Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
China's rising influence loomed over the regular aid summit that was convened in Phnom
Penh in June 2010, six months after the deportation of the Uighurs. The venue was the
Palais du Gouvernement, a musty grey Art-Deco edifice built to house the French coloni-
al administration in the 1930s. Set along the Tonlé Sap riverside in tropical gardens filled
with topiary hedges and outspread Traveler's Palms, the building had played some inter-
esting walk-on roles in Cambodia's modern history. In the late 1970s it was where Pol Pot
received “fraternal” foreign guests. It later housed the UNTAC mission. On this particu-
lar morning, diplomats and aid officials filed through iron doors into an air-conditioned
hall with a dark green board announcing the “3rd Cambodia Development Cooperation
Forum.” For the next two days it would be the backdrop to a surreal sort of theater.
At the top of the bill was a keynote speech by Prime Minister Hun Sen. The topic:
his government's commitment to “deep reform.” Hun Sen's audience, facing each other
around a long horseshoe of tables draped with gold fabric, was drawn from the foreign
governments, multilateral aid agencies, and international NGOs that had bankrolled Cam-
bodia's development since the early 1990s. They put on headphones and listened as Hun
Sen ran through a list of his government's achievements. After 20 years of donor talk-
shops he had learnt the language well. He spoke of “ownership” and “multifaceted de-
velopment.” “Sustainability” and “efficiency” both received a dutiful airing. The govern-
ment's goal was an “operation-oriented administration with high productivity, responsib-
ility, and capacity.” Hun Sen hailed the government's “significant progress” in education
and its “remarkable progress” in health. “The Royal Government will continue legal and
judicial reform,” he announced circularly, “by implementing the Strategy for Legal and
Judicial Reform.”
It was all quite meaningless. The meetings of the Cambodia Development Cooperation
Forum (CDCF) had taken place in various guises, and had undergone several name
changes, since the first donor meeting was held in Tokyo in 1992. In that time, Cambodia
lack of progress on the various reform “benchmarks” formulated by its Western “part-
ners”. Donor conditionalities had done little to alter Cambodia's destructive political dy-
namic. Land-grabs, forestry crimes, and high-level corruption—the oxygen of the CPP's
patronage state—all remained widespread. Despite years of assistance, social services
like health and education still relied heavily on foreign aid, and even then remained in
a dire state. Very little aid money seemed to reach the people whom it was theoretically
intended to help.
With China backstopping Hun Sen's domestic agenda, diplomats and donor agency
representatives seemed more resigned than ever. The Cambodian government had made it
clear that it intended to pursue “hard” infrastructure development over the sorts of “soft”
development—human rights, democratic reform, good governance—that would under-
