Cambodia's Curse (46 page)

Yet by 2010, 80 percent of Cambodia’s people remained desperately poor and barely educated. Cholera broke out nationwide soon after the dengue-fever epidemic abated, while malaria, tuberculosis, and dysentery remained commonplace. Almost 1 Cambodian of every 10 had diabetes, while World Health Organization figures showed that every year nearly 10,000 people, most of them children, died of diarrhea-related illnesses, all of them easily preventable. Five women died during childbirth every day.

The government had passed a law in 2009 legalizing land seizures in certain circumstances and also began selling off governmentministry buildings in prime downtown locations, relocating workers to the suburbs.
Oknya
Lao Meng Khin bought one building belonging
to the Ministry of Cults and Religion. (His companies were also behind the eucalyptus plantation in Pursat Province and the destruction of Boeng Kak lake.) Another developer with close connections to Hun Sen was given permission to buy the colonial-era government headquarters compound in downtown Siem Reap. The provincial government moved to new buildings more than ten miles from the city center.

Meanwhile, Hun Sen, trying to show he was sensitive to overspending during the world economic crisis, promised that “we won’t spend money buying cars for government officials.” A few weeks later the government said it had signed a fifteen-year contract with a limousine service to provide one hundred Mercedes Benz 280S sedans, with drivers, for those same government officials. In the meantime, outside the capital 95 percent of the nation’s roads remained unpaved.

The Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association reported that in 2009, 235 “human rights defenders” had been charged with crimes for doing their work—more than ever before. Life expectancy remained stuck, at sixty-one. So had the average per-capita income, at somewhere between $500 and $600. But 42 percent of the children still suffered from stunting. Fewer than 20 percent of Cambodian families who lived outside of the cities had access to a toilet or clean water. At least one-third of the people lived on less than $1 a day.

What, exactly, had $18 billion in aid accomplished? “The pain, the suffering continue, in spite of Cambodia being the highest per capita recipient of foreign aid, for more than five years,” Bert Hoak and Ray Zepp wrote on a Cambodia news blog in 2008. Hoak had owned a bookstore and guesthouse in Phnom Penh for many years; Zepp wrote a travel guide about Cambodia. They, like so many foreigners who held affection for the state and its people, were growing ever more distressed. “The deforestation increases, in spite of foreign aid,” they wrote. “The human rights abuses, the killing of journalists and editors, dissidents and others continues, and will continue, in spite of foreign aid. Our continued aid will only serve to prolong the misery, to prop up a despotic regime, to prolong the ecological devastation, even to the point of no return.”

In 2007 the
Cambodia Daily
reported, “There had been brief discussion of postponing the next” donor meeting “until an anti-corruption law is enacted, said a Western diplomat on condition of anonymity. That radical proposal, however, didn’t last very long before it was shot down.”

 

What would happen if the donor community did in fact stand up to Hun Sen? What if they stood together as one and announced that they would withhold all but humanitarian aid until Hun Sen lived up to his promises to address the donors’ concerns about education, health, food security, corruption, sanitation, land seizures, and the rest?

In the meantime, the World Food Program would continue delivering school meals. Other organizations would help poor patients receive ID cards, enabling them to receive free medical care. Every manner of direct humanitarian aid to the poor could continue. But all of the other initiatives, the “governance” programs and others from which government officials fed, would be put on hold. Sure, Hun Sen and Sok An could continue seizing land and selling it to
oknya—
even sucking sand from the river bottoms and selling it to Singapore.

But most government employees would find they had to live on their actual salaries, fifty or seventy-five dollars a month. More important, the developed world would be delivering a strong statement—stronger, even, than the one the UN occupation offered, since Cambodians quickly realized then that the UN was a toothless, clawless tiger. Now, after decades of complicity and neglect, the developed nations would at last declare: We are here for the Cambodian people. It is your job to serve them.

The government’s invulnerability, its invincibility, might be thrown into doubt. When the CPP could no longer reliably provide for its members, perhaps the model would begin to break down. Maybe, just maybe, after 1,000 years, Cambodia’s rulers might finally be forced to give the people their due.

I
eng Sary was a key intellectual architect of the Khmer Rouge approach to governance. In the 1950s he attended school in Paris with Saloth Sar—Pol Pot—and there they planned their genocidal revolution. While the Khmer Rouge held power, Ieng Sary served as foreign minister.

After the government’s fall, after the disclosure that 2 million people had been killed, after years of bloody insurgency, Ieng Sary took up Hun Sen’s offer of amnesty in 1996 and, in time, simply moved back to Phnom Penh, where he settled into a mansion, by Cambodian standards, in a housing development for ruling-party officers—just down the street from the Senate Golf Range. There he lived comfortably among his former victims, protected by legions of bodyguards.

For foreigners working in Cambodia, donors or diplomats, this seemed little different from allowing Joseph Goebbels or Rudolf Hess to move back into their Berlin homes after World War II to live out the rest of their days in peace and comfort. Yet Cambodians found it utterly unremarkable that a Khmer Rouge leader lived openly among them. Ask anyone how that could be, and all you’d get back was a puzzled look.

If nothing else, Ieng Sary fed the state’s omnipresent culture of impunity. If he, with the blood of 2 million people on his hands, faced no penalty, no censure, no retribution, how hard was it to accept the killing of a journalist here, a trade-union official there, a crane operator riding his motorbike down the street—even a servant thrown off the roof? As Theary Seng, the advocacy-group director, put it, the Khmer Rouge crimes remained “the baseline. This is thirty years later, but we are still comparing ourselves to the Khmer Rouge. Today, the government can say it took 10 lives, or even 100 lives—but what’s that compared to 2 million? That’s still the Cambodian standard,” and most foreign governments felt the same way.

Maybe most Cambodians were quiescent about living among the former Khmer Rouge killers. But foreign diplomats were appalled. As Thomas Hammarberg, the UN human-rights officer in Phnom Penh in the late 1990s, delicately put it, “This led to a contradictory situation. First, it became obvious that it would no longer be possible to avoid a real discussion about justice.” At the same time, he noted that in the days leading up to the “coup” in 1997, both Hun Sen and Ranariddh were actually courting the Khmer Rouge, hoping to recruit their fighters for the battle to come.

Still, Hammarberg and others at the United Nations were convinced that these mass murderers, the Khmer Rouge leaders cavorting around town, must be put on trial. In April 1997, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights passed a resolution requesting Hammarberg “to examine any request by Cambodia for assistance in responding to past serious violations of Cambodian and international laws as a means of bringing about national reconciliation, strengthening democracy and addressing the issue of individual accountability.”

The United Nations wanted at last to put the Khmer Rouge leaders on trial. Actually, the Vietnamese had already tried to do the same thing. In 1979 they staged a show trial and condemned them to death, in absentia. (Later, King Sihanouk pardoned them.) But the UN, in another bureaucratic understatement, called that trial “flawed.” One
could only wonder why the United Nations wanted to jump into that pool again after the “flawed” occupation and election just a few years earlier. But for human-rights officers, the reemergence of the Khmer Rouge leaders in everyday Phnom Penh society was such an affront that they could not help themselves.

In the days before the “coup,” Hammarberg had asked the co–prime ministers, Ranariddh and Hun Sen, if they would like to ask the United Nations for help in staging a trial. They both agreed, though one can only imagine what was running through their minds. At that moment both were focused on the certain battle ahead. And when thinking about a trial, Hun Sen could not help but consider that he and many members of his government were former Khmer Rouge officers. Nonetheless, they both signed a letter asking for help, because, they said, “Cambodia does not have the resources or expertise to conduct this very important procedure.” They were too busy to argue about this now; there’d be time to undo it later.

The street battles of July 1997 put all discussion on hold. And when Hun Sen emerged as the victor, almost every nation on earth angrily blamed the coup on him. For a while Cambodia’s seat in the United Nations sat vacant once again until someone could decide whether it would be given to Ranariddh, as he argued, or Hun Sen. Neither the Security Council nor the UN General Assembly wanted anything to do with Hun Sen. The trial idea lay dormant.

Just then Kent Wiedemann arrived in Phnom Penh as the new U.S. ambassador with a mandate from Washington, he said, to push the government to hold a trial. “It stemmed from the belief,” he said, “that there should be a firm structure in place for the rule of law. Anyone who commits these crimes against humanity should be put on trial.” Still, “this was just after the coup d’état, the kind of atmosphere when nobody was willing to rely on Cambodia for justice.”

In Washington, all the while, the departments of State, Defense, and Justice were furiously negotiating with Thailand and other countries so that the United States might seize Pol Pot and spirit him into
Thailand so he could be flown away into custody and put on trial. The air force was said to be prepped for the operation, and the islet nation of Palau said it was prepared to take him. To a world dulled to genocide, given the spate of more recent cases, State Department officials hoped to make the point that the Khmer Rouge had killed more than twice as many people as had died in Rwanda and almost twenty times more than were killed in Bosnia. The
New York Times
reported that President Clinton issued a written order to organize the logistics for capturing and holding Pol Pot until he could stand trial.

But in April 1998 Pol Pot died, still a free man. Officials in Washington were disappointed, deflated. Soon, however, they turned their attentions to Ta Mok, the Khmer Rouge military commander, and other former senior officials. For the United Nations, though, Pol Pot’s death “was a reminder that time was running out,” Hammarberg said in his account of the debate, written for the Documentation Center of Cambodia. “Other Khmer Rouge leaders were aging.”

In 1998 two more Khmer Rouge leaders, Khieu Samphan, who had been the head of state, and Nuon Chea, who had been known as “Brother No. 2,” accepted the amnesty offer and received a warm welcome when they showed up at Hun Sen’s country estate. The prime minister told them, “The time has come to dig a hole and bury the past.” This remark came back to haunt him. Was that the attitude of a man who wanted to put the Khmer Rouge leaders on trial?

A few days later, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea went on a road trip, as local and world media reported. Here’s how the Associated Press described their journey:

Hun Sen insisted that he still wanted to put on a trial for the Khmer Rouge. But then, complicating the matter, he added new crimes to the list of events he wanted prosecutors to investigate, including the American bombing of Cambodia and Chinese support for the Khmer Rouge. So began a tortured minuet between Hun Sen, who did not consider a trial to be in his best interest, and the United Nations, whose leaders felt trapped by the process they had initiated. Now, of course, they also held no real enthusiasm for dealing with Hun Sen.

Over the following few years Hun Sen and his aides threw up one objection after another. They worried about national stability. They complained about infringement upon their sovereignty. They insisted that any trial take place in state courts, even though Hun Sen knew full well that his court system was thoroughly corrupt. Reforming the courts had been on his own campaign agenda during the most recent election. “If foreigners have the right to lack confidence in Cambodian courts,” Hun Sen said, “we have the right to lack confidence in an international court. Why? Because those who mandate an international court used to support the Khmer Rouge.”

Still, the UN repeatedly objected and refused. In Washington administrations changed, and the government lost interest in capturing the aging leaders. “It became such a difficult, convoluted, lengthy, very, very difficult process,” said Wiedemann, largely because “as far as the UN was concerned, and others, there was no Cambodian qualified to participate in the tribunal in any meaningful way. The secretary-general wanted to appoint judges with eminent standing in the international community.”

Finally, Kofi Annan, the secretary-general, threw up his hands and said he’d had enough. Hun Sen must “change his position and attitude,” he declared, and “send a clear message that he is interested in a credible court, a credible tribunal which meets international standards.” Until that day came, the United Nations was backing out of the
discussions. When several UN ambassadors complained about his decision, Annan directed them to Hun Sen. In Phnom Penh the prime minister retorted, “I now suspect that political tricks are being played by the United Nations to protect the Khmer Rouge.”