The dark side of Cambodia's development

While Cambodia under Prime Minister Hun Sen has made great progress during the last three decades, the World Bank neoliberal economic agenda adopted by his regime has given rise to gross social inequalities and marginalisation of the poor. Tom Fawthrop reports.

---

IT is now 36 years since the end of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia that all but destroyed a nation, decimated its most educated people and reduced the country to Year Zero.

Amazingly the foreign minister who emerged from the debris in 1979, a gaunt-looking 27-year-old Hun Sen, drafted from the obscurity of a Cambodian dissidents and defectors camp in Vietnam to serve in the newly installed Heng Samrin government, is still in power.

Hun Sen's parents were poor rice farmers. He entered politics without any diplomas or degrees. From being the world's youngest foreign minister in 1979, he now ranks as the region's longest-serving prime minister after 30 years at the reins. But have the survivors of the Killing Fields, one of the worst regimes in history, since achieved a society which provides for social and economic justice?

Cambodia has clearly made great progress in the last three decades. The nation was reborn in the 1980s.The Khmer Rouge were finally defeated and peace returned in 1999. Cambodia long ago lost its hitherto regular spot on the TV news covering the world's most dangerous war zones. 

Cambodia's experience in the field of international justice and the creation of a complex UN-backed tribunal to try senior Khmer Rouge leaders deserves to be noted. It is the trial that so many cynics predicted would never take place. Whatever thelegal shortcomings, a very real justice has been belatedly obtained by millions of Cambodians whofinally saw the late Khmer Rouge head Pol Pot's chief accomplices held to account, given a fair trial and convicted of crimes against humanity. That Cambodia was brave enough to face its tragic history, should command international respect.

Today the magic of ancient Angkorian temples and the nation's cultural revival once again captivates visitors. Impressive economic growth rates have been fuelled largely by tourism and the garments industry. The country has also attained a measure of political stability and been spared the cycle of military coups that has blighted neighbouring Thailand.

However, there is still a very dark side to Cambodia's development. Land rights for the poor are lacking, while the country's precious natural assets are being rapidly exploited - its forests opened up to logging corporations and much of its agricultural land turned over to predominantly Chinese plantation firms with 99-year concessions. This has been well documented over the years by the British non-governmental organisation (NGO) Global Witness.1

In the capital Phnom Penh all the hype about a Cambodian economic boom may have attracted some foreign investors, but the real benefits in soaring land values were snapped up by the new Cambodian elite using strongarm tactics by police and private security forces to dispossess urban poor communities.

Tycoons initially acquire the land, and only subsequently offer it for lease or sale to private foreign companies. This led to at least 80,000 families having been evicted from Phnom Penh in recent years to make way for so-called 'development projects', with many families never receiving any compensatory money or resettlement for their loss. The drive for profit, legitimised by the neoliberal agenda, outstrips concerns for human livelihood.

The phenomenon of criminalising the poor is growing in Cambodia, where street people often complain of being arbitrarily arrested and beaten up by the police or gathered up by the military and shipped by truck to remote areas, where they are dumped and told not to return to the city. Meanwhile most of the rural poor have seen few gains during the last 16 years of peace and development.

However, the pattern of land concessions for foreign-owned plantations, land-grabbing, real estate speculation in the towns and the brutal evictions of the urban poor has roots that go beyond the domestic political arena.

The neoliberal agenda, which has to a large extent dictated the primacy of the free market and the neglect of public sector services especially education and health, was foisted on Cambodia in the wake of the UN peacekeeping operation in the 1990s.

After the peacekeeping forces withdrew, the international bankers and Western aid consortia moved in, to direct what many referred to as a post-conflict country in transition.

Applied throughout the Third World as the recipe for 'structural adjustment', the paradigm of the World Bank's neoliberal development model - sweeping privatisation, starving the public sector of any significant aid - was imposed on Cambodia in the mid-1990s as the supreme conditionality demanded by all the major donor countries - Japan, the US, Australia and the European Union (EU) - contributing to the country's reconstruction.

Nearly all aid in education and health, except in the cases of tackling malaria and HIV/AIDS, was disbursed through NGOs and the private sector. Much international aid was squandered on a seemingly endless stream of overpaid World Bank consultants who churned out reports that had little impact.

The UK NGO ActionAid reported that almost half of a $1.5 billion aid budget went to 'technical assistance', and that the 700 or so international consultants working in the country were earning far more than Cambodia's 160,000 civil servants put together.

Meanwhile absurdly low salaries of public sector teachers were ignored despite the fact that the Cambodian education system has been plagued by the problem of a demoralised and unmotivated teaching staff.

In the 1980s, when Cambodia had been systematically denied Western aid, teachers on low salaries but supported by state subsidies, seeing themselves as part of a struggle to rebuild their shattered nation, were generally highly motivated.

Then after the 1993 elections, billions of dollars flowed in, but little or none of these funds went to public sector professionals. Doctors, nurses and teachers were shamefully marginalised in the new economic order and, in one of the great development ironies, became demoralised and relatively worse off than they were in the period from 1987-90.

Since 1993 private schools, colleges and universities have flourished. Private medical clinics and hospitals have also sprung up with little regulation by the national health authorities. This has been hailed by the World Bank as proof of great advances in health and education. The reality, however, is that wealthy citizens who fall sick travel to hospitals in Thailand or Singapore and the not-so-rich to Vietnam for medical treatment, not trusting Cambodian facilities and doctors. The World Bank policy has led to a system steeped in corruption and low medical standards in both public and private Cambodian hospitals.

In short, the stress by external donors on 'order and stability' as an indicator of progress has served the interests of foreign capital and the local elite, the two mutually reinforcing factors in the economic scramble for Cambodia.

Western hypocrisy

Conventional wisdom has uncritically viewed Western aid as being always benign and benevolent, which conceals any criminal complicity and diverts all the blame onto the Cambodian elite.  

The case of the EU sugar trade regime puts things in perspective. The EU has set an appalling example with its support of international sugar corporations against the poor farmers of Cambodia.

According to David Pred, founder of the NGO Inclusive Development International, communities in three Cambodian provinces 'have been uprooted, women and children made homeless and preyed upon by traffickers, and human rights defenders shot and thrown in jail for standing up to' foreign sugar companies engaged in profiteering from the EU's Everything But Arms (EBA) scheme of trade preferences.

Cambodia is a beneficiary of the EBA initiative, which provides duty- and quota-free access to the European market for all products excluding armaments from the world's least developed countries. That might sound good except that, in the case of the sugar trade, all the advantages have been grabbed by foreign companies such as the British agribusiness corporation Tate & Lyle and their Thai suppliers and Cambodian business partners.

Pred argues that the effect of this multinational sugar chain is that companies such as Tate & Lyle and Coca-Cola directly benefited from 'the forced displacement and impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of rural Cambodians to clear the way for large-scale agribusiness' to set up sugar plantations under the EBA scheme.2

Writing in the Cambodia Daily in 2014, Pred said the EU, despite civil society protests, refuses to review its policy in the light of these rampant abuses. 'It is hypocritical that the EU allows these companies to peddle their dirty goods in Europe, while professing to be a beacon of universal human rights . it is a scandal that these criminal enterprises are actually rewarded by the EU with lucrative trade preferences.'

A Cambodian Spring?

It is really no surprise that an arrogantly complacent ruling elite around helmsman Hun Sen were dealt a setback in the 2013 elections. The ruling party suffered the loss of 22 seats, with the united opposition coming in a strong second with 55 seats in the 123-member national parliament. Too soon to dub it a Cambodian Spring, but it certainly indicates clear signals of rising discontent.  

However, the opposition has failed to offer a real alternative to Hun Sen's ready embrace of the neoliberal free-market model of development promoted by the likes of the World Bank. The surge of support it enjoyed owed more to a massive protest against the Hun Sen establishment and the widespread corruption and cronyism characterising the status quo.

But neither side has come up with policies and programmes that could serve to narrow the yawning gap between rich and poor. Instead, the best hope for alternative policies to challenge the old order - which includes Sam Rainsy and many other opposition figures - is for leaders to emerge from the new generation of Cambodian graduates, NGOs and restive youth of all social backgrounds who have been excluded by the established parties.

On their part, however, international donors and lenders like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Western governments may not welcome the demise of a more or less compliant elite - which has opened every possible door to foreign investment by providing a low-tax laissez-faire framework - in favour of the rise of a radical reform movement that would question their record of collusion in Cambodia over the last 20 years.

Just like the European banks reacting to the spectacular victory of the anti-austerity movement in the recent Greek elections, the World Bank and its partners in Cambodia will recoil in horror at the emergence of any new party in Cambodia that would challenge their neoliberal agenda.        

Tom Fawthrop first reported on Cambodia in December 1980, two years after the ouster of the Khmer Rouge. He is co-author, with Helen Jarvis, of Getting Away with Genocide?: Elusive Justice and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (Pluto Press, 2004). His work on Cambodia has been published in the Guardian (UK) and Australian media. He is also a contributor to BBC and Al Jazeera TV. In 1989 his documentary on Cambodia, Dreams and Nightmares, was screened on British television's Channel 4.

Endnotes

1. www.globalwitness.org/campaigns/corruption/oil-gas-and-mining/cambodia

2. www.inclusivedevelopment.net/eus-everything-but-arms-initiative-is-impoverishing-cambodian-farmers/

*Third World Resurgence No. 293/294, January/February 2015, pp 49-51