“A City With No Smoke and No Sound” - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 160

capacity or will to implement LMAP faithfully. Promises were simply taken at face value.
Like the World Bank's demobilization program (see Chapter 5), LMAP became just one
in a series of problematic attempts by donors and development agencies to relieve poverty
and promote transparency via “technical” reforms. Far from reducing poverty and pro-
moting “social stability,” the application of the World Bank's market template had nearly
the opposite effect. David Pred, an American lawyer advocating on behalf of the Boeung
Kak residents, argued that the Bank was “asleep at the wheel for seven years,” while the
government manipulated LMAP to serve elite business interests.
In September 2009 land rights activists filed a formal complaint with the World Bank's
official “inspection panel” in Washington, arguing that it had failed to uphold its own
safeguard policies. Eighteen months later, as the last residents were being evicted from
their homes, the panel handed down its decision. It concluded that the Boeung Kak fam-
ilies had, in fact, been denied access to due process of adjudication and that their evic-
tion had, in fact, represented a violation of World Bank safeguards. The Bank promised
redress. “We are deeply troubled and frustrated about the people who are being forced
from their homes,” said Bank President Robert Zoellick. “ We have repeatedly called on
the Government to end the evictions. We are seeking a positive Government response.” 17
They didn't receive one. When the World Bank had raised preliminary concerns back
in late 2009, the government responded by pre-emptively cancelling the LMAP project,
with Hun Sen claiming donors had insisted on “too many conditions.” 18 The Bank re-
sponded by freezing its funding to Cambodia, but for most of Boeung Kak's residents, it
all came much too late. The lake was already gone.
Cambodia's greatest living architect still lives in the home he built nearly half a century
ago, an angular structure of red brick and concrete rising from behind a fence covered in
bougainvillea. Like many of Vann Molyvann's designs, the house is a seamless blend of
modern and traditional forms. During the 1950s and 1960s, Molyvann was Prince Sihan-
ouk's court architect and senior town planner, presiding over the transformation of Phnom
Penh into a modern capital. Today, the Molyvann name is attached to some of the city's
most striking buildings, from the fan-shaped Chaktomuk Theater, where Pol Pot and Ieng
Sary were tried for genocide in 1979, to the Olympic Stadium, perhaps the landmark of
the “Khmer modern” school. Such designs privileged the needs of water, natural light,
and ventilation—the hallmarks of the local context and climate. An elevated V-shaped
roof, still seen on many old villas around the city, has become Molyvann's trademark, a
coded signature of his initials—VMV—written in zigzags of concrete.
On a bright sunny morning in February 2013, Molyvann shuffled into the cool down-
stairs of his home wearing a grey suit-jacket over a pinstriped black shirt, spectacles
hanging from his neck. At 86 years of age, the master architect was now too frail to