Cambodia's Curse (32 page)

When the world economic crisis hit in 2008, Rainsy offered one of his more moderate proposals. In a letter he asked Hun Sen to issue a $500 million stimulus package, for the many thousands of Cambodians who had lost their jobs. The government scoffed, saying, “Sam Rainsy should be able to address this. He is a parliamentarian.” In other words, Rainsy should introduce a bill that the CPP majority would then reject. While the Asian Development Bank said the economic crisis was pulling 2 million people into even deeper poverty, Hun Sen called Rainsy’s idea “not logical. It is opposition logic.”

“My own idea, just me, is that first we need to have a strong farmer organization” to lobby the government, Kith Seng said. Burma, Thailand, and Vietnam all had rice growers’ associations. “Now, the farmer has land but not credit. The farmer offers labor and technical skill. So the state needs to support them with low-interest credit. Now they leave that to the private sector, and the private lenders charge them 45 percent to 60 percent a year. Another of my ideas, and I raise it at meetings,” to no apparent effect, “is to support a focus on new enterprise. Give a loan to the association of rice milling to buy new mills.” That idea, too, went nowhere. What happened instead, he said, was that every year “there’s a difference between the community level and the national level. At the community level, they talk about how they do not have enough to eat. At the national level, they still talk about having a rice surplus. And they sell that surplus to Vietnam and Thailand.”

In 2009 the government declared a surplus of 2.5 million tons and committed to sell it to Vietnam, Thailand, and whoever else would
buy it—leaving many thousands of Cambodians, like Cha Veun, wondering where they would find the rice they needed to survive. She was forty-six and had no teeth. She lived on a raised wooden platform, perhaps eight feet by eight feet, with no walls. She said she earned roughly 2,500 riel a day—about 50 cents. The people of her village, Bon Skol, near the border with Vietnam, made earthenware cooking pots for sale at market. And Cha Veun’s pots served as a metaphor for her situation. Hers were miniature versions of the same cookery—toys, she explained. She had lived there all her life but owned no land and could only help other villagers with their crops. “But I don’t earn enough to buy food.” Has the government ever helped her? “Not yet. I want them to help me be not so poor. But it doesn’t happen. And I don’t have enough to eat.”

 

Jean-Pierre de Margerie, head of the World Food Program office in Cambodia, observed that “lots of people here think food security is inventory. They refer to total production. But food access is the biggest problem. In fact, it’s huge. Between 1.4 million and 1.5 million people are chronically food insecure,” meaning they cannot get enough food to supply 2,000 calories a day. Aware of this, while government leaders sold off much of Cambodia’s rice, and pocketed the proceeds, they also asked the Asian Development Bank to donate rice for Cambodia’s poor. “The food-security concern in Cambodia is not whether the country is capable of producing sufficient food to feed its own population,” said Arjun Goswami, the bank’s country director. “It has been capable for several years now. The concern is whether” any of this abundance is made available to the nation’s own people.

While rice sacks were stacked on trucks and ships for export, the Asian Development Bank declared an “unprecedented food-security emergency” and budgeted $38 million in “emergency food assistance”—$38 million worth of rice. That was the rice the people of Dang Rung village said they never got.

I
f education is the answer for Cambodian society, as so many experts assert, then the nation is lost. In a nationwide survey only 2.6 percent of Cambodia’s schoolteachers said they were providing students “a high-quality education.” That should be little surprise. Education is by its very nature a reflection of the society it tries to teach. So every foible and folly that crippled the nation can be found in the schools.

Every day, just before Chhith Sam Ath’s two young sons headed out the door for elementary school, their mother gave each of them a small wad of cash. As soon as they entered the classroom, they handed the teacher their money. So did all the other students, one by one. Children who didn’t make the daily payments were likely to get bad grades. In some schools they were sent home or forced to stand in the corner until it was time to leave.

Tens of thousands of poor families do not send their children to school because they simply cannot afford to pay the bribes. In Cambodia, school has never been mandatory, so these children may end up working in the rice paddies, or else their parents take them to Thailand to beg. The International Labor Organization estimated that 38 percent of Cambodia’s children between ages seven and fifteen worked
at least part-time. “We can see them in restaurants, children selling things on the street. Pulling carts. Working in brick factories. Picking trash at dumps,” said Rong Chhum, president of the national teachers’ union. Others worked in neighboring countries as beggars or prostitutes. “A lot of children do not have any education at all.” And so another generation is lost.

The problem isn’t just children who don’t go to school. For those who do choose education, “you go to school and learn how to bribe people,” said Chhith Sam Ath, a nonprofit association leader, shaking his head. Teachers, in turn, had to give some of their bribe money to their principals. “We are required to pay 2,500 riel, 5,000 riel,” between 50 cents and $1.20, “to the principal at the end of the month,” Rong Chhum said. Principals, in turn, had to pass some of that money up to the local Education Ministry office. An NGO study called that “a facilitation fee,” required before the ministry would release salaries and other state funds for the schools.

These fees and payments are all but untraceable. All government salaries and payments were made in cash, and they were not documented. “Everyone in government is paid in cash,” said In Channy, president of Acleda Bank. In fact, “77 percent of the economy works on cash.” What’s more, that USAID corruption investigation said, “the national budget was described to the assessment team as non-existent or in even more derisive terms.” Without a budget, there could be no accountability.

Bribing teachers was an evergreen story in the nation’s newspapers. In late 2009 the
Phnom Penh Post
reported that the economic crisis had pushed teachers to double the amount of their bribes. “Oung Bunoun, 12, a third-grader at Tuol Svay Prey, said students have to pay money to their teachers, and that if they don’t, they will receive lower grades,” the paper wrote. “A teacher from Phnom Penh’s Anuvath primary school, who declined to be named, said Monday that she has to collect money from her students because she cannot feed her family with the salary provided. ‘It’s not only me that takes money from them but also the
other teachers,’ she said. ‘So why can’t I?’ Chea Cheat, president of the Municipal Department of Education, acknowledged that the department allows teachers to take money from students but said it would take action against any school that forces students to pay more than 500 riels.” Even the education minister, Im Sethy, considered the bribes an unavoidable fact of life. “Our policy is to cut down on these irregularities, but if you look at the living conditions of these people, it’s understandable,” he said with a matter-of-fact tone.

Because of the bribes, poverty, and other factors, 15 to 20 percent of the nation’s five and six year olds never entered school. The percentage was probably higher; the statistics conflicted. For those who did go to school, “the average class sizes are 75–80 students,” the education minister said. “It’s very hard for the teacher.”

“After the first year, already 10 percent of them drop out,” said Teruo Jinnai, head of the UNESCO office in Phnom Penh. “And then 10 percent after that. And by the time they finish the 6th grade, half of them are gone.” Just under 13 percent go on to high school, and fewer still graduate. About 3 percent go on to college.

The percentages can be far lower in rural areas. “I would say only half go to school,” said Mou Neam, village chief in Bon Skol, just west of the Vietnam border. “The village school goes up to the sixth grade. The few who go on to the higher grades go up the road to another school, two kilometers away.”

In Dang Rung village in Pursat Province, village chief Kok Chuum said, “Fifty children entered first grade this year. Only two are in high school, and they will probably drop out after grade 9,” when public education is no longer free.

The few students who reached high school had been so well schooled in the art of bribery that they had learned how to buy their way to a diploma. High school teachers would sell them answers to tests; they would also take money to change a grade or cover up absences. All of it came to a head at final exam time each summer. “It’s like a battlefield,” Education Minister Im Sethy said.

In the classroom students collaborated. They collected a pool of cash, two or three dollars each, and offered it to the teacher when he walked in with the final-exam papers. If he accepted the bribe, a student would then photocopy the answer key and pass it out to all the others who had contributed. If the teacher wouldn’t play along, then street vendors sitting at folding tables outside the school sold answer sheets of uncertain provenance. Photocopy shops set up satellite businesses outside large urban schools, and each year newspapers published photos of students mobbing the vendors. In 2009 the
Cambodia Daily
quoted sixteen-year-old Kanhchana saying, “It will be a tough time for us during the exam if the teachers will not accept money.” Another student, Nhan Theary, added, “We can do everything by ourselves, but the result will not be so good.”

Every year Rong Chhum, the teachers’ union president, issued a warning: Don’t allow the students to cheat! That seemed counterintuitive since it was his members, the teachers, who facilitated the cheating. But the union took the position that their members had no choice but to take money because their pay was so low—as little as forty-five dollars a month.

Each year Im Sethy asked the Interior Ministry and the army to send squads of police and soldiers to the schools, and sometimes the officers shooed away the answer-key vendors sitting at tables. Other times they looked away. “Year by year we try to make it better,” Im Sethy said. “For example, this year I ordered that the photocopy centers in schools be closed. We spread out the desks” so students could not share answer keys. Nevertheless, Rong Chhum disagreed. “The students pay off the police. It was the same as last year. There was still a lot of cheating.” The result of all this, he said, “is 75 percent of public school students move through the system without getting even a basic knowledge of the subjects they study.” He said this with a tone of dark certainty and a determined stare. “The majority of students seem to know nothing.”

Students applying for medical school proved the point. In 2008 1,800 students took the entrance exam. To pass students had to get at
least half of the answers right. Only 369 of them managed even that. The students rallied and protested and screamed and yelled until finally the medical school relented and said a score of 25 percent was enough to enter medical school, which entitled another 507 students to pass. Still, more than half the test takers, after cheating and bribing their way through school, had been unable to answer even one question out of four correctly.

At the National University of Management, “We used to require a thesis for graduation,” said Seng Bunthoeun, the vice rector. “But students would just copy old cases. They cheated. So we dropped it.” Just like their forebears, the students had managed to graduate but had learned little if anything at all.

W
hen King Norodom first handed sovereignty over his state to France in 1863, the occupiers found a nation almost uniformly illiterate. Cambodia had not a single school, just those temple classes, where monks taught the children about Buddhism, the Cambodian oral tradition, and perhaps how to read sacred texts. Historians have concluded that the education system changed little, if at all, between the Angkorian period and the early twentieth century.

A primary goal of educators remained to reinforce the social hierarchy. Historian David Ayres showed that the Buddhist notion of individual helplessness is the central factor in that process. As he wrote, “Students were equipped to become citizens in a system in which they were taught to refer to themselves as slaves and to willingly accept the necessity of their subservience to individuals of higher social status.”

From their earliest years Cambodian children learned that ambition and personal aspiration should not, could not, be a part of their character. Be satisfied with the life you have, the monks told them, no matter how poor or menial. Education “simply took children from the rice fields and then gave them back to the rice fields.”

Girls were instructed to expect even less. They were not permitted to attend even the temple classes. Instead, their mothers taught them subservience and docility. Nothing embodied that idea more than the
Chbab Srey
, a piece of traditional literature that described a woman’s place in the home, written in the form of a mother talking to her daughter. One passage said: “Dear, no matter what your husband did wrong, I tell you to be patient, don’t say anything ... don’t curse, don’t be the enemy. No matter how poor or stupid, you don’t look down on him. ... No matter what the husband says, angry and cursing, using strong words without end, complaining and cursing because he is not pleased, you should be patient with him and calm down your anger.” The
Chbab Srey
was required reading in the schools until 2007, when Ing Kantha Phavi, the minister of women’s affairs, managed to convince the Education Ministry to pull it from the curriculum. Nonetheless, she acknowledged, “it is still taught in rural areas.” This in a nation where more than 80 percent of the people lived in rural areas.