Cambodia's Curse (45 page)

Broderick, the lead UN officer, was a big, beefy New Yorker, a UN bureaucrat who seemed primarily interested in projecting a positive
image of the UN’s work. He sat in a large leather chair, surrounded by several cabinet officers. “The donors and the international community are getting smarter,” he asserted. “We are chipping away at the edges. We are drilling down on the corruption issue where it affects the people.”

In contrast, Richard Bridle, director of the UNICEF office, one of Broderick’s agencies, complained that donors remain complacent, “unable to change. We are too comfortable with our control mechanisms.” The donors “are embedding and enabling the mentality of dependency,” said Theary Seng, who was director of a local advocacy group, the Center for Social Development. The Cambodian government, after all, had been dependent on foreign patrons since the Angkor empire fell in the fifteenth or sixteenth century—the Thai, the Vietnamese, then the French, the United States, the United Nations, and finally the world’s NGOs and donors.

But some donors pointed to Theary Seng and the other critics and said: Look, this government is not so bad. “There’s a free press,” Peter Jipp, a senior specialist with the World Bank, offered with a cheery grin. “You don’t find that in other states—Laos, Vietnam. There’s a developing civil-society network. So, in the parlance of the donor community, these are the champions!”

Kek Galibru saw all of that as a bitter irony. “At least the government can use us,” she said. “Our presence helps them a little bit. They need money from the international community, so they can say: Look at Licadho. They are free!”

Mu Sochua, a senior Sam Rainsy Party parliamentarian, liked to take her case to Washington, just as her boss, Sam Rainsy, was wont to do. “In Cambodia, the pillars of democracy are all there,” she told an audience at the National Democratic Institute. “But you have to look at the quality, the functions. It’s really just a facade.”

 

So it also seemed for newspaper editors. Michael Hayes, founder and executive editor of the
Phnom Penh Post
, was a cynical, hard-bitten
journalist from Massachusetts, but he acknowledged that the government needed the semblance of a free press to keep the donors happy. Still, Hun Sen sued the paper for defamation in 1994 and threatened to sue several times after that.

Khmer-language papers were generally affiliated with the government or political parties and were fairly predictable. But they, too, were targets of the government’s wrath. In the summer of 2008 two men speeding by on a black motorbike with dark-tinted faceplates shot and killed Khim Sambor along with his twenty-one-year-old son as they walked down the street in downtown Phnom Penh. Khim Sambor was a reporter for the
Khmer Conscience
, an opposition newspaper, and not surprisingly the paper had been writing critically about the government. That year, the government sued twenty-five journalists for defamation or related pseudo-offenses. Defamation lawsuits Hun Sen filed against several opposition newspapers in the summer of 2009 forced some of them to close.

By and large, though, the government did not worry so much about the two English-language newspapers. Hardly anyone in the country could read English, only donors, diplomats, and some government officials. Still, even those papers could be only so free.

For most of its life, until 2008, the
Post
published once a week. “When we were weekly, I would read everything,” Hayes said. “Sometimes I would cut out stuff or change the tone” to keep from angering government officials. He pointed to that day’s paper. Inside was an interview, and the interviewee had said something critical of the government. “I sent a message to my staff: ‘We have to be more careful. We could get nailed for this!’”

Sure enough, in 2009 the government sued the
Cambodia Daily
for defamation, saying it had quoted an opposition politician who criticized the Cambodian military. The paper had made no accusation. It had simply quoted someone else. Isn’t that what newspapers are supposed to do? Still, Judge Sin Visal told the court, “The article published in their paper caused confusion among the Cambodian people and
damaged the dignity of the military officers.” The government did not review or censor stories before publication. But lawsuits and intimidation forced editors to censor themselves.

The donors knew all of that. The papers reported it. They also knew that their image was poor, their effectiveness questionable. They realized that their continued support of Hun Sen and his government served as a prop holding him up. They knew that many of the senior government officials who told them how concerned they were about corruption were sitting on fat wallets. “There are some reformers in the Finance Ministry,” a senior World Bank official observed. “But I think even they are corrupt.” So, some donors were taking small, tentative steps to address the problem. “Good governance” was the catchphrase for this.

However, even those projects faced justifiable skepticism. “Since NGOs cannot seem to have any influence on government, they say it’s better to get good governance projects going,” said Peter Manikas, who managed the National Democratic Institute’s Asia programs. “Why they think that would possibly work is beyond me.”

One World Bank governance project served as the poster child for this kind of absurdity. In 2009 the bank allotted $20 million for a program called Demand for Good Governance, intended to help “grassroots groups, independent media, trade unions, etc.” demand “transparency and accountability” from the Cambodian government, the bank said. “It will enhance the capacity of non-state actors to constructively engage with the government in support of better development outcomes and improved governance.”

So what was the bank going to do with that $20 million? Hand it over to the government. Stephane Guimbert, the economist in the bank’s Phnom Penh office, spoke about this plan with a straight face that betrayed not even a hint of recognition that the whole idea was ludicrous. “A small component of this money goes to nongovernment actors,” or NGOs, he noted, and then explained that the bank had asked the government for permission to do even that. “But we think
the government itself could do a number of things to improve transparency. If there is no information coming out of government, what good does any of this do? The public is not going to accomplish anything.” He sat in the bank’s comfortable, air-conditioned conference room, at a conference table where bank officers often worked on white boards to lay out their development plans. “All sorts of scenarios have been piloted in Cambodia,” he acknowledged with a smile. This was one of the rooms where bank officials plotted their forestry and landregistration programs—while failing to look up, out the window, to see army officers felling the forests and developers burning residents’ homes.

“This is like a jungle to them,” said Ok Serei Sopheak, a former government official who was serving as a consultant to the World Bank. “It’s not very easy to understand the mind-set of this place.”

 

Foreign medical NGOs didn’t look out the window often enough, either. Ask any one of them what had been accomplished in the past few years, and he would most likely say: We defeated HIV/AIDS! Prodded and funded by foreign governments and private groups, Cambodia reduced the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the general population from more than 3 percent to just under 1 percent—a major public-health victory. But that laudable accomplishment masked a darker truth.

Medical experts working in Cambodia allowed the nation’s health policies to be determined by the priority or caprice of officials in Geneva, Washington, or Berlin—not Phnom Penh or Battambang. That gave the country a skewed health policy that made little effort to address the patients’ most pressing needs.

“Everybody talks about AIDS,” complained Dr. Sin Somuny, executive director of Medicam. “It affects 0.09 percent of the population. Well, diabetes now affects 10 percent of the population. But no one talks about that. Funding for diabetes is twenty-five to thirty times less.”

O’Leary, director of the World Health Organization office, explained that international donors “want to give money to the big thing
of the moment. Right now,” in 2009, “it’s influenza,” better known as swine, or bird, flu.

Beat Richner, that hospital director from Switzerland, was scornful. “They care about bird flu because a bird may fly to California,” he said. “But a mosquito flies only 120 meters.” Hence, the dearth of funding for malaria or dengue fever, two mosquito-borne illnesses. “Two years ago 22,000 children in this country had dengue fever. But did the WHO care? No. They cared about bird flu.”

When he spoke only nine people in Cambodia had contracted swine flu, but Richner’s hospital was full of children afflicted with malaria, dengue fever, encephalitis. Not one Cambodian hospital had a bacterial lab, but donors did put one in a French medical-research clinic in Phnom Penh—to conduct swine-flu tests. “Infectious diseases, infectious diseases,” Sin Somuny said, shaking his head. “If you care about the lives of the people, it should not just be infectious diseases.”

“You know, beggars can’t be choosers,” countered Dr. Paul Weelen, another WHO official. “Donors set the agenda for what is done in these countries. Where there’s no money, not much is happening.”

W
hen Charlie Twining was ambassador, just after the UN occupation and the first national elections, “our countries put a lot of money into the UN operation,” he said, “and we pushed hard to have the UN and other agencies open offices there. We very much wanted to see the apparent success continue. We were very much drawn into that way of thinking.”

Now, said Broderick, the UN chief, “we are pretty much at a stalemate, and there is a lot of frustration.” He was speaking about the debate over corruption, but that was a comfortable metaphor for the donors’ larger presence in society. “We continue to engage the government” but seldom gain much from that. “We need to move away from the narrowminded focus on the law and find individual entry points” direct to the
Cambodian people. Meantime, the government had learned to play the donors like a fiddle. “It’s not uncommon for senior opposition leaders to be charged and convicted without evidence, and to be subsequently pardoned” to “soften up international donors before crucial pledging conferences,” the United Nations Human Rights Council noted in 2008.

Government officials also used the donors’ complacency as justification for their own behavior. When a human-rights group issued a statement criticizing the government for failing to pass the anticorruption law, Information Minister Khieu Kanharith shot back, “If the government was not good, then donors would not have provided aid to Cambodia. They have not provided us with millions of dollars for useless spending.”

And so the donor community talked and then talked some more. While continuing to give Hun Sen the money that kept him in power, more and more every year, they eagerly awaited the opening of exciting new restaurants or cultural attractions. “You know, there was a small theater at the Royal University, a subcampus, in 2002 and 2003,” said Jinnai, head of the UNESCO office. “But then the government sold the site to a developer in 2004, and they tore the theater down. Another theater burned down. They sold that land to a developer, too.” Though for most people working in Cambodia, this parable would bring to mind images of land seizures and corruption, not so for Jinnai. Instead, he went on with a wistful tone, saying, “Culturally, 2002 and 2003 was a good time here. I’m still hungry for this sort of culture now.”

 

The United Nations and the developed world spent more than two years and $3 billion to redeem Cambodia in 1992 and 1993, bring it back from the abyss, and offer it a doorway into the modern age. Then the world turned away, and the nation fell back into habits that had pertained since the Angkor era. For a while, particularly after the “coup” in 1997, the United States and some other nations grew angry and tried to punish Hun Sen. In time, though, the world simply gave up. Their efforts had failed. To them, Cambodia had become just one
more sad little state, like Senegal or Laos—beyond redemption, of little note. All the while, donors and NGOs made a home in Cambodia. They lived well and did good work. Each one could take pride in some small accomplishment, a problem assuaged, a life improved. But they also grew to be enablers.

By 2010 donors had given at least $18 billion. The government relied on them to provide social services, then took credit for most everything they did and boasted about these “accomplishments” at election time. Government officials also maintained their comfortable lifestyles by ladling money out of the donor accounts. In fact, “the government has succeeded in persuading donors to pay salary supplements to its employees with remarkable regularity, despite regulations in virtually every donor organization against doing so,” the USAID corruption study noted.

Just before the $1 billion donor meeting in December 2008, Heng Samrin, the CPP’s honorary president, blithely promised once again that the government “will ensure sustainable development, poverty reduction, the promotion of the rule of law and equity in social justice, as well as the elimination of land-grabbing, deforestation, illegal fisheries resources and the prevention of national income loss and the strengthening of public order.” Standing at a podium, he was the picture of smiling beneficence.