Cambodia today is a country for sale

PACIFIC DAILY NEWS

January 27, 2010

Cambodia today is a country for sale

By A. Gaffar Peang-Meth

The conflict between Cambodia's proponents of development and of human rights continues, despite the 1991 Paris Peace Accords' stipulation that economic development and respect for human rights must go hand in hand.

Surely a Cambodia in relative peace, with new roads and buildings, is better than the Khmer Rouge's Cambodia of forced labor, destruction and death.

Last month, even U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia Carol Rodley, who acknowledged Cambodia's continued problems with democracy and human rights, told a Long Beach audience that today's Cambodia has more roads, more buildings and more businesses; the people are more competent and more optimistic; Cambodia sends troops with U.N. peacekeepers abroad.

The Monivong Boulevard's Kentucky Fried Chicken, the 27-story Canadia Bank Tower with health club and restaurant, among others, are eye-catching. The third of Cambodia's 13 million people who live on 50 cents a day; the poor scavenging the city's dumps, eating rodent meat or who are evicted from their homes and their land to accommodate new development,
aren't.

While the Paris Accords' necessary stipulations weren't implemented, Hun Sen, who lost the 1993 U.N.-organized election, was allowed to elbow himself to become "co-premier." His 1997 coup killed many royalists, and sent the elected premier fleeing town. Sen has ruled without meaningful opposition since.

Cambodia's sad story is written with the help of foreign aid donors, who have provided more than 50 percent a year of Sen's national budget.

A 2006 report by the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (Licadho), "Human Rights in Cambodia: The Façade of Stability," accused the world community of a failure to "speak out" against Sen's regular human rights breaches. It warned: "Cambodia's current period of relative political calm is no guarantor of meaningful long-term stability, and ongoing, systemic human rights violations will, to the contrary, promote instability."

It detailed illegal land grabs, arrests and threats of arrests of opposition and human rights activists, continued impunity, a corrupt, incompetent and politically biased judiciary. "There can be no genuine stability without human rights and rule of law," the report stated.

In June 2007, "Cambodia's Family Trees," by the London-based Global Witness, an anti-graft NGO, detailed Premier Sen's family members, business associates and senior officials, dubbed as a "kleptocratic elite," who were allegedly engaged in illegal logging and stripping of Cambodia's public assets for personal profit.

In February 2009, its report, "Country for Sale," charged the same "corrupt elite has captured the country's emerging oil and mineral sectors while Cambodia's international donors turn a blind eye."

"Cambodia today is a country for sale. Over the past 15 years, 45 percent of the country's land has been purchased by private interests" and "millions of dollars ... paid to secure concessions" never showed up in Sen's economy and finance ministry's revenue reports.

In the March-April 2009 Foreign Affairs Magazine's "Cambodia's Curse," Stanford's Joel Brinkley wrote that U.S. embassy-funded studies in Phnom Penh "showed in stunning detail that Cambodian government officials steal between $300 million and $500 million a year (most years, the state's annual budget is about $1 billion)."

Regional peace and stability were put at risk last month, as Sen used his favorite graduation ceremony to blast Thai foreign minister Piromya as "chief of terrorists," declaring the Abhisit government does "not have long to live" and charging, "Thailand, you are invading my country, and Cambodia cannot tolerate your invasion."

To show he's in control and his government's popular support, Sen read the results of a survey by the International Republican Institute, a U.S.-based nongovernmental organization: 79 percent of people polled said the Sen Government was moving in "the right direction" and 53
percent said they will vote for Sen's ruling Cambodian People's Party.

The reliability of a survey, conducted in a general atmosphere of threats, arrests, physical disappearances, repression and fear may be questioned, but new roads, modern bridges and new schools are improvements that are tangible and real to the Cambodian people.

Andrew Marshall's Dec. 12 "Khmer Riche," in the Good Weekend Magazine for the Sydney Morning Herald, asserted: "The Khmer Rouge are dead; the Khmer Riche now rule Cambodia."

Marshall toured Phnom Penh's Tuol Kork precinct -- like "a 'homes of the stars' tour in Beverly Hills, except that Tuol Kork's backstreets are piled with rubbish" -- as his driver "points out giant mansion after mansion, and tells me who lives there."

"Depressingly, the Khmer Riche Kids sometimes seem indistinguishable from the old colonial ruling class," he wrote. "They carry U.S. dollars ... and live in newly built neoclassical mansions so large that the city's old French architecture looks like Lego by comparison."

Such as Meas Sophearith, 21, son of a general, whose family has a "four-mansion compound with lots of razor wire, and a gate guarded by special force soldiers, " Or Ouch Vichet, 28, whose parents gave him "a villa, half a million U.S. dollars, and a 400-hectare rubber
plantation," while his parents-in-law gave him "$100,000 in cash and another villa worth $200,000."

These "rich kids can spend $2,000 on drinks in a single night." They are "Cambodia's future," Marshall wrote.

If these accounts represent Cambodia moving in "the right direction," Cambodians have lots more to worry about.

A. Gaffar Peang-Meth, Ph.D., is retired from the University of Guam, where he taught political science for 13 years. Write him at peangmeth@yahoo.com.

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Jan. 7 'liberation' was day of infamy

PACIFIC DAILY NEWS

January 6, 2010

Jan. 7 'liberation' was day of infamy

By A. Gaffar Peang-Meth

Tomorrow is the 31st anniversary of the Vietnamese army's takeover of neighboring Cambodia's capital of Phnom Penh. The event prompted controversy; debates and discussion about the ramifications of that takeover continue today.

In 14 days of 1978, Hanoi's army, backed by aircraft, moved swiftly across the Cambodian border, sending Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge fleeing towns and cities. The Vietnamese captured Phnom Penh Jan. 7, 1979. Hanoi's troops remained in Cambodia for the next 10 years, until December 1989.

For the victims of Pol Pot's genocidal rule, which began April 17, 1975, and resulted in the deaths of upwards of two million people, destroying a culture and a society, Jan.7, 1979 was the day of deliverance by Vietnam. Surely, Vietnam was their "savior" and their "liberator" at a time when the world watched the horrors of the killing fields.

But others -- Cambodians and a host of foreign governments -- worried.

The world was still governed by the well-specified rule of law founded on the principle of absolute, comprehensive, permanent and inviolable sovereignty and independence. As Singapore argued before the
international community at the United Nations, the world is no longer safe, and peace and security are no longer assured, if a more powerful state is allowed to invade a weaker one like Vietnam had done. The Association of South East Asian Nations spearheaded calls for Vietnam to withdraw its troops from Cambodia.

As a result, the United Nations and other international organizations became a political-diplomatic battleground for many years between proponents and opponents of Vietnam's invasion.

And it was so that the anti-Vietnamese Khmer Resistance was born, first as separate armed bands with similar goal and, later, as a loose coalition of Cambodians of the fallen Khmer Republic, Cambodians of the monarchy, and the leftovers of the Khmer Rouge, in spite of their differences, to pressure Vietnam to withdraw, and to seek Cambodians' self-determination.

Unfortunately, the Paris Peace Accords, concluded in 1991, weren't implemented according to the agreements' stipulations and spirit by participating parties, including Cambodians.

Cambodian nationalists asked, since 1979, if Vietnam's goal was to "save" and "liberate" the Cambodian people from Pol Pot, what prevented it from surrendering a freed Cambodia and her people to work with the world community to build a new government and social order? Wouldn't Vietnam have received gratitude so profound by ceding to the United Nations the role of assisting Cambodians' self-determination?

For many Cambodians, Jan. 7 was a day of infamy. Pol Pot was replaced by those referred to as Cambodians with Khmer bodies but Vietnamese heads, the Khmer Viet Minh. This cohort, created by the Vietnamese Communist Lao Dong, trained at the Son Tay Military Academy and at the Nguyen Ai Quoc political school, led by a disgruntled regional field commander, Hun Sen, who sought Hanoi's support to return to power. It was, they felt, like replacing cholera with the plague.

Cambodian opponents assert that Vietnam attacked Pol Pot in 1979 because he became too independent of Hanoi. The invasion was initiated to bring the insolent back into line.

As French critic Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr said, "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose," or, "The more things change, the more they remain the same."

Look at the history of relations between Cambodia and Vietnam for affirmation.

The Vietnamese southward expansion after Nam Viet freed itself in 939 from Chinese bondage was described by Vietnamese scholar Nguyen The Anh in "Le Nam Tien dans les textes Vietnamiens," as a centuries-long phenomenon called "Nam Tien" (progression southwards), "one of Vietnam's history's constants." Anh described the "sparsely populated and accessible land available for (Vietnamese) rice growers" to the south as "favorable for encroachment."

Vietnamese "Confucian persuasion" was abandoned in favor of "an action resolutely imperialistic" to grab land and impose Vietnamese "administrative and cultural practice ... to better integrate (the new area) into the Vietnamese space."

Very briefly, historical records reveal that until the French protectorate was established in 1863, Cambodia was a battlefield for Thai and Vietnamese armies that fought on Khmer soil. Khmer dynastic quarrels led each Khmer side to seek support from Bangkok and Hue. Cambodia was known as a "two-headed bird" -- a tributary state to both foreign capitals.

In 1833, after Annam defeated the Thais in Cambodia, the Annamization began: Annam installed teenager Ang Mey as queen, Cambodia's capital was renamed "Nam Viang," Cambodia's reorganization followed Vietnamese administrative lines, authorities adopted Vietnamese names, customs and dress. In 1840, the Cambodian government was seated in Saigon, and Cambodia's name was changed to "Tran Tay" -- or western commandery.

Opponents of Vietnam's 1978 invasion see Hun Sen and his ruling Cambodian People's Party as a force seeking integration of Cambodia into the late Ho Chin Minh's dream of a federation of former French Indochinese states of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

The recently revealed "classified" contingency plan by Thailand for military action against Cambodia, should the Thai-Khmer dispute escalate, is seen by Professor Naranhkiri Tith as "exactly what Hun Sen wanted."

Logically, the Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation between Sen's Cambodia and Vietnam is an important instrument for Sen to invite Hanoi's troops -- the "liberators" against Pol Pot -- to help fight the Thais on Khmer soil, a repeat of history.

A. Gaffar Peang-Meth, Ph.D., is retired from the University of Guam, where he taught political science for 13 years. Write him at peangmeth@yahoo.com.

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