was supposed to feed Cambodia’s most malnourished children. The thieves then sold the stolen rice for cash.

The WFP fed millions of children in desperately poor countries worldwide. Typically, it provided school lunches, as an inducement for parents to send their children to school. The lunches, rice and fish, were often the only meals the children would get each day. WFP and UNICEF surveys found that at least one-third of Cambodian children were malnourished. The WFP classified the situation as “alarming.” UNICEF data showed that about 40 percent of Cambodia’s children were “stunted” for lack of nutrition, and 10 percent suffered from wasting, meaning essentially that they were starving to death. Given those numbers, it was no surprise that one child in ten died before reaching age five. That is why the theft of WFP rice was so devastating for the children who were to have eaten it. Most likely, some of them died as a result, as the thieves should certainly have known.

The WFP fired several Cambodian employees, and newspapers reported that some senior government officials were implicated—though, of course, none were ever penalized. But Hun Sen was contrite. He promised to pay the WFP back, either in rice or in cash.

As for his formal response to the corruption report, he apparently realized that the annual donors meeting was just a few weeks away. This would be an inopportune time to lash out at the United States, the nation that had paid for the report. So Hun Sen pulled out that old chestnut, always available for troubled moments like this. He promised once again to pass the anticorruption law.

The amazing thing was that anyone believed him. Hun Sen had first proposed this law in 1995, another moment when donors were restive over corruption. The offer had quieted them for a while, and the government had then thrown up an imaginative array of excuses and roadblocks to explain away the failure to pass the bill. For example,
answering questions during the previous donor meeting, Hun Sen had promised to pass the law by the end of June 2003. And in fact, that June a law was brought up before the parliament for a vote. But it failed because the assembly could not muster a quorum. Someone had stipulated that, for this particular vote on that particular day, seven-eighths of the assembly membership had to be present. Every opposition member was there. Somehow, though, just enough members of Hun Sen’s own political party failed to show up. So the proposed law was shelved for another year.

When the 2004 donor meeting dawned, the donors were in a nasty mood. American ambassador Charles Ray dropped his diplomatic veneer and lambasted the Cambodian leadership. “Ordinary Cambodians,” he told Hun Sen and the state’s other leaders assembled before him, “are subject to a daunting array of small and medium exactions, some paid virtually on a daily basis.” He noted that the corruption report had highlighted the significant loss in revenue due to smuggling, bribes, and other illegal practices. The total, up to $500 million, was roughly equal to the amount the donors gave each year. As an example, payments students made to teachers each morning, starting in the first grade, “suggest that children as young as six are already being schooled in the art of corruption and bribery.”

When his turn came to speak, Hun Sen put away his usual scornful bombast and did not respond directly to the angry accusations. Cambodia, he said, was “at a crossroads in its difficult journey towards sustainable development and poverty reduction.” He promised again that his administration would pass the long-awaited anticorruption law, aggressively fight corruption, strengthen government institutions, and improve governance.

All of the donors had heard that before. Some shook their heads and rolled their eyes. When they finally made their pledges the total came to only $504 million for the coming year—almost $100 million less than they had provided at the last meeting. Cambodia had asked the donors to pledge $1.8 billion to be paid over the next three years,
“but the donors would have none of it,” Verghese Mathews, the former Singapore ambassador to Cambodia, wrote in the
Straits Times
. “The donor community has been demanding good governance for years and is not amused at the unacceptably slow pace of reforms.” Now, the former ambassador added, “the signal was clear—future aid would be conditional” on progress. But Hun Sen had heard that before, too, and experience had shown him that he needn’t worry about it.

W
hen the government delivered some emergency food assistance, three hundred residents of Dang Rung village rioted. Some of them saw the sacks of free rice, scores of them, delivered to the village chief. But none of them got any. So they naturally assumed he had given the rice to his family, friends, and CPP cronies, leaving none for the rest of the villagers. “We didn’t see even a grain of rice,” fifty-six-year-old Saing Moeva said with a sneer. He was rolling a cigarette from a plastic bag holding a small bit of tobacco, leaning against a pillar holding up his one-room home. Asked if he had ever received any aid from the government, he chortled as he said, “Yes, every five years,” at election time. “They come around and give us a sarong, 2.5 grams of seasoning, and a scarf.” His sense of humor was rare among Cambodians. In fact, it was quite rare to see Cambodians laugh at all. Given their desperate situation, they seldom even smiled.

His wife, Mou Chouerm, rose from the hammock under the house and pointed at a small cultivated patch. “I grow mint and sell it at market,” she said, her voice slurred. “I can earn 7,000 riel, maybe 10,000.” That’s roughly $1.75 to $2.50. The slur was the product of an ugly deformity. She’d had a stroke years earlier and lost control of the
right side of her face. Her mouth drooped, baring her teeth, almost as if a lead weight pulled at it. She had looked like this since 1985, when she collapsed and her husband decided “to take her where they could treat her with traditional medicine. She had bad spirits, so we went to a secret spirit house about thirty kilometers from here. A traditional drama group played music to chase away the spirits. It didn’t really help.”

In 1985, during the Vietnamese occupation, professional health care was largely unavailable in the provinces. But the spirit treatment left more lasting damage. Not only did Mou Chouerm and Saing Moeva have to pay about $500 for the ceremony, “we also had to buy alcohol, beef, and other food for those people.” To come up with the necessary funds, the family had to sell half of its land. Now Mou Chouerm still presented an ugly sneer, and they owned so little land that they could not produce enough rice to feed themselves. That is why they were so excited to hear that the Asian Development Bank was donating free rice to the poor.