Cambodia's Curse (51 page)

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.”

I
n 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 Legal 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.

“Cambodia is not a perfect democracy yet,” insisted Hem Hong, Cambodia’s ambassador to the United States. “We need to improve ourselves.” But all of the available evidence showed that the state was moving quickly in the opposite direction.

“I don’t know if it is right,” Ok Serei Sopheak, a former government official, said matter-of-factly. “But a lot of people think we are moving toward Myanmar’s model.”

C
ambodians have been abused by so many leaders over so many years that they expect nothing from their government. In fact,
they remain convinced that any change at all will be painful, if not fatal. As Vickery put it, they want only to be left alone.

Around the world billions of people live under evil, autocratic governments. In Darfur and southern Sudan thousands of people live in small grass huts, even more primitive than Cambodian homes. They wear the old clothes that Americans donate to Goodwill. I saw a young man who lived in Rumbek, in southern Sudan, wearing a tattered uniform shirt from a Chrysler dealership in Arkansas that had the worker’s name on a patch sewed over the breast—Clem. Still, Sudanese were more prosperous, on average, than Cambodians. The Sudanese government slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people, but in both places rebel groups fought back—eventually bringing the conflicts to a military standstill. Cambodians are incapable of that.

In Burma a self-interested military junta offered its people little if anything but continued oppression, and when a cyclone ravaged the country in 2008, the government refused to let many international relief agencies deliver shipments of food and medicine, afraid the aid workers would subvert their rule. But in normal times, Burmese are far more productive. They grow almost twice as much rice per acre and generally are more prosperous. Occasionally, they stage massive pro-democracy demonstrations, even knowing that the government will strike back. Cambodians are incapable of that.

In North Korea the regime kept its citizens locked down tight and ignorant of what was happening in the rest of the world. Occasionally, the nation suffered a famine. All the people knew about anything was what government radio told them. But then most everyone in the nation had electricity to play those radios, though there were frequent outages. North Korea’s average per-capita income was three times higher than Cambodia’s, and the government at least offered meager food rations. Not so in Cambodia.

Haiti remained the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere and one of the poorest in the world. As in Cambodia, most residents did
not have electricity, toilets, or clean water. But by almost every measure Haitians were better off. For example, UNICEF reported that 29 percent of Haitian children under age five suffered from moderate or severe stunting, largely a result of malnutrition. In Cambodia the number was 42 percent. In 2007 10 percent of Haiti’s people had access to the Internet. In Cambodia the number was close to zero.