A torturous road to nation-building
By Barbara Crossette
Thursday, March 20, 2008
PHNOM PENH:
When the U.S. State Department's voluminous global human rights re****t
appears each year, as it did last week, the temptation is to dive into
the sections on hot-topic nations such as China, Iraq or, lately,
Pakistan. Not a lot of readers would turn first to Cambodia. Yet this
poor and psychologically wounded country is a prime object lesson in
the perilous, unending business of nation-building. With a national
election coming in July, Cambodia needs some attention well in
advance.
In 1992-1993, the United Nations led a multimillion dollar effort to
remake this Southeast Asian nation, which in barely two decades had
been whipsawed into the American war in Indochina, brutalized by the
Khmer Rouge and ground down and isolated by a Vietnamese occupation.
Fifteen years later, the country is among the world's most badly
governed and politically corrupt. The State Department's re****t
summarized it concisely: "Corruption was considered endemic and
extended throughout all segments of society, including the executive,
legislative and judicial branches of government." It is made all the
worse, the re****t added, by a "culture of impunity."
Corruption is not just money; it is a corrosive mentality that debases
national life in a country still not sure of itself. It deters aid and
investment except by people from predictable (mostly Asian) nations
who don't care - or who benefit from pervasive graft. But in a broader
sense, what corruption has done to Cambodia is create a culture of
easy wealth and casual lawlessness, a sad example to young people born
into a broken society that was stripped of its intellectual middle
class and Buddhist leader****p under the Khmer Rouge.
Even the quality of architecture, scholar****p, literature and the
Khmer language has eroded. A measure of success nowadays is a garage
full of late model Lexus SUVs and Toyota Land Cruisers, most of them
acquired by government officials or their cronies at public expense.
Life in the graceful capital, Phnom Penh, is good. There are French
restaurants and fine hotels that cosset tourists. But the government
of Prime Minister Hun Sen, a crafty and uncompromising leader who was
able to corner political and military power in the 1990s, abetted by
misguided UN decisions, has no coherent social policies.
People in the countryside live perennially on the edge of hunger. The
World Food Program is still feeding about 1.8 million of the country's
14 million people. Health services in rural areas are all but non-
existent; unqualified midwives cause the maternal mortality rate to
rank among the worst in Asia.
Corruption also threatens the credibility and indeed the future of a
UN-backed tribunal designed to bring to trial, finally, some of the
remaining Khmer Rouge leaders who terrorized the country and reduced
it to human and physical ruin from April 1975 to January 1979. In
tribunal custody are four top former Khmer Rouge officials: Nuon Chea,
Brother Number 2 to Pol Pot, who died in 1998; Khieu Samphan, the
former head of state; Ieng Sary, the foreign minister, and his wife,
Ieng Thirith, who held, bizarrely, the ****tfolio of social affairs.
Also in jail is the Khmer Rouge chief torturer, Kaing Guek Eav, known
as Duch, the commandant of the notorious Tuol Sleng interrogation
center, which is now a tourist attraction.
The tribunal, at the insistence of Hun Sen and against the wishes of
UN legal officials, was designed not to be independent but a hybrid
called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. That has
brought a corrupt judiciary and political patronage practices into a
judicial process that distinguished and experienced international
lawyers, prosecutors and judges struggle to keep on track.
The Cambodian government, reacting to outside re****ts detailing
corrupt or questionable tribunal staffing, has refused to open an
investigation of its own. Donors - most of all the United States,
which pressed Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, to agree to
a flawed tribunal - are withholding money needed to carry cases to
their conclusion. Trials are expected to begin this year.
Many Cambodians distrust the tribunal, not only because they do not
understand why any of those in custody deserve a day in court, but
also because they suspect that political chicanery by the Hun Sen
government, with its share of former Khmer Rouge figures, will see to
it that the process is carefully controlled, or thwarted. Mindful of
its own history, the government abjures the terms Khmer Rouge or
Communist and labels the disaster that overtook the country simply the
"Pol Pot regime" absolving itself of guilt.
The State Department noted in its current re****t that there do not
appear to be any politically motivated killings or political prisoners
in Cambodia. But the re****t does acknowledge, citing work by
courageous Cambodian human rights groups, that abuses by the military
and police, often in league with governing party officials, occur
widely around the country. Journalists can attest to that. There is
also vigilante justice in the absence of a judicial system that
Cambodians can trust. The UN human rights office in Phnom Penh has
do***ented brutal land seizures by the well connected that drive out
thousands of poor farmers with no means of recourse. This is a major
deterrent to rural development.
The corruption and violence in the countryside should be a warning.
During the Khmer Rouge years, as discussion around the tribunal is
making ever more evident, Cambodians suffered most at the hands of
local zealots and barely thought about a national movement or knew its
name. The level of horrors that killed about 1.7 million Cambodians -
through slave labor, dislocation, disease, starvation and execution -
varied from place to place. In the eyes of most Cambodians there was
no central government then. There is little more now.
As the July election approaches, the governing Cambodian People's
Party knows how to stage a vote that monitors will likely find
reasonably fair. What visitors will not see is the maneuvering already
under way to buy off potential opposition figures with government jobs
or bring bogus charges against others, to sow dissent within and among
what few independent political groups that survive, and to use the
party's ubiquitous neighborhood committees to bring voters into line.
This is not the democracy the world thought it had installed.
Cambodia's nightmare is not over.
Barbara Crossette, a former bureau chief of The New York Times in
Southeast Asia, was in Cambodia in January and February helping local
journalists prepare to re****t on the Khmer Rouge trials.
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