“A City With No Smoke and No Sound” - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 154

colonies are plagued by poor infrastructure and a lack of social services. They very often
lack proper sanitation and access to clean drinking water. Few are technically in the city at
all: on average, they are 20 kilometers away, in a semirural no-man's-land far from most
urban amenities. Communities that live beyond the city's water and electricity supplies
are forced to pay between 4 and 16 times more to secure these from private suppliers. 5
Over the past 20 years Phnom Penh has been physically and socially transformed by
urban land evictions and modern developments that have replaced “informal” city settle-
ments with all the trappings of the rising Cambodian middle class: malls, hotels, gated
communities, and the sprawling villas of the wealthy. The center of the city is populated
by middle-class Cambodians and expatriates. Surrounding them is an outer ring inhabited
by the displaced urban poor. Along with thousands of migrants who have flooded into the
city from the countryside in search of jobs in garment factories or on construction sites,
they form a new proletariat consigned to the periphery of Phnom Penh's urban revolution.
In many ways Cambodia's capital is a success story. When the Khmer Rouge abandoned
Phnom Penh in January 1979 they left behind an urban husk, a phantom-city of aban-
doned buildings and collapsing infrastructure. The Australian journalist John Pilger, vis-
iting in August of that year, likened Phnom Penh's desolation to “the wake of a nuclear
cataclysm which had spared only the buildings.” 6 The Khmer Rouge had unspooled dec-
ades of human and social development in a graceful capital that had been known in the
prewar years as the “Pearl of Asia.” After the liberation, as hungry families trickled back
into the derelict capital, they brought village life with them: chickens and cows roamed
about the city while people camped on the floors of shop-houses and strung their laundry
from the balconies of peeling colonial villas. Most of the city's streets remained unpaved
and muddy, troubled by few motorbikes and even fewer cars.
In the PRK years all property remained in the hands of the state, which organized hous-
ing for civil servants but otherwise let people take up residence wherever they could find
the space. New arrivals set up shelters in public parks, while cyclo drivers and construc-
tion workers often slept in the street. Political leaders, naturally, occupied the choicest
locations. In 1979 Hun Sen moved into a property fronting the Independence Monument
in the center of the city, where his imposing mansion stands today. “There were so many
houses in Phnom Penh—everybody could choose one,” he later recalled. “I could get
300 houses if I wanted.” 7 Little changed until 1989, when the government reintroduced
private property rights. The new land registration system, however, was chaotic. In theory
anybody could apply for titles to land they had occupied throughout the 1980s, but prac-
tice, as so often, differed wildly. Those with money or connections were able to satisfy
land registration requirements and obtain formal title deeds, but the rest of the population
lacked the knowledge or resources to navigate a complicated registration process.