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In-Depth Information
mine its hold on power. A few months earlier the US had announced the cancellation of a
shipment of 100 military trucks, a punishment of sorts for the deportation of the Uighurs.
The Chinese then stepped in with a shipment that was nearly twice the size.
With their influence on the wane, Western governments faced a choice. They could
walk away from the field and leave it to China, or they could remain, pursuing their own
strategic agendas, and hope for the best. Most opted to stay. And so as Hun Sen droned
on, spouting buzz words and promises, his audience did what they had done at every pre-
vious meeting: they pretended to believe him. The next day—June 3, 2010—donor rep-
resentatives laid out their aid “indications” for the coming 18 months. They added up to
$1.1 billion. This meandering vaudeville had culminated in a grand finale: the largest aid
pledge in Cambodia's history.
Despite all the promises, the third CDCF meeting turned out to be the last. Not long
afterwards the Cambodian government cancelled the event scheduled for 2012 and post-
poned it indefinitely. They didn't say why, but the obvious assumption was that due to
Chinese backing, and the possibility of a windfall from oil and gas revenues, Hun Sen
was no longer willing to endure the theater of donor criticism. As the projector machines
were switched off and the doors clanked shut in the Palais du Gouvernement, an era came
to an end—the last era in which Western donors had any significant say in Cambodia's
future. In NGO-speak, Hun Sen had finally taken full “ownership” of his country's devel-
opment.
Where did things go wrong?
The opening of Cambodia to international aid 20 years earlier had taken place in an at-
mosphere of great optimism. The arrival of the UN coincided with the dawning of what
many people hoped would be a new post-Cold War international order, in which the chal-
lenges of peace, justice, democratic development, and poverty alleviation would all di-
minish under the sustained efforts of a so-called “international community” working in
tandem with empowered local NGOs. The general assumption was that Cambodia had
been wiped developmentally clean by the Khmer Rouge, and was thus an ideal test for
new theories of peace building and democratic development. Guilt about the Western role
in Cambodia's past intersected with hope about its future. Cambodia became a subject for
rescue, a new “White Man's Burden,” a blank slate awaiting its inscription with rights
and democracy and everything good.
Infusing this new civilizing mission was an overweening confidence that economic and
political development had reached its zenith after the Cold War—that the world was drift-
ing inevitably,
à la
Francis Fukuyama, toward the adoption of free markets and Western-
style democracy. This was matched by the rise of global discourses plotting out the path
to the promised land, which any country could tread if it adopted the recommended for-
mulas. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund brought their free market
