Cambodia's Curse (27 page)

For Wiedemann, that was just too much. Both of his predecessors, Twining and Quinn, had witnessed political violence at least this bad. They had issued the expected State Department mealymouthed statements intended to ensure that no one was offended. Typically, they went something like this: “We condemn this act of violence and call on all parties to refrain from provocative acts so that the Cambodian people can exercise their democratic rights without fear or intimidation.”

But Wiedemann would have none of it. Before he spoke out he waited until the polls had closed—Hun Sen, not surprisingly, won control of 1,600 of the 1,621 communes. By then at least twenty opposition-party activists had been killed. Then Wiedemann pronounced the government’s denial of any responsibility “appallingly irresponsible, insulting almost, and dismissive of the international community’s concerns, expressed to the government time after time after time, when it is unwilling to accept the fact that there are some political killings.” Cambodian newspapers eagerly devoured his remarks. Later, he explained: “I was absolutely convinced that the government was involved, and I was angered at the denials. It was just so obviously politically motivated. So I made a decision to go public with it.”

Behind this was the fact that a new political order had taken hold. For Wiedemann and other diplomats, the hope, the idealism, that motivated them before had been crushed. So why hold back? “There was a lot of that kind of feeling among the diplomatic community, a huge frustration among everyone that the hopes of UNTAC and the international community had not worked out. We would wring our hands. And then, sitting in Phnom Penh, it was very easy to get pissed off by the antics of Hun Sen.”

For his part, the prime minister bristled when asked about complaints that the elections fell short of international standards. He offered one of his typical nonsensical dismissals. “What are international standards?” Hun Sen asked rhetorically. “I don’t understand. International
standards exist only in sports. If your understanding of it is poor, go back and study it.”

 

Now that the United States had turned away from Cambodia, except for those senators and staff whose mission was to topple Hun Sen, the embassy’s mission gradually evolved from supporting democratic change to attacking corruption. The Agency for International Development was the lead office in this effort, and soon this consumed nearly all of the USAID officers’ time.

The U.S. Embassy was alone in its efforts. “Broadly speaking, the American embassy was almost the only country out there speaking frankly about misbehavior of the regime—corruption, impunity,” the ambassador said. “Maybe the Aussies sometimes, occasionally the Brits. In part I think it’s a matter of our national style. Other countries tend to regard the process of change as something that takes a very, very long time. We are not so patient. We want results more quickly—and for good reason. People are suffering and dying.”

Early on, USAID officers decided to charter a comprehensive study of corruption, to find out how extensive and costly the problem actually was. Everyone “knew” that corruption was widespread. But ask any government official about the problem, and most likely he would shake his head and lament the problem—while sitting on a fat wallet.

USAID hired Casals & Associates, an international consulting firm, to investigate the following questions: “the degree to which corruption exists in Cambodia; the types of corruption most harmful to democratic governance; the capacity of government, civil society and the media to combat and expose corruption.” The research would take many months.

Meanwhile, year after year, international aid groups were still holding pledge conferences in Phnom Penh. Every one of the 2,000 or more aid agencies, from the World Bank to the Despondency Saving Wanderer Organization, prepared to tell Cambodian officials what they planned to spend in the coming year. Along with the pledges,
however, the donors were also making certain demands. Leading up to these meetings each year, some of the donors were still berating their peers to make the donations conditional. The primary condition: Don’t give any money until the government stops the political murders and passes that anticorruption law. Every year the list of demands grew longer and longer. And, beginning with Wiedemann, every year the U.S. ambassador, addressing the group, would berate the government for failing to make much if any progress.

As his term reached its end, Wiedemann began to see the pattern, and it made him angry. “Every single year, the donors get together,” he said. “They decide among themselves in advance what they want to talk to the government about. They spend two days lambasting the government, the ministers, and you get all these promises of change. Then the donors turn in their pledges. And nothing changes. Year after year after year. All the things the donors do, that’s money Hun Sen doesn’t have to spend. You know he does get some legitimate money, from taxes on the garment industry and a few other things.” And then more from illegal logging and selling off land rights to his cronies. Wiedemann’s frustration had reached the breaking point.

In 2001 he decided to tell Hun Sen and the rest of his government exactly what he thought. Every government minister came to these meetings, and Wiedemann was not timid. For a few days, at least, every minister played the role of toady to the agencies and nations that funneled millions into their budgets, serving hospitals and schools—as well as paying for their children’s private schools and those shopping trips to Singapore. Each of the ambassadors from major nations spoke—Britain, France, the United States, and others. When Wiedemann’s time came, “I was looking right at Hun Sen.” Years of pent-up anger and frustration boiled inside him. He was thinking, he said, of “one time, there were these young women imported from Eastern Europe—Romania and Bulgaria. They were kept locked up in hotels so they could be used by senior officials in the Cambodian government. Licadho or some other aid group told me
about it. We are the ones who got the girls out and took care of them until we sent them home.”

Speaking to Hun Sen and the other ministers at the aid conference, he said, “It is very clear there is very heavy corruption in this country. Lots of places are corrupt, even the United States. But it’s out of control in Cambodia. The thing is, you are slow to admit that it’s happening. If it was just simple corruption at the lower levels, that would be one thing. But it’s not. Every year we have brought it to your attention at every donor meeting.” As he spoke Hun Sen and his aides “were squirming, angry,” Wiedemann said. “Every year we get all these promises of change. Then the donors turn in their pledges. And nothing changes. Year after year after year. We are tired of this. Something has to be done.” First, and foremost, he told them, you need to pass that anticorruption law.

In the months before the conference the government had announced that it had completed a draft of the anticorruption law and had sent it on for consideration by the Council of Ministers—essentially equivalent to the cabinet in the U.S. government. From the council the law would be sent on to the parliament.

Of course, over the past seven years the government had said exactly that many times. In 1995, for example, Son Soubert, second deputy president of the National Assembly, told the news media that the parliamentary committee on defense, interior, and investigations had nearly finished consideration of a tough anticorruption law. In 1996 Ranariddh vowed to speed up passage of the law. In 1999 the story changed. Now, the government was saying, several government ministries were drafting an anticorruption law. In July 2000 the
Cambodia Daily
reported that the Council of Ministers had approved the draft law.

During the pledge conference the year before Wiedemann spoke, the Asian Development Bank’s country representative, Urooj Malik, had insisted once again that donors wanted to see real progress in the coming year. “The government’s report card since the last meeting
does not look good,” Malik said at the time. The British ambassador, Stephen Bridges, added that there had been “little or no progress in judicial reform or anti-corruption efforts. These are key reform issues and are essential for the future development of the country.” Hun Sen and his aides, as always, vowed that would be the year donors saw real progress. So the donors pledged $548 million.

A year later, when Wiedemann took the podium, nothing had changed. Nonetheless, when donors announced their pledges, they totaled $615 million, exceeding the government’s request by $115 million. So it went—and so it would continue to go.

T
he men arrived in the middle of the night with bulldozers and chain saws. They began by cutting a road through neighborhoods, rice paddies, even the grounds of the local temple. They reached the edge of the forest just after daybreak. The bulldozers, with engines revving, vertical exhaust pipes belching thick black clouds of smoke, plowed small trees to the ground, while men with chain saws got to work on the larger trees. All of this made quite a racket, of course. Angry villagers rose from their hammocks, then rushed to the forest half-a-mile away, a place intimately familiar to all of them. “No one told us” that the forest demolition was going to begin that day, said Um Huot, a village leader.

In this 75,000-acre forest, Um Huot and hundreds of others made their livelihood. They hunted for small animals, tapped trees for resin, harvested fruit and bamboo, cut rattan-palm vines to make baskets and furniture, plucked mushrooms and herbs from the forest floor, and chopped down an occasional tree for lumber. Using the forest’s bounty, they “lived by nature,” as Cambodians always had. They had no choice—no other livelihood was available to them. But when they reached the forest that morning, villagers found a heavily
armed military unit guarding the men with bulldozers and chain saws. The soldiers drew their weapons and ordered the villagers to turn away.

The villagers knew full well that the company conducting this frontal assault on their forest intended to clear-cut it, knock down every tree, and haul the timber away for sale to builders in China or Taiwan, leaving behind only vast fields of stumps and sawdust. The villagers were certain of this because, a few years earlier, Hun Sen had staged an elaborate signing ceremony in Phnom Penh as he awarded rights to this forest to the company Pheapimex. The new owner, Lao Meng Khin, was a prominent tycoon and an
oknya
—roughly defined as one of Hun Sen’s wealthy cronies.

To become an
oknya
was quite an honor in the Cambodian business community, and the title carried with it a rich tradition. In the 1800s, according to historian David Chandler,
oknya
were expected to give generous gifts to the king. In exchange they received titles and seals and insignia of rank—along with positions or business opportunities that made them even richer.

In 1993 Hun Sen decreed that anyone who donated at least $100,000—a princely sum in postwar Cambodia—for public works projects would win the
oknya
title, bestowed by the king. Holders of this title did favors for the prime minister, usually taking on building projects that helped Hun Sen enhance his own reputation. They got favors in return—like the right to buy forest concessions.
Oknya
has no direct translation in English. But the word originated in early Khmer, referring to someone who was a special devotee of Siva, the Hindu deity. In the modern context it was a wealthy person, a mandarin, a special devotee of Hun Sen.

Every time the prime minister visited a humble village in some remote area, he brought along several of his
oknya
who stood around him like acolytes as he asked the dirt-poor villagers what they most needed. Throughout the 1990s most often the villagers would say they needed a school. Hun Sen would spread his arms as a show of his
beneficence, then point to an
oknya
and say: “Presented as requested.” All of this was usually televised on one of the government-controlled channels. Then it was the
oknya
’s job to build that new school.

Mong Reththy probably built more schools than anyone else, many hundreds of them. He was an agricultural tycoon who ran the nation’s largest palm-oil plantation and became one of Hun Sen’s first
oknya
. He explained, “Before Samdech Hun Sen asks anyone to build a school or a temple, he asks if we accept this or not. When we go someplace really poor, I know in advance I am responsible for that. When Samdech turns to me and says, ‘Mong Reththy will help,’ I already know. Samdech does not force anyone.”

Mong Reththy spoke of this while sitting at a formidable luxury-wood table on a raised, covered deck in the front yard of his house, a gated Greco-Asian mansion with Corinthian columns and goldtrimmed cornices. His fifty-fifth birthday party had been staged in this yard the day before—it was also, he pointed out, the twenty-first anniversary of his business. Overhead, hanging from two dozen wires stretching the width of the large front yard, dozens of flag-size white sheets fluttered and snapped in the breeze, creating a dramatic backdrop of light, shadow, and sound. To his left two dozen black standing fans were lined up in a row, power cables carefully coiled, waiting for servants to haul them back to storage. A young girl served tea, then sat in a chair twenty yards away, her eyes locked on Mong Reththy in case he decided to beckon her. Behind her in his garage sat a BMW 750i and a Lexus LX570—together about $180,000 worth of automobile.

Mong Reththy is also a senator, as are most
oknya
, which some Cambodians view as a serious conflict of interest. Mong Reththy “is the tycoon in the sector,” said Kang Chandararot, a senior economist with a local NGO. “As a senator he makes it hard for newcomers to come into that sector.” Mong Reththy disagreed: “Not surprisingly, in the Senate I am in charge of agriculture. I am also chief of the agro-industry association.” He put his hand on his heart. “I do not use my role for family or
personal benefit. Some individuals use such an opportunity to do that. But I am committed to doing something for the people. My business is another thing.” Then he confided, “I have no education. I went to a temple school for only four years.” But his business card lists a doctorate in business administration—a common dishonest conceit for prominent Cambodians. His voice carried a pleading tone as he said, “I hope you can see that I am a normal person.”