Cambodia's Curse (15 page)

The next month, Second Prime Minister Hun Sen made an announcement, broadcast nationwide over state radio. Since the elections, he said, “corruption has become more widespread in all circles, like mushrooms sprouting during the rainy season.” As a result, the government was preparing a comprehensive anticorruption law. It would define corruption and the punishment for corrupt individuals. A strong office should be established to investigate and crack down on corrupt practices. The office should be independent; it should have sufficient rights and powers to conduct investigations, make arrests, and imprison offenders. “Prominent persons who are honest, courageous and resolute in their tasks,” he said, “should be appointed as members, and they should have a clear mandate.”

As a further check, Hun Sen said, “a strong and responsible press network should be created to publish accurate news, enabling the masses to become aware of the problem of corruption.” He asked the Cambodian press “to show its courage and responsibility in using democracy jointly with the government to achieve successes for the people who are currently striving to eliminate corruption.”

“He said all the right things,” Twining observed. “We were very impressed.” And it worked. In Paris, some speakers talked about corruption and human-rights abuses. But the Cambodians talked up their proposed new law and also pointed out: We’re a young nation, just emerging from genocide and war. Give us a chance!

The Cambodians asked for $295 million. The donors gave them $430 million. “That amount,” First Prime Minister Ranariddh told reporters waiting for him at the Phnom Penh airport, “is double our need and much more than we require.” He was grinning.

A
fter Hun Sen and Ranariddh divided up the ministries, Sam Rainsy of the Funcinpec Party was appointed minister of finance. He was an erudite French Cambodian, educated at the Sorbonne,
who’d worked as an investment banker in Paris before returning to Cambodia in 1993. In addition to Khmer, he spoke French and nearperfect English. Most Cambodians viewed him as an elitist, and as if to prove it, he typically wore expensive suits and round tortoise-shell eyeglasses. Cambodians, by and large, did not wear glasses. They couldn’t afford them.

Since returning to Cambodia, Rainsy had devised and trademarked a political personality that made him a dissident within the government. He inveighed against corruption, both political and financial—though rumors about corruption in his own ministry, never confirmed, swirled through Phnom Penh. While Sihanouk, Hun Sen, and Ranariddh plotted and schemed during the first weeks after the elections, Rainsy had remarked, “Everyone is ready to do anything to survive. They are showing no moral values, no signs of concern for the national interest or the common good.”

Rainsy liked to play to the audience in the bleachers—foreign governments, particularly France and the United States. In his first months on the job, he won plaudits from them by announcing that he had improved tax collection so that the government could soon begin paying civil servants a living wage, reducing the incentive to take bribes. At about the same time, though, the parliament voted to raise its members’ own pay from about $30 a month to $1,800—ostensibly to reduce the need to take bribes. Needless to say, that got more attention than Rainsy’s 20 percent pay increase for civil servants.

But Rainsy’s biggest problem was his mouth. “Over the last 10 years, people, especially leaders, tended to confuse their personal assets with the state’s assets,” he told the
Toronto Star
in June 1994. “They saw their personal interests as the national interest. This was the worst combination we could have, a jungle economy and former Communist cadres who use their discretionary powers to serve their personal interests. They’ve been doing whatever they want. They just use their political power to get rich by disposing of national assets like they are their own assets.” A bit later he told the Associated Press,
“You cannot start a business here without all the officials asking you for money.” And now, with a divided government, “instead of bribing one party, you have to bribe two.”

Every time he made a remark like that, diplomats and aid-group officers stood up and clapped. But Cambodian government officials and the businessmen who were bribing them grew to loath Rainsy. And, needless to say, the corrupt officials in government outnumbered Rainsy and his kind by at least 1,000 to 1.

Rainsy managed to inspire foreign confidence in the government’s future. But this may have left Rainsy with the view that he was invulnerable. He was wrong. In October 1994 Ranariddh and Hun Sen fired him, saying he was “not a team player.” Rainsy’s wife, Tioulong Saumura, offered a curious explanation for his fall: “My husband was not good at explaining what he was doing because of his poor communication skills.” Rainsy may have been booted out of government. But he was not going to fade gracefully away.

 

Even with Hun Sen’s lofty pronouncements about corruption and a free and open press, it quickly became clear that Cambodia remained a dangerous place for the reform-minded. Two months after Rainsy left office, two men riding by on a motorbike shot and killed Chan Dara, a young reporter for the
Koh Santepheap
(Island of Peace) newspaper, in Kampong Cham, about seventy-five miles northeast of Phnom Penh. Chan Dara had been writing stories about corruption in government—as Hun Sen had publicly requested. A few weeks earlier in downtown Phnom Penh assassins on a motorbike had gunned down Nguon Chan, the editor of the
Voice of Cambodian Youth
newspaper. He, too, had been reporting on corruption.

Information Minister Ieng Mouly, when questioned about Nguon Chan’s murder, offered a surprising bit of candor. He told a reporter for the
Christian Science Monitor
that he could not “exclude the possibility that members of the police or the military were responsible for this assassination, but it doesn’t mean it’s the policy of the government.”
Ieng Mouly soon lost his job. And never again did a Cambodian government official even suggest complicity in one of those killings. From that day forward, as the killings continued year after year, the government’s position was steadfast denial.

In his speech for the donors in 1995, Second Prime Minister Hun Sen had urged the news media “to publish accurate news, enabling the masses to become aware of the problem of corruption.” He had also promised to write and enact an anticorruption law. A few days after that speech, Keat Chhon, the new finance minister, told reporters, “The royal government is seriously implementing internal legislation to combat corruption” and is “determined to adopt measures to that end: the establishment of an anti-corruption office, the drawing up of an anti-corruption law, the exercise of administrative reform, and the strengthening of education to fight corruption.”

Nevertheless, since the meeting in Paris, where the government got everything it wanted—and more—the anticorruption legislation had disappeared from public discussion. The government had decided it didn’t want anyone even to talk about the subject anymore. This approach was very much like King Norodom’s insincere promise to the new French administration a century earlier that he would abolish slavery, quieting his masters so he could head off for an afternoon at his harem. That strategy would become commonplace in the coming years. But this time, Hun Sen, Ranariddh, and King Sihanouk all had personal agendas in mind.

 

In June 1994 Sihanouk, heading to China for medical treatment, said he would be more than willing to become the ruling monarch again. “I have no plan to take power now,” he told the
Far Eastern Economic Review
. “But in case the situation becomes anarchic and desperate, I would have to take power for one or two years.” Rumors that Sihanouk was coming back rippled through Phnom Penh, to his delight. He continually encouraged the talk. “The people see that unless Sihanouk takes power, there is no leader capable of reuniting the
country and giving everyone faith and confidence,” he said. “I don’t want to be the man of factions. I want to be the man of national unity, national reconciliation.”

Listening to all of this, Hun Sen warned him: If you try to come back, I will fight you with everything I have. “I don’t admire much this regime,” Sihanouk said after receiving Hun Sen’s threat. “But I accept it.” The fact that his own son was first prime minister in the government didn’t seem to change Sihanouk’s opinion. He obviously had little respect for Ranariddh. Just before he was appointed figurehead king, Sihanouk spoke to a luncheon with Ranariddh in the audience. He glanced at his son as he quipped with a biting tone: “They want to make me king so I am completely neutralized. That’s why Prince Ranariddh wants his father to be king.” From his sickbed in Beijing, Sihanouk sent a steady stream of fax messages to Funcinpec Party officials, all of them highly critical of his son.

It turned out this drama had other players, too. A month after Sihanouk left Phnom Penh, a column of military troop transports and armored personnel carriers rumbled along the road toward the capital from the east, carrying about three hundred men armed with rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. When the force reached the outskirts of Phnom Penh in the early-morning hours, government troops surrounded the vehicles, and all of the soldiers surrendered. Who did they find leading this small renegade force, apparently attempting a coup? Prince Chakrapong, King Sihanouk’s black-sheep son, who had slunk off to Vietnam after his secession scheme failed. The next day fourteen armed Thai soldiers, some dressed in Cambodian military uniforms, were caught at the Phnom Penh airport, apparently there to add “firepower” to the coup attempt.

Chakrapong, being a royal, was hustled onto a plane and sent back into exile the very next day. He said nothing about his intentions, but the reigning theory was this: Chakrapong planned to depose, if not kill, his hated brother, Ranariddh, and return his revered father, Sihanouk, to full power. Then Dad would give him a powerful new job
in his government. The bizarre incident remained an enduring mystery but had the result of persuading both Ranariddh and Hun Sen to build up their personal guard forces so that soon each of these armies numbered in the hundreds.

 

Ranariddh was growing more and more frustrated with his place in government. Yes, Hun Sen had given him several ministries—in theory. But all of the bureaucrats down in the bowels of these agencies were CPP loyalists. What’s more, the true source of power, since the time of Jayavarman II in the ninth century, was in the provinces. There, the people who grew rice created most of the nation’s wealth. Hun Sen and his political party maintained complete control nationwide, and Ranariddh could do little to change that.

At a Funcinpec Party conference, Ranariddh vowed to demand true power sharing in the provinces. By then no one held any doubt that a drive for greater personal wealth, which came from enhanced power, was Ranariddh’s principal aim. He had already made it known that he had no use for democracy, the central aim of the $3 billion UN effort. “The Western brand of democracy and freedom of press is not applicable in Cambodia,” he remarked in 1995. Ninety percent of Cambodians had voted in the recent election, but democracy and freedom of the press were not proving to be useful for Ranariddh. By this time his government had charged fourteen journalists with antigovernment slander.

All the while, members of his own party were losing faith. Ranariddh had never served in government before becoming first prime minister. He remained aloof and uninterested in much beyond enriching himself and advancing his own personal interests. And then those almost daily faxes from the king were working to undermine him among his own staff. Even so, he remained oblivious. “I don’t think Ranariddh knew that people in his own party were turning against him,” said Quinn, the State Department official. “They wanted to bring the king back.”

Hun Sen was no more of a democrat. How could he be, given his history? During a meeting in Paris in 1996 Cambodians held a demonstration against him. Hun Sen warned them: “You can hold a demonstration in France, but do not do it in Cambodia!”

Now, the co–prime ministers were not even talking to each other. Hun Sen told author David Roberts that he and Ranariddh do not “hug and kiss each other, we do not love each other. In fact we barely speak. We do not have regularly scheduled meetings because we have little to discuss.”

If anyone doubted that Sihanouk, Hun Sen, and Ranariddh all were driven to win dominance, they had only to witness the political violence still endemic in the capital city. Perhaps the most heinous of these crimes was the hand-grenade attack on the Buddhist Liberal Party headquarters in September 1995. Two men on a motorbike, wearing helmets with tinted faceplates, drove up to party headquarters, threw a hand grenade into the reception room where dozens of people had gathered for a rally, and then sped off. Their bike had no license plate, which was not uncommon in Cambodia. Then they drove over to a nearby pagoda, where another crowd of party members waited for the rally, tossed another grenade into that crowd, and sped off, leaving blood, mayhem, and death in their wake. More than thirty people were injured, and at least ten of these eventually died from their wounds.