Inside gated mansions like his all over Phnom Penh and other cities,
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wait for the prime minister to call. When the call comes, they know they will have to travel to some godforsaken spot and spend a little money to make Hun Sen look good. But then when they need or want something, the prime minister is ready to return the favor—for a price. So it was in 2000 when
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Lao Meng Khin asked to buy the rights to take out the last major forest in Pursat Province, in south-central Cambodia. They agreed on a price, to be paid directly to Hun Sen.
Another
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, Ly Yong Phat, also a wealthy senator, actually bought the right to sell off tons of Cambodian land. Singapore was a veracious purchaser of sand; the city used it as landfill to create more real estate. For years it had bought sand from Indonesia, but sucking it from the bottom of the seabed had caused “very severe environmental damage in many Indonesian islands,” the Indonesian Foreign Ministry had said. Indonesia banned sand dredging.
Almost right away,
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Ly Yong Phat bought the right to begin sucking sand from the bottom of Cambodian rivers and seashores, for sale to Singapore. The
Phnom Penh Post
reported that sand dredgers were at work inside the Peam Krasp Wildlife Sanctuary, among other places. By the summer of 2010 riverbanks were beginning to collapse, dragging boat piers and outbuildings down into the water.
Eventually, Hun Sen issued what he called a “partial ban” on sand dredging. This still left him a loophole, allowing the continued sale of contracts as he pleased. Similarly, in 2002 Hun Sen issued a ban on logging. No one could cut down any more trees. Existing land concessions
were canceled pending review—including Lao Meng Khin’s. This was a sop to the World Bank and the other donors who were decrying the ongoing rape of Cambodia’s forests. But, just like so many of these edicts, in the tradition of King Norodom’s serial promises in the 1880s to abolish slavery, the moratorium existed only on paper. In the field it had little effect. Lao Meng Khin had already paid handsomely for his concession. No one was suggesting that Hun Sen had given the money back. For him and other
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in the lumber business, the moratorium was nothing more than a brief pause.
After an appropriate period of time had passed, the government took up a new tactic. Now, the government was no longer selling lumber concessions. Instead,
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and other tycoons could buy large plots of land to establish so-called plantations. It just so happened that they planned their plantations on the nation’s dwindling forested acreage. All those trees would have to be cut down (and sold) to make room for new durian or kumquat farms.
Lao Meng Khin quickly came up with his own scheme: Once the “plantation” land was cleared, Pheapimex would use the property to create a vast eucalyptus farm with the intention of using the trees to feed a paper mill. That was the plan when the bulldozers showed up in early 2004—under armed guard provided by the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces. “I heard that the people are complaining about the cutting of the resin trees,”
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Lao Meng Khin offered. “But we are planting eucalyptus in a place that does not violate anyone’s property rights.”
No, the villagers did not own the forestland. Neither, actually, did Hun Sen. But shortly after Hun Sen announced the deal, more than seven hundred villagers showed up in Phnom Penh to protest the concession. “If they destroy the old forest, they might as well come to kill us,” declared Luek Thuon, a sixty-six-year-old villager. “That forest is our rice pot.”
After the bulldozers had wreaked havoc for a day, the villagers decided they would stage a sit-in at the forest’s entrance. Um Huot, who
had grown to be the voice of the protesters, organized it. He was a middle-aged man with an expression of serious purpose locked on his face. He sat on a small wooden porch in front of his modest home, under a corrugated metal roof, and explained the crime in stark terms. The Vietnamese occupiers, the Khmer Rouge, and others had deforested millions of acres in Pursat Province over the previous thirty years. Vast areas of land were clear-cut and now offered only stumps and weeds. Why, then, Um Huot asked, does Lao Meng Khin need this particular plot of land—the only forested land left—for his eucalyptus plantation? “There’s plenty of empty land. Why don’t they use some of that?”
The answer, Um Huot knew, was that the eucalyptus-plantation proposal was simply a cynical trick, a rationale for the rape of the area’s last forest that made no sense to anyone who looked at it with any care. But then, who could challenge Hun Sen? Who could point out these fallacies? Did anyone have leverage over him? Or did Hun Sen and the rest of the Cambodian government, as so many diplomats and human-rights workers complained, live behind an unassailable shield of impunity?
Um Huot managed to recruit eight hundred villagers for the sit-in. They brought sleeping mats and stayed at the forest entrance around the clock, trying to block the bulldozers. And as so often happened in Cambodia, at 12:45 a.m. someone crept out of the woods and threw a hand grenade into the field of sleeping villagers. Eight people were wounded, fortunately none fatally. Um Huot decried the attack. The police, following the script, said the protesters had themselves ordered the grenade attack so they could blame it on the government. Why else was no one killed? It happened that Peter Leuprecht, the UN human-rights envoy, was in Phnom Penh at the time, and he exclaimed, “I deplore this grenade attack that was launched against peaceful protestors, and I hope that a serious investigation will be carried out.”
As usual, no one was ever arrested or charged. The only positive result occurred a few days later when the Ministry of the Interior, responding to outrage from diplomats and human-rights officers, temporarily
suspended the clear-cutting operation. Um Huot and the others viewed it as a stay of execution. They returned to the forest to pursue their livelihood—fully aware that they were living on borrowed time.
The fracas at the forest served as a coda to the World Bank’s efforts to reform forestry management. Over the months leading up to the grenade attack, all of the bank’s initiatives crumbled under the weight of official corruption and, within the bank itself, institutional torpor and incompetence.
In December 2002, 150 people gathered at the Forestry and Wildlife Ministry to protest ongoing deforestation at numerous sites around the country. Thousands of villagers were losing their livelihoods, just like those people in Pursat. The government loosed the police on the protesters. Officers kicked them and attacked using electric batons. Seven people were hospitalized; one was killed. Global Witness, the government’s forest monitor, issued an acrid, accusatory report. Hun Sen, furious, fired Global Witness and kicked its investigators out of the country—something he had probably wanted to do for a long time.
Hun Sen had hired Global Witness only because the donors had left him little choice at that time. In the following years, he had bristled and bridled as he watched the group work against his interests. “We have the right to terminate visas for anyone who dares to abuse our national sovereignty, our political rights and inflict damage to our reputation,” he said. “I will sue Global Witness because it has accused Cambodian police of killing people and injuring several others.” After he dismissed the group the investigators left. But soon others arrived. Like a hound that sniffed a covey of quail, Global Witness could not let this investigation go. It didn’t need a government contract or Hun Sen’s permission. The group would finish its investigation and publish a report on its own.
The World Bank soon ran into troubles of its own—from its own internal office of investigations. For years, the bank had worked to reform the government’s forest-concession program—the one that
sold vast swaths of forest to
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and other wealthy businessmen. The fruit of the bank’s effort was the bogus logging moratorium and other theatrical administrative orders. Meantime, the trees, millions and millions of trees, continued falling all over the country. Trucks loaded with lumber clotted the state’s roads. Hun Sen and his cronies grew ever richer from the concession payments that went directly to them, not the government.
In 2006 World Bank investigators from Washington found that their officers in Phnom Penh had so single-mindedly pursued concession reform and phony regulations that they’d ignored what was really going on. If they had bothered to lift their eyes from their desks and look out the window, they would have seen that the government had authorized “an estimated 3–4 million cubic meters of illegal logging,” the investigators’ report said. Yet all the while Ian Porter, the bank’s Cambodia office director, lauded the enactment of new regulations. He seemed to have forgotten that the state had issued similar regulations years earlier. Shortly after taking office in 1993, Hun Sen and Ranariddh had announced a new rule that said timber exports were now “prohibited under any circumstances.” Why did the bank think the new promises were any more believable?
Over the years, dozens of Cambodians told the bank’s executive officers about the continuing deforestation. As the bank investigators finally put it, falling into World Bank internal jargon, “Bank was frequently made aware of numerous complaints of harms to local communities due to cutting of resin trees. Bank’s failure to consider and investigate these problems does not comply with OP 4.01 and OP 4.36.” In other words, the international communities’ initiative to save Cambodia’s forests was in shambles.
Against this backdrop the government faced national elections once again in the summer of 2003, the third since the UN occupation. The players remained the same, as did the issues. Violence diminished a bit. Still, opposition officers were killed, the CPP intimidated voters by multiple means, and all the parties tried to buy votes. Turnout dropped
by about 10 percent over the previous elections in 1998. Analysts hypothesized that many voters realized that the election would not, could not, bring any real change. Whatever happened, they seemed to believe, Hun Sen would cling to power, while Ranariddh and Rainsy would scheme to maneuver the results to their own advantage.
Yet when the votes were tallied, Hun Sen found himself in a fix once again. This time the CPP won 47 percent of the vote, the Sam Rainsy Party 22 percent, and Funcinpec 21 percent. A variety of smaller parties won the rest of the vote, but none of them wound up with enough to claim a seat in parliament.
The CPP had “won,” but Hun Sen still did not have the two-thirds supermajority needed to form a government. He would have to reach out to at least one of the opposition parties. Either one could push him over the top. But Rainsy and Ranariddh were not going to shake his hand so easily this time. Or so they said.
The two men formed a coalition called the Alliance of Democrats—a name intended to show the differences between their outlook and Hun Sen’s. They created a platform, listing the demands that had to be met before they would join a governing coalition. Any Cambodian reading these conditions could immediately see their true intent: to effectively remove Hun Sen from power. This time Rainsy and Ranariddh had come up with a particularly clever scheme to overturn the election results, one that their fans in the international bleachers happily embraced. Both Rainsy and Ranariddh said they would not join any government unless Hun Sen signed a pact confirming these points:
• The government would establish a new nonpartisan National Election Committee. King Sihanouk would appoint the chairman and vice chairman.
• In each village nationwide a village committee representing all three parties would replace the CPP-appointed village chief.
• The parliament would enact a new election law to make elections freer and fairer by, for example, opening broadcast media to all candidates.
• The three parties would agree on judicial reform to remove the government’s control of the court system.
• The parliament would pass an anticorruption law, and the government would establish an independent anticorruption commission (nine years after Hun Sen first proposed that idea).
Further proposals were intended to break Hun Sen’s control of the government bureaucracy, the military, and the police. Finally, if any party chose to withdraw from the coalition, the parliament would have to take a vote of confidence in the government. If the government could not win that vote, new elections would be held—under the new, presumably fairer election law.
Having lived under Hun Sen’s many-handed control of Cambodian governing institutions for a decade, the Alliance of Democrats knew precisely how to block him at every turn. Well aware of Rainsy and Ranariddh’s intentions, Hun Sen refused to sign. His spokesman, Khieu Kanharith, said simply, “It is absurd for the losing parties to issue demands to the winning party.”
The deadlock dragged on, month after month, and true to form Ranariddh spent most of his time at his home in Paris, saying he would come back when Hun Sen conceded. Rainsy hopscotched between Paris, Sydney, and Washington, still trying to convince foreign leaders of Hun Sen’s perfidy.
Hun Sen, meantime, continued in power as if nothing had changed. Brazen murders of opposition leaders continued at a brisk pace, and in January 2004, four months into the election stalemate, two men on a black motorcycle with license plates removed, wearing helmets with dark-tinted faceplates, pulled up to a street stall where a man named Chea Vichea was reading a newspaper. They shot him dead and then sped off.
Chea Vichea was the nation’s most prominent labor leader, president of the Free Trade Union of Workers of Cambodia. He had organized numerous workers’ rights marches and demonstrations. He
was a member of the Sam Rainsy Party. His death haunted the CPP for years—especially after the courts trumped up charges against two obviously innocent men and sentenced both to long prison terms.
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The CPP was following what was now standard and established practice: Peel away some opposition-party members with blandishments and bribes. Kill the rest.