The arrival of UNTAC in 1992 marked another painful transition for Cambodia. Unlike previous UN missions in other countries, which had concentrated on policing ceasefires and disarming the combatants, UNTAC’s task was multi-dimensional. The UN Security Council charged UNTAC with peacekeeping, but added new duties which included the arrangement and supervision of national elections and the ‘civic, economic, humanitarian and political reconstruction of the country’. It was a difficult order and although UNTAC did manage to run what was perhaps the freest election in Cambodian history, in other respects the intervention was less successful. As Amalia Branczik of the University of Colorado has observed:
Of two billion dollars spent on the UNTAC mission in Cambodia, most was spent on UN staff salaries (an estimated 118.5 million dollars) and travel costs (62 million dollars). Almost 9000 new vehicles were purchased at a cost of approximately 81 million dollars, and all senior UN bureaucrats were given a daily hardship allowance of 145 dollars to supplement their salaries. At the time, the average annual income in Cambodia was 130 dollars.
The 1993 elections
The UNTAC-sponsored elections were held in May 1993 and boycotted by Pol Pot’s faction, which also launched military attacks on SOC forces and threatened to kill people who voted. They also refused to allow UNTAC personnel into their zones. These difficulties were compounded by widespread political violence and intimidation by the parties that participated, especially Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), which made full use of its ‘coercive state power’ against its opponents. Twenty parties contested the polls, the four most important being Son Sann’s KPNLF; a CGDK partner reinvented as the Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party (BLDP) under the direction of an old Lon Nol general, Sak Sutsakhan; Hun Sen’s CPP; and the royalist FUNCINPEC, headed by Sihanouk’s son Prince Ranariddh.
Just over four million valid votes were cast, in spite of the Khmers Rouges’ threats. The UN and most independent observers agreed that the election had been free and fair in spite of attempts at intimidation, although the CPP immediately disputed this. No party gained an absolute majority, but FUNCINPEC secured the largest vote, of 45.47 per cent. The CPP gathered 38.23 per cent and the other parties managed 12.59 per cent between them. This translated into 58 seats for FUNCINPEC, 51 for the CPP, 10 for the BLDP and 1 for the small Moulinaka party. As the largest party, it was possible for FUNCINPEC to form a minority government, but this would hardly have made for stable government in the face of the mutual hostility of the other parties.
Clearly, it was necessary to form a coalition but this was difficult, given that the BLDP were the political descendents of Sihanouk’s old enemies Son Ngoc Thanh and Lon Nol. They were also the enemies of the CPP. They had coexisted out of necessity with FUNCINPEC and the Khmers Rouges inside the border coalition, but now had no reason to act with forbearance. With the Khmers Rouges rampaging in the countryside and the CPP disputing the election count, there was a clear danger that the country might revert to civil war.
For his part, Norodom Sihanouk saw the opportunity to regain the position he had held prior to the Lon Nol coup as unelected head of government as well as chief of state. He had behaved very erratically during the UNTAC period. He was often out of the country and he blew hot and cold in his attitude to UNTAC itself. After the elections he announced that he would head up a coalition government, acting as president of council of ministers and commander-in-chief of the armed forces despite the fact that he hadn’t been elected to anything. Surprisingly, Prince Ranariddh, the FUNCINPEC leader, rejected the plan, leaving Sihanouk sputtering about ‘disobedience’, which was somewhat rich as he had behaved with all his old deviousness in playing Hun Sen and his son off against one another. As it turned out, it was the last chance that Sihanouk would have to regain his old supremacy and impose a Sangkum-type solution on the country. Henceforth, back on the throne as King Sihanouk, he would play a largely ceremonial role in a regime dominated by Hun Sen until his retirement in favour of another son, Sihamoni, in October 2004. ‘Sihanoukism’ was dead, although the king remained popular.
A bizarre compromise
The crisis was resolved when the CPP and FUNCINPEC agreed to share power in a new provisional government that became the Royal National Government of Cambodia on 29 October 1993, leaving the BLDP out in the cold. There was a curious twist to this coalition. In what was perhaps a world-first achievement, Ranariddh became First Prime Minister and Hun Sen Second Prime Minister. Despite the ranking, it was clear who really held the power in this arrangement. As Mao Zedong had once observed, ‘power grows out of the barrel of a gun’ and in Cambodia in 1993, the CPP dominated the country’s police and armed forces. The veteran New York Times journalist Henry Kamm noted crisply in his book Cambodia: Report from a Stricken Land that ‘UNTAC, pleased with its successful elections, offered no objections to the perversion of their result.’ Other observers mused that the peacekeepers had lost more soldiers to AIDS than to hostile fire. To be fair, one wonders what they could have done about Hun Sen’s manoeuvres, short of waging war and plunging the country into a new abyss of chaos and destruction.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
The Khmer political scientist Sorpong Peou believes that the post-UNTAC period marked the beginning of the ‘slow death’ of the democratisation process that UNTAC was supposed to have begun. Henry Kamm was more forthright, declaring that a ‘clique of thugs’ ran the country, caring nothing for the Cambodian people, most of whom lived in misery as they had always done. Immediately after the elections, the new finance minister Sam Rainsy went on an international tour, seeking to boost donations of foreign aid to his country. Yet, as Daniel Ten Kate noted in the Cambodia Daily at the time, ‘While appealing for money abroad, the new government voted to increase their salaries tenfold. Policemen earned an average of [US] $9 to $12 a month. Soldiers netted a maximum of $13. Now legislators would take home $650 every month.’ The country was also sliding into the same kinds of official corruption that had marked the Sihanouk and Lon Nol regimes, a case of what the French call plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same). Sam Rainsy, who has a reputation as Cambodia’s ‘Mr Clean’, denounced the rampant corruption and was expelled from FUNCINPEC and from the National Assembly for his temerity, with the full support of Hun Sen’s CPP, without even a vote.
The coalition government also slid easily into the same old patterns of authoritarianism that had characterised previous regimes. Although the new period had seen a blossoming of independent media (from around 14 newspapers before 1993 to 51 after 1994), the government often clamped down heavily on its critics. It should be noted that Prince Ranariddh, well schooled by his dictatorial father, was no more enamoured of press freedom and freedom of speech in general than his CPP ‘Second Prime Minister’ Hun Sen. For Ranariddh, like many authoritarian Asian leaders with their rhetoric of ‘Asian values’, democracy equated with economic development, and he had no understanding of the essential links between successful development and full political and civil rights in a flourishing civil society (a theme developed by the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen in his book Development and Freedom).
In November 1994, the anti-government Khmer Ideal was suspended from publication for caricaturing Hun Sen and Ranariddh as ‘dogs’; intemperate language to be sure, but something that would be accepted as part of the political cut and thrust in a free society. The following year, the paper was closed down on the orders of the Phnom Penh municipal court and the publisher fined US$4000 for describing Hun Sen and Ranariddh as ‘greedy dictators’. Human rights organisations slammed the presence of heavily armed riot police in the courtroom. In April of the same year Michael Hayes, the American editor of the English-language Phnom Penh Post, was charged with ‘misinformation’ following publication of a number of articles critical of the government. Although King Sihanouk assured Hayes of a pardon, Khmer journalists were not so lucky. Many were imprisoned or fined for speaking out against government policies, and four journalists paid with their lives for their outspoken criticism during the first few years of the new regime. The most notorious case was that of Thun Bun Ly, the 39-year-old editor of the Khmer Ideal, who was gunned down by unidentified assassins as he travelled to work one morning in 1996. Armed police blocked the route of his funeral cortège at Phnom Penh’s Independence Monument, yet in previous years they had done nothing to prevent mobs from sacking the offices of opposition newspapers.
Although Hun Sen had previously warned against allowing the country to fall back into anarchy, the security forces were often the worst abusers of the rule of law. There were persistent reports of police routinely abusing their power, especially in Battambang province where the Special Intelligence Battalion carried out rape and torture. The country’s problems were compounded at that time by the Khmers Rouges insurgency, which made large sections of the countryside unsafe for travel, although there was little likelihood of them ever returning to power.
Hun Sen emerges as the undisputed ‘strongman’
Meanwhile, relations between FUNCINPEC and its CPP coalition partner deteriorated, with both parties correctly suspecting the other of trying to stitch up deals with factions of the Khmers Rouges. From 1996 onwards, there were massive defections from the guerrillas. Ieng Sary, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan made their peace with the government, and the Khmers Rouges were reduced to a small rump under Son Sen and Pol Pot in the Dangrek Mountains near Anlong Venh on the Thai border. David Roberts, in his book about 1990s Cambodia, quotes Hun Sen’s candid comments on Ranariddh: we do not ‘hug and kiss each other, we do not love each other. In fact, we barely speak. We do not have regular scheduled meetings because we have little to discuss.’ The writer William Shawcross described Hun Sen in an article which appeared in the 14 November 1996 New York Review as ‘an increasingly dangerous psychotic’ who had shown that he would not stop at violence to get his way.
A showdown was looming, and it was clear which side would prevail. Hun Sen had the military muscle, in contrast to Ranariddh’s ineffectual forces. In July 1997, the calm of a Phnom Penh morning was rent by the clanking of tanks and heavy gunfire. Hun Sen had launched a bloody coup against his coalition partner. Fighting raged for the next two days, although the conclusion was never in doubt as the FUN-CINPEC forces were outnumbered and outgunned. Dozens of people were killed and many hundreds more wounded in the gun battles in the capital’s streets. Ranariddh fled and a number of his leading associates
Hun Sen in 2002. (Courtesy Newspix)
were executed, some after torture, and others were ‘shot while trying to escape’. The CPP troops engaged in an orgy of looting, stripping the airport buildings at Pochentong, raiding factories and even hospitals, and making off with their booty tied atop tanks.
Disputes still continue as to whether Hun Sen’s actions constituted a coup d’état. From the CPP point of view, they had staged a pre-emptive strike to prevent a looming merger between FUNCINPEC and the main body of Khmers Rouges who had been their CGDK partners for over a decade on the Thai borders. There is some evidence to support this claim. Whatever interpretation one favours, Hun Sen had emerged triumphant as the country’s most powerful figure. King Sihanouk was a figurehead, the royalist party was weakened, and the following year Pol Pot died peacefully in a remote village after being tried by the remnant of the Khmers Rouges for ordering the execution of his lieutenant, Son Sen. Cambodia was now ruled effectively by a dictator, a ‘strongman’ whom the US scholar Stephen Heder had once described as ‘both a competent political administrator and a ruthless political criminal’.
The astute Hun Sen was aware that force alone does not legitimise a regime. Despite its corruption and abuse of human rights (the latter documented in Amnesty International’s annual reports and the publications of Human Rights Watch and Citizens for Public Justice etc.), the regime maintained a populist façade, claiming to care for the poor who made up the overwhelming bulk of the population. In fact, a study by the UN Development Programme published in March 2003 indicates that poverty has become much worse under Hun Sen, and the rate of infant mortality rose from 79 deaths per 1000 in 1987 (under the PRK) to 95 per 1000 in 2000. Trade unionists—including women textile workers who attempt to organise to improve their standards of living and conditions of work—have been brutally repressed and/or subjected to officially condoned private violence.
In 1998, however, Hun Sen surprised his critics by announcing that the country would hold fresh elections for the National Assembly. The elections, which were held on 26 July, were supervised by a team of international observers from the European Union, ASEAN and NGOs, all of whom, to FUNCINPEC’s chagrin, proclaimed them to have been free and fair in the main. The result was a clear victory for the CPP, although it fell short of the two-thirds majority necessary under the constitution for it to govern in its own right. As a result, the CPP formed a new coalition with FUNCINPEC, which accepted some junior portfolios.
The following year saw Hun Sen win another important political victory when his country was accepted as a member of ASEAN. The CPP’s pre-eminence was reconfirmed in July 2003, when the party again won a majority of votes, and is unlikely to be challenged in the near future. As summed up in The Economist at that time, the CPP has
more powerful electoral assets than brute force: more money than the opposition, a more effective party machine, the administration’s power of patronage and control of the media. The opposition parties’ many flaws are also an asset to Mr Hun Sen. Prince Ranariddh . . . offers little effective leadership [and] his party’s popularity has slipped.
The magazine also pointed out that while Sam Rainsy is a courageous voice against corruption in what he calls a mafia state, ‘his autocratic style as leader of the party that bears his name alienates allies almost as fast as he recruits them’.
Nor has the government displayed much interest in coming to terms with the horrors of the DK years, either through trials or via a ‘truth and reconciliation’ process as in post-apartheid South Africa. The PRK, it is true, made the S21 torture centre at Tuol Sleng into a ‘museum of the genocide’, but there has been little progress in bringing the top Khmers Rouges leaders to trial. Indeed, at the time of writing, only two of the worst leaders have been indicted: Ta Mok, the one-legged former commander of the DK’s South-west Zone, and Duch, the schoolmaster-turned-torturer who ran Tuol Sleng. Pol Pot and Son Sen are dead and although the Cambodian government came to an agreement with the United Nations in May 2005 to set up a tribunal to try the other former leaders, it remains to be seen whether this will happen.
Hun Sen does have a valid point when he complains of Western hypocrisy. It is true that many of the countries that now call for indictment were happy to recognise the legitimacy of the Khmers Rouges when it suited their own purposes. However, this does not justify Hun Sen’s refusal to proceed against the remaining DK leadership, of whom Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea live in comfortable retirement in Cambodia, protected by the government. Nor can there be any justification for Hun Sen’s refusal to accept a United Nations proposal for an international trial, rather than a trial overseen by the notoriously corrupt pro-CPP Cambodian judiciary.
Deeply entrenched social problems
Today, Cambodia remains one of the poorest nations on earth. Between one third and one half of its 13 million people live in abject poverty on less than US$1 per day, and the numbers rise every year. Fifty per cent of the country’s children under five are underweight. Corruption scares off foreign investment and the country’s rate of economic growth has slumped, with the World Bank predicting that it could fall to less than 2.5 per cent in 2005. The estimated per capita GNP was US$280 in 2002. The country relies heavily on foreign aid donations, which make up some 50 per cent of its budget, yet the US Agency for International Development estimates that corrupt officials siphon off up to US$500 million per year. Michael Hayes of the Phnom Penh Post says that ‘Corruption is there up and down the chain of command, from the top to the bottom’, adding that ‘Hun Sen has to start with his own party members for a start.’ Indeed, he has to start tackling corruption even closer to home, as many observers believe that his own family members and cronies are involved in illegal logging scams that cost the country dearly both financially and ecologically. Certainly, as the environmental NGO Global Witness has shown, the government has permitted widespread illegal logging and has threatened whistleblowers with imprisonment. Chea Vanath, of the Centre for Social Development in Phnom Penh, says, ‘Corruption is across the board and the more poor you are, the more you are affected by corruption. The poor who depend on the health sector, the education sector and rural administration are among those [worst] hit.’ Cambodia, as much as post-communist Russia, fully deserves to be known as a kleptocracy, a country ruled by thieves.
In the past, landlessness was never a problem of the same magnitude as it was in neighbouring countries. The old crown land system allowed those who farmed the land to live on it indefinitely and the French cadastral laws granted land titles to those who could prove continued use of it. The upheavals of the 1970s and collectivist experiments meant that many peasants and even city-dwellers cannot now produce proof of ownership and they are liable to be expelled from their land and homes by ruthless officials and developers. Any tourist who walks the Phnom Penh streets at dawn cannot but notice the country people who have drifted to the city in the hope of finding work, waiting for contractors to hire them. For most, this consists of dangerous and underpaid casual work on construction sites, or as cyclo (bicycle taxi or rickshaw) drivers. Women often have little choice but to turn to prostitution, or are shanghaied into sex slavery by criminal gangs.
Prostitution—including child prostitution—is a major social problem in Cambodia. There are an estimated 60 000 to 80 000 prostitutes in the country, one third of them below the age of 17. In one survey, 70 per cent of children interviewed in the vicinity of Angkor said that Westerners had approached them for sex. Given the poverty of the country, it is not surprising that many accept. In the capital, parents can sell their 12-year-old girls to a brothel for between US$300 and $1000, a vast sum in a country where much of the population lives on less than a dollar a day. Although Western sex tourism is a problem in Cambodia (much of it involving children), most brothel customers are Khmer men. Some young men in Phnom Penh have made a sport of gang rape (bauk, or ‘plus’ in Khmer) and they clearly regard their victims as less than human. Such attitudes are perhaps inevitable in a society traumatised by decades of war and suffering. As the writer Raoul Jenner has lamented, Cambodia has become ‘a society governed entirely by the strongest’, in which ‘the price placed on a human life is less than that placed on a motorbike’.
The psychological damage and emotional trauma of the past casts a long shadow and manifests itself in anomie or social breakdown, a loss of values, greed, selfishness, violence and crime. Prostitution in turn is the main cause of the country’s HIV/AIDS pandemic, with the main route of transmission from male clients to their regular partners. AIDS accounted for over 17 000 deaths in Cambodia in 2002 and the prevalence rate is around 2.6 per cent for adults, though perhaps considerably higher. Between 170 000 and 280 000 people in the 0 to 49 age range are infected. However, cooperation between Cambodian health authorities and NGOs in condom awareness programs has at least led to a decline in HIV infection rates from 42.6 per cent in 1998 to 28.8 per cent in 2002 among female brothel-based prostitutes. This modest success is one bright spot in a country fraught with enormous problems.
Widespread ecological damage
In Chapter 3, the idea was discussed that ecological devastation might have contributed to the decline of Angkor, a theory closely associated with Bernard-Philippe Groslier and Roland Fletcher. Those we might term ‘social archaeologists’ believe that logging on the watersheds north of Angkor led to erosion, silting and other environmental problems that disturbed the delicate ecology of the complicated anthropogenic wetland that was Angkor. Today, Cambodia is once again facing a major ecological crisis as illegal logging and pollution threaten the country’s primary natural system, the Mekong River and the Great Lake. The annual floods of the Mekong, which back up into the lake, allow the world’s fourth largest catch of freshwater fish and provide work for over a million people. The fish form the largest single source of protein for the Cambodian population. It is also estimated that up to 80 per cent of the rice production in the lower Mekong basin depends on the river’s annual floods.
Much of the wildlife has abandoned the Great Lake or died. Birds are relatively scarce, reminding us of the legend of the kingfishers, and the once ubiquitous crocodiles have almost vanished. Not all of this is Cambodia’s fault, but stems in part from a series of dams and irrigation schemes built far upstream in China’s Yunnan province and on some of the Mekong’s tributaries in Vietnam. These projects have led to at least a 12 per cent decrease in river levels since the works began and erratic flows that disrupt fishing and agriculture along the banks.
What of the future?
Unfortunately, the world has largely forgotten about Cambodia since the UNTAC period. There have been other crises and other conflicts to absorb the world’s attentions: wars in the Middle East, the Asian tsunami, genocides in Africa and the Balkans, terrorist attacks in the heartlands of the Western world, and the threat of global warming to name just a few since UNTAC pulled out and left the Cambodians to their own devices. Cambodia, too, is a small country without appreciable supplies of vital raw materials such as oil that might bring it to the centre of world attention. One trusts that the Cambodian proverb srok khmer moun de soun (the country of the Khmers will never die) will prove true.
Looking back over the past quarter of a century (let alone the earlier Dark Age that beset Cambodia in the first half of the 19th century) it is difficult to imagine that anything worse could befall the Khmers. Cambodia has staggered from crisis to crisis since 1970 and in the absence of a developed civil society there is little check on the arrogance of government and the corruption of the administration. With entrenched rulers primarily interested in their own power and wealth, there seems little prospect of change in the near future.
On the other hand, as Gottesman points out, ‘There are many indications of a budding civil society’, including a number of human rights organisations, ecological organisations and other NGOs that maintain offices in Phnom Penh and regional centres. In a way, for Cambodia to have survived is itself a triumph, but there is no guarantee that it will not become a failed state, as was a real possibility before the establishment of the French protectorate in the 19th century. However, those readers who hope for remedies to social problems and forecasts of what might be will be disappointed. We might do worse than remember the social historian Roy Porter’s wise words at the conclusion of his book on London, where he warns against Cassandras and oracles:
The temptation at the conclusion of a volume like this is to offer either a blueprint for . . . regeneration or a funeral oration . . . Historians, however, make rotten physicians, worse planners and appalling prophets. I shall therefore resist the temptation to offer diagnoses and prescriptions.