Hunsenomics and Its Discontents - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 148

his friend, warning that anyone attempting to arrest him had better “wear a steel helmet.”
The investigation then came to a convenient end when Ho Sok, the Funcinpec official
leading the drug probe, was murdered during the July 1997 coup. 49 The environment-
al group Global Witness claims that the Oknha Mong Port has been used as “a gateway
for large-scale smuggling,” including by senior members of Hun Sen's bodyguard unit. 50
When asked about the allegations, Reththy dismisses them as the fabrications of political
enemies. “We are pure gold,” he says, quoting a Khmer proverb. “We're not afraid of any
fire.”
Despite being an oknha and senator who has built more than 3,000 schools bearing Hun
Sen's initials, Reththy insists he has received no personal favors or tax breaks. “It's not a
business, it's just like a charity,” Reththy says of his school-building partnership with the
prime minister. “We just want to help the nation … The children don't have schools. If
you don't construct schools, how can they study? And the poor people, when their houses
have been hit by a storm, if you don't reconstruct their houses, where can they stay?”
Reththy's comments hint at the central paradox of Hunsenomics. On one hand, Cam-
bodia's economy continues to surge. With each passing year, more international corpora-
tions are moving into the country. In car manufacturing, there is Ford and Tata; in insur-
ance, Prudential and Manulife. A country that had no paper currency 35 years ago now
has a flourishing retail banking sector, while investment funds raise capital for further en-
trepreneurial ventures. The economy is slowly starting to diversify away from low-skilled
garment production into more sophisticated forms of industry, such as vehicle manufac-
turing, electronics, and sporting equipment. 51 The most positive sign, perhaps, is the re-
cent surge in investment from Japan, which typically holds its firms to higher standards
of transparency than the Chinese, South Korean, and other Asian firms that have pre-
viously been the handmaidens of Hunsenomics. Hungry for the legitimacy and prestige
that comes with Japanese investment, Hun Sen has bent over backward to accommodate
Japanese firms, handing out his personal phone number to CEOs and directors. 52
But as entrepreneurship and investment flourish in the visible half of the economy, the
shadow economy continues to elude any attempt at control. Consider the Cambodian gov-
ernment's highly publicized attempts at cracking down on corruption. These have arisen
almost entirely as a response to foreign donor demands that the country improve trans-
parency and combat graft. Cambodia first announced to donors that it had drafted an anti-
graft bill in 1994, but it was 16 years before it was signed into law—and then in much
watered-down form.
In 2001, after seven years of inaction on corruption issues, frustrated foreign govern-
ments tabled the passage of an anticorruption law as a reform “benchmark”—one of sev-
eral changes it requested of the Cambodian government in exchange for their aid dis-
bursals. When government and donor officials met for their regular Consultative Group