Cambodia's Curse (3 page)

In Saharan Africa, the Brazilian Amazon, and other remote places, indigenous tribes live by this credo. But Cambodia is the only place where the bulk of the nation, more than three-quarters of its people, still lives more or less as they did 1,000 years ago. Until the 1940s, the nation had no schools outside the capital. The populace relied upon village monks who taught the principles of Buddhism and not much else. The state had not a single middle school, high school, or college. In large areas of the nation, the first schools were not built until the 1990s. Still, in some remote areas even now, most children still do not attend school at all. Fortunately, most villages do have a school now, and every region has its health clinic. But little else has changed.

A few miles south of Pailin, in the far-western corner of the state, near the Thai border, Ten Keng sits unsmiling under her primitive house shucking corn just harvested. “I have no education,” she says with no apparent shame. Most everyone she knows is illiterate. In fact, the national teachers’ union estimated that 60 percent of the nation’s women could not read or write.

She’s thirty-six, and her eight-year-old daughter, a first grader, sits on a bench behind her mother doing her homework—Khmer-language workbook exercises. If this little girl lives true to the averages, she will leave school after the second or third grade, as nearly half the nation’s children do, and begin helping her mother in the cornfields or rice paddies.

Ten Keng’s house is perhaps fifteen by twenty feet, one room with hardly any visible possessions, and sits on wooden poles about ten feet above the ground. There’s no electricity, running water, natural or bottled gas for cooking, telephone service, radio or television, or other clear evidence of the modern world. Ten Keng cooks for her family over an open fire; she burns sticks and twigs and places her earthen pot over the flames, perched on three rocks.

Narrow palm fronds woven into a bamboo frame serve as her home’s exterior walls. The roof is thatched. A crude log ladder climbs to the open front doorway. Hammocks hang underneath. That’s where the family sleeps. A trench out back serves as the bathroom.

Around the house fruit hangs heavy from a papaya tree; clutches of nearly ripe coconuts cling to several palms. And a young mangosteen tree proffers dozens of purplish brown fruit that look ready to pick. A bucketful of tiny black seeds lie on a tarp, drying in the sun. Sesame seeds, Ten Keng says as she shoos away a gray-and-white duckling and a black rooster pecking at them. The seeds will bring a small fortune at market—maybe $60 or $70. Ten Keng’s family needs it, even amid this natural abundance.

In a good year—that is, a year with a lot of rain—the family can earn 2 million riel, the Cambodian currency, or about $500. In a drought year, she says, the total may fall to $125—about 34 cents a day on average—for the entire year. And lately, those drought years come more and more often. Growing rice and corn, picking fruit, catching fish, “most years we have just enough to eat,” she relates, betraying neither sadness nor self-pity. That’s just the way it is, she seems to be thinking, but she also doesn’t smile. Cambodians by and large are a dour people. Every day is a struggle. Life holds few opportunities for joy.

That impoverished people like Ten Keng and her family live here may not seem unusual. Every country, even the United States, has desperately poor communities. But in Cambodia, Ten Keng’s reality is the norm. At least 80 percent of the nation’s 13.4 million people live in rural areas, more or less as she does.

Paul Mason, a social worker, has worked in Cambodia for nearly two decades, and he recalls standing with a colleague beside a harvested rice field a few years ago when the colleague stood on top of his car, looked around in every direction, and remarked: “It probably looked like this here 350 years ago!” In the years since, Mason says he has seen some changes. A smattering of rural homes now have metal roofs—an anthropologist’s measure of social advancement. What’s more, in the past few years, motorbikes have shown up parked outside some of those Middle Ages huts.

However, this measure of progress can come only at a high cost. Bought used, motorbikes generally sell for $200 or $250. That’s almost half the average annual wage for Cambodians. “To get motorbikes often they have sold part of their land,” said Sara Colm, the Cambodia representative for Human Rights Watch. “I have seen that in remote villages.” With no education, the buyers, eager for this new mobility, may not fully realize the implications until it’s too late. “Then they don’t have enough land to feed themselves,” Colm said, shaking her head.

Across the country, some people now also have small black-and-white televisions, powered with car batteries, leading to an incongruous sight: TV antennae atop tall bamboo poles strapped to the side of tiny palm-frond houses.

“See?” Mou Neam said with a broad grin. He is the village chief of a small settlement in eastern Cambodia, near the Vietnam border. He had just turned on his little television. The battery sat on the floor amid a welter of wires and alligator clips. After a moment, a fuzzy black-and-white image of a Thai soap opera came on the screen, and Mou Neam boasted: “We can watch TV for a week on one charge!”

As it turns out, however, layering bits of the modern world into a society still living in the Middle Ages is causing disruption—not broader progress.

C
ambodia sits at the center of a poverty-stricken region. But by almost every measure, Cambodia is the poorest.

As a people Cambodians are generally short and thin. Obesity seems not to be a feature of society here. And it’s no wonder. “The vast majority of rural poor consume only rice,” said Jean-Pierre de Margerie, an earnest French Canadian who heads the World Food Program office here. A diet of only rice, only starch, leads to stunting, wasting. “Seventy percent have access to meat protein, on average, only once per week.”

Ten Keng said she can afford to buy meat “maybe two to four times a month, but just a few grams.” Millions cannot afford to buy enough food to provide even the minimum daily caloric count, roughly 2,000 calories, to avoid malnutrition. So children suffer stunting—a failure to develop physically or mentally for lack of protein in the diet. That means they will grow up short and, in many cases, not very smart. “If you don’t provide a well-balanced diet to age two, you risk physical and mental damage that is irreversible,” de Margerie warned. “Our goal is to get stunting down to 30 percent” of the children “in five years.” In the meantime, almost one child in ten dies before reaching the age of five of either illness or malnutrition. Cambodia’s child mortality rate is 60 percent higher than in Vietnam or Thailand, its neighbors.

But if you travel the corridors of government in Phnom Penh, you’ll find Cambodia’s only portly people: senior government ministers. Their diets are rich in fatty foods. Their obesity serves as an emblem of their wealth—just as it did for kings and noblemen in ancient times.

 

Thailand, Cambodia’s western neighbor, has a gross domestic product per capita more than four times higher than Cambodia’s. The average
annual income for the Thai is about $3,000, compared to just under $600 for Cambodians—the second lowest in Asia. But then Thailand has largely been at peace for centuries. Its most significant military adventures were successive invasions of Cambodia in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.

Among the Southeast Asian nations, only Burma is poorer, on a per-capita basis. Yet Kent Wiedemann, who was chief of the U.S. mission in Burma just before he became ambassador to Cambodia in 1999, observed that the average Burmese “were actually more productive and much better off on a material basis than the rural people in Cambodia—even though the Burmese are under a much worse political regime.” Even North Koreans are more prosperous. The average income there is almost triple Cambodia’s.

Ask any Cambodian leader why the nation remains so stagnant while most of its neighbors prosper, and he will blame the Khmer Rouge years. “We are a war-torn country just now standing up from the ashes,” Nam Tum, chairman of the provincial council in Kampong Thom Province, said in 2009, echoing similar remarks by dozens of officials, thirty years after the Khmer Rouge fell from power. In Phnom Penh at that time, the United Nations and Cambodia were putting several Khmer Rouge leaders on trial. But so much time had passed that the leaders were old and frail. Some of them were likely to pass away before they could stand trial. Pol Pot was already long dead.

At the same time, though, Vietnam’s experience over the same period complicates Nam Tum’s argument. Vietnam suffered a devastating war with the United States in the 1960s and ’70s that killed 3 million Vietnamese and destroyed most of the nation’s infrastructure, just as the Khmer Rouge (and the American bombing of eastern provinces) did in Cambodia.

The war in Vietnam ended just four years before the Khmer Rouge defeat in 1979. Yet today Vietnam’s gross domestic product per capita is almost ten times higher than Cambodia’s. Only 19 percent of the economy is based on agriculture, compared to more than one-third for Cambodia. Vietnam manufactures pharmaceuticals, semiconductors,
and high-tensile steel. Cambodia manufactures T-shirts, rubber, and cement. Life expectancy in Vietnam stands at seventy-four years. In Cambodia it is sixty-one, one of the lowest in the world. (In the United States it is seventy-eight years.)

Most Vietnamese students stay in school until at least the tenth grade. By the tenth grade in Cambodia, all but 13 percent of the students have dropped out. Vietnam’s national literacy rate is above 90 percent. UN agencies say that Cambodia’s hovers around 70 percent, though available evidence suggests that may be far too generous. Most Cambodians over thirty-five or forty years of age have had little if any schooling at all. The explanations behind these and many other cultural and economic disparities lie in part in the nations’ origins. Vietnamese are ancestors of the Chinese, while Cambodians emigrated from the Indian subcontinent. From China, the Vietnamese inherited a hunger for education, a drive to succeed—attitudes that Cambodian culture discourages.

Author David Ayres wrote in his book on Cambodian education,
Anatomy of a Crisis
, that in Vietnam, “traditional education provided an avenue for social mobility through the arduous series of mandarin examinations.” In contrast, “Cambodia’s traditional education system had always reinforced the concept of helplessness, the idea that a person was unable to determine their position in society.” Village monks taught children that, after they left the pagoda school when they were seven or eight years old, their only course was to make their life in the rice paddies, as everyone in their family had done for generations.

The two nations have fought wars from their earliest days, when the Vietnamese were known as the Champa and lived only in the North of the country. The rich, fertile Mekong Delta in the South was part of Cambodia for centuries—until June 4, 1949, in fact, when France, which was occupying both nations, simply awarded the territory to Vietnam. And North Vietnam, where most Vietnamese lived, early in the nation’s history, was not blessed with the same fertile abundance as Cambodia. As a result, the Vietnamese never acquired a dependence on “living by nature.”

Even with Vietnam’s fertile South, an accident of nature has always given Cambodia an advantage. The Tonle Sap lake sits at the center of the nation, and a river flowing from it merges with the Mekong River, just north of Phnom Penh. Each spring, when the Mekong swells, its current is so strong that it forces the Tonle Sap River to reverse course, carrying tons of rich and fertile mud, as well as millions of young fish, back up to the lake. When the lake floods, it deposits new, rich soil on thousands upon thousands of acres around its perimeter. The fish provide meals for millions of people through the year.

Cambodian civilization was born on the shores of the Tonle Sap. The wonder and reliability of this natural phenomenon still encourage many Cambodians to “live by nature.” Even now, many Cambodians say they have no need for society’s modern inducements.

 

For all the devastation the United States wrought on Vietnam during the Vietnam War—the U.S. Air Force pummeled the nation with 15 million tons of bombs and other munitions—nearly all of that was used in the North, while American aid workers and diplomats spent millions of dollars aiding and modernizing the South.

Kenneth Quinn was a young American foreign-service officer stationed south of Saigon in the late 1960s and early 1970s and remembers building irrigation canals and introducing farmers to a new strain of high-yield rice that would enable them to grow three crops a year instead of one. Suddenly, he said, these farmers had a bit of disposable income.

Quinn said he also learned what he called “the incredible power of roads.” In Vietnam,