Cambodia's Curse (2 page)

Back then, before the Internet, even before Nexis and other newspaper data banks, when a regional paper wrote something, no one else saw it. For us, we heard only from readers in Kentucky and southern Indiana. After that, our words and pictures simply faded into memory. That was the nature of newspaper work back then.

T
wenty-nine years later, in the summer of 2008, I was heading back to Cambodia for the first time. In the interim I had left the
Courier-Journal
and taken a job with the
New York Times
, where I worked as a reporter, editor, and foreign correspondent for nearly twenty-five years. I had reported from more than fifty countries, though I had never made it back to Cambodia. But I had a big question on my mind.

A decade after their invasion, the Vietnamese had pulled out of Cambodia, in 1989, and left a puppet Marxist government in place. The Khmer Rouge, still directed by Pol Pot, continued waging a guerrilla war against the occupiers and their government. The country seemed unable to pull itself out of the morass.

In 1992 and 1993 the United Nations occupied Cambodia. The state became a UN protectorate—the first and last time the United Nations tried anything so ambitious. The UN deployed 16,000 troops and 5,000 civil administrators. It ran the country for two years, and the whole enterprise cost $3 billion. The United Nations gave Cambodia a constitution that afforded the people—5 million Khmer Rouge survivors—all the human rights and privileges of a modern democratic state. Then
the UN staged elections. To everyone’s surprise, 90 percent of the electorate voted. The UN claimed that showed a hunger for democracy. Once the new government took office, the UN pulled out.

No other nation had ever been given a chance like that. The world had come together out of guilt and concern (and self-interest) to help pull this little nation out of the mire and give it an opportunity to start over, to enter the modern age. What happened? What had the new democratically elected government done with this extraordinary, unprecedented gift? To find out, in August 2008 I set off for Cambodia once again.
¹

 

On my third morning in Phnom Penh I was eating breakfast at the Intercontinental Hotel—a far cry from that place in Aranyaprathet in 1979. I picked up a copy of the
Phnom Penh Post
, an English-language daily. As I read a small story on page 3, I sat up straight and would have exclaimed out loud, had I not been in the dining room.

Hun Chea, a nephew of Prime Minster Hun Sen, had been driving his Cadillac Escalade SUV at high speed in downtown Phnom Penh when he ran over a man on a motorbike. The accident ripped off the motorbike driver’s arm and leg.

Hun Chea tried to flee, the paper said, but running over the motorbike had shredded one of his tires. He had to pull over. But here’s the part that captured my attention: As the motorbike driver, a crane operator, lay bleeding to death in the street, “numerous traffic police passed the scene without stopping. But the wreck drew the attention of about 20 military police, who removed the license plate from the SUV.”

They removed Hun Chea’s license plate? A few days later I asked Cambodia’s minister of information, Khieu Kanharith, about the incident. The police removed the license plate? He had to think for a
moment but finally managed to say, “You try to cover the plates because it’s harder to sell a car if it’s been in an accident.” As a reporter, sometimes it’s hard to keep a straight face. But then, being the information minister in Cambodia is a tough job.

T
wo years researching and two long summers reporting in Cambodia answered my question: What had Cambodia done with that singular chance, that great gift the United Nations had bestowed? As it turned out, in the twenty-first century a corrupt, autocratic leader was running the country. The United Nations, in hindsight, had overestimated its ability to effect democratic change.

Cambodia was the first major state-building effort of the late twentieth century. The most dramatic examples before Cambodia were Germany and Japan. Both became thriving democracies; they showed it could be done. But these states had been on their knees, defeated and destroyed by war. When the occupying troops arrived, neither Germany nor Japan had any remaining homegrown leaders or oligarchs, no one who had anything much to protect. The people embraced the democratic changes Western occupiers brought along, and no one of note with wealth or power was left to stand in the way. That’s why those occupations succeeded.

Cambodia’s story was different, though the United Nations’ leaders seemed unable to recognize that. They were starry-eyed about the broad international cooperation that had suddenly come about after the fall of the Soviet Union just a year or two earlier. Surely, the United States, Russia, China, Europe, Japan, and Vietnam, working together, could make this work. After all, this nation, like Germany and Japan, had been destroyed in a civil war of sorts. In Washington, the State Department plunged into the planning. The assistant secretary of state for the region, Richard Solomon, grabbed the issue as his own and pushed it hard—even as some more senior officials began expressing doubts.

In fact, the Cambodian “war” had ended in 1979, more than a decade before the UN occupation began. An old leader had regained his strength while new ones had emerged. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the consummate self-interested monarch who was extremely popular with most of the Cambodian people, had ruled Cambodia since 1941, until a military coup deposed him in 1970. The Khmer Rouge brought him back as their titular head of state—though he was imprisoned in his palace during their reign. Then, as the UN troops began arriving in 1992, they made him honorary king again. But he wanted nothing less than his old job back—the all-powerful monarch, just like the kings who had ruled Cambodia since the beginning of time. Now, however, he had competitors.

During the Vietnamese occupation, from 1979 to 1989, a young Khmer Rouge officer named Hun Sen was named prime minister. He was barely educated, but clever and utterly ruthless—as one might expect of a young man trained by the Khmer Rouge and then the Vietnamese military. The prime minister’s job was handed to him in 1985; he was not about to give it up.

A third competitor arose, Norodom Ranariddh, one of Sihanouk’s sons. He had led a hapless guerrilla organization, funded by the United States. Its goal was to drive the Vietnamese and their appointed government, including Hun Sen, out of the country. After Vietnam pulled out, Ranariddh coveted power too. He seemed to know or care little about governance. But as prime minister, he knew he would be able to enrich himself. Ranariddh was not as clever as Hun Sen, but he was of royal lineage, which gave him a strong advantage.

So, past examples like Germany and Japan—even South Korea—simply were not useful models for this grand experiment. In fact, the Cambodian venture was unprecedented. Even before the UN troops left, the three aspiring leaders were grappling for power, as if the UN election had never taken place. Their contest lasted many years.

The troops may have left, but the United Nations was still there, running a phalanx of charitable organizations—UNICEF, UNESCO, the World Food Program (WFP), and the rest. The United States
Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Bank, and other major relief agencies from around the world worked alongside the UN. In fact, in time, 2,000 different donors and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) set up shop in Cambodia. As the power struggles grew heated, even violent, the government grew ever more corrupt, and the donors began pushing the leaders to live up to their promises, to serve their people.

Hun Sen, Ranariddh, and the king offered little more than lip service to those demands, but that seemed to be enough. The donors kept giving money, hundreds of millions of dollars, year after year—even as the nation headed for a military showdown to settle the power struggle once and for all.

Successive American ambassadors played their own roles. The first one, Charles Twining, marveled at the wonder of Cambodia’s new beginning and tended to be charitable even as the situation deteriorated. Then came Kenneth Quinn, who decided, logically enough, that he could do the most good by forming a close relationship with Prime Minister Hun Sen. But in Washington by then, Hun Sen was the villain of Cambodia, roundly despised for his corrupt and oppressive policies. So Quinn grew to be a polarizing figure because he alone stood up to defend the prime minister.

Quinn aside, the United States and other Western nations had lined up behind the lone remaining opposition leader of any consequence, Sam Rainsy. He talked the talk of a democrat but was far more popular in Washington than he was in Cambodia. He survived repeated legal attacks and an assassination attempt. But over time his allies began noticing the dictatorial way he ran his own political party. For all Rainsy’s talk of democracy, it was hard to tell whether he was just a poseur.

Fighting finally broke out between Ranariddh and Hun Sen in 1997. Hun Sen became the uncontested leader. After that, successive American ambassadors arrived with a different point of view. The horrors of the Pol Pot era had receded from memory, replaced by
more recent genocidal moments in Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur. So these later ambassadors, particularly Kent Wiedemann, tended to view the government’s corruption and venality with little if any sympathy. Wiedemann admitted that he effectively turned American policy toward Cambodia over to the human-rights advocates. Washington no longer cared.

The United Nations had invested years of effort and $3 billion but then dropped the matter—except to continue bragging about its success, even as Cambodia’s leaders fell back into old patterns of self-interested turpitude. As a result, even today, Cambodians remain the most abused people in the world.

W
hen American visitors came to see Joseph Mussomeli, while he was the U.S. ambassador to Cambodia, he would adopt a melodramatic tone as he told them: “Be careful because Cambodia is the most dangerous place you will ever visit. You will fall in love with it, and eventually it will break your heart.”

Yes, Cambodia is an alluring place, exotic and peaceful now after decades of genocide and war. Many in the West still feel sympathy, even responsibility, for the horrors of the Khmer Rouge years, when 2 million people died. As a result, visitors often smile as they watch ordinary Cambodians go about their lives in relative tranquility. “People in America,” Ambassador Mussomeli observed, “all they know of Cambodia is the Khmer Rouge.” So it’s no wonder that tourists and visitors often “fall in love” with the state they see today.

On the streets of Phnom Penh hundreds of young people buzz past on motorbikes, carrying wives and children and every manner of cargo—mattresses, plate glass, even pigs and other livestock. Motorbikes outnumber cars by at least fifty to one. Espresso bars and stylish restaurants dot the cityscape—primarily for the thousands of international aid workers who still live and work here. One new
twenty-seven-story skyscraper, a bank, is up, and several others are under construction, rising quickly in competition for the city’s sky.

Everywhere you look in this most tropical of lands, flowers are abloom. Trees show off bright red, yellow, orange, or blue blossoms that rustle gently in the breeze. Now and then, you can spot a wild monkey jumping from branch to branch, even in the city center. Look up at the palm or mango trees, and you’ll see ripe coconuts and fruits just waiting to be plucked. In fact, amid the litter in the streets—where in the United States you’d see half-crushed Bud Light cans and plastic water bottles—you’ll find bristly, red lychee-nut shells and coconuts with drinking straws poking out of small holes.

Therein lies the central conundrum of Cambodian society. This is a nation so abundant that for all of time Cambodians have been able, as people here put it, “to live by nature”—to grow rice, pick fruit, catch fish, and live in homes built from nearby trees and vegetation. With all that plenitude there for the taking, who needs the modern world?