Cambodia's Curse (16 page)

The tactic had a long history. One infamous grenade attack killed Ieu Koeuss, leader of the Democratic Party, in 1950. His party was struggling for dominance in the fight for independence from France. King Sihanouk and Ieu Koeuss’s party were bickering. French police were arresting party members, and Democrats were squabbling among themselves. When someone tossed a grenade into party headquarters, Cambodians endlessly debated who had the greatest motivation to kill him, and the police never made an arrest.

Grenade attacks allowed perpetrators to make a strong statement without leaving fingerprints. Each government faction loudly blamed
one another, and in the end no one was ever caught or charged. That led many to believe that the government must be responsible; why else would the police never make any arrests? This impression was convenient for Hun Sen and Ranariddh; it was useful to be feared.

The 1995 attack on the Buddhist Liberal Party headquarters followed the new democratic government’s refusal to give the Buddhist party a permit to hold a rally. Hun Sen had warned on national television that if Son Sann, the party leader, proceeded with the party congress anyway and violence occurred—perhaps even a grenade attack—he would hold organizers personally responsible. If you violate my rules, he was saying, I will attack you—and then blame you for the casualties.

At that time the Buddhist party was locked in a leadership struggle of its own. Another politician who was friendly to the government was trying to oust Son Sann. So who threw the grenades? At a moment like that, Cambodia could be a hall of mirrors. That’s why grenades were such a popular weapon of misdirection.

W
ith the leaders consumed by their personal holy wars, Cambodian society drifted toward anarchy. Phnom Penh was rife with drug traffickers; a deputy police chief estimated that six hundred kilograms of heroin passed through the city each week, and allegations flew that government ministers, even Hun Sen, were deeply involved in the trade. The Cambodian military, mimicking the Khmer Rouge, was plundering the nation’s forests, selling immensely valuable teak, rosewood, and mahogany-like lumber to the Thai. Shortly after taking office Hun Sen and Ranariddh, in one of their few collegial acts, wrote a letter to the Thai prime minister saying that, effective immediately, only the Defense Ministry had authority to export timber. The two of them told no one else in the government about this, meaning that the stream of illicit money would flow directly through the ministry to
them. Just three weeks earlier the government had issued a strong public directive, saying timber exports were now “prohibited under any circumstances.” Rainsy, still in government then, got hold of the letter to the Thai prime minister and made it public. As finance minister, all he could say was, “All state revenues should be centralized in the budget.” But he was powerless to enforce this declaration.

Phnom Penh, once one of the region’s most beautiful colonial cities, was now crowded with shanty towns crammed into almost every open space. Beggars and cripples lay about the streets; thousands of Cambodians had lost one or both legs to land mines. With no toilets or trash collection, fetid sewage and garbage lay in wait of the rainy season to carry it away—somewhere. Young children played in the trash, often naked because their parents could not afford diapers or clothes.

The government was doing nothing for its people. The statistics that limned their lives remained bleak and were growing worse. The life span for an average Cambodian was barely fifty years, a statistic pulled down by the depressing fates of mothers and their newborn children. Almost 20 percent of all newborns died before they reached age five. One mother in ten did not survive childbirth—among the worst rates in the world. Outside Phnom Penh, maternal care was almost nonexistent.

Hun Sen traveled the nation dedicating new schools, usually named for him and paid for by friends in business as thanks for the access the second prime minister gave them to government largesse. But, just like Sihanouk’s school-building program in the 1960s, most of these new schools had no educated teachers. A school was lucky to have a teacher who had completed third grade. Even then, their pay was so low that teachers continued demanding daily bribes from their students. Only about two-thirds of the children even started school, and most of those dropped out after the second or third grade. For Hun Sen, each new school building was a onetime cost paid by someone else—and a magnificent gift for the voters. But Hun
Sen, like Sihanouk before him, was nowhere to be seen when the uneducated teachers were taking cash from their students and trying to educate them in subjects they did not understand themselves.

Education was hardly the only problem. People who lived outside the major cities—in other words, almost everyone—had access to nothing but noxious, dysentery-inducing drinking water. Fewer than one Cambodian in ten had a toilet. Malaria, dengue fever, encephalitis, hepatitis, meningitis, pneumonia, tuberculosis, typhoid, and dysentery all were commonplace, and the HIV/AIDS rate was growing so fast that it set off alarms around the world. “I heard about it in Fiji!” said Dr. Michael O’Leary, a World Health Organization (WHO) official based there in the 1990s.

Government leaders, when they even heard about their society’s growing list of afflictions, tried to foist blame. Henry Kamm, a
New York Times
reporter, asked Om Radsady, chairman of the parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, about the state’s burgeoning dysfunction, and he blamed the West. “The big powers should take responsibility,” he said. “When you buy a car, you get a service guarantee. Maybe we drove the car badly, but you should share responsibility.”

Even so, in the West the nations that put up all that money for the UN operation clung to the conviction that their funds had been well spent. All told, the United States contributed $1.2 billion, and both Washington and the United Nations continued talking up the Cambodia operation as a great success.

When Clinton’s secretary of state, Warren Christopher, visited Phnom Penh in August 1995, as part of a larger regional tour, he told Cambodia’s leaders, “I have come here to salute the progress the Cambodian people have made with such dignity and courage toward peace and freedom. No people in the world more deserve these blessings of peace and prosperity and freedom.” On the fifth anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords in 1996, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali congratulated Hun Sen for his “statesmanship.” Winston Lord, the new assistant secretary of state for the region, called Cambodia “a
model UN success story,” and his deputy cheerily reported that the concept of human rights “has permeated” the government.

Twining, the ambassador, was also inclined to be generous. He believed that most of the people in government had a steep learning curve, and no one should expect Cambodia to become a Jeffersonian democracy overnight. Twining had little pressure from Washington to step into the nation’s intramural battles. As usual, the State Department didn’t really care. “It’s fair to say they had other fish to fry,” Twining said. “There was some relief that the country was finally at peace. I think the view was that Cambodia needed sustenance but not a lot of attention. There were other things going on. For example, the Somalia debacle. As for Cambodia, it was considered a little better off than it had been before.” And for Washington, that seemed to be enough.

But over time Washington also began adding modest cautions. In the fall of 1995 Lord told Congress, “Cambodia’s emerging democracy continues to show impressive endurance. The Royal Cambodian Government has begun the process of building political and economic institutions suitable to the country’s current needs.” But Lord also felt compelled to offer a gentle warning: “As a friend, the U.S. has been candidly telling Cambodia’s leaders in recent months of our concerns over recent trends, especially in cases involving freedom of expression and of the press, and how those trends might jeopardize international support for the process of change in Cambodia.” At the annual donors’ conference a few months earlier, Cambodia had received pledges of $500 million. That money made up more than half of the nation’s annual budget. But Lord had warned that if the nation’s leaders did not change their ways, they might not get so much money the next year.

Rainsy, who was starting a new political party, loudly urged the donor nations to “impose conditions,” including “the establishment of a true rule of law, the strengthening of democratic institutions and mechanisms, and guarantees that fundamental human rights will be respected.” And, of course, he added his signature issue: an end to corruption. All of this played well abroad. The
New Republic
called him
“Cambodia’s stubborn saint.” But as always, others in government saw him as a dangerous scoundrel. A year earlier he’d been booted out of the Finance Ministry. Now Rainsy had so many friends and admirers abroad that Hun Sen and Ranariddh grew quite worried about his ability to dissuade donors from giving.

Hun Sen blasted him. “In the past, there was the Khmer Rouge blocking all kinds of aid to Cambodia, now we have a second Pol Pot against aid to the Cambodian people,” he told reporters. Then that summer, Ranariddh offered a motion to expel Rainsy from the parliament. Rainsy’s friends in the bleachers howled. Human Rights Watch, the British House of Lords, Amnesty International, the International Parliamentary Union, and several U.S. congressmen warned of dire consequences and questioned the expulsion’s legality. No matter. The parliament voted him out, nearly unanimously. Rainsy was a private citizen again. Soon after that he came by the U.S. Embassy one afternoon and asked Twining if he could reside there for a while. He cited threats and dangers to his person. But living at the embassy would also give him the certain imprimatur of strong support from the U.S. government. “When he left government, he began looking elsewhere for support,” Twining said, in part because “he often spoke out a bit more forcefully than the traffic would bear. Once he came by and asked whether he could stay a bit. I persuaded him to go home and said we would protect him.”

 

In the months leading up to the 1996 donor meeting, Ranariddh repeatedly vowed to speed up work on an anticorruption law, the one Hun Sen had promised to enact, and move it to the parliament for a vote. Cambodia’s new ambassador to Washington, Var Huoth, wrote a letter to the
New York Times
protesting a critical story about his government. “An anti-corruption law is being drafted to be submitted to the National Assembly for adoption,” he wrote, adding, “I do not have to remind you that Cambodia still suffers from the aftermath of the mass murder, starvation and destruction by the Khmer
Rouge.” At the same time Rainsy continued his public attacks, harping on corruption again and again. By the time of the meeting in July, no new law had even been introduced, but the donor nations gave Cambodia $518 million anyway, a 4 percent increase. Ranariddh was jubilant—particularly since the donors obviously had paid no attention to Rainsy. “He looks ridiculous now,” Ranariddh said with obvious glee.

If Ranariddh and Second Prime Minister Hun Sen were thinking analytically, then no doubt a recent metaphor came to mind: the leaders of the UN occupation force turning away after that Khmer Rouge child soldier, standing at the bamboo-pole checkpoint, refused to let them pass. Now, these donors were every bit as toothless. Once again Jupiter was throwing no thunderbolts from the mountaintop. Whatever Ranariddh and Hun Sen said, whatever they did, the donors would come through anyway. Cambodia had found a new and reliable patron. Undoubtedly, each of them was also plotting how he might end the democratic charade, knock the other guy off, and place himself at the top of the government—as each of them had intended all along.

As Twining left office at the end of 1995, after four brutal years he had lost much of his optimism. “We all wanted to keep things moving forward,” he said. “But I sent a cable to Washington saying I wasn’t sure how long this government would last.”

I
n 1996, as Twining’s term as ambassador was winding down, the Clinton administration choose Ken Quinn to replace him. Just like Twining, Quinn’s background gave him a deeply sympathetic view of the state. In fact, at his confirmation hearing, he told the senators that the climb with his fiancée up that South Vietnam mountain in 1973 had changed his life. “My involvement with Cambodia began on a hot and humid Mekong Delta afternoon in June 1973, when I climbed to the top of Nui Sam Mountain along the Vietnamese-Cambodian border and witnessed a spectacle that would forever change Cambodia and reorient my professional career,” he said, sitting at the witness table, looking up at the panel of senators on the Foreign Relations Committee. “From that vantage point at the top of Nui Sam, as far as the eye could see, every single one of the dozens of hamlets that dotted the lush green Cambodian plain was ablaze. Thick black smoke billowed from every cluster of thatched dwellings in which thousands and thousands of Cambodian rice farmers and their families lived. I was stunned.” He easily won confirmation and took office in early 1996 filled with a warm sense of honor and purpose. “I was thinking that what we were doing was noble,” he said.
“We didn’t have any defense interests, any economic interests or intelligence interests. We were doing this because it was the moral thing to do.”