Cambodia Lacks Clear Spending of Resource Money

By Im Sothearith, VOA Khmer
Original report from Washington
14 December 2009

[Editor’s note: VOA Khmer recently spoke with specialists in the field of natural resource management in developing countries and learned that Cambodiais not alone in struggling to use natural resources to benefit its citizens. The resource curse, where natural riches fail to help the poor, is a worldwide scourge, the global experts told VOA Khmer in numerous interviews. Below is Part 15 of the original VOA Khmer weekly series, airing Sundays in Cambodia.]

Cambodia lacks a clear mechanism for spending revenue from natural resources that could benefit citizens and socio-economic development, experts say.

In his book, “The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It,” Paul Collier, an Oxford University economist, says development is about giving ordinary people hope that their children will live in a society that has caught up with the rest of the world.

Natural resources can create a huge opportunity for a country, he told VOA Khmer in an interview, but they must be used for ordinary citizens and not elites. A major benefit can come in education, building what economists call “human capital.”

This doesn’t always happen to resource-rich countries.

“There are many reasons why things go wrong,” Collier said. “Often the revenue’s sometimes not captured by the government through taxation. But the more usual problem is the revenue gets badly spent; so, instead of revenue being well spent on good investment, they use it for public consumption, and they become a battleground between politicians.”

It is hard to tell now whether Cambodia is on a path for responsible spending, Antoine Heuty, deputy director of Revenue Watch Institute, based in New York, told VOA Khmer by phone recently.

Revenue from resources like oil and timber can be volatile, so its expenditure must be stabilized in budgets. In practical terms, that means saving resources to ensure consistency and to avoid the disruption of policy and spending.

“Harnessing the revenues to the development requires a sustainable investment path, and that means investing resources domestically and not saving it abroad altogether, because that’s not going to work in the long run,” Heuty said. “So, there is a way to spend the money properly if it is discussed in consultation with citizens, civil society, with parliament in a systematic framework to explain how the money will be used, and to give accounts as how it has been used and to what impact.”

“Having the strategy, making sure that you have proper consultations, and linking that back to the budget are three fundamental features to make sure that expenditures are delivering for Cambodia,” he added.

Such mechanisms are not in place in Cambodia. Even the government’s so-called “rectangular strategy”—which also focuses on reform in fisheries, forests and land—fails to mention management of natural resources.

Cheam Yiep, a lawmaker for the Cambodian People’s Party and head of the National Assembly’s finance committee, acknowledged the lack of regulations, but he said the government and parliament are working on a resources law.

For now, revenue from natural resources is simply put into the national budget for general public spending.

But there is no substitute for transparency in bringing resource benefits to the public, “with the emphasis upon good public investment,” Collier said.

Oil revenue must be handled well, because it has such tremendous potential to transform a country like Cambodia, said Petter Stigset, a senior advisor of Oil for Development, Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, which has been working with the Cambodian National Petroleum Authority on a new petroleum law.

“It’s an absolute prerequisite that all the money that flows or will flow from the oil and gas business is controlled,” Stigset said, “that it goes to the state, not to individuals or to anything else.”

Financial crisis takes toll on Cambodia's poor - 26 Apr 09

Plight of Cambodia's poor worsens

As the global economy falters, concern is rising for those living on the margins of society.

Cambodia has enjoyed more than a decade of solid growth but, as that slows, more and more people are being left by the wayside.

Opposition politicians say corruption means that most of the foreign aid coming into the country is not reaching those in need. Laura Kyle reports from Phnom Penh.

Many Cambodians in Rhode Island says the genocide trials come too late

Sunday, February 15, 2009
By Karen Lee Ziner
The Providence Journal staff writer (Rhode Island, USA)

PROVIDENCE –– Molly Soum was 5 years old when the Khmer Rouge forced her and her 3-year-old sister into hard labor with other children, “breaking rocks, with no food or water, and no shade.” Soum lost her father, grandfather and three uncles to the 1975-79 genocide that claimed an estimated 2 million lives and left bodies and bones scattered across Cambodia’s Killing Fields.

As a U.N.-backed tribunal prepares to prosecute the first of five aging Khmer Rouge leaders this week, Soum — like others in Rhode Island’s large Cambodian community — is bitter that only a handful of people will face prosecution for crimes against humanity.

Many see the trials as a waste of millions of dollars, occurring decades too late, and tainted by government corruption. Only a few people interviewed last week said they will follow the proceedings, either through online reports, or satellite television.

Kang Kek Ieu, known as “Comrade Duch,” is scheduled to appear at an initial hearing Tuesday that is expected to review witness lists and determine the extent to which “civil parties” can participate. Duch ran the Toul Sleng interrogation center, where thousands of Cambodians were tortured and executed before the Vietnamese invaded the country in December 1978.

The trials of the four others — Khieu Samphan, the group’s former head of state; Ieng Sary, its foreign minister; his wife, Ieng Thirth, former minister for social affairs, and Nuong Chea, the movement’s chief ideologue — are not expected to start before next year. Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge supreme leader, died in 1998 at age 73, before he could be tried for war crimes. At the time, he was held prisoner by former colleagues who had accused him of betraying the revolutionary movement he once led.

“I would like to see them electrocuted,” says Soum of the five who are slated to stand trial. A transition specialist at the Genesis Center and former Cambodian interpreter for the state, Soum said, “I’d like to see them have to watch The Killing Fields film over and over and over — to see what they did,” before they are put to death.

“I believe they should be put on trial, but my heart is too numb to feel the justice.” She added, “Why do we have to wait three decades? Why? There’s no punishment to them. They live, they laugh at us through all these years. I’m very angry.”

A WAVE OF CAMBODIAN REFUGEES arrived in Rhode Island throughout the early 1980s. Those refugees and subsequent generations are estimated at more than 15,000. Resettled by agencies including the International Institute of Rhode Island and Catholic Social Services, they clustered primarily in Providence’s West End, where they established the first Cambodian Buddhist temple in the country.

Many had witnessed the executions of family members and fellow countrymen as the Khmer Rouge worked, tortured and starved people to death as part of a radical experiment in agrarian communism.

The Khmer Rouge referred to this experiment as turning the clock back to “the Year Zero.”

During a four-year reign, from 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge systematically slaughtered urban dwellers, Buddhist monks, people with connections to foreign governments, and teachers, doctors and other intellectuals — even people who wore glasses.

They separated children from parents and brainwashed them, and forced the entire population to work in collective farms or forced labor projects.

The genocide went largely unreported until Dith Pran, then an assistant to New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg, emerged four years after he was captured by the Khmer Rouge and told the world about the horrors he’d witnessed. That included the mass graves scattered throughout the country that became known as the Killing Fields.

In Rhode Island, and in other Cambodian resettlement communities around the world, survivors suffered extremely high rates of posttraumatic stress, as they tried to cope with language and cultural barriers in a foreign culture.

Rhode Island’s survivors include Sary Kim, a 60-year-old former seamstress and factory worker now enrolled in job-retraining classes at the Genesis Center in Providence.

Kim still carries images of body parts flung by land mines into the trees, as she and her family ran through the jungle from the Khmer Rouge. She is haunted by a child who was left alone on the jungle path: Kim wanted to carry the girl, whom she estimated at age 2 or 3, but was already carrying her own children. The child appeared traumatized and “could not speak.”

Kim said she was unaware of the pending trials, and will not follow them. Kim said, “I don’t want to know.”

Makna Men, acting director of advisement at Bristol Community College in Fall River and newly appointed chair of the mayor’s Southeast Asian Advisory Council in Providence, came from Khao I Dang refugee camp when he was 13.

He calls the tribunal “a big show,” with only “a very selected few” of Khmer Rouge leaders being tried. Until recently, Men followed news of the pending trial on the Internet. Now he has stopped.

“To me, I lost my father during the Khmer Rouge time and a lot of my first cousins, and my mom lost a lot of her brothers and sisters. The wound is already there in my heart, the torture, the suffering, the starvation — to me this trial really doesn’t do any good,” said Men. “It is not going to close the book.”

One of Men’s enduring memories is the death of his father in 1976.

“The Khmer Rouge didn’t allow me, didn’t allow my brother to go to see his body. They said, ‘If we allow you to go, will you bring him back to life?’ The only one they allowed was my mom. They wouldn’t let us go. He caught malaria or whatever and then the policy of the KR in my village was if you get sick and you cannot work you cannot get food. He died of sickness and starvation at the same time. That memory is going to stay with me ever since. Am I angry with Khmer Rouge? Yes, I am very angry with them.”

Men’s wife, Samoutta Men, is a substance-abuse prevention coordinator at the Socio-Economic Development Center for Southeast Asians, in Providence. She believes the millions spent on the trial could have been used to establish a foundation in memory of Cambodian holocaust victims, and to help educate Cambodia’s young people.

“For me, the healing is never completed,” she said.

Ken Oung, one of several people interviewed at the Cambodian Buddhist temple on Hanover Street, has no confidence in the trials.

“Those key witnesses who are sitting in the government cannot be subpoenaed,” he said. “It’s close to $150 million for less than 10 people. To me, it’s symbolic to tell the international community ‘We are the government; we care.’ But do they really care?”

Oung also believes that the millions spent thus far should have been used for other purposes, such as a psychiatric hospital to help survivors, or education programs “to tell our young generation about the genocide.”

Said Oung, “The trial will not bring justice for me. To spend so much money is ridiculous. It took almost thirty years for the preparation.”

CAMBODIAN DEPUTIES voted in 2001 to create a special tribunal that would bring former Khmer Rouge leaders to trial for war crimes.

The tribunal, formally known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, was set up in 2006 — 13 years after it was first proposed, and nearly 30 years after the Khmer Rouge were toppled by the Vietnamese invasion. The tribunal is administered jointly by the United Nations and the Cambodian government, and is to comprise elements of Cambodian and international law.

According to The New York Times, hundreds of people have applied to the court to be officially recognized as victims of the Khmer Rouge, and to bring parallel civil cases against the five cadre leaders. They may potentially have the right to participate in the investigation, be represented by a lawyer, call witnesses and question the accused at a trial.

Other news reports state that authorities are still deciding how many civil parties will be allowed to participate, and to what extent.

Duch, 65, who is expected to appear at Tuesday’s hearing, has been detained since 1999. He is charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes: those include having committed or abetted murder, torture, rape and persecutions on political grounds.

SAM BECKER, supervisory deputy clerk at District Court, Providence, has long been involved in Cambodian politics, through a political party formed in the United States. He will watch the trial closely.

“First thing in the morning, I go on the Internet” and check for updates on the pending trial, Becker said. He also speaks with his brother and other relatives who are still in Cambodia.

Becker is pleased about the pending prosecutions, “but they’re not doing enough,” Becker said of the tribunal. “The members of the Khmer Rouge being held right now, they are old and their health is not that good. This process is so long. I hope by the time the actual trial is going to go, they won’t be dead.”

Becker criticizes the U.N. for “letting the government dictate the process,” and wrote a letter of protest to then U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan two or three years ago.

“I said the U.N. is losing their credibility” by allowing a communist dictator to dictate to the U.N. body — “the international body that’s supposed to be finding justice.” He adds, “The people running the government are former Khmer Rouge, so what are you going to do?”

Becker lost many relatives to the Killing Fields, including his sister and a cousin who was a Buddhist monk.

“My main point is, I hope the government will get this over with before they die off. We want to know why over two million people were killed, and if any other foreign countries were behind it.”

With wire reports
kziner@projo.com

Sacrava's Political Cartoon: Hyena-Om Yen Tieng

Cartoon by Sacrava (on the web at http://sacrava.blogspot.com)

Premier Hun Sen 'Will Not Dare To Clash With Cham Prasit' [-Nepotism in full swing among the CPP ministers in P.Penh]

Cham Prasidh and his wife, the powerful Lok Chumteav Tep Bopha Prasidh

09 Feb 09
Moneaksekar Khmer
Translated from Khmer by Anonymous

Minister of Public Works and Transport Tram Iv-tek has appointed his daughter as office chief. Tek Leakhena was appointed office chief while her husband was made deputy director general of a department in this ministry. At the Ministry of Environment there is also competition among Minister Mok Maret's relatives. Such an example has been adopted by officials of the Cambodian People's Party (CPP) as seen with Trade Minister Cham Prasit and Social Affairs Minister It Sam Heng.

Sources have reported that Public Works Ministry personnel were greatly surprised when Tram Iv-tek appointed his daughter Tek Leakhena as office chief, along with Tek Leakhena's husband as deputy director general of a department. The ministry staff said that it is a bit too soon to make Tek Leakhena's husband a deputy director of a department and Tek Leakhena office chief.

At Mok Maret's Ministry of Environment competition is still ongoing for the posts of director general of administration and office chief between Mok Maret's brother-in-law (younger brother of Maret's wife) and Mok Maret's nephew. There has been no decision yet on this matter as Mok Maret has difficulty deciding who to give the position to: one is brother-in-law, the other is nephew. In any case the position of director general of administration will not escape from Mok Maret's brother-in-law or nephew. The incumbent director general has been reported trying hard to find a backer; it would be very hard, however, for the incumbent director to keep his position once the circular on retiring officials is out.

It Sam Heng at the Social Affairs Ministry is the most well known for appointing relatives and his own children to high positions at the ministry's office or cabinet. With so many relatives and offspring working at the ministry, and in order to avoid criticism from various circles, It Sam Heng ordered his relatives to change their family names and hide their biographies. Some of these are It Sam Heng's nephews but some officials at the ministry did not realize this when looking at the names before these people were accepted.

Trade Minister Cham Prasit is the one renowned for considering relatives first for jobs at the ministry: offspring, nephew, and wife all work at the ministry. Daughter Cham Nimol is chief of the minister's office. Son Cham Borit is deputy director general at Camcontrol department. Most special of all is Cham Prasit's wife: Tep Bopha; she is head of the archives department and in charge of Cham Prasit's secret documents. The trade ministry is the most famous in appointing offspring, nephew, and wife to high positions to facilitate corruption and to hide documents.

At the Trade Ministry Chm Prasit's wife is the one at the helm. In Cham Prasit's absence it is not any one of the many officially appointed state secretaries who will be acting minister; instead it is Tep Bopha Prasit even though she has not been officially appointed. Tep Bopha Prasit's power is very strong. Some of the state secretaries have nothing to do while Tep Bopha Prasit has plenty of work to do with no time to rest.

Apart from the Trade Ministry and the above other ministries, there is also the Ministry of Urbanization of Im Chhun Lim who made his son office chief. This appointment drew a lot of attention from some leading officials at the ministry as it was made in this fourth term.

And it is the same work structure based on family ties at other institutions. This culture is increasingly expanding now with ministers holding the same portfolios for the past three or four terms. Some appointments have been seen as appropriate looking at the officials' competence. Some others are not competent work wise and are not suitable for their positions; they are there due to the leadership positions of their fathers or uncles. Some of these officials only carry the minister's documents and oversee the budget; this is part of corruption.

Apart from the various ministries, in some provinces and cities relatives have been appointed office chiefs. Phnom Penh City Governor Kep Chutema appointed his daughter as his personal assistant. This personal assistant's influence has been affirmed to be even stronger than that of the office chief. Everyone is fearful of the influence of Kep Chutema's daughter.

No action by the prime minister to deal with this issue has been seen. And this has led to the inefficiency of circulars putting officials into retirement as seen currently spreading at various ministries and offices. Each ministry is the sole property of the minister in charge and his family. There are some subordinate officials who could not work with and who have left those ministries.

Such a culture has not been dealt with because it is believed that if it is to be dealt with, the trade ministry should be the first. It is said that in any event Prime Minister Hun Sen will not dare to clash with Cham Prasit. If it is going to be dealt with, it has to be done with everyone. If not, let it spread all over.