A Hundred Lotuses Blooming? - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 189

memoration of the founding of the international rights movement, seemed to contain both
a claim and a challenge. Look around, he seemed to say. Is this not democracy?
Of all the positive legacies of the UNTAC mission, Cambodia's flourishing civil society
sector has been the most substantial and lasting. When the UN pitched its blue tents in
early 1992, hundreds of NGOs sprang up overnight and a rambunctious press rushed in
to fill the vacuum of the preceding years. Suddenly there was great freedom and optim-
ism. Millions in foreign aid flowed to local organizations, which became subcontractors
of the international project to remake Cambodia and “save” it from a cruel past. Foreign
advisors and consultants arrived by the planeload, and development projects of every sort
were initiated. Cambodia's ramshackle socialist capital became an aid industry mecca, a
steamy tropical outpost of what Alex de Waal has termed the “humanitarian internation-
al.” 3
Two decades on, little has changed. The sprawling UN mission and the main global
development agencies remain comfortably ensconced in Phnom Penh. More than 2,600
NGOs are registered with the government, 80 percent of them local. 4 Civil society groups
employ 43,000 people, 5 who are involved in every conceivable area of development,
from good governance, land rights, environmental conservation, and gender equality, to
health care, anti-human trafficking, and wildlife rescue. The mainline Cambodian human
rights groups, including LICADHO and ADHOC, work tirelessly to monitor and doc-
ument government abuses of every sort, and their reports are transmitted via a vigilant
English-language press.
When UNTAC arrived many Cambodians still blanched at the word angkar (“organ-
ization”), which had terrifying connotations under the Khmer Rouge. But these benign
angkar have since become a prominent part of people's lives, more trusted than corrupt
state institutions like the police and the courts. Colorful NGO insignias hang on wooden
village huts and on the headquarters of the big international development agencies; they
are printed on T-shirts, banners, and the sides of hulking white four-wheel drives. Twenty
years on, democracy, universal rights, and social justice are literally emblazoned on Cam-
bodian civic life.
They also remain curiously superficial. Like the protestors at Freedom Park, Cambod-
ian civil society flourishes within strictly defined limits. In certain times and places it
operates freely, sometimes even providing services—say, in health and education—that
the government patronage system fails to provide itself. But activists and journalists ven-
turing into more sensitive areas quickly run afoul of the official consensus, which has
subsumed nearly every independent Cambodian institution, from the media and the uni-
ons to the Boy Scouts, the Cambodian Red Cross, and the Buddhist monkhood. Twenty
years after the UN jump-started civil society in Cambodia, it lives on under Hun Sen