In downtown Phnom Penh, a few doors away from the World Bank’s offices, not far from the U.S. Embassy, Monument Books offered shelf after shelf of books about the Khmer Rouge era and other periods of Cambodian history, all written in English or French, all by Western historians, journalists, or other chroniclers. Books written by Cambodians were rare, and in almost every case those authors were expats educated in the West who had written memoirs, typically about their experiences under the Khmer Rouge.
Part of the explanation was education. For all of time, until the French occupation of Cambodia, the nation had virtually no books, just short scribbles on palm leaves. Until the 1960s few Cambodians could read or write. Even in the twenty-first century, illiteracy was widespread. And of the few people who were capable of writing a book about Cambodian society, most probably considered it too dangerous. When Tieng Narith, a political-science professor at Preah Sihanouk Raja Buddhist University in Phnom Penh, wrote a book about
modern-day Cambodian society in 2007—unpublished, only for use in his classroom—he was immediately arrested. A judge convicted him of “printing false documents” and sent him to prison for two and a half years. But this isn’t the only explanation, either.
For decades, foreign authors have tried to puzzle their way to an understanding of the paradox that is the Cambodian personality. It may seem a broad generality to refer to it this way, but every state has certain common personality characteristics, even if not every citizen displays them.
While trying to understand Cambodia, foreign writers sometimes fall into glib stereotypes and generalizations. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, French writers routinely characterized the people as “obedient and lazy.” These people liked to note that Cambodians would plant just enough rice to feed their families and then go home. If fertilizer or a hybrid rice seed allowed them to double the size of their crop, they would grow only half as much. Philip Short, the British author, made the same point, concluding that “the perception of indolence has become part of the country’s self image, an explanation for its failure to keep up with its neighbors.”
Michael Coe, author of a book about Cambodia’s Angkor period, recounted a legend that he offered as a parable for the Cambodian people. In 1594 the Thai army attacked the town of Lovek, he wrote. The city was “surrounded by a fence of bamboo hedges. The invaders fired a cannon containing silver coins at the fortifications. The Khmer cut the bamboo to the ground to get the money” and “left themselves defenseless.” Soon after, the city fell.
David Chandler, the dean of Cambodian historians, offered his own assessment of other writers, while offering his own analysis of the Cambodian personality: “The inherent stability of Cambodia, often the subject of absurd romanticism among colonial writers, has rested throughout nearly all of Cambodian history on the acceptance of the status quo as defined by those in power. Because the people in the countryside have never been asked to play a part in any government, they saw few short-term rewards in resisting those in power.”
Michael Vickery, another academic and author, served as a schoolteacher in Cambodia in the early 1960s, under a U.S. government aid program. He learned Khmer and made study of the nation his passion. In one of his books he told of his visit to a remote Cambodian village in 1962, where he saw “wild looking boys” carrying “dead lizards strung on sticks like freshly caught fish” they were taking home for dinner. Their village, in a remote corner of Banteay Meanchey Province, was home to people Vickery found “strangely hostile.” These villagers made it clear “they did not like city people.” But Vickery also noted that they had a “valuable cottage industry. The villagers made beautiful silk.” He offered to buy some, but the villagers steadfastly refused, saying it was only for their own use. Vickery’s money, no matter how much he offered, was of no value because “there was nothing in the market they wanted.” Just like the farmers the historians had described. Of what use was that extra rice? Vickery concluded that “for reason of climate, inaccessibility and incompatibility,” these villagers, like so many others around the country, “had evolved a nearly autonomous, autarkic lifestyle, wanting only to be left alone.”
And so it remains. In 2006 and 2007 Jeffery Sonis, a physician at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, conducted a survey on the prevalence of PTSD among Cambodians and sent teams of surveyors across the nation to ask questions. Though he originally intended to ask the subjects to sign forms, he had to abandon that plan. Cambodians, he found, were too suspicious of outsiders. “In Khmer Rouge times, they ask you to sign a form, and then they kill you,” Sonis said he learned. “Now, unscrupulous businessmen ask you to sign a form, and then they take away your land.” The people trusted no one. They just wanted to be left alone.
Cambodians themselves are the first to tell you that they hold no real national identity. They seldom feel “Cambodian.” That has been true through the ages. But the Khmer Rouge era hardened this trait. “The survival instinct has taken over,” said Ing Kantha Phavi, the minister of women’s affairs. “Surviving doesn’t mean giving help to others. If you help others, you may be betrayed. A lot of people did a lot of
bad things to survive. So people are more individualistic. They think only of themselves. They think first of survival. They don’t think of society at all.”
Beat Richner, the hospital director, saw the results of this firsthand. His maternity-ward doctors refused to talk to their patients. “After the Khmer Rouge, no one is talking to anyone. They don’t want to be in interrogations.” Even now, “older docs still keep to themselves. They do not talk to others”—including their patients. Yet this underlying personality trait existed long before the Khmer Rouge ruled. Sihanouk used to call it “individualism” and once described that as “a national failing.”
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Still today, “in this society there is no one else you can count on,” said Chandler, the historian. “They don’t think a society really exists.” That tendency proved useful for most of Cambodia’s history, as the nation lived through successive wars with its neighbors. Most Cambodians focused only on family and village life. These were their only havens as foreign troops ranged over the nation and government leaders schemed and connived for their own accounts. Egoism was of undeniable value during the Khmer Rouge era. To survive Cambodians had to behave as Kok Chuum, the Dang Run village chief, did. “I ate wild potatoes I found in the woods,” he said. “I did it secretly. I told no one.” Presumably, back then, others near him were starving to death, as workers did all over the nation.
But in the twenty-first century individualism, this shared personality trait, ensured that Cambodians would remain hungry and illiterate. By and large they could not, would not, stand up and advocate for themselves.
Imagine that Bulgarians or Indians, Malay, Bolivians, Poles, or citizens of most any nation ruled by a government styling itself as a democracy instead sold off the nation’s harvest each year, leaving its people without enough to eat. Evicted thousands of people from their homes, burned down their houses, then dumped the residents into empty fields and sold their property to a developer. Amassed vast personal fortunes while 40 percent of the children were so malnourished that they were growing up stunted. Allowed schoolteachers to demand bribes from six year olds and doctors to extort money from patients, letting them die if they did not pay. Presided over a state in which 80 percent of the people lived under conditions little changed from 1,000 years earlier so that everyday lives remained simply battles for survival. Would any of these other populations stand for this? Even in Iran, a brutal theocracy, the people arose in furious opposition to the government in 2009 for far less.
But Cambodia is home to a world-class paradox. In 2010, 60 percent of the nation’s population was born after 1979, when the Khmer Rouge fell from power. “You’d think,” said Kent Wiedemann, the former American ambassador, “that if these people look around at their neighbors and see that they are relatively more prosperous, they would not want to spend their lives grubbing around in the mud, in the rice paddies. They would demand something more from their government.”
As it happens, though, the International Republican Institute conducted national surveys of Cambodians every few years to gauge their view of current issues. Their pollsters spoke to people nationwide, urban and rural, young and old, well-off and poor. The IRI was the U.S.government funded agency that employed Ron Abney, who was injured in the 1997 grenade attack. The agency’s leaders had long disliked, even
loathed, Hun Sen. Yet year after year the group found that 75 or 80 percent of the Cambodian people said they were satisfied with their lives. They expected nothing more. The country, these people said, was going in the right direction.
The
Cambodia Daily
reported on one of those surveys in February 2009. It showed that 82 percent of the respondents said the country was on the right track. Some other headlines in the same paper read, “U.N. Agencies Alarmed by Jump in Child Malnutrition,” “Prosecutor Accused of Bias in Land-Dispute Case,” “Panelists Criticize Government’s Lack of Budget Transparency,” “Banteay Meanchey Man Charged in Rape of Two 6-Year-Olds,” and “Prime Minister’s Son Promoted to Rank of 1-Star General.”
The poll respondents said they were happy because the government provided infrastructure: roads, bridges, wells, schools. Kimber Shearer, a director of the International Republican Institute’s Asia Division, tried to explain the seemingly contradictory finding, saying the “people specifically give credit to Hun Sen for building all of this—no matter who really built the schools.” In fact, foreign donors, or Hun Sen’s
oknya
, built most of the infrastructure that Cambodians appreciate. The poll findings were not new. In 2003 the Asia Foundation conducted a similar survey and came up with similar results: Only 9 percent of the population said “the country is headed in the wrong direction.”
Hun Sen’s government touted these surveys as validation, a fact that certainly rankled the IRI’s leaders. But the principle behind the people’s point of view kept Hun Sen in power. If 80 percent of the people lived hardscrabble, subsistence lives in the countryside—quite literally hungry, barefoot, and illiterate—what did they care about the newspapers that reported about criminality, corruption, or malfeasance? The papers didn’t circulate where they lived. Even if they did, they couldn’t read them. Most people did have television, but the government controlled all of the stations. Regular news-program fare showed Hun Sen standing in a village, pointing to an
oknya
, and asking him to build a new road or bridge, “presented as requested.” “Control
of the electronic media is a serious problem,” Ambassador Mussomeli asserted. “Until they open up TV and radio, no, you cannot have a free and fair election.”
Local human-rights groups put all sorts of reports on their Web pages that detailed government abuses. Licadho’s site featured reports like these: “Police and Military Burn and Bulldoze Houses During Land Eviction in Cambodia’s Northwest” and “Cambodian Teacher Convicted of Defamation in Land Dispute with School Principal.” But who saw these reports? Journalists and other NGOs, perhaps. In 2009 the Cambodian Chamber of Commerce reported that Internet penetration nationwide stood at .0014 percent. About 20,000 of the 13.5 million Cambodians had an Internet subscription. (Still, in 2010, the government started discussing Web censorship, saying, “If any Web site attacks the government, or any Web site displays inappropriate images such as pornography, or it’s against the principle of the government, we can block all of them.”)
Javier Merelo de Barbera Llobet lived in western Cambodia for more than two years, helping villagers as a worker for Jesuit services. He spoke to dozens of them during the 2008 election campaign, and he said he observed a constant theme: “People were very afraid of the CPP losing. They were very afraid of change.” After all, for centuries change in Cambodia has generally led to misery or death.
Chan Sophal, chairman of the Siem Reap provincial council, said his government “is encouraging the people to change their way of living. Train them in business farming, chickens or pigs. Give them microfinancing.” But wasn’t he dealing with an intensely conservative population that resisted change? “In your question, you are proving my reality. The biggest challenge we have is facing the state of mind of our people. They don’t want to change. This will require lots of time; this will need education.” In the meantime, “our goal, if we can achieve it, is improved infrastructure—better roads, bridges, and irrigation for remote rural people.”
The governor pointed to a similar problem. “A big part of this challenge now,” he said “is fishing.” The government was trying to
enforce a ban on fishing during the spawning season; fish stocks were severely depleted. The problem was, for all of time Cambodians have eaten rice and fish and very little else. The annual flood of the Tonle Sap River washed millions of fish into the Tonle Sap lake. Water from the lake flooded rice paddies even miles inland, carrying fish spawn.
At the evictee site for HIV/AIDS patients outside Phnom Penh, the residents dragged through the afternoon, still depressed about losing their homes in the city a few days earlier. They were dispirited and hungry. But then at dusk, one of them walked down to the rice paddy behind their tiny refugee camp, dropped a small net into the water, and came back with a few dozen tiny fish, each at best two inches long. The mood in the camp suddenly changed. Children giggled; smiling parents eagerly gathered sticks and started little fires in their earthen cauldrons. Dinner was here! Who was going tell these people they couldn’t fish?
Nonetheless, Hun Sen ordered a fishing moratorium in 2009. If you eat fish roe, the prime minister told his people in a television address, it’s like eating thousands of fish. But convincing Cambodians to stop catching fish was as unlikely as persuading them to stop growing rice—or to accept microloans and start agribusinesses, as council chief Chan Sophal was proposing.