Cambodia - climbing out of the abyss [The impartiality of this article is in doubt as it involves Vickery, a supporter of Hun Sen gov't]

by Eric Beauchemin
Radio Netherlands
19-05-2006

Cambodia used to be one of the more prosperous countries in Southeast Asia. But it began to decline at the end of the 1960s as a result of corruption within the central government. This eventually led to a series of peasant revolts and the emergence of the Khmer Rouge.

The government was trying to take more than its fair share of the wealth from the rural regions to improve the cities and increase the wealth of a small number of rich Cambodians. Peasants responded by exporting their main produce - rice - to neighbouring countries.

"The government tried to stop this," explains Michael Vickerey, a leading Cambodia scholar, "because they earned income from taxation and export.

The first revolutionary outburst was in a rural area in Battambang Province in 1967, when peasants fought against government officials trying to collect their rice crop. In the ensuing years, there were more and more explosions of rural violence."

Khmer Rouge
The Khmer Rouge gradually expanded their control over the country. In 1970, King Sihanouk was overthrown, not by the Khmer Rouge, but by his own supporters, led by General Lon Nol. That same year, the United States invaded Cambodia to try and expel the North Vietnamese who were hiding out in the border region. Washington intermittently bombed their camps, killing up to 150,000 Cambodian peasants. Hundreds of thousands of others fled to the capital, Phnom Penh.

The chaos resulted in growing support for the Khmer Rouge, who marched into Phnom Penh in April 1975. Their leader, Pol Pot, began a radical experiment to establish an agrarian utopia. That meant forcing virtually everyone out of Phnom Penh and other cities and towns. Tens of thousands died during the mass exodus. By the end of the Khmer Rouge rule in 1979, one million people - or one in eight Cambodians - had died of starvation, disease, exhaustion and executions.

Pol Pot in front of photographs of some of the numerous victims of his regime

Failed state
Despite the mass killings, Cambodia was not a failed state, at least not initially, argues Michael Vickerey. "By 1977, you can start talking about the Khmer Rouge project having failed. I think some Khmer Rouge realised that it was failing, but they couldn't draw lessons from their mistakes and start changing what they were doing. Instead they blamed it all on foreign (i.e., Vietnamese) saboteurs. They began an anti-Vietnamese pogrom and invaded Vietnam in 1977."

"This is what led to their overthrow," says Vickerey. "The Vietnamese responded by invading Cambodia. Because they were much stronger, they eventually won. So in the end, the Khmer Rouge project failed and Cambodia became a failed state. Everything collapsed. In the last months of 1978 and early 1979, the Khmer Rouge army just fled everywhere. There were a few months of total anarchy until the Vietnamese re-established some kind of political and economic discipline."

Cambodia scholar Michael Vickerey

Restoring power
The Khmer Rouge eventually retreated to the jungle and, with the support of the United States and other Western powers, continued to fight the Vietnamese-backed Cambodian government for another decade, effectively blocking the country's recovery. Nonetheless, the government was gradually able to reassert its power over the country, drawing Cambodia back from complete state failure.

According to Vickerey, "by 1981, the internal administration was almost entirely under the Cambodian government. There still was a strong military presence, but they were mainly fighting against the rehabilitated Khmer Rouge along the border."


Corruption
The Killing Fields had a profound effect on all of Cambodian society. According to Thida Khus, the Executive Director of SILAKA, a local management and administration training association, "the main problem is that people do not trust each other. People lost a sense of security. They believe anything can happen at any time. So they think only in terms of short-term gain, trying to get as much as they can if they are in a position of power."

Corruption is indeed widespread in Cambodia, but that has always been the case, asserts Vickerey. "In the pre-war system, and this goes back to the pre-French Cambodian government, officials were not paid salaries. Corruption was the normal way that officials lived. The French made some moves to provide salaries so that officials would not be corrupt, but this never took over completely. After independence, the same things continued, and in spite of efforts by governments with modern ideas, old practices still continued."

Centre for Social Development Director Chea Vannath

Nation-building
After the Vietnamese finally withdrew in 1989 and elections were held in 1993, the Cambodian authorities began modernising their laws, but there is still a huge chasm between legislation and reality, says Yong Kim Eng, the president of the Khmer Youth Association. "Laws exist on paper, but they aren't enforced. Powerful men in the military and the government still do what they want."

It took years for Cambodia to become a failed state, and it will take many more years for it to be reformed, believes . "We're in a nation-building phase. We now have a state apparatus. We have a government with separation of powers. But after more than a decade, we're going forward and backward at the same time. By that I mean we're a country that came out of the killing fields, but we emerged so quickly from oppression, hardship and communism that it's difficult for people to adjust to being a so-called democracy with respect for human rights."

SILAKA Executive Director Thida Khus

Future
Compared to other countries in the region - such as Burma and Laos - Cambodia today finds itself in a relatively good position: there is greater freedom, social services are improving, and the government exerts control over the territory. But the events that led Cambodia to become a failed state and their consequences are issues which all Cambodians still need to confront, believes Thida Khus.

"I think the important thing for Cambodian society and the Cambodian government to understand is that we are considered a failed state. I don't think people even realise that we have failed. It's in the interests of everybody to really pull ourselves up and do some real painful reform, social reform and soul-searching."

And that is likely to take a few decades, says Chea Vannath. "It's just a natural process of growing pain. That doesn't make me sad or happy. No, it's just the facts that we need to face."