The new colonialists

Hun Xen's monstrous mansion in the middle of Phnom Penh

10 Jun 2011
Andrew Cornell
The Australian Financial Review

Donors supply around half Cambodia's annual budget, more than $US1 billion a year - and the government of Hun Sen skims close to half of that amount, building monstrous mansions while less than a fifth of the population have toilets.

From a distance, the floating villages of the vast Tonle Sap lake in Cambodia appear to be mirages. But the shimmering water is real and the huts, makeshift restaurants, workshops - even schools - are indeed afloat. Colourful banners flap in the breeze then, as the hired water taxi nears, there is something else on the water: a distinct, acrid smell.

There are hundreds of such villages on the Tonle Sap, Asia's largest freshwater lake fed by the monsoonal peak of the Mekong River. Some are slums. This one is a slum. Coming closer to the village, other craft, some fishing, some hawking goods, come by and one bumps right up close.

It's a tiny, hardly seaworthy dingy steered by a filthy old man in rags (although he may well only be in his 40s). And next to him is a tiny, naked child, no more than four or five. The child is draped in a snake, it's a smaller python but, next to the child, looks like a giant anaconda and it is thrust towards our taxi. Someone hands over a couple of American dollars and the old man steers the boat away.

It's an extraordinary moment but, in the few hours we spend cruising through these villages, we see another three beggars plying the child-with-snake routine. Other small boats come up ferrying mothers begging for their children or just children alone. The pervasive acrid smell is a mixture of rotting fish and sewerage, and raw humanity. Good luck dining at some of the restaurants with their holding pens offish sitting next to the crocodile display littered with rotten chicken meat.

"These villages move all the time; they move with the [seasonal] rise and fall of the lake; they shift to where there might be work. Some are Khmer [Cambodian] but some are Vietnamese [even though Vietnam is hundreds of kilometres away]," says Nick Butler, a guide with the Sam Veasna Centre, an eco-tourism organisation set up to preserve bird life by providing villages with alternative incomes to slashing forests.

Yet which wealthy westerner could resist a dollar for a snake child? Or, for that matter, the cute, persistent urchins selling guide books and matches at Angkor Wat? Or silk scarves in the old market of Siem Reap? And these are the more humane faces of child labour.

Yet resistance is crucial to Cambodia's development. "Every child out selling guidebooks or begging is not going to school, and education is the long-term future of the country," says Mastercard Worldwide's Elizabeth Duke. Duke, vice president, commerce development, oversees the company's local philanthropy program. "But it is a huge challenge - the kids can make good money and some of the parents are themselves victims of the Khmer Rouge or [are] damaged individuals."

The plight of these children illustrates in microcosm the great challenge for Cambodia and for those nations and organisations who, with the best of intentions, are trying to help it recover from the utter devastation of the Khmer Rouge. For the challenge at a national level is that the more charities and non-government organisations assume responsibility for civil services, for health, education, essential services, the less the notoriously corrupt Cambodian government supplies those services itself.

As international sovereign governance monitor Global Witness argued in its damning 2009 report Country for Sale, Cambodia needs a "model geared towards enabling the country to harness its own resources for development, rather than continuing this cycle of corruption-fuelled aid dependency. For the majority of Cambodia's people, life is short and tough," the agency wrote in its report. Nearly 70 percent of the population subsists on less than $US2 a day, and one in three children under five are underweight for their age.

International aid has propped up basic services in Cambodia for over 15 years and currently provides the equivalent of half the government budget. "Yet Cambodia is rich in timber, minerals and petroleum and, over the past 15 years, the government has leased 45 percent of the country's land to private investors. What happened to these natural resources and where has all the money gone?" asks Global Witness.

Cambodia is indeed still recovering from the catastrophic four-year reign of the Khmer Rouge, which killed an estimated 2 million of its own people, around a quarter of the population, including teachers, monks, civil servants and just about anyone who stood between Pol Pot and his insane plan to return Cambodia to "year zero". Then there was the decade-long war with Vietnam. There are more than 200 registered aid organisations operating within the country, which Is estimated to be the highest per capita number in the world, according to the journal Foreign Affairs. Donors supply around half Cambodia's annual budget, more than $US1 billion a year - and the government of Hun Sen skims close to half of that amount, building monstrous mansions while less than a fifth of the population have toilets.

In Siem Reap, in central Cambodia next to Tonle Sap and the gateway to the Angkor Wat temple complex, the challenge is obvious. A local guide who calls himself "Jim" says he lived in the jungle as a child during the terror of the Khmer Rouge. "It's much better today," he says, "more schools, more work. Much better." But does he trust the government and officials? "No, no, all corrupt, very corrupt; we pay bribes all the time. But still getting better."

Or, as one Khmer legal aid officer told Foreign Affairs regarding the abuse and killing of citizens by Hun Sen's government: "Ten lives or even 100 lives, what's that compared to 2 million? That's still the Cambodian standard, and that's the international standard."

The corruption drags in even companies with highly regarded governance standards, such as BHP Billiton. Although the company itself hasn't confirmed which country is involved in a US Securities Exchange Commission graft investigation from 2009, Global Witness has reported on an abandoned Cambodian bauxite joint venture where BHP was involved. "[The inability to trace where mining fees appear in government accounts] raises questions as to where BHP Billiton's $US1 million payment made in September 2006 has gone, and how companies manage the risk of investing in corrupt environments,” the agency said. BHP has confirmed the payment to the government but said it was legitimate.

Another anti-corruption agency, Transparency International (Tl), scores Cambodia two out of a possible 10on the widely cited Corruption Perception index, against 1.4 for Myanmar (Burma), 2.7 for communist Vietnam and 8.7 for Australia. Moreover, in the past three years, according to Tl's Global Corruption Barometer, 43 percent of people surveyed in Cambodia believed corruption had increased; 27 rated it the same and 30 percent said it had decreased. Tlsaid "a degree of political will for reform exists within the government, but the reality is that those in power have little reason to change a system that has secured them much power and personal wealth. Stricter costs imposed by the donor community would serve to pressure the government and effect real change".

That is a statement which can equally be applied on the social scale when asking a still rudimentary civil society with millions of still traumatised citizens to forego immediate financial gain for longer-term civil health. It is a complex problem; for the non-government organisations, charities and aid workers, every day in Cambodia exposes the moral challenge. In Siem Reap, for example, the easy accessibility of Angkor Wat has created a tourism boom since the country was re-opened for tourism and there's an opportunity for locals to earn American dollars.

One tourist who couldn't step away from the challenge was Tania Palmer, an Australian retail entrepreneur who had read in an airline magazine of a Siem Reap orphanage in need. Straight off the plane, she bought a ticket to Cambodia and within six months had abandoned her Australian business to work with Khmer children. She was driven around Siem Reap by a tuk tuk driver called Rem Poum, who used the money to support his extended family while preparing to become a monk. That career path, too, was abandoned as Palmer and Poum married and set up the Green Gecko Project to help feed and educate orphans and street kids.

“l read this story about orphans sleeping in nets and there wasn't even enough nets - I just felt compelled to look and I'd never been to South-East Asia. It was just so hot and sweaty but I couldn't forget it,a Palmer said. "I came back to Byron Bay but I was so miserable; it just seemed a meaningless life there." Together with Poum, she set up the project and immediately encountered pervasive corruption and prejudice. "We had tiny kids carrying other kids in a sling because they get more money begging that way but they didn't get to keep the money, of course; their families did and some of these families are seriously dysfunctional," Palmer says. "And we wanted these kids to go to school but the schools wouldn't have them because they said they were 'too stinky, too noisy'. When we started here I was accused of being a spy."

The project was named Green Gecko, Palmer says, because geckos are small but have a voice, come out at night and need parental care. Now six years old, Green Gecko cares for 70 children and while no new children have come on board in recent years - simply because Palmer and Poum are at their limit - there was a steep intake in 2006 when the government trucked all the street children out of town for the duration of a Korean travel expo. "Our only plan initially was to get the kids off the street and give them a meal but it is that old saw 'give the man a fish...' so we try to teach them to fish," Palmer says.

The fishing is pragmatic. Khmer martial arts are on the curriculum as many of the children, because of their home life and the state of Cambodia, are likely to encounter the threat of exploitation and abuse. "The Cambodian government says there are no amputees here - but you only have to look around. One of the mothers lived under a tarpaulin and, to earn money, went through rubbish for melon seeds. [Some of] the parents have huge problems, addictions," says Palmer.

The Green Gecko facility today is an inspiringly vibrant operation with playing fields, classrooms, vegetable gardens and a small shop. The children are boisterous but disciplined, articulate and engaging - and, while there's plenty of noise, it's positive not disruptive. With children ranging in age from kindergarten to senior secondary, there is a genuine sense of extended family. When i visited celebrations for the first university place for a student were taking place.

The project is also staffed by volunteers from groups such as the AusAID program and VIDA (Volunteering for International Development from Australia). Palmer says she's very aware of the challenge identified by governance groups to pressure the Cambodian government into providing more for its citizens. "The reality is, though, that won't happen for a long time and there are these needs now," she said.

MasterCard is one corporate which supports Green Gecko through its affiliation with Siem Reap's Hotel de la Paix, by providing reconditioned bicycles.

Each year, the bicycle program provides hundreds of basic but solid bikes to help children get to school or, in the case of a sewing school, an organisation supported by the hotel, young women from the countryside getting to Siem Reap to learn a trade. Khmer society is very patriarchal and the school teaches not just sewing and small business skills but "life lessons", according to Chhun Chhoeurn, acting director of the Life and Hope Association which runs the school. "Sometimes the men don't like to see the women with their own business - it is a bit threatening - so we have to be sensitive. But there is good business opportunities [for women] making wedding costumes and other things for the village," he says.

One student, Chimoi, a typically fine-boned young Khmer woman heard about the sewing school on the radio after she had been injured working on a building site as a labourer - unskilled, unsafe, Insecure employment, typical for uneducated young Khmer women, particularly where there is a development boom as in Siem Reap. "I want to learn to design clothes, embroider. I want to have my own business and, with the school, I can get a [sewing] machine," she says.

The nexus between Green Gecko, the sewing centre, dozens of other aid projects, Hotel de la Paix and MasterCard Is typical of the web of foreign government, non-government, corporate, philanthropic and volunteer support that sustains Cambodian development. Wat Damnak was a royal palace and now houses the Centre for Khmer Studies, the Hotel de la Paix LHA Sewing School and the Life and Hope Association offices. The hotel also supports the Sangkheum Centre for Children, a joint venture of the Italian NGO Progetto Continent and the Cambodian NGO Khmer Angkor Development Organisation.

However, unquestionably good projects, such as Green Gecko and LHA Sewing School, highlight a paradox of aid.

It was articulated clearly in a widely cited Foreign Affairs essay from 2008 (reprinted in The AFR's Review) titled The New Colonialists. "[An armada of non-government organisations] are increasingly taking over key state functions, providing for the health, welfare and safety of citizens [in a range of countries]," the authors, Michael Cohen, Maria Figueroa Küpçü and Parag Khanna from the New American Foundation wrote. "These private actors have become the "new colonialists" of the 21st century. In much the same way [that] European empires once dictated policies across their colonial holdings, the new colonialists - among them international development groups such as Oxfam; humanitarian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) like Médecins Sans Frontières; faith-based organisations such as Mercy Corps; and mega-philanthropies like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - direct development strategies and craft government policies for their hosts.

But though the new colonialists are the glue holding society together in many weak states, their presence often deepens the dependency of these states on outsiders. They unquestionably fill vital roles, providing life saving healthcare, educating children and distributing food in countries where the government can't or won't. But, as a consequence, many of these states are failing to develop the skills necessary to run their countries effectively, while others fail back on a global safety net to escape their own accountability.

Jim, the Khmer guide, is pragmatic, though. His country is rife with corruption and nepotism, the judiciary is among the worst takers of bribes, but "for the next generation, we are very hopeful. They will go to school; they will be better". In teaching their children to "fish", Green Gecko's Palmer is committed to raising a generation of Khmer who won't accept corruption and can wean Cambodia off the culture of dependence on aid. Some of the kids now learning to read and write and fend for themselves might once have spent the day on a rotting boat with a python and living in absolute squalor on a raft on Tonle Sap with no hope for the future.

Andrew Cornell is a senior writer with The AFR. The author's itinerary was organised by the Life and Hope Association.