By Daniel Ten Kate
Feb. 16 (Bloomberg) -- A Cambodian math teacher who turned a school into a torture chamber goes on trial tomorrow in the first hearing involving leaders of the Khmer Rouge movement that tried to slaughter the nation’s intellectual class 30 years ago.
Kang Kek Ieu, 66, also known as Duch, oversaw Tuol Sleng prison in the capital, Phnom Penh, where only about a dozen of at least 12,000 inmates survived. He is the youngest of five Khmer Rouge leaders who will face trial before a United Nations-backed tribunal accused of genocide.
“Thirty years later, we have not recovered,” said Sok Siphana, a former vice-minister in Cambodia’s Commerce Ministry who now works with the International Trade Centre, a UN agency, in Geneva. “To do the things that Thailand and Malaysia take for granted, we are struggling to just fill that initial base.”
The Khmer Rouge is blamed for the deaths of at least 1.7 million people during its rule from 1975 to 1979. Tuol Sleng was the most notorious prison in a network that targeted Cambodia’s educated elite as the movement attempted to create a classless, agrarian society free of foreign influence starting at Year Zero.
Cambodia’s human resources remain an impediment to growth after almost two decades of foreign aid, which finances about a third of its budget. The country’s gross domestic product, the second-smallest of 10 Southeast Asian nations, has doubled in each of the past two decades after staying roughly the same size between 1968 and 1988.
Skilled Workers
The murder of so many skilled professionals by the Khmer Rouge means Cambodia now “has the weakest human infrastructure of any country in Asia other than perhaps Laos,” said Robert Broadfoot, managing director of Hong Kong-based Political & Economic Risk Consultancy Ltd.
The Khmer Rouge took power after a U.S. bombing campaign during the Vietnam War stirred discontent in the countryside against General Lon Nol’s coup-installed government. Led by Pol Pot, the regime evacuated Phnom Penh to put people to work on farms and closed all schools, universities and monasteries. Money, markets and private property were abolished.
Former head of state Khieu Samphan, 77, ex-foreign minister Ieng Sary, 83, his wife Ieng Thirith, 76, and Nuon Chea, 82, who was second in command to Pol Pot, are also facing trial before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. Pol Pot and Ta Mok, the Khmer Rouge military chief, have died.
Mass Graves
Prisoners at Tuol Sleng, known as S-21, were tortured by interrogators who accused them of being Russian or American spies. Most were transferred outside the city for execution at one of more than 20,000 mass graves discovered across the country, according to the Documentation Center of Cambodia.
Sok Siphana’s family was one of three of 173 in his village that survived the Khmer Rouge. They fled to a refugee camp in Thailand after Vietnam invaded in 1979.
Cambodia was embroiled in civil war for much of the next decade until a UN-brokered accord in 1991 brought peace and foreign aid that amounted to $5.5 billion over the past decade.
“The early part of the shift from a command economy to a market economy after the UN came in was pretty much done by foreign technical advisers,” said Sok Siphana, who has two doctorate degrees and engineered Cambodia’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2004. “We were more the translators in those days, but now more and more you see stronger ownership.”
School Teachers
After the Khmer Rouge regime fell, Cambodia had only 226 secondary school teachers. Last year, almost 30,000 teachers were available for the 33 percent of the country’s 14.2 million people who are under 15 years old.
“Cambodia is starting with such a primitive human infrastructure that the industries on which it can base its development are really quite limited,” Broadfoot said. “They’ve supplemented their lack of indigenous human resources by opening the door more to foreign skilled professionals.”
Prime Minister Hun Sen’s foreign investment friendly policies such as 99-year leases for agricultural land, tax holidays and low import tariffs led to a boom in the tourism, construction and garment sectors. The economy averaged 9.8 percent growth over the past decade, bringing down the poverty rate to 30 percent in 2007 from as much as 50 percent in the early 1990s.
Multinationals in Cambodia include Chevron Corp., the second-biggest U.S. oil company, BHP Billiton Ltd., the world’s largest mining company, and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Ltd., Australia’s third-biggest bank. The country plans to open its first stock exchange later this year.
Economic Growth
The International Monetary Fund said last week the economy may grow 4.7 percent this year because of the global recession. The government plans to extend tax breaks for clothing manufacturers and invest in power plants to help bolster the economy this year to create jobs for the 250,000 Cambodians who join the labor force each year.
Cambodians who were overseas at the time of the Khmer Rouge are reluctant to come back because of excessive corruption and the lack of a meritocracy, said opposition leader Sam Rainsy, who was a student in France in the late 1970s. Transparency International, a global non-governmental organization, ranked Cambodia 166 out of 180 countries in its 2008 Corruption Perceptions Index.
“Education, ideas, merit don’t play any role in the promotion process in Cambodia,” said Sam Rainsy, who became the country’s first finance minister in 1993 after UN-sponsored elections. “It will take a long time for Cambodia to reach the cultural and educational level it had before the war.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Daniel Ten Kate in Bangkok at
dtenkate@bloomberg.net
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