Cambodia's Curse (30 page)

A villager working for the local government had come by to take their names and location. But to get to their house, he had to pass a Funcinpec Party sign planted at the head of the dirt track leading to their home. And when he spoke to Saing Moeva, the odds that day were fifty-fifty that he was wearing a Human Rights Party T-shirt. During the recent campaign party workers had come by handing these out for free. “No, no, I am CPP,” he objected, waving his arms, as if to say otherwise would suggest treason. “Any political party can put up a sign.” In fact, those signs dotted the countryside, everywhere. “They asked me, and I said okay, but I didn’t know they would put it on my property.” As for the shirt, “I have only two, and I wear this one sometimes.” He pointed to the other, a blue work shirt hanging from a nail under the house. Animated, he gesticulated urgently toward his pants, his only pair, torn over the left knee. “We are poor; we are very poor.”

To prove the point, Mou Chouerm climbed the log ladder into their small house. The floor was almost bare. Practically their only possession was a twelve-inch National-brand black-and-white television
sitting on a rusted folding TV table, wired to a car battery on the floor. To watch it they sat on the floor. She pointed to the tin ceiling, speckled with bright spots, the tropical sunlight shining through scores of tiny holes—so many that, when it rained, they could take a shower. She shook her head and, unable to shake her anger, she again said: “We didn’t get any rice.”

 

Down the dirt road, around a bend, Chan Yat sat quietly on a neighbor’s stoop. At seventy-six, she was ancient. On average Cambodians could hope to live to about sixty. She had few teeth, so her lips curled into her mouth. She shaved her head. The furrows on her face seemed to testify to a difficult life. She was the poorest of the poor, and her reality had changed little if at all since she was born here in this village in 1933. Some of her neighbors now had battery-powered radios and television sets. A few had motor scooters. But nearly all of them lived on what they could forage or grow and slept in hammocks under their bamboo-walled homes. Some of those same huts were standing there, she said, when she was a little girl.

Chan Yat walked slowly to her own house, leaning on a cane, a bamboo sapling that happened to have a crook at the top. She lived in a miniature Cambodian house on stilts just two feet high. They held up an enclosure maybe five feet by five feet and no more than four feet tall. The walls were woven palm fronds halfway up toward the roof. The upper half was covered with empty Blue Diamond Cement bags tacked to the frame.

She spoke in a whisper. “Yes, I got some rice. A bag, fifty kilograms. The village chief brought it.” Her son, a laborer, normally brought her a bit of food now and then. As she spoke a crowd gathered outside, fifteen or twenty people. Visitors were in town, asking about the rice! The villagers tried to outshout each other. “I didn’t get any,” said a middle-aged woman. “Not a grain. Nothing!” Another woman angrily insisted, “They gave the rice to the people who don’t need it. Those people probably sold it. They didn’t give any to the people who would actually eat it.” She rubbed her stomach as if to say, I am hungry. A
scrawny gray cat with a white belly sidled past her, scanning the ground for food. It pounced on a spider.

As the villagers grew angrier and angrier, Chan Yat, the only one there who had actually been given some of the rice, sat quietly, leaning on her bamboo cane, looking down at the dirt. “People here are very poor,” a man shouted. “We didn’t get any food. We never get any food! It all goes to them,” he snarled, pointing in the direction of the village chief’s house.

 

Kok Chuum had heard it all before. He had been village chief for seven years. He was a warm, voluble, soft-spoken fellow with cheekbones so high they seemed to be reaching for his forehead. As he sat at a table in the yard of his small compound, four buildings and sheds holding stores and equipment, he explained, “The food we get is not for everyone.” Chickens, ducks, and pigs wandered about. “There’s not enough. Some years only enough for four families. Some years twenty. We rotate. This year we got four tons, enough for forty families,” more than half the village.

Even so, some people say they have never been given any rice—not even a grain, they like to say. “I know some people say that, hoping to get more,” he explained in a quiet tone, showing no surprise. “But that’s a lie. I think the problem here is the state of mind. Some people go to the water and come back with empty hands.” He shook his head. His manner was sorrowful, not disparaging. “The way of thinking here is very low. They don’t have any ambition. They go to school and come out without any idea of doing anything.”

Kok Chuum was in his forties, and like most people his age, he had attended a temple school through the third grade where he did learn to read and write; that’s all. But he was a man in motion, and that had obviously paid off. He was quite prosperous, by his village’s standards.

Asked what he earns, he offered a counterintuitive answer, for Cambodians, and talked instead about how much he was able to save. “If I don’t have a wedding to pay for or some other big expense, I can save 2 million riel a year.” That’s almost $500, roughly the average per-capita
income for Cambodians. A few years earlier he had bought a rice mill—a primitive, almost cartoonish-looking device that sat in a shed. A gas-powered motor turned a ten-foot cloth belt that in turn spun gears, each almost three feet in perimeter. Kok Chuum used it to make rice-based animal feed for sale. The machine cost him $1,400 a few years earlier, “and I have not made my investment back yet.”

He asked visitors to remove their shoes before climbing the log ladder to his house. Inside, his young daughter watched cartoons on a small battery-powered
color
television. The house was painted a dark red—the only one in his village with paint. Moralistic public-service posters decorated the walls. One showed a man sleeping under a tree, a straw hat pulled low over his eyes, next to a broken-down cart. His oxen were wandering away. Others offered picture stories preaching against alcoholism, drugs, domestic violence.

From his villagers came the constant refrain, punctuating every conversation: “I am poor” or “I am hungry.” Kok Chuum had his own personal declaration, offered repeatedly: “I work very hard.” He had learned to rely on no one else. After all, as the CPP village chief, Kok Chuum sat on the lowest rung of the government ladder. The position paid only $10 a month.

Asked what his government did for his constituents, he answered, “The dikes and canals. And they maintain the road and the bridges.” Just what King Indravarman III had done for his people nearly a millennium earlier.

 

Kok Chuum’s remarks, and those of the villagers, did not sit well with His Excellency Chhay Sareth, Pursat Province’s longtime governor and now its provincial council chief. He sat in the provincial government’s council room at one end of a twenty-five-foot conference table that seated at least forty people. Along the wall at the other end loomed a massive video conferencing system with a fifty-inch Sony LCD monitor, a camera on a tripod, and a rack of assorted equipment.

A few months earlier, Hun Sen had asked every province to install one. He’d been in western Cambodia for the dedication of a new $450
million golf course and sports complex. The prime minister was an enthusiastic golfer. He had built an eighteen-hole course at his country estate, and his official government Web site lists his scores ahead of everything else (“Number of pars: 51 percent”). But while visiting he had ordered each of the twenty-four provinces, the army, and bordercontrol stations to install video conferencing systems because, he said, “This will allow me to give direct orders following my reading of local media.” Ministries and departments should also convert to this “new gadget,” the prime minister added.

Pursat was one of the nation’s poorest provinces, and the equipment cost between $50,000 and $75,000. Chhay Sareth pointed to it, saying, “We need to use more machinery. Cambodia is behind other countries. We need to get to modern times.” For now, though, he wanted to talk about a more primitive issue, the food aid. He leaned forward, pushing down hard on the table as he said in a sharp tone, “The government cannot satisfy everyone. The food aid is very limited. The people like to say the authorities don’t take care of them. But sometimes the people don’t receive the food aid because they are not home. They are away—job migration—and when they get back it is too late. But the poverty is not from this food-aid confusion. It’s from laziness. Or, the people have lost the land they had for farming.” Then the governor sat up straight, hands on his hips. “I don’t agree that most people don’t trust the government. I am here, president of the provincial council, and we lead from zero. Pol Pot killed everything. We are still rebuilding.”

Chhay Sareth relaxed a bit and sat back in his chair. He wore a tan safari suit and gold wire-rim eyeglasses, an outfit identical to the one Hun Sen often wore.
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Unlike some other governors, he did not present an ostentatious show of wealth. A plastic pen stuck out of his
pocket; on his wrist he wore a simple gold watch and on his left hand a small diamond ring.

His people, Chhay Sareth acknowledged, live a life that “is a kickback to centuries ago. This is Cambodia’s tradition.” He was hardly the only official to refer to abject poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, disease, and premature death as “Cambodia’s tradition.” He concluded, “I cannot say what my council will do, but we have a work plan, and we need to improve agriculture.”

So say his colleagues, nationwide. In 2009 the parliament changed the law to give the provinces more money and greater control of their fates. To manage this it set up new provincial counsels. Flush with this new authority and the promise of new cash, a half-dozen governors and council chairmen described their vision for the twenty-first century. But, to a man, they echoed Chhay Sareth’s tenth-century ideas.

Chan Sophal, chairman of the provincial council in Siem Reap Province, dressed in that same tan safari suit, the same gold-frame glasses, told of his ambition: “Better roads and irrigation for remote, rural people.” His gold watch bore small images of the CPP’s three iconic leaders, Prime Minister Hun Sen, Deputy Prime Minister Sok An, and Chea Sim, president of the senate. Viewed from across the chairman’s desk, the three tiny faces brought to mind old publicity photos of The Three Stooges, Moe, Larry, and Curly. “Give them a better capability to farm,” chairman Chan Sophal continued. “Help them improve their land so they can grow more rice.”

In Kampong Thom Province, north of Phnom Penh, council chairman Nam Tum wore exactly the same uniform and offered a similar plan. “For a long time, people have relied on the tradition, living on forest products. We need to change the Cambodian tradition so that people don’t live by nature anymore. Then we could have a real free market.” He sat in the lobby of the governor’s mansion in one of those high-back luxury-wood chairs with serpentine carvings. Two rows of these chairs faced each other, twelve of them in all. Behind him, hanging high on the wall, were portraits of the king and queen mother.
Two brown lizards crawled over the queen’s face. “We must solve the problems of the agriculture sector so it can grow. The well-educated people were killed by the Khmer Rouge. So today’s younger generation, the people who are trained and educated, if we want to grow as a nation we need to send these people back to help the farmers improve their rice.”

In Battambang Province, Governor Prach Chann’s safari suit was linen, not cotton. A gold pen stuck out of his breast pocket. He sat on one side of a conference table for twelve people, a microphone at each place. His massive, richly carved luxury-wood desk loomed at the end of the room. His views were consistent with those of his counterparts in other provinces: “The way people make a living is traditional. We want to pursue conservation and development to maintain our regional culture related to the development of agriculture.” But like several of his colleagues, he also blamed his people, saying “their poverty is from laziness.”

In Pailin Province, the governor, a former messenger for Pol Pot now wearing one of those signature tan safari suits, said he was too busy to talk as he climbed into his limousine in front of the provincial office building. In the lobby a bulletin board showed him cutting ribbons and kissing babies, in many cases wearing a military uniform so heavily encrusted with medals that it was a surprise he didn’t walk with a stoop. Down the hall, the deputy governor, Mey Meakk, said simply: “Our main job is to build roads for accessibility and help them improve farming.”

No one in government offered a view that differed from this one. No one mentioned manufacturing, service industries, technology. Nobody spoke of higher education. Not one official strayed from a vision of his country that differed at all from the goals of the Angkorian kings. But then most of these men, generally in their fifties and sixties, had little if any education themselves.

When these men were children there were no schools, save those temple classes for young children. Those people who managed to go
to school in Phnom Penh generally left the country before 1975 or were killed by the Khmer Rouge. The same held true throughout the Cambodian government. Prime Minister Hun Sen said he left school when he was sixteen to join the Khmer Rouge, which would be quite unusual for a man his age who lived in the provinces. (Some biographies say he was eighteen, but they also list an assortment of bachelor and master’s degrees as well as a Ph.D. that he never earned.) On the twenty-fifth anniversary of his appointment as prime minister, in January 2010, the
Cambodia Daily
published a long profile in which one of the prime minister’s closest colleagues seemed to let the cat out the bag. Cheam Yeap, a senior CPP legislator, said Hun Sen “only finished grade three or four before joining the resistance. Even though he studied a little bit, he learned very fast.”