Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre is the 
country’s top tourist attraction, with its ornate stupa enshrining ten floors of skulls excavated from the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge (see pic).
And the history is strikingly recent. In the late 1970s, as I was moping around as a self-pitying would-be intellectual at university in Britain, one woman I met was a teenager fending off starvation in a Khmer Rouge labour camp for children, eating banana trees ‘ leaves, fruit, flowers, bark – all’ to stay alive. Now an NGO activist, she still can’t bear to eat Cambodia’s luscious bananas, or coconuts (her other source of survival). She escaped from the camp and joined the resistance in the forests until Pol Pot fell and she could resume her life.
Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge were overthrown by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979, bringing the end of a decade of the deepest imaginable trauma for Cambodians. First the ’American War’, which killed a far higher proportion of Cambodians than Vietnamese, thanks to Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk’s willingness to let his friend Ho Chi Minh use the country as a transport corridor, and Henry Kissinger’s refusal to let a little thing like national sovereignty stand in the way of America’s bombers. Then four years of Pol Pot and the death of about two million Cambodians (no-one really knows for sure) out of a population of about 8 million through hunger, disease, forced labour and execution, deliberately targeting a generation of educated and skilled people.
What effect does that have on a country’s long-term development? Do you have to wait for the next generation – all the bright young scholarship kids heading off to universities in Australia, Europe and the US – to come through into leadership positions before the country can take off?
Pol Pot was replaced by the far less bloody, but still autocratic and occasionally ruthless regime of Hun Sen (see pic), Prime Minister for the last 25 years and today still only 59, but the atrocities of the killing fields live on in a miasma of fear never far from the surface of conversation. Parents tell their kids ‘don’t get involved in politics – it’s like using an egg to break a rock; even if the rock is cracked, you will fail. If anyone speaks out, run far away’. ‘No-one’s cleverer than my government’ says one female activist, ‘they control the media, the judiciary, the education system, everything’.
Cambodians laugh when they get nervous, and discussion of politics gets people giggling in earnest. People seem to avoid pronouncing the name of ‘Hun Sen’ or his party, the Cambodian People’s Party – it feels a bit like Lord Voldemort (‘he who must not be named’) in Harry Potter. One activist accuses me of playing tricks when I ask about politics, invoking a local saying that ‘when old people ask each other questions, they are just trying to catch each other out.’ Cheers.
Among activists, the younger generation seem more resigned than the older ones, only glimpsing a freer Cambodia far off in the future, and even fearing what might happen without a strong leader to keep anarchy at bay. One says the options for Cambodia are Singapore or Myanmar – autocracy is a given, but it could bring economic development, Lee Kuan Yew style, or kleptocracy and poverty, a la Burma.
Right now, it feels like it could go either way – growth is strong, fuelled by demand from China for Cambodia’s natural resources and a garment industry rebounding from the last global slowdown. But corruption and poor governance are endemic. Every government employee, from policeman to minister, reportedly has to pay regular fees to the party on a sliding scale according to their position. With that kind of pressure, who is an official going to listen to – poor people or investors waving wads of notes? It’s almost impossible to buck such an all-encompassing system – everyone is dirty. It certainly makes me sceptical of any technocratic talk of strengthening ‘good governance’ through training or legislative reforms, unless it touches on the underlying structures.
When corruption doesn’t work, intimidation is an option, but violence is seldom necessary.The fear of those in power is either justified, or at least entirely understandable given the traumatic (and recent) past. People follow orders, even if those orders say ignore the law.
But the law is not an entirely empty vessel. Sure, it can be demoralizing when you spend months, if not years, preparing all the legal documentation only to be over-ruled because of some backroom deal in Phnom Penh, but the good guys win sometimes – the PM recently cancelled a dozen big land grabs for failing to live up to their legal commitments. In practice, what is eventually decided in such cases emerges from the complex and murky interaction legal process, money and power (including the power that comes when poor people organize, as well as donor pressure and state and military might). That interaction will decide which future awaits Cambodia.
Tomorrow: a visit to a land grab + a bit of self doubt]]>