Cambodia's Curse (52 page)

Of course, Cambodia is hardly the only corrupt country. When Joseph Mussomeli was the U.S. ambassador, he said he would “always tell the Cambodians that we put about six hundred American government officials in jail each year for corruption. It reminds me that we also have a corrupt society and that we are doing the right thing about it. We’re putting them in jail. There’s no shame in admitting corruption; the shame is in denying it and not doing something about it.”

In fact, the Cambodian government almost never imposed any real penalty, even when an official was caught red-handed. In 2007 Ly Vouchleng was president of the National Court of Appeals when she was exposed for taking a $30,000 bribe in exchange for releasing two human-trafficking suspects from jail. She lost her job. Soon after, however, she was appointed legal counsel to the Council of Ministers. In 2009 the government removed Ke Kim Yan from his position as commander in chief of the military because he’d been caught in several shady land deals. Less than two months later Hun Sen appointed him deputy prime minister. And in the spring of 2010 a Phnom Penh court convicted an assistant to Interior Minister Sar Kheng of fraud and sentenced him to two years in prison for taking a $25,000 bribe in exchange for a job at the ministry. Upon convicting him, the court let him go, saying time served, a few months, was enough.

M
any nations have suffered dark histories that left sad legacies. Many of those same nations are ruled by leaders who mistreat the people now. But no nation has suffered so much in the recent past.
No other people lived through an era when their own leaders killed one-quarter of the population—only to find that when the offending government fell, uncaring, avaricious leaders replaced it. No other nation’s population is so riven with PTSD and other traumatic mental illnesses that are being passed to a second generation and potentially to a third—darkening the nation’s personality.

All of that offers the Cambodian people a toxic mix of abuse unmatched anywhere in the world. But given their history, given the subservient state Cambodians have accepted without complaint for more than a millennium, they don’t seem to care.

Once, just once, they dared to hope. The world’s major nations gave them the chance to choose their leader for the first time in history. Almost every Cambodian embraced it; 90 percent of them voted. But then their leaders betrayed them, and the world deserted them.

Now, once again, most expect nothing more than they have. They carry no ambitions. They hold no dreams. All they want is to be left alone.

N
ine Cambodians out of ten may not hope, or care. But change is coming. Even for a nation lost in the past, the modern world encroaches, far more slowly than in most any other place, but inexorably still.

In the late 1960s Ken Quinn, the State Department officer working in Vietnam who later became ambassador to Cambodia, watched as villagers in South Vietnam replaced their thatched roofs with metal—an anthropologist’s measure of social improvement. Soon he began to hear radios and see televisions in these homes, and not long after that he watched families send their children to middle schools. Quinn credited the roads the United States was building in South Vietnam back then. They opened the villages to commerce. While he was ambassador to Cambodia during the late 1990s, Quinn pushed Washington to
build more roads. But growing violence, culminating in First Prime Minister Ranariddh’s “coup,” put an end to those plans.

Ten years later, however, the Chinese stepped in and began building important roads and bridges, particularly in neglected rural areas. In some of those places now served by roads, a few farmers are buying tractors of sorts. Really, they are motor scooters with a till attached. But that’s a big step above tying a rock to a plow pulled by an ox.

But then prosperity came to those Vietnamese in the 1960s because they also adopted the modern rice-cultivation techniques that the Americans offered. That increased their yields—and their wealth. Cambodians, on the other hand, resist change. Dr. Yang Saing Koma, president of the Center for the Study and Development of Agriculture, in Battambang, knows that as well as anyone. “The most important thing is just to change your thinking,” he said. “The problem is you have to have a better way to explain the new techniques to the farmer. In a very simple way.” When his group does that, “we ask them to do a pilot project, test it first” on a small plot of ground. “And once that happens, some of them are receptive. But now the government is in it; they’re pushing this, too.”

It’s hard to know how quickly farmers may adopt modern agricultural techniques. But the metal roofs, motor scooters, and now even a smattering of cell phones in rural areas suggest incremental change.

The nation grows ever more prosperous, too. For all his faults, Hun Sen has given Cambodians one very important thing: more than a decade of stability and calm that bring some predictability to their lives for the first time in centuries. Stability is important not just for Cambodians. It encourages more tourists to visit the Khmer Rouge sites in Phnom Penh and the monuments left behind from the Khmer empire at Angkor. Tourism, one of the three legs of Cambodia’s economy, continues to grow. Leopard Capital, an investment-fund manager in Southeast Asia, said tourist arrivals increased by 26 percent between 2008 and 2009. In the first half of 2010, 1.2 million people visited Cambodia, another large increase.

Foreign investment is still slow to come and is unlikely to grow significantly, as long as businessmen see that so many hands will be reaching into their pockets as soon as they arrive. For now, few Western companies dare to try. But Cambodia’s commerce with its neighbors is growing fast. In the first quarter of 2010, trade with Vietnam grew by 127 percent compared to the same period a year earlier.

Yet all of this skirts Cambodia’s largest problem: Hun Sen and his organization, the Cambodian People’s Party. A variety of Cambodians and Cambodia experts, asked about the state’s future, seemed to agree that fundamental change cannot come until Hun Sen leaves the scene. He was born in 1952, so he could potentially remain in power into the 2020s or ’30s. “In 2013, I will be only 61 years old and still firm,” he proclaimed at a university graduation ceremony. “Even now I have already become the longest ruling prime minister in Asia and made a historical record.” He suffered a bout of swine flu in 2010 but still seemed healthy and robust after that and evidenced no interest in stepping down from office.

Don Jameson, who served as a political officer in the U.S. Embassy during the 1970s, married a Cambodian woman and remains intimately involved with the state. He visits often and follows events day by day. “As long as Hun Sen remains in power, which could be another twenty years or so,” he said, “it is hard to envision any basic changes in direction.” Still, he and others also pointed to a growing number of urban Cambodian college graduates; 40,000 people start college in Cambodia each year, and a growing but uncounted number study abroad. Many of these people are quite skeptical of the government and seem poised to push for change when the time is right.

David Chandler, the historian, has been following events and writing books about Cambodia for decades. And “when I was in Cambodia last month, I faced several large audiences of university students,” he told me in the summer of 2010. “Queues of questioners” lined up, “and some even sent follow-up e-mails. They asked some probing
questions.” That had never happened before. In past times, he said, students were passive, uncritical.

“A French official with UNESCO, whom I met officially, told me that the quality of local personnel coming into the UN system in Cambodia is higher every year,” Chandler went on to say. UN and NGO officials told me the same thing. All of this led Chandler to conclude that educated, urban Cambodians, at least, “are not simply sitting back and letting things wash over them” any longer. “This doesn’t mean that they are politically foolhardy. It means that they are more skeptical and responsive than Cambodians have generally been.”

Thousands of educated young Cambodians are no longer willing to accept the current state of affairs, unlike generations of students before them. But what can they do? For now, not much. They cannot speak up or organize without risking their lives; none of them wants to see two helmeted men on a motorbike with no license plate approaching from behind.

They have little choice but to bide their time, wait for Hun Sen to step down—or for some unforeseen external event to intervene and rattle the status quo. But when that day comes, these Cambodians will have a distinct advantage over similar groups in other countries that faced moments like this. The UN occupation, for all its faults and failings, did leave Cambodia with an enduring gift—a true democratic system of government. Cambodians are accustomed to voting, and the government is properly divided into executive, parliamentary, and judicial branches that have the ability to check one another. The current regime distorted it, turned it into a one-party, job-protection racket. But, in the right hands, all of that could be undone. “A series of events, actions, and circumstances” as yet unseen “could converge to precipitate a tipping point,” said Gaffar Peang-Meth, a Cambodian with a doctorate earned abroad, at the University of Michigan—one of the very few Cambodians with these qualifications in all of time. He’s a professor of political science who recently retired from the University of Guam. Not only are some students and recent graduates dissatisfied,
he said, but “I also know some people in the current regime, in the military as well as in the bureaucracy, who are unhappy.” Maybe, just maybe, he offered, “if the right spots are pushed at the right time, a seemingly unchangeable situation can be altered. Call me a dreamer if you will, but thoughts give rise to dreams, and dreams to actions.”

All of that amounts to little more than a warm breath of hope. But for Cambodians, that’s more than anyone has offered in a very long time.

I
have many people to thank. James Hoge, who was editor of
Foreign Affairs
magazine, trusted me to write that first article about Cambodia, in the spring of 2009. Researching that piece, I saw the book. The Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting gave me a grant for travel expenses. So did the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Later, after I had written the magazine article, Peter Osnos, who was the editor of my first book in 1989, trusted me to write this one. Lindsay Jones served as an outstanding editor. Thank you all.

In Cambodia, Phann Ana, an outstanding reporter for the
Cambodia Daily
, worked as my research assistant and translator for two summers. Van Roeun and Phorn Bopha also were able colleagues for shorter periods.

In the United States, Don Jameson, who follows Cambodia hour by hour, kept me abreast of the latest developments. And Luke Henesy worked tirelessly as my research assistant here at Stanford.

Most of all I thank my family. Researching and writing this book, while also writing a weekly op-ed column and holding down my job at Stanford, required an incredible commitment of time. My wife, Sabra, and my daughters, Veronica and Charlotte—to whom this book is dedicated—put up with me, even encouraged me, all the while.

Over two years, I interviewed more than two hundred people, Cambodians and others with experience in the country. I read twelve books and parts of several others as well as probably a thousand newspaper and magazine articles—not to mention scores of government and privateorganization documents and reports. The
Cambodia Daily
and the
Phnom Penh Post
were important and reliable sources. My database contains 7,387 distinct digital records.

Far more important than any of that, of course, are the months I spent traveling the country in 2008 and 2009. Looking back after more than three decades in journalism, those experiences were among the most fascinating, even amazing, I have ever had.