Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Rainsy's anticorruption crusade put him on a collision course with the two prime min-
isters. In October 1994, after a showdown with Teng Bunma over a Phnom Penh market
development that had dispossessed local vendors, Rainsy was dumped from the cabinet.
The following May he was unceremoniously kicked out of Funcinpec, and then stripped
of his seat in parliament. The vote that removed him from the National Assembly in June
1995 was a travesty of democratic procedure. Son Soubert, then the assembly's vice-
president, recalled, “It was completely illegal. They didn't even give him the chance to
present his case. After the proclamation by the vice-president, they switched off all the
microphones so he couldn't say anything.”
Sam Rainsy's anticorruption crusade incensed the government, but it had little impact on
the donor countries that had bankrolled the UNTAC mission. In June 1992, as UNTAC
was getting under way, the major donor nations and development agencies had gathered
in Tokyo for a Ministerial Conference on the Rehabilitation and Reconstruction of Cam-
bodia. At the meeting, Koji Kakizawa, Japan's Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs, de-
scribed the world's commitment to establishing a “truly durable peace” in Cambodia.
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For William Draper III, administrator of the UN Development Programme, Cambodia re-
mained “a critical test for the post-Cold War world.”
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To maintain the UNTAC's momentum, the new UN Secretary-General, Boutros
Boutros-Ghali, asked foreign governments for $590 million to fund Cambodia's recon-
struction. The donors went on to pledge $880 million. They also established the Inter-
national Committee for the Reconstruction of Cambodia (ICORC), a foreign aid “club,”
chaired by the World Bank, which would meet annually to assess Cambodia's needs and
outline their aid contributions. When ICORC met for the first time in Paris in September
1993, donors pledged another $120 million.
The influx of development aid filled the vacuum left by the drop-off in Soviet-bloc
aid at the end of the 1980s, and re-established Cambodia's long-standing reliance on out-
side support. Vietnamese and Soviet assistance had guaranteed the survival of the PRK
throughout the 1980s, just as the French had helped preserve the kingdom from Viet-
namese and Thai encroachments in the nineteenth century. China had also played a key
role in bankrolling the cruel experiments unleashed by Pol Pot. Unlike Cambodia's past
patrons, however, these foreign donors claimed to represent a brave new liberal world. In
place of the socialist brotherhood they spoke of democracy; instead of the
mission civil-
isatrice
, there was the exalted tongue of human rights.
None of these concepts was interpreted too literally. The superpowers that had framed
the Paris Agreements hadn't paid $2 billion to bring democracy to Cambodia. They had
paid $2 billion to get it off the agenda. “It wasn't to establish democracy,” said Charles
Twining, who became ambassador when the US mission was upgraded in 1994. “It was
