Food stalls at Psar Thimei, Phnom Penh
The Island (Sri Lanka)
"Most of the people in power are corrupt" said our tour guide in Phnom Penh. "There is such a lot of poverty but there are extremely rich people too."
"Corruption remains a way of life in Cambodia. It is the leadership that must set an example but right now that example is take, take, take, and it goes on from the highest government official to the lowest paid civil servant. Sometimes it is overt, but it is increasingly covert with ministers signing off government land to private companies for a steal and contracts being awarded to shadowy business figures with close connections to the leadership. At its worst, it has seen the partial privatization of Cambodia’s heritage, with new private roads being bulldozed through to ancient temple sites and hefty tolls levied …But it is not only the locals who know how to play the game." This from the Lonely Planet Guide, 5th edition (undated but very recent). Nick Ray mentions the parallel state that is the NGO world, which has helped in poverty alleviation but NGO and multinational individuals and foreign consultants "are riding the gravy train to Geneva, stashing six figure, tax-free annual salaries, driving the latest 4WDs and renting houses with seven bathrooms."
"The depressing reality of politics in Cambodia is that the political elite have consistently and wholeheartedly betrayed the long-term interests of their people for short-term personal gain. Entering politics is not about national service but self-service."
Is the Lonely Planet Guide (LPG) and we talking here of Cambodia or Sri Lanka? Listened to and read about, Sri Lanka was invariably substituted for the name Cambodia. Is rampant corruption in the midst of stark poverty a disease of developing countries? Corruption there all over the world, but not to the extent it exists in the poorest of poor nations where, staring at malnourished children and poverty burdened women, the well-heeled, well-fed cheat, steal and grab and live it up. This is so in Sri Lanka too.
A Lankan businessman resident in Siem Reap had this to say: "We had a minister coming over to talk tourism, and trade probably. He did no business talking, no meetings. Stayed in the best hotel with a number of people brought along, ate, drank and had a wonderful time and went back." Such a one exists no longer to parasite on the taxpayer of the country, which means everyone, since all pay in one way or another to keep our government going and ministers having a jolly good time.
The LPG introduction to the country ends thus: "That Cambodia has made progress in spite of its government and not because of it comes down to the Cambodian people: their tenacity, good humour and instinct for survival. Most Cambodians are hardworking and honest." Sadly, this cannot be said of us Sri Lankans, in general.
PM Hun Sen has proved himself a survivor, personally and politically, having lost an eye in the battle for Phnom Penh in 1975. He defected to Vietnam in 1977 and was elected PM in 1997. He’s been in power since then.
Tourism
The highest forex earner is tourism. Trippers pour into Cambodia. This month is not the high season since it’s very hot but streams of tourists were everywhere and like a flood in Siem Reep. South Koreans head the list of tourists, our travel guides said, with Japanese coming a close second and then the Europeans. Sri Lankans too straggle along, but most do the three country tour – Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Too expensive for yours truly!
It’s hot with intermittent showers just now. The monsoon will start around July/August and that means floods and rice growing.
Naturally tourism is encouraged and visas seem to be given freely. Trouble getting one is that Cambodia is not dpl represented in Sri Lanka. You need to send your passport and application to New Delhi and twiddle your thumbs for two weeks, or get it at Bangkok. Some apply for their visas at the immigration counter in Phnom Penh and we witnessed success - three women. Both Bangkok and Cambodia seem to be more careful with men applicants.
The route we followed was: go to Bangkok, visit the Sri Lankan embassy, get a letter and go to the Cambodian embassy. We were told we’d have to submit applications in the morning and go for the passports with visas stamped in the evening. Not us six women. The Sri Lankan embassy had already sent our application and we were positively treated with courtesy at the Cambodian Embassy and so within an hour or so our visas were in hand.
A word here about the Sri Lankan Embassy and Ambassador. Prof. J B Dissanayake seems the ideal choice for this neighbouring Buddhist country with much through traffic (hopefully of only the tourist kind). Here is an excellent choice of a non-career diplomat.
He invited us in to meet him when we went to the embassy, chatted for quite a long while, offered tea and gifted a book of his to each of us, and assured us that his embassy had done all in double quick time to see that we were able to keep to our tour schedule.
Four years of hell
1974 -1979 was the Khmer Rouge regime, implementing as it did the most radical and brutal restructuring of a society ever attempted: its goal to transform this Theravada Buddhist country into a Maoist, peasant dominated agrarian cooperative. Within days of Blood Brother No I – Paris educated Pol Pot taking power, the entire population of the capital and provincial towns, including children, the sick and elderly, was forced to march out to the countryside to undertake slave labour in mobile work teams for 12 to 15 hours per day. All intellectuals and the educated were brutally tortured and murdered.
Reminded us of the strategy to uproot tea from estates and grow manioc and the most foul murder of persons like Prof Stanley Wijesundera. Most mercifully the JVP uprising was nipped in the bud though thousands of youth made red the streams that ran through JVP dominated areas.
Visits to the War Museum and the Killing Fields were emotionally searing, to say the least.
In 1975, Tuol Svay Prey High School was taken over by Pol Pot’s security forces and made a detention and torture camp with classrooms divided into small cells where inmates were chained to their beds. Much smaller rooms had prisoners thrown in after torture sessions and chained as they writhed on the ground. Pictures were taken of the prisoners which are now bulletin boarded and left to stare at with tears of deep sorrow, and anger in the viewer, at the extent of such senseless brutality.
Corruption AND
The Killing Fields are by a tranquil lake and one hoped the dead rested in peace. One large square was where women and children were dumped in a shallow mass grave, often battered to death to save ammunition. Exact figures of those killed is still debated. The figure given us by our tour guide was 2.5 million, one fourth the population at the time.
To bring some peace to the disturbed mind we were then taken to the Royal Palace with the so tranquil Silver Pagoda on the same grounds.
When Pol Pot died a miserable lonely death in Khmer Rouge captivity on 15 April 1998, people would not celebrate until they actually saw pictures of his corpse on TV. They could not believe the monster was no more. The trial of the Khmer Rouge is still going on, 25 years too late. Pol Pot escaped rightful punishment.
Bites of info
One guide claimed that Cambodia is the world’s number one rice exporter, but a Thai claimed his country held this place. Whatever it is, Cambodia has only one harvest of rice per year, after the monsoon rains. Much of the land is covered with jungle within which people have their leaf walled and roofed houses, specially in the outskirts of Siem Reep. Forest cover from more than 50 percent has dwindled to 30 percent. The rest of the land is covered with grass and small bushes – these being rice fields.
Every Cambodian we spoke to had been affected by the Khmer Regime. Our two guides had both grown up in refugee camps after their parents fled Phnom Penh and Siem Reep respectively. Within ten years however, their lives are much more normal and they strive hard over education, earning and helping their families.
The Vietnamese it was who defeated the Khmer Rouge regime and the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) that steered the country to sanity and democracy, however circumscribed, with two years of supervision of the administration of the country with the goal of free elections. On May 25. 1993 elections were held. Even today, UNTAC’s activity is heralded as one of the UN’s success stories. But the LPG says, "it was an ill-conceived and poorly executed peace because so many of the powers involved in brokering the deal had their own agendas in advance." As of now, King Norodom Sihanouk is in retirement in Siem Reep having brought back his ballet dancing younger son from Prague and installed him as King Sihamoni who is unmarried. His elder brother is a power in the government.
Poverty
Much of it is seen around. Kids with (self imposed) miserable faces and uncombed malnourished hair sell you stuff at the ancient sites or even beg, but not whiny. They look lovely. The boat people seen on the boat-ride on Tomle Sap Lake in their floating village of Chong Kneas were very interesting. You see women cooking; infants in cloth strung cradles; small kids swirling around in flat metal saucers of diameter around one foot, often getting overturned and soon rising to the surface; a shop with a crocodile and gecko farm, also shopping! Children gaily defecate from their boat homes to the canal and lake. Most huts have TVs, though no electricity. When the monsoon arrives and the water level rises, they transfer themselves to land houses; at other times too so that this transfer is sometimes 15 times per year. Fresh water is brought in huge barrels and sold to the lake dwellers. Fishing is their industry. The lake is huge and at dry season two metres deep. Once the rains come the depth increases to 15 metres.
Progress but child labour
Material improvement – definitely. You can sail to Siem Reap from Phnom Penh, the journey taking around 5 hours, or drive down. We opted to fly Bangkok Airways to save time. A huge canal connects the land to the lake and is crowded with motorized boats. Ours had a boy of around 11 being the pilot to the teenaged driver/sailor. He would take down a huge oar and disentangle his boat from others. This canal is being extended so that soon it would be right at the doorstep of Siem Reap.
Within ten years there has been so much progress in buildings and infrastructure. For example eight years ago in Siem Reap there were just a handful of hotels, now hundreds of them, all new and clean with guest houses crowding in.
The life of the ordinary man, needless to say, has improved from what it was in the past, though there remains so much more to be done to bring some quality of life, especially for women and children.
More on Siem Reap next Sunday and, hold your breath, Angkor Wat!
