The Peasant King - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 130

years, the pragmatism of a rural guerrilla fighter had turned into the tactical obsession and
occasional paranoia of a man now isolated from the reality of most ordinary people.
Perhaps it was inevitable. As his power and stature rose, Hun Sen's old circle of trusted
advisors—men like Sok An, Cham Prasidh, and Hor Namhong—had been replaced by a
younger caste of sycophants, who filtered the country's realities and told the prime min-
ister what they thought he wanted to hear. In 2013 Phoeung Sophoan, an official in the
Ministry of Land Management, announced plans to build a new, 35,000-hectare capit-
al city in honor of Hun Sen. At a preposterous cost of $80 billion—seven times Cam-
bodia's GDP—“Samdech Techo Hun Sen Dragon City” would spread out to the north of
Phnom Penh, an Asimovian fantasy of towers and shimmering arcades culminating in a
600-meter skyscraper. At its tip Hun Sen would have a private office, closer to Olym-
pus than ever. “In the 12th century we had Suryavarman II who built Angkor Wat,” this
would-be Cambodian Speer told the Cambodia Daily . “Now we are in the Samdech Hun
Sen period.” 39 The project had little hope of ever being built, but it showed the extent of
the sycophancy that now surrounded Cambodia's leader.
In large part, too, Hun Sen was constrained by a political system that had no clear
purpose beyond its own perpetuation. Political stability rested not on any deep social or
political consensus, but on a tenuous pact between the country's elites, whose loyalties
had to be constantly renewed through fresh distributions of profits and patronage. There
was no goal beyond the endless branching and twining of patronage strings, no objective
beyond the capturing of fresh resources to swell the system further. Despite the demo-
cratic mirage that had settled over the country in the early 1990s, little had changed in the
way political power operated. The king still ate his kingdom, just as he did in precolonial
times.
Under Hun Sen, however, the system approached the outer limits of its logic. Despite
entrenching himself in an unparalleled position of power, Hun Sen's reliance on the Cam-
bodian elites meant that even had he wanted to, he had little real power to rein in corrup-
tion and other abuses. Land, forests, and natural resources were all fed into a machine that
produced little for ordinary people. Cambodia's health, education, and justice systems
were neglected—its future mortgaged—in order to keep the Ponzi scheme of patronage
afloat. The Cambodian contradiction was cast into sharp relief after the CPP's landslide
election victory in 2008. This was the moment when Hun Sen and his government might
have started building a legacy by focusing on the needs of Cambodia's poor. Instead, it
marked the beginning of an era of Big Money.